Housing For Votes

All three of the main parties have announced house building programmes, none of which measures up. The Tories want to build too few with too many to buy, Labour will build more and will focus more on affordable rather than subsidised housing but how it will work is not yet clear, the Lib Dems want to build loads including new towns all over the place, but they probably are not going to a a big player in the next government. The Greens are the most ambitious and the best focussed in their plans to build half a million affordable social houses to rent, but sadly their leader’s brain crashed when she was asked to explain how this would be paid for, by whom and at what cost.

This all serves to demonstrate how gravely short is the political class of the skills needed for the hour in which the nation now stands. We are in the midst of a recovery driven by another housing bubble in which house price inflation roars ahead while inflation itself goes negative and if steps are not taken on a dynamic scale to correct all this, the whole thing will bust apart.