Building Houses costs money.
New health and safety laws, environmental laws, efficiency laws, all cost money to implement, all of these drive up the cost of new housing.

I recently purchased a house, 3 bed quasi semi and the 60x20 feet of land it sits on for £85,000, originaly up at £105,000.
The rebuild insurance for this house stands at £110,000.

To rebuild this house, 20x20 feet, to meet modern standards will cost more than I paid for the house and the garden.

So, if it already costs over £100,000 to build a small house, without land costs included, anyone hoping for massive construction to come to the rescue is dreaming.

Dominic, Manchester, UK

Wrong. There isn't a shortage of houses in the UK. It is all to do with London. Get a proper spread of businesses throughout the country and the rest follows. For your measley 1 bed flat in Ealing for £250,000 go anywhere else for a 3 bed semi.

Den, Liverpool, UK

“There is a shortage of housing in the UK and recent waves of immigration compound that problem. If you want the Government to do something other than relying on interest rates to control house price inflation, they simply have to build more homes.”

Spot on Nigel if only Scotsman Brown in his ivory tower could hear us all screaming to him.

build more houses & control our borders.

Adrian, Aldershot, uk

We might need to look beyond the headline figure here to find the real story.

Talking, off the record , to a number of estate agents round Norwich, I hear a darker tale. That of an increasing number of desperate home owners, small time renovators and speculators who have bought new builds off-plan converting their mortgages to buy-to-let because they can't find buyers for their property at a price that makes them a sufficient profit on the transaction.

However, many then go on to struggle to find renters for the same properties. There also appears to be a glut of 2 bed flats in the city that stand empty for months on end.

With or without another rate rise there is little support for the market from first time buyers, who find it cheaper and more practical to rent. As such the "capital gain" rational for many BTL investors looks shaky and certainly seems to offer little compensation for rents that don't cover mortgage repayments.

Huw Sayer, Norwich, England

Nigel Terrington has a bit of a vested interest in more homes being built, don't you think? More homes built equals more homes to be bought by buy-to-let landlords. The new homes are still going to be out of reach of 1st time buyers.

The problem isn't so much a shortage of homes; people aren't living on the street if they can't afford to buy and are simply renting until much later in life. The issue is a shortage of realistically-priced homes because they've all been bought up by landlords.

I hate to be an advocate of taxation, but there seems to be no other way to release homes for the next generation. Remove tax breaks for landlords and they will invest their money in something that will genuinely benefit the economy.

A politcal party is going to get wise to this soon and realise that the next generation of voters is going to want to know who is going to help them stop being tenants. Does anyone remember how much a vote-winner selling council houses was for the Tories?

Paddles, London, UK

"Price of starter homes in the capital exceeds the £250,000 threshold at which the tax doubles to 2 per cent." -> I think that James Rossiter, Property Correspondent, might have never bought a house above £250,000... Surely everybody knows that stamp duty changes from 1% to 3%?

Javier, Reading, UK