"Australia, New Zealand, Canada, the United States, the Netherlands and Sweden have also placed heavy emphasis on home ownership. But Britain is one of the more extreme cases, and the consequences have been profound." Prof. John Muellbauer, University of Oxford.

Home ownership has been embedded as a defining aspiration in British society since the Thatcher Government's reforms of the 1980s.

As the primacy of these polices has remained unchallenged in the subsequent decades, a distinct British property democracy has emerged. In the UK 70% of the home value is embedded in the land rather than the value, a figure much greater than the OECD average of 40%.

With wealth tied up in land value, and problems with supply, an affordability crisis has taken root. Housing has become what some have described as a 'wicked' policy problem, tied to electoral interests, generational divides and attitudes to wealth. It is increasingly a mechanism for transmitting inequality in the country.

Why housing markets fail and how to fix them

John Muellbauer, who leads the Macroeconomics and Housing project at INET Oxford, works on policy solutions to the housing crisis. His recent INET Oxford Working Paper outlined how Britain can reform it's council tax system, which has been largely untouched since the 1990s.

In a new long-form profile for the University of Oxford's Pulse magazine, John goes into depth on the origins of and what is required to reform what his call's Britain's 'distinctively dysfunctional' housing market.

John argues wholesale change is needed, including looking at policies such as right to buy; local authority borrowing; direct public investment; public private partnerships; land value capture and community land trusts.