A REPORT published this week by the National Housing Federation says that the average 21-year-old in Britain will have to wait until he or she reaches the age of 43 until getting a foot onto the property ladder. The findings are based on how long it would take the average young person to afford a 20 per cent deposit and earn enough to maintain mortgage payments. Unfortunately for young people in the South West, the wait will be even longer. Here they will have to save until they are 48 – assuming that they delayed having a family and saved with discipline along the way.

The prospect of having to save diligently for more than two decades before being able to purchase your first home is far from fair, especially considering the high and increasing rate of second-home ownership we're all familiar with in Devon. Meanwhile, home construction has declined to its lowest peacetime level since 1924.

This inaccessibility of affordable housing is a problem that has been left to fester for far too long and needs urgent action. Earlier this week even former Cabinet minister Ed Balls recognised that "Labour leaders over several decades never paid enough sustained attention to housing…"

For that reason in the Coalition Agreement the Liberal Democrats and our Conservative colleagues outlined multiple policies to make buying a home more of a possibility and less of a dream. From exploring measures geared toward bringing the 300,000 empty homes around the country back into use and promoting shared ownership schemes to help people at least part-own their homes, to incentivising local authorities to develop sustainable homes, we are determined to improve the housing supply across the UK.

As the housing minister simply put it, the single biggest way we can improve the lack of housing is to get more homes built. In order to do so, the Government will be offering councils in England extra money for every new home built, particularly affordable homes. The New Homes Bonus will not instruct local authorities how or where to build, but it will reward them for giving planning permission and supporting the construction of new homes where they are needed and wanted locally.

These steps alone will not fully address the problem nor will they improve the situation overnight. The banks' continued reluctance to lend makes securing a mortgage all the more difficult and the lower wages of the South West should be brought more in line with the rest of the country. Nevertheless, I believe the Government's schemes proposed thus far are positive first steps and indicative of the "sustained attention" future homeowners deserve and will finally get.