Not that we expect anyone to thank us but housing policy is working

We have, for a number of years now, been pointing out that what ails the British housing market is really very simple. We have a shortage of permits that allow one to build on specific pieces of land.

We do not have a shortage of land - housing is 3% of so of our land area. We don't have a shortage of land where people wish to live either - given the inevitability of positional goods like a mansion in Mayfair at least - nor even, over time, of the ability to build more housing.

We've just a legal structure and a bureaucracy dedicated to not allowing people to build housing without those permits in artificial shortage.

Recent policy has been, not as fast as we'd like, not as big a change as we'd like but in the right direction at least, to issue more of such permits. The result being, as even The Guardian notices: 

At last, a reason to celebrate: house prices are falling.

We're not the sort who would boast of having told you so, heaven forfend that we should be so self-regarding.

But, you know, we did tell you so.

These markets things, the interaction of supply and demand changing prices, they really do work, are a useful description of that reality out there.