So that's the housing shortage solved then

This is just excellent news, the Labour Party seems to have figured out what's wrong with the UK housing market.

Sir Michael Lyons told the Guardian he had identified protracted delays in the release of land as the single biggest cause of Britain's housing crisis.

Hurrah!.

We have no shortage of land in the UK, only 3% of the country is housing and under 10% is developed in any manner whatsoever. So there's plenty of room to increase housing by, say, 25%, for that would take some 1% of the country. This really isn't a land shortage.

However, what we do have is a shortage of land that people are allowed to build housing upon. It is this which makes housing itself so expensive: the scarcity value of the permission slip to build a house on a particular piece of land. So, issue more permission slips more quickly and that scarcity value will fall.

Yes, we know, we've been saying this ad nauseam this past decade. You're getting sick of hearing it and we're getting very bored with saying it. But if even the Labour Party's housing investigation committee is now coming around to this idea than obviously our repetition has not been in vain.

If not enough permission slips to build houses makes housing expensive then the answer is to issue more permission slips.

It's so simple an idea that even Labour are managing to get it.