Supporting Nimbys is building up trouble for Tories

‘Rental numbers are stark because renters do not vote Conservative’

- Stephen Pollard

FROM eggs to hospital beds to housing, there is a common thread in Britain in 2022: shortages. It has started to feel as if there is simply not enough of anything to go round.

That is particularly true of housing. For decades, the Conservatives were triumphantly associated with championing the desire of ordinary working people to own their own homes, after the extraordinary success of Baroness Thatcher's iconic Right to Buy policy.

But in recent years - partly because of failures to adapt to some of the consequences of Right to Buy it has become steadily more difficult for people to get on the housing ladder in areas in which they actually want, or need, to live.

In the 1990s, for example, when average house prices were 3.9 times the average wage, if you saved 5 per cent every month you would have enough for a house deposit within three years. Today, with average house prices nine times average wages, it would take nearly 25 years.

THAT'S why 44 per cent of 25 to 34-year-olds now rent up from just 16 per cent in 1993. The figure is 28 per cent among 35 to 44-year-olds today, compared with a tiny 8 per cent in 1993.

The lack of affordable housing is not just a fundamental policy failure. It is a moral outrage.

The proper response, of course, is obvious: build more houses.