Half a house is hardly worth having

I’m going to start with a declaration of interest. I own a four-bedroom house in Cambridgeshire, in which I have been living for the past nine years. I own no other property, either in Britain or abroad. I feel obliged to say this because increasingly when I read headlines such as ‘Doom and gloom as house prices fall further’, I wonder: has the author got a portfolio of bedsits in Stoke-on-Trent or has he just bought a house in Tooting and is desperately trying to flog his flat in Streatham? The received wisdom that falling house prices are a bad thing is certainly not shared by the public at large. Last week a BBC poll revealed that 28 per cent of Britons can’t wait for house prices to fall — compared with only 22 per cent who want them to rise. The remaining 50 per cent, like me, couldn’t really care less.