What is behind the recent surge in councils buying up retail property? From shopping centres to offices, retail warehouses, industrial parks, solar farms, garages and even country clubs, local authorities across England are splashing the cash. The sums of money involved are staggering, Surrey Heath council, for example, spent £86m on a shopping centre in […]
Theresa May’s premiership started well, with a speech outside Number Ten on the “burning injustices” that she was determined to tackle in government. But the central motif of May’s domestic agenda is, according to The Times, going up in flames. In 2016, May lamented the fact that if you’re born poor you’ll die on average […]
It’s amazing the capacity some policy wonks have to identify a problem and then come up with a completely wrongheaded solution. So it is with the latest report from the Housing and Finance Institute. The authors insist that rather than cutting stamp duty, the Government should be subsidising people to buy houses. Their argument is […]
Millions of families are no better off than they were back in 2003. According to a new report from the Resolution Foundation, incomes for all households in 2017/18 increased by just 0.9 per cent, the lowest rise for four years and less than half the average between 1994 and 2007, just before the financial crisis. […]
Though the ongoing Brexit tussles in Parliament and Brussels have unsurprisingly created something of a policy vacuum, there is perhaps no greater crisis in contemporary British politics than housing. The extent of the problem is truly staggering. Since 1995, average house prices in the UK have increased by an astonishing 300 per cent – rising […]
Town versus country may seem like a question of personal preference, but it’s really a matter of human progress. Cities are the engines of human liberation and economic growth. Urbanisation is also good for the planet, for people in the cities have a smaller environmental footprint than people in the countryside. And, as such, it […]
There’s so much nonsense in the IPPR’s latest report On Borrowed Time, it’s hard to know where to start. It leads on an eye-catching call for the Bank of England to cap house price increases at 0 per cent for the next five years. Rather than allowing supply to meet demand, say through liberalising the […]
One day several years ago Tony Blair sat on his sofa and decided that the office of Lord Chancellor was an anachronism that needed to be abolished. Immediately people started pointing out it wasn’t quite that simple. The office is so embedded into UK law, statute, legislation and practice that the absence of a named […]
Quick question: if I asked you to lend me £10 and then asked you to pay me for borrowing it from you, you’d think I was mad, right? Well this is currently the deal the world is getting when it lends money to Germany over any duration for the next 5 years. That makes no […]
If the Government ever wants to solve the housing crisis, they need to step up and dispel the Green Belt myth that has become so entrenched within the British psyche. The romanticised notion of a “green and pleasant land” is strangling our cities and preventing the much-needed supply of houses. That’s right. The time has […]
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 […]
Last Thursday in Queen’s Square, Bloomsbury a small party was held to celebrate some of the finest architectural designs of the past year. All were by respected specialists in the field and each had been submitted to the Royal Academy for their Summer Exhibition – and all but one had been rejected out of hand. […]
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 […]
Roll up, roll up. The Conservatives are looking for a candidate to be the Mayor of London. But there’s a catch. A Tory source tells The Sunday Times: “We are likely to lose anyway, so it is better to send a visible message to voters that we are changing.” That is taken to mean either […]
So, you want to heal the generational divide? Thinktankers and policymakers have been out in force over the past few weeks throwing ideas around about how to shift some of the burden from the shoulders of my generation – the student loan generation, generation rent, “those entitled millennials”. The vast majority of those ideas are, […]
Seattle is, by many measures, one of the fastest-growing cities in America, if not the fast-growing city. A few big tech companies, including Amazon and Microsoft, plus other large, successful businesses such as Boeing and Starbucks, have fueled this explosive rise. But prosperity hasn’t necessarily bred contentment, as the traditionally left-wing city turned on the […]
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