Housing

Blog

LSE British Politics:

Without radical planning reform, Burnham cannot build the houses he's promising

Governments keep promising to build more houses, and keep failing to do so. Now, Andy Burnham has upped the challenge by promising not just more houses, but specifically more council houses since World War II. Paul Chesh...Read more...

Paul Cheshire

5 August 2026

Blog

LSE British Politics and Policy:

What the price-to-rent ratio reveals about Britain's housing crisis

The consensus that Britain's housing crisis stems from the lack of enough houses being built has received intense criticism lately. Christian Hilber and Andreas Mense analyse the price-to-rent ratio of UK homes and argue...Read more...

Christian A. L. Hilber and Andreas Mense

15 December 2025

Blog

The Conversation:

Could new tenants' rights usher in rent controls? Here's why that wouldn't necessarily be a positive

The new Renters' Rights Act introduces provisions to protect tenants in England against rent increases. While the UK government says it "does not support the introduction of rent controls", the act does allow tenants to ...Read more...

Jan David Bakker and Nikhil Datta

21 November 2025

Blog

The Conversation:

How new renters' rights could drive landlords out of the market

Many elements of the renters' rights bill are likely to improve the lives of renters without harming landlords. But some of the improvements for tenants will make being a landlord more difficult or even, for some, undesi...Read more...

Jan David Bakker and Nikhil Datta

24 October 2025

External report

Policy Landscape 2025:

Housing (chapter)

As Parliament returns from its summer recess, the Resolution Foundation and UK in a Changing Europe have partnered to produce the Policy Landscape 2025 report - a series of evidence-led, research-based assessments of the...Read more...

Paul Cheshire

2 September 2025

Blog

The Conversation:

Housebuyers hate stamp duty. Why hasn't it been reformed before now?

For years, academic economists have argued that council tax and stamp duty are deeply flawed. But now the UK government is said to be considering a change to stamp duty so that it is only paid on houses selling for more ...Read more...

Paul Cheshire

28 August 2025

Government consultation

Planning and Infrastructure Bill

Written evidence submitted by Paul Cheshire to the planning and infrastructure bill committee...Read more...

Paul Cheshire

24 April 2025

Journal article

Economic Geography:

Don?t shoot the pianist: creative firms, workers, and neighbourhood gentrification

We examine links between creative activity and gentrification at the neighbourhood level. These dynamics are both complex and important to understand. Artists may help `upgrade? inexpensive neighbourhoods before being di...Read more...

Diana Gutierrez-Posada, Tasos Kitsos and Max Nathan

24 March 2025

CentrePiece article

in brief... Successful caps on fees disprove the idea that it?s unwise to meddle with free markets

Jan David Bakker and Nikhil Datta show how the success of a reform of letting agents? fees was partly due to their hidden nature....Read more...

Jan David Bakker and Nikhil Datta

20 February 2025

Journal article

The Economic Journal:

Judge dread: Court severity, repossession risk and demand in mortgage and housing markets

We study the impact of borrower protection on mortgage and housing demand using variation in the likelihood that houses are repossessed coming from heterogeneity in preferences of local judges. We develop a framework tha...Read more...

Piero Montebruno, Olmo Silva and Nikodem Szumilo

29 January 2025

CEP discussion paper

Measuring quality of life under spatial frictions

Using a quantitative spatial model as a data-generating process, we explore how spatial frictions affect the measurement of quality of life. We find that under a canonical parameterization, mobility frictions - generated...Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Fabian Bald, Duncan Roth and Tobias Seidel

11 December 2024

Blog

The Conversation:

Successful caps on English letting agents' fees disprove the idea that it's unwise to meddle with free markets

Five years ago, the UK government enacted the first legislation regulating prices in the English rental market since the 1960s. The Tenant Fees Act 2019 didn't interfere with what landlords can charge tenants in rent, bu...Read more...

Jan David Bakker and Nikhil Datta

5 December 2024

Government consultation

Scottish parliament: Local Government, Housing and Planning Committee

Christian Hilber gives evidence to the Housing inquiry....Read more...

Christian A. L. Hilber

5 November 2024

Blog

VOX EU:

The housing consumption channel of mortgage demand

Many housing markets have experienced a dramatic rise in house prices and mortgage debt over recent decades that has outpaced average income growth. Increased wealth and increased collateral values have been cited as pos...Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Nikodem Szumilo and Jagdish Tripathy

19 October 2024

Blog

LSE Politics and Policy:

Why higher house prices lead to higher borrowing

In the past three decades, house prices and mortgage debt in the UK have risen much faster than income. In other words, people end up borrowing more money when house prices go up. This finding goes against many canonical...Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Nikodem Szumilo and Jagdish Tripathy

2 October 2024

Blog

LSE Politics and Policy:

Labour's planning reforms - how to make housing targets work

Labour promised serious reforms to the planning system while in opposition. What it has proposed now that it's in Government, including reforms to the National Planning Policy Framework, is very far from a fundamental re...Read more...

Paul Cheshire

19 August 2024

Blog

LSE Politics and Policy:

Labour's planning reforms - building on grey belts and missed opportunities

Perhaps the proposal that people are most aware of when it comes to Labour's planning reform plans, the one that hit the headlines, is the idea of potentially re-defining small areas of green belts as "grey belt land". T...Read more...

Paul Cheshire

19 August 2024

CEP discussion paper

Housing-consumption channel of mortgage demand

We quantify the housing-consumption channel in mortgage demand according to which households borrow more following house-price increases since housing and non-housing consumption are imperfect substitutes. To identify th...Read more...

Gabriel M. Ahlfeldt, Nikodem Szumilo and Jagdish Tripathy

29 July 2024

Blog

Jam Tomorrow (Podcast):

The Green Belt: Fields forever? (podcast)

Ros Taylor talks to LSE professor Paul Cheshire and journalist Jonn Elledge about the problems facing Labour as it tries to persuade Britons of the need for more housing and infrastructure. And Paul Cheshire sets out a p...Read more...

Paul Cheshire, Jonn Elledge and Ros Taylor

16 July 2024

CEP discussion paper

Avenging the tenants: regulating the middle man's rents

We explore the role of intermediaries in the rental market. Using novel UK data on fees letting agencies charged to both tenants and landlords, combined with a matched property-agency listings dataset, we study the effec...Read more...

Jan David Bakker and Nikhil Datta

12 July 2024

CEP discussion paper

Land use regulation, homeownership and wealth inequality

We examine the role that housing market regulatory restrictiveness plays in differentially affecting the net wealth of owners and renters over time, and its contribution to wealth inequality. In tightly regulated desirab...Read more...

Christian A. L. Hilber and Tracy M. Turner

10 June 2024

Journal article

Town Planning Review:

Pushing water uphill: containment policies doomed to fail

London has had a green belt for seventy years making it the `canary in the coal mine? for `zero land take?. Because of strong demand for housing space, rising prosperity underlies rising urban land demand so rigid physic...Read more...

Paul Cheshire

1 May 2024

External report

Labour Economics: Thinking through Labour's economic agenda

With the Labour Party having vowed to achieve the fastest growth in the G7, the Social Market Foundation has brought together leading economic experts to provide independent analysis of the party's proposed approach - an...Read more...

Timothy Besley, Aveek Bhattacharya, Jagjit Chadha, Paul Cheshire, Neil Lee, Alan Manning, Andrew McNeil, Margarida Bandeira Morais, Henry G. Overman, David Soskice, Anna Valero, Giles Wilkes and Alison Wolf

22 April 2024

CEP discussion paper

Why delay? Understanding the construction lag, aka the build out rate

We explore the determinants of the speed of residential development after dwelling construction starts. Using a sample of over 140,000 residential developments in England from 1996 to 2015 and employing an instrumental v...Read more...

Michael Ball, Paul Cheshire, Christian A. L. Hilber and Xiaolun Yu

15 April 2024

Journal article

American Economic Journal: Economic Policy :

Local retail prices, product variety, and neighborhood change

We study how local grocery markets within a city are affected by changes in housing markets. Our empirical strategy exploits a shift in the spatial distribution of construction activity induced by a large-scale, place-ba...Read more...

Fernando Borraz, Felipe Carozzi, Nicolas Gonzalez-Pampillon and Leandro Zipitria

1 February 2024