Too little genuinely affordable housing is available or being built.

Turkeys don't vote for Christmas

The volume housebuilders match supply with demand, and they will not build at a rate that reduces sale prices.

Homelessness in England has risen by 26% in the last five years.

Temporary housing can be awful
"Family live with sewage spills and maggots in 'horrific' temporary housing "If anyone runs the kitchen tap, the sewage bubbles up higher. There are maggots in the kitchen, and mould and damp throughout the house, including the children's bedrooms. The windows are stuffed with bin bags as they do not close properly."

There is a record 123,000 households living in temporary accommodation in England, including 160,000 children.

Councils spent £1bn tackling the issue last year, 50% higher than in 2022 as the numbers spiralled.

The problem is housing distribution not numbers.

"“effective demand” for housing (demand backed by purchasing power) bears little relationship to need. As the professor of economics and finance Josh Ryan-Collins points out, since 2016, more homes have been bought as “additional dwellings” (second homes, holiday homes, Airbnbs, buy to lets, and so on) than by first-time buyers. Almost 1m homes in England are left empty, and the number of vacant properties has risen 32% since 2016."

People find this hard to believe, but there is a massive housing surplus in this country. We have a higher ratio of bedrooms to population than ever before. The problem is that it’s woefully maldistributed: prosperous couples and single people knock around in mansions while families are crammed into tiny flats. Most of the expansion of housing supply in the UK since the 1980s has created extra space for wealthy people, rather than new homes for those who need them. About 8.8m homes in England are under-occupied. There’s already more than enough housing, by a wide margin, to meet everyone’s needs, if effective incentives for redistribution were created. But the government tells me it has no such plan.