In September the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change released a report on the UK’s crisis in housing affordability. The report is big on solutions and relatively light on historical context, which is handy because one of the people responsible for this crisis is Tony Blair.
House price inflation averaged 21 per cent during Blair’s ten years in power, with the average nominal house price more than trebling between the 1997 election and the summer of 2007. Nearly half a million council houses were lost to Right to Buy and more than 100,000 were demolished during New Labour’s time in power. Gordon Brown removed what he called the “middle-class perk” of tax relief on mortgage interest for homeowners, but failed to remove it for landlords, creating an industry worth tens of billions of pounds per year that was based on tax avoidance and the transfer of money from wages and student loans to the savings of the already wealthy.
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