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Kate Barker’s new little green book highlights the need for a holistic approach to housing policy

Kate Barker’s new little green book highlights the need for a holistic approach to housing policy

You can’t blink these days without missing yet another paper, report, seminar, briefing or book on how to solve the housing crisis. Some are bonkers, others deserve some credit and attention and a few are worth spending a bit of time on. Kate Barker’s new book Housing: Where’s the Plan? falls clearly into the latter camp for at least three reasons. It’s short and quick to read. It covers a lot of ground, well. It doesn’t arrogantly suggest that there’s…

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Construction jobs growth appears solid but not spectacular

Construction jobs growth appears solid but not spectacular

The number of people employed in construction is up 3.3% on a year ago, according to the latest ONS Labour Market data. This finding underlines official data showing a steady rise of the industry from recession. Output in the second quarter was up 4.5% up on a year ago. The growth in workloads is solid, but by no means a boom-time level, and like output the rise in employment stalled in the second quarter. There are of course always reasons…

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Construction recovery stalls, but the forecasts remain bright

Construction recovery stalls, but the forecasts remain bright

The latest official output data from the Office for National Statistics show growth apparently stalling in the second quarter. This may seem at odds with trade surveys and media commentary which tend to point to construction booming. It’s not really. Despite the zero growth recorded by ONS for output in the second quarter of this year, at the risk of doing a Michael Fish, I think we can be confident that the industry is pretty much set on an upward…

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Government must plan and act as if in the longer-term construction matters

Government must plan and act as if in the longer-term construction matters

In business certainty is a good thing. It may be less exciting for the crisis-management junkies we seem to be in Britain, but it helps us be more efficient. There is however one certainty that is painful to experience. This is the certainty that an action or lack of action will lead to an unnecessarily destructive outcome. Today the RICS launched its quarterly construction market survey. Its headline: “Private sector continues to provide forward momentum.” It’s all pretty predictable stuff….

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Are we witnessing the start of another housing problem?

Are we witnessing the start of another housing problem?

There’s something, no lots of things, desperately disturbing about today’s stories (examples here and here) telling of Government panic over potentially unflattering house-building figures released just before the General Election. Where to start? Let’s start with “starts”. These seem to be the housing figures in question. On 20 February I tweeted: “For those not familiar with the terminology: you live in a housing completion, you don’t live in a housing start” It was a jibe in response to a press…

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Instead of drop-kicking the planners, shouldn’t we really half-nelson the rich?

Instead of drop-kicking the planners, shouldn’t we really half-nelson the rich?

The blame game over who’s responsible for England’s housing crisis and silver-bullet “here’s-the-answer” approaches to solving it is growing into a national sport. Various interest groups, professions, political parties, social classes, business groups and their mouthpieces come under fire. Meanwhile, each fires back their silver bullet, with a crowd of suitably-armed commentators joining in. With this kind of entertainment the lobby to encourage ITV to re-run World of Sport wrestling must be flagging. With that sad image in mind, I…

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Do prostitutes and drug dealers really do more trade than construction firms or estate agents?

Do prostitutes and drug dealers really do more trade than construction firms or estate agents?

It’s a tricky job measuring economic activity and a bit thankless when its relevance is so frequently debated. But not normally quite as much as now. The Office for National Statistics yesterday released details of its estimate of the impact on GDP of methodological changes to improve the usefulness of the statistics. Some of the changes are down to new standards adopted in the European Union. Usefully, we hope, there will be an estimate for own-account construction – or self-build…

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Is the deep-seated problem of housing supply really just about planning?

Is the deep-seated problem of housing supply really just about planning?

Does constraint on planning approvals restrict the supply of homes or does the demand for homes determine the level of planning approvals? Perhaps both work in tandem or parallel. These questions have bugged me for years. Here’s some fresh thought prompted by the release of the latest house-building figures and, in part, by concerns expressed over the weekend by Bank of England Governor Mark Carney about “a housing market that has deep, deep structural problems”. The housing market is a…

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More a house-building recovery than a construction recovery – so far at least

More a house-building recovery than a construction recovery – so far at least

Construction output grew 0.6% in the first quarter of this year. That’s up on an earlier estimate of 0.3% in the first release of the GDP figures. Work done in the first three month was 5.4% more than in the same period a year earlier. That’s the very encouraging headline story from the latest ONS construction output data. And we can be more encouraged given the iffier-than-normal weather at the start of this year. This provides reasons to think that…

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Forecasters see spring in the step of construction with fewer dark clouds on the horizon

Forecasters see spring in the step of construction with fewer dark clouds on the horizon

The latest set of construction forecasts from Experian, the Construction Products Association and Hewes all exude greater confidence than those released at the start of the year. There were few radical changes to the expected numbers above adjustments that would naturally be made to accommodate new data. But the sentiment is more encouraging, with concerns over downside risks easing. Indeed Experian suggest that the balance of risk within its forecast has probably shifted to the upside. The downside risks of…

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