Douglas Carswell

Home-owning democracy?

It is deeply worrying that so many young people cannot afford to buy a home. We desperately need a Government that addresses the gap between house prices and wages. Unfortunately this Government is doing the opposite.

The basic reason houses are unaffordable for so many young people is that house prices have risen inexorably while wages have stagnated. This is the result of years of artificially cheap credit: by setting negative interest rates in a bid to create the illusion of economic growth, the Bank of England has incentivised borrowing and inflated asset prices.

But the Chancellor is to blame too. He has not only backed the Bank's monetary activism, but also added his own cheap credit through Help to Buy. Encouraging more mortgage lending without building any more houses can only ever have one consequence: price inflation. Far from making houses more affordable for first-time buyers, Help to Buy has only served to place them further out of reach.

Nor is that the only policy pushing up house prices. The Government promises to deliver 200,000 homes a year to account for population growth. But even it met that target, the new homes wouldn't even cover population growth just from net immigration, which currently stands at over 300,000 per year. As long as immigration outstrips housebuilding, prices must continue to rise – and we can't control immigration while we remain in the EU.

At the same time, planning regulations prevent desirable housing development. Regulations on building design produce regimented, identikit houses and flats that people don't want to live in. New developments are imposed on local communities from the top down, without concern for the impact on local infrastructure and services.

Affordable housing requires more sound money and less regulation. We need to liberalise design – encouraging innovative construction that produces not just houses but homes. We need to localise planning, enabling local councils to choose where to build and keep the resulting tax revenue. We need to retake control of our borders, so that housebuilding can keep pace with sustainable population growth.

Above all, we need a Government that is actually serious about tackling our country's enormous debt burden.

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