We shouldn't bail out buy-to-let developers

Developers of buy-to-let flats have repeated the mistakes of sixties town planners. And now nobody wants to buy their poky flats. But the answer isn't for public authorities to buy them up for social housing.

Last year I spent a week in Manchester filming a property programme. The producers put me up in a 'luxury' two bedroom flat on the edge of Manchester.

It was absolutely hideous. The flat was tiny pre buy-to-let, its floor space would have made it more a studio than a two-bedder. It came with tiny furniture presumably to make its own tininess less obvious and had no storage space at all. It was a pretty dismal place to be.

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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.