Weekly Economics Podcast: Will selling off public land make the housing crisis worse?

The housing crisis is a hot topic at the moment. We often talk about who can buy, sell and rent houses — and how much they cost — but we rarely talk about the land beneath them.

Lots of land in the UK is owned by the government and local authorities — public land. But a load of it is being sold off, from old hospitals to sites owned by the Ministry of Defence. The government says that we should sell it to developers to build houses on to deal with the housing shortage. But is that really happening? Is selling off our public land really helping to solve the housing crisis?

This week host Ayeisha Thomas-Smith welcomes back NEF’s Subject Lead on Housing, Alice Martin, to talk us through these thorny questions. She’s joined by NEF researcher Duncan McCann and journalist and author Dawn Foster, both experts on the issues of housing and land.