Let's build some prefabs and call them "Homes for Heroes" (Boondogglers gonna boondoggle)

Hey, let's build some prefabs

Nothing like a good boondoggle is there!? And right now the best way to get your boondoggle off the ground is to play the "Essential Workers are Heroes" card:

An alliance of housing associations, offsite manufacturing firms and many others across the property sector has launched a call to the private, public and charitable sectors to join together to build low cost Homes for Heroes, to thank our heroic essential workers who’ve kept Britain going during the coronavirus outbreak.

The proposal, from G15 (part of a group of housing associations and construction businesses who plan on solving the housing crisis without changing planning policy), is to build 100,000 prefabricated homes for the "NHS staff...care workers, teachers, refuse collectors, delivery workers and many more" who have helped us through the pandemic. Splendid stuff.

So what's wrong here? Well the first thing is (as wise readers will have spotted), those "essential workers" (we'll use the official boondoggle term from now on - "heroes") are already living somewhere and are in work. These, for all their heroism, are not society's destitute.

So what's going on here? What is this coalition of housing landlords, construction companies and consultants trying to achieve? For sure we need more houses - homes for all sort sof people not just heroes. Since 1997 we've had a planning and housing policy run by NIMBYs with the result that, particularly in London, the sort of professional and managerial folk who 30 years ago stood a fighting chance of buying a house can't do so any more. And let's be clear, this isn't a result of the market failing but entirely down to the stupidity of government.

Between 1997 and 2010 the area of England covered in 'green belt' doubled and, even worse, new national parks, world heritage protections, environmental protections and wildlife desigantions arrived. Couple this with cheap money and governments prepared to pander to relatively wealthy potential buyers and you get the situation where most graduate, professional, hard-working folk look at the housing market and retreat in despair to paying an inflated rent to a private landlord.

Into this space gallop our "Homes for Heroes" champions - "we'll stick lots of prefabs on land owned by local councils and rent them to you cheaper". And that's great until you realise that all this is only possible because the taxpayer is coughing up the subsidy tht allows for cheap social rents. Those heroes get to live in "good quality affordable homes which are well designed, energy efficient and digitally connected". Even better the homes will be "equipped with private outside areas and access to high quality green spaces". Elysium-on-Thames (except for the fact that this all reads like the sales blurb from a park homes company).

This is a boondoggle, a proposal designed by businesses that make money from rents or building homes with the express purpose of securing government grant to secure those rents and that building business. And, to achieve this, the group making the pitch has made a specific appeal to public sympathy for "heroes", those essential workers who've helped us through the coronavirus pandemic. Forgive me for finding this exploitative and unjustified.

If these organisations really want to do something about getting more and better housing, maybe they should ask how we got here in the first place. How the indulgance of suburban NIMBYs by politicians has resulted in one of the world's tightest urban containment tourniquets, the London Green Belt. We hear nothing from these supposed housing campaigners about making it easier for anyone - not just big housing companies with fat government grants - to build houses. I guess we shouldn't be surprised - that would kill the "suck up to government" business model after all.

So forgive me if I don't cheer for these "Homes for Heroes". It's a boondoggle, a bald attempt to exploit the current crisis to extract grant from government made by organisations with an interest in either building or managing the resultant housing.

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Thoughts on the price of fish (and the G20)....

I thought, dear reader, that while we're all distacted by the lunacy that is the British legal system, I'd talk about the price of fish. Or rather about the G20 summit over in Seoul this last week. I think it's quite important and am delighted at the event's inconclusive nature.

You know how it is with international boondoggles. Lots – in the case of the G20, thousands – of well-dressed, well-paid public servants toddle off to some far-flung corner of the world. And there they argue, pontificate, discuss and ultimately lecture us about how the private sector – the bit that actually creates the wealth – should behave.

This time round, the G20 has underlined the truth – with a big, thick red crayon. And that truth is that all the mucking about we’ve had since J. M. Keynes decided he – personally and on his own – could design a better world economy has covered over that truth. Lots of lovely communiqués, statements, treaties and concords have been agreed, issued, signed and published – all of them ignoring that truth. We get stuff like this:

…enhance the Mutual Assessment Process (MAP) to promote external sustainability.

We will strengthen multilateral cooperation to promote external sustainability and pursue the full range of policies conducive to reducing excessive imbalances and maintaining current account imbalances at sustainable levels. Persistently large imbalances, assessed against indicative guidelines to be agreed by our Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors, warrant an assessment of their nature and the root causes of impediments to adjustment as part of the MAP, recognizing the need to take into account national or regional circumstances, including large commodity producers. These indicative guidelines composed of a range of indicators would serve as a mechanism to facilitate timely identification of large imbalances that require preventive and corrective actions to be taken.

Sounds good eh? Well it’s just an admission of failure really.

An admission that we can’t design a better world economic system regardless of the size of our brains or the sophistication of our computer models. And that, dear reader, is the truth that is underlined by this current G20 communiqué – although it doesn’t actually read that way, of course, because our leaders don't want to admit they can’t fix it or, indeed, to point out that no government intervention of any kind can fix it.

Fortunately for all of us, the world’s arch-protectionists (a treasured position held for many years by the French but now passed quietly to Barak Obama and the US Treasury) have not got their prize of managed trade. Indeed – and I can hear the squeals of protectionist pain – we actually got a reference to trade liberalisation! Something that Governments can do that really will help the world economy – you know, that free trade stuff that makes us rich!

...our strong commitment to direct our negotiators to engage in across-the-board negotiations to promptly bring the Doha Development Round to a successful, ambitious, comprehensive, and balanced conclusion consistent with the mandate of the Doha Development Round and built on the progress already achieved.

Despite this, it remains that case that the USA – using Gordon Brown’s ‘world-saving’ approach – is deliberately tanking its currency and intentionally feeding inflation so as to avoid facing up to its debts. And to support this we can expect the US Government to start “getting tough on trade”. Like this:

President Barak Obama attacked China’s policy of undervaluing its currency minutes after he and other Group of 20 leaders ended a summit that failed to agree on a remedy for trade and investment distortions.

“It is undervalued,” Obama said of the Yuan, speaking to reporters in Seoul after the meeting concluded. “And China spends enormous amounts of money intervening in the market to keep it undervalued.”

And of course the Chinese are supposed to sit about doing nothing while the US pours $600bn of freshly printed cash into the system so as to force the dollar’s value down? China may indeed be manipulating its currency – using its cash reserves to keep the Yuan’s value down – but the US cannot surely criticise this as it is following exactly the same policy.

The truth – that painfully inconvenient truth – is that none of this matters. Our economy is determined by the sum of value-adding interactions between individuals and groups of individuals. By something called trade. And for trade to work best we need the following conditions:

1. Money available to individuals to spend on the things they want – which means we must cut taxes (across the board)
2. Free movement of goods and services around the world – which means scrapping the CAP and other systems designed for subsidy and protection
3. Currencies that compete and find equilibrium in a free international system – which means taking the printing presses off the Government
4. Fewer – ideally no – barriers to entry – which means less regulation, fewer controls and a much smaller state

If we set these conditions we will thrive. And, in thriving we will provide those things we want as a society – schools, hospitals, security and protection for the sick, the disabled, the old and the unlucky. Things we’re struggling to provide now under the misplaced belief that Governments can design a better world economy.

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Pitstop on the road trip to Copenhagen. Truth, lies and climate change.

Like 99% of bloggers I ignored the call to post about climate change on the 15th October. Mostly because the whole climate change & global warming "debate" (if it can be characterised as such) has become more akin to some millenarian cult rather than an informed response to scientific enquiry. Just search the phrase "...if we don't act now on climate change" and you'll find endless doomladen scenarios - some from organisations with a specific financial interest in the campaign and other from ordinary people frightened by the apocalyptic predictions of the pundits.

I am sceptical about all this campaigning - not because I wish to deny the self-evident fact of climate change but because of the hubris and the deliberate use of questionable facts to promote one or other favoured outcome. And those who claim there is no climate change are just as bad - as anyone who has read Christopher Booker's Sunday Telegraph column will know!

Before looking at the options facing "the planet" (like the planet gives a monkeys) we should start by disconnecting a great deal of supposed environmental outcomes from the climate change discussion - such as climate change meaning more hurricanes, for example. We should concentrate on the incontrovertible rather than the challengable.

For me there are three options:

1. Run about like chicken licken telling everyone we're all doomed, that whatever the latest boondoggle it is the "last chance" to respond to climate change and that anyone who questions the wisdom should be treated in a manner akin to 17th Century witches (albeit, and in a very modern way, stopping short of burning).

2. Deny the whole climate change argument - it's just a big scam and an excuse for more big government and the introduction of socialism on the back of "saving the planet" (or, if you're Booker, it's all part of the Great European Conspiracy to destroy democracy).

3. Do what humans have always done - respond to changes in our environment by adapting what we do, through technology and by applying our highly developed brains to the problems around us. This doesn't require "co-ordinated international action" or a new raft of regulatory constraints on behaviour. And it does not require more Government just giving ordinary people the incentive to change behaviour.

So let's not waste our time (and other people's money) gathering in Copenhagen to discuss climate change - it's not there that we will find the answers. Let's stop spending millions of "climate change strategies" resourced with expensive officers paid for with taxpayers money. And let's stop the hectoring of ordinary people over their supposed environmental misdeeds.