How a disastrous Tory policy blew up the housing market

8 comments

1. I really don’t know how Labour are going to manage this,

   Everything has been broken by the tories. And on 5th June Labour will suddenly be getting the blame for everything being wrong,

   We almost need some form of independent commission reviewing the effect of the 14 years of Tory and highlighting the damage caused by policy of austerity

2. With the help of family, COVID and a lot of time on my hands, my partner and I managed to get out of the rent trap.

   We avoided Help To Buy once we saw the catch – 20% of the value of your home taken by the government once sold. 

   I’m no economist, but it was clear this was not a sensible choice for us (or the country). It clearly artificially inflated the availability of pricing within your earnings bandwidth without actually addressing the housing stock.

   This only benefits certain types of people and it’s not the poor. 

   We’re lower than median salary workers. We’ve spent out adult lives stuck in poverty as our earnings filled someone elses pocket. We were not going to fall for that parasitic b.s.

   According to this article, 2 out of 5 users of Help To Buy actually needed the scheme, most people were using it to upscale their homes with (presumably) intent to sell in their old age.

   I’m glad the Tories will be gone soon. If this election can nail the coffin shut on their vampiric disregard for normal people then the election cannot come fast enough.

3. This is the natural culmination of decades of housing policy. And I hate to say this, but there is no easy solution or quick fix here.

   People think that suddenly because we give planning permission for loads of new homes that will sort things. Ignoring the fact that we will struggle to actually build them due to labour shortages in the construction industry that have been there for decades, this will just slow the rise. You need measures to remove the incentives to see homes as investments, sort out the rental market, create social housing and many more things to actually impact on house prices.

   Oh, and while a crash seems like a good idea, the reality is far from it.

4. Import 10 million people, build 4million houses.

   Logic.

5. It was already going that way under labour. Remember those ‘buy a house’ shows to rent out for profit in the mornings.

6. > a scheme that cost billions, pushed up prices, did almost nothing for new buyers – but made house builders a lot of money

   Classic Tory scheme.

   When 20% of all their donations come from property developers, is it any surprise they do things that put a fuck ton of money back into their hands?

7. Someone at work made a point to me yesterday that I hadn’t considered before. We were on the topic as I am currently in the process of buying my first home.

   It used to be the case that a family only needed one house. But now that divorce rates are so much higher, often families now need 2 homes when the parents have separated. There are on average roughly 100,000 divorces a year so that means an extra 100,000 people needing a new home (on the assumption they live together and then move out, but there will be outliers there).

   Where families separate, or where the children have ‘flown the nest’, people still hang onto 3,4 bedroom houses when perhaps a 2,3 bedroom would suffice, meaning there is less availability of homes.

   There are also a lot of people ‘coparenting’ and living separately.

   There are a lot of women who are now pursuing careers, as opposed to being a homemaker, so there is a rise in career women who need their own home.

   It seems our whole housing system was designed around this somewhat outdated idea of a single family unit. This is adding a lot of pressure to the housing market.

   That isn’t to say we don’t face other issues, but it did give me pause to think, especially as we’re laying so much blame on immigration as to the lack of available homes.

8. Average house prices in London went up 300% between 1997 and 2008. If you think that government policy is the reason for house price increases you may be in for a disappointment.