Last to spot first time buyer crisis - by Rupert Bates

Now I know the Deputy Prime Minister feels stressed and overworked, but do politicians ever take their noses out of their red boxes and smell the real world percolating?

How else to explain Nick Clegg announcing last week as if it happened yesterday and only his position in one of the highest offices of State gave him access to such privileged information  that - wait for it - first-time buyers were having a tough time and unable to obtain mortgages.

For the love of god man, where have you been? The government has donned its shining armour and called mortgage lenders, housebuilders and other industry leaders to an emergency roundtable, presumably including Grant ‘YIMBY rocks' Shapps and Sir Lunchalot Eric Pickles, now known as the Laurel and Hardy of housing delivery. Perhaps Stan and Ollie should take the housing ladder and ram the first rung straight through the window of the lenders. Actually, come to think of it, why do we still call them lenders?

The housing industry and especially housebuilders have been banging this drum for an age. If I printed out all the press releases I got on the subject of first-time buyers frozen out of the market from Stewart Baseley, boss of the Home Builders Federation and former Barratt and New Homes Marketing Board chief David Pretty, there would be no forests left for the government to sell off.

What.house.co.uk and our sister print publication Showhouse - not to mention a host of other housing media and professionals - have covered the issue of banks, bailed out by first-time buyers and everyone else, refusing to lend, eversince credit crunch entered the lexicon.

The banks have made monkeys of Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling - not difficult admittedly - as they took the cash and promised to use it to stimulate the economy, the housing market and small businesses, with fingers crossed behind their backs, before using it for bonuses.

The trouble is when the housebuilding industry warns about how first-time buyers, with perfectly good jobs and sizeable deposits, are unable to get on the ladder, everyone shouts vested interest.

Well of course it is - selling new homes is good for housebuilding business. But what's good for housebuilding business is great for the economy - the knock-on effect considerable in terms of job creation, wealth creation and social mobility.

The army of government advisers and researchers may shrink as the cuts take effect, but it is well worth in key industry sectors having staff scanning the specialist media and monitoring the social networks and forming a sentence and a conclusion from the words on the street. That way the government may spot problems before they become terminal. 

As it is David Attenborough has been commissioned to do a programme called ‘In search of the First Time Buyer.' If he does find one, he or she will be sitting beside a deposit big enough to make an elephant proud.

Rupert Bates is editorial director of www.whathouse.co.uk