Housing bubble, toil and trouble

BBC NEWS | Business | Why is it so expensive to buy a house?: "Thanks to successive government policies, hardly any new council houses have been built for the last 20 years.

Some people who might once have rented have been more or less forced to buy instead.

Tony Key, Professor of real estate economics at the Cass Business school in London, said this under supply of housing has led to a huge distortion in the UK property market.

'Somewhere around the mid 1980s we stopped building council houses and we didn't fill in the gap.

'There's been a group of people who might logically be renters who have been forced into being owner occupiers,' said Professor Key."