Chief Executive Mike Brown responds to Sajid Javid’s comments to Andrew Marr, that the government should borrow money to fund the demand for 300,000 affordable houses to be built each year.
“Sajid Javid is, I believe, opening up an extremely important debate and I am of course supportive of his intentions to solve the housing shortage. He is the Secretary of State who first publicly announced last year, that the country’s housing supply was in crisis and the market was broken. This proposal for the Government to borrow at the current historic low interest rates to support infrastructure development makes good sense and will certainly help with supply.
“It is a clear recognition that the market economy on its own cannot solve the supply issues in the UK housing market. I would however also urge Mr Javid and his colleagues to commit to long-term and consistent strategic approaches to both funding and land supply. We must, I feel, make such commitments if we genuinely wish to see the issues of housing affordability for our successor generations resolved.”