In the UK housing market it’s back to the 1970s

The ever widening gap in regional property values is spelt out in Mail Online is even more remorseless detail than the news section of its source, the upmarket estate agents Savils.

Homes in the ten richest London boroughs are worth the combined total of houses in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, it emerged yesterday.

And in a dramatic illustration of the growing wealth gap between the South East and the rest of the UK, a survey has revealed that Elmbridge, a borough in the Surrey stockbroker belt, has a housing stock of £31 billion – £2 billion more than the whole of Glasgow.

Northern Ireland’s housing stock of 765,000 properties is worth £72 billion. The region has experienced the steepest fall in a single year -just over 10% last year or 50% over 5 years. Still, one person’s investment disaster is another’s opportunity. To us oldies it’s a gap that’s just  like old times, when we painfully straddled the Irish Sea…..

Brian Walker

Former BBC journalist and manager in Belfast, Manchester and London, Editor Spolight; Political Editor BBC NI; Current Affairs Commissioning editor BBC Radio 4; Editor Political and Parliamentary Programmes, BBC Westminster; former London Editor Belfast Telegraph. Hon Senior Research Fellow, The Constitution Unit, Univ Coll. London