Half a house is hardly worth having

Turnbull2000 · 22 May 2008 at 2:06PM

The Spectator - Half a house is hardly worth having

I’m going to start with a declaration of interest. I own a four-bedroom house in Cambridgeshire, in which I have been living for the past nine years. I own no other property, either in Britain or abroad. I feel obliged to say this because increasingly when I read headlines such as ‘Doom and gloom as house prices fall further’, I wonder: has the author got a portfolio of bedsits in Stoke-on-Trent or has he just bought a house in Tooting and is desperately trying to flog his flat in Streatham? The received wisdom that falling house prices are a bad thing is certainly not shared by the public at large. Last week a BBC poll revealed that 28 per cent of Britons can’t wait for house prices to fall — compared with only 22 per cent who want them to rise. The remaining 50 per cent, like me, couldn’t really care less. My house doesn’t get bigger or smaller depending on this month’s Halifax house price index: it will be the same old place whether it is worth £2 million or tuppence.

It is a message, however, which has been lost on Gordon Brown. At the heart of last week’s ‘Queen’s speech’ — delivered by Gordon himself, in desperation, six months early — were measures quite shamelessly designed to reinflate the housing market.

But more to the point, why is the government trying to buck the housing market at all? Leave it alone and prices will continue their slide. Then, perhaps in a couple of years’ time, first-time buyers will be able to afford to buy themselves entire houses, rather than the half-houses which Gordon is offering them now.

Surprised this hasn't been posted.