Zack and the Green Party shoot for the impossible
It’s nice that someone has an ambition and to an extent the bigger the better. We do though think that aiming for the already known to be impossible is just that too, too, ambitious. Which brings us to Zack and the Green Party’s new idea on rent:
And in the long term, we’ll put in place a national Fair Rents Guarantee – to keep rents affordable for everyone, forever. That doesn’t just mean cheaper homes, it doesn’t just mean government savings.
It will mean that people can stay in the places they love, close to their family and friends. It will mean young people can take those first amazing, exhilarating steps into independence and have full lives waiting for them on the other side.
Young families able to live around the corner from the in-laws, not crammed into their spare room.
The historical English experience has been rather more geographic mobility than that. But OK. It’s just that the two desires here are impossible to achieve. Each is possible, sure, but not both together.
The first idea is that rents should be nice and low and the government is going to legislate to make them so. We’ll be back to the local council inspector deciding what a place is worth and woe betide anyone who tries to charge more than that. That this number will be low - as it was last time - is not just an observation or prediction, it’s the very aim of the plan.
The second idea is that there will be lots of lovely rental properties - just around the corner from Granny - available at these nice cheap prices.
Sure, it’s possible to have lots of rentals available. Sure, it’s possible to legislate for nice low rents. But doing the second means that the first won’t happen. They’re wholly irreconcilable as outcomes.
Well, unless there’s some massive housebuilding programme, million upon million of new houses. If that happened we’d not need to limit rents anyway. Increasing supply has its own effect on prices, obviously. But artificially fixing prices nice and low has that opposite effect upon prices.
As we say, ambition is good but shooting for the Moon on a stick doesn’t work. Especially if the insistence is that we should also have a pony.
Tim Worstall