Mr. Sebastian Barnes:

There are lots of questions around housing policy that are complicated issues on which the council does not have a view. What we can say is that we do see through the national development plan a big increase in public investment in housing. To look at how that is being accommodated, a growing economy, falling interest rates and a not massively fast increase in current spending are all coming together and they are creating a space to undertake that investment while, at the same time, bringing the budget towards balance and bringing debt down. The Government has been able to tackle those two objectives at the same time to restore the public finances to a safer place and to have a significant increase in the amount for public housing investment. It is important to underline that it is doing those two things. We produced a new analytical note just before our fiscal assessment report came out on public investment. One of the big things there is the supply constraint. We estimate that it will need another 30,000 working in construction to deliver the plan the Government now has. That might be quite difficult to find. There are very few unemployed construction workers. Migration is a bit more complicated than it was previously. In some ways the bottleneck may be on the construction sector side.