The government recently published its major housing white paper, Fixing our broken housing market. The paper concerns the huge problems in our housing and land markets, causing higher rents and prices which lead to higher welfare spending and higher taxes.
We reviewed the paper and produced a response, which we sent to the Department for Communities and Local Government for their consultation. We identified five broad points:
- The white paper correctly diagnoses the problem of a shortage of supply
- It fails, however, to address the importance of the planning system in causing the shortage
- Without reform to enable more development on land with excess demand, the crisis will continue and deepen
- Some proposals are worthwhile but fail to match the scale of the challenge
- Some proposals are fundamentally flawed and would exacerbate the crisis
The full response is available here, including an explanation of the five points and our view on each of the individual questions.