Many different reasons for this but the mechanism that delivers around half of affordable homes is seizing up/has seized up, with knock-on effects for delivery of open market homes

Listened to most of Starmer speech and the one jarring note for me was that bit about scraping the 50% target for going to university. If the target ever existed hadn't it been scrapped already? And if the implication was that it was at the expense of technical education why can't we have both?

Guess this shows (just) that intrinsic motivation trumps extrinsic motivation (and also trumps Trump) www.bbc.co.uk/sport/golf/l...

“Our research highlights the challenges, with build costs 17% higher than in 2022 and sale prices up just 1%. The government says it wants to ‘build baby build’ but this is only possible across half the country – and often only in the least affordable markets.” business.zoopla.co.uk/research-the...

A crazy situation www.politicshome.com/opinion/arti...

Struck by this from an academies boss on Today about fall in primary school numbers: ‘it’s not just the birth rate, it’s a lack of social housing, the benefit cap, the two-child cap, families moving out of London’ Then warns hospitals etc can’t get staff because of housing costs

The most embarrassing speech he's made since... yesterday? Last week?

Rent controls of a sort set to arrive in Scotland as Housing Bill reaches final stage www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Would never have guessed that I’d end up thinking that the new Observer is better than the old one. Less surprised that it is way better than the Saturday guardian

There are issues with environmental regulations and the way they are implemented but this does not look likely to end well www.theguardian.com/environment/...

Not sure what it means but every single 'accidental landlord' quoted in this FT piece 'prefers not to use his real name' www.ft.com/content/a0bd...

Seems unfair to punish current owners and players if Chelsea cheated before they were there, so just strip them of all the titles they won in the Abramovich era? www.theguardian.com/football/202...

Her incompetence as a leader is now dangerous for the future of the country not just the Conservative Party. When we desperately need leaders to step up….

Women are not deemed reliable witnesses of their own lives

I do love the "how can we afford this" framing of the triple lock that utterly fails to engage with the counterfactual of "how do we as a society cope with older people living in desperate poverty and dying of it". Proper basic social policy stuff.

Every now and again we need to remind ourselves that normal service in the economy stopped around 15 years ago, and it’s little wonder people are stressed and looking for scapegoats ifs.org.uk/data-items/r...

Fascinating FT article about how Paris plans to make state-subsidised housing 40 per cent of primary residences by 2035 (gift link) on.ft.com/46L3PAL

Just two weeks left to apply for the @thinkhouseinfo.bsky.social 2025 Early Career Researcher's Prize. Deadline is 25th Sept. You could follow in some great footsteps. Get in touch if you have a paper you're considering submitting: www.thinkhouse.org.uk/about/early-...

Elon, speaking at the Tommy Robinson march today: “This is a government against the people and not for the people, this is why everyone is gathered here today…we don’t have another four years…there’s got to be a dissolution of parliament” And the government just…continues to use X.

Get you want to jack up the rent - but why would you evict a family willing to pay it? Because you can? inews.co.uk/news/labour-...

A reminder of what Mandelson said to the FT's questions about Epstein in February this year

Grimly crisp illustration of the mechanism whereby toxic and unrepresentative social media shapes mainstream coverage. Prominent journalist logs onto X, sees claim, assumes truth, repeats in national broadcast from trusted mainstream news org. Happens all day every day, just especially stark here.

Buying a retirement flat for £60k and having to sell for £40k sounds like a depressingly familiar story from that sector. But having to pay another £25k in 'deferred service charge' (despite already paying a service charge) to the developer is a new one on me www.theguardian.com/money/2025/s...

Most of us are in a wobbly position when it comes to our understanding of immigration numbers. How would things go if we didn’t make these half-remembered statistics so central to how we form and articulate opinions? georginasturge.substack.com/p/how-to-mak...

did she go for “Saxon” forefathers rather than the usual “Anglo-Saxon”, because it was those bastard East Angles in Cambridgeshire who kicked her out?

FFS "The Housing Secretary has identified that there are believed to be up to 1.4million homes that have been granted permission but have not yet been built. He believes these projects are the key to reaching the 1.5million homes target by the end of this parliament."

Stunning advice being given to Downing Street

Admits he was wrong? Misspoke? How can you forget you don’t own a house? (Maybe easier if you already own several?) www.theguardian.com/politics/202...

Saw this on C4 News earlier and if anything beats it to the Stirling Prize it will have to be pretty astonishing www.architecture.com/awards-and-c...

Hmm 🤔

Police investigate lettings of hundreds of affordable homes by allegedly corrupt housing officers in Barking and Dagenham news.sky.com/story/two-ar...

Angela Rayner is a huge loss to the government and to housing - important to have a powerful Secretary of State during spending review, even more important to have one who knew what the priorities should be

Book launch at the LSE last night for The Climate Diplomat, the book about international climate negotiations by Pete Betts. Pete started working on it after being diagnosed with brain cancer and given 15 months to live. He died almost two years ago with most of it written…

Good piece about what’s made homes unaffordable - with a depressing conclusion that politicians focus on supply because more effective measures to tackle demand are too difficult on.ft.com/45LMuZ2 Making British homes affordable again

Credit to Ed Davey for this. www.theguardian.com/politics/liv...

Of course the Building Safety Regulator should speed up its work but Sky News might want to rethink the url that calls it 'red tape' to check that new buildings and remediated existing ones are safe news.sky.com/story/the-re...

PM programme has been a good listen in the last few days, notably the interviews with an asylum seeker from the Bell Hotel yesterday and a Migration Observatory researcher today. Hadn’t realised before the extent to which Brexit has driven increase in small boat crossings

The normalisation of lying in our political culture, and BBC's failure to address it. I have read the summary judgement, judges' decision has nothing to do with ECHR. It mentions it once, to pour cold water on a Home Office argument!

'Families can't live the way we're living.' Overheating in the spotlight as tenants complain of 43C temperatures inside their flats - one combining that with windows she can't open because block is surrounded by scaffolding for cladding remediation www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

A stark example of poor co-ordination between services. Councils must take 'reasonable steps' to prevent homelessness among all eligible applicants who are likely to become homeless within *56 days*. If HO and council timelines don't align, people are even more likely to fall through the cracks

This comes only nine months after it doubled the move-on time to 56 days, recognising that 28 days is not long enough for refugees to find a home and causes homelessness (Think this is for newly recognised refugees who've been granted asylum) www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

FISH!!!!

A very happy 40th to Giroscope 🎂 www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025...

Looks like we are now live-broadcasting Reform events on mass deportation plans on major TV channels including the BBC. We've just published a study showing that this type of coverage moves public opinion in an extreme direction & normalises those ideas further: www.cambridge.org/core/journal...

Today programme excelling itself this morning by making a trail of a speech by Farage its main item at 810 and then interviewing not Farage but someone who’s not even an MP

Guardian editorial repeats mistake about build to rent's impact on rents from the FT: if you build lots of shiny new flats somewhere then of course average rents in those areas will rise. (Does not mean there are not big Qs to ask about BTR and who owns it) www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

Rayner buys second home maybe. Not sure how many properties you have to own to have an empire but pretty sure that two does not count www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/202...

This is an Allison Pearson column masquerading as an interview with Lucy Connolly right down to the question (Do you think you are Starmer's political prisoner?) that becomes a statement and a headline www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/08...

Is there anything else done by the last Tory government that she'd like Tory councils to challenge? www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Big kite being flown here. Should she do this? Potential to raise raise revenue, free up housing market, reduce over-investment In property. So 100% Will she do this? Lots of losers and many more who will think they might be losers even though they might not be. So 20%?