Oxford economist John Muellbauer argues that Britain has “probably the most regressive annual property tax in the world”, and that fixing it, alongside cutting Stamp Duty, is essential to tackling the housing crisis.
In his new article, Muellbauer traces today’s housing emergency back to policy choices made in the 1980s. Council Tax is still based on 1991 values and hits lower-value homes hardest. Meanwhile, Stamp Duty discourages people from moving or downsizing.
His answer is to reform both taxes together. Stamp Duty would be cut now, and Council Tax would be replaced over time with a proportional property tax. Read the full article below and the original here.
Land, housing and the British economy
John Muellbauer
Introduction
In 1987, I questioned the multidimensional folly of the Poll Tax that Keith Joseph had persuaded Margaret Thatcher to introduce, replacing the long-standing proportional Domestic Rates system (Muellbauer 1987).
A third area was to examine the role of housing and labour markets in driving regional migration. For example, one paper explained the mechanisms and feedbacks behind the unsustainable UK credit and house price boom in the 1980s (Muellbauer & Murphy 1990), and its consequences for consumer spending, the balance of payments and overvaluation of the exchange rate. Indeed, two years later, the UK was forced out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism.
The UK housing crisis of 1990–4 provided a foretaste of the pre-eminence of housing issues in the Global Financial Crisis in 2008, since when macroprudential policy, especially for mortgage markets, has become so prominent.4
Housing and the environment are intimately connected, since housing is one of the main and most intractable contributors to global heating. Economic inequality, especially between generations, and social exclusion are dramatically influenced by housing.
Poor housing often has negative health outcomes, and restricted access to housing can affect family formation. Productivity growth can be severely impeded by failing policies and institutions related to land use, housing and credit markets. Renters and the young bear the brunt of the affordability crisis, increasing the polarisation of political attitudes between themselves and more secure homeowners, as documented by Ansell & Cansunar (2021).
This provides fertile ground for scapegoating by the populist right. Failing growth and the housing affordability crisis help to explain the rise of the populist right; see Abou-Chadi et al. (2024) for international evidence.
In consequence, major parts of UK wealth are owned and controlled by foreign entities, with the profits shifting abroad. Related to low investment, the productivity record has been dire, particularly in the last fifteen years, and made even worse by Brexit. The result of fiscal austerity is calamitous, with fifteen years of under-investment, especially at local levels, leaving public services in a precarious condition.
Excluding London, the UK would be one of the poorest countries in Northwest Europe. Yet in London, the high housing costs offset for many the advantage of higher earnings. Housing affordability is a critical problem throughout the UK, especially for the young. Average living standards are now lower than fifteen years ago. Average life expectancy has improved across twenty European countries, but England has had the slowest rate of improvement, and the rest of the UK has fared little better (Steel et al. 2025).
In Northwest Europe, across individuals, and in the OECD, across and within regions, the UK is also one of the most unequal countries (McCann 2019). Poverty and inequality measures look considerably worse in the UK when account is also taken of housing costs.
This is offset by some of the highest transactions taxes globally, which impede labour mobility and choice. Together these taxes misallocate the existing stock of housing. Within Northern Europe, we have the worst insulated homes and the highest commuting times. Rises in UK house prices have greatly outpaced general increases in consumer prices; see Figure 1.
Figure 1.
Underlying these increases in house prices are, especially in the UK, far larger increases in land prices. The distinction between housing and land is an important one. House prices reflect both the cost of the structure and the underlying land. Hence, given the relative stability of building costs plus the profit margin of builders, land prices are necessarily more volatile than house prices.
The role of land in the economy, and the regulatory and institutional changes made by the Thatcher government, largely left unchallenged by later governments, are discussed in Section 2. One major consequence of these changes was diminished investment, productivity growth and international competitiveness, and a deteriorated fiscal position, discussed in Section 3.
Moreover, they increased the risks to financial stability. Another important consequence was a housing affordability crisis, and its distributional ramifications, the subject of Section 4.
Land and housing institutions and the Thatcher reforms of the 1980s
The levels of land prices and house prices, and their spatial distribution, are influenced by these regulations. High and volatile land and house prices also influence the structure of the building industry. Building and environmental regulations affect the quality of what is built.
Regulations governing the housing market affect the way property is bought and sold, and regulation of the private rental sector affects the quality of provision and security of tenure. On the side of demand, monetary policy, the regulation of finance, especially mortgage finance, and the structure of taxation have a major impact and, together with supply, will affect the affordability of land and housing. Taxation includes housing transactions taxes like stamp duty, mortgage interest tax relief for landlords and owners, property taxes for owners and inheritance taxes.
The Labour government’s 1947 Town and Country Planning Act had introduced the present discretionary planning system. As the planning system generated large gains associated with permissions, the taxation of development gain as a potential revenue raiser became an important issue.6
Another land use regulatory change brought in after the Second World War was the New Towns programme which operated from 1946 to 1970. The New Towns Act (1946) detailed how new, large-scale communities would be located and paid for, and planned and delivered by dedicated single-purpose, long-life Development Corporations, appointed by government.7
Connected to this, council house building became a major source of residential investment, and 29 per cent of households were living in social housing by 1979. The new government inherited a set of regulations of building standards that had evolved in the 1960s and 1970s.8
In the private rental sector, rent controls had long been in place as part of housing market regulation, but inflation in the 1960s and 1970s had decimated the stock of private rentals. An important feature of financial regulation was the use of credit controls on the supply of mortgages, with building societies dominating the mortgage market.
Tax relief on mortgage interest for owner-occupiers had been limited to the first £25,000 in 1974. Finally, the taxation of homes was based on Domestic Rates in proportion to 1973 home values.
The next subsection describes the first major regulatory change, financial deregulation, and its role in the credit and house price boom of 1985–9, and subsequent bust. Contributing to boom and bust, there were changes on the supply side, including the sales of council housing and the elimination of the existing property tax, discussed in the subsequent subsection.
Financial deregulation
The abolition of exchange controls in 1979 made the ‘corset’ ineffective, as circumvention became easier through disintermediation abroad. Lifting the ‘corset’ in 1980 led to the major entry by the clearing banks into the mortgage market in competition with building societies. By 1982, banks provided 36 per cent of net mortgage advances.
The relaxation of regulations for building societies followed, and some took on higher risk borrowers, diversified into commercial real estate, estate agency, financial advice, stockbroking and overseas markets, and increased funding from wholesale markets with potential maturity mismatch issues.
Furthermore, a new breed of lenders, typically offshoots of foreign banks, acquired a rapidly increasing share of the mortgage market from around 1985. Without a High Street presence, they lent through financial intermediaries, who lacked ‘skin in the game’ and hence did not have sufficient interest in screening the credit worthiness of their customers.9
The Bank of England’s estimates of home equity withdrawal relative to income show high rates from 1984 to 1988, at times even exceeding the highs of the 2002–6 house price boom. As the economy overheated and inflation rose, monetary policy tightened sharply, beginning in 1989, tipping the housing market into a crisis10 and the economy into recession. More broadly, easier access to credit became an important permanent driver of the UK’s low rates of household and national saving.
These episodes of financial stress occurred despite protection offered by mortgage indemnity insurance, where risk was partly transferred to insurers (who themselves had to be rescued by a Bank of England lifeboat).
Many of the patterns of regulatory lapses and distorted incentives resulting in the 1989–93 crisis were later repeated in the Global Financial Crisis.
The regulation and taxation of land and housing
As part of Mrs Thatcher’s political project to create a ‘property-owning democracy’, the 1980 Housing White Paper introduced the right-to-buy (RTB) for council house tenants at discounts initially ranging from 33 per cent for those resident for three years, to 50 per cent for those resident for twenty years or more.
This policy reduced the overall rate of home building, with private sector house building close to earlier levels despite the higher house prices. The right-to-buy policy without replacement persisted to 2024, permanently reducing the supply of social housing; see Section 4 for more detail.11
The post-war governments used land-value capture to enhance land supply and fund infrastructure (as under the New Towns Acts of 1946 and 1965; see Halligan 2021: chapter 8).
Land-value capture refers to capturing for the taxpayer the greater part of the increase in land value from two factors: firstly, changes in planning permission and, secondly, infrastructure investment.
After the 1961 Land Compensation Act, it became increasingly difficult to use land-value capture. However, in the mid-1980s, policies for a time used the Development Corporation model that preceded Thatcher’s government: for instance, in the London Docklands and Merseyside. With extended planning powers, derelict land, acquired cheaply or already in public ownership, was brought into use and private finance leveraged in with small amounts of government subsidy.
Afterwards, these mechanisms fell out of favour, until recently. Moreover, in 1985, the government abolished the Development Land Tax introduced by the Labour government in 1976. In 1990, a Town and Country Planning Act was introduced, and Section 106 of the act, rewritten in the 1991 Planning and Compensation Act, provided a new mechanism12 for land-value capture; see Section 5.
It must also be acknowledged that the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL), legislated in the 2008 Planning Act and implemented from 2010, brought back a type of development tax.
The reduction in social housing provision forced more families into the private rental sector, where far more generous credit terms for buy-to-let investors in the late 1990s boosted rental supply.
These reliefs were intended to support family farms, but are also used by wealthy non-farmers as a tax avoidance strategy, driving up demand and prices for land. In 2024–5, inheritance tax on farm estates worth over £2.5 million was reintroduced through the Agricultural and Business Property Reliefs, albeit at a lower 20 per cent rate.
Mrs Thatcher later replaced the Domestic Rates, against the advice of her chancellor Nigel Lawson, by the ‘Community Charge’ (better known as the ‘Poll Tax’). Anticipation of the abolition of Domestic Rates probably gave a significant fillip to the house price boom from 1986; see Figure 1.
The Poll Tax charged the same tax to every household regardless of income or property value and was part of Thatcher’s project to promote a property-owning democracy. The Poll Tax was introduced in Scotland in 1989, and in England and Wales in 1990.
Its deep unpopularity, seen in the widespread and protracted Poll Tax riots (BBC 2016), ultimately led to the resignation of Mrs Thatcher in 1990. The Poll Tax was replaced (except in Northern Ireland) by the hastily designed Council Tax in 1993, which retained key regressive features; see Section 5.
Council Tax in England remains in place to this day, and, astonishingly, is still based on 1991 valuations, although Wales revalued housing in 2003.
The ONS (Office for National Statistics) household balance sheet data used here suggests that, for an ‘average’ British house, around 70 per cent of the value is in the land rather than the structure.14 This share is even higher in parts of the South although lower in the North and in Wales.
Figure 2.
The impact on growth, fiscal capacity and financial stability
In the immediate aftermath of the 1980s credit and house price boom, there was a damaging housing crisis and recession, as noted above. More recently, prior lax financial regulation has been closely connected with the damaging effects of the Global Financial Crisis and the government debt burden from bailouts of major banks.
In a dynamic model with overlapping generations and land speculation, they show how credit and land price booms impair investment in more productive sectors and curtail long-run growth. The triggers for land speculation may be low interest rates or the relaxation of financial regulation. There is no planning authority in this model, and hence planning constraints are not explicitly considered.
They find a boom–bust pattern in output, which is correlated with greater credit allocation to less productive non-tradable sectors, including construction and real estate. This mechanism is also confirmed for the US in a panel study of firms (Doerr 2020), which argues that when real-estate values rise, there is a relaxation of collateral constraints for firms owning real estate.
Reallocation of capital and labour towards these less efficient but collateral-owning firms in the non-traded sector explains the negative consequences for aggregate industry productivity.
Another US panel study by Chakraborty et al. (2018) finds that bank lending for housing during boom periods crowds out commercial lending, and that this lowers investment by firms (especially small credit-constrained firms).
For Europe, a country panel study by Grjebine et al. (2023) on a database of 33 sectors and 14 countries, finds that the group of countries where real-estate booms started early and were substantial (Ireland, the UK, France and Spain) all experienced real-estate shocks that generated total factor productivity losses.
These shocks led to a re-allocation of investment across sectors, resulting in lower aggregate growth in total factor productivity.
Productivity rises by an estimated 0.14 per cent following a 1 per cent fall in the house-price-to-income ratio.16 An even larger effect of 0.31 per cent is found for London and the greater Southeast in a related study (Homes England 2025).
A further deleterious effect of volatile land prices is that monopoly power combined with expected land price appreciation raises the incentives to withhold land supply and constrain the rate of housebuilding.18 This helps explain the low build-out rates after planning permission has been granted in the UK, contrasting with far higher rates in, for example, Germany.
These authors argue that rising UK house prices encourage business formation (through rising housing collateral) and therefore boost growth. For 1974–90 and 1966–90, they find that VAT and private company registrations vary with fluctuations in net home equity (home equity minus mortgage debt). From these correlations they conclude that high house prices are beneficial: ‘Our results provide new arguments for favouring taxes on human capital and subsidies on housing assets.’
This policy conclusion is wrong. Fluctuations in net home equity are strongly correlated with consumption growth (which drives business profit opportunities), which probably accounts for much of the correlation between net home equity and registrations of small companies.
The study also neglects to mention the collapse in new registrations and the record company-insolvency rates when negative housing equity peaked in the downturn of the early 1990s.
A further problem with the policy conclusion is that encouraging ever-higher housing collateral requires ever-rising house prices, and ever-higher land prices, which is clearly unsustainable. Moreover, to accumulate collateral for the acquisition of loans, a business must invest in housing, as opposed to human capital or other kinds of capital, which may have been more beneficial. These opportunity costs are ignored by the paper.
A related point is that focusing only on business formation, the article does not question the productivity of the types of business investment financed by higher housing collateral. Finally, for long-run productivity growth, relationship-based bank lending for businesses may have had better outcomes than the algorithmic lending model based on housing collateral, that became prominent amongst UK banks (on which Black et al. (1996) rely).
For Australia, these authors acknowledge the difficulty of untangling housing collateral from wealth effects, but conclude that there may be a small collateral effect. This does not, however, undermine the considerable and consistent evidence cited earlier that high house prices undermine productivity growth. These studies examine the net effect of all the transmission channels (including a possible collateral channel).
This makes imports more expensive, and with the UK heavily dependent on raw material imports, this affects the cost base20 and living standards.
Most recipients now claim these benefits through Universal Credit, regulated through local housing allowances. In real terms, the benefits have become less generous since 2012, while rentals and house prices have increased, increasing financial pressures on low-income tenants (Bell 2024: 180).
This market structure had the temporary advantage that cuts in interest rates in the Global Financial Crisis fed through quickly by improving the cash-flows of borrowers to stabilise the housing market and the economy.21
However, as tighter macroprudential controls have replaced the laxity prevailing prior to the crisis, entering the housing market has become more difficult for the young. With extraordinarily low interest rates, the strong post-crisis growth of house prices favoured investors and the wealthy at the expense of the young and the less well-off.
The UK market structure makes indebted households, and therefore the economy, vulnerable to cash-flow deterioration when interest rates jump, as seen in 2021–5.
The UK’s housing affordability problem
They find the response in the UK is both small and slow. The cumbersome planning system and inadequate release of land for housing development are partly responsible; the decline in UK housebuilding, strongly linked to the collapse of council house building, is another reason. The collapse of ‘new-build’ council housing is shown in Figure 3.
Sales of social housing at large discounts, and a lack of replacement have cut the social housing stock. By 2006, 2.8 million council homes had been sold, around half of the stock.
Figure 3.
When so much of the cost of a home lies in the land, the quality of the building may be compromised to keep down the price. It is not only the quality of new build that is problematic. The existing stock of housing is often of poor quality, especially in the private rented sector.
This is illustrated in Figure 4, with the price of housing rising from P1 to P2.
The housing demand function also depends on the price of housing relative to other prices, and on other factors that shift demand, such as income, population, demography, interest rates, tax changes and lending standards in the mortgage market. In empirical analysis, house prices become the dependent variable.
The demand function for housing is inverted, and price is written as a function of the demand shifters and the stock of housing (e.g., Muellbauer 2018). The most important demand shifter is total real household income. The ratio of total real household income to the stock of housing is therefore the most important ingredient in explaining the price of housing.
Figure 4.
Assuming a value of 1.8 for the UK,24 Figure 5 shows the rise in UK real house prices (the red line) and how much is explained by the rise of real total household income relative to the housing stock (the lower blue line).
The graph suggests that 63 per cent of the rise in real house prices by 2025, relative to 1980, is explained by this variable. Hence, UK housing investment did not increase the housing stock sufficiently to keep up with the growth of real household income.
Figure 5.
The blue line is calculated as 1.8 times the log of total household income relative to the housing stock. The green line is calculated as 1.8 times log of population relative to the housing stock.
The predominant influence of higher real per capita incomes on the demand for housing, and hence on higher house prices, is apparent from the very different profiles of the blue and green lines. The blue line captures the effect of both population and rising income per head, whereas the green line captures only the effect of population.
The falling green line shows that from 1980 to 2008, the housing stock grew by more than enough to keep up with population, but this has not been true since, in a period of weaker income growth. The figure also suggests periods when lower interest rates, shifts in mortgage credit conditions and other factors affected house prices.25
The conclusions also differ from those of Mulheirn (2019), who claims that there is no supply problem (see Cheshire (2019) for a detailed critique of this paper). Mulheirn confines his claim to the twenty-three years from 1995 to 2018.
Over those years, Figure 5 shows that only half of the growth in real house prices is explained by the failure of supply to keep up with income and population. Indeed, other factors, such as lower interest rates and credit easing, account for the rest of the growth in house prices in this period.
The analysis suggests that a 1 per cent increase in the stock of housing—approximately the recent annual level of residential investment—would, given average real income and population, result in real house prices being only 1.8 per cent lower.
This suggests that an extended period of higher rates of residential investment is needed to lower real prices. By comparison with other OECD countries, the UK suffers especially low vacancy rates and low numbers of homes relative to the population—symptoms of a serious housing shortage.
Clearly, the composition of what is built (for example, the proportion of social housing) and the location and quality matter. The decline in UK housebuilding, strongly linked to the collapse of council house building, has worsened the housing affordability problem, particularly for poorer households.
The fraction of households in the social rented sector after 1980 declined from 29 per cent to 16 per cent by 2022–3. Those remaining in social housing tend to be disproportionately elderly, very poor or disabled; they face limited labour-market participation linked to health issues, single-parent families and weak local economies (Judge 2019).
Many social housing blocks are aging high-rise structures facing decommissioning, and the alternative of expensive, low-quality private rentals inflates housing-benefit costs. Part of the solution is to build more social housing and to make better use of the existing stocks of all types of housing. Less defective property taxes would improve the match between existing housing and what is needed locally (for example, homes for young families versus luxury housing). Appropriate taxation of property is a recurrent theme in the rest of this article.
It is striking too that during 1997–2008, when credit conditions were relaxed in the mortgage market (especially in 2005–8), the improved access to credit did not increase owner-occupation among the young. Instead, the increase in house prices relative to income priced many of them out of the market.
Figure 6.
A holistic policy package
An example is the ‘Help to Buy’ scheme of 2013–23. This scheme did benefit participants—but greatly boosted the profits of the large housebuilders and almost certainly raised house prices. This would have priced many potential first-time buyers out of the market.
What is needed is a holistic policy package. The four-part policy package presented below develops proposals in Ansell et al. (2025): the resulting synergies and interactions between the different elements of the package make the whole far more effective than the sum of its parts.
Planning reform
Drawing on this, Watling & Breach (2023) argue that ‘Nimbyism’ has distorted the planning regime. They propose a flexible zoning code that includes mixed-use zones, guarantees planning permission for proposals that meet planning and building-regulation standards, and merges Local Zoning Plans with Local Transport Plans to better integrate infrastructure and housing.
An interesting example is given by a significant relaxation of zoning restrictions in Auckland, New Zealand, in 2016. Greenaway-McGrevy & Phillips (2023) studied the consequences, finding a substantial expansion of housebuilding and slower rent rises compared to the no-reform counterfactual.
Creative solutions should be drawn from European experience, including insights from Falk (2025). To improve the low productivity of many UK cities, Falk argues that axing planning controls is insufficient. Decisions should be devolved to the appropriate level (city or region). The objective should be to build better-served and well-connected neighbourhoods, not just new homes. This requires permitting creativity beyond the standard forms of tenure and finance.
Land-value capture
Historically, LVC was widely employed in new-town development throughout the 1950s–1970s. To strengthen LVC, further reform of the 1961 Land Compensation Act is recommended, extending beyond the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act (2023).
The aim should be both to reduce the scope of ‘hope value’ in compulsory-purchase compensation and to extend the range of public agencies and circumstances when such powers could be used.28
Synergies with planning—such as imposing tougher affordability conditions (for example, S106) and higher build-out rates and increasing the number of such planning permissions—can enhance LVC.
Likewise, broader tax reform, including a tax on high-value agricultural and unbuilt land can reduce land values and incentivise land release for housing development.
Expanding social housing
The National Audit Office (2022) estimates a long-run economic return of £2.70 for every £1 invested. To alleviate current pressures on vulnerable households, large sums are spent on housing benefit (‘local housing allowances’) and temporary, often poor-quality, accommodation.
Instead, longer term investment in expanding social housing through building and purchase could have offered far better value. It is vital that such long-term investment29 is paired with land-value capture (enhanced by tax reforms; see below) and planning reform, to maximise the investment return.
Benefits of tax reform and a green land-value tax
The Council Tax is based on 1991 values, uses a banded system with cliff-edges, and is both locally and regionally highly regressive (Adam et al. 2020; Corlett & Gardiner 2018; Dixon et al. 2021).
Stamp Duty on transactions is progressive, but the high marginal rates calcify the housing market, discouraging mobility and down-sizing, and limiting choice. The following graphic (Figure 7) from Cook (2025) examines the joint distributional impact of the two taxes, based on a two-person household in a primary residence.
Stamp Duty is averaged over an assumed fifteen-year holding period. It is apparent that the regressivity of the Council Tax is approximately offset by the progressivity of Stamp Duty (especially in London).
Figure 7.
The reform would require an immediate cut in Stamp Duty and the announcement of a coming tax reform for Council Tax that could take several years to implement. Cuts in Stamp Duty cannot be pre-announced, as transactions and tax revenues would dry up in anticipation.
However, the combination of an immediate cut in Stamp Duty rates (for example, halving them) with a forthcoming proportional property tax would help stabilise Stamp Duty revenue. This is because a jump in housing transactions would be catalysed by the cut in rates and shifts in desired property portfolios induced by the prospect of Council Tax reform.
Coupled with a reduction in transaction taxes, these reforms could increase labour-market flexibility and help the economy adapt to structural shifts. Moreover, they can reduce social exclusion and inequality across regional, intergenerational, and other dimensions, while also cutting greenhouse gas emissions from buildings and contributing to climate-change mitigation.
The OECD (2022), reflecting a widespread view among economists, notes that, because land supply is highly inelastic, taxes on unimproved land are economically efficient, unlike taxes on improvements that can deter investment. As the problem of deterring investment is especially germane to business, shifting the UK’s Business Rates to LVT would be particularly beneficial for economic efficiency and growth; see Muellbauer (2005) and the Mirrlees Review (2011).
According to the UNEP (2020), 28 per cent of emissions of energy-related CO2 emissions come from the operation of buildings. A Green Land-Value Tax would combine a charge on land with a charge on buildings, offset by a discount based on carbon emissions—a split-rate property tax designed to reconcile climate goals with equity and housing affordability (see Muellbauer 2023).
A Green Land-Value Tax would require a property revaluation which separates the land and building values. Such a revaluation has recently been carried out in Germany. In the UK, sometimes arbitrary differences in land values between nearby locations due to the planning system increase the complexity of separating land from building values.
However, automatic valuation methods for conventional property valuations have made great strides in accuracy, speed and lower costs, given developments in AI, machine learning and granular data availability.
A feasible short-term goal would be the combination of a proportional property tax on residential property with green discounts, and a land tax on high-valued unbuilt land and agricultural land. The high-value land tax (for example, on value exceeding £40,000 per hectare) would provide a powerful incentive for improving build-out rates and the release of land for New Town developments.
Such a tax requires the greater transparency in land-market pricing resulting from the compulsory registration at the Land Registry of all land option contracts, as recommended by the Lyons Housing Review (2014) and progressed under the 2023 Levelling-up and Regeneration Act.
A simple, equity-based deferral model (Muellbauer 2018) would grant every retired household the right to defer tax, with the tax authority registering a proportionate interest at the Land Registry equal to the unpaid tax each year. For instance, a 0.5 per cent rate for cash-payers and 0.6 per cent for deferrers would result in a 6 per cent tax of the sale value after ten years.
Conclusions
Building targets remain unrealistic, land-value capture is stalled and the construction industry resists change.
Successful examples of widespread access to shelter—such as Singapore and Vienna—share a common factor: public ownership or control of much of the land. Community land trusts offer another way of providing shelter by eliminating the part of the demand for housing based on the historic reputation of land as an ever-appreciating asset.
Declaration of conflict of interest
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Muellbauer, J. (2026), ‘Land, housing and the British economy’, Journal of the British Academy, 14(3): a22 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/014.a22