Housing

Columnists like the Guardian’s Owen Jones have perpetuated a myth that harms rather than eases access to truly affordable homes for the impoverished on whose behalf they campaign. Taken in by the rhetoric of special interest groups, they recycle claims that house building is stymied by Treasury restrictions on council borrowing. Abolishing this ‘cap’ would help town halls to ‘resolve the housing crisis’ by constructing ‘hundreds of thousands of homes’. So says Jones in his personal manifesto: ‘Agenda for Hope’. But Jones and others who adhere to such views are not only misguided. They are diverting attention from the real and practical problems that need to be urgently fixed: that

Generation Y – are they really a jilted generation, or do they have absolutely no reason to be complaining about their lot? This was the question posed at Tuesday night’s Spectator debate, with the motion: ‘Stop whining young people, you’ve never had it so good’, and chaired by Toby Young. It all kicked off with an introduction from Alan Warner, the investment director at Duncan Lawrie, who expressed his gratitude to Tony Blair for putting Islington – where Warner owned his first London home – on the map. It’s not just this generation who feels hard done by when it comes to property, he said. Every generation feels like it

The Wolfson Economics Prize has unveiled its shortlist today of plans for a new garden city that is both economically viable and popular. There are five shortlisted entrants, listed below, which will develop their plans for a new settlement between now and August. The winner will receive a £250,000 prize, while all finalists have £10,000 to develop their ideas further. Barton Willmore, led by James Gross. Barton Willmore is the UK’s largest independent planning led town-planning and design consultancy. Barton Willmore’s entry sets out a ten-point plan for the delivery of a new garden city, arguing for the development of a cross-party consensus and the production of a National Spatial

An Englishman’s home is his castle. And today, record numbers of people are living that adage thanks to Help to Buy; a scheme that is reviving house-building after decades of inaction. Statistics released today show more than 27,000 homes have been bought through Help to Buy. This is great news. For too long, hardworking people in this country have been priced out of the housing market: for the simple reason that demand was outstripping supply and because prospective buyers who could afford a mortgage were not able to stump up the huge deposits banks were demanding. Politicians on all sides recognise this problem; but it is this Conservative-led government which is taking action.

Britain has a long and proud history of opening its doors to the vulnerable and oppressed; of welcoming workers, students and tourists from across the world. I believe that Britain is a tolerant and welcoming country. But, right now, we have a big problem with immigration data. UK migration statistics are worryingly inadequate. Between 2001 and 2011, ‘official’ records were off by 350,000. Without sound evidence it is difficult – if not impossible – to build a full picture of the scale and nature of inward migration to the UK. Policy suffers as a result. How can we plan for the future of schools and hospitals if we don’t know

The press love a bit of Oxbridge competition, but Oxford is embroiled in a far older and more ruthless rivalry: town vs. gown. It was in a dispute between the university and city of Oxford that Cambridge University has its foundations. In 1209, according to Roger of Wendover’s chronicle, an Oxford liberal arts scholar accidentally killed a woman. The Mayor led a group of townspeople to the killer’s house, only to find that he had fled – instead, they seized the three innocent scholars with whom he rented the house and hanged them. Fearing future tyranny and terrified of their fellow citizens, an exodus of Oxonians left the dreaming spires

Transport It is ruinous travelling by train these days. Have you tried it? My advice: don’t. Aside from re-nationalising the railways, the Budget could make some gesture of goodwill to the countless people whose entire earnings are being sucked up by our trains. One pal, who isn’t earning much, is commuting from Hampshire to London. It’s costing him around £450 a month – not much when you consider he probably takes home about £800 after tax. For him, I’d like National Railcards available to all those earning under £22,000. I’d also like off-peak train tickets to be fixed at 2/3rds of peak train ticket prices. Other countries have lower priced

Every year the Budget comes and goes, amid a flurry of live blogging and urgent blog posts at The Spectator. And almost every year, the papers are full of the minutiae which make for entertaining headlines. So this year, I say: Please, no more pasty taxes.  They just lead to days and days of stupid headlines, which might be fun (for the first hour), but simply end up detracting from the more serious announcements; or rather, the ones that will actually affect most taxpayers. Anyway, moving on. For selfish reasons, I am entirely in favour of raising the basic income tax threshold. I know that the Tories and the Lib Dems

The American economy always feels better when the Super Bowl is on. Ads for trucks and beer fill the airwaves. It’s steak and cigar season for the corporate bigwigs, not a time for the calorie conscious. For a few days, they can forget about foreign labour and cratering emerging markets and wallow in the fantasy that America is still about men in faded jeans and worn baseball caps, doing practical things with their hands. Now the pigskin has been locked away until autumn, however, one can take a colder look at the behemoth. No doubt, it has been a fine few years to be rich in America. The crash of

George Osborne’s evidence to the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee was dispiriting for a number of reasons. The first was that he told the peers that the chances are that politicians will still be struggling to ensure that housing supply keeps up with demand in 10 years’ time. He said: ‘I imagine if we were all assembled again in 10 years’ time we’d still be talking about the challenge of making sure that our housing supply kept up with housing demand and we’re all legislators here and we all have a responsibility to the next generation.’ listen to ‘George Osborne: Housing crisis will still be with us in 10

Is George Osborne’s recovery a credit-driven illusion? Many of his critics says so, and ask – as this magazine did two weeks ago – why we still have emergency interest rates at a time when the economy seems to be booming. One thing we learned from the crash is that cheap debt and housing bubbles can end in disaster, and with his interventions in the mortgage markets, it looks like Osborne could be blowing a bubble now. But striking research suggesting otherwise was released today by Citi’s Michael Saunders, Coffee House’s favourite economist:- Citi’s research found that the economy’s growth has happened while the private sector has been paying down

Ed Milliband appears to have woken up this week – too late – to a housing crisis. He echoes his predecessors, who promised too little, too late and failed to deliver. Their lack of ambition will continue to fail the generation who couldn’t buy before the boom. As the IFS reports that even those born in the 60s and 70s are going to be worse off than the post-war generation, it’s no wonder that those in their 20s and 30s are angry. At the launch of his housing commission this week, Mr Milliband set out five ideas to meet Labour’s headline pledge of 200,000 homes.  This is not enough and

Under the last Labour Government, house building fell to its lowest peacetime level since the 1920s. Labour’s top-down Regional Strategies and eco-towns built nothing but resentment. Advised by Ed Balls and Ed Miliband, Gordon Brown engineered an economic bubble that resulted in a speculative bust and the biggest budget deficit in our peacetime history. This Government is clearing up the mess left by Labour. We are working with – not against  – local communities to help build more homes, scrapping Regional Strategies and rewarding development via decentralising local government finance – from the New Homes Bonus, to the local retention of business rates to a localised Housing Revenue Account. We