Property News · August 12, 2016

The Guardian view on housing policy: a rethink is needed | Editorial


The government has boosted demand but not supply. There are too few new homes, and too many penalties on social housing. It’s not a policy, it’s a disasterIt is very hard to detect what this government thinks a successful housing policy looks like. In the past six years, the party of home ownership has failed to revive home ownership. Far from the Tory dream of a Britain transformed into a property-owning democracy, the median price for a house is now nearly nine times the median income and generation rent struggles to put so much as a toe on the property ladder at all.Meanwhile, the long war of attrition against social housing goes on: right to buy, almost moribund by 2010, was fanned back into life with new and bigger discounts in the early coalition years. Council receipts from the discounted sales were cut to a third of the sale price, which has to be reclaimed in a slow and bureaucratic process from central government to meet the obligation imposed by Whitehall to replace all right to buy sales. In fact, councils are now building just one new home for every nine sold. Continue reading…

Source : theguardian.com
Read more…The Guardian view on housing policy: a rethink is needed | Editorial

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