Home sweet goldmine

Home sweet goldmine

Behind all those scary housing market numbers - 12% wiped off property prices in a year; new mortgage approvals down by 71%; house sales at a 30-year-low - is an even scarier thought: are we going to end up having to change our whole attitude to our homes?

In Britain today we no longer even think "home". We think "property". Or in other words "investment". Capital gain, sure-fire winner, right-to-buy, loan-to-value, buy-to-let, remortgage, equity release, rental yield, profit. Lots of it. (Or, just at the moment, not.)

I have just made a new documentary series with Channel 4 - The price of property - about what our stampede for property ownership has done to us. (And no, in my late 40s and off the property ladder for 20 years, I STILL can't afford to buy a house in London.)

What we have done over the past 30 years or so, encouraged by governments only too happy for us to feel fat and contented and eager to vote for them, and by lenders engaged in an utterly irresponsible feeding frenzy, is commoditise what should be a basic right - a roof over our heads.

As soon as that happens, in come the speculators, profit-seekers and moneymen. And suddenly everyone - government, banks, estate agents, builders, TV producers, and the 70% of us who now own our homes - finds themselves with a strong vested interest in seeing prices continue to spiral upwards.

The UK housing market was insanely out of control and plainly unsustainable. What's happening.....continued below

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to it now is violent, but basically a good thing: falling prices are necessary, and badly burned banks may have learned something about the long-forgotten art of responsible lending.

But is it enough? How long will it really take to break that link, now deeply entrenched in our minds, between home ownership and wealth acquisition (if you even consider it needs to be broken)?

What could we do - tax profits on house sales? Somehow make long-term private renting a truly viable alternative to ownership, as it is in large parts of continental Europe? Encourage sensible sale-and-leaseback schemes that mean people can own their homes, or rent them (or a bit of both), without it really mattering much which?

It seems to me we need to get back to a place where we think of houses as homes, not get-rich-quick schemes. But from where we now stand, is that possible?

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