[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.