. Today, it carries a report of an upcoming speech from Nick Boles. Some selections follow ...

It is “immoral” that young people are being priced out of the housing market because of a lack of cheap homes [and] the housing shortage is a bigger threat to “social justice” than poor education and unemployment ...

“either they will spend their retirement propping up their kids and their grandkids, or they can accept more development so their grandkids don’t have the problem”.

“I genuinely think that the single biggest way in which we are failing to deliver social justice in this country at the moment is unaffordable housing – more than schools, more than jobs, more than benefits,” ...

it was simply “immoral” that young people had to wait for so long to save a large enough deposit to buy a home.

... we have a simple choice. We can decide to ignore the misery of young families forced to grow up in tiny flats with no outside space. We can pass by on the other side while working men and men in their twenties and thirties have to live with their parents or share bedrooms with friends.

inflation in house prices in recent decades has been unacceptable and was caused by artificial restrictions on building ... if the price of food had risen in line with housing over the past 30 years, a chicken would cost £47 and a jar of coffee £20.
“In the 1990s, the average person setting aside five per cent of their income each week could save up a deposit on a house after eight years,” he will say. “Today it would take the same person 47 years.”

“We have comprehensively failed to persuade people to embrace the level of house building that is required. We are in this terrible vicious circle where we have built ugly stuff, which does not involve local people and does not bring them any benefit in terms of improved local infrastructure or anything else. They hate it and so they fight any further proposals tooth and nail, perfectly understandably. And the process of fighting it means much less land gets planning permission and the value of land goes through the roof. So the cost of building becomes completely unaffordable, so people build c--p.”

Under plans to be announced on Thursday, local people would keep up to 25 per cent of revenues from a Community Infrastructure Levy which builders pay to win planning permission to spend on community projects,

“Work out what you want, where you want it, what you want it to look like, the money that enables you to reopen the municipal pool,”

...

“I was a Nimby once, and my entire family were,”