Medicine that is hard to swallow.

Not Amoxycillin, but a cure for the ridiculously over-inflated British housing market.

It seems that house prices are starting to fall.

We desperately need cheaper housing - prices have become ludicrous as cheap loans became available and larger mortgages more affordable. At one time a mortgage of 2.5X the larger income, 1X the smaller was all that any building society would offer. Then came Maggie Thatcher and the ethos became greed is good - house prices skyrocketed at the rate of £1000 a week in London in the mid 80s (that's £1000 a week on a £35,000-£40,000 house). We moved from our maisonette to a 3 bed house at this time, and in the next 5 years it went from £36,500 to about £100,000, then back down to the £74,000 that we sold at to move to our present home in 1990.

At the time of our move we met many in the trap of negative equity - owing more on a mortgage than their house was worth. It was also the time of crucifying interest rates, at 15% or more, and many simply lost everything they'd worked for, unable to maintain mortgage payments or recover equity after selling their homes.

Chris and I still remember the young couple whose house we viewed in Didcot: he was a builder, and there was no work, they'd bought at the crest of the boom and done the house to suit themselves. The girl was younger than Chris and had a baby in her arms - the look of despair on their faces was painful, and we almost wished we could buy the house to help them, except that wouldn't even clear their debts. And there were many like that.

The result of that era, plus joining the EU laid the foundations for todays housing market. A shocked mortgage industry found ways to make mortgages more affordable, while the European banks required UK interest rates reduced down to their levels before allowing the pound to be linked to Euro rates. But underlying that is the fact that housing stock never depreciated back to the level it was at before the boom started, and has remained far too high ever since. Conditions aren't right for a market crash like we experienced then, and as long as interest rates don't escalate it'll never happen. But we do need a reduction in the price of housing compared to salaries, and this is the part that will hurt. If they could just remain static for the next 15 years then that would help a very great deal.