The Cost Quantity And Quality Of Housing Consumption In The Uk

Author : Daniel Rossall Valentine
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781549983146
Total Pages : 66 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (831 download)

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Download or read book Solving the UK Housing Crisis written by Daniel Rossall Valentine and published by . This book was released on 2017-10-17 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Britain has become a country divided into two nations, people who are on the property ladder and who are benefiting from property price rises, and those who are not on the ladder and fear never being able to get onto the ladder since property prices are rising faster than salaries. This second group face a lifetime living at the parental home or being at the mercy of rolling 12 month tenancies.Building more houses, despite being the solution most widely touted, is not the answer to the UK's housing crisis. In the face of demand from both domestic and overseas investors who see housing as a safe haven for their money, building more houses will have no downward effect on prices. The author proposes a radical package of policy measures that will eliminate the artificial inflation of house prices which has occurred over the last twenty years. These policy measures, if enacted, will reunite the UK, by enabling young British people once again to realistically aspire to own their own homes.Politicians and commentators in the UK have shown a lack of ideas in relation to solving this crisis. Media understanding and analysis of economic and fiscal matters in the UK is very weak, and highly dependent on the press releases of Government and industry bodies. The UK's powerful housing lobby has stepped into this intellectual vacuum by promoting house-building as the solution. However, this report demonstrates that new houses cannot be the primary solution to this immense problem. It is pure fantasy to think that the global demand for British houses can ever be met. Every town and village in the South of England would be ruined by millions of under-sized and under-quality flats and houses before demand was close to being met from the world's 15 million strong financial elite, and house prices would still keep on rising. The solution to the UK's housing crisis lies not in the creation of new housing stock but in changing the usage patterns of existing stock.This report urges that measures are taken to limit the investment demand for houses. It is investment demand (not the commonly mentioned "shortage of new houses") that has corrupted the housing market in many areas and pushed average house prices out of the reach of average citizens. The solution to the housing crisis is similar to the solution to the banking crisis of 2007/8. Just as consumers had been damaged because banks had failed to separate high-street banking from an increasingly aggressive and dominant investment banking operation that was driven by an excess of elite money, so the UK housing market needs separating from a global investment market. Since housing has become an investment market, it should be regulated closely like other investment markets. The process of market separation is neither complex nor expensive and it will once again allow British citizens to own a share of their own nation. This report focuses on the international aspect of this problem, the issue of foreign buyers, since their role in price inflation is both substantial and relatively simple to restrict.