The most puffed up panic in the land.

There is no housing crisis. There is just a housing market. There is no housing “need”, unless you are sleeping in the street. There is just housing demand and housing supply. There is also housing panic, housing lobbyists and housing stark raving madness, the last much in evidence last week.

Simon Jenkins, The Times – 15 July 2007

The news that the government wants all children to learn economics is fine but ministers should go to the head of the queue.

The housing policy that Gordon Brown set out in his “Queen’s speech” was based on nothing more substantial than anecdote. Everyone knows a house that is worth five times more than “some time ago”. Everyone knows someone frantic to get “onto the housing ladder”. Everyone is eager to buy or sell. House prices are second only to sex on the mind of the macho British male.

The assumption that every adult citizen has a “right to a decent home” that they can “afford”, courtesy of the government, must be the last hangover of postwar socialism and a brainless basis for policy. It is matched only by the archaic belief of Yvette Cooper, the housing minister, that this right is reflected in a fixed stock of “housing need” unrelated to price or any other financial variable. She must think she is running Moscow’s housing department in the 1950s – full article