Why we aren’t building enough houses to meet demand

It’s not the planners’ fault we aren’t building enough houses. Or land-banking developers. It’s getting the infrastructure in place. So what can we do about it?

We aren't building enough houses, on that everyone seems to agree.

Two quick points to make on that. First, London is different. There, we seem to be in process of building more than enough. I've added the numbers up here before,but just to illustrate I have had another press release in this morning from property development group Ballymore.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.