In 1968, England alone completed about 350,000 new homes, and the UK as a whole almost 426,000. That was the peak of the postwar building programme — rationed materials, simpler technology, a country still clearing rubble. In 2024-25, England added about 190,000 new-build homes: little more than half its 1968 output, for a population more than twelve million larger.
The gap is real; it does not come from how the homes are counted. So what changed?
The supply case — and the question it can’t answer
The standard answer is planning constraints, and the standard answer is correct, as far as it goes. In England and Wales, a typical home cost about 3.5 times typical full-time earnings in 1997. In England the ratio peaked at 9.1 in 2021 and still stood at 7.6 in 2025. In Australia, relative to incomes, house prices in early 2026 were a quarter higher than a decade earlier, on top of an already steep climb since the 1990s. Canada suffered the worst deterioration of any OECD country with comparable data between 2004 and 2024: its price-to-income ratio worsened by more than 80%.
Christian Hilber and Wouter Vermeulen estimated that real house prices in England would have risen about 100 percentage points less between 1974 and 2008 if all regulatory constraints had been removed, roughly half of the actual increase. Restrict supply in a growing city and prices rise.
The supply case does explain something. The gap between 1968 and 2024-25 is partly a gap between planning systems: between a postwar regime that presumed development was a public good and a later one that treated it as a burden requiring justification. Green belts were drawn tight around England’s cities and now cover an eighth of the country. Local opposition acquired legal teeth. The discretionary nature of the English planning system, where every application requires individual assessment rather than meeting a code, made refusal cheap and delay routine. If Hilber and Vermeulen are right, then without regulatory constraints, something close to half of England’s real price growth between 1974 and 2008 would not have happened.
But the supply diagnosis, taken alone, cannot explain the record. If the problem is planning constraints, meaning the regulatory rules that restrict where and how densely housing can be built, then the solution is obvious: build more permissively. That solution has been obvious for roughly forty years. Governments of several parties, in several countries, have identified the problem, commissioned reviews, issued white papers, set targets, and produced approximately the same output. Yet no government has fixed it.
The reason is that fixing it is not in the interests of the people making the decisions.
Who blocks supply, and why that’s rational
England’s planning system, built on the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and its successors, concentrates veto power over new development in local planning committees, a veto the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 now lets ministers narrow by sending more decisions to officers. Those committees are made up of elected councillors, who answer to constituents. And in the areas where housing is most needed and most fiercely opposed, the constituents who attend planning meetings, write objection letters and vote in local elections are homeowners.
Toronto offers a direct test. In council votes there from 2009 to 2020, councillors who represented wards with higher homeowner shares were significantly more likely to vote against large housing developments, particularly when those developments fall within their own ward. Across the city’s wards between 2009 and 2018, a ten percentage point increase in local homeownership correlated with 47 fewer units permitted per square kilometre. Homeownership was among the strongest predictors of a councillor voting against development.
The arithmetic behind those votes is not subtle. Take a household holding a £400,000 home with a £200,000 mortgage still outstanding, which leaves it £200,000 in equity. A ten percent fall in house prices wipes out £40,000 of real wealth the household may be counting on for retirement, school fees, or passing something to their children. That gives it a personal and rational reason to stop prices falling.
The Right to Buy compounds the problem structurally. Under the Housing Act 1980, close to a million council homes in England alone were sold to their tenants by 1990; the total has since passed 1.9 million. This would have shifted tenure without consequence had it been paired with replacement. It wasn’t, and the restrictions on replacement were deliberate.
English councils owned about 5.2 million homes at the end of 1979; today they own fewer than 1.6 million, and even counting housing associations the whole social rented stock is only about 4.2 million, in a country with eight million more homes. Around four in ten of the homes sold under Right to Buy were let by private landlords by 2017 in the councils that kept records, in London typically at more than double the council rent: the same assets at higher cost, with the public subsidy gone private. As a mechanism for converting publicly subsidised social infrastructure into private wealth-producing assets, the policy worked exactly as designed.
Right to Buy: the mechanism in detail
Right to Buy came wrapped in tight Treasury controls on what councils could do with the money. Through the 1980s, central capital controls let councils spend only a fraction of their sales receipts; from 1990, under the Local Government and Housing Act 1989, three-quarters of every receipt had to be set aside to pay down housing debt. Most of the proceeds of the UK's biggest privatisation therefore flowed to central government, not into new council homes. With replacement deliberately starved of funds, almost every sale became a net loss to the social stock. The policy transferred publicly subsidised assets to private ownership, blocked replacement, and created a new landlord class collecting market rents on homes originally built for social tenants.The Germany deviation
Germany’s housing politics from the 1970s to the 1990s produced a different set of structural choices. The homeownership rate settled below 50%, and at 47% in 2025 it is still the lowest in the EU. It was held in place by the absence of open-ended mortgage interest relief for owner-occupiers, whose tax support came as capped allowances and later a flat grant, a large social rented sector, and strong tenant protections such as Kauf bricht nicht Miete, the principle that a property sale does not terminate an existing tenancy. Transaction costs reinforced the pattern and have since climbed steeply: the real-estate transfer tax, 2% until 1997, now runs from 3.5% to 6.5% depending on the state. Since 2015 a rent brake, the Mietpreisbremse, has also capped rents on most new lettings in tight markets at 10% above the local comparative rent; homes first let after October 2014 and the first letting after a comprehensive modernisation are exempt.
These structures had a measurable effect. From the mid-1990s to 2009, German house prices fell by about a quarter in real terms, and price-to-income ratios fell with them. While the UK and Australia were diverging sharply, Germany was not. If you make housing expensive to transact, only modestly deductible against income, and relatively unrewarding to hold as a speculative asset, fewer people treat it as a speculative asset.
Then the European Central Bank pushed rates toward zero, and eventually below it, and Germany’s structural buffers began to give way. Between 2010 and mid-2022, German house prices roughly doubled, and the Bundesbank estimated that urban prices in 2022 sat 25–40% above what fundamentals could justify. In Munich, asking prices for flats nearly tripled in the decade to 2021-22. Germany’s social housing stock, just under four million units at the end of the 1980s, had shrunk to about 1.05 million by the end of 2024, as price-control periods on older stock expired far faster than new units were built. In January 2026 the Pestel Institute put the country’s housing shortfall at 1.4 million homes at the end of 2024, almost all of them affordable or social housing.
Germany did not fail in the same way as Britain or Australia. Its structural choices bought two decades of relative stability while Anglophone markets broke almost immediately following financial deregulation. When the monetary environment became extreme enough, those protections gave way too.
Germany's housing crisis in numbers
ECB deposit rate: below zero from June 2014 to July 2022. German house prices: roughly doubled between 2010 and mid-2022. Munich flats: about €9,000-9,500 per square metre at the 2021-22 peak. Social housing: just under 4 million units at the end of the 1980s, about 1.05 million at the end of 2024. Estimated shortfall: 1.4 million homes at the end of 2024 (Pestel Institute estimate).How housing became money
Germany’s structural protections worked because they kept owner-occupied housing from becoming a leveraged speculative asset. The UK, Australia, and Canada chose differently. There, a sequence of financial deregulations had the cumulative effect of converting housing from a consumption good into a leverageable asset.
In the UK, the process ran roughly as follows. The Bank of England removed the “corset” restricting bank lending growth in 1980. The Building Societies Act 1986 allowed building societies to borrow wholesale and compete with banks, ending their mutual constraint on credit expansion. Building societies, which had held around 80% of all outstanding mortgage lending in the 1970s, lost ground fast: in the second half of 1987, banks and new specialist lenders accounted for more than half of net new mortgage lending. Josh Ryan-Collins, Toby Lloyd and Laurie Macfarlane trace how this deregulatory sequence shifted the binding constraint from income multiples (how much you earn) to asset value (how much the house is worth). That shift created a feedback loop: rising prices justify larger loans, and larger loans drive prices higher.
That matters for the supply question. In a goods market, high prices signal suppliers to produce more; supply rises to meet demand, and prices moderate. That is the market mechanism supply advocates are invoking when they argue for deregulation. But housing in its financialised form does not behave like a goods market. In an asset market, high prices signal holders to retain and buyers to enter before prices rise further, so sentiment constrains the market more than supply does. And the people who control supply decisions are the same people holding housing as their primary asset.
Australia formalised this with negative gearing: property investors can offset losses from investment properties against other taxable income, an explicit state subsidy for holding investment properties at a loss in the expectation of capital gain. In its May 2026 budget, the Albanese government moved: for future purchases, negative gearing is to be limited to newly built homes, with existing investments grandfathered, and from July 2027 the 50% capital gains discount is to be replaced by inflation indexation, backed by a 30% minimum tax on real capital gains.
Beyond its distributional effects, financialisation changed how high prices are perceived. In a consumption market, high prices for renters are a failure signal: something is going wrong and needs fixing. In an asset market, they are the measure of success. Rising rents mean rising yields and rising valuations, which in turn confirm that the people who own property made a good decision. That reframing is not a market outcome: it follows from converting the dominant electoral constituency into asset holders and then asking them to vote on policy.
What ultra-low rates did
The supply constraints, the NIMBY arithmetic and the financialisation of lending were all in place before 2008. What the decade after 2008 added was an extreme demand-side accelerant.
Falling interest rates raise the present value of future income streams, and assets with long duration get repriced most dramatically. Housing is especially exposed because households can borrow four to five times their income against it, a ratio no other asset class offers ordinary people at this scale. Across many economies, short-term interest rates turn out to be a strong driver of house prices: changes in rates up to five years earlier continue to affect prices, gradually rather than immediately. At ultra-low real interest rates, the sensitivity of house prices to rate changes is substantially higher than conventional estimates predict. As rates approached zero, asset values were repriced sharply upward, with the amplification greatest because rates had been so low for so long.
The Bank of England launched quantitative easing in March 2009. Over successive rounds it bought £895 billion of bonds. Through portfolio rebalancing, in which the central bank buys gilts and the sellers reinvest elsewhere in search of yield, QE pushed up the prices of other assets, while lower gilt yields fed straight through into cheaper mortgages. Residential property, which combined tax advantages and leverage in ways bonds couldn’t match, was a natural beneficiary. The Bank itself describes both channels as part of how the policy works.
Theresa May, in her July 2016 campaign speech launching her bid for the Conservative leadership, put it plainly, in words that changed nothing: “Monetary policy — in the form of super-low interest rates and quantitative easing — has helped those on the property ladder at the expense of those who can’t afford to own their own home.”
The housing crisis of the 2010s was the existing system meeting an extreme demand-side shock. That system was already supply-constrained, ownership-concentrated and politically captured, and the shock amplified what was already there.
QE as regressive redistribution
When a central bank buys government bonds at scale, it compresses yields and pushes investors toward assets with higher returns, while cheaper borrowing flows through to mortgage rates. Residential property, with its leverage potential and tax advantages, is a natural beneficiary of both. Asset price inflation hands its gains to the people who already hold assets. Those who rent rather than own get nothing from the appreciation. They do, however, help service the debt of the landlords who buy the houses that QE helped inflate.The inheritance machine
Housing outcomes increasingly turn on birth circumstances instead of income, education or professional trajectory: specifically, whether your parents own property and when they bought it.
In the UK, ownership rates among adults whose parents did not own have declined disproportionately: the gap between people from owning and non-owning households has widened as average prices have risen. The Australian pattern runs in the same direction. Younger Australian buyers face the steepest rise in price-to-income ratios of any country in a 13-country OECD comparison since 1979, and cannot replicate the housing wealth that cohorts who entered the market decades ago had accumulated at equivalent life stages.
Legal & General and Cebr estimated in 2017 that parental help with deposits, the “Bank of Mum and Dad”, was equivalent in scale to the UK’s ninth-largest mortgage lender. That help is the mechanism through which a property-owning class reproduces itself. The children of homeowners receive equity contributions that allow them to meet deposit requirements; the children of renters do not. Those who cannot access parental capital either rent indefinitely, leave expensive cities, or delay ownership by a decade or more, losing a year of wealth accumulation with every year of delay.
The gap compounds. A person who buys at 27 with parental help starts accumulating equity during the steepest earning years of their career. A person who buys at 38, if they ever buy, has spent their thirties paying rent that covered someone else’s mortgage while saving a deposit against a target that moved upward. By the time the second person owns, the first has a decade of asset appreciation behind them and is probably thinking about what to pass to their own children.
What separates them is when their parents happened to buy, whatever either of them earned and however hard they worked. Added up, decisions that were rational for the people who benefited from them have built an inheritance economy.
What would fix it, and why it rarely happens
The economics of what would fix this is largely settled. Governments could allow as-of-right upzoning near transit hubs: mandatory permission to build at higher density without case-by-case planning approval. They could tax land on its location value rather than its improvements, which would be economically non-distortionary because land supply is fixed and cannot be reduced in response to taxation. And they could remove the investment tax advantages that subsidise speculative holding, such as Australia’s negative gearing and the UK’s capital gains exemption on primary residences.
The Mirrlees Review of 2011, the most comprehensive review of UK taxation in a generation, found a strong case for land value taxation, recommended replacing business rates with a land value tax, and was largely ignored.
Every one of these fixes runs into political economy, because each directly reduces the asset value of the dominant electoral constituency. Homeowners vote at far higher rates than renters: at the 2024 UK general election, roughly 71% against 38%, by Ipsos estimates. They have a precise financial stake in planning permissions and tax policy. A politician who successfully delivers affordable housing by allowing supply to meet demand has cut the wealth of the people most likely to vote and most likely to notice. From the politician’s perspective, this is rational democratic behaviour.
Land value taxation: the economics
Henry George argued in 1879 that taxing land value, meaning the location itself rather than buildings or improvements, would be economically non-distortionary because land supply is fixed. You can't build less land in response to being taxed. An LVT falls on the economic rent generated by location, penalises land-banking and speculative holding, and removes the perverse incentive to leave productive land underdeveloped. That is the modern economic consensus, and economists across the political spectrum, from Milton Friedman to Joseph Stiglitz, have endorsed the principle. The Mirrlees Review of UK taxation in 2011 recommended it for business land. Denmark, several Australian states and a handful of US cities levy land taxes, but no major economy has made it the backbone of its tax system. Politically, though, LVT requires existing landowners, who vote, to pay for the social value of their locations, which they currently capture for free.There is also a structural feature of housing politics that makes the coalition for reform self-defeating. Renters, aspiring buyers and priced-out young professionals, the natural constituency for housing reform, are not a stable political bloc. They eventually buy, or give up, or leave the expensive city. When they buy, they join the defensive coalition. The defensive coalition never converts; the reform coalition continuously haemorrhages members to homeownership. Every person who crosses from renter to owner joins the side defending high prices against the side that was recently harming them.
New Zealand provides the partial exception. In 2016 Auckland upzoned roughly three-quarters of its residential land under its Unitary Plan, and the upzoning applied across those zones at once rather than site by site. The effects are measurable. Greenaway-McGrevy estimates that the reform raised long-run floorspace by about 24% and left three-bedroom rents 22-35% below where they would otherwise have been six years on. The country then tried to scale the idea up. A National Policy Statement on Urban Development in 2020 was followed by an amendment to the Resource Management Act in 2021 which, backed by both Labour and National in a rare political configuration, required the five largest urban areas to allow three homes of up to three storeys on most residential sites. The consensus did not last. After National returned to power, 2025 amendments let Auckland and Christchurch back out of the blanket rules, and Christchurch moved to do so.
The exception proves that the lock can be broken, but breaking it requires a political configuration that is rare and temporary, and that must be institutionalised quickly before the newly forming homeowner constituency reasserts itself. New Zealand’s partial retreat shows how short that window can be.
What was built
England completed about 350,000 homes in 1968; in 2024-25 it added about 190,000 new builds, for a population more than twelve million larger. In between, housing became the main asset of the voters who control planning decisions, financial deregulation locked credit and house prices into a feedback loop, the social housing stock was sold and not replaced, and a decade of ultra-low rates and quantitative easing inflated what owners already held.
The political economy that produced all of this is structured so that those who can fix it benefit from not fixing it. Beyond producing unaffordable housing today, it is building an inheritance economy for the decades ahead.
In that economy, a person’s housing outcome will increasingly turn on whether they were born into the right property-owning family at the right point in the price cycle, instead of what they earn, where they went to university or what they contribute to a productive economy.
That society is being built through choices, stacked over forty years, that were rational for the people making them. Whether those choices can be reversed is a real question. Whether the people with the power to reverse them have any incentive to do so is a different question, and the two answers point in opposite directions.
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