Is it the roof, the bricks or the drains?

"Unaffordable housing" The term still keeps cropping up. Which part of a house is not affordable? The roof? The bricks? The drains? The roofing tiles? The plumbing system? The amount builders have to be paid to put it all together?

Go into any builders' merchant and check the prices. They are all very affordable. It costs, at most, £100k to build a decent house. Which is very affordable when spread over 40 years - £50 a week. So what is going on to make houses unaffordable? I have asked this question many times over the past 30 years. Usually, the response is a yawn, so the resulting problems, are in a sense a richly deserved reward.

Too many have stood aside, not watched what is going on in the world and failed to try and make sense of it. Hence the talk about "unaffordable house prices" Anyone who uses the phrase "unaffordable house prices" without further explanation is guilty of extreme mental laziness. Which is most of us, and now we are living with the consequences of our neglect. This of course includes the Nationwide Building Society, which would do everyone a good turn if they scrapped their so-called House Price Index and replaced it with a housing land price index.

From a discussion group...

"Land isn't a primary factor in a knowledge based, high technology economy. It's a primary factor in an agricultural economy. You are a few hundred years behind the times."

Why does this idea keep popping up?

This old story was told me by Vic Blundell, who for many years ran the various Georgist groups in Vauxhall Bridge Road.

A prosperous landowner is riding though his country estate. He comes across a notorious poacher with a brace of pheasants under his arm.

Landowner: "You're trespassing! Get off my land!"

Poacher: "Your land? How did you get this land?"

Great Portland Estates is taking on Transport for London in a £25m row over the development of a Crossrail station. Toby Courtauld, chief executive of the West End property specialist, said yesterday that TfL has compulsorily purchased a London property from the company at a price that is "nowhere near our valuation".

Great Portland's 18/19 Hanover Square in London was acquired last month for £35.9m via a compulsory purchase order (CPO) to enable the construction of Crossrail's Bond Street station. However, Mr Courtauld claims Great Portland's independent valuation of the property priced it at almost £60m. He said the company is "vigorously pursuing" TfL for the extra cash and pledged to go to the independent Land Tribunal if the dispute is not resolved. "Our shareholders should expect value from their assets and that's what we are going to get them," Mr Courtauld added.

Chutspa

Perhaps, but does the compensation they think they are entitled to include the hope value based on expections of the higher rentals that tenants will pay once Crossrail is open? How much will Great Portland gain from the uplift in the value of their property portfolio that will occur due to Crossrail? Isn't this the return the taxpayer is entitled to on its investment? In the absence of a suitable English word, the Yiddish word chutspa comes to mind.

Read Daily Telegraph article here

Partly as a result of the discussions that have been taking place under the sponsorship of the Coalition for Economic Justice, of which the Campaign is a member, we have had further thoughts on how LVT might be introduced. The concern that has been expressed centres around the role of local taxation. Put simply, there is a lot of land value in some local authority areas and very little in others, and this is unrelated to the costs of providing the services. The highest rates of LVT would have to be levied in the poorest areas. It has long been recognised that there would be a need for an equalisation scheme to redistribute the revenue, a problem that applies to any tax; the same would be true, for example, of local income tax or local sales tax.

We put forward here for discussion a radical solution: capitation payments which the authorities would be free to spend as they wished - a kind of reverse poll tax. What are the objections? Is it undemocratic? Is it unjust? Please give us your views. Read our proposals here