George Osborne has something to boast about during his
budget update on Dec. 5. UK growth is up and the deficit is down. But the
Chancellor of the Exchequer has engineered an all-too-British recovery, in
which house-price inflation will soon be too prominent. A radical policy shift
is needed to build a genuinely sustainable revival. The government’s Help to
Buy mortgage indemnity scheme makes a re-run of housing boom and bust all the
more likely. House building is disgracefully low – a social problem and a
constraint on growth. For three decades from 1960 the UK built 298,000 homes a
year. Since 2000, the figure is 180,000 and falling. It was 141,000 in 2010-12.
It’s vital that Osborne acts to spur residential construction. Read more on the
Reuters website.
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