Following on from this morning’s planning applications data for England published by the Department for Levelling Up, Housing & Communities, mortgage experts share their views.
Lewis Shaw, founder of Mansfield-based Shaw Financial Services: “Once again we have evidence of rank incompetence from the Tory party. Now it’s planning suffering when we’ve already got a housing crisis. We have a structural supply side problem with not enough homes as it is and they’re baking in the problem further. With a recession around the corner, I’m reminded of the words of Aristotle: ‘Poverty is the parent of revolution and crime’.”
Ross Boyd, founder of the always-on mortgage comparison platform, Dashly.com: “A drop in the number of residential planning applications during the fourth quarter of last year is not want you see and will exacerbate the already dire lack of supply. We need to desperately build more homes but if the planning is falling short, that becomes a Mission Impossible.”
Rhys Schofield, managing director at Belper-based Peak Mortgages and Protection: “Seven percent fewer residential applications agreed than a year before and we wonder why house prices are going through the roof. Until we build more houses as a nation that are fit for purpose, any work done to help get people on the ladder is merely tinkering round the edges because we are seemingly happy to blindly ignore the root cause of the problem, namely supply. Supply is obscenely low.”
