Standard English house, boringly normal - Klaus Hausman
A message from those good folks at the Adam Smith Institute:
Today the Adam Smith Institute, along with our friends at the Taxpayers’ Alliance, launch our drive to get as many of you involved in the housing white paper consultation as possible.
It’s been an issue that has blighted Britain for decades. Scarce and irregular housing supply in the places people want to live, and an incentive structure that allows home owners to lock-out first-time buyers from the market, have left a whole generation priced out and our country less productive and poorer than we need or ought to be.
This could change though. In consultation is the Planning For The Future white paper. Its basic aim is to move England to a zoning-based system where local councils set out rules about what can be built where, but don’t take an active role in approving or rejecting individual applications for development. Rules over discretion. More micro-democracy. More beautiful buildings where people want to live.
It’s an issue we’ve been researching for a decade and its vitally important that the country gets these reforms right. So that’s why we want you sensible folk to join us in submitting evidence to the consultation.
Click the button below (or click here) to be taken to the page with our suggested answers to the questions being asked, click here to be taken to the full consultation page, and watch our video setting out how the housing crisis began and how we can fix it (and do like and share it with your friends).
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Tim, none of these articles are appearing on your website
As we all know from reading Tim's blogs (and the opening pages of every economics text book) - supply and demand curves, plus incentives, really do matter; a lot.
So whilst we all may agonise over the difficulties youngsters face with high house prices, we all know that any significant increase in supply will result in a depression of the major assets many people have been striving all their lives to accumulate. The very people most likely to vote (nationally and locally, and vote conservative at that) are the ones who will pay most attention to this.
So the home.owners are incentivised to reject planning reform and the politicians are therefore incentivised to leave well alone.
There's a thesis (sorry, no link) that indicated places with a high % of owner occupiers resist new development to keep prices high, and places with a high % of renters prefer new development to keep rental prices low. How to tilt these balances towards keeping prices low? No stamp duty regardless of usage would be one.