James Joyce on... the housing ladder

Sunak’s panicky promise to remove stamp duty for first-time buyers is a crowd-pleasing gimmick but misses the point: it does not increase the supply of homes. It could even push up prices by increasing demand, rather like “Help to Buy” did: that scheme should have been called “Help to Sell”.

Increasing the supply of homes is the only way to increase affordability and availability, which is why the Liberal Democrats want to see local councils freed from the obligation to sell to tenants under “Right to Buy”. That scheme did not increase supply, but cut the amount of social housing. We will push for changes to the law to make it easier for councils to acquire land to build new housing, and press for a national target of 150,000 new council and social homes a year.