April 10, 2023 1:45 pm
“This is all driven by a shortage, it is just we haven’t built enough homes for decades,” Freddie Poser of campaign group Priced Out told. The Centre for Cities estimates that the national housing stock should be 15 per cent larger to avoid house price inflation, while housing charity Shelter argues for an extra 90,000 homes for social rent to be built each year.
“For productivity to grow and for our ability as a country to grow and to innovate, we need people to do high-productivity jobs and in the modern, knowledge-focussed economy that the UK mostly has, that means people being located near each other in places where there is an existing knowledge economy.”reduce pressure on the most expensive housing markets
The Government’s last major push to solve the crisis came in 2020, when then-Housing Secretary Robert Jenrick proposed liberalising the planning system to make it quicker and easier to build new homes in every part of England. It was scuppered by the opposition of Conservative MPs who feared losing local control over new developments.
Labour insiders are sceptical that Mr Gove can deliver meaningful reforms in the face of opposition from his own side. Despite some criticism that Sir Keir Starmer did not specifically name housing as one of his five “missions” for government, a Labour source said: “It is going to be a big, big part of our offer. We deliberately didn’t make it one of our five missions because it underpins so much else.