Please join us for the launch of the New Economics Foundation's major new report into the broken land system. The report showcases new research revealing how high land values both drive the housing crisis, and put up significant barriers to any attempts to solve it. Join us to discuss one of the major factors behind the growing housing disaster in the UK - unaffordable, inflated land values - and explore vital first steps to ensure that land is used for the benefit of everyone

Confirmed speakers include:

Rt Hon John McDonnell MP (Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer)

Polly Neate (CEO, Shelter)

Sara Mahmoud (Senior Economist, New Economics Foundation)

Beth Stratford (housing and land economist, co-founder of the London Renters Union)

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High rents. Evictions and insecure tenancies. Millions of families priced out of home ownership. Over a million households on the waiting list for social housing. The effects of our broken housing system are all too obvious.

What is less obvious, but no less broken, is the market which sits beneath the housing market, and drives many of the worst aspects of it. When we talk about high rents, or high house prices, what we are really talking about is the unaffordability of land.

We will never tackle the housing crisis until we take major steps to address the broken land system. New research by the New Economics Foundation shows how high land values both drive the housing crisis, and put up significant barriers to any attempts to solve it.

It shows how in places with high land values the housing crisis is most severe: rents eat up a massive chunk of people’s income, and the numbers of homeless people housed in temporary accommodation dwarfs other areas, hitting the poorest most severely. It also shows how these same high land values systematically stymie attempts to redress the housing crisis, such that the building of affordable homes has plummeted in exactly those places which have the highest land values, and so need them most.

Please join us to discuss the report’s main findings, as well as its recommendations for how to fix the broken land system.