Housing

Hammond can build his way out of trouble

Sometimes in life the biggest risk you can take is to play it safe. This is the predicament of Philip Hammond as he approaches the Budget next month. If he adopts a safety-first approach, it will almost certainly go wrong and he’ll be forced into a credibility-draining U-turn, as he was in March. His best hope is to be bold, and to hope this generates enough momentum to carry him over any bumps in the road. The two longest-serving chancellors of recent times have relished the theatrics of Budget Day. Both Gordon Brown and George Osborne loved pulling a rabbit out of the hat at the last minute, wrongfooting the

If the Tories want to survive they must build more houses

Too many Tories have a sense of inevitable defeat at the next general election. They can see what the problems are but are fatalistic about their ability to solve them before 2022. Sajid Javid isn’t one of these Tories. He quickly grasped that the election result changed the internal Tory debate about housing policy and has been pushing for more radicalism ever since. On Sunday, he went on Andrew Marr to argue that the government should borrow to build. Javid’s argument is the same he made when he was backing Stephen Crabb for leader in 2016, interest rates are so low that it makes sense for government to borrow to

Cabinet urge Hammond to be bold on housing in the Budget

With the next European Council not scheduled until December, political attention now turns to next month’s Budget. As I say in The Sun this morning, there are signs that the government is getting to the right place on housing. I understand that when Cabinet discussed the Budget this week, a frequent refrain from ministers was the need to be bold on housing. One ally of the Chancellor tells me, ‘Housing will be the big centrepiece of it’. I understand from government sources that the Budget is likely to back both land release and the government directly commissioning houses. This means the government would free up public sector land and then

Why we need more than Help to Buy to fix the housing market

The Conservative Party conference kicked off with news that the government plans to earmark an additional £10 billion for the Help to Buy scheme to support 135,000 home buyers. Theresa May’s extension to David Cameron’s flagship housing policy, which has helped over 320,000 buyers since its launch in 2013, is part of a raft of eye-catching measures to win over voters under 45 who deserted the Conservatives in the last election. With house prices now almost eight times the average income and many struggling to afford a home, housing has become a critical political issue. The increase in cash is a clear attempt to appeal to the young hoping to

With average house prices now eight times the average wage, affordable housing remains a dream

Housing – and specifically the dearth of reasonably priced housing – is an issue that crops up again and again in the political conversation. Young people are being priced out of the housing market; even where new housing is being built, very little of it could be classed as ‘affordable’. So today’s news that the average house price is now eight times the average wage will, probably come as little surprise. House prices have been increasing exponentially over the last few decades; in 2000, the average house was 3.96 times the average income, and even since 2007 the average house price has increased by 19%. The fact that it isn’t

Quantitative easing has made houses hopelessly unaffordable

Financial crises tend to see asset prices collapsing, making housing more affordable. But it’s been different this time because the authorities in the UK, and elsewhere, countered the crisis with low interest rates and quantitative easing. By slashing the cost of borrowing and flooding the system with liquidity, these policies set out to – and succeeded in – inflating asset prices. So we have seen the UK stock market and housing market rising at roughly the same amount in the last ten years. Taken together with weak wage growth, the result is that housing in the UK (as in many other countries) has become less affordable. So what has been

Ed West

The Tories need houses, not memes, to win over the young

The Tory party has a new youth wing called Activate to try to win over the kids with ‘memes’ – I believe they’re called – similar to the way that Momentum has built a sort of cult around Jeremy Corbyn. This is in response to the dismal recent Conservative youth vote, which bodes ill for the party. As a party member rather optimistically put it, ‘we’ll only be fine when a Conservative politician can go to Glastonbury and not be booed’. Yeah, I wouldn’t be too hopeful on that one to be honest. Among the under-40s there is an almost visceral dislike of Tories and Toryism, which stems from a number of

Why driverless showers are key to the housing crisis

Although it is commonly assumed that faster-than-sound passenger travel died with Concorde, this isn’t quite true: it overlooks the Caledonian Sleeper. With a few whiskies inside you, this is as close as you can get to teleportation. Yes, according to the timetable it takes about eight-and-a-half hours between Perth and London, but as you are asleep for eight of them, this makes for a supersonic speed of 900 miles per conscious hour. Quite simply, if you are asleep, or otherwise productively or pleasurably engaged, travel time isn’t that important. And if you accept this principle, it becomes clear that Google and Tesla’s Elon Musk have missed an opportunity to really

Mad about the girls

It’s not unusual to see a pop concert on TV where teenage girls and a group of middle-aged men are separated by safety barriers, as the glow sticks wave and the band’s name is excitedly chanted. But in Storyville: Tokyo Girls (BBC4, Tuesday), there was one fairly major twist: the teenage girls were the band, and the middle-aged men their swooning fans. As this jaw-dropping documentary explained, the girls in question are known in Japan as ‘idols’. Their songs tend to be about how demure and innocent they are; and to prove it, they often perform in school uniforms — although with skirts a lot shorter, I suspect, than is

The Grenfell Tower blaze was a disaster waiting to happen

Those images from the early hours of Wednesday – fire shooting up the side of a tower block, with desperate people trapped inside it – were what I have been fearing for seven years. In 2010, I spent six months working on a BBC investigation into concerns about fire safety in refurbished high rises. Our findings were conclusive. Fire chiefs and safety experts all agreed that the vogue for cladding old concrete blocks with plastic fascia, removing asbestos and replacing steel window frames with ones made of UPvC cancelled out all the fire prevention measures that had been built into the blocks. In their original form, tower blocks are stacks

Nick Cohen

Grenfell Tower and the politics of needless death

As the body count rose from the Grenfell Tower fire, sensible people warned us not to rush to judgement. Activists, mainly from the left, denounced a complacent housing bureaucracy at the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation, and a Conservative government, which had refused in its laissez-faire way to regulate rented housing. The warnings sounded sensible. At the time of writing, I still do not know for sure why the fire spread with such ghastly effectiveness. Why rush to judgement and into print? In any case, is there not something wrong with people whose first reaction to a disaster is to take cheap shots? But sensible points can be beside

Housing is escalating up the political agenda

As we ready ourselves for what has become an annual pilgrimage to the polling booths, in terms of finance there is little doubt that housing is taking centre stage in this election. This was not always the case. It’s true that if you look back to newspaper coverage of the housing crisis in the late 1940s and 1950s, post-World War Two, some of the articles could be reproduced word for word in tomorrow’s nationals. But in the 1980s and 90s, back when the structural undersupply of new homes was just getting truly entrenched, housing didn’t seem quite so important. This is one of the reasons why it is escalating back

A method to his madness

I first came across the extraordinary creations of the artist and illustrator William Heath Robinson at least 60 years ago. I loved them, even though I may not have understood every nuance. When I look once more at old favourites such as the machine for conveying peas to the mouth I often spot in the corner some little twist or joke that I had not seen before. What also wasn’t clear at the time is how prescient some of his contraptions were — in one illustration you can see a prototype selfie stick; in another he invents the silent disco. Many of his madcap solutions were semi-serious responses to societal

Martin Vander Weyer

Here’s who should be Mrs May’s cabinet supremo to tackle the housing shortage

Who should be housing supremo in what we all assume will be Mrs May’s new administration? Brandon Lewis and Gavin Barwell, recent junior ministers with that brief, achieved nothing — if we also assume the brief was to procure an adequate supply of new homes, in the private sector or ‘social’ one, which the ‘just about managing’ could afford. The number of affordable homes built in 2015-16 was just 32,000, half that built in the previous year and the lowest since 1992. But action is coming — apparently. ‘We will fix the broken housing market,’ declares Mrs May, mustard-keen on fixing broken markets, ‘to build a new generation of council

It’s time for a real Department of Housing, with a minister to match

‘I earned capital in the campaign, political capital, and I intend to spend it’.  That was how George W Bush put it after winning his second presidential election in 2004. He’s possibly not the best model for good governance, but the sentiment is worth pondering as Theresa May rolls on relentlessly towards victory. Mrs May will wake on June 9 with money in the bank, politically if not fiscally. She’ll have crushed and possibly split apart the Labour Party, secured her party another five years in office and stamped and stamped and stamped her personal authority on the Conservative Party.  With every day that passes, there are more whispers that

Is it time to take a close look at the prime London property market? Spectator Money investigates

‘It feels like 2010,’ was the verdict last week of one seasoned operator in the prime London property market. What they meant is that after a period of uncertainty and restraint, the smart money is beginning to take a longer, harder look at the top-end of the London market. In 2010, the market was coming to terms with impact from the global financial crisis. In recent years, pricing has been adjusting to higher taxation, a political by-product of the downturn designed to address wider affordability concerns. However the stamp duty increase of December 2014 for £1 million-plus properties, which had the single biggest dampening effect on demand, is nearly two

Homeowners ‘earning’ more from their properties than their jobs

It brings a whole new meaning to ‘working from home’. New research has revealed that homeowners in one in three UK local authorities ‘earn’ more from their properties than going to work. I don’t know whether to be thrilled or depressed by this news. Although given I live north of Manchester and (not surprisingly) more than nine out of ten areas where house prices are outpacing earnings are in London, the South East, South West and the East of England, I’m veering towards the ‘crying on the inside’ option. A closer look at the data from Halifax also shows that London boroughs dominate the top ten list of locations. The biggest

What is happening in the housing market? Let’s take a closer look

Dinner table conversations these days prove that you don’t have to be an estate agent or work in the property industry to have a view on the UK housing market. Just a look at the headlines and stories on housing which appear in the media every week is further proof of the country’s interest in all things bricks and mortar. But in the media it’s more likely to be agents or industry specialists giving their view, rather than homeowners or renters in specific parts of the country. Yet the sentiment of homeowners and renters plays an important role when it comes to the housing market – not least in determining

The perils of leasehold property

You’ve traded in your beat-up turkey of a car. You’ve forked out on insurance, finance, the MOT, and what you think are tasteful new rims. Next thing you know, you’re being summoned to court. The tricked-out wheels were a step too far. The car-maker is suing you for messing with their product. The fluffy dice in the rear view are also a problem. If you lose in court, it’s goodbye to your gleaming saloon – dice and all. ‘Get off it mate. It’s your car. You paid for it. We don’t live in some preposterous ownership dystopia,’ I hear you say. After all, if this were true, there would be

Letters | 16 February 2017

Living room Sir: Sajid Javid is quoted as saying that the biggest constraint on building more houses is the ‘lack of land’ (‘Javid’s home truths’, 11 February). While he is right to call for government intervention, I don’t agree with this view. We may live on a small island in relative terms, but that doesn’t diminish our actual land mass. For argument’s sake, let us say the average house takes up 100 square metres. This means that you could fit 10,000 houses into a single square kilometre. To put that into perspective, the Isle of Wight, with an area of 380 km², has the capacity to accommodate 3,800,000 houses. Obviously,