Earlier quoted context omitted.
> We need to build houses at least as fast as the population grows. Because this has not happened for decades. Over those decades UK population growth [1] is lower than the new house building rate [see chart in article]. [1] https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/GBR/united-kingdom/pop...
The graph shows building rate as a proportion of the size of existing stock. But the existing stock is grossly insufficient to our needs. We've been building around 200k houses a year for decades, much less than that during most years of Conservative rule: https://www.statista.com/statistics/746101/completion-of-new... This is around 0.3% of the population. The population increase year on year is consistently larger…
You're right it's growing faster than that. E.g. Mid 2018 to mid 2019, it rose by 361k people. But the UK average household size is 2.4, so 200k new houses should in theory accommodate a population growth of 866k.
If those were the only numbers that mattered, it wouldn't be a problem. We'd catch up fast.
But all houses are not the same. A large part of the problem is people following jobs, and so a significantly higher rate of construction may be needed because people move, and needed types of properties change. Unless you can make the places people are moving away from to be more attractive, e.g. by infrastructure improvement to tie areas together in ways that make them attractive regions for businesses.
The bigger issues, however, I think are two structural problems:
1. As long as house prices go up at a sufficient rate, the soundest strategy for a developer may be to raise capital to buy land and then sit on it until house prices go up. Your cost of capital to finance it will be financing costs for the cost of the land for however many years you sit on it, and the financing costs for the construction itself only from you start construction until sold. Doubly so because if you're a large developer, holding a large parcel of land while you're, say, developing something else nearby, and releasing only limited numbers of properties onto the market contributes to keeping the prices up. Near me, one of the best properties in the area, a huge tract right next to one of the best connected train stations in the UK (East Croydon) remained undeveloped for over a decade because developers had no urgency to do anything. It's now slowly being developed, but they're taking their good time about it, because why wouldn't they?
You could address that by progressively harsher taxes by duration of under-utilisation, or strengthen ability for local government to take over land, to make it necessary for developers to either move at speed or unload the land on others, but if you fix the house price increases by other means, this problem will also go away by itself.
2. There is no political will to cause house prices to drop, because that would mean a lot of people who have seen this as a pension investment, and plan to downsize, will vote against you.
To fix this you probably need a combination of starting slow - reforms that gradually cause the market to stagnate so people stop seeing it as surefire way to make money - coupled perhaps with tax and pension adjustment structured to make it feel like your reforms are relatively neutral. E.g "package" it with substantial state pension increases, or allow for some degree of writeoffs for paper losses on declining property prices, perhaps limited to pensioners only, etc. Some of it you could sunset, and some might well end up being very unfair and effectively bribing people who shouldn't have gambled on their home as their main investment asset, but if that's what it takes to get support for crashing house prices, it'd be worth it.