Fortsätt till huvudinnehåll

What housing crisis?


The Chief Executive of Shelter has written an article in today's Guardian about the housing crisis and the need to build more.

It is not a crisis. The situation has been much the same since the end of World War 2. The problem is chronic. Houses are affordable. What is not affordable is the land the houses stand on. Land value taxation is an essential element in any solution to this.

But where are all these new houses going to go? And if they were all built, how would their occupants get to work? And where would their children go to school? And what about all the other services they will need? The problem cannot be considered in isolation.

A major factor in all this is regional imbalance. 85% of the UK population live within an area bounded by Leeds, Dover, Bournemouth, Bristol, Birmingham and Liverpool - about one third of the total land area. And most of that within a 100 mile circle centred on Oxford. This is due to decades of economic mismanagement. A major factor is our tax system which ignored the benefit of location. Thus, fringe areas such as Devon and Cornwall, and most of Britain north of Manchester, are marginalised, as the higher costs of production in those areas, due, eg to transport, are not compensated for in any way. So the drift to the South East goes on as it has for the past fifty years.

To keep on building houses in London and the South East is not a policy. A policy must include tax reform so that the amount paid reflect location value - ie land value taxation again, which effectively creates tax havens precisely where they are most needed. This will help to redress regional economic imbalance and revive those parts of Britain remote from London and the South East.

And it need major infrastructure improvements such as a new high speed rail link with full size trains (not the mini-trains they run at the moment), a shift of freight on to rail and urban light rail/tramway schemes to provide adequate feeder for long distance travellers. And land value taxation must be part of the policy for infrastructure improvements, because without it, the benefits of the enhanced values are just picked up by landowners who happen to win out and the Treasury has to fork out but gets little in return.

The issue is one of land use and fiscal planning. And it also needs vision, a commodity that seems to be in short supply in the UK at the moment.

It is alarming that the Chief Executive of Shelter does not appear to appreciate the big picture which forms the background to the problem they are concerned with. Really, one despairs.

I look around me in Scandinavia and see that people generally are enjoying a markedly higher quality of life than in the UK, both in their own private spaces and in the public environment. Yet these are poor countries with small populations on the fringe of Europe. If they can afford it then the big wealthy UK can.

Kommentarer

Populära inlägg i den här bloggen

Importing people to sustain demand

I got involved in a discussion with a Youtuber called “Philosophy all along”. This was in connection with criticism of Trump’s policy of deporting illegal migrants, which he argued would be bad for the economy as it would reduce demand. This implies that there is a need to import people to sustain demand. There is no obvious reason why a population should not be able to consume everything that the same population produces. If it can not, then something else is going on. It is a basic principle that wages are the least that workers will accept to do a job. Wages are a share of the value added by workers through their wages. The remainder is distributed as economic rent, after government has taken its cut in taxes. Monopoly profit is a temporary surplus that after a delay gets absorbed into economic rent. Land values in Silicon Valley are an example of this; it's like a gold rush. The miners get little out of it. Rent and tax syphon purchasing power away from those who produce the g...

The dreadfulness of British governance

I wrote to my MP on two entirely separate issues recently. The first was to do with the replacement for the Inter City 125 train, which at £2.6 million per vehicle, is twice as expensive as it ought to be. The second concerned the benefits of a switch from business rate and Council Tax to a tax based on site values. In both cases, the replies were full of spurious, unsubstantiated assertions and completely flawed arguments. This is typical. You will not get an iota of sense from the government on any area of public policy at all - finance, economics, trade and employment, agriculture, housing, health, transport, energy. All junk. If you write to your MP you will invariably receive answers that are an insult to your intelligence, no matter what subject you are writing about. Of course they cannot understand statistics. They are innumerate. Whitehall is staffed with idiots with a high IQ. Look at their IT projects. And mind your purse, they will have that too.

How much more will the British tolerate?

The British are phlegmatic, tolerant and slow to rouse. Thus there was no great reaction after the terrorist attack in July 2005. The murder of Lee Rigby created a sense of outrage, but nothing more, since it appeared to be an isolated incident. Two serious incidents within a fortnight are another matter. Since the first major terrorist incident in 2001, authority has tried to persuade the public that Islam is a religion of peace, that these were isolated events, or the actions of deranged "lone wolves", having nothing to do with Islam, or to reassure that the chances of being killed in a terrorist attack were infinitesimally small. These assurances are are beginning to wear thin. They no longer convince. If government does not act effectively, people will take the law into their own hands. What, however, would effective action look like? What sort of effective action would not amount to rough justice for a lot of innocent people? Given the difficulties of keeping large n...