Britain’s housing crisis won’t be fixed without a new tax landscape

We need policies that stop treating property as a store of wealth and that allow people to move home cheaply

John Healey’s critics on the right and left accused him of dodging the big questions in his first budget. The chancellor failed to announce reforms that might tackle some of Britain’s chronic problems, they say.

Healey’s scatter-gun budget, as the Resolution Foundation called it, was more about politics than economics, and unapologetically so.

Housing was one area of policy that took up a considerable chunk of his speech. And yet the measures amounted to very little, if a test of his policy changes was to ask how different will the UK be at the next election.