NIMBYs are destroying California. They'll do the same to London if we don't stop them.

California, the golden land of promise, blessed by sunshine, fertility and the fruits of liberty. It's in a mess, you might even say dying. For the first time in its history the Golden State has more people leaving than arriving. And the reasons? As Jimmy McMillan once said "the rent's too damned high". California has an acute, almost terminal, housing problem:

The median price for a house now tops $600,000, more than twice the national level. The state has four of the country’s five most expensive residential markets—Silicon Valley, San Francisco, Orange County and San Diego. (Los Angeles is seventh.) The poverty rate, when adjusted for the cost of living, is the worst in the nation. California accounts for 12% of the U.S. population, but a quarter of its homeless population.

Four out of ten Californians pay more than 30% of their income on rent or mortgage, the worst in the USA. And the reason is pretty simple. Californians have voted, agitated, campaigned, petitioned and marched against building new homes - again and again. NIMBYs are destroying California.

This being America, the finger is pointed at the zoning system used by town planners over there and, specifically, zoning only for single family homes. Worse than this, these zones don't just say "you can only build single detached homes here" they also dictate the size of individual plots. And in places where agricultural land sells for $1m per acre, limiting density to at low as 10 homes per acre makes for expensive homes. But it's not just this rather crazy system but that it is made worse by having 90% of the land in the state excluded from development and by having a set of NIMBY-inspired environmental, heritage and ecological policies the main effect of which is to prevent development.

Bob Tilman has spent best part of six years trying to get permission to redevelop his laudromat in San Francisco into an apartment block. There's still no permission and opponents - yes opponents of housing is a city with a huge crisis - have used political pressure, environmental regulations and heritage rules to try and prevent the scheme. Elsewhere in the city the same anti-housing campaigners have stopped the development of a homeless shelter.

We can, from the comfort of civilised England, smile and laugh at California's problems. We can point at the gross hypocrisy of progressive, left-of-centre politicians working with wealthy residents to stop affordable housing. We can even boggle as politicians elected on supposedly pro-housing platforms then spend half their campaigning on stopping housing. But we need to pause for a minute and consider whether, in our 'world city' the same problems are brewing.

Spend even a little bit of time looking into London's housing issues and you'll quickly find all the same conditions we see in California. Not just rising homelessness, sofa-surfing and exploitative, often illegal rentals, but politicians (commonly those progressive left-of-centre politicians like we see in California) saying that the impossible is possible, that we can meet housing need in a growing city without making a lot more land available for housing. There are nice warm words about 'brownfield' sites, talk of increased density and affordable housing provisions, but when the chance comes to get one of those dense development with lots of affordable housing, reasons are quickly found to refuse the development. "It's too tall". "What about heritage". "Ooo Kew Gardens".

This pattern is repeated everywhere as council planning committees indulge loud NIMBY lobbies by drawing up the most restrictive local plan possible with the least amount of housing land allocated they can get away with. And then those same Councils lobby for billions in public money to "solve the housing crisis" - the housing crisis their planning decisions have contributed to. Just about every home counties planning authority is squirming about trying to reduce the self-evident need for them to play a bigger part in meeting the housing demand that a massively successful London brings.

The planning system has a sclerotic local plan process, is obsessed with protecting the 'green belt' at all cost, and is vulnerable to loud, organised anti-housing minorities. We should look at California and take the warning - get the system changed, allow more housing development and put the NIMBYs back in the box. Most people support more housing for families, more affordable housing and a fairer planning system, it's time politicians - nationally and locally - had the balls to face down the anti-housing campaigners and get a nation where the rent's not too damned high.

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Embracing disruption - why our approach to housing and transport regulation has to change

On the face of it, it's a good news story. Clever architects in Alabama have reimagined the house so it can be built for just $20,000. They're only small, not really so very different from that icon of American living space, the trailer, but these houses do represent some sort of progress.

Until of course you speak to a city planner, a banker, an insurance company. Then there's a problem:

"The most daunting problems aren't brick and mortar problems, they're these network and system problems that are threaded together and all intersect in the built environment," he says. "We're able to attack all these problems simultaneously—when we see a lever over here and wiggle it, we can very clearly see the implication it has on other systems down the road."

The barrier to, in this case, housing affordability isn't the prosaic task of building a home but rather the collection of systems, regulations, controls and vested interests that have grown up in our sophisticated societies. All of those systems of control exist for a good reason - in the case of housing they make sure that what's built is safe, doesn't harm neighbours, protects heritage and has regard to the environment. Looking at building codes (or regulations as us Brits calls them - for once using a longer word than US bureaucrats) each element, whether it's about wiring, pipes or the depth of foundations was purposive, put there to ensure safety or quality. The problem is that these codes are (because to work they have to be) inflexible - if it says something has to be 3-5mm then it has to be 3-5mm even if technology now means it only has to be 1-1.5mm.

"They're built more like airplanes than houses, which allows us to have them far exceed structural requirements. ... We're using material much more efficiently. But the problem is your local code official doesn't understand that. They look at the documents, and the house is immediately denied a permit simply because the code officials didn't understand it."

The issue here - and it's a significant one given the current rate of technological change, much of it disruptive - is that regulatory reform is a slow and painful process filled with all sorts of obstacles. It took the UK government three years to conduct a review of housing standards that didn't even touch the core of building regulations (although it did prevent local councils dreaming up their own 'tougher' regulations especially around environmental standards).

None of this is to suggest that regulation isn't a good idea but rather to recognise that technological change moves faster than regulatory reform and that often the barriers to that reform are as much about protecting the current systems (and those who profit from them) as they are about ensuring safety and environmental protection. Although I've been talking about housebuilding, the same issues apply to other targets of technological disruption such as taxis, hotels and retail distribution - the regulatory environment is captured by the business and their public sector 'clients'.

Here's an example from Barcelona:

Like other big tourist destinations around the world (for example Berlin and San Francisco), Barcelona is struggling to cope with the influx of millions of tourists each year, many of them staying in short-term rental accommodation, which the local authorities say causes community strife, encourages speculation, and prices locals out of the city by driving up housing costs and limiting the supply of homes for rent.

Pretty straightforward - the city government in the Catalan capital is acting to prevent that community strive and guard against unaffordability. It isn't anything to do with collecting taxes or protecting the interests of existing providers. After all there's a housing shortage in Barcelona?

Barcelona has 283,155 vacant homes, 11% of the total, and 311,653 rented homes, 17.8%, while the defaults on leases have grown by 22.7% compared to the previous study, to stand at an average of 12,897 euros.

So, while rents in Barcelona are sky high and they're clamping down on Airbnb, there are quarter of a million empty homes. This isn't to have a go at Barcelona but rather to illustrate how protecting systems (precisely what that city's left wing mayor says she isn't doing) results in protection of existing interests - in this case hotel owners and landlords of high-priced city centre property.

Our problem is that what we already have in place - in its widest sense, infrastructure - is either vulnerable to digital disruption or else prevents that disruption taking place. And because the regulatory systems track that infrastructure and are difficult to change, other places without such constraints (or with autocratic governments) are able to move more quickly. Worse still, and this is very evident in housing and transport, those profiting from the existing system - or persuaded by politicians that its loss will harm them as we've seen in Barcelona - agitate for extending regulations to capture or prevent disruptive technology.

The new technologies - all that disruptive digital stuff especially - will eventually succeed because they meet consumer demand for things such as cheaper travel and accommodation. What's missing from our regulatory response is a preference for embracing that disruption. Instead, we seek out reasons not to allow a $20,000 house, a cheaper and safer form of taxi or a flexible low-cost means to stay in otherwise unaffordable places. And, as those empty homes in expensive Barcelona attest, our housing markets are crying out for disruption. All our zoning, building codes and planning rules act to prevent this change - making the land, the materials and the labour more expensive and forcing us to spend further billions in incentives and subsidy to stop the whole thing falling over again.

In Bradford we've acres of inner city 'development' land that's mostly just sitting there mouldering. We know there's demand - one local organisation had over 200 enquiries for a handful of new build properties for sale (but no buyers as once you've paid for the land and built the house the price is too high) - but the way we build and the cost of land makes it uneconomic. New approaches such as that $20,000 Alabama house or the prospect of 3D printed homes could work on this land if we purchased it and cleared it - perhaps that would be a better use of Community Infrastructure Levy and affordable housing commuted sums that sticking it into the existing system of housing development.

To make this work - and to make future transport systems work too - we need to design flexibility into regulatory systems allowing greater discretion for individual regulators. We also need to stop doubling-down on failed systems whether it's Barcelona's approach to holiday lets or Palo Alto's crazy planning system. The first question should be 'does this make most people's lives better' not 'can I find someone who doesn't like it' and to create regulations to match when the answer to that first question is 'yes'.

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Does requiring affordable housing reduce supply?

Planning authorities in the UK generally require that a proportion of housing on developments over a certain size is set aside as 'affordable' or else that a commuted sum is paid to the planning authority in order that they may provide affordable housing elsewhere. The definition of affordable here doesn't matter except to note that it is housing at below market prices (either for rent or sale). There is little political objection to this principle other than its degree and in the impact it might have on the viability of development.

The objectives of such policies are firstly to ensure that there is an adequate stock of affordable and social housing so as to meet need, and secondly that communities are 'integrated' (meaning that we don't repeat the errors of the past by building isolated or separate social housing 'ghettoes'). And the use of planning obligations seems to make sense as it ensures delivery.

However, these excellent policies may contain a problem by reducing supply of new housing across all tenures and housing types. In the USA these policies are called 'Inclusionary Zoning' (or IZ) - so named to set them as different from exclusionary zoning that it used to prevent the development of low cost housing - and a couple of US economists, Tom Means and Edward Stringham, have shown how these policies might not be the solution they're cracked up to be:

“Between 1980 and 1990,” they write, “cities imposing below-market housing mandates end up with 9 percent higher prices and 8 percent fewer homes overall. Between 1990 and 2000 cities imposing below market housing mandates end up with 20 percent higher prices and 7 percent fewer homes overall.”

Put simply the imposition of requirements to provide affordable housing on a development site (or else pay a commuted sum) seem to result in less housing being built and, unsurprisingly, house prices being higher. Now it may be that the UK's housing market will behave differently - the problem is that most research into affordable housing here is either funded by affordable housing providers or else focuses on affordable housing supply rather than supply in general.

Like most policies around housing the real issue is hidden in a thicket of detailed studies. We need below-market prices for housing because housing is expensive. Housing is expensive because the land on which the houses are built is expensive. The high land price is a consequence of there being a limited supply of said land. And the limited supply is (to a considerable extent) a matter of policy choice:

The reason, after all, that housing is expensive in places like New York, San Francisco, DC, and other IZ-friendly (not to mention rent-controlled) locales is that zoning regulations prevent supply from keeping pace with population growth. In response, public officials have pursued demand-side solutions to this fundamentally supply-side problem, through a massive subsidy apparatus that includes rent-control, public housing, Section 8, tax credits, and now inclusionary zoning. Combined, these measures are band aids for a mortal wound, since they ignore the underlying cause of why hot urban housing markets remain expensive. And sometimes, by discouraging construction, these measures worsen the problem.

Translated into English this tells us that, where you have pressured housing markets (something that is true in London but not in Bradford), the answer lies in more supply of land and allowing higher densities rather than regulating or subsidising housing. Almost everyone who looks at the problem realises pretty early on that the barrier to our supply problem in housing isn't finance, isn't government funding and isn't the market. The problem is the planning system.

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Something everyone but the planners seems to know...

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From Keith Exford, Chief Executive of leading housing association, Affinity Sutton:

‘Housing markets are very different around the country,’ he said. ‘The case for increasing supply in London is pretty compelling because of huge demand and significantly higher prices. But in some parts [of the country] it’s difficult to argue that we should be building new homes.’

Like much of the North really... 


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So we make providing homes to rent more expensive - that will help the housing crisis!

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The Welsh government (and plenty of English councils) are keen on the idea of "accrediting" private landlords.

The government will set out plans to improve the private rented sector and will expect landlords to register on an accreditation scheme.

It all seems like a great idea - we'll have a scheme that improves the quality of homes and management in the "sector". But the problem is that these schemes involve (this is from a voluntary one in Leeds):

Payment of a non-returnable application and membership fee.

And while this is fine if it's only a few quid, will it stay that way? If you inherit mum's terraced house and rent it out rather than sell, you'll end up losing a month's rent in accreditation to add to the month's rent in agent fees and the month's rent in costs. So you either sell or put the rent up.

This isn't simply a registration scheme but a means by which the sort of provisions under section 82 of the Housing Act 2004 become common-place.

In a selective licensing area the landlord must comply with the fit and proper person test included within the Housing Act 2004 to obtain a licence. His rented properties must be let within the terms of the licence conditions to ensure that the properties are safe and that the landlord can, and will, deal with anti-social tenants.

Accreditation is about exercising state-control over the private rental sector - it isn't about improving stock quality or housing management. It is expensive and the expectation is that the landlord will be picking up the cost - an act that simply makes housing more expensive.

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A little point about housing and the 'green belt'

There you have it - a little piece of Bradford's 'green belt'. In this case it's Hewenden Reservoir looking from the Great Northern Trail (the former railway line) towards East Manywells. And like much of the South Pennines it is beautiful in an everyday kind of way. Not spectacular but, when the sun shines and makes those shadows, cryingly gorgeous - one of the things that make this small part of Yorkshire unique and wonderful.

So when the debate about housing arises, it is this sort of landscape, this kind of place that we must protect from development. Or should we?

Today, it being that time of year, I was at Denholme Clough delivering election leaflets. Now up at the Clough -  the bit of Bingley Rural Ward that bumps into Calderdale - there used to be three farms. That was three (or maybe four) dwellings. One was the halal abattoir at Sunside Farm, the other two typical, slightly tatty hill farms. There were perhaps ten electors here (and half of them were Mr Hussein's family).

Today all this is gone or going - the abattoir closed a while back and where there was once just one farm house, we now find a conversion creating five homes. All now occupied. Across the road another farm has been developed - a further five homes. It is, I don't doubt, only a matter of time before the third of the farms turns into a collection of barn conversions, cottages and houses - maybe five or six more places to live.

From three or four homes - all in the 'green belt' - will have been created 15 or 16 dwellings. And the old abattoir buildings and several barns remain untouched - perhaps for another development, another creation of new homes.

This picture is repeated again and again across the area - former farm buildings now redundant as farms consolidate and tenancies end are turned into homes. All within the 'green belt'. At Denholme House Farm and The Flappit there's been new build as well - a dozen or so nice new houses built were once there were tatty barns and corrugated steel cowsheds.

And none of these developments - in the 'green belt' - meet with objections except, on occasion, from planners upset that their precious "open-ness of the green belt" might be threatened by building on these farmyards and by converting these barns. There are maybe 50 such places in Bingley Rural - that's over 200 homes that can be developed without the need to take a single inch of green field.

Imagine the creative planner who said "maybe with a little new build at each of these places we could double that number" - we'd have approaching 500 new homes without any encroachment on those green fields. Spread that across the rural area of Bradford and we might get 3000 new homes - maybe even more. All without a threat to the green belt. All without petitions, protest groups and the endless paper war between the planners and the public - a war in which the planners get a phyrric victory. For sure they permissions granted and houses built but this is at the cost of public perception of planners - the firm view held 'out there' that planners do what developers want.

It's important to see this because Bradford Council want about 1500 homes built in Bingley Rural's villages over the next 15 years. There are already permissions for around 600 houses - with the 500 that developing existing rural sites brings we get most of the way towards the 'target'. There really isn't any need at all to 'release' tracts of land from the current 'green belt' for future development.

But all this requires planners to get out from their closed box, to stop believing the commercial propaganda of the house building companies and to think for themselves how we can meet Bradford's housing needs without any large land take from the 'green belt'.

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The money you need Sally - it's already in your commuter village

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Sally Thomas works for something called the Social Regeneration Consultants (SRC) and has been given space by leftie-rightie-wishy-washy think tank, Res Publica to air her views on rural housing - or rather rural "social" housing. And she relates this terrible tale:

Despite early backing from County Council planners, a positive partnership with a regional housing association keen on community investment and really good prospects for securing ring-fenced funding from the Government’s Homes and Communities Agency for precisely this type of community-led development, the plans have stalled.

The reason is quite simple – private land values. The site owner is not interested in selling to anyone who wants to build affordable homes because they simply can’t provide him with enough money for his land.

You see the problem don't you? Well Sally doesn't - the truth is that land in her nice commuter village is at a premium because:

For a village community with pressing housing needs and surrounded by green belt that few wish to see developed, this is not good news.

If you want a 'green belt', you have to pay for it and that payment is captured in those land values.  The sad truth however is that people such as Sally - who claim to be "social entrepreneurs" - are simply grant farmers chasing whatever taxpayers' cash there is to be got for their favoured scheme. Perhaps this community needs to think about those elderly residents who need the housing. I'm guessing that these people are already in houses and have captured in those houses the price of having that 'green belt'.

But not Sally nor the parish council nor the "regional housing association keen on community investment" seem willing to recognise this fact. So no grant means no homes despite that fact that the people who might live in those homes have the cash to build them.

I won't be rushing out for creative advice from Sally's Social Regeneration Consultants that's for sure.

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In which the CPRE loses the plot....

The Campaign for the Protection of Rural England (CPRE) used to be a pretty conservative organisation - it understood the rhythm of England better than more urban, 'in-your-face' environmental organisations and did much good as a result. However, it appears to have succumbed to an unholy alliance of BANANAs* and eco-loons:

"Many councils are currently facing hard financial choices.  In these circumstances it will be very tempting to seek to fill shrinking coffers by permitting any development, regardless of its environmental impact. But decisions based solely on money, rather than on whether proposed development is appropriate and sustainable, could be hugely damaging.  It could also undermine the fundamental principle that planning decisions should be taken in the public interest, taking account of land use consequences.”

Not only does this argument completely miss the point - planning committees and the local councillors that serve on them simply aren't going to "permit any development" - not and get re-elected. It beats me quite what the CPRE is after here - their press release reads like a NIMBY manifesto:

Rather than focusing on delivering housing numbers alone, the Government should also be emphasising the need for well designed and appropriately located new homes in high quality, thriving neighbourhoods.

Firstly - as anyone who has been listening to the government on housing will know - the main drivers of 'housing numbers', the Regional Spatial Strategies (which for some unknown reason CPRE supported) have been scrapped. However, the ability to develop is being pushed right the way down to local communities themselves - rural places with housing need included. What CPRE seems to want is for directed planning - the system that has failed to meet housing need and especially the housing needs of poorer people in rural areas.

In Cullingworth - which isn't exactly the deepest of deep rural areas - I spend much time seeking to bend the daft planning rules beloved of CPRE and its NIMBY supporters so as to allow small scale, sensitive housing development. And a small incentive for seeing housing developed will go a long way to getting these sorts of development underway. What won't happen is that large estates will get built on green field sites simply because there's a cash incentive. If these developments take place, it will be in the face of local opposition from residents and the Councillors they elect.

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*BANANA - 'build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone'

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A special thank you to the Adam Smith Institute for exposing more NEF nonsense.

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As you know, dear reader, the New Economics Foundation is one of my very favourite institutions - a source of endless 'hand-to-face' moments, squeals of delight at ignorance and general 'do these greenie lefies really believe that' occasions.

It seems I'm not alone and the venerable Adam Smith Institute gets a similar pleasure - here commenting on NEF's solution to the housing supply problem:

Well, if you work for the nef, you suggest that taxation on property development should be raised. Quite ignoring that taxing something produces less of it. You then insist that private sector organisations shouldn't be allowed to get planning permission. No, really, reducing supply is well known to reduce prices, isn't it? Finally, we'll bankrupt most of the current developers by taking away their land banks which already have planning permission.

Oh, and joy of joys, they also reinvent the collaterialised debt obligation (CDO)* but this time it's the government's housing benefit payments that provide the collateral.

Great stuff.

*CDOs were at the bottom of the the foetid pile of dingos kidneys that is the US banking system, since you ask

Housing - an issue waiting to bite us all

Two stories I’ve run across today suggest that over coming months and years there’s a really big an important issue that will bite politicians – an issue that has barely merited a mention in the “great debates”, hasn’t registered at all in the frothy new media campaigning and yet concerns one of the true basics of people’s lives – housing.

The first story is a report from the New Statesman (that I found suitably fisked by JuliaM) on Margaret Hodge’s campaign in Barking:

“There are 11,695 families on Barking and Dagenham's housing list and local anger has been directed at the new faces they see down the street. As I follow Hodge canvassing, complaints about housing crop up again and again. We hear tales of families that have had to wait three, five or even more years to get a home. One man has spent eight years living in a one-bedroom flat with his wife and four children.”

Now Labour machine politicians like Hodge want to blame all this on right-to-buy – on the wicked Tories. But that’s only part of the story – yes right-to-buy had an impact on the stock of social housing. Yes, right-to-buy has led to an increase in private rented property on formerly mono-tenure estates. But local authorities like Barking have not replaced the shortfall and more importantly have created the situation where only people in “priority need” get access to social housing.

The result of this is precisely what the residents of Barking interviewed by the New Statesman were saying – houses in the area are simply not available for the working sons and daughters of current residents. Not because they’re white but because they aren’t in “priority need”. Which brings me to the second story where Victoria Derbyshire interviews a soldier wounded in Iraq and who cannot get a home (a pre-requisite for getting a job) because he is not in “priority need”.

In truth our housing system – I can’t credit it with the positive term “market” – is almost entirely dysfunctional. Constrained by stifling rules and regulations, battered by politicians and simply not delivering good homes for hard working people like it should. And, unless something changes, it will get worse – already in London so-call “affordable” rents are not really affordable for low paid workers and this will be the case in Leeds and other cities in the next few years.

As I said, be prepared for housing to become a really big issue some point soon.

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Public asset transfer to deliver affordable housing for rent?

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Although the popular misunderstanding of financial markets now surpasses (thanks mostly to convenient political lies) our misunderstanding of the housing market, the latter remains the one most fiddled with by governments. And the result of this intervention - always done for the best of reasons - is a market than has built into it the most enormous distortions. Distortions that, as these things are wont to do, cause the greatest problems for the poorest and least articulate.

At the root of this distortion is our planning system - at its root, the nationalisation of decisions about property rights. However, as is often the case with well-meant interventions, the beneficiaries of our planning system are not those who that system was intended to benefit. Just as agricultural support goes disproportionately to rich farmers and arts subsidy flows does little to help struggling artists, the planning system acts to preserve and promote rising asset prices for folk like you and me - people living in suburbia, in the holy 'green belt'.

As a result of the planning system's control over the use of land that would otherwise have provided housing, we have higher land values and (subject to periodic shocks) steadily rising housing prices. And - even at the time of recession - the fundamentals of that market environment remain. There are too few houses in places where people want to live - applying upwards pressure on price. And, since I live in one of those places - whoopee!!

There is little prospect (for which read 'not a chance', 'zilch') of a government arriving that will reform this situation - a government that will end land use designation as a tool of social control. So to address the problem - how to provide housing for those people who need to be housed - we need to think differently. And remember, that housing need is not primarily housing for poor people - we've plenty of that and fewer poor folk. It's housing for the son's and daughters of us residents of nice suburbs, dormitory villages and barn conversions. Plus of course dealing with our reluctance to turn assets into cash so as to care for ourselves in old age.

Across all these communities there are parcels of publicly-owned land - not the recreation grounds, playing fields and village greens but pieces of land where the state is behaving speculatively. The former school site in Cullingworth fits this bill, for example. What the public body owning the land wants is to maximise land value, realise that value and secure a capital receipt for use funding a wider 'capital programme'. It is unlikely that the local community will see any benefit from this land disposal.

My suggestion is to require public bodies to transfer such land to housing trusts or associations - for the specific purpose of building affordable housing for rent. By removing land value from the equation, such development becomes affordable even for a small village land trust. If it costs £50,000 to build a house and there are borrowing costs of £5,000 pa a return on capital of 10% can be achieved with rents at well below market levels. Such an approach presents other problems - around allocations, for example, where I would favour breaking the mould and having a stricter local lettings policy - but would provide a stock of affordable housing that remained so because it is unaffected by rising land values.

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Housing policy - a couple of modest suggestions

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I was struck by a piece in New Start Magazine about how the UK's planning system is a drag on the development of housing - and especially housing for rent. The article draws comparison with planning regimes in France, Germany and Holland where performance is a little better than in the UK.

Thinking about this it struck me that there is a further issue - land value. We know that land values are far higher in the UK than in France (mostly a function of the amount of developable land available - France is a lot bigger than the UK) and that those land values represent a significant element in the cost of housing.

So why not eliminate land value entirely? Rather than providing subsidy to the housing associations to build affordable homes on public land (and in effect turning the subsidy into a capital receipt for the public agency owning the land) why not require those agencies to gift the land at no consideration? This would make building affordable homes affordable and the subsidy could go directly as grant for the purchase of land - a major saving and a more effective system.

And while we're about this we should extend a duty onto developers to retain an interest in the properties they build for at least 25 years - whether in the form of a freehold or an equity share. This would provide an incentive to build better, more efficient housing.

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