Domino effect

As my colleague Jules Birch has already highlighted in two excellent blogs on insidehousing.co.uk, Baroness Thatcher had an enormous influence on the UK housing sector.

For me, more than anything, her time in office marked the acceptance by the government that it is correct to rely to a far greater extent on the market to supply the homes we need. Consequently housing supply has consistently failed to meet demand and house prices have ballooned. This has, to a large extent, ensured that those who are successful enough to buy a home in desirable parts of the UK are rewarded. The problem is that this has built up a massive wall of housing demand (growing by 221,000 a year in England, according to government data published this week) for those people on lower incomes or unemployed. For overcrowded families or tenants stuck paying the bedroom tax with no smaller home available to move into, this legacy looks less like a mass emancipation and more like a mass housing market failure.