‘This is a really big issue. That is, of course, why no politician dares touch it.’ (Martin Wolf on the UK’s housing crisis, Financial Times, 5 February 2015).
Housing affordability is a key concern of an ever-larger fraction of UK voters who are crammed into artificially limited space. At the same time, a lot of wealth lies in housing assets and there are many vested interests in keeping things this way (such as current homeowners and private landlords). Substantive reforms could solve the housing crisis, but politicians of all stripes back away from such reforms out of fear of being demonized by vested interests. Instead, proposed policies tend to tackle the symptoms – rather than the causes – of the UK’s housing crisis.
This Election Analysis provides an overview of the key issues and the underlying causes. It discusses the merits and demerits of key policy proposals from the major parties. It concludes with a discussion of those reforms that ought to be on the policy agenda.