A stinging indictment of Britain’s broken housing

Sajid Javid, announced plans to reform the UK’s “broken” housing market.

Dr Matthew Partridge
By
published
in Features

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Sajid Javid wants to fix Britain's broken housing market
(Image credit: This content is subject to copyright.)

On Tuesday, the communities secretary, Sajid Javid, announced plans to reform the UK's "broken" housing market. The government's white paper "reads like a stinging indictment of the way we have gone about providing homes in recent decades", says The Guardian.

But while there is talk of loosening green-belt restrictions and building more, there needs to be "real protections for renters legislating for longer, more secure tenancies tied to predictable rents". The government also needs to let councils build more houses "there's no chance of building the target 250,000 homes a year through the private market alone".

Housing is increasingly "like Monopoly, with the youngest and poorest shoved off the board before they have even started to play", says Alice Thomson in The Times, But "it is short-sighted to tarmac over fields and smother them with identikit brick boxes". Instead, we should "regenerate once-beautiful market towns rather than allow them to disintegrate slowly", or incentivise small builders to "think creatively on fiddly complicated brownfield sites". We also need to encourage "the elderly to move to more practical accommodation for their last years".

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It would be good to persuade older people to downsize to free up homes for young families, agrees Kirstie Allsopp in The Daily Telegraph. But it's easier said than done. There's the quality of modern homes for a start new-builds are "becoming ever smaller, meaner and less suitable for people living in them". Stamp duty and conveyancing delays also make it harder for people to move. Javid is right: the housing market is broken. But "not for the reasons he thought".

Dr Matthew Partridge
Dr Matthew Partridge
Shares editor, MoneyWeek

Matthew graduated from the University of Durham in 2004; he then gained an MSc, followed by a PhD at the London School of Economics.

He has previously written for a wide range of publications, including the Guardian and the Economist, and also helped to run a newsletter on terrorism. He has spent time at Lehman Brothers, Citigroup and the consultancy Lombard Street Research.

Matthew is the author of Superinvestors: Lessons from the greatest investors in history, published by Harriman House, which has been translated into several languages. His second book, Investing Explained: The Accessible Guide to Building an Investment Portfolio, is published by Kogan Page.

As senior writer, he writes the shares and politics & economics pages, as well as weekly Blowing It and Great Frauds in History columns He also writes a fortnightly reviews page and trading tips, as well as regular cover stories and multi-page investment focus features.

Follow Matthew on Twitter: @DrMatthewPartri

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