Raising the Roof addresses one of the key issues of our era – the UK’s housing crisis. Housing costs in the United Kingdom are among the highest on the planet, with London virtually the most expensive major city in the world for renting or buying a home. At the core of this is one of the most centralised planning systems in the democratic world – a system that plainly doesn’t work. A system that has resulted in too few houses, which are too small, which people do not like and which are in the wrong places, a system that stifles movement and breeds Nimbyism. The IEA’s 2018 Richard Koch Breakthrough Prize, with a first prize of £50,000, sought free-market solutions to this complex and divisive problem. Here, Breakthrough Prize judge Jacob Rees-Mogg and IEA Senior Research Analyst Radomir Tylecote critique a complex system of planning and taxation that has signally failed to provide homes, preserve an attractive environment and enhance our cities. They then draw from the winning entries to the Breakthrough Prize, and previous IEA research, to put forward a series of radical and innovative measures – from releasing vast swathes of government-owned land to relaxing the suffocating grip of the green belt. Together with cutting and devolving tax, and reforms to allow cities to both densify and beautify, this would create many more homes and help restore property-owning democracy in the UK.

The UK's chronic housing shortage is lowering the quality of life for millions, turning the British dream of home ownership into a cruel nightmare – not least for 'generation rent'. Countless vulnerable families are meanwhile being deprived of access to decent social housing, causing homelessness to spiral. In this searing polemic, Liam Halligan offers radical solutions to the most urgent political issue of our times. Fully updated, with a foreword from former Chancellor Sajid Javid and drawing on extensive interviews with Cabinet ministers, civil servants, leading developers and struggling homebuyers across the country, Home Truths is a no-holds-barred critique of the UK's housing crisis.

Britain has become a country divided into two nations, people who are on the property ladder and who are benefiting from property price rises, and those who are not on the ladder and fear never being able to get onto the ladder since property prices are rising faster than salaries. This second group face a lifetime living at the parental home or being at the mercy of rolling 12 month tenancies.Building more houses, despite being the solution most widely touted, is not the answer to the UK's housing crisis. In the face of demand from both domestic and overseas investors who see housing as a safe haven for their money, building more houses will have no downward effect on prices. The author proposes a radical package of policy measures that will eliminate the artificial inflation of house prices which has occurred over the last twenty years. These policy measures, if enacted, will reunite the UK, by enabling young British people once again to realistically aspire to own their own homes.Politicians and commentators in the UK have shown a lack of ideas in relation to solving this crisis. Media understanding and analysis of economic and fiscal matters in the UK is very weak, and highly dependent on the press releases of Government and industry bodies. The UK's powerful housing lobby has stepped into this intellectual vacuum by promoting house-building as the solution. However, this report demonstrates that new houses cannot be the primary solution to this immense problem. It is pure fantasy to think that the global demand for British houses can ever be met. Every town and village in the South of England would be ruined by millions of under-sized and under-quality flats and houses before demand was close to being met from the world's 15 million strong financial elite, and house prices would still keep on rising. The solution to the UK's housing crisis lies not in the creation of new housing stock but in changing the usage patterns of existing stock.This report urges that measures are taken to limit the investment demand for houses. It is investment demand (not the commonly mentioned "shortage of new houses") that has corrupted the housing market in many areas and pushed average house prices out of the reach of average citizens. The solution to the housing crisis is similar to the solution to the banking crisis of 2007/8. Just as consumers had been damaged because banks had failed to separate high-street banking from an increasingly aggressive and dominant investment banking operation that was driven by an excess of elite money, so the UK housing market needs separating from a global investment market. Since housing has become an investment market, it should be regulated closely like other investment markets. The process of market separation is neither complex nor expensive and it will once again allow British citizens to own a share of their own nation. This report focuses on the international aspect of this problem, the issue of foreign buyers, since their role in price inflation is both substantial and relatively simple to restrict.

The UK has, in recent years, been suffering from what is nothing short of an economic crisis. Growth has now completely stalled in those western democracies, the UK included, where high government spending and high taxes have steadily burgeoned, decade after decade. Free-market economies now threaten to leave us behind in terms of wealth, opportunity and standards of living. At the end of Rishi Sunak's 2024 government, expenditure was at 45 per cent of GDP and taxes were 36 per cent and rising – yet still nowhere near sufficient to cover public expenditure. The government's net annual borrowing is now a completely unsustainable 4.4 per cent of GDP, with our overall national debt growing rapidly and alarmingly. In this arresting and powerful manifesto for economic change, Jon Moynihan analyses the UK's decades-long stagnant economy and looks at what can be done to resuscitate it. Combining rigorous research with unparalleled business experience, he explores the key dynamics affecting economic growth, ranging from government borrowing, expenditure, tax and regulation to the way national resources are deployed on non-productive and futile, growth-stifling endeavours. Ultimately, Moynihan shows that unless we act now to reverse the decline, by radically restructuring our economy to stimulate economic growth, the UK risks stagnation, financial collapse and a long-term disintegration in our standard of living. Ignore his warning at your peril.

This book aims to make clear the interconnections between social policy and criminal justice practice, bringing together key social policy concepts within a framework for reducing reoffending rates. The book focuses on the key social policy issues of employment, health and mental health, low income and poverty, housing and family. It shows how understanding and treating these as issues interconnected to criminal justice outcomes can and does lead to improvements in criminal justice practice. This book enables students and criminal justice practitioners to understand how a social policy focus can better inform practice with those involved in the criminal justice system. It features: - a 10 point summary of key points for learning; - chapter heading questions to support independent learning; - tables and graphs to illustrate the text.

Buying a house is off-limits to many thanks to rising rents, pay freezes, and a lack of affordable homes. But it hasn't always been this way. What went wrong? The book is an easily readable work on the UK Housing Crisis, the biggest domestic issue in our country today. Few other books on UK current affairs have more relevance in a post-Brexit society, on the biggest issue that successive governments have done nothing about for 40 years. For the price of a new plastic Fiver, you can find out why the under-40s cannot afford anything but basic Shelter, if at all, and why the older generations have spent their lives chasing ever-rising house prices. At times Amusing, at other times Sobering, this is more than analysis or an opinion. There is a wider debate on how we want to live our lives and what the Housing Crisis has done to our Freedom. This gives the options available to our society to truly reform the Housing Market and to ensure that this situation never happens again in our society. It argues for a Popular Movement to force Reform on the Government. This could be bigger than Brexit. The Rigged Housing Market.