00:00For many, the dream of owning a home is slipping out of reach, not just because of high prices,
00:06but because the entire system is stacked against first-time buyers.
00:10And even though new homes were promised, the scale of the challenge is far greater than a single pledge can fix.
00:17There's the sense that if you're going to buy a home, then you're going to have to sort of find whatever it may be,
00:23you know, of course, depending upon the deposit.
00:24And, of course, if you're lucky enough to have a sort of rich mom and dad who can sort of help you with that,
00:28then, of course, that becomes more affordable.
00:30But for many people on pretty low salaries, you know, the average wage is about $30,000 a year.
00:38You know, even with two, you know, the norm used to be sort of three times the sort of the joint salary.
00:42That's still what, you know, $180,000, you're not going to get much.
00:46And certainly sort of in most towns and cities where people want to live, houses are a lot more expensive than that.
00:52So there is a big, big problem.
00:53The $1.5 million, which, of course, was the sort of extra homes, I should add, which was a manifesto pledge from sort of Labour coming into the election to build, build over the sort of the Parliament.
01:03You divide that, that's $300,000 a year over five years.
01:07The fact that they're not sort of getting to that sort of level is hardly surprising.
01:11One of the biggest constraints is land, its high cost, limited availability and control by a small number of developers who release supplies slowly to maintain profits.
01:23That creates a bottleneck in the system where affordability is squeezed and targets become harder to meet.
01:30Because, of course, it's not the government that are going to sort of do this because they don't, you know, build houses, certainly sort of the, for speculative sort of purposes, by, you know, by the sort of things that developers build.
01:42And, of course, the big problem we do have in this country is land is very, very expensive.
01:47And, of course, it's also controlled by effectively a cartel of sort of large housing developers who then turn the tap on and off to suit themselves.
01:54So, you know, the government, you know, and well-intentioned as this may have been, it was always going to be difficult to influence those house builders to sort of to increase their supply and, in effect, reduce the sort of the value of those homes or the sort of the cost to make them affordable.
02:09So there's a whole set of dynamics here.
02:11Add into that, of course, there is a sort of problem.
02:14We've got sort of a real crisis in social sort of housing.
02:18I'm talking about council housing, sort of social landlords.
02:20But, of course, who's going to build those?
02:22Well, local authorities.
02:23And we know, of course, in many cases, local authorities have had their sort of budgets chopped to the bone.
02:28And, you know, they can barely provide the statutory services, let alone building additional houses.
02:32So it's a big problem and it's not going to sort of be solved any time soon, if ever.
02:37Local authorities were once the largest provider of council housing.
02:41They have seen their budgets slashed.
02:43Many now struggle to deliver even their core services, let alone fund large-scale house building for social rent or affordable ownership schemes.
02:53Well, when we talk about 700,000 net migration, of course, that means that, you know, there's people who sort of come and there are obviously those who leave.
03:02But because that's the additional sort of people, you know, that's the best part of three quarters of a million people.
03:07Yeah, that's the size of sort of a major city.
03:09So the fact is that if more people come into the country, they have to go somewhere, which, of course, increases the demand, which, of course, means the prices go up.
03:17So the affordability factor becomes even more a problem.
03:20And, of course, as we also know, wages have remained pretty stagnant in sort of recent years and have not kept pace with inflation since the cost of living prices.
03:29And, of course, we only have to hear what the doctors are saying about losing the value of their wages.
03:35So there's a big problem.
03:37And the fact is, you know, Margaret Thatcher, back in 79, she came to power talking about the home-owning democracy.
03:44And, indeed, for a while, of course, the number of people in private households, it went up.
03:48But it's come down markedly ever since.
03:50And, of course, there is a problem.
03:51And I don't sort of see how we're going to sort of fix that one.
03:53Whether it's affordability, planning, land or labour, the barriers to fixing Britain's housing crisis are deep and complex.
04:04Migration adds further pressure.
04:06But even without it, the numbers don't stack up.
04:09What's clear that is without systematic reform, short-term pledges and election promises are unlikely to shift the dial.
04:17And for a generation locked out of home ownership, the idea of having a place to call your own is feeling less like a right and more like a fantasy.
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