UK Housing Industry: Turning Houses into Gold!

Britain’s crisis of housing affordability is nothing to do with foreign speculators, according to Paul Cheshire writing in the Spring 2014 issue of CentrePiece magazine. Rather, it is a result of decades of misguided planning policies that constrain the supply of land and turn houses into something like gold or artworks. Houses have been converted from places in which to live into people’s most important financial asset.

He notes that we have not been building enough houses for more than 30 years – and those we have been building have too often been in the wrong place or of the wrong type to meet demand. For example, twice as many houses were built in Doncaster and Barnsley in the five years to 2013 than in Oxford and Cambridge. And more of Surrey is now under golf courses than has houses on it.

Professor Cheshire also exposes myths about the social and environmental benefits of ‘greenbelts’. Their only value is for those who own houses within them: Britain’s towns and cities provide far richer biodiversity than the intensively farmed land of the greenbelts. He concludes that more land should be released for development while protecting our environmentally and amenity-rich areas.

The full report is available here:
http://cep.lse.ac.uk/pubs/download/cp417.pdf