Our pronounced regional inequality is a symptom of an economy that is broken in many important areas. Fixing those would go a long way to make the Government’s much-vaunted ‘levelling up’ a reality. Four of the most broken areas are higher education, banking, transport and housing. There are radical but realistic ways to improve each of […]
This weekend saw the collapse of yet another attempt to fix the deeply broken British system of property tax. A trial balloon of a new ‘mansion tax’, floated to the papers, was quickly shot down by a barrage of outrage from the Conservative heartlands. It doesn’t have to be so hard. There are tried and […]
Shortly before being named Boris Johnson’s housing adviser, Jack Airey published a fascinating, radical and thoughtful report proposing US-style rules-based zoning to replace our current discretionary land use planning system. In doing so he echoed Nicholas Boys Smith, the founder of Create Streets and surviving chair of the Building Better Building Beautiful Commission (BBBBC), who […]
Living with Beauty, the final report of the late Sir Roger Scruton’s Commission on Building Better, Building Beautiful, has no fewer than 45 recommendations to transform the quality and quantity of what we build. Restored to his role of Chair after losing it through a misquoted and misrepresented interview with the New Statesman, Sir Roger […]
Ian Mulheirn, an analyst who argues that there is no shortage of homes, has written a new post citing a recent estimate that if we had doubled the responsiveness of our housing production – to still below the underwhelming levels of Canada, Japan and Denmark – prices would only be about 9% lower than they […]
The most important policy of Boris Johnson’s new government may be one that wasn’t in the manifesto at all. Today’s news that the government intends radical planning reform is welcome to everyone who understands the profound damage to wages, growth and fairness caused by our decades-long failure to build enough homes in the right places. […]
‘Rebalancing Britain’ is a major collaboration between CapX and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation focusing on how the Government should tackle the longstanding imbalances in the British economy. The project focuses not only on the well-documented North/South divide, but on the way smaller towns and cities are often left behind in national policy debates. I think […]
“So many of the parishes in our district are merrily approving more houses around their village,” an official from Oxfordshire fumed to me last month, “and that’s against Council policy!” I had to pinch myself: living in London, it’s normally the reverse. Making sure local people benefit is one obvious way to gain support for […]
Robert Jenrick, the new Secretary of State for Housing, wrote a striking call in 2017 to boost home ownership by building homes on government land and selling them at cost to the under-40s of that area. In the South East, that could mean a 75% discount to market price. That is little short of electoral […]
Yesterday’s report from the Campaign to Protect Rural England about the brownfield land with space for a million homes perfectly illustrates the organisation’s many strengths, and its weaknesses. With exquisite attention to detail, it demonstrates that there are unused sites in London with the potential for 170,000 homes. Someone has done a lot of work. […]
A new report from the Social Market Foundation, suggesting building co-living spaces for sale to mitigate the housing crisis, has attracted the usual backlash. Much of the opposition to tiny homes, co-living facilities and the like comes from those living comfortably in large houses with no idea of the hard choices facing young people. Why […]
As the “news” breaks that perhaps nearly one per cent of the enormous green belt surrounding London has been allocated for 200,000 homes, let us ask: who benefits? News of potential green belt encroachment is the Campaign to Protect Rural England’s best recruiting tool. There is no mystery here. The story was seeded by the […]
The Mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, is reported to be considering bringing in rent controls. It is not clear that he has power to do that, or how it would work. Rent control might improve the lot of suffering existing tenants, at least for a while. But the lesson from cities like Berlin, where such […]
Why can’t you afford a home? UCL researcher Josh Ryan-Collins says it is due to inevitable landowner profits from land, to a majority of homeowners blocking fair taxation of those profits, and to excessive mortgage credit. His new book is not yet widely available, but he has written a long summary. Causation is complex. Lawyers […]
A disturbing new trend has emerged. Faced with strong evidence from the US of the terrible damage to welfare and GDP from our long-term failure to build enough homes with access to jobs and opportunities, the beginnings of a counter-revolution are stirring. The first signs that the counter-attack had spread to respectable academia emerged at […]
The Chief Secretary to the Treasury is right about two things. This country needs to build many more homes. And if it does not, the Conservatives face an increasingly uphill electoral battle. As she says, Jeremy Corbyn has successfully tapped into the many people who want a shake-up. The backlash against her remarks in the […]
For some Conservatives, home ownership is a precondition for support for capitalism. But is that really the case? After all, you don’t need to own a farm or a factory to enjoy the benefits of their products. You can do very well in a fairly-organised modern economy with nothing more than human capital or a […]
Shaun Spiers, until recently Chief Executive of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, has written a fascinating, profoundly significant, and at times deeply frustrating book. Reading How to build houses and save the countryside filled me with excitement and hope. But occasionally I had the urge to hurl it at the wall. It offers compulsive […]
In her party conference speech last year, Theresa May dedicated her premiership to “renewing the British Dream” by “fixing our broken housing market”. And so it is reasonable to assume that the ideas of anyone advising the prime minister of housing are likely to be fairly important. That is exactly what Toby Lloyd, formerly head […]
The Resolution Foundation’s depressing claim that one-third of millennials face renting their whole life has made headlines today. But the think tank’s report also contained the encouraging — and unsurprising — revelation that countries building plenty of homes have generally not seen huge price rises, despite low interest rates and a big banking sector. Perhaps […]
