IEA Editorial Director Kristian Niemietz has written in The Daily Telegraph criticising the government’s latest proposals on renters’ reform and expediting planning permission for failing to match its pro-house building rhetoric.

Kristian wrote:

“I saw someone tweet a quote from a politician about Britain’s housing crisis which, I thought, hit the nail right on the head…I then saw that it was Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. 

“If you were wondering why, after having neglected this issue for 14 years, Gove and his colleagues now seem to be belatedly waking up, the answer is very simple: they’re not. The Government has indeed announced a series of measures supposedly aimed at alleviating the housing crisis, but there is a chasm between how sensible Gove’s rhetoric is in the abstract, and how laughably inadequate the actual policy announcements are.

“For Conservatives, housing has long been a dilemma. They know that a failure to build houses will erode their future electoral base. But they also know that housebuilding will anger their current electoral base. So far, they have prioritised the present over the future. The problem with the future is that it becomes the present eventually.”

Read Kristian’s full piece here.