Rents and prices are being driven up by the surge in demand for houses following government schemes such as Funding for Lending and Help to Buy but the supply of new homes is failing to keep pace.
Cable said: “Property is simply unaffordable for families without big incomes or access to the bank of mum and dad. Yet we are nowhere near recapturing the house building drive which pulled Britain out of the slump in the 1930s.”
Cable said barely 100,000 homes a year are being completed - a quarter of what was being achieved in the 1960s.
And there is an increased pressure on housing stocks because two million social homes have been sold under the Right to Buy scheme since Mrs Thatcher took power in 1979 and three quarters of a million were sold under Labour.
Cable said this has added an enormous pressure on families trapped by a “lethal” combination of low pay, rising rents and tighter benefit rules.
He added: “The priority right now is increasing housing supply through private and public sectors.”
