Repairing housing is key to Britain’s economic recovery

Labour’s manifesto suggests it understands how a dysfunctional housing sector destroys lives, but do the party's commitments go far enough?

The perilous state of the UK housing market is an excellent example of the “housing theory of everything”. This nerdy idea, coined by economist Thomas Piketty, claims that housing underpins everything in a functioning economy and that if you fix the housing problem first, everything else – from wage growth to productivity, from tax take to children’s av…