What could possibly be the answer?
The crisis in the British housing market is reaching terrifying proportions and it is going to get worse.
Yesterday we learnt that rental prices are rising by 9% a year, unsustainable and likely to throw thousands onto council waiting lists and the streets. Landlords blame new rules and regulations, like not poisoning their tenants, or higher mortgage costs, which haven’t risen in months. The word from the tenants is that they are being gouged by greedy, selfish and opportunistic owners. Which sounds much more likely to me.
Then we find that the government’s new “planning regime” which goes under the laughable title of the National Planning Policy Framework, is a farce. It removed mandatory targets from local councils and they are immediately pandering to the NIMBYs and cancelling house building projects everywhere they can.
It is therefore neither national, a framework or a planning policy, but it might save a few Tory seats.
Then you have the Council for the Protection of Rural England complaining that it is becoming too expensive for even medium earners to live in the countryside. Strange that, what with the CPRE being in favour of much, much more house building in the countryside.
Interestingly this has been a disaster for the low paid and poor for years, it is only now that it is hitting the middle classes that we have started to care or even notice. So what is the answer?
The simple facts are that without vastly expanded house building this problem will get far, far worse. But we now have a housing policy deliberately designed to stop that happening, for party political reasons.
Things will get worse before they get better.
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
By Jonty Bloom Media