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New towns, greater homeownership and localism heavy: a possible Labour housing strategy?

New towns, greater homeownership and localism heavy: a possible Labour housing strategy?

Business Secretary Vince Cable has in recent weeks upped the debate on house building and yesterday called together a mix of top folk from across the housing spectrum to chat about ideas for financing more homes. It’s encouraging. It indicates that the Government is eager to improve the wretched state of house building. But it’s also worrying. Last November the Coalition launched a “radical and unashamedly ambitious” housing strategy for England. What of that?

Why young folk can’t buy homes

Why young folk can’t buy homes

My patience runs thin when listening to the reasons why young folk can’t buy homes. And today I’ve had to listen to and read various interpretations of why they can’t, prompted by the release of the interesting Halifax sponsored research “The Reality of Generation Rent: Perceptions of the first time buyer market”. Call me unnecessarily reductive, but there is one simple over-riding reason why young folk struggle to buy a home, so simple it seems to be the most often…

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Is an inaccurate measure of foreign workers messing up the construction data?

Is an inaccurate measure of foreign workers messing up the construction data?

Here’s a couple of graphs for stat-spotters I thought worth placing together. For some while there has been unease about both the workforce jobs figures and the repair, maintenance and improvement (RMI) sector figures in the official construction output statistics. The two sets of data are linked and there’s been some concern that an under recording of foreign workers was impacting on the workforce jobs figures and in turn on the RMI data, as Labour Force Survey data is used in estimating…

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