There seems to be an awful lot of housing news and comment circulating just at the moment. And it isn’t just more of the same. The arguments for a change of gear on housing policy seem to be growing louder and more frequent. The housing sector, it’s argued, […]
On Thursday Kris Hopkins, the Housing Minister, published a post at the Spectator entitled This government is solving Britain’s homes crisis. The post was designed to coincide with the publication of statistics about the unlovely, and largely unloved, Help to Buy scheme. When I saw the post I […]
Warning about an impending housing bubble or denying that any signs of a bubble can be detected are popular media pastimes in the UK. Bubbles are bad. Bubbles shut people out of the housing market because property is unaffordable. Bubbles store up trouble for those who buy at […]
The resurgence of private renting is perhaps the biggest transformation in the UK housing system over the last decade. Indeed, if you put it into a longer historical perspective it is quite remarkable. In the 1970s, in the face of seemingly inexorable growth of owner occupation and local […]
The objections to George Osborne’s latest wheeze to assist the housing market are hardly worth discussing. They are almost too obvious. And they have been rehearsed at length in relation to similar, smaller scale initiatives that have already been tried. The new “Help to Buy” scheme, announced in […]
[Originally posted at Dale&Co, 24/09/12] There’s a joke going around at the moment: Did you hear that Nick Clegg has joined a boyband? It’s called No Direction. This came to mind when I read of Clegg’s announcement on Sunday’s Andrew Marr Show that the Liberal Democrats are proposing […]
[This is the text accompanying my presentation to the 2nd Social Liberal Forum Conference: “Social justice across generations”, King’s College London, 14/07/12. Not all of it was delivered on the day, because of the way the session panned out and because there’s too much of it. My thanks […]
Most recent comments