Adam Smith Institute: "Burning Down the House: Why Help-to-Buy will stoke a housing bubble, and risks taxpayers' money with no promise of a return"

Link to PDF on web site

"Help-to-Buy will not end the housing crisis. The government’s plans to increase liquidity in the housing market will do little to solve the UK’s long-run housing supply shortage – and do much to aggravate high housing prices while improperly using the state as a risk transfer mechanism.

"Liberalisation, not intervention, is the best long-term solution for the distorted British housing market.

"... A number of ... supply-side solutions have been proposed by the ASI and/or its affiliates on numerous occasions in the recent past, including:

• releasing limited amounts of farmland for suburban development,
• radical liberalisation of urban planning laws (proposed by ASI Fellow Tom Papworth), and
• the abolition of mandatory affordable housing provision in new housing development (proposed by ASI Fellow Preston Byrne).

"The full contents of these arguments do not bear repeating here. What such solutions have in common, however, is that the obstacles to their implementation are political and regulatory, not economic."