Why stay?
Great to hear that the Today programme will be covering the housing crisis in the UK for the next three days. I really hope they can get away from the discussions about immigration and house building to look at the more long lasting damage housing shortages and sky high prices are causing.
For instance I have found online a contribution to the FT’s comments section from a young graduate. This graduate and his partner both have very well paid jobs, but together they have £130,000 of student debt and so pay 60% tax, they come from poor backgrounds and have no chance of inheriting much of anything.
Their chances of getting on the housing ladder are terrible but they have friends and colleagues who are doing just that with help from the bank of mum and dad, funded no doubt by the property profits of their parents.
Just imagine what this does for social mobility. Why bother trying if you can never catch up no matter how good you are or how hard you work?
Just imagine what this does for productivity, if the brightest and best can only afford to live in certain areas of the country where house prices are low enough for them to buy. A mobile and flexible labour market is essential to productivity.
The comment ends with a plea from the author for advice on where he and his partner can work and prosper, here or abroad.
I fear we will lose them, top graduates can work around the world. Yet just the hint of yet another house price boom has the red tops salivating.
40 years of council house sales and low house building have brought us here, 40 years of Nimbyism, 40 years of property porn on TV and treating ever rising house prices as a good thing.
This is going to take decades to fix and huge political will, which seems in very short supply.
If you were in your 20s with no hope of ever owning a property, but with excellent skills and qualifications recognised around the world, would you stay?
Economics, trade and Brexit, not necessarily in that order but the dog always comes first.
By Jonty Bloom Media
Assuming (please god) that Labour get in they will need at least two terms to effect any meaningful change - and after ten years a reorganised tory party, if in government, will very likely just start undoing it all (again). Not a way even to run a whelk stall
As soon as I heard the word immigration in reference to housing crisis I knew we were back on the BBC political agenda as dictated by right wing ‘think tanks’