Braced for the cuts

Just about the only certainty in politics right now is that public money will get scarcer. So far, housing investment has held up, as the government pulled forward Homes and Community Agency budgets and pumped extra cash into propping up house building.

It’s debatable how well spent that money has been – some argue that it was essential to prevent a collapse of output and loss of capacity in the industry. Others say it has done little apart from rescuing a few housebuilders (and some housing associations) from bankruptcy and preventing the land market from finding a realistic price floor on which a reformed house building industry could start new projects.

Either way, it’s striking how quickly we have moved from the position 18 months ago when the HCA was being created. Then the buzz phrase was ‘doing more with less’. Today it is about doing less with more, as grant rates have risen far above pre-credit crunch levels.