Maybe a little bit of both, but the real gap is affordable housing.  This is a legacy of a 25 year gap in public investment in housing.  The private sector has continued building houses, with numbers going up and down in relation to prices and economic activity, but without public housing investment we have seen the housing mix change drastically.

New builds have increasingly been aimed at the top end of the market and have been often purchased by people who already own houses and have ready access to finance. So while we are building more homes than ever before, affordability has been going down.  This pattern has nothing to do with the planning system and tweaking the planning system won’t fix it.