Housing

Planning Minister Nick Boles admitted yesterday that he did not believe his controversial suggestion for Britain to build homes on two million acres of countryside should be put into practice. The new minister caused a storm last month when he supported a 3 per cent increase in UK-wide development to alleviate the housing shortages caused by high immigration. The plan was to build homes on green-field land, increasing development from 9 per cent to 12 per cent nationwide. But yesterday, Boles denied the claims, arguing that they were meant to illustrate a wider point about under-development rather than create a particular policy or target. His admission came after the Prime

Mark Prisk took over as housing minister in September’s reshuffle, and has quite a task on his hands to get housebuilding figures looking healthy again. The Conservative MP was previously in the Business department as Construction Minister, so he knows all about the challenges of getting Britain building. He has bravely put himself up for a grilling by Coffee House readers, and will be answering a selection of your questions posted in the comments below. Please post your questions below by 5pm Friday 16 November, and we will post Prisk’s answers next week.

We are now closer to the 2015 election than the 2010 one. We also expected by now to have the coalition’s mid-term review, the document that will set out its priorities for the second half of its term in office. But its publication has now been delayed until January. This is because the debates about what new policies to include in it are still going on. The quad—David Cameron, George Osborne, Nick Clegg and Danny Alexander—met on November 1st to discuss various ideas for it. They were, as I report in the Mail on Sunday, joined by Oliver Letwin and David Laws for this meeting with the Cabinet Secretary Jeremy

Treasury Questions was a little quieter than usual today: George Osborne is away and so Ed Balls left the questions to his colleague Chris Leslie. The Shadow Chancellor didn’t say entirely quiet, though, gradually turning a warm shade of pink as he barracked away while perched on the opposition front bench. Labour landed very few blows today: Rachel Reeves continued the attack on the EU budget, Leslie tried rather ineffectually to talk about borrowing, and backbenchers made a few grumbles. The two really interesting questions came from the coalition benches: and more specifically, from two sacked ministers. Tim Loughton, who is fast establishing himself post-reshuffle as an effective campaigning backbencher

Now that the Tories have at least agreed within their own party that they can find £10 billion of further cuts to the welfare budget, they are starting to ramp up the rhetoric on why it’s fair to do this, and how they can achieve it. Yesterday, Chancellor George Osborne said this: ‘Where is the fairness, we ask, for the shift-worker, leaving home in the dark hours of the early morning, who looks up at the closed blinds of their next door neighbour sleeping off a life on benefits? When we say we’re all in this together, we speak for that worker. We speak all those who want to work

This morning’s big housebuilding announcement was aimed at unblocking obstacles in the planning system to get development of new homes and extensions going. But it hasn’t unblocked tensions within the government. The main controversy is over whether to relax the quotas for affordable housing within each new development, and The Times reports that Nick Clegg and Eric Pickles were at loggerheads with George Osborne over the idea. This morning, Downing Street announced that developers can bypass a council’s affordable housing requirements if they feel they make a site commercially unviable. The claim is that this will release 75,000 new homes currently stuck behind this barrier. There are various measures to

Today’s publication of the Montague Review into institutional investment in build-to-let addresses an important gap in our housing market. Large numbers of people, and a growing number of families, who would have bought homes in the past are now shut out of ownership for the medium to long term. Dominated by buy-to-let landlords, the private rented sector currently offers them variable quality and limited security at a high price. These working families represent a new form of housing need but they risk being overlooked if the Review’s recommendations get caught up in a conflict between affordable housing (or social housing as it used to be called) and the private rented

You’d think the American sub-prime crisis would have taught politicians the world over not to try to rig the housing market. But no, David Cameron is back on it today — about how to ‘unblock’ the system so the debt geyser starts to gush again. ‘The problem today is that you have lenders who aren’t lending, so builders can’t build and buyers can’t buy,’ says the Prime Minister. ‘It needs the government to step in, and help unblock the market.’ The idea that lenders may not lend because they feel the housing market may fall, and people may be unable to repay, is instantly dismissed. He speaks as if debt

It’s a day for growth initiatives. In addition to those described earlier, George Osborne has announced that Whitehall’s annual underspend will be reinvested into capital spending projects. The emphasis on infrastructure echoes Danny Alexander’s statements during the Lib Dem conference, when the Treasury secretary disclosed that existing programmes would be brought forward and funded by recalibrating budgets. So there seems to be agreement between the two parties about bolstering the coalition’s growth strategy in a certain way, which may explain why the Tories are so determined to resist pressure to introduce politically awkward tax cuts. Grant Shapps has also been elaborating on the changes to the Right to Buy. He

Messy deals and fudged compromises: an inevitable feature of coalition politics. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that the resulting policy will always be bad. As a result of grubby negotiations in Downing Street, it looks as if we might just end up with a change in direction of tax policy which should have been made years ago. The battle over the 50 pence tax rate seems to be settling into an uneasy compromise: the Chancellor gets to abolish it possibly in 2013 ­ and in return the Lib Dems get some form of mansion tax, the levy proposed by Vince Cable on homes costing more than two million pounds. Ever the party of