I see in the press this morning that the house builders, some councils, and other usual suspects are lobbying for a huge house-building programme. They still want us to believe that house prices went as high as they did because of some kind of "housing shortgage". The census data clearly refuted the claim that there was any kind of housing shortgage in the UK - since the early 1990s we have consistently increased the number of houses faster than the number of households in every region of the UK. To those of us (such as myself) that pointed this out, they responded that we should ignore the census data as "misleading", because (they said) the rises in house prices clearly showed that there were "hidden households".
Well, guys, I know it's pointing out the obvious, but house prices are falling like a stone. Your story is kaput, dead, an ex-story, devoid of life, nada, nothing, The End, game-over-insert-coin. There never was any aggregate housing shortgage. There may have been some problems with what kinds of houses were built, but that's another story. And there was obviously a purchasing affordability issue (doh!) such that first-time buyers exited on mass circa 2004, but that was a symptom of prices being too high, not of there being fewer houses than households. (I became blunt to the point of rudeness recently with a panel including Labour and Lib Dem MPs that tried to persuade us that there was a terrible affordability issue and that without a huge house-building programme prices would spiral upwards indefinitely, making home ownership an unattainable dream for the middle classes.)
House prices were not high because there were not enough houses being built. It...wasn't...true.
Furthermore, we don't have the foggiest idea where we will need the extra houses that will, of course, need to be built in the future (we build more houses all the time, and need to do so - that's not in dispute). Over recent decades there has been a drift to the South-East. Will that be what happens over the next two decades? London has a correlation with the UK cycle of about 1.7 - that means that if the UK economy shrinks 10%, London is expected to shrink 17%. If that happens, there will be mass unemployment in London. No-one is going to be moving here; everyone is going to be moving away. If we build loads of houses where we thought we needed them in 2005, they will inevitably end up as ghost towns.
Let it go. You were wrong. It happens. We don't need to accelerate the rate of housebuilding, and even if we did, we don't have the foggiest idea where to build them. Come back with this plan in five years' time and we'll see where we are then.
