[tboughen]

This may be true if the housing market has sufficient capacity to build homes at the required rate. The UK’s experience over the past 50 years is that the private sector has built around 170k homes per year, but the rate of household formation suggests we need around 300k extra each year.

The U.K. hasn’t built 300k+ homes per year (or anything like that) since the government stopped building houses - the private sector has never picked up the slack. And the result is hugely increased prices.

[pas]

What's the bottleneck? Obviously the demand is there, right? What's constraining the private supply side to expand? (More explicitly: what happened when the public sector building shrunk, why private sector did not pick up the slack?)

Is the difference that council housing is in a large part publicly funded? Difference in the permitting process?