Reading the latest conference output from Labour is the same depressing catalogue of expropriation and the state will provide all.

This time it is housing.

The pressure of the underperforming house building sector is two fold.

A) the planning laws that have been in place for nearly a hundred years originally designed to prevent ‘ribbon development'. While preventing ribbon development was an issue in the 1930’s, the proposed solution was the creation of new towns and cities. However instead of allowing the market to function organically, these new conurbations were to be controlled by politicians and their friends in the big building companies. Result graft and corruption ( T Dan Smith Et Al ) and the blight of mono designed public housing and mostly Jerry built housing.

I never got my head round how twenty five year mortgages could be granted on housing with a twenty year design life.

The self build movement, that built good quality houses with individual designs was crushed by corporate building companies and big government by the doughnuting or land banking. Around large conurbations the corporate giants would buy up or take options on farms and sit on the land. Until the pressure on housing would mean that land bought for pennies would magically be worth millions per acre by a piece of paper called a planning permission.

The State owns millions of acres in defunct WW2 airfields. Which could have been released for housing using the self build concept, after all until the 1940’s there were no such things as planning authorities or planning officers.

State interference in the market has largely increased the cost of housing and produced uniform poor quality housing and where there was once the ‘vernacular‘ of difference styles of housing thrived across the country.

B) There is no getting away from the fact that unfettered immigration allied to Welfarism has increased the pressure on the existing housing stock. Labour’s solution as ever is the creation of ‘Bidonvilles’ where impoverished communities are created that have no economic reason to exist other than to house people who are totally dependent on state handouts. These Bidonvilles are mostly pockets of high crime and violence.

The State has created the housing crisis on so many levels, the State is not the solution.