I was grateful to read Claudia Sorin’s reply to my own letter, but to repeat once again, the measures she proposes will not resolve the problem of affordability, because they fail to recognise the root cause of the problem.

Between 2008 and 2013, the population of the UK increased from 62 to 64.6m, an increase that was slightly above the long term trend line. But house prices fell! Why? Credit availability!

The answer to the affordability problem is right there in front of us, yet all the major parties fail to recognise that bank lending is a far bigger driver of house prices than numbers built.

What we need is homes that are affordable, not affordable homes. The best way to ensure affordability, as has been demonstrated many times in the past, is simply to reduce mortgage multiples.

Not everybody has a mortgage, but markets are made at the margins.

This is not a theoretical argument, Claudia: the evidence is provided in my first paragraph. If anybody thinks that building more homes will bring down prices, they need only look at the price of new builds.

That’s not to say that we shouldn’t build more homes – the ones we have are often in the wrong places – but this is a different issue.

While banks are happily writing mortgages, and governments are in cahoots, those ever smaller plot sizes will come with ever larger price tags.

Reducing mortgage multiples can bring us a controlled deflation of house prices, without requiring governments to commit to unattainable building targets, without having to extort hundreds of millions of pounds, in the form of taxes, from consumers’ pockets, and without forcing people into the trap of shared ownership.

Until governments realise the simple fact that if you help buyers pay more, sellers will hold out for more, the problem will never be solved.

As Claudia has demonstrated, Labour are not a party that is going to solve this. In fact, only the Greens (through proposals on land value tax) appear to be applying any creative thinking.

James Young
St Anne’s Road, Wyke Regis