We are in a housing crisis. This crisis means that people are struggling to afford the cost of renting, let alone home ownership.
But we know this, Priced Out recently gave evidence to the London Assembly which said that it would take the person on an average income 19 years to save for a deposit. Those who deny a housing crisis are simply ignoring the largest issue that is crushing the lives of younger people in our country.
In the Young Liberals we have young barristers, doctors and teachers who cannot afford to get onto the housing ladder. If it is affecting professionals in this way then it becomes obvious the impact on those earning below the national average.
With such a serious problem facing people in this country, the Liberal Democrats should be leading from the front in championing building enough homes to tackle the ever-spiralling cost of owning your own home.
However, to describe our response as lacklustre would be to do a disservice to the word lacklustre. The housing motion and policy paper coming to conference proposes the abolition of the national housing target, to be replaced with a nimby charter allowing local councils to pass the buck to the next council for housing young people.
But the worst part is the fact that the party has been told no twice, yet still persists in going against common sense and wanting to actively block the building of enough homes, perhaps believing that they stand a better chance of overturning the will of the party at a physical conference.
The Young Liberals, working with Liberal Reform and Lib Dems for Housing have come together to say to the Federal Party, this proposal falls far short of the basic notion of liberalism that “no one shall be enslaved by poverty”.
Across our country, millions of people languish, unable to get onto the housing ladder. Our party must not choose a course of action we all know will make things immeasurably worse for people who just want a good start in their adult life.
We know there is the strength of feeling within the party for us to unite around supporting an ambitious national housing target, and we as Young Liberals, Liberal Reform, and Lib Dems for Housing will be working together to table a successful amendment at conference.
The party should think very carefully before picking another fight on housing that it cannot win.
* Janey Little is Chair of the Young Liberals
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Was really disappointed to see the paper from FPC. Given that we explicitly supported housing targets only 2 years ago, I wish we as a party could focus on how to get young people on the housing ladder rather than pandering to NIMBY interests.
Looking at the policy proposed, it seems to criticise the Tories (rightly) for missing targets, and for their actions over the housing system. It then goes on to suggest our solution to missing targets is to abolish them for private housing, and to push decisions to local authorities (as the Tories have done, which has resulted in sod all being built). This seems like a poorly thought out attempt to curry votes at the expense of principles, and I’m glad we have the Young Liberals to organise and fight on this. All the power to their elbows.
The party needs to be careful.
I get that being a local campaigner means standing up for the desires of local residents, but if we become pro-NIMBY at a national level it’ll be a disaster for us.
This is a great article and it’s great to see Young Liberals standing up against those who think they can ignore the crisis facing the next generation.
It’s always been very easy to chase the NIMBY vote in politics, but I didn’t join the Lib Dems to do what what was easy to get elected. I joined because it has history of doing what was right despite the consequences.
I’m a parent of two children, and every part of my being tells me that I need to make sure their lives will be easier than mine. Yet for the first time it feels that we have failed to do this for generations below ours. This has to stop, and making sure they can afford their own home seems a good place to start.
Removing the national target from our housing policy will send a strong signal at the Liberal Democrats don’t want to build lots of houses. Whether this is the intention of removing that target or not this is how it will be interpreted by young people and the media.
The most frustrating thing for me, is why the authors of this paper are so obsessed with removing the National housing target. We’ve just had a hugely successful set of local elections, in areas where voters are often Nimby-ish, which we won despite (or maybe because) we have a national policy that is extremely ambitious in house building.
And if we are to have a hope of motivating younger people to vote for us in general elections, we can’t be seen as the party that wants to leave them languishing in rented accommodation until their great grandparents die, and housing is freed up
But that is just it.They cannot afford their own house.If councils were able to build houses FOR RENT the young will not need a deposit and go straight to living in it.Modular housing NO LONGER MEANS PREFAB.They are built simulated brick for that look that people seem to be brainwashed into wanting.The repairs will be the responsibility of the council.They are being built in small batches in existing cities etc to fit into the structure of pipes electrical systems etc.The rent goes for maintainance of the property and can also be used for other council funding.
The problems of today go back to Thatchers time when people were allowed to buy their council house and the housing stock started to decline.
I see no reason why modular housing cannot be built in cities in small batches with existing infrastructure and equally larger estates being built from scratch.The party and the country needs to take a look into the future of housing development and not live in the past. To be radical is not a sin.
Great article – thank you for posting. A key line from the policy paper is:
“2.4.2 In other words, the main drivers of the housing crisis are less to do with general housing supply than they are to do with other factors.”
This is a very problematic statement and cannot be allowed to form the fundamental principles around which our housing policy is based. As seen from the response from Young Liberals, it is also a dog whistle that only the cats will hear.
The priority has to be to expand the provision of social housing. Since no one will opt to pay more for a lower quality private rented accommodation when better quality, lower cost social housing is available, expanding social housing sufficiently will undercut the private rented sector to the point that landlords unable to get tenants at a rent that makes then sufficient profit will choose to sell up instead. This will have the effect of increasing the supply of housing available to purchase and, therefore, help reduce prices facing those trying to get on the housing ladder.
Excellent article!
I’d argue that the housing crisis is shaping up to be the corn laws moment of our age. So much household spending goes on housing expenses to the benefit of a privileged few who use state power to enrich themselves.
We need a broad coalition to take on the landed interest. Cheap housing, like cheap wheat, benefits almost everyone.
The housing crisis is not a simple issue of supply and demand or even solely an issue of interest rates. This Savills report shows how house price have increased since 1952 https://www.savills.co.uk/landing-pages/a-brief-history-of-the-uk-housing-market-1952-2022.aspx
“From Q4 1995 to Q3 2007 Inflation adjusted house price growth was +173% over 11.75 years. A prolonged and unprecedented upswing in values in period of increasing mortgage availability during which the average loan to income ratio increases from 2.3 to 3.1 during and the average effective mortgage rate sits between 5.0% and 7.0%. Buy to Let gathers significant momentum from the turn of the century. Nominal annual house price growth peaks at 25% at the beginning of 2003 as prices increase by 87% in nominal terms over the period 2001 to 2004 alone. A significant slowing in house price growth in 2005 gives way to a final burst of house price growth in 2006 & 2007 that leaves affordability stretched (though not as much as in the late 1980s).”
One of the biggest threats now is the buying-up of large swathes of rental properties by big private equity firms like Blackrock and big British companies that would entrench rents Big British companies are entering the rental marketThe introduction of a Land Value Tax can put a stop to using housing as investment and make housing affordable again over time https://libdemsalter.org.uk/en/
I’ve mentioned this problem previously but no-one has yet addressed the wider issue of what will happen in the economy, if somehow we do manage to make housing more affordable in terms of the ratio of house prices to average earnings.
If this is to happen at the same time as earnings aren’t rising, or are rising only slowly, many recent buyers will find themselves in a position of negative equity. The removal of housing collateral would have near catastrophic consequences for an economy which is floated on a sea of private debt. Governments would be loath to allow this to happen.
One way around this would be to allow wage, salary and other inflation to rise significantly but somehow keep house prices constant by engaging in a comprehensive house building program using modern housebuilding techniques to keep down costs. This would however be seen as a transfer of wealth from those with savings to those with debts and would also face considerable political opposition.
So we seem to have got ourselves into the situation of wanting both cheap and expensive housing at the same time. Once house prices, and levels of private debt which have fuelled the housing ‘boom’, have been allowed to rise sharply it is going to be very difficult to get them back down again.
Mortgage debt is a financial instrument. One persons debt is another persons asset secured on property. In the aggregate economy, when house prices fall it has no meaningful effect on the utility of a home to a mortgage free owner occupier, but does impact the collateral that is held by a mortgage lender and the returns to investors.
The dramatic increases in house prices from 1995 to 2007 were the backdrop to the financial crisis as private debt creation far outstripped national income growth.
A housing crash will generally occur with a recession and be followed by a long period where prices plateau for a decade or more, if not reflated by money creation as they were after the 2008 banking crisis.
Mortgage lending needs to be tightly regulated and interest earnings from lending on land subject to a Land Value Tax. That policy needs to be accompanied by a rebuilding (or reacquisition of foreclosed properties) of the publicly owned council housing stock to provide for low cost rental property. That, in turn, requires the acquisition of low cost land by local authorities i.e. land that is not inflated by the hope value of residential planning consent. That is the norm in countries like Germany, Austria and the Netherlands.
@Peter – you’ve explained the economics pretty well; when it comes to inflation there is a tension between the interests of those with capital wealth and those without. Currently the Tories are doing a depressingly effective job of keeping the Overton Window focussed on protecting the former (Sunak: “inflation is the number one enemy”).
However increasing numbers of people (with a big generational disparity) are being enslaved by poverty due to a lack of affordable housing. Our focus must therefore be on helping address those issues; not just protecting the real-terms value of capital wealth in this country.
There’s a documentary on Channel 4 called “The Ice Cream Wars” which starts with Glasgow Council building affordable houses way out of the city center and with nothing else around.
As ever on posts about housing, I’m going to have to request that policy is aimed at building communities and affordable, quality homes rather than just numbers of houses.
Construction costs are not the issue driving house price inflation.
A 3 bedroom house can be built for about £126,000 at the lower end of the range with costs increasing for higher end specifications/larger floor areas.
How much does it cost to build a house?
The average house price for England and Wales is £362k (median 278K). London and SE is off the charts London house prices map
The difference between construction costs and house prices is land value. Prefabricated housing won’t change that.
Land is a non-produced cost. Its value increases as demand for land in any given location increases. Demand increases with population growth driven by infrastructure investment and regional economic growth. Capture increases in capitalised land rental values (as against artificially inflated market values) for the public benefit and you can develop a virtuous circle of regional investment and economic development that can be recycled into local economies, instead of extracted by a globalised financial sector for the benefit of offshore capital.
@Peter – we have a situation where average house prices are rising the same amount as the average earnings of someone in the UK. No one is suggesting that we want to crash the housing market or indeed lower the price of people’s houses. We just need to build enough so that the average price rises in line with wages which is not happening. That might mean some folk get into negative equity but it would also mean that overall we would see lower inflation in the UK and lower interest rates (which will help folk pay their existing mortgages). Even then the evil of folk’s houses being worth less isn’t as evil as a whole generation not being able to get onto the property ladder and be stuck paying exorbitant rents their whole life.
A timely and well presented article. It highlights our parties lack of a distinct message which resonates with younger voters who are our country’s future. It mimics the short-termism of both the Conservatives and Starmer’s Labour. We are all chasing the same few votes in a few swing constituences.
The sign of good, strong leadership is to have the resolve to do what is right, which is not the same as doing what is popular. Abolishing housing targets at the national level does not resolve the problem that faces all but the top 5% many of whom can’t afford a home to rent let alone to buy. The housing crisis will only be resolved if we can up the supply of homes, and in particular, social homes to rent.
A good start would be to take on developers sitting on large “land banks” to boost their profits. Research has shown Britain’s biggest housebuilders own land banks with sufficient space to build over 441,000 new homes.
Another point is that tradionally built homes typically take 40 weeks to build. Modular homes on the other hand can be errected on-site in 2 weeks and of a higher standard.
We’re not going to form the next Government, But we can put together cohearant “Red Lines”.
@ Jack,
“No one is suggesting we want to…lower the price of people’s houses.”
You can’t have it both ways. Either you want houses to be cheaper in real terms or you don’t. As I said previously the contradiction is that there is general agreement that we need to help out young people by making housing more affordable for them but also there would also probably be general agreement , but I’m not including myself, that the value of our existing properties should be protected.
” We just need to build enough so that the average price rises in line with wages which is not happening”.
It is now. The price of housing is falling in both real and nominal terms and we’re very likely to soon , if we aren’t already, see the type of negative equity and mortgage default problems which I referred to earlier.
The problem has been caused by the monetarist policies of governments going back at least 35 years. Governments haven’t wanted to do the borrowing to keep the economy going so they have got the private sector to that for them instead. So even if you get your wish, with prices starting to rise again at the same level as wages we’ll still see housing being unaffordable to most. Taking a rough average of £300k which is somewhere between the two figures Joe has quoted will mean that they’ll still be priced at something over ten times average earnings.
@ Joe,
As always you spruik the idea of a Land Value Tax as a solution to most problems. Canberra has a LVT but housing is still some 25% more expensive there than in Brisbane and Adelaide which don’t have one.
Incidentally you might think that housing would be relatively cheap in a country with a large area and low population. However it doesn’t seem to work like that. The median price for a house in Canberra is over A$1million. That’s about £520k
The House of Commons Library published a research report in May Tackling the under-supply of housing in England
The paper focuses on the main barriers and possible solutions to increasing supply in England, including:
– The potential contribution of the local authority and housing association sectors. The widespread view that meeting delivery targets will require major public sector investment in a housebuilding programme.
– How to ensure more land suitable for development is brought forward at a reasonable price, including how more public land can brought forward more quickly.
– How to properly resource local authority planning departments and address a planning system that’s widely seen as slow, costly and complex.
– How essential infrastructure to support housing development can be funded.
– How to encourage and support more small and medium sized (SME) building firms into a market dominated by a small number of large companies.
– How to ensure the construction industry is in a fit state to deliver housebuilding capacity, eg through improved training. The Government commissioned Farmer Review of the UK Construction Labour Model (2016) concluded “many features of the industry are synonymous with a sick, or even a dying patient.”
I agree with the article.
Appealing to the NIMBY vote in Chesham and Amersham helped us to win that byelection, but this is not a sensible path for a nationa political party.
Everybody supports housebuilding, but somewhere not near them. The only way to overcome that is by having the national government of England impose housebuilding targets and overruling local objections in the national interest.
Peter Martin,
when a government wants to reduce imports, get people to to drink less alcohol, quit smoking or drive less it uses taxation as an incentive to drive behaviour. Taxes have to be a sufficient proportion of the cost (actual or imputed rental value of land for LVT) to drive behaviour.
Land Value Taxes can similarly be used as a disincentive to the use of existing housing as an speculative investment in land rather than needed shelter and more productive forms of investment like quickly building new housing on land banks held back as speculative investments.
The Mayor of Manchester, Andy Burnham, gets it MANCHESTER WAITS IN THE WINGS
“I think we’re trapped in a model that doesn’t work particularly well, which is overtaxing people’s work or people’s labour and under-taxing capital and assets.” Land value capture is the way to take a first step out of that [unfair tax system], because you’re not necessarily saying ‘we’re going to come and swipe something that you’ve got’.”
Land Value Capture is the central element of an economic reform program that seeks to address the basic causes of poverty and widening inequality by way of a major redistribution of the burden of taxation from labour to capital wealth.
@ Mohammed Amin, “the national government of England”.
Writing from Scotland, Mr Amin, I’m sorry to have to correct you, but there is no such thing as ‘the national government of England’…… even though it sometimes feels that that’s what it is.
As per the Savills report, housebuilding in the 1960’s and early 1970s exceeded new household growth, but still equates to 3.0% per annum on an annualised basis (7.0% per annum in nominal terms)
“Q2 1958 to Q2 1971
A prolonged period of largely consistent price growth that equates to 3.0% per annum on an annualised basis (7.0% per annum in nominal terms) as the swinging sixties take hold House building continues at an average rate of over 350,000 per annum on average, peaking at 425,830 in 1968, with private enterprise now delivering over half of all homes”.
Even with this historically high level of housebuilding for over a decade, house price inflation really took off from 1971 to 1973.
“Q2 1971 to Q4 1973
Inflation adjusted house price growth of +63% over 2.5 years.
A dramatic increase in prices, reflecting an easing of credit conditions and a spike in economic growth. Prices rose in nominal terms by 42% in 1972 alone and doubled over 3 years of the Barber boom.”
The reason for this dramatic increase was the same reason that caused the high asset price inflation from 1995 to 2007. It is not primarily housing supply (where restricted supply drives high rental prices) or low interest rates, it is the volume of credit creation going into the housing market (even with mortgage rates of 8% or 9%).
When banks create excess money it can go into property and stocks creating asset bubbles, into excess consumption creating inflation or into the business sector creating investment, jobs and economic growth.
Direction of bank lending towards the productive economy and disincentivising speculation in housing with LVT is the key to making housing more affordable while addressing housing supply is key to the rental sector.
You can have a significant rate of decline in the inflation adjusted value of housing without creating negative equity for those on standard mortgages. Firstly, there is inflation itself. At the moment, that is quite high so just keeping absolute values steady would make them more affordable.
In addition, a standard mortgage requires you to pay off a small amount of the principal each year. If prices fall in absolute terms by the same amount that they pay off in the first year, the value of the equity in the home never falls.
Thirdly, if we assume everyone now starts with at least a five percent deposit, a slightly higher rate of fall would cause their equity to fall to zero over the first few years of the mortgage but then rise again.
Politically however a target of keeping absolute values steady (with a slow decline in real values) is probably sensible.
Would it not help if we were to get away from the idea that everyone should own their own house? The problem started when Margaret Thatcher allowed the tenants to buy their Council houses. This resulted in the social housing stock becoming vastly depleted.
As to the young not being able to buy their houses; would it not help if they did not have vast debts already round their necks in the form of Student Loans to be repaid. We have to remember that banks and building societies are not charities; immediately someone says that they have a debt of around £50,000 from Student Loans, this immediately makes them a bad risk, surely.
This thread started as comment on the conference resolution on housing and the Young Liberal dismay at the proposed removal of a national housebuilding target. It has then widened into a discussion of various issues surrounding housing. Let’s get back to the basic issue.
Given that the great majority of target seats in the next GC will be Tory held it will be tempting to set policy positions designed to tempt Tory voters to switch. Fair enough if these policies are true to liberal principles and acceptable to the many target voters who are certainly not former Tory supporters. In my view the removal of a national housebuilding target crosses that line. Whatever spin is put upon it, commentators would label this as nimbyism and we would suffer. The Young Liberals are right on this one.
It is cheering to see the Young Liberals standing up for good, sensible Liberal policies against the ingrained tendency of this party to pander to only the loudest and most conservative local voices in any area. We do not have enough homes, and we must build more. Everything else we might do – on overseas owners, second homes, LVT – may help on the margins, but must be conceived of as secondary to the primary goal of enough homes that prices and rents drop considerably. This will free up incomes for productive ends, rather than having them squandered by a dysfunctional housing market.
Perhaps, if we can turn this supertanker around, we can start to think meaningfully about planning reform – coupling council tax increases to rent rises might, for example, help spread the pain and encourage more folks to speak out against the usual suspects who always form any NIMBY campaign.
Nothing in this discussion addresses the issue of who is supposed to build the extra homes needed,
The construction industry’s shortage of skilled labour is such that even if the entire planning system vanished tomorrow it would make little difference to housebuilding rates as the skilled workers are not there. Indeed, even this government has had to identify some construction trades as shortage ones for which overseas recruitment is now allowed.
I’ve been writing about the industry since 1987 and it has had this skill shortage problem pretty well the entire time.
Various posts above rightly suggest modular housing (and maybe 3D print) could be a solution, since working in these needs shorter training times. But there is a ‘chicken and egg’ problem in attracting investment and the demise of Legal & General’s modular components factory is hardly an encouraging sign.
This post and the comments illustrate the dilemma in housing policy – there are policies designed to appeal to voters (which are often called ‘populist’) and different policies designed to produce an outcome.
In UK, housing for sale is in the private sector, for all intents and purposes. Setting a target for the private sector without other interventions is doomed to failure. Joe Bouke and others have explained the challenges and potential unintended consequences of a housing target.
The first Party to propose a deliverable policy to address the housing policy is likely to attract the votes of young voters. I am not an expert, but I suspect that an essential first step is to focus only on homes for first time buyers, coupled with reform of the rental sector.
The only basis on which a general housing target might be considered a good policy for the Lib Dems is that we would not be called upon to deliver it. That is hardly a sound basis for policy making.
The House price to rent ratio is a measure of the relationship between house prices and rents. House price to rent ratio in United Kingdom (UK) from 2nd quarter 2015 to 4th quarter 2022
“Since 2015, the gap between the cost of buying a home and renting has grown, with homeownership becoming increasingly less affordable. As of the fourth quarter of 2022, the house price to rent ratio in the UK stood at 131.7. That meant that house price growth has outpaced rental growth by nearly 32 percent between 2015 and 2022”.
Land with planning consent in the right places for work, schools, shopping, leisure etc is always going to be scarce relative to the demand. That is why Land Value Tax is important for capturing and recycling excess rents from for the public benefit.
To address Housing supply (and therefore rents) LibDem policy needs to be focused on local authorities acquiring land in the right places at existing use value for the development of council housing, freeing up private sector housing in the rental market.
To address house price inflation, residential mortgage lending should be restricted to non-bank lenders and deposit takers like building societies.
The problems with the housing market began in 1971 when UK banks were allowed to compete in the mortgage market, eventhough housebuilding was running at a level of 360,000 per year. The ability of the banks to create money from nothing and lend into the residential housing market is the source (and will continue to be) of excessive house price inflation.
Just to say that I agree with the article and all the good comments supporting it! thanks to @Joe Burke for all the factual statements too
Mark Smulian raises an important issue regarding the construction industry’s shortage of skilled labour. There is discussion of this issue from page 88 of the HofC Library research report Tackling the under-supply of housing in England
“Some of the main challenges facing the sector in recent years have included a shortage of skills and insufficient recruitment, supply chain disruption and lower productivity growth than the economy average.
The government’s efforts to address the skills shortage, such as making it easier for the sector to employ workers from abroad have been welcomed.
Also the number of apprentices starting in construction is higher than pre-pandemic levels. However, some industry members have criticised the Construction Industry
Training Board (CITB), a public body which helps the sector develop skills and attract workers, for being ineffective.
On productivity, the industry has welcomed government actions to, for example, support the development of modular housing. Meanwhile supply chains have largely recovered from disruption caused by the pandemic.”
The construction industry is an area ripe for training and job programs and has been used successfully in the past for such purposes. With 350,000 long-term unemployed (over 6 months) and an urgent need for local authority council house construction this sector would seem to be a good place to start with government funded job guarantee programs that provide training for bricklayers, plasters, plumbers, electricians, JCB operators, Carpenters, modular housing fitters etc. After six to 12 months of work related training they would be prepared for an apprenticeship or career in construction.
@ Joe,
“The ability of the banks to create money from nothing and lend into the residential housing market is the source (and will continue to be) of excessive house price inflation!”
Banks have always had this ability. German banks too and they haven’t had the same level of house price inflation.
I always find it useful to compare a bank’s created money with a casino’s gambling chip. The banks aren’t doing anything different except they are doing it digitally. A casino is creating money if it lends it in the form of its created chips. Just as the casino can create as many chips as it likes so can the bank create as many of its own digital IOUs as it likes. Both still have to be able to guarantee them against the IOUs of the Govt/BoE.
So, it might seem odd, but I’m saying that although it might be easy to blame the banks, they aren’t really doing anything wrong. They’ll always do what banks do and try to lend out as much as possible in a rising housing market.
The blame lies squarely with governments of all political parties for using monetary policy as the sole regulatory mechanism in the economy. They have deliberately floated it on a sea of private debt with the price of housing as the collateral.
The government mandates the Bank of England to regulate the banking sector and maintain financial stability. Most of the money in circulation is created by the commercial banks. The Bank of England is able to influence the amount of money in the economy to some extent. It does so in normal times by setting monetary policy — through the interest rate that it pays on reserves held by commercial banks with the Bank of England. More recently, though the Bank of England’s asset purchase programme has sought to raise the quantity of broad money in circulation. This in turn affects the prices and quantities of a range of assets in the economy, including money Money creation in the modern economy
Professor Muellbauer compared the UK and German Housing markets in his 2018 research paper What Germany can teach us about repairing our broken housing market
“In housing affordability levels and volatility, there could hardly be a greater contrast than between the UK and Germany. Even after Germany’s recent boom, average house prices compared to average incomes are still lower than in 1980, while the UK’s have rocketed. Residential housing supply has expanded far more in Germany and mortgage credit is more tightly regulated. A sensibly regulated rental market and stable German house prices have combined to produce a healthy rental sector with satisfied renters and long tenures.”
Bank executives are incentivised to increase their loan books as long as they can regardless of the economic and financial consequences of creating an asset bubble. As Citigroups Chuck Prince put it “When the music stops, in terms of liquidity, things will be complicated. But as long as the music is playing, you’ve got to get up and dance.”
What we as a party need to do is develop and present policy that incentivises banks to stop dancing before the music stops.
@ Joe
As you’ve said yourself:
“Residential housing supply has expanded far more in Germany and mortgage credit is more tightly regulated”
It was the neoliberal fad for deregulation which has caused the problems. If the Lib Dems are serious about doing anything for younger people, a reversal of the deregulation of banking should be a high priority.
Maybe an even higher priority would be to do something about the proliferation of holiday homes which sucked the life out of many rural communities. In addition there are estimated to be over 600,000 empty properties in the UK.
I doubt if anything much will happen and we’ll be having the same conversation in ten years time.
If we can’t reform the land market, the housing problem will not resolve. Land tax in some form is likely part of the answer, as has been well argued on this site before. I am halfway through this book, and commend it to you all:
https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/rethinking-the-economics-of-land-and-housing-9781350374270/
Peter Martin,
the Policy Paper – Tackling the Housing Crisis coming to conference next month includes the following:
●Building 150,000 social homes each year
● Build 10 new garden cities
● A package of proposals to improve the energy efficiency of new and existing homes
● Investing in the construction workforce.
● Introducing a national licensing system and register for Landlords.
● Provide longer tenancies, rent smoothing and strengthen tenants rights.
● Abolishing residential leasehold and capping ground rents to a nominal fee.
● Require developers and councils to undertake meaningful community engagement.
● Managing the impact of second homes with greater powers for local communities to levy supplementary taxes
● Reform the Land Compensation Act so that councils can acquire land at fair values.
The paper notes at 1.04 “Tackling affordability is complex and will not be addressed by supply alone because the housing market behaves like a bond market, with investment and profit competing with need as reasons for purchase. Having said that, a continued supply of new houses is vital. That is why we plan a rapid increase in building social housing to 150,000 a year, alongside plans to build 10 new garden cities”.
Interesting discussion. Can we move away from the name calling though it hinder debate. In Blaby district we have campaigned against plans to build housing on local parks. Does that make us NIMBYS. We have plans being brought forward for 800 houses in a community that has doubled in 10 years. Its also less than a mile from land where 2000 houses have been given planning permission . No sign of them being built any time soon because “there is no demand” . Opposing ill considered development is not nimbyism.
Building 150,000 houses a year seems singularly lacking in ambition. When I was much younger 300,000 houses a year was considered too little.
There is an aspect of this debate that seems to have been missed, namely empty properties. There are still many empty houses, some in poor condition, but not all. Flats above city centre shops and businesses that could be brought into use and, as more people go in for hybrid working, there will be vacant offices that could be repurposed as housing.
Whilst new build will be important, we also need to be much more savvy about getting empty property back into use and repurposing buildings that might otherwise remain empty. We also need to tackle those owners who buy up property and then deliberately leave it unused so as to make large capital gains in the future. This is not being tackled by the present corrupt government, whose pals own the empty property.
So, lacks ambition, could do better?
Mick,
building 150,000 social homes each year when added to current rates of private sector housebuilding would bring the number of new dwellings constructed to well over 300,000 per year.
The points you raise about empty properties is an important one. Flats above city centre shops and businesses that could be brought into use,; vacant office buildings; owners who buy up property and then deliberately leave it unused so as to make large capital gains in the future etc. All of these issues can be addressed with a Land Value Tax that deliberately incentivises bringing vacant land/property back into its highest and best use as quickly as possible.
You are of course correct to say “this is not being tackled by the present corrupt government, whose pals own the empty property”. The system funds the extravagant earnings of the banking sector and hedge fund/private equity sectors that drives inequality and is also the source of Tory party donations for election campaigns.
The Labour government should have addressed this in 1997-2010 but did not and Vince Cable was a lone voice in the desert during the coalition years. Let’s hope we are in a position to push this agenda forward after next years elections.
We have a much more complicated system within housing. This government wastes so much on useless projects.
As I write on the need for more accessible housing I also look at the end result. There are still many empty properties. Above shops, a large school has been empty for many years, King Edwards School in Bath. A beautiful building owned by Smiths Brewery.
In Scotland properties left to just fall down in more remote areas.
Disabled people with commodes in the living area, washing at the kitchen sink, crawling upstairs. A Local Authority was forced to pay £30,000 to a disabled person.
Some areas of the world do need support for the future. Albania is becoming a tourist area. There are ways to make areas a much better.
I like the idea of British farming and food production or do we simply fill our island with housing?
30 disabled people perished at the top of a Tower. Ladders not reaching them and this was tried to be covered up. I find it shocking as I am disabled to be treated in this fashion. My last thought.
We need to have a comprehensive set of policies to solve our housing and living crisis. With so many issues to deal with owning your own home need not be essential for living a good life. What is needed is a varying housing stock that allows everyone to have a roof over their head that is affordable. easily available and allows for moving as appropriate. Renting should be easier, with improved rights more affordable so everyone can consider it as part of their housing journey.
” ●Building 150,000 social homes each year
● Build 10 new garden cities”
Whilst this may play well on the doorstep, it is reality denial.
We can expect both the climate crisis and the resource crisis to get significantly worse before 2030, so whilst There is a need to woo voters, expect reality will require a rapid u-turn…
@Helen Dudden
“In Scotland properties left to just fall down in more remote areas.”
If it’s a remote area without demand what woud be the point of rebuilding such a property?