When George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, is spotted outside Westminster, he is very often making an appearance on a building site, wearing a fluorescent safety jacket. It was no surprise to hear him claim once again, in his budget speech on March 19th, that "We're getting Britain building". Sadly, given the huge extent of Britain's housing shortage, the chancellor's proposed interventions do not add up to much. The biggest announcement was that the government will extend Help to Buy, a scheme that guarantees mortgages for people purchasing newly built homes. Mr Osborne also hopes to build a new town at Ebbsfleet, a patch of post-industrial land in the Thames estuary, and promises to speed up the redevelopment of several rotting 1960s and 1970s social housing estates in London. By making it easier for house builders to shift their stock, Help to Buy has probably helped boost building slightly, especially in northern cities where construction had all but ceased. Extending the programme will boost Britain's housing stock by 120,000 by 2020, the Treasury claims, though it will also expose taxpayers to any future house-price crash. Mr Osborne also announced a new fund to support lending to small house builders—who have struggled to get financing in recent years— which ought to have a similar effect. The new town is more adventurous. Ebbsfleet, where a high-speed rail link to London opened in 2007, has had plans for new homes for almost 20 years. Few have been built, mostly because the site is a partially flooded quarry with little in the way of shops, public transport or infrastructure. The government's new idea is to create a development corporation with control over planning and the ability to borrow to clean up and prepare the site. That was how post-war new towns such as Milton Keynes and Stevenage were built. A similar interventionism is visible in the plan to rebuild 1960s estates. Many of these, such as the Aylesbury Estate in Southwark and Robin Hood Gardens in Tower Hamlets, are crumbling. By increasing the density on the sites, and using the proceeds of selling the extra houses built, it ought to be possible to cover the cost of reconstruction. But councils have been short of money to do much themselves, and private developers extract high returns in exchange for putting up capital. With central-government money, those projects ought to move quicker and councils ought to get more for their land.

单选题 George Osborne's housing proposal seems to be ineffective because of______.

单选题 According to Paragraph 2, Help to Buy is a project designed to______.

单选题 We can learn from Paragraph 3 that extending Help to Buy______.

单选题 Ebbsfleet is mentioned in the text to show______.

单选题 In return for investing in estate reconstruction, private developers need______.