George Osborne's final Autumn Statement before the General Election has been trailed across the media since Sunday, including announcements about housebuilding as part of the National Infrastructure Plan. A lot of this - including the garden city in Bicester - is fairly old news, but it's interesting that the government is planning to get directly involved in building houses - 10,000 of them just outside Cambridge.

The Treasury might want to use this as an opportunity to try out Generation Rent's proposed model of a bubble-free housing market - we estimate that it would cost £1bn to build 10,000 homes, sell them at little over cost-price and plough the proceeds into another 10,000 home project. Those new houses would be shielded from any above-inflation price rises.

When it came to the Statement itself, earlier this afternoon, Osborne had very little to offer those who want cheaper housing. His big announcement, which is bound to dominate tomorrow's front pages, was the reform of stamp duty. 

It will come as no surprise to many that the latest research released from Savills shows that under 35s are paying the most per household on housing.

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

For almost a year Labour has been touting its Lyons Housing Review as the central plank of its offer for the 2015 manifesto. But its publication today, after so much foreplay, has left me disappointingly unsatisfied.

Alex Hilton presented Emma Reynolds with a box of chocolates when they sat down to talk housing at our event with SHOUT last night. It was in recognition of Labour's work so far on making renting less of the waking nightmare it currently is - but not anything fancy - just Milk Tray, this time. There is still a lot we want from the next government.

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.

At Generation Rent, we've listened to lots of experts who have analysed the housing crisis and have come to a conclusion. The principle problem is that you can't just buy or rent a home, you have to pay for an investment too. Some people say the problem is supply - and that's true - but the supply problem exists because of the inability to supply homes that people need without charging them a high price because of a potential future investment return.

And so we've been looking at how you can decouple the investment value of a home for an investor from its utility value to the person living there. And we came up with this. Britain needs a second housing market. A bubble-free housing market for people who only want a home, sitting neatly alongside a free market for those people who want an investment.

And it turns out this could be implemented cheaply and easily and that it will save taxpayers money. We've made a short presentation here and written a paper, Buying out of the bubble. 

So we're calling for a secondary, bubble-free housing market - and we need your support to get politicians to adopt it and implement it. Join Generation Rent today (it's free) and help us campaign for real, effective solutions to the housing crisis.

Cheers,

Alex

Private renters spend 40% of their income on rent, compared with owner occupiers whose mortgage payments average 20% of income, according to the Government's English Housing Survey published this morning.

That means that renters spend two days a week working to pay off their landlords mortgage - most would prefer to be paying off their own, but house prices are far too expensive. It's hard to see how this could be characterised as anything other than exploitation.

An initial set of figures for 2012-13 was published in February - today's more detailed look reveals that:

• Only half of private renters agree that living in their sector is a good way to occupy a home, rather lower than in the other two main tenure groups.
• 73% of private renters were aged under 45 compared with 37% of social renters and just one quarter (27%) of owner occupiers
• A fifth of private renters last year were couples with children - up from 12% in 2008-09
• Over half (55%) of private renters said they anticipated owning their own home in the longer-term. Around a quarter (27%) reported that they expected to still be renting from a private landlord in the longer-term.

This graph makes it clear just how inadequate the private rented sector is - we have proposed a number of policies to fix it in our Renters Manifesto - and sign up here!

The number of houses being left empty has increased by 25% in the past decade - and so has the number of households with 6 or more people. That's according to the Office for National Statistics, which has published analysis of household composition data from the 2011 census. 

It's already well-documented that private renting has risen as fewer people are able to afford to buy a house, but these two statistics are a stark illustration of the growing inequality in British society as a result of the broken housing market. The 3 million-plus people crammed into the 543,000 households of 6 or more would be a bit annoyed to know that there are over 1 million homes around the country that are going spare. 

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.