"Lies, damned lies and rent statistics"

Fine article by Ian Mulheirn, who is one the heroic few pointing out that the "lack of housing supply" explanation for high prices is a bit of a myth. Sure, selling prices have rocketed, but that's largely due to easy credit availability/low interest rates. The true measure of housing costs is of course rents. They have shot up in London/south east over the last twenty years, but that's due to higher wage differentials and not lack of supply. Overall, they'd been pretty flat.

The housing supply numbers commonly used and, until recently, the housing need numbers bandied about, have long been wrong or misleading. Given the importance of rent — the ‘price’ that tells us whether demand for housing services is outstripping the supply — using the right measure of that is particularly vital...

Unfortunately [the ONS Index of Private Housing Rental Prices] only goes back to 2005. However, combining it with the prototype index for the UK prior to 2005— albeit based on a much smaller sample —suggests that real like-for-like rents have been pretty benign since 1996, and comfortably below average household income growth.