Tag: Housing finance

Housing: What Crisis?

Last Friday evening I took a trip out to Coalpit Heath to talk housing at a meeting of the newly constituted South Gloucestershire Liberal Democrats. The title I was working to was Housing: What Crisis?. The talk was followed by a Q&A session in which members of the […]

International evidence on housing booms

This post is the first of its kind for me. The post is jointly authored by myself and my friend and colleague Ken Gibb. It is being published simultaneously on both our blogs. You can find Ken’s post here. A recent NIESR paper by Armstrong and Davis (November […]

Articulating problems, finding solutions

I’m not sure whether anyone is tracking the frequency with which stories about the UK’s problems appear in the media, but intuitively you get the sense that it is increasing. Barely a day seems to pass now without something appearing prominently somewhere. Housing is not just on the […]

Lyons leaps to height?

The final report of the Lyons Housing Review – which may well be the last major party political publication on housing before the election – was published this week. How does it measure up? Has it delivered on the ambition to sort out the chronic problems of the UK’s […]

Housing pathology and paralysis

A few weeks ago Janan Ganesh in the FT described the UK housing market as an ‘institutionalised pathology’. The problems that the housing market is causing for the British economic and political system seemingly become ever more apparent by the day. There is an increasingly strong coalition of […]

Doing something about housing

What to do about the housing crisis? It’s a question that, should you have been so inclined, you could have focused on throughout much of yesterday’s proceedings at Liberal Democrat Spring Conference. A motion on the reform of planning policy was passed, unamended, during the morning’s official business. […]

Vince on “social housing”

Vince Cable made a substantial speech to the Royal Economic Society at the beginning of this week. The speech is worth reading in full because it represents one of the most thorough, thoughtful and wide-ranging perspectives on the economy that you are likely to hear from a front […]