How would YOU fix the housing market? Gresham House’s property expert David Orr

Whether it’s unaffordable house prices, higher mortgage rates, soaring rents or increased levels of homelessness, the housing market appears to be stuck in a never-ending crisis.

There remains an insatiable appetite to buy property. Many of those who don’t own aspire to, and pour their life savings towards achieving it.

It is a dream that continues to move further out of reach for many, as the chronic under-supply of properties means house prices rise and rents increase.   

As for those who already own, they tend to want more. Whether that means buying a bigger and better home, purchasing a holiday home or investing in buy-to-lets, the British obsession with acquiring property doesn’t stop at the first one.

Owning property has become synonymous with both wealth creation and wealth preservation and as the money keeps piling in, the prices keep going up.

Can you fix it? Each week we are speaking to a property expert about the housing crisis. This week we spoke to David Orr, chair of Gresham House Registered Providers and former chief executive of the National Housing Federation

Government interventions often appear to add fuel to the fire. Stamp duty holidays, Help to Buy, Right to Buy and other schemes were meant to help more people on to the ladder. 

But while many of those initiatives were successful, they also had the effect of pushing up house prices further for those that came after. 

Worst of all, homelessness is rising. More than 300,000 people are recorded as homeless in England, according to research by the charity Shelter, with many in temporary accommodation. 

In This is Money’s new series, we speak to a property expert every week to ask them what is wrong with Britain’s housing market – and how they would fix it. 

This week we spoke to David Orr, chair of Gresham House Registered Providers, an asset management company that invests in social housing. 

He is a former chief executive of the National Housing Federation.

Does Britain have a housing crisis? 

David Orr replies: Clearly we have a housing crisis. We got here by not having a proper strategy for housing for decades. 

We have consistently failed to build anything like the number of new homes that we’ve needed for a growing population and for changing household formations. 

The worst aspect of it is that we have more children living in temporary accommodation, often of very poor quality, than we’ve ever had in our entire history. 

We also have more people sleeping on the streets than we have had for a long while. 

And we have more adults in their 20s and 30s living at home with their parents. 

We have huge indicators of a system which is broken at various parts of the market.

–  Read: What next for mortgage rates in 2024 – and how long should you fix for?

Undersupply: David Orr says the Government has consistently failed to build the homes that are needed for a growing population

How does this compare to the past?

It is always difficult making comparisons with the past in terms of availability of homes and their affordability. 

The quality of the homes has of course progressed, but being able to access an affordable home is more difficult now than it has been at any time since the 1950s.

What was the biggest cause of the housing crisis? 

Firstly, we have not built enough homes, period. We have not got a supply of homes that has kept up with growing and changing demand. 

Secondly, we have never had a proper long-term plan. Housing is a commodity that lasts for a very long time. 

When people are building new homes, they are investing in the future. 

And if you only ever have Governments that provide short-term measures or initiatives, with an eye to the politics of the next six months rather than the housing of the next 60 years, then you will end up with the kind of mess that we have now.

We have been plagued by ‘initiative-itis’ in that you get another new minister coming along, and announcing they are going to put money into a new thing, without having any connection to the fundamental underlying problems in the way that housing is delivered. 

I think that every study into housing that has been done in the last 10 or 15 years, has ended up by concluding that the fundamental problem is that we do not have a coherent plan.

How would you fix the crisis?

I would build 300,000 new homes a year, of which at least 40 per cent would be for social and affordable tenures. I would do it in a way that builds mixed-tenure communities.

We have also been living through a cost-of-living crisis, where one of the big challenges for people has been being able to afford to heat their homes. 

We could have solved that problem years ago by investing more in improving the insulation of our homes, so people would not have to spend as much on energy. 

Shovels in the ground and cranes in the sky: Orr would build 300,000 new homes a year, of which at least 4% would be for social and affordable tenures

We have been working on this over the years. In 2022, Gresham House Registered Providers built a development in Stanford-le-Hope, Essex, using insulation, low-carbon and battery technologies providing new owners with zero energy bills.

I think the UK should have made more use of compulsory purchase, where councils can acquire land without the consent of the owner in order to enable property development. 

At the moment, anyone who owns land can get a huge and completely unjustifiable increase in their income if they get a planning permission for homes to be built on it, and we should rebalance all of that.

Housing needs cross-party political support in the way that we have done with climate change, for example, and the single most important thing is having a clear long-term strategy that the whole industry and nation can then get behind in trying to deliver.

Will the housing crisis ever be fixed in your opinion?

I have stood on public platforms and said that the current crisis was neither inevitable nor accidental. 

This has not happened by accident – it has happened because of decisions that we as a nation have either made or failed to make. 

It is because of decisions that we have made about investment and land values and where we’re spending our money, and it has happened because there have been many people with a vested interest in seeing a shortage of supply so that the price of their home keeps on going up by much more than the rate of inflation.

If the problem has been created because of those decisions or failure to make decisions, then it can be resolved by making different decisions. I don’t think there is a mystery to all of this.

I think it is possible to resolve the crisis, just not quickly. It is more likely to be resolved by doing it strategically and coherently – having a long-term plan and being prepared to invest in it year after year. 

There also needs to be some mechanism for testing the progress that we are making against that plan.

I am still optimistic enough to believe that as a nation, we can fix this problem. But to do so, we must make a decision that it is in all our interests to fix the problem and get on and do it ourselves.