Could we hope for sentience?

No, this isn’t about AI, this is about the housing debate. Where we should hope for something better than we’re getting. Perhaps not sensibility, or good sense, but how about we start by hoping for sentience?

To start with, this defines the crisis, wrongly, as being exclusively about the quantity of homes available. But (and leaving aside the fact we have 1.5 million more dwellings than households: ONS/census data), the crisis is actually about the cripplingly high cost of buying or renting a home and the short supply of social housing – very different to ‘not enough homes’.

Dig a little deeper and you get the ‘supply and demand’ argument: ‘increasing housing supply will bring prices down’. But this logic doesn’t work if demand stays high.

Yes, there’s much else wrong with that piece from the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England.

But our hope - not even a demand, merely a hope - that we might be able to observe a little economic sentience when matters economic are being discussed?

Leave aside that ignorance of the really basic stuff about supply and demand and focus on that last - “if demand remains high”. But if demand remains high then that’s the reason itself to build more houses. People want there to be more houses - that’s high demand. Therefore there should be more houses because that’s what people want. They’re actually insisting that because people want more houses therefore they shouldn’t be allowed.

As we say, sentience in the debate would be useful. But what really worries us is that CPRE has an input into housing policy. How did we end up with the economic understanding of this level being an input into public policy formation on matters economic?