On Tuesday, the communities secretary, Sajid Javid, announced plans to reform the UK’s “broken” housing market. The government’s white paper “reads like a stinging indictment of the way we have gone about providing homes in recent decades”, says The Guardian.
But while there is talk of loosening green-belt restrictions and building more, there needs to be “real protections for renters – legislating for longer, more secure tenancies tied to predictable rents”. The government also needs to let councils build more houses – “there’s no chance of building the target 250,000 homes a year through the private market alone”.
Housing is increasingly “like Monopoly, with the youngest and poorest shoved off the board before they have even started to play”, says Alice Thomson in The Times, But “it is short-sighted to tarmac over fields and smother them with identikit brick boxes”. Instead, we should “regenerate once-beautiful market towns rather than allow them to disintegrate slowly”, or incentivise small builders to “think creatively on fiddly complicated brownfield sites”. We also need to encourage “the elderly to move to more practical accommodation for their last years”.
It would be good to persuade older people to downsize to free up homes for young families, agrees Kirstie Allsopp in The Daily Telegraph. But it’s easier said than done. There’s the quality of modern homes for a start – new-builds are “becoming ever smaller, meaner and less suitable for people living in them”. Stamp duty and conveyancing delays also make it harder for people to move. Javid is right: the housing market is broken. But “not for the reasons he thought”.