When everyone in politics agrees on something, it is usually a sign that the idea is either very good or very bad. Today something was published which was both. An array of housing charities and think tanks have published an open letter to James Brokenshire, the Housing Secretary, calling for reform to the planning system. […]
My dad once told me about a cruel trick school boys would play on each other. One would ask “do you want to see a match burn twice?”. He would then strike the match, blow it out and stab it on another boy’s arm, burning him. This is the unfortunate situation in which the Department […]
Tucked away in yesterday’s strategy for tackling rough sleeping were details of a £28 million Housing First pilot in Greater Manchester, the West Midlands, and Liverpool. Like most of the strategy it wasn’t new, the strategy “reaffirmed” a previous government announcement, but it’s a reminder of a welcome willingness to try a sensible strategy that […]
One of my colleagues used to have a theory about how Britain’s housing crisis would eventually become self-limiting. It went more or less like this: the problem at the moment is that the cost of NIMBYism (i.e. organised resistance to house-building) is not borne by the NIMBYs themselves. NIMBYism, to the extent that it is […]
How many cabinet ministers truly believe in free enterprise? Given we have a Conservative government, it is depressing that such a question should need to be asked. The threat from Jeremy Corbyn should have restored the ideological divide between the two main British political parties. Yet so often the Conservative response is one of appeasement. […]
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 […]
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 […]
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