How Labour can make homes more affordable | Housing

George Monbiot (Home truths: the only thing Labour is building is a bigger, more dysfunctional housing market, 26 January) hits several nails on the head, but the most pivotal is his hunch that ministers “are intelligent people pretending not to be for political reasons”.

In a housing market bloated by financialisation after a decade and a half of interest rates close to zero, ownership prospects have been increasingly confined to those inheriting property wealth, and the only way that will change within the mortgageable years of the current unendowed cohort will be through the puncturing of this Ponzi scheme by government intervention.

There are several options, including a revaluation of the stock with revision of the council tax banding system, which Monbiot mentions but which Labour has ruled out for reasons unexplained, and revision of the wider property tax and planning regimes to favour full-time dwellings more forcefully.

But improved affordability means the value of property coming down. That means negative equity and grief for the banks, whose profligacy spawned the financial crisis at the root of this housing crisis.

And so the default position is to defend the haves against the have-nots and, in the meantime, hand out more planning consents for developers to take their time with in the hope that enough people still swallow the myth that something useful is being done. Unintelligent indeed, but it buys political time.
John Worrall
Cromer, Norfolk

George Monbiot’s excellent piece on housing, planning and government policy had one serious omission. He didn’t mention that developers already have planning consent for more than 1m homes. Why aren’t they being built, and how do we make sure that they are?

These unused permissions not only represent a missed opportunity; they are an obstacle to the allocation of other land in the local plan. If the government wants to see some building, not just more paperwork, then it should make some minor changes to planning law.

Make all planning consents lapse after five years without any automatic right of renewal and apply this to all existing planning approvals. Allow planning authorities to de-designate the site in the local plan if development has not taken place. Get rid of the rule that sticking a spade in the ground with a witness constitutes the start of development and void all such token starts. Introduce a rule that all “on completion of development” conditions should apply from five years after the start of a development whether finished or not.

All of these could be incorporated in a short bill that could be sped into law to get things moving. It’s what Attlee or Roosevelt would have done, but I doubt that Starmer and his government have the guts.

The potential impact on the balance sheets of big developers should be enough to get quite a bit of activity going, whether by actually building or by forcing the sale of land with permission to other developers who can.
Stan Collins
Kendal, Cumbria

George Monbiot makes a very cogent analysis, but his proposal that capital gains tax be applied to property increasing in value does not find favour in this house. When I sell and move, my next home will also have increased in value and I will therefore need to use all my selling price to buy it. And the same situation applies to all people moving home.
Rob Harris
Westbury-on-Severn, Gloucestershire