Last week, CapX and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation launched Rebalancing Britain, a major new project focusing on how the next Prime Minister should tackle the longstanding imbalances in the British economy. The project will focus not only on the well-documented North/South divide, but on the way smaller towns and cities are often left behind in […]
Britain’s housing crisis is uniquely severe. We build houses more slowly than anyone else, we have seen a fastest house price rise than any developed country, and our homes are the most expensive houses compared to the average salary. Quite a record. Britain’s unique inability to build houses and our unrivalled centralisation is not a […]
In some quarters the proposed solution to Britain’s housing problems is lots and lots more social – ie below market rate – housing. For the more extreme, this should mean local councils building, owning and renting out the dwellings. As one young couple have recently found out, this is no solution at all. Thomas Gallagher […]
Take a quick stroll through a bustling city like London or New York, and you can’t help but feel that such places are the antithesis of environmental sustainability. Yet counterintuitively, large metropolises like these might just be some of the most environmentally friendly places on earth. Each year, the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial […]
Soaring house prices, rising rents, and homeownership near record lows in British cities are recognised as massive political and economic challenges by all. But the flip side of these growing costs has received less attention – how political choices have gifted huge windfalls for homeowners in the wealthiest cities. Homeownership is not the same thing […]
So far, the big question in the Conservative Party leadership campaign has been how to handle Brexit. But there’s another issue that could be even more important, both for the country and for the Conservative Party’s continued existence, and scarcely anyone is talking about it. That issue is housing. The price of property in many […]
The dynamics of the UK’s housing crisis are well-documented: millions prevented from getting on the housing ladder, sky-high rents for often woefully inadequate accommodation and, underpinning it all, a planning system seemingly designed to stop development rather than encourage it (most recently detailed on CapX by Sam Watling today). Perhaps less well understood is how difficult […]
Those on the left always used to have a simple diagnosis for the housing crisis. Housing was in short supply because, from Thatcher onwards, government stopped building council houses. The state became to reliant on the private sector for delivery. There are criticisms to be made of this argument, but its main thrust – that […]
When Chief Secretary to the Treasury Liz Truss made the bold call for one million homes to be built on the green belt, some were quick to point out that such a policy wouldn’t necessarily receive a warm welcome from voters. Will Tanner, Director of the Mayite think tank Onward, drew attention to recent polling […]
At some point soon, Theresa May is going to go. The next leader of the Conservative party will then be asked to form a government, and in doing so will face an unenviable challenge. With no working majority in the House of Commons, and under pressure to hold an early General Election, whoever follows Mrs […]
Campaigning in the 1979 general election, then Prime Minister and Labour leader Jim Callaghan warned Britain of the risks of voting Conservative: “The question you will have to consider is whether we risk tearing everything up by the roots.” The Tories, he said, “were too big a gamble for the country to take”. As we […]
One of the great success stories of the modern world has been the sustained increases in life expectancy we have seen in recent decades, and which are projected to continue for the foreseeable future. The fact we are living longer, healthier lives is something to be celebrated. It does, however, raise a number of tricky […]
Labour’s latest housing wheeze is a plan to scrap a scheme that allows office and industrial buildings to be converted into homes without planning permission. This will apparently put an end to “slum housing and rabbit hutch flats” and lead to housing becoming more affordable. Now, improving the quality of housing and making it more […]
Half of England is owned by just 1 per cent of the population. That’s the eye-catching headline in today’s Guardian, based on a new report about who owns land in the UK. The figures have been compiled by Guy Shrubsole, a Friends of the Earth campaigner and author of Who Owns England? The answer, at least […]
The Centre for Social Justice recently released an in-depth survey of people across Britain that found family breakdown was one of the most significant determinants of poor life outcomes. When someone experiences trauma in childhood, linked to an unhappy home life of familial conflict, doubled the probability of someone experiencing homelessness, doubled the probability of […]
The Government has decided, for reasons unknown, to effectively abolish the assured shorthold tenancy, leaving the assured tenancy as the only viable form of renting. That sounds pretty trivial, but it is not far off a return to the situation that prevailed in a previous era when we barely had a private rental market. And […]
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