Holmes Calls on Ministers to Wake Up to the Affordable Housing Crisis

Commenting on surveys released by the Royal Institution of Chartered of Surveyors (RICS) and the Trades Union Congress (TUC), Paul Holmes MP, Liberal Democrat Housing Spokesman said

"Today's RICS and TUC surveys highlighting the soaring and increasingly unaffordable cost of house buying must be a wake up call for a complacent Government.

"New Labour's policies over the last 10 years have deliberately slashed the building of social housing to rent (with waiting lists soaring from 1M to 1.6M), and encouraged the soaring cost of home ownership and of the Buy to Rent market. The continuing shock waves from the collapse of the US sub prime mortgage lending market will soon be coupled with the effect of large numbers of UK mortgage payers moving from existing fixed rate mortgages to the new higher interest rates.

"The Government should commit to building a million extra new houses over and above the 'normal' private sector new build in the next 10 years. These extra houses should primarily be divided between affordable housing where the land is held in Community Land trusts (so keeping house prices down not only at first point of sale but at subsequent re sales), and social housing to rent with Councils being restored to an equal footing alongside Housing Associations."