Statutory overcrowding standards and England’s crisis of housing space

Advocates for housing justice have, since the urbanisation and industrialisation of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, included, as part of their demands for decent, secure and affordable housing for the working poor, the necessity for adequate housing space. House building has not kept up with the expansion in demand for homes, leading to increasingly cramped houses. The current shortage of housing contributes to its expense and housing unaffordability is further exacerbated by the failure of earnings to keep pace with house prices. From the early years of the twentieth century the state has prescribed space standards for new build homes, either nationally via design guidance linked to funding regimes for social housing or locally, via planning laws for private housing. The structural changes consequent upon England's rapid urbanisation and industrialisation during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries led to massive internal migration from the country to cities which rapidly became overcrowded.