Housing, everybody’s favourite excuse to rebuke the government, is back in the news again with a vengeance, this time it is mainly about the so-called bubble in London and the South East.
Of course, like most popular and populist opinions, when dissected they do not stand up to reasoning.
It is true the housing market is dividing up in to a number of niches, at the top of which are the oligarchs, hedge fund managers and the recipients of massive bonuses, in the middle are those who cannot compete in the Westminster, Kensington and Chelsea markets and have moved into neighbouring areas such as Notting Hill, part of Cheshire and other popular locations.
Then there is the market in which the mass of people have to compete, including those trading up, down, buy-to-lets and first-time buyers.
Even so, we know the picture is not so rosy, according to the latest figures from the Office of National Statistics on overcrowding.
This Victorian social menace is returning along with tuberculosis, the disease that often follows overcrowding, damp and uninhabitable homes.
According to the study, of the 23.4m households in England and Wales in March 2011, over 1.1m households were considered over-crowded.
Most of these overcrowded homes were concentrated in the social (8.7 per cent) and private rented sectors (8.6 per cent), compared with the owner-occupied sector (2.3 per cent).
The demographic breakdown is not surprising: 64.3 per cent of the 23.4m households were owner-occupied, 18 per cent in private renting and 17.6 per cent in social renting.
While the vast majority of owner-occupied homes had at least one spare room (82.7 per cent), this compared with nearly half of the private sector (49.5 per cent) and 39.4 per cent of the social rented sector.
Again, the figures confirm what many people have observed: that London has the highest concentration of overcrowded homes (11.3 per cent), more than double the next highest region, the West Midlands (4.5 per cent). London also has the highest concentration of rented households (50 per cent) and the highest population density.
So, competition for the few affordable homes in London is intense, which is driving house price inflation.
All this breaks down into social policy, which can often further disadvantage the very people left out of the house owning market.
Already, with the mortgage market review coming into operation within the next 48 hours, we have the unusual spectacle of a state agency intervening in domestic space to tell hard-pressed first-time buyers and families how they should spend what little disposable income they have.
Ignoring the reality for a moment, that the average cost of a home in the UK is £253,000, including London, and excluding the capital it is £196,000, and the average wage is just over £26,000, this works out at a multiple of nearly 10 times. In other words, unless a first-time buyer is lucky to get a home far below the national average, he or she can kiss goodbye to getting on the much cherished housing ladder, especially in the capital.
