Saturday 7 September 2013

Housebuilding seems to depend on confidence

Andy Boddington has a thought-provoking piece on Liberal Democrat Voice. I'll leave it to others to weigh up his solutions to the problem of the dearth of housing. I was most interested in the peaks and troughs of the graph which accompanied his article.

The first thing that struck me is how much the rises and falls of each of the lines (private, housing association and council house completions) coincided. over the years since the last world war. There was a noticeable surge in council house building when Macmillan and Marples were at the Ministry of Housing under Churchill, and again during the early years of both Wilson governments (private building also fell during the first of those) and of course building by councils falling to virtually nothing when Thatcherite policies held sway between 1990 and 2008.

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