But these overall population density numbers are essentially meaningless in the context of an informed debate about housing density and planning needs etc. The facts are that the other European countries listed have far larger swathes of extremely low pop density land (either rural/agricultural or uninhabitable (mountains, forests, etc). Nobody wants to build houses there to any significant degree, so they're essentially irrelevant to the debate.
Instead, we need to look at land availability (and the different classes of land availability - green, brown, industrial, etc) in the areas where there actually is significant demand for new/replacement housing. In the UK, this consists roughly (in descending importance) of a) the area 50km around London, b) Greater Manchester, c) Birmingham, d) Leeds/Bradford, e) Sheffield, f) the Glasgow-Edinburgh corridor, and g) the other areas surrounding cities and larger towns.
When one compares the situation in the UK with that in those other countries, the UK is still at a disadvantage, since its major urban/suburban zones (especially the 50km around London) are denser and more built-out than in many other countries. Nonetheless, there's plenty of available land to meet the needs. What's needed is a proper, joined-up planning strategy, which in turn is driven by a proper, joined-up masterplan of housing (and other construction) needs over the next 30-50 years. It can be done. But it requires political vision, political will and cross-party communication/consensus. Those, I suspect, are the real barriers to be overcome.
