Official estimates from the ONS: 'UK average house prices increased by 8.6% over the year to February 2021, up from 8.0% in January 2021; this is the highest annual growth rate the UK has seen since October 2014." Well done everyone, you just made a home even more unaffordable.

This house price boom in the midst of the worst economic crisis in three centuries is the inflation we should really fear. Politicians too often think rising house prices are good politics. They're wrong and that's only true if you pander to a great public illusion.

Specifically, I mean the illusion that rising house prices make you better off. They don't. Look around you; you're living in the same home. Nothing has changed.

We revile consumer price inflation (and economists obsess about whether it's too high) cos we think of ourselves as buyers and don't want to have to pay more. But with house prices we think of ourselves as sellers. So we'll be able to sell for more, right? Giant freebie, right?

Wrong. So wrong. Unless you plan to rent - or live in a tent - then you'll also have to buy a home. And the price of the place you want to buy will also have risen.

Say you're a young couple owning a flat that's gone from £50,000 to £100,000 in 5 years. You're expecting a baby so your next move in the market is UP - in other words you need to upsize to a house.

The house, however, has also doubled in price over 5 years. It's gone from £100,000 to £200,000. So what's the net effect on your chances of getting that house? Well, you've gained £50,000 more. But when you buy the new place it will cost you £100,000 more. You lose.

Assuming prices rise by the same amount over the market, house price rises make you worse off if your next move is to upsize. They make no difference if you're not moving. And they only benefit those whose next move is to DOWN-size.

They're the only ones who can truly say house price rises have made them better off. And who are they? Generally, the older generation who were able to ride this ongoing 50-year surge in house price inflation and are now in a position to downsize (if suitable homes are there).

The younger generation - many of whom are having families and need proper family homes even as their parents under-occupy their empty nest houses - are the losers. Where they can afford, it's largely because central bank policy has kept interest rates super-low.

Instead of building sufficient affordable homes for families to live in and aiming to get house prices down, Chancellors from Lawson in the 1980s to Osborne to Sunak have spent public money pushing prices up further. Why is this regarded as a sensible use of 'taxpayer's money?

And since a few days ago, we are collectively, through the government, underwriting the 'risk' that house prices fall. In other words, if we get what some regard as a desirable policy goal - falling house prices - then the taxpayer will be supporting banks again.

A house price crash would increase the purchasing power of anyone whose next move in the property market is UP. Conventional economists, I'm well aware, will say 'it's not the price that counts, it's the repayments and they're super-cheap cos of ultra-low interest rates'.

But why is it we're relaxed about the risk of rising interest rates when it comes to homeowners - but super-worried (at least, if you're Rishi Sunak) when it comes to the public finances? Who's more vulnerable: the government, that can print money? Or the homeowner, who can't?