Just to add to this

Weird. In today's claim of UK economic growth in the 3rd quarter being revised to 0.6%, it saidand construction."
WTF are they building? Bunkers, 'appen?

If the slight increase in growth is attributed to housing construction then The Cabinet will be holding their heads in their collective hands after yesterdays announcement on the tightening up of the mortgage rules, "Shot our bloody selves in the foot again haven't we" will be the refrain.

The Olypmic site and just about every railway station in London for a start.

Olympic sites, Crossrail, airport expansions, etc, etc.
ONE BILLION POUNDS ON ONE UNDERGROUND STATION - Tottenham Court Road.

Titter all you like, that is a complete disgrace.

I think Boris should be humoured and we should build another huge airport near London.

There is a need for social/inexpensive housing - as I see it there are some serious obstacles:
Cost/availability of land, unlike most countries in Europe this is very compact country - either we want housing or green belt
Lack of capital - where is the money going to come from?
Long term nature of the ROI especially if the properties are to rented
Would you want to invest in this type of housing if all you were going to do was create another Gipton, Bransholme or Easterhouse inner city slums where a large chunk of residents will simply trash the properties.
If we want encourage manufacturing then you cannot convert brownfield sites into housing.

If this type of housing delivered a reasonable return there would be builders supplying this market - the fact there isn't on any scale suggests the returns are small and long term if at all. This type of project is exactly what Keynes envisaged in his economic theory a stimulus with more than one benefit. Something needs to be done to stimulate the housing market, more time first buyers need access to the funds to buy houses. Most are paying rent that is more costly than their mortgage would be.

A few thousand hectares are not going to sort this issue - it is significantly bigger than that.

As I pointed out ROI isn't spurious its real - the culture of business banking in this country is a ROI of 24 months to 60 months max we are not in Germany where banks/companies take a more pragmatic view sadly.

Introducing a land tax is would simply see a crash in the property market through a simple supply and demand curve.

The term an Englishman's home is his castle comes to mind - we are not in Europe our culture/aspiration is to own our own property. The ability to borrow is often secured on the back of home ownership etc. We want to pass something on to our offspring a house is a tangible reflection of our existence.

Your ideas are very credible but they are not realistic given the current status quo.

They were very realistic 30 years ago and there is absolutely nothing to prevent a return to that realism, apart from the stupidity of viewing a house as an investment. The land it sits upon may be an investment, the house itself is a depreciating asset.

Why would there be a housing market crash if suddenly houses and land were to appear on the market? If anything, it should see a housing stimulus rather than a crash. There may be a crash in values but that would be little different to a crash in stock markets. Anyone who invests in markets are warned that they may go down as well as up. Anyone investing in a house should get a similar warning.

One thing is certain, the status quo cannot continue, with ever increasing numbers being priced out of the housing market, something has got to give.

why not not ? I saw them in concert last february and they still looked good though Rick Parfitts' voice was a little strained !

The idea had we continued to run a surplus it would have put us in a better position to cope is another myth. It is yet another simplification of government economics to that of credit card or personal loan type scenario. What happened was way beyond the normal economic cycle.



No government in history has started to run a surplus because it felt there was about to be a financial crisis of any kind. They have their economic policies and their spending is tied to those. What Labour did deficit-wise was nothing out of the ordinary. It is only hindsight that lets you say what you do.



But the "boom" did not end in the sense we went through a dip in the economic cycle. We had a banking crisis not a simple downturn in the economic cycle which is a vastly different thing.

No government, Labour or Tory, could have anticipated that and taken preventative measures beforehand.

Your first paragraph is inaccurate - property is not a depreciating asset - it cannot be viewed as a piece of machinery or a car that becomes obsolete as new technology overtakes it. It will always have a value and given the supply is exceeded by demand its value will increase. In a set of accounts you would typical depreciate a building over 50 years but you then have it revalued every 5 years the gain is then stuck in a revaluation reserve in the balance sheet. More often than not the increases in the reserve account are greater than the accumulated depreciation.

As standards of living/material desire increase people's aspirations also grow, owning your own home is an aspiration to millions these days - you cannot simply turn the clock back 30 years because society isn't the same as it was 30 years ago. There is no logic in renting if you can buy a property - especially as the costs of doing so are only going to go one way and as a % of your income it will remain at a fairly constant level. If you buy a property you feel some pain years 1-5 which gradually eases as inflation takes over by year 20 the mortgage is significantly smaller % of your income.

I never said there would be a housing crash what I said was there would be a property crash if you implemented your land tax. If as you hoped your tax would force people to sell one thing would happen - prices would fall. As a result assets values would be significantly reduced much of which will be used to secure borrowed working capital in the form of loans and overdrafts. The banks would then start asking for their monies back and companies would go bust.

An aspiration that is getting more remote for an increasing number of our society. How do you propose to address that fact? You have already stated your objections to people receiving sufficient remuneration to enable them to start on even the lowest rung of the property ladder.

For the totally unrealistic aspiration of 100% home ownership to happen, one of two things must happen first: either wages of the lower paid increase to the level where they can then afford to buy a home or prices of property drop to levels sufficient to enabled the lower paid to obtain a mortgage on their current meagre income.

Or do you have some other magic solution?