In an age of austerity landlords have made £177 billion in capital gain alone over the past five years. On top of this they have received £30-40 billion in rent a year, including about £9 billion a year in Housing Benefit.

Today the ONS released its latest House Price Index, showing UK house price inflation to the end of October 2014. Really, not much has changed. Whilst inflation has slowed a miniscule amount, falling from 12.1% in the year to September to 10.4% in the year to October, this is still a worryingly high figure for those struggling to buy their first home. Indeed, once seasonal adjustments have been taken into account, inflation has actually risen by 0.1%.

I'm very pleased to be delivering the MSc Sustainable Urban Development public lecture for Oxford University and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors on 7th November.

I'll be exploring the failure of the housing market, the threat it poses to the economy and how a secondary, cost price housing market can fix the problem.

Not only is everyone welcome but it's also free to attend. I hoe you will come along and heckle wittily. But please do rsvp to David Howard at [email protected]

Many thanks,

Alex

As the latest House Price Index reveals an annual increase of 19.6% in the cost of London homes, the MIPIM property fair rolls into the capital tomorrow. MIPIM is a forum focused on international investment in housing, which brings together tens of thousands of investors, property developers, politicians and landlords to discuss how best to make huge amounts of money from housing in cities across the world.

There has been a flurry of bad news for renters over the past few days. 

• According to Homelet, rents have risen by 8.2% in the past year.
• One in five Londoners has no disposable income at the end of the month, according to the Centre for London, which has coined the term "Endies" in their report, "Hollow Promise".
• Shelter has found that the Bank of Mum and Dad is shelling out £23,000 on average to help their kids into a home of their own. 
• The National Housing Federation has found that a first time buyer today has to raise a deposit 10 times bigger than their parents would have - after taking inflation into account.
• And this morning, it's the turn of the Office for National Statistics to tell us that house prices have jumped 13.5% for first time buyers in the past year. That's another £5000 to find this past year alone - and the picture is even worse in London.

Politicians are waking up to the fact that the 9 million private renters being shut out of home ownership and social housing need a stable, decent and affordable home. Only last week the government announced its support for a Bill to end revenge evictions. 

But we need to keep the pressure on - both to reform private renting and build more genuinely affordable homes. To do that we need your voice - so please sign up to the campaign.

Melsonby sub-postmistress Diana Garbutt was found dead in her home in March 2010. Her husband Robin was arrested three weeks later and was subsequently found guilty of her murder.

Unoccupied since the crime, the only shop in the North Yorkshire village, along with its attached living quarters, has now been sold on at a knock down price. 

Is house price inflation starting to slow? Across the whole market, it would seem so, with the Office for National Statistics finding inflation fell from 10.4% in May to 10.2% in June. That is still well above anything that's remotely healthy - and house prices were already historically expensive, even after the 2008 crash. 

But first time buyers have it particularly bad. If you want to buy a house, prices are now 12 percent higher than they were a year ago (in May inflation was running at 11.3%). For people who already own a house and want to move, they are seeing a slowdown - from 10% to 9.5%. 

The government insists that it’s doing all it can to end the housing crisis by ramping up the rate of house building. So far it’s managed a modest bump, but earlier this week, we learned that it's forecasting another dip in 2014/15.

(Source: Newsnight)

At a time when we need to double house building to keep rents and house prices affordable, to think that the government could allow a fall like this is staggering.

The Labour Party is calling a debate on the issue in Parliament next Wednesday, 9^th July, to examine what has gone wrong and what can be done to boost supply.

Alex Hilton (me) brandishing the Evening Standard today

The Evening Standard today splashes on an exclusive YouGov poll in which 50% of Londoners want house prices to decrease. The Housing Minister Kris Hopkins, Chancellor George Osborne and London Mayor Boris Johnson have all stated publicly that they want house price rises to continue.

With half of Britain's renters in London and the South East, these powerful politicians are increasingly at odds with the public's day to day experience of the economy. They are also ignoring warnings from the Bank of England Governor Mark Carney, who has called the current state of the housing market "the biggest single threat to the economic recovery".

Right now, politicians seem happy for a free housing market to grind down renters as long as homeowners and landlords are content, and so they have offered no real solutions. We have offered a solution. Our paper, Buying out of the Bubble, outlines how a secondary, bubble-free housing market can be developed, offering low cost housing to people willing to forego free market-level returns in capital gain or rents.

A secondary housing market would provide affordable housing for those people who just want a home, not an investment, while insulating the free market from what will otherwise become a traumatic market adjustment, with dire consequences for London's economy.

Sign up as a supporter of Generation Rent and help us win a better deal for renters.

Alex Hilton
Director, Generation Rent

Bank of England Governor Mark Carney's warning this week that the housing market represents the principle threat to the economic recovery created a media shock, but little response from those in power. This displays a lack of understanding at senior levels of the scale and immediacy of this threat.