Tag: Conservative led Gvt

Why did Britain’s political class buy into the Tories’ economic fairytale?

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Ha-Joon Chang
Falling wages, savage cuts and sham employment expose the recovery as bogus. Without a new vision we’re heading for social conflict

Sunday 19 October 2014 17.46 BST

The UK economy has been in difficulty since the 2008 financial crisis. Tough spending decisions have been needed to put it on the path to recovery because of the huge budget deficit left behind by the last irresponsible Labour government, showering its supporters with social benefit spending. Thanks to the coalition holding its nerve amid the clamour against cuts, the economy has finally recovered. True, wages have yet to make up the lost ground, but it is at least a “job-rich” recovery, allowing people to stand on their own feet rather than relying on state handouts.

That is the Conservative party’s narrative on the UK economy, and a large proportion of the British voting public has bought into it. They say they trust the Conservatives more than Labour by a big margin when it comes to economic management. And it’s not just the voting public. Even the Labour party has come to subscribe to this narrative and tried to match, if not outdo, the Conservatives in pledging continued austerity. The trouble is that when you hold it up to the light this narrative is so full of holes it looks like a piece of Swiss cheese.

First, let’s look at the origins of the deficit. Contrary to the Conservative portrayal of it as a spendthrift party, Labour kept the budget in balance averaged over its first six years in office between 1997 and 2002. Between 2003 and 2007 the deficit rose, but at 3.2% of GDP a year it was manageable.

More importantly, this rise in the deficit between 2003 and 2007 was not due to increased welfare spending. According to data from the Office for National Statistics, social benefit spending as a proportion of GDP was more or less constant at about 9.5% of GDP a year during this period. The dramatic climb in budget deficit from there to the average of 10.7% in 2009-2010 was mostly a consequence of the recession caused by the financial crisis.

First, the recession reduced government revenue by the equivalent of 2.4% of GDP – from 42.1% to 39.7% – between 2008 and 2009-10. Second, it raised social spending (social benefit plus health spending). Economic downturn automatically increases spending on many social benefits, such as unemployment benefit and income support, but it also increases spending on things like disability benefit and healthcare, as increased unemployment and poverty lead to more physical and mental health problems. In 2009-10, at the height of the recession, UK public social spending rose by the equivalent of 3.2% of GDP compared with its 2008 level (from 21.8% to 24%).
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When you add together the recession-triggered fall in tax revenue and rise in social spending, they amount to 5.6% of GDP – almost the same as the rise in the deficit between 2008 and 2009-10 (5.7% of GDP). Even though some of the rise in social spending was due to factors other than the recession, such as an ageing population, it would be safe to say that much of the rise in deficit can be explained by the recession itself, rather than Labour’s economic mismanagement.

When faced with this, supporters of the Tory narrative would say, “OK, but however it was caused, we had to control the deficit because we can’t live beyond our means and accumulate debt”. This is a pre-modern, quasi-religious view of debt. Whether debt is a bad thing or not depends on what the money is used for. After all, the coalition has made students run up huge debts for their university education on the grounds that their heightened earning power will make them better off even after they pay back their loans.

The same reasoning should be applied to government debt. For example, when private sector demand collapses, as in the 2008 crisis, the government “living beyond its means” in the short run may actually reduce public debt faster in the long run, by speeding up economic recovery and thereby more quickly raising tax revenues and lowering social spending. If the increased government debt is accounted for by spending on projects that raise productivity – infrastructure, R&D, training and early learning programmes for disadvantaged children – the reduction in public debt in the long run will be even larger.

Against this, the advocates of the Conservative narrative may retort that the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and that the recovery is the best proof that the government’s economic strategy has worked. But has the UK economy really fully recovered? We keep hearing that national income is higher than at the pre-crisis peak of the first quarter of 2008. However, in the meantime the population has grown by 3.5 million (from 60.5 million to 64 million), and in per capita terms UK income is still 3.4% less than it was six years ago. And this is even before we talk about the highly uneven nature of the recovery, in which real wages have fallen by 10% while people at the top have increased their shares of wealth.

But can we not at least say that the recovery has been “jobs-rich”, creating 1.8m positions between 2011 and 2014? The trouble is that, apart from the fact that the current unemployment rate of 6% is nothing to be proud of, many of the newly created jobs are of very poor quality.

The ranks of workers in “time-related underemployment”, doing fewer hours than they wish due to a lack of availability of work – have swollen dramatically. Between 1999 and 2006, only about 1.9% of workers were in such a position; by 2012-13 the figure was 8%.

Then there is the extraordinary increase in self-employment. Its share of total employment, whose historical norm (1984-2007) was 12.6%, now stands at an unprecedented 15%. With no evidence of a sudden burst of entrepreneurial energy among Britons, we may conclude that many are in self-employment out of necessity or even desperation. Even though surveys show that most newly self-employed people say it is their preference, the fact that these workers have experienced a far greater collapse in earnings than employees – 20% against 6% between 2006-07 and 2011-12, according to the Resolution Foundation – suggests that they have few alternatives, not that they are budding entrepreneurs going places.

So, in between the additional people in underemployment (6.1% of employment) and the precarious newly self-employed (2.4%), 8.5% of British people in work (or 2.6 million people) are in jobs that do not fully utilise their abilities – call that semi-unemployment, if you will.

The success of the Conservative economic narrative has allowed the coalition to pursue a destructive and unfair economic strategy, which has generated only a bogus recovery largely based on government-fuelled asset bubbles in real estate and finance, with stagnant productivity, falling wages, millions of people in precarious jobs, and savage welfare cuts.

The country is in desperate need of a counter narrative that shifts the terms of debate. A government budget should be understood not just in terms of bookkeeping but also of demand management, national cohesion and productivity growth. Jobs and wages should not be seen simply as a matter of people being “worth” (or not) what they get, but of better utilising human potential and of providing decent and dignified livelihoods. Ways have to be found to generate economic growth based on rising productivity rather than the continuous blowing of asset bubbles.

Without a new economic vision incorporating these dimensions, Britain will continue on its path of stagnation, financial instability and social conflict.

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/oct/19/britain-political-class-tories-economic-fairytale?CMP=fb_gu

In work, but poor: barriers to sustainable growth and the need for a living wage

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While the UK has returned to growth, many workers continue to suffer economic hardship as real incomes have yet to recover. This means that, just as in the past, the UK economy is relying on an unsustainable growth model where workers spending more than they earn to support the economy. Setting the UK on a sustainable path and reversing the growth of in-work poverty requires policies to raise real wages, writes David Spencer. 

Rejoice. The UK economy is back to where it was before the crisis. The depression is over and sunny economic uplands lie in the future. Feel good, damn it, the economy is growing again. But there is a reason why the positive growth statistics are treated sceptically. That reason relates to the fact that real incomes have fallen in the UK. Despite the restoration of growth, workers in the UK have continued to suffer cuts in their real pay. One of the arguments for growth is that it raises real incomes – in the UK at least, the reverse is proving to be true. The economy has achieved growth, while many millions of workers have suffered increasing economic hardship with little prospect of improvement.

From a growth perspective, the grim facts of the recovery provide cause for concern. The UK economy has only been able to grow by workers spending beyond their means. Workers have run down savings and borrowed more to increase their consumption and this has driven growth. But workers can only go on behaving like this for so long. Without a rise in real pay, the spending must come to an end and with it the recovery. 

There is no sign yet of net exports recovering to support consumption and any rises in business investment will need to continually confound expectations to offset the further fiscal tightening to come. Again as in the past the UK economy is relying on workers spending more than they earn to support the economy. This is a growth model that cannot be sustained and will ultimately end in disaster.

Even the most ardent backers of the government’s current policy stance must harbour some concerns about the prospects for growth in the economy. Lower real wages may help firms keep a lid on their costs but from the perspective of raising demand on a sustainable basis they place restrictions on the ability of firms to grow output. Demand side barriers will bite in the end and terminate the recovery.

But beyond growth there are deeper issues here relating to work and its relation to poverty. Work has long been heralded as the best form of welfare and the route to economic success. This view – summed up in the mantra ‘work always pays’ – has been exposed as a miserable lie. Now it seems that work for many is no escape from poverty. Working hard for a living often means struggling to keep one’s head above water.

Evidence shows that in-work poverty is on the rise in the UK. Among working age adults in low income households, the number in working families has been growing and is now greater than the number in workless families. It used to be that worklessness was the prime determinant of poverty. Now it is more likely to be low waged work.

How did we get into this situation? The underlying causes are complex and multifaceted. They include the decline of unions, the deregulation of the labour market, an inadequate training system and the rise of the service sector at the expense of manufacturing. The UK has lacked the necessary modernising forces that would have otherwise led it towards a high wage economy. Instead, it has evolved an institutional structure that has favoured and entrenched low wages.

What can be done? In the short term, policies to raise real wages in the UK would help not only to sustain the recovery if that is the concern but also to address the problem of in-work poverty. The national minimum wage, although a welcome development, has not managed to address the problem of low pay and this is where calls for a living wage come in. Raising the minimum wage to the level of the living wage would be a bold but economically sensible step to take. Critics may say that this will lead to unemployment. Yet evidence shows that minimum wage hikes have not had adverse employment effects. Indeed, their effect has been to increase productivity via higher levels of worker morale and to reduce welfare spending.

Longer-term, the UK needs to break its reliance on a low wage growth model. For this, it needs a new industrial strategy that focuses on building things rather than on making money. It needs to invest in new industries via the help of the State. Challenging vested interests particularly in the world of finance and creating a model of sustainable prosperity based not on endless growth but on the promotion of human flourishing remain the ultimate goals. Whether these goals are achievable under current conditions remains a moot point. Yet they are goals that we need to keep in our sights and agitate for.

In the end, the UK cannot afford to pay workers less. Driving real wages down is a recipe for economic stagnation and human misery. For all our sakes, we should seek a rise in real wages. 

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the British Politics and Policy blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please read our comments policy before posting. Featured image credit:

About the Author

David Spencer is Professor of Economics and Political Economy at the Leeds University Business School.

Five minutes with Thomas Piketty: “We don’t need 19th century-style inequality to generate growth in the 21st century”

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In an interview with EUROPP’s editor Stuart Brown and British Politics and Policy at LSE’s editor Joel Suss, Thomas Piketty discusses the rise in income and wealth inequality outlined in his book, Capital in the Twenty-First Century, and what policies should be adopted to prevent us returning to the kind of extreme levels of inequality experienced in Europe prior to the First World War. Professor Piketty recently gave a lecture at the LSE, the video of which can be seen online here.

Your research shows that inequality is rising and that without government action this trend is likely to continue. However, are we correct to assume that inequality is a fundamentally negative development in terms of its consequences on society?

There is no problem with inequality per se. In actual fact, up to a point inequality is fine and perhaps even useful with respect to innovation and growth. The problem is when inequality becomes so extreme that it no longer becomes useful for growth. When inequality reaches a certain point it often leads to the perpetuation of inequality over time across generations, as well as to a lack of mobility within society. Moreover, extreme inequality can be problematic for democratic institutions because it has the potential to lead to extremely unequal access to political power and the ability for citizens to make their voice heard.

There is no mathematical formula that tells you the point at which inequality becomes excessive. All we have is historical experience, and all I have tried to do through my research is to put together a large body of historical experience from over twenty countries across two centuries. We can only take imperfect lessons from this work, but it’s the best that we have. One lesson, for instance, is that the kind of extreme concentration of wealth that we experienced in most European countries up until World War One was excessive in the sense that it was not useful for growth, and probably even reduced growth and mobility overall.

This situation was destroyed by World War One, the Great Depression, and World War Two, as well as by the welfare state and progressive taxation policies which came after these shocks. As a consequence, wealth concentration was much lower in the 1950s and 1960s than it was in 1910, but this did not prevent growth from happening. If anything, this probably contributed to the inclusion of new social groups into the economic process and therefore to higher growth. So one important historical lesson from the 20th century is that we don’t need 19th century-style inequality to generate growth in the 21st century, and we therefore don’t want to return to that level of inequality in Europe.

How would you respond to those who doubt whether there is sufficient evidence to draw this kind of conclusion?

This will always be an imperfect inference because we are in the social sciences and we should not have any illusions about what is possible. We can’t run a controlled experiment across the 20th century or replay the century as if World War One and progressive taxation never occurred. All we have is our common historical experience, but I think this is enough to reach a number of fairly strong conclusions.

The lesson we have already mentioned – that we don’t need the kind of extreme inequality of the 19th century in order to have economic growth – is simply one imperfect lesson, but there are other important lessons if you look at, for instance, the rise of inequality in the United States over the past 30 years. For example, is it useful to pay managers a ten million dollar salary rather than only one million dollars? You really don’t see this in the data: the extra performance and job creation in companies which pay managers ten million dollars rather than one. In the United States over the past 30 years almost 75 per cent of the aggregate primary income growth has gone to the top of the distribution. Given the relatively mediocre productivity performance and the per capita GDP growth rate of 1.5 per cent per year, having nearly three quarters of that going to the top isn’t a very good deal for the rest of the population.

This will always be a complicated and passionate debate. Social science research is not going to transform the political conflict over the issue of inequality with some kind of mathematical certainty, but at least we can have a more informed debate using this historical cross-country evidence. Ultimately that is all my research is aiming to do.

What specific policies can be used to prevent us returning to the kind of extreme levels of inequality you have discussed?

There are a large number of policies which can be used in combination to regulate inequality. Historically the main mechanism to reduce inequality has been the diffusion of knowledge, skills and education. This is the most powerful force to reduce inequality between countries: and this is what we have today, with emerging countries catching up in terms of productivity levels with richer countries. Sometimes this can also work within countries if we have sufficiently inclusive educational and social institutions which allow large segments of the population to access the right skills and the right jobs.

However while education is tremendously important, sometimes it’s not sufficient in isolation. In order to prevent the top income groups and top wealth groups from effectively seceding from the rest of the distribution and growing much faster than the rest of society, you also need progressive taxation of income and progressive taxation of wealth – both inherited and annual wealth. Otherwise there is no natural mechanism to prevent the kind of extreme concentration of income and wealth that we’ve seen in the past from happening again.

Most of all, what we need is financial transparency. We need to monitor the dynamics of all of the different income and wealth groups more effectively so that we can adapt our policies and tax rates in line with whatever we observe. The lack of transparency is actually the biggest threat – we may end up one day in a much more unequal society than we thought we were.

Thomas Piketty is a Professor of Economics at the Paris School of Economics. He is the author of Capital in the 21st Century (Harvard University Press, March 2014).

Minimum wages: the economics and the politics

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Minimum wages are increasingly popular with politicians and the public; even most economists now agree that they have little or no negative effect on employment. Alan Manning discusses this newfound enthusiasm – and the likelihood that it will lead to much higher minimum wages in some parts of the world.

There was a time when the minimum wage was seen as a backwater of labour market policy, an appendix for which the best one could hope would be that it did not cause any problems. But no longer: in many countries, there is now a strong movement to raise minimum wages.

In November last year, Angela Merkel finally announced that Germany would be introducing a minimum wage, replacing or supplementing the current system that sets minima in a small number of lowpaying sectors and collective bargaining that sets minima in some other industries. In May this year, Swiss voters will be asked to vote on the world’s highest minimum wage – 22 Swiss francs an hour (about £15) – with one canton already having voted for that rate in principle though another has rejected it. And in 2011, the free market redoubt of Hong Kong introduced a national minimum wage.

In the United States, President Obama seems to have given up hope of his proposal to raise the federal minimum wage to $10 per hour in the face of an impasse in Congress. But he has recently used his executive power to impose a $10.10 minimum wage on the few hundred thousand people who work on federal contracts.

The president is also actively encouraging states and cities to raise their local minimum wages, thus bypassing the obstacles in Washington. Increasing numbers of them are doing so, and some are going further: Seattle’s mayor, for example, proposes a $15 minimum wage. Minimum wages at this level – about 60% of median hourly earnings – are pushing the envelope of what has ever before been attempted with the minimum wage.

The UK is not immune from this newfound enthusiasm for the minimum wage, with all the main political parties seemingly falling over themselves to find some way to inject new vigour into the National Minimum Wage. Last autumn, the business secretary Vince Cable wrote to the Low Pay Commission (LPC), asking it to consider the economic circumstances in which the minimum wage could be increased at a rate above inflation. And the Labour Party has set up a Low Pay Review to consider options.

Not to be outdone, Chancellor George Osborne in January expressed the opinion that the nascent recovery means that the minimum wage can now be increased substantially. Without quite saying it in so many words, he dropped a heavy hint that he thought £7 an hour would be reasonable within 18 months, which would be a 10% increase from the current rate of £6.31.

I was a member of an expert panel convened by the Resolution Foundation and chaired by the LPC’s first chairman George Bain to reinvigorate the National Minimum Wage. Central to our ideas was that the LPC has been very successful in doing a limited thing – setting a minimum wage to tackle extreme low pay. But the wider problem of low pay remains as serious as ever and – in spite of its name – the LPC has never attempted to develop a strategy for this bigger problem. The LPC seems to have convinced itself that the minimum wage could not be pushed much higher without threatening jobs, but the consequence is that we can never learn whether that judgment is correct.

So what explains this widespread enthusiasm for the minimum wage? In my view, both economics and politics are at play.

The economics of minimum wages

A generation ago, the vast majority of economists would have said that a rise in the minimum wage inevitably costs jobs. This has changed, with two strands of research having the biggest impact. In the United States, the work of David Card and Alan Krueger, then both at Princeton University, shattered the cosy consensus and argued that the actual evidence linking the minimum wage to job losses was weak. Although their findings were controversial (and the debates rumble on to the present day), there has been a large shift in the weight of academic opinion.

The other strand of research that has been very influential examined the UK experience, with CEP researchers playing a sizeable role, though not the only one. Some people predicted that the introduction of the National Minimum Wage in 1999 would cause hundreds of thousands of job losses, but this simply did not materialise. Any impact on employment seemed to be tiny and LPC research has reached similar conclusions for subsequent years when the minimum wage rose faster than average earnings. In spite of this accumulating empirical evidence, it is still common to find economists fall ing back on the argument that a minimum wage must cost jobs because demand curves for labour inevitably slope downwards. Faced with a conflict between the evidence and twentieth century economic models, they reject the evidence rather than the theory – not an ideal template for scientific endeavour. But there are, in fact, uncomplicated theoretical reasons why the minimum wage set at modest levels has little or no effect on employment.

First, the increase in total labour costs associated with a given increase in the legal minimum wage is often considerably smaller than the numbers suggest. As the minimum wage rises and work becomes more attractive, labour turnover rates and absenteeism tend to decline. Moreover, the cost associated with losing a job rises; so, arguably, workers are inclined to work a bit harder and need less monitoring. Of course, an employer could voluntarily choose to pay higher wages if net labour costs actually fell, so a reasonable guess here is that these offsetting economies reduce, but do not eliminate, the impact of a rise in wage rates.

Then there’s the gap between employer perception and reality. Individual employers often view a rise in wages with horror, assuming it will drive them out of business. But all too often, they are implicitly assuming that they alone will suffer the cost inflation when it affects their competitors as well. Prices rise a bit and the effect on employment is only through the effect of a fall in sales, which may well be minimal.

But there is a more fundamental reason why there is no evidence of the job losses predicted by standard economic theory. The key assumption – that labour markets are highly competitive – is often wrong. The view of the labour market that underlies ‘Economics 101’ is not one that many people would recognise. For in this hypothetical world, losing a job is no big deal because finding an identical job is no harder than discovering that the local Sainsbury’s is out of milk and going to Tesco instead.

But that is not most people’s experience of labour markets. The reality is that competition for workers is not as strong as many economists would have you believe. An employer who cuts wages will find that most employees are unhappy, but that few will just walk out of the door. So it may make economic sense for employers to pay workers less than the marginal worker adds to revenues. In this more realistic world, a rise in the minimum wage will not necessarily price the marginal worker out of their job.

The politics of minimum wages

Academics might like to think their research has a big influence over public policy, but the driving force behind higher minimum wages is that they are very popular. Many people think there is something very wrong with an economic system in which someone who works hard is still unable to provide an adequate standard of living for themselves and their families. Such views have always been common, but they are much more common after the crisis when living standards are threatened and the link between growth and living standards seems to have been severed.

So in most countries of the world, voters (including right-wing voters) support rises in the minimum wage. In the UK, a poll in January 2014 found 66% favouring a substantial increase in the minimum wage – with majorities among supporters of all main political parties. In the United States, a poll in March 2013 found 71% in favour of raising the minimum wage, including 50% of Republicans. In Switzerland, voters seem to support the record-breaking minimum wage even as it is opposed by their government.

In some places, these political pressures will almost certainly lead to much higher minimum wages than we have seen in recent experience – perhaps to around the 60% of median earnings mark. This is the point at which many economists get nervous that negative effects on employment must surely kick in, but we do not have many studies to know whether these concerns are valid. There are only a few countries around this level currently – Australia and New Zealand (with low current unemployment rates) and France (with a more dysfunctional labour market) – so this is hardly conclusive one way or the other. But it seems likely we may be about to find out.

Note:  This article was originally published in the Spring issue of the Centrepiece magazine and gives the views of the author, and not the position of the British Politics and Policy blog, nor of the London School of Economics.

About the Author

Alan Manning is professor of economics at LSE and director of CEP’s community research programme. His 2003 book, Monopsony in Motion: Imperfect Competition in Labour Markets (Princeton University Press), explains the theory behind minimum wages; and his 2009 CentrePiece article ‘The UK’s National Minimum Wage’ describes CEP’s role in providing the intellectual context for the policy, advising on its implementation and evaluating its impact.

‘More than a Minimum: The Resolution Foundation Review of the Future of the National Minimum Wage’, was published in March 2014.

The shoebox flat is our housing crisis in microcosm

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Our homes are shrinking in size and rising in cost, while a lack of supply means we can’t even choose where and how we live

 

One Hyde Park, London, United Kingdom

Opposite ends of the spectrum: One Hyde Park has seen flats go for up to £140m … Photograph: View Pictures/Rex

 

A flat in London has captured the headlines. The “studio” in question is minuscule, its rent £170 a week, and it was snapped up within 16 hours of being advertised. In it a bed seems to jut out from the kitchen units like an oversized ironing board, a naked bulb hangs over a tiny table with one chair, and the only practical way to browse the narrow wardrobe appears to be standing on the bed. It hardly deserves the name apartment – unless one goes back to its original etymological meaning of “a separated place”.

The significance of the story is more symbolic than actual. It marks the culmination of four decades of irrational housing policy, increasing urbanisation, woefully inadequate building programmes, uncontrolled rent inflation, and the divestment of social housing stock. It marks – especially seen in conjunction with a flat at One Hyde Park selling for £140m last month – the denouement of Britain’s housing crisis and its re-emergence as a class issue.

The reality behind the individual story may be much more complex, of course. Little is revealed about the personal circumstances of the tenant. For all we know this tiny pod could be the environmentally conscious selection of a fashionable urbanite seeking to reduce their carbon footprint, or the thoughtless impulse of a student who only plans to use it as a base and occasional “crash-pad”, or even the clandestine choice of a relatively well-off unfaithful spouse who works nearby.

Shoebox studio flat in London rented for £170 a week. … while this is the ‘shoebox’ studio flat in London which was let for £170 a week. However, the general trends emerging from the data are undeniable: our homes are shrinking – they are on average nearly half the size that they were in 1920s; prices, especially in the south-east, continue to soar while mortgage lending requirements are tightened; all of which makes buying a property unaffordable for the vast majority of first-time buyers. The rise in the cost of renting in England and Wales has consistently outstripped inflation, which in turn has consistently outstripped wage growth, creating an unprecedented squeeze on low- and middle-income households. Half of all rural land and more than a third of all land in the UK is owned by a tiny 0.6% of the population.

Even those trends, of course, are not without complicating factors. Data tends to be disproportionately skewed by the property market in the south-east, and the debate is consequently London-centric. A growing number of Londoners are taking advantage of that price differential and moving outside the M25. London men in their 40s spend on average 84 minutes of every day commuting – a factor which might make the small central flat a much more attractive prospect. We work increasing numbers of hours and lead an increasingly sedentary lifestyle – more than 14 hours a day are spent sitting down. Add sleep into the mix and perhaps house size becomes less important.

With our increasing presence in different social media platforms, online gaming communities and the ability to roam unlimited virtual space for information or entertainment, our requirements of private space may be changing. One’s Facebook wall is possibly a more vital personal space than the wall made of bricks and mortar above their monitor; superfast broadband is a more key requirement than a spare room.

Environmental factors mean we simply must try to limit the amount of space we take up, heat, light and consume. If this is the case, we should stop obsessively focusing on house size as the only factor which affects our quality of life. In urban areas, taking action to reduce light and sound pollution, ensuring there are plentiful green public spaces, free exercise programmes and the availability of fresh produce at low prices are just as crucial. In rural areas, the improvement of internet speed and availability, and the efficacy and price of transport are key.

The only statistics which are entirely indefensible, and the absolute crux of the issue, are those of the increasing number of people who are homeless, living in shelters or temporary accommodation. The facile answer to this national shame is, of course, less immigration, suggesting it could solve the housing crisis through a declining population. Yet a declining population brings with it a lack of growth and economic activity, reduced revenues and an increasing pension deficit. All this would inevitably result in is less, not more, housing.

The only answer to the lack of housing is building, utilising and converting more of it, and ensuring its fair distribution by making it affordable. Individual preference may reasonably lead one to a shoebox flat; lack of any alternatives shouldn’t.