Questioning has turned to housing, and the challenges with high rental increases and constructing new residential properties.

Independent MP Allegra Spender asked about the intersection between houses being built by governments and those being built privately, and whether the two are adding to the challenges in building new housing.

Bullock replies that there is “quite a pipeline” of residential properties to be built, but approvals have been “very low”.

“Part of the reason for the pipeline being quite long is that it’s been taking quite a long time to complete houses, much longer than it did pre pandemic, and that’s the result of shortages, of trades, cost implications of the supply chains,” she says.

“Brad [Jones, assistant governor of financial markets] referred earlier to a number of small construction companies, companies that perhaps did a fixed price bid on a house, agreed to build it for a fixed price, and found prices rose, and that’s caused problems.

“So the pipeline has been long, for a long time, and it’s been strung out, so that’s that’s not helping in terms of detached housing.”

Bullock adds that there is lots of competition between the residential and non-residential construction sectors, which makes it hard to get tradespeople and affects high density housing in particular.

The process for developers to have higher density residential properties to be built also “slows things up immensely”, she says, and builders struggle to make projects “stack up” commercially because of construction costs.

“So the cost to them to build these new flats, people aren’t willing to pay, [or] can’t pay them. It’s unaffordable,” she says.

“There’s all these factors together which are impacting on the supply of housing, not just attached houses, but broadly speaking, which are making it very challenging to build enough housing at the moment.”