[concordDance]

Except in practice regulation increases cost and reduces access, particularly of anything new. Regulation has made building so difficult in the UK that oligopolies have formed and 90% of the young will never be able to buy a house unless they inherit.

[d4rti]

Which regulation do you think is responsible?

Personally I blame Right to Buy for the collapse in building new homes, as this graph [1] neatly illustrates; Local authority building collapses, Housing association building is a trickle by comparison. Private housebuilding has remained relatively stable since 1955 by comparison.

The financial crisis also has a notable effect, but it's small by comparison.

The cost of housing is fuelled mainly by lack of social rented supply, and the high cost of land with planning permission. It's also to some extent a consequence of political service to the baby boomer generation, who got high house building when they needed it, had the heyday of BTL and have constrained house building since to preserve the value of their investments. The size of houses is decreasing [2] and I can't find a source for it, but certainly anecdotally plot size is decreasing too. The young are paying more for less.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Housing_in_the_United_Kingdom#... /File:Dwellings_completed_in_England_1946-2015.png 2: https://www.labc.co.uk/news/what-average-house-size-uk

[ZeroGravitas]

House size decreasing makes sense as people become more urban.

Everything else you said is exactly spot on though.

It was regulations intentionally written to make the rich richer and keep the poor poor that caused the issue. It wasn't a mistake, or an unintended effect of the nanny state going too far, quite the opposite.

[d4rti]

The reason I mentioned it as such is that it's not really regulation, as much as the effects of the right to buy policy causing the public sector to stop building houses; reversing this wouldn't really be 'deregulating' but would actually be involving government to address a market failure.

[ZeroGravitas]

The original idea of right to buy, as discussed by Labour, in the late 70s was to reinvest the money from sales in building new council houses.

The Tory policy implementation sold them off cheap and slowly ratcheted down the amount of the sales price going to that purpose and the building dramatically slowed. Again, not an accident or unintended effect.

Basically bribing the better off council house owners into voting conservative (and for policies that cause the housing crisis) at the expense of the poor.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

> Regulation has made building so difficult in the UK

Lack of appropriate regulation allowed Grenfell tower to burn down. 72 people died. (1) The case for "deregulation" of UK housing is a grotesque joke.

1) How lax building rules contributed to Grenfell disaster https://www.ft.com/content/bf6bcbd0-5b35-11e7-9bc8-8055f264a...

[concordDance]

It sounds callous, but even if those 72 deaths could be attributed to regulation on houses (they can't, that's apartment blocks), it would still be an acceptable price to pay. It costs less than a million to save a marginal life, housing regulations have cost north of a trillion (comparing total cost of housing stock then to now adjusted for inflation), so unless those regulations have saved a million lives? They aren't worth it.

Humans are really bad at thinking at scale, but this is essential for good pubkic policy.

[SideburnsOfDoom]

So you are splitting hairs by, after the fact, by distinguishing between "houses" and "housing"; making up numbers of what regulations cost (not the same as the total cost of housing, right?) and insisting that fireproof cladding just isn't worth it in purely monetary terms.

You're right though, it does sound callous.