The housing crisis lies at the door of government
The Chancellor of the Exchequer, Philip Hammond, wants more houses built. Good, but ministers are imprudent to blame the shortage on others. Yesterday, Mr Hammond criticised big housebuilding companies for hoarding land and local authorities for blocking development. He follows hard on the heels of the Communities Secretary, Sajid Javid. Last week, Mr Javid criticised baby boomers for “not facing up to the reality” of how the housing crisis affects the young. He forgot that most baby boomers know – from their own adult children – just how difficult things are.
Ministers are attacking only the symptoms: the cause of the housing shortage is government. Why, for instance, are the big half-dozen builders so dominant in the market nowadays? Because the planning system is so difficult that only the big boys can afford to make it work. The unbelievable delay and expense involved in getting permission to build can take five or six years, making the business unfeasible for small firms. A friend of mine recently wanted to erect a new domestic oil tank in a conservation area: this required 26 pages of paper and 19 forms.
Until he was a Cabinet minister, Mr Hammond was a long-standing director of a house-building company, Castlemead Homes. He must be aware of these realities. Rather than passing the buck, he should acknowledge and – better still – correct them.
As for baby boomers, one reason many of them do not downsize as they age is stamp duty, which was made punitive by George Osborne when he was Chancellor. If the mere act of moving will cost you five- or even six-figure sums of tax, it makes more sense to improve the house you have got. Misplaced government action has immobilised the middle and upper end of the housing market without helping would-be home owners at all.
Even the minimal interest rates are making people who own houses stay put. The low cost of borrowing and the consequent inflation of asset prices have discouraged people from making their money work in more creative ways. So existing owners just sit and watch their house value grow. This is the consequence of quantitative easing, not of the unique selfishness of the over-fifties.
It is completely within the Government’s power to make houses cheaper. If it decreed that anyone could build a house on any field, anywhere in the country, prices would plummet and the new generation would be housed. I am not advocating this: there are environmental and other objections. But the situation is not what people like to call “market failure”: it is because the Government is suppressing the market. There isn’t much good news just now, but I must say the first two items I heard on BBC radio yesterday morning did make my gloomy features crack into a broad smile.
There was “intense pressure”, said the seven o’clock news bulletin, on Robert Mugabe to step down after 37 years running Zimbabwe. This was quickly followed by the information that Gerry Adams is to retire after 34 years running Sinn Fein.
Both are seriously bad men. Both had real leadership skills, but malignly misapplied them. Both were lauded by many in the West, essentially for no other reason than their extreme-left hatred of Western values.
As a college-chapel-attending Cambridge student in the late Seventies, I found no gathering of the Anglican clergy complete without “Bob” Mugabe being sung as the true liberator whom British policy should back in the civil war in Rhodesia/zimbabwe. There was little interest in the moderate leader, Bishop Abel Muzorewa, who was against Christians killing one another. Stanley Booth-clibborn, then vicar of Great St Mary’s, Cambridge, later Bishop of Manchester, was the most unstoppable of Mugabe’s cheerleaders. At one meeting, a bored clergy friend of mine worked out that Mugabe, spelt backwards, reads “E ba gum”. This consoled him.
As so often, it was the unfashionable people who understood matters better. White Rhodesians, moderate blacks, grass-roots Tory supporters and Margaret Thatcher all got the measure of Mugabe before he had even attained power. If Western policy elites had worked this out by the early Seventies, the past 37 years might have been avoided.
The National Trust rightly insists on calling him Father Christmas, but really there is nothing inaccurate about the name of Santa Claus for the rather elusive entity in whom small children believe. The only annoying name for him is “Santa”, which just means “saint”. It is like referring to a specific Muslim festival as “Eid”, as the word means simply “celebration”. You need to state which saint – and which eid – you are talking about.
A simple fact about being married for 70 years is that it is a very long time in human history. When Princess Elizabeth married Philip Mountbatten, the population of the world stood at fewer than 2.5 billion. Today, it is more than 7.5 billion. Three times the span of their marriage takes you back almost to the battle of Trafalgar. Six times gets you back to Shakespeare and the first Elizabeth.
The endurance of an intimate human partnership for so long is, in any couple, a triumph over time. When it is the partnership that involves our head of state, it is a moving historical achievement.