240,000 new homes ‘still not enough’

The government’s aim to see 240,000 new homes built annually does not go far enough, according to the independent body set up to advise ministers on such matters.
A report by the National Housing and Planning Advice Unit says the figure should be 270,000 and predicts that England is heading for a housing crisis. It says house prices in England are more than seven times the average salary and that they are set to reach nine and a half times this by 2026.

“We built more than [270,000 homes] back in the 1930s in Britain, when we had a considerably smaller population,” according to Prof Stephen Nickell, one of the report authors. “And most other countries in the developed world, proportionately speaking, build houses at a faster rate than we do.”