Ed Balls MP, Labour’s Shadow Chancellor, responding to the Financial Policy Committee’s report, said:

“These measures, while welcome, simply reinforce the fact that it is the Chancellor who has to act to tackle the root cause of our unbalanced housing market. We are not building enough homes to match rising demand and responsibility for that lies with the Chancellor, not the Bank of England. As the Governor pointedly said last month the Bank of England can’t build a single house.

"Labour has repeatedly called for action to boost housing supply, but the Government has failed to act and we’ve seen the lowest levels of house building in peacetime since the 1920s. The danger of George Osborne’s failure to get more homes built is that we end up with a premature rise in interest rates to rein in the housing market which ends up hitting millions of families and businesses.

"You can’t deal with the cost-of-living crisis and create a strong and balanced recovery without building more homes. That’s why Labour has committed to getting at least 200,000 new homes built a year. And we should introduce a Help to Build scheme for small and medium-sized builders alongside a reformed Help to Buy.”