Theresa May’s speech to the Conservative Party conference was indeed a debacle in terms of presentation. But the content was worthy of more analysis.
The shortage of houses, particularly in the South-East of England, is a persistent and major political problem. Young voters have great difficulty in finding accomodation, while the old profit from rising (and unaffordable to the young) house prices. This leads to divisions in society that populist and left-wing leaders can exploit.
So what is the Prime Minister and the Government going to do about it? They have promised to spend another £10bn on the “Help to Buy” scheme which has improved the share prices of the housebuilding companies I own already. This may well enable some people to buy houses that they could not otherwise manage to do, but it is also likely to increase house prices rather than reduce them.
In addition, she has committed to spending £2bn to fund more affordable housing with measures to ensure councils release more land for housing, and encourage developers to actually build more homes.
These are positive moves, but it’s only tackling one end of the supply-demand equation. One of the core problems is over-population in the South-East and a concentration of business activity in London, which creates a need for more housing, more social infrastructure, more transport, and more land use that simply cannot be satisfied quickly enough, if at all. Rapid growth in population, driven partly by immigration, is one cause that needs to be tackled if this imbalance is ever to be rectified. And a policy to redistribute economic activity more broadly across the country would make a lot of sense surely.
One little reported item in Mrs May’s speech was the announcement that the Government is to make a presumption in favour of organ donation legal. So instead of an “opt-in” system, you will be required to “opt-out” if you do not wish to become an organ donor.
As a kidney transplant patient myself, I view this as a positive step forward to increase the number of donations. As Mrs May said in her speech, 500 people died last year because of a lack of suitable donors. That particulary affects heart donations, but even kidney disease patients have a much shorter life expectancy on dialysis as against having a transplant. The economics are that transplants are cheaper than dialysis, and the quality of life much improved. So I hope this measure will go through unimpeded.
Roger Lawson (Twitter: https://twitter.com/RogerWLawson )
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