The unspeakable truth about housing

Earlier this year I was a panellist for Any Questions, and a young man in the audience asked what could possibly be done to make it easier for Britons his age to buy currently unaffordable property. I said what none of my fellow panellists was foolish enough to venture on the radio: scarcity always raises prices, and the UK’s housing shortage is overwhelmingly caused by high rates of immigration. Reduce newcomers, ease the problem.

I’ve appeared in enough public forums to read the room. A sudden pin-drop silence followed by murmurous resettling in chairs conveyed shock, then palpable unease. Clearly I had just broken a fierce social taboo. Once upon a time, taboo-breaking entailed saying something incorrect, tasteless or immoral. Nowadays, you horrify an audience by saying something true.

UK fertility has been below replacement rate for a startling 50 years. That helps explain why over the course of 25 of those years, 1973-1998, the population only grew from 56 million to 58.5