The best way to bring house prices down is to get building

Crash? What crash? A much-feared slowdown in house prices – due to hit last year – appears to have been more of a speed bump than a full snarl-up, with all the indicators now pointing green once again.

That is of course good news for homeowners and will bail a few out of negative equity.

It’s not necessarily good news for first time buyers, however, who even with last year’s readjustment remain far less able to afford their first home today than they were five, ten or twenty years ago.

Whilst there was speculation in some quarters that Jeremy Hunt would bring in further measures to ‘help’ first time buyers at the budget – one excitable briefing even talked of the insanity of 99 per cent mortgages – the truth is that the only way house prices are going to come down significantly is through more housing in the parts of the country that people want to live, and reducing the disincentives to move by ridding ourselves of the absurdity of stamp duty.

The Tories do, in fact, understand this.

A plan to rip up the planning system, however, died the night that the Lib Dems won a by-election in Chesham and Amersham on an anti-building ticket.

To their credit, Labour are talking a good game indeed on the sort of planning reform necessary to allow housebuilders to stick spades in the ground.

Berkeley Group, one of the most vital London builders, has described the current set-up as “increasingly uncertain, unpredictable and burdensome” and warned it will not move forward with the sort of mega-projects the capital needs.

The question is now whether the Labour leader Keir Starmer’s promises to take on the vested interests, the nimbys, and the bananas (build absolutely nothing anywhere near anything) will hold up in the white heat of the election campaign and, perhaps, afterwards into government.

For the next generation’s sake, let’s hope they do.