Last week, polling for CapX found broad agreement that there is a housing crisis in Britain, though people in all regions thought it was less bad in their local area, with politicians the most likely culprits in the eyes of voters. This week we turn to opponents of development – habitually feared by governments – […]
Consensus is a rare thing in British politics these days. On one thing, however, the overwhelming majority of voters agree. Housing has become a problem. A big problem. In new polling for CapX this week, Matt Singh found that three in four Britons either ‘strongly agree’ or ‘agree’ that there is a housing crisis in […]
The third and fourth parts of our Battle of Ideas series consider an issue that has quietly been moving up the political agenda – housing. As I’ve argued previously, the 2017 “youthquake” was in fact a rentquake, and the difficulties facing younger would-be homeowners are of far greater political significance than is commonly acknowledged. For […]
According to the Times, stamp duty receipts fell by nearly £1 billion last year as a result of another misguided bit of tax tinkering introduced by George Osborne back in 2014. Osborne had planned to shift the tax burden onto the most expensive homes. Transactions in England, Wales, and Northern Ireland fell 2.6 per cent […]
Harry Phibbs’ article last week, Labour should practise want it preaches on housing, made a number of points about the housing and planning policies of Labour councils. Here Labour Islington councillors Diarmaid Ward and Asima Shaikh offer their response to Harry’s piece. We keep our aims very simple in Islington: create a fairer borough by building genuinely […]
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 […]
Power in local government is particularly important to a political party that is in opposition nationally. For a start there is the impact on morale of council election results. Politicians can dismiss (or pretend to dismiss) opinion polls. Real elections cannot be so easily brushed aside. So local elections are taken, quite reasonably, as a […]
This week CapX is republishing some of our favourite articles of the year. This piece first appeared on August 21. Living on our planet is more enjoyable than it used to be in almost all respects. We live longer, we are healthier, we learn more, and we enjoy greater comfort. The one exception is what […]
For the first time, we learnt from the Office for National Statistics today that nearly 600 homeless people died in England and Wales last year. This has increased by a quarter compared with five years ago. These are shocking figures and it’s simply not acceptable in our society that people are being left at such […]
This week Carwyn Jones stands down as First Minister of Wales after nine years in the post. When Jones took over in 2009 the UK still had a Labour Government and Gordon Brown would cling on as Prime Minister for a few more months. Given the turbulence of modern politics, for Jones simply to have […]
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 […]
A lesser spotted announcement in last week’s Budget was a commitment to ensure that empty lots on high streets — flats above shops and disused malls — could be transferred quickly to housing. It’s a war I’ve been waging for a decade. It’s something I’ve raised with nearly every councillor, MP or housing executive that […]
Part of the drama of Budgets used to be the Chancellor of the Exchequer pulling a rabbit out of the hat. George Osborne, that most political of Chancellors, was keen on them. But it had become a bit of a tradition – like the Chancellor waving the red despatch box in the air when leaving […]
This week on CapX we are publishing the winning entry and the runners-up for the Institute of Economic Affairs Breakthrough Prize. The prize, supported by entrepreneur Richard Koch, sought ideas for a “free market breakthrough” policy to solve the UK housing crisis. Today, Charles Shaw and Daniel Pycock argue that a new system of Simplified […]
This week on CapX we are publishing the winning entry and the runners-up for the Institute of Economic Affairs Breakthrough Prize. The prize, supported by entrepreneur Richard Koch, sought ideas for a “free market breakthrough” policy to solve the UK housing crisis. Today one of the runners-up, Stephen Ashmead, explains why a new self-build framework would […]
This week on CapX we are publishing the winning entry and the runners-up for the Institute of Economic Affairs Breakthrough Prize. The prize, supported by entrepreneur Richard Koch, sought ideas for a “free market breakthrough” policy to solve the UK housing crisis. This year’s winner is Ben Clements, an analyst based in London, who proposed a […]
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