Shouldn’t have sold all the council houses off. Frankly, there needs to be a building of council houses similar to post WW2, but clearly will never happen.

Red and Blue Army!

All basic economics, a lack of housing means an increase in prices, but what has caused the biggest issue with a lack of housing, natural population growth or immigration?

Selling off stock and not rebuilding is the original issue.

As far as I'm aware there is no natural population growth in Western European society, so population growth comes from immigrants and their offspring largely.

One reason, amongst others, lack of housing and the expense of housing. To get married you would like a house, to have kids, naturally, you want a house. A house is 500k - sh1t, may as well just forget it.

Red and Blue Army!

Think of the frauds with more than one identity, it could be a clever way to catch them out.

Sorry but I don’t agree with what you are saying with regard to selling off stock (unless of course you were referring to retaining affordable rental property). Those houses were sold to sitting tenants so didn’t disappear from housing stock, they just got shifted from the Council rental to the privately owned sector.

I agree there was a cut back in building and that is part of the economic answer that has created price increases. Low supply plus high demand equals higher prices. Developers in the 80s onwards were not like the local authority developers of the post war period who built and built and built to replace war damaged property, they were more selective and tended to just about meet the housing requirements to ensure prices didn’t crash due to oversupply.

Prices in the current market place reflect an extended period of low interest rates, continued high demand and continued under supply. The issues have been exacerbated by massive bulk purchasing by Middle Eastern. Chinese and Russian buyers which leaves thousands of properties vacant, never to be occupied in cities across the UK.

The matter of resolving under supply would not I think help the market any longer anyway. I don’t think a massive building project would reduce prices as there is so much money washing around with the rich people that they can jump straight in and buy whatever is built.

If you want a solution to affordable housing, you need to build to a targeted population that takes the rich man out of the equation. For example you could put strict planning obligations onto developments so that only first time buyers are allowed to purchase and that if they are sold on they can only be sold again to first time buyers. There is lots that could be done including producing much cheaper housing such as modern pre fabricated buildings and park homes.

Another big help will of course be to control immigration so that demand is curtailed.

Yep, sounds about right which is why in my view restricting sales of certain developments to first time buyers only would massively influence the market in favour of youngsters.