Housing

[WhileTheChief..]

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There is a large body of work from many sources that suggests a ‘huge amount of new homes’ is not really the answer at all.

The evidence suggests that it’s almost impossible to build your way out of high prices in any sensible manner. To increase the available housing stock by a big enough percentage is simply not feasible in any reasonable timescale.

To understand high prices it’s useful to understand the root cause and the evidence suggests that lack of primary supply is not a meaningful contributor.

By far the biggest contributors have been policy (think the buy to let boom…now brought to a shuddering halt by the belated tax rule changes), stamp duty increases squishing the secondary market (fewer people move as it’s so expensive to do so thus limiting supply at any one point) and of course the biggest culprit of all; availability of credit and the cost of that credit.

I totally understand that the build build build mantra seems intuitively obvious in terms of a basic supply and demand dynamic but it really doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

Leaving prices to the side for a moment, whenever there's talk of homelessness on the news, it always comes round to there being a shortage of homes.

So, even taking all your points into account, do we not still need a huge number of new homes being built every year?