Tackling housing market volatility in the UK. Part I: Long- and short-term volatility

The UK housing market has exhibited persistent price volatility over the past
40 years, which has deleterious social and economic consequences. This is the first of two papers to synthesise the work of the Joseph Rowntree Foundation’s Housing Market Taskforce that was established to identify long-term solutions to tackle, first, the root causes of volatility and, second, to provide better protection for households from its consequences. This paper deals with the first of these issues. It argues that there is a need to improve housing supply to tackle volatility in the long run, but that that counter-cyclical policies are also required to tackle volatility in the short run.