Last week saw Prime Minister Boris Johnson pledge to loosen regulations to help developers build.
Measures should help developers more easily build extensions and transform derelict shops into housing.
This all sounds good to me, though the devil may be in the detail with these changes and deregulation is not a panacea.
To be honest I found his labelling of the measures a ‘new deal’ a bit daft.
I remember studying Franklin D Roosevelt’s ‘new deal’ at school, which were measures of spending designed to help the US out of the Great Depression in the late 1920s and 1930s.
And to compare the two seems laughable due to their scale.
According to The Guardian Johnson’s commitment to bring forward infrastructure spending of £5bn amounts to 0.2% of current UK GDP, compared to an estimated 40% of US national income in 1929.
Anyway, perhaps this is all just semantics from Johnson, and we should appreciate these measures for what they are.
Though his comparison with FDR is nonsense, many will be happy the PM is looking to invest rather than return the country to austerity.
In terms of the housing market, much of the news that’s coming in suggests things are on the up owing to pent up demand, both in terms of homeownership and demand from tenants.
Meanwhile Mortgages for Business research suggested that landlords are looking to take advantage of a subdued market by remortgaging and then using the spare cash to buy more property.
This is good news, and I hope it puts to bed talk of how a stamp duty cut is apparently needed to kickstart the property market.
Personally I would like the government to let the market settle for a while without continually fiddling around with it.
I thought the PwC report from last week was very realistic and sensible in its outlook.
The market may be slower for some time, especially when this pent up demand wears off, so it’s probably best not to get too up or down in the months’ ahead.
The property market should be robust enough to get through it, while despite my cynicism I look forward to hearing more details about this so-called ‘new deal’ in future.
Ryan Bembridge, Editor, PropertyWire
