Now that Torsten Bell is just an MP, not the head of the Resolution Foundation, we seem to be getting teaching granny to suck eggs moments:

Government research finds a 1% increase in housing stock drives a 2% fall in house prices or rents

Well, yes, obviously.

This is not a surprise. Further:

The amount of floor space the average private renter has is down 16% since the 90s

Equally obvious. We’ve noted a number of times that British new builds are the smallest in Europe. Chicken hutches are what are put up because we nationalised land development back with the TCPA in 1947. Nationalisation and planning mean shortages after all.

In truth, richer households can always secure a decent home and it’s too often the disadvantaged who lose out on there being too few homes.

Of course, the richer can buy their way out of shortages, the poorer cannot. When food’s expensive it’s not the rich on involuntary diets now, is it?

Yes, those on higher incomes tend to move into new builds initially, but generally everyone enjoys bigger, better homes. And who is the floor space boost biggest for? Those on the lowest incomes. Building is an agenda for the many, not the few.

Again, obviously and as we’ve been saying these decades.

This is all blindingly obvious and has been for those decades we’ve been shouting about it. The reason British housing is as ghastly as it is and ghastlily expensive to boot is because the ability to build new housing was nationalised. Therefore the answer is the privatisation of planning - blow up the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors: Proper blow up, kablooie.

Yes, it’s entirely true that building houses that Britons wish to live in where Britons wish to live is going to annoy an awful lot of bourgeois Britons. But that’s not the point of neoliberalism at all - we hold the keys to how to make life better for the poor. Less government, less planning, more markets and more capitalism red in tooth and claw. Which is exactly how we’re going to get more, larger and better houses for Britain’s poor. Which is, of course, why we need to do that kablooie bit.

77 years of nationalised land use permissions has left Britons living in hovels. We should, you know, change that.

Tim Worstall