Taking the Hard Road








Then in 2012 the council comes back to her:



Council: You’d be helping the construction sector.

Susan: <click>

Council: ….Hello? ….Hello?





Yes David, we certainly are.


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4 Responses to Taking the Hard Road

  1. I’m still appalled that house prices are beyond the reach of most people, especially in areas like Devon where I live. Cameron is also talking of relaxing the proportion of ‘affordable’ (!!!) homes in developments; who’s going to buy the houses in any case? Recently an entire estate in a Devon town where businesses are folding fast and where only a couple of houses were sold was offloaded to a housing association in Liverpool, who filled it with people for whom there are no jobs.
    I looked at new estate locally, and a one-bedroom flat is £100,000 in a place where wages are low and work is often seasonal. Rent for similar is £550 a month! Come on! Someone (the Government maybe?) needs to consider the problems and regulate the housing ‘market’. Housing is a right in a civilised society, not a commodity.

    • If the government were to finance a scheme for building affordable housing they could drive economic growth and at the same time start to address the problem you are talking about.

      As it is they are choosing to cut spending and hoping a deeply depressed private sector sorts the problems out. No sign of that on the horizon though.

  2. One of the constraints that Mervyn King put on quantative easing was that it had to go via the banks and could not be put directly into state projects such as building affordable housing. This has meant that the money has not reached small businesses because the government’s (slightly psychotic) faith in the banks is badly misplaced.

    The announcements yesterday are looking to circumvent that constraint as far as I can see.

    Secondly, councils have naively put onerous percentage requirements on developers for affordable housing. If a developer has land and planning permission but doesn’t build, you have to ask why. The issue as far as I can see is that the public sector is unsympathetic to the needs of the private sector, such as turning a profit, which is how jobs are protected and companies grow. Allowing a slightly smaller proportion of affordable housing will mean more sites are developed so we will end up with more affordable housing.

    One alternative would be for government to engage with developers to build 100% affordable housing projects but I think this is a step to towards “ghettoisation” and, therefore, not a good route.

    The only way to bring house prices down is to meet demand with supply, which, in theory, would ultimately result in all housing being affordable. The next generation will need to see their homes as somewhere to live and not an investment.

    Sorry for banging on about this but I think that state investment in construction is one of the few ways of practically kick0starting the economy. The Tories need to stop shying away from state intervention. The private sector can’t solve this problem.

    Finally, I’m not in construction!

    • I take your point, but disagree that meeting demand with supply is the only way, or indeed the right way, to solve the problem. We need market regulation – it’s the wish of people to live in areas like mine that drives purchase and rental prices through the roof, to the point where local people have no hope of affording a HOME as opposed to an ‘investment property’. Our communities are literally being destroyed as wealthy people from other areas move in and treat the country as a theme park. This is not simply about economics, and can’t ever be. Why do we not tax people (massively) on second homes and invest the income in local housing? By the way, the term ‘affordable’ is a nonsense – very few new homes are that.

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