Housing is escalating up the political agenda

As we ready ourselves for what has become an annual pilgrimage to the polling booths, in terms of finance there is little doubt that housing is taking centre stage in this election.

This was not always the case. It’s true that if you look back to newspaper coverage of the housing crisis in the late 1940s and 1950s, post-World War Two, some of the articles could be reproduced word for word in tomorrow’s nationals. But in the 1980s and 90s, back when the structural undersupply of new homes was just getting truly entrenched, housing didn’t seem quite so important.

This is one of the reasons why it is escalating back up the agenda now, with Jeremy Corbyn announcing on the campaign trail that housing was his top priority. The challenges in the housing market are myriad – resulting in a shortage of housing in many areas where there is strong demand. The scale of problem is best illustrated by the government’s recent housing white paper which was actually called ‘Fixing Our Broken Housing Market’.