” … The public sector has to be a steady supplier of homes, much as it was during the 1950s under the Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan governments.
To most people in the housing industry, this was obvious for years. Labour, under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, attempted to bully private housebuilders into including social housing in their estates. But it was always an uphill task. Tony Pidgley, the chairman of Berkeley Group, who pocketed a 42% rise in his take home pay to £23m last year, could not close the supply gap even if he wanted to.
He needs to make a profit for his hungry shareholders, who have set him a target of generating £2bn in pretax profit over three years from 2015, as reservations fall by 20%. Social housing is a discreet element of the Berkeley mix, but like most other major housebuilders, it cannot be more than that.
Turnbull makes no judgment on private developers, other than to highlight the empirically irrefutable point that they never build more than 120,000-130,000 homes a year in a country that, even if net migration were brought down to the tens of thousands, would require at least 200,000 new homes a year.
Fathom Consulting is one of the economic consultancies that continue to make this point year after year. It argues that property suffers from a market failure, which must be tackled by the government. Let’s hope that the Lords makes the same point.”
East Devon Watch 