ABSTRACT
This chapter addresses the question of housing supply and the policy problem of meeting the demand for new housing in Britain in the early 2000s. In a previous review of English housing policy since 1975 I argued that planning for new housing supply was, in retrospect, perhaps the most signifi cant failure of housing policy in that period (Bramley, 2007; Bramley et al., 2005). After 2003, housing supply was subject to a ‘sudden rediscovery’ after 25 years of neglect, and a major critical review (Barker, 2004) led to greatly enhanced attention from central government. However, the task of re-energising supply has been complicated by cross-cutting political priorities and, more recently, by a fi nancial and economic tsunami, the credit crunch, which threatens to derail the necessary measures required for a longer-term solution.
