... were building nearly 300,000 homes a year. Today it's half that, but demand has increased. The result is a legacy of spiralling house prices, rising land values and a shortage of affordable homes. In London and the South East more and more young people and key workers can't afford to live where they want. They're being priced out of their communities. In other parts of the country - in the North and Midlands - the housing market has collapsed and thousands of homes face demolition. While private house building declined over the past 30 years so did the condition of local authority housing. By 1997 the repairs backlog on local authority housing was a record £19 billion. Throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s not enough was done. The problem just got worse. As more people moved into home ownership - many of them through the Right to Buy - ...

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