housing Articles

‘There are five of us living in a two-bedroom flat, the children fight all the time, there is no space for them to do their homework, I sleep in the living room … it is too much’ a woman told me at my councillor surgery last week. I have lost count of the number of...

A mansion tax is a good idea in principle. But in practice it raises a number of policy challenges. So shadow chancellor Ed Balls is correct to say that it should be done in a fair way. One challenging fact about a mansion tax is that it is, in effect, a tax on...

If you go past a building site on your regular commute, you will have experienced the strange feeling of noticing that, after a seeming eternity of nothing much happening, a whole structure suddenly springs up, almost out of nowhere. It is as though all that time...

For a government desperate for power, giving free cash to individuals is a giveaway that’s hard to beat. This is what Chancellor George Osborne did with the Help to Buy scheme aimed at helping people buy a new home with a government-backed mortgage. Parliament’s...