UK new homes smaller than those built before WW2

British houses have never been smaller with the average housing space being smaller than of homes built before the Second World War, new research published on Monday has shown.

The average living room is now 17.09 square metres large, just above the 16.01 sq m of living rooms built in the 1930s, LABC Warranty has found in a new analysis that shows how UK houses are steadily getting more cramped as the decades pass.

New houses have fewer bedrooms overall and the average master bedroom is now 13.37sq m, smallest in the last 80 years.

Houses started to get larger in the 1950s in a “housing revolution” that increased demand for property. This stretched out to the 1960s and 1970s.

The report shows that house size peaked in the 1970s with a dramatic fall in the subsequent decades. The average living room in the 70s was of 24.89sq m and the overall house space was of 58.09sq m.

In present day Britain, the average house size is 46.01sq m, smaller the previously recorded low in the 1930s of 46.84sq m.

This analysis backs up the research carried out by the Royal Institute of British Architects who in 2015 where they said homes in the UK were being built like "rabbit hutches".

What has concerned the government more in recent years has been the shortage in the number of homes, though 2017 was one of the strongest years for house building starts and additional housing supply in the last quarter of a century, with 217,000 homes said to have been built.

In 2015 the government set out a target of building 1m new homes by 2020 and last year said the new target was to build 300,000 homes in England in 2018, even though this number has only been achieved in six years since the WWII.

As a means of freeing up the building process, the government is carrying out a review to discover why there is such a gap between the number of houses completed and the amount of land allocated or gaining planning permission in areas of high housing demand.