Housing: creative solutions

  While economists clutch their spreadsheets and politicians claim "steady growth," the real economy is screaming warnings that almost nobody wants to hear. The signals are there, hiding in plain sight: in the cardboard boxes piling up at recycling centres, in the lipstick tubes sliding across checkout counters. And they're both pointing toward the same grim destination—a housing market collapse that will make 2008 look like a dress rehearsal. UK house prices fell 0.3% in September, erasing August's gains and bringing the average home to £298,184. The Halifax tries to spin this as "broadly stable," but stability is precisely what we don't have. What we have is a market teetering on the edge, propped up by nothing more substantial than collective delusion and the desperate hope that somehow, this time, the fundamentals don't matter. Here's what does matter: the economy that underpins housing demand is crumbling, and the establishment indicators y...

  Another year, another grotesque symptom of Britain's broken housing market. While families languish on ever-lengthening social housing waiting lists, consigned to the precariousness of private renting, a different story unfolds for a select few. 2024 saw a record surge in the creation of limited companies designed solely to hoover up buy-to-let properties. Sixty thousand of these entities sprouted up last year, a 23% jump from the previous "record" in 2023. Let's be clear: this isn't about providing homes ; it's about financial engineering, about exploiting a system rigged in favour of the propertied class. This isn't some sudden blip, but a deliberate, decade-long trend, turbo-charged since 2018 when the tax rules were conveniently "rewritten" for landlords. Now, nearly 400,000 buy-to-let companies stalk the land, gobbling up homes and turning them into investment vehicles. We're told 70-75% of new buy-to-let purchases are now funnelled...

Following the debate about how many houses are needed in the UK, industry-expert Peter Brown directs our attention to a topic this argument could be overshadowing. The debate around how many new homes are  needed  misjudges the big issue – a new Labour government will struggle to increase housing completions for sale and for rent. Public services are failing, satisfaction rates are at record lows and waiting lists are soaring. Focusing on hospitals, schools and the courts,  the IPPR  claimed that public services won’t return to acceptable levels of quality until the 2030s and that the post-election government will inherit one of the most challenging contexts of any government since the Second World War. In October, at the Labour Party conference Keir Starmer’s pledged 1.5 million homes over the next parliament and conference was  told  that a Labour government will “deliver the biggest boost in affordable and social housing for a generation”. Yet despite a ...