There is grim news on the housing front this morning: the National Housing Federation
(NHF) reports that the housing market will descend into “crisis” unless the supply of houses is dramatically increased. It
points out that only 105,000 new homes were built last year, the smallest amount since the 1920s. This is a long-term trend, as demand has consistently outstripped supply. The NHF thinks
that those facts will not change and predicts homeownership will fall to the level of the mid-1980s, when Margaret Thatcher announced that her goal was to help “more and more people
to own property.” The conclusion is obvious if those are the premises: average property prices will swell beyond the means of ordinary people. The NHF projects that average property prices will increase by 21 per cent over the next 5 years, from £214,647 to £260,304.
It’s a familiar litany.
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