A COUPLE of days before the Commons broke up for the summer a group of sixth form economics students from Ringwood School visited the Palace of Westminster and I had half an hour or so with them.

One of them raised the problem they will face as young people finding somewhere affordable to live anywhere near the place where they have been raised.

It is worth reflecting on the fact that the ‘baby boomers’ - now entering retirement - enjoyed rather better prospects than this generation. They had the prospect of ‘a job for life’ with relatively generous occupational pension provision. They occupy properties worth multiples of the price that they originally paid, and they had their higher education entirely at the tax-payers’ expense.

Those sixth formers, by contrast, face substantial debt if they go to university – the workplace for them is likely to involve changing careers a number of times, and final salary pensions are history. As for housing, deposits required for a mortgage locally are currently well beyond their reach.

It is for these reasons that I am rather scathing about critics of the Government’s ‘Help to Buy’ scheme, which is designed to address precisely this problem. Many can afford mortgage repayments but have little prospect of saving the deposit without the help of wealthy – or not so wealthy – parents. The purpose of the scheme is to help them with the deposit.

Ultimately however, as the economics students will understand, the rising price of housing is driven by a shortage, and the only way to take the pressure off the price, is to increase the supply. For years we have been building too few houses to meet our needs. Part of the problem is the clash of interests between those who need a home and those who already own a property and have become, not so much NIMBYs as ‘BANANAs’ (Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anyone).

The purpose of the Government’s planning reform has been to take the heat out of these conflicts. It begins from the premise that communities understand their housing needs and will welcome new housing to address them, if they are in the driving seat, and can choose the type and location of the housing.

If the elected representatives draw up a proper plan, then it is that plan which will determine where and how things are built. Developers will soon start to take the hint and realise that, by putting in applications which conform to the plan, they will avoid lengthy and expensive disputes.

The key to this process is that local authorities need to wake up to the new power that they have been given and develop a local plan which is robust and which enjoys community support. Hopefully, this offers a better prospect for our young people to afford a home, in the place they call home.