Housing Crisis Is Worse Than Any of the Parties Are Prepared To Admit

In recent months, all three of the main parties have sought to demonstrate that they are responding to the housing crisis. Labour has pledged to build 200,000 homes a year by 2020 through the creation of new towns and garden cities. The Lib Dems have called for councils to be allowed to pool their borrowing limits in order to fund a major expansion of social housing. The Tories have launched Help to Buy, which, they claim, will stimulate supply as well as demand.  But for some idea of the extent to which all parties are still underplaying the extent of the crisis, it's worth reading the Policy Exchange report on the subject. As it notes, the UK needs a minimum of 1.5 million new homes from 2015 to 2020 simply to meet need, 300,000 a year. Around 221,000 new households are expected to be formed each year over this period and there is a significant backlog. Thus, even the target spoken of in Labour circles - a million in five years - falls short. Download a copy of the report from the Policy Exchange website.