Sustainable Communities Bill ignores sustainable housing

Gerrard Winstanley office at evnuk.org.uk
Tue Feb 7 16:37:07 GMT 2006


From/By
James Armstrong 
22 Harveys Terrace, 
Dorchester DT1 ILE                             tel 01305 265510


LOCAL WORKS - WITHOUT HOUSES FOR LOCAL WORKERS?   
THE SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES BILL  
[3306 complete. 900 last page]

A proposed new Act of parliament promoting sustainable communities  
does not address  the rural housing crisis.  This is curious when 
housing is the biggest item in household expenditure. 'Farming', 
'Food', 'Travel' and 'Traffic congestion' are prominently featured in 
the Bill. In contrast 'Social housing' is obscurely mentioned but 
neither defined nor expanded on, and grouped with 'Post-offices, 
Eating places and Open spaces', in paragraph 2 of schedule one. 
    
This Bill is an appeal to harness the genuine grievances of rural 
communities about centralised 'economic' driven  policies from 
Whitehall  inappropriate for local circumstances, aiming  to direct 
the energy of  the nimby brigade towards otherwise laudable goals like 
reducing traffic congestion, reducing food miles and reducing the 
monopoly of food supply by  private or public agencies using 
centralised depot distribution systems  whether supermarkets or 
suppliers of milk and meals for schoolchildren. 

THERE IS A HOUSING CRISIS	

The lack of houses available to people on low, average and even high 
incomes is a national problem and particularly acute in  rural areas 
and arguably is the main cause of the decline of rural communities..  
How can communities thrive if people cannot afford to  live there?  
Without people  how can commerce thrive- and vice versa?  Yet the 
campaign and the Bill  is curiously unconcerned about the housing  
crisis. 

Rural housing is a divisive issue amongst those who have it who want 
the value to go up and those who need it who want prices to come down. 
There is tension between wealthy incomers and disadvantaged local 
people in unequal competition for the same houses. Landowners, owner 
farmers and property owners thrive from the scarcity of houses.  When  
permission to develop is given, land jumps in value from £2,000 per 
acre to anything up to £1million per acre. The landowner pockets the 
windfall the house-buyer pays an inflated price and the house-needy 
goes un-housed.    

If land was widely owned the profits would be dispersed.  If 
permission was freely available the scarcity and speculative value of 
land with permission would disappear. 

If houses were built by the self-build method  this would   reward 
local initiative, encourage  sustainability  and the community's 
economy would be stimulated by the local activity.

There  is potential  controversy too  from people who  oppose any 
development especially from non appropriate building. Revealingly the 
campaign features as  a bullet point,  '162 green belt developments 
approved'. and glaringly omits the 'elephant in the  sitting room' - 
house completions annually declining whilst housing demand annually 
increases. And house prices out of reach of average salary earners.
We can only conclude that to avoid  antagonising  opposing interests 
the campaign takes the easy way out and omits  mention of the problem. 

The Sustainable Communities Bill mistakenly believes that 
sustainability can be achieved without large-scale building of houses 
in rural areas,  also  associates development with despoliation. This 
is  muddle-headed when the only housing mentioned in the campaign is 
'social housing'.which is typically low specification houses. built to 
 a budget, in mono designs, grouped in   clearly defined  schemes, not 
integrated with  non-social houses, administered by a housing 
association for which occupants are admitted after means testing and 
not allowed to be sold  on the open market.  In other words only 
socially divisive social housing is promoted in a Bill promoting 
community.

All communities are local.  Houses are an existential  requirement for 
living  and  so you cannot have a community without adequate housing,  
nor a thriving economy without a growing community . A Bill which 
perpetuates social division and does not address the acute rural  
housing crisis  can neither achieve its aims nor hope to enjoy  enjoy 
wide support.

Central to an amended  Bill should be measures to build houses in 
rural areas  which   people could  occupy  while living in an 
integrated  community, houses within a price range appropriate to the 
local economy.  We say this can be achieved by community supported 
self- or community-built housing as an alternative to inappropriate 
overpriced commercially built 'estates' of houses of a specification 
designed to appeal to affluent incomers. 'Social housing' stigmatises 
and is a superfluous stickingplaster solution.   'Social housing' is 
divisive, does not confront the mainstream crisis of  high price, low 
availability and often intrusive design.  

To what kind of 'choice' does a 'social housing' policy  aspire ?   To 
this end  Planning Permission should be directed to the house-needy 
would-be occupier  not, as at present, to  the well-housed and 
affluent land-owners who as a group have  abused their monopoly of 
land to restrict the supply while illegally reaping monopoly rewards. 
An amended  Sustainable Communities Bill  would have the role of 
assessing local housing  needs, planning local development, monitoring 
building and occupancy. 

   J Armstrong                 Dorchester                              
                                                            3rd Feb 
2006
       SELF- AND COMMUNITY- BUILT   HOUSES MEET LOCAL NEEDS AND 
PROMOTE  COMMUNITIES. LANDOWNERS AND  BUILDERS NOW  MONOPOLISE 
BUILDING LAND.
Promoting  Self Build and community build  houses in locations  styles 
and by people and on land approved and provided by the community is a 
solution. 
      At present the provision of houses is handed over to commercial 
interests.
The driving forces are the landowners (a restricted group) whose 
interest is to pocket the windfall gains received with planning 
permission  of undeveloped land.     Land prices rocket.the other 
beneficiaries are the Property developers  whose interest is to 
maximise the  profit by building at the lowest cost and selling at the 
maximum price.  The result is standardised   mono-designs, crammed on 
sites at the highest possible density.   Houses are built of design, 
specification and price inappropriate to the locality because they are 
not tailored to the local need but to the most lucrative market.     
     A scarce resource, building land with planning permission, is 
being  used to make profit, not to meet needs.          This scarce 
resource, land with p.p. or with potential planning permission, has 
been bought up long ago..This is where the name 'spec. builder' comes 
from. .All monopolies  used against the public interest are illegal.
The monopoly (land with p.p.) of an existential need (shelter-houses) 
usedagainst the public interest ( to raise prices ) is illegal, evil,  
unpardonable and unsupportable in a democracy- yet  this is the result 
of the present planning regime. 
Self build is an entirely practical method of people building exactly 
the house to meet their specific need, at the highest specification 
and the lowest cost . The technology is widely available and the level 
of skill required no greater than that available to the average d-I-y 
enthusiast.   
The key fact is that the cost of the materials and labour for a high 
specification house is sometimes   less and often very much less  than 
half the asking price.   If in the case of self build the labour cost 
is nil or next to nil then the cost is yet considerably lower and  
comes within the range of the least affluent of the community.  In 
addition mortgages are available to help finance the self building 
process. Also the great advantage of self build is that building can 
progress as the income of the builder allows.  On completion the house 
is a source of pride to the builder and the community and fosters 
initiative.  Eco- friendly materials can be used .  Labour/ and 
material/miles are typically  reduced.
Self build is an iconic example of local   initiative for sustainable 
communities promoting  local employment , use of local labour, 
materials etc. and allowing the community  to influence the look of 
it's environment. It is perverse that self build is virtually squeezed 
out of the system. It is  unacceptable   that the ODPM Barker Report 
inadvertently or purposely entirely overlooked  it. It is squeezed out 
 because  of the difficulty of finding land and the exploitatve price 
of  land with planning permission.  This in turn is caused by a 
deliberate campaign principally by two groups.    Builders who want to 
profit by cornering the market for new houses at high prices  The 
method used is to buy up land with  p.p. and land with potential p.p.
round every town and village in the country. Thus a  country wide 
virtual monopoly has been achieved The ODPM Barker Report lists the 
landholdings of the giant builders.  Inspection of the registers in 
the planning department of the county offices reveals the local 
monopoly of  applications by a few entities.    Second. The giant 
landowners   want to maintain their windfall gains from  releasing 
land for building.   The method is to dribble the land onto the 
market, Restricting  the supply of land puts up the price.  This 
reaches obscene levels as at present when a backlog of  housing demand 
builds up  against an ever increasing  peak of  prices for the limited 
supply of houses available   House builders join in the campaign by 
restricting the number of houses built.  National statistics show an 
annual decline in the number of houses built, Barker suggests the 
annual shortfall is in tens of thousands and the cumulative shortfall 
perhaps half a million.  
The Planning Regime is not blameless.   It lends itself  to 
exploitation by those who control the availability of land.  This was 
foreseen by the sponsors in 1947, but has only reached crisis point as 
builders'  land acquisition policies  have matured so that they   have 
amassed land-banks over the years. 
A demonstration of this is that now the giant building contractors 
make more profit from buying and selling land  than they do from  
house- building.. 
       THE NEED FOR HOUSING LAND IS  EXPLOITED BY MONOPOLY LANDOWNERS 
In this context it is worth looking at a historical precedent -  the 
Government's handling of the sudden demand for land in the nineteenth 
Century. 
When a national railway network was proposed  arrangements  were 
necessary to see that land was available.  The Government foresaw that 
this was an opportunity for unscrupulous landowners to 
Hold out against the needs of the  railway companies which had a 
public   service dimension..  HMG intervened and passed the Regulation 
of Railways Act  1844.  Among the provisions were the possibility of 
compulsory purchase of land.  Also the proviso that HMG could call in 
the operation for public ownership  after the railway companies had 
operated commercially for  21 years. (a little noted precedent for 
'nationalisation' although  never implemented)    Clearly HMG 
anticipated that speculators would exploit their monopoly of transport 
against  the public interest. To that end many subsequent railway Acts 
  limited freight charges. Of course abuses  happened and in some 
cases Railway promoters solicited funds from the public with no 
intention of ever building a railway.  A peculiarity of land is that 
it  lends itself to monopoly exploitation.  All land is 'local'  he 
who owns it owns a monopoly of that land, so it is peculiarly  
susceptible to exploitation   Would it be surprising if  speculators 
have exploited the T &C P Act?
They have done so and  it is time to amend it. 
    THE PLANNING  REGIME REQUIRES RADICAL CHANGE
Planning  permission is now granted to the land owner. It should be 
changed and granted to the  would-be house occupier and preference 
given to the self or community builder /occupier.
The inspiration  for the  Town and Country Planning Act  of 1947 was 
for central Government to step in and secure for the people adequate 
houses  and to preclude unscrupulous people  from exploiting their 
need .
The Act has failed in this. It should either be withdrawn completely 
allowing people in housing need to build anywhere they want- housing 
being  more  critical than ogling the landscape in a utilitarian 
society.
Or, a new Act should be introduced meeting the needs of the homeless 
not the pockets of the wealthy and  the share prices of Banks, 
Building Societies and Builders in the city .
Planning permission for house-building should be granted to the house-
needy and  not to the landowner who is already well housed.
This needs supervision at a local level- here the proposed  Local 
Works communities have a role.  In deciding where houses should be 
built,  how many, of what design and by whom. They can give preference 
to sustainable building for sustainable communities by encouraging 
local families to undertake building  the houses they require.  
In the present  bizarre and unsatisfactory  situation the planning 
regime instead of promoting the building of houses with the interests 
of the house needy in mind, it rewards landowners with unearned  and 
unheard riches, landowners  either hereditary or in their guise as   
land-banking  building corporations  whose interest is restricting the 
supply of new houses, driving up their prices and catering for the 
most affluent speculators in houses to the detriment of both those in 
greatest need and the beauty of the countryside and the character of 
our villages and towns.    Planning Permission Punishes the Poor.
 'SOCIAL HOUSING' IS 'PAST IT'. SUPER SELF-BUILD  HOUSING IS JUST GOOD 
ENOUGH  
Within the range of products displayed by such builders are included  
purposely non-designed houses whose role  is to show off the 
desirability  of the up-market 'estates'(sic).  Easily recognisable  
non-designs  of four apartments to the block turn up in myriads in 
every town and County in the country.  Another role is to build a 
'social house'  which profitably attracts Housing Corporation funds - 
presented by the developer  as a standard design sold at 'cost'  to 
contrast the additional design features of the  non-standard house as  
justifying the enormously inflated (and speculative) price demanded of 
the public.     
'Social houses' then both offer a sop to the conscience of local and 
central government otherwise apparently helpless before the 
machinations of the builders. The house-needy are stigmatised by their 
post-code .  To the advantage of the speculative builder the otherwise 
often poorly appointed and unremarkable standard  show house is  set-
off  to its advantage.  This is a definition of social housing you 
will not  find in the Barker Report.  'Social Housing' extracted from 
developers is a  puncture repair solution to a defective sticking- 
plaster. Council houses were built in thousands in the 1950's. Now  
HMG funding has been withdrawn .
The alternative is better houses and  savings by building houses by 
the Community-build method -  so great that those unable to wholly 
finance their own house can be part financed by the others benefiting 
from the new regime, and  part by the labour the would-be occupier  
contributes to the community build project.
THE TOWN & COUNTRY  PLANNING ACTS NEED TOTAL REVISION AND REDIRECTION 
The purpose of introducing in 1947  the Town and Country Planning Act, 
which controls where houses are built by issuing permits to build,  
was to compensate landowners with £300million  for their development  
rights taken away  when formerly  they  benefited  from the increase 
in value as agricultural land was acquired when needed for housing 
development. The war destruction, the resumption after  the hiatus in 
building and the demob of  a million servicemen stimulated this 
central government initiative.

Providing 'land fit for heroes' in 1947,  would  inevitably be an 
expensive, £m300 , sticking plaster, without confronting the Powerful. 
It was designed to cover the wound left by the missing land on which 
to build the urgently needed  houses, land  torn away from cottagers,  
small  farmers and squatters  in the previous century under the  
Enclosure Acts. The 1947 Act  took for granted that  private agencies 
would otherwise exploit people's needs. Central to the current housing 
problem is land.  Again and again the Barker Report states this. It  
is  the  scarcity of land with planning permission-  not of  land in 
absolute terms which is the root cause of the housing crisis.  There 
is no shortage of land in a territory with 60million acres - 
sufficient  for Puck to circle the globe with a ribbon of British land 
four miles wide (and return in forty minutes.) 
The recipients of planning permission should be the house-needy not 
the landowner. There is no alternative way to  make  housing provision 
match people's needs and means. This will  at a stroke destroy  
windfall gains,  introduce an alternative to buying a house, replace 
speculative land value with lower existing -use value,  and  
significantly and crucially reduce  the cost of providing  new houses. 
It will also free tenant farmers from ruin. If it  reduces the income 
of the predatory rich few, they are a tiny privileged well-housed 
selfish coterie  satiated with past undeserved  gains and  it will 
increase the felicity and happiness of the many,  the  long suffering 
badly housed and the young  house-needy.  The  1947 Act has proved a 
disastrous license to exploit people's needs.   Associated with the 
Proposed New Act is  a reserved compulsory purchase power to bring 
forward land required for manifest public need. Providing land for 
houses requires  these powers more than  do roads, railways & defence. 
Why defend an inequitable society?
Such an Act , by reducing the price of land from speculative/ monopoly 
-to commercial- levels will make it possible at any future date  to  
de-privatise land so that its use reverts to the public whose 
existence and needs give it value and taking it from the status of a 
commodity open to speculation to that of a utility and a national 
resource not a private treasure hoard.. The public interest and 
dependence on land , shown  by the  amount of public taxes required to 
control its use, buy it for houses, roads and airports and  subsidise 
it for farming , suggests  the time has come to prevent  it's 
exploitation  against the public interest.  Winston Churchill 
castigated the landowners' monopoly as 'the worst of all monopolies' 
to  the House of Commons in 1909 and advocated ending it.  Churchill 
and Lloyd George  were sidetracked by  local  trouble in Sarajevo.
THE LANDOWNERS COUP    THE  STATE WITHIN THE STATE
There is no  polite way of saying that a small group of wealthy, 
powerful and politically entrenched people,  the traditional land 
lords , the N.F.U.,  and builder/developers-the ariviste landowners  
with giant land banks, maliciously spread a campaign of misinformation 
to protect their  ill gained profits amounting to £billions annually.  
They inflate the cost of the largest item in household expenditure- 
housing, and  via  mortgages they  influence the amount of consumer 
spending - which regulates the economy.  They have more control than 
the Exchequer !  The myth is that there is a shortage of land, that 
the green belt is in danger, that the countryside will be concreted-
over if the required houses are built,  that development is spoliation 
 and that   they are custodians  and guardians of something called  ' 
heritage..'  There are infinite variations of this theme. Land 
arrangements are no more ancient than the Tudor pillagers and lordly 
enclosers of the 1800's 
   This group  long ago captured political power in Parliament and now 
concentrate on  manipulating their monopoly of landownership (see 
Kevin Cahill's book, ' Who Owns Britain?') in our arrested  democracy.
This coup  was   achieved by promoting advantageous laws  shifting the 
burden of tax from Land tax to Income tax, now to Council tax. This is 
done  through securing massive state subsidies to agriculture,  and 
increased land values through both  EU grants and  by manipulating the 
Planning Laws in their favour.  
The CAP Regime now replaces the Corn laws. Exploiting housing need is 
the latest scam.   Plus ca change
Exercising a monopoly (on land with p.p.) against the public interest  
is illegal. Although (so far) it escapes the prosecution of the 
Competition Commission this is  not a reason to preserve misdirected 
Planning regime and the private taxation system dependent on it which 
operate in exactly the  opposite fashion to which  it was  intended 
and  is an affront to open democracy.  The truth is that there is 
plenty of land, that  houses of appropriate design complement the 
landscape as  John Constable showed,  that it is the developers' 
ghastly commercial non-designs in which the minimum architectural 
input and maximum environmental damage  is  involved which are 
inappropriate and attract valid nimby resentment. Their universal 
product  sits ill at ease  with vernacular designed houses , 
themselves  a well-loved feature of the British landscape.    
Exploiting vulnerable people is a vicious and illegal abuse of the  
monopoly of land, wealth and privilege. Changing the planning regime 
and promoting self and community build housing with the help of an 
amended   Sustainable Communities Bill can right this pernicious abuse 
which will be changed because democracy cannot survive entrenched 
injustice.    900words    James Armstrong,        3rd Feb 2006    
james36armstrong at hotmail.com               





Features Editor

Planning Magazine.





Dear Sir,                                                              
                                        4th Feb 2006

I enclose an article of  792 words, ' Local Works- without houses for 
local workers?'
On the subject of the Sustainable Commuities Bill  For consideration 
for your publication  'Planning'.

A further 900 word article 'The £300million sticking plaster' , the 
1947 T & C P Act '
goes on to trace the original intention of the  present planning 
regime and suggest radical changes.
The message is :
"A scarce resource, building land with planning permission, is being  
used to make profit, not to meet needs.        
  This scarce resource, land with p.p. or with potential planning 
permission, has been bought up long ago..
This is where the name 'spec. builder' comes from. .
Monopolies  used against the public interest are illegal under UK and 
EU law..
The monopoly (land with p.p.) of an existential need (shelter-houses) 
used against the public interest ( to raise prices ) is illegal, evil, 
 unpardonable and unsupportable in a democracy- yet  this is the 
result of the present planning regime. "

You will have seen that Messrs Sainsbury have appealed to the 
Competition Commission against the monopoly of out of town sites for 
supermarkets. Last year I followed the same thinking and asked  CC to  
 consider the monopoly of building land.

I made a submission to the Barker Report and have found glaring 
oversights in the method and findings.


Yours faithfully,


James Armstrong 
22 Harveys Terrace, 
Dorchester DT1 ILE                             tel 01305 265510













The Editor,

The Guardian 






Dear Sir,                    AN ILLEGAL HOUSING SCAM.                  
                         4th Feb 2006






I enclose for your consideration an article of  792 words, ' Local 
Works- without houses for local workers?'
On the subject of the Sustainable Commuities Bill  For consideration 
for your publication.

A further 900 word article 'The £300million sticking plaster' , the 
1947 T & C P Act '
goes on to trace the original intention of the  present planning 
regime and suggest radical changes.


Alternatively the article can be printed complete at  3306 words.












Yours faithfully,


James Armstrong 
22 Harveys Terrace, 
Dorchester DT1 ILE                             tel 01305 265510



               LOCAL WORKS - WITHOUT HOUSES FOR LOCAL WORKERS?   
792words (I page)
     THE SUSTAINABLE COMMUNITIES BILL  3306 complete. 900 last page
A proposed new Act of parliament promoting sustainable communities  
does not address  the rural housing crisis.  This is curious when 
housing is the biggest item in household expenditure.' Farming' , Food 
 '
And  'Travel'  and 'Traffic congestion'  are prominently featured  in 
the Bill. In contrast  'Social housing' is obscurely mentioned but 
neither defined nor expanded on, and grouped with  Post-offices, 
Eating places and Open spaces, in paragraph 2 of schedule one.     
          This Bill is an appeal to harness the genuine grievances of 
rural communities about centralised 'economic' driven  policies from 
Whitehall  inappropriate for local circumstances, aiming  to direct 
the energy of  the nimby brigade towards otherwise laudable goals like 
reducing traffic congestion, reducing food miles and reducing the 
monopoly of food supply by  private or public agencies using 
centralised depot distribution systems  whether supermarkets or 
suppliers of milk and meals for schoolchildren. 
THERE IS A HOUSING CRISIS	
         The lack of houses available to people on low, average and 
even high incomes is a national problem and particularly acute in  
rural areas and arguably is the main cause of the decline of rural 
communities..  How can communities thrive if people cannot afford to  
live there?  Without people  how can commerce thrive- and vice versa?  
Yet the campaign and the Bill  is curiously unconcerned about the 
housing  crisis. 
         Rural housing is a divisive issue amongst those who have it 
who want the value to go up and those who need it who want prices to 
come down..  There is tension between wealthy incomers and  
disadvantaged local people in unequal competition for the same  
houses.  Landowners , owner farmers  and   property owners thrive from 
the scarcity of houses.  When  permission to develop is given, land 
jumps in value from £2,000 per acre to £1million per acre. The 
landowner   pockets the windfall  the  house-buyer pays an inflated 
price and the house-needy goes un-housed.    If land was widely owned 
the profits would be dispersed.  If permission was freely available  
the scarcity and speculative value of land with permission would 
disappear. If houses were built by the self-build method  this would   
reward local initiative, encourage  sustainability  and the 
community's economy would be stimulated by the local activity.
There  is potential  controversy too  from people who  oppose any 
development especially from non appropriate building. Revealingly the 
campaign features as  a bullet point,  '162 green belt developments 
approved'. and glaringly omits the 'elephant in the  sitting room' - 
house completions annually declining whilst housing demand annually 
increases. And house prices out of reach of average salary earners.
We can only conclude that to avoid  antagonising  opposing interests 
the campaign takes the easy way out and omits  mention of the problem. 
       The Sustainable Communities Bill mistakenly believes that 
sustainability can be achieved without 
 large-scale building of houses in rural areas,  also  associates 
development with despoliation.This is  muddle-headed when the only 
housing mentioned in the campaign is 'social housing'.which is 
typically low specification houses. built to  a budget, in mono 
designs, grouped in   clearly defined  schemes, not integrated with  
non-social houses, administered by a housing association for which 
occupants are admitted after means testing and not allowed to be sold  
on the open market.  In other words only socially divisive social 
housing is promoted in a Bill promoting community.        All 
communities are local.  Houses are an existential  requirement for 
living  and  so you cannot have a community without adequate housing,  
nor a thriving economy without a growing community . A Bill which 
perpetuates social division and does not address the acute rural  
housing crisis  can neither achieve its aims nor hope to enjoy  enjoy 
wide support.
      Central to an amended  Bill should be measures to build houses 
in rural areas  which   people could  occupy  while living in an 
integrated  community, houses within a price range appropriate to the 
local economy.  We say this can be achieved by community supported 
self- or community-built housing as an alternative to inappropriate 
overpriced commercially built 'estates' of houses of a specification 
designed to appeal to  affluent incomers..  'Social housing '  
stigmatises and is a  superfluous stickingplaster solution .   'Social 
housing' is divisive, does not confront the mainstream crisis of  high 
price, low availability and often intrusive design.  To what kind of 
'choice' does a 'social housing' policy  aspire ?   To this end  
Planning Permission should be directed to the house-needy would-be 
occupier  not, as at present, to  the well-housed and affluent land-
owners who as a group have  abused their monopoly of land to restrict 
the supply while illegally reaping monopoly rewards. An amended  
Sustainable Communities Bill  would have the role of assessing local 
housing  needs, planning local development, monitoring building and 
occupancy. 
   J Armstrong                 Dorchester                              
                                                            3rd Feb 
2006
       SELF- AND COMMUNITY- BUILT   HOUSES MEET LOCAL NEEDS AND 
PROMOTE  COMMUNITIES. LANDOWNERS AND  BUILDERS NOW  MONOPOLISE 
BUILDING LAND.
Promoting  Self Build and community build  houses in locations  styles 
and by people and on land approved and provided by the community is a 
solution. 
      At present the provision of houses is handed over to commercial 
interests.
The driving forces are the landowners (a restricted group) whose 
interest is to pocket the windfall gains received with planning 
permission  of undeveloped land.     Land prices rocket.the other 
beneficiaries are the Property developers  whose interest is to 
maximise the  profit by building at the lowest cost and selling at the 
maximum price.  The result is standardised   mono-designs, crammed on 
sites at the highest possible density.   Houses are built of design, 
specification and price inappropriate to the locality because they are 
not tailored to the local need but to the most lucrative market.     
     A scarce resource, building land with planning permission, is 
being  used to make profit, not to meet needs.          This scarce 
resource, land with p.p. or with potential planning permission, has 
been bought up long ago..This is where the name 'spec. builder' comes 
from. .All monopolies  used against the public interest are illegal.
The monopoly (land with p.p.) of an existential need (shelter-houses) 
usedagainst the public interest ( to raise prices ) is illegal, evil,  
unpardonable and unsupportable in a democracy- yet  this is the result 
of the present planning regime. 
Self build is an entirely practical method of people building exactly 
the house to meet their specific need, at the highest specification 
and the lowest cost . The technology is widely available and the level 
of skill required no greater than that available to the average d-I-y 
enthusiast.   
The key fact is that the cost of the materials and labour for a high 
specification house is sometimes   less and often very much less  than 
half the asking price.   If in the case of self build the labour cost 
is nil or next to nil then the cost is yet considerably lower and  
comes within the range of the least affluent of the community.  In 
addition mortgages are available to help finance the self building 
process. Also the great advantage of self build is that building can 
progress as the income of the builder allows.  On completion the house 
is a source of pride to the builder and the community and fosters 
initiative.  Eco- friendly materials can be used .  Labour/ and 
material/miles are typically  reduced.
Self build is an iconic example of local   initiative for sustainable 
communities promoting  local employment , use of local labour, 
materials etc. and allowing the community  to influence the look of 
it's environment. It is perverse that self build is virtually squeezed 
out of the system. It is  unacceptable   that the ODPM Barker Report 
inadvertently or purposely entirely overlooked  it. It is squeezed out 
 because  of the difficulty of finding land and the exploitatve price 
of  land with planning permission.  This in turn is caused by a 
deliberate campaign principally by two groups.    Builders who want to 
profit by cornering the market for new houses at high prices  The 
method used is to buy up land with  p.p. and land with potential p.p.
round every town and village in the country. Thus a  country wide 
virtual monopoly has been achieved The ODPM Barker Report lists the 
landholdings of the giant builders.  Inspection of the registers in 
the planning department of the county offices reveals the local 
monopoly of  applications by a few entities.    Second. The giant 
landowners   want to maintain their windfall gains from  releasing 
land for building.   The method is to dribble the land onto the 
market, Restricting  the supply of land puts up the price.  This 
reaches obscene levels as at present when a backlog of  housing demand 
builds up  against an ever increasing  peak of  prices for the limited 
supply of houses available   House builders join in the campaign by 
restricting the number of houses built.  National statistics show an 
annual decline in the number of houses built, Barker suggests the 
annual shortfall is in tens of thousands and the cumulative shortfall 
perhaps half a million.  
The Planning Regime is not blameless.   It lends itself  to 
exploitation by those who control the availability of land.  This was 
foreseen by the sponsors in 1947, but has only reached crisis point as 
builders'  land acquisition policies  have matured so that they   have 
amassed land-banks over the years. 
A demonstration of this is that now the giant building contractors 
make more profit from buying and selling land  than they do from  
house- building.. 
       THE NEED FOR HOUSING LAND IS  EXPLOITED BY MONOPOLY LANDOWNERS 
In this context it is worth looking at a historical precedent -  the 
Government's handling of the sudden demand for land in the nineteenth 
Century. 
When a national railway network was proposed  arrangements  were 
necessary to see that land was available.  The Government foresaw that 
this was an opportunity for unscrupulous landowners to 
Hold out against the needs of the  railway companies which had a 
public   service dimension..  HMG intervened and passed the Regulation 
of Railways Act  1844.  Among the provisions were the possibility of 
compulsory purchase of land.  Also the proviso that HMG could call in 
the operation for public ownership  after the railway companies had 
operated commercially for  21 years. (a little noted precedent for 
'nationalisation' although  never implemented)    Clearly HMG 
anticipated that speculators would exploit their monopoly of transport 
against  the public interest. To that end many subsequent railway Acts 
  limited freight charges. Of course abuses  happened and in some 
cases Railway promoters solicited funds from the public with no 
intention of ever building a railway.  A peculiarity of land is that 
it  lends itself to monopoly exploitation.  All land is 'local'  he 
who owns it owns a monopoly of that land, so it is peculiarly  
susceptible to exploitation   Would it be surprising if  speculators 
have exploited the T &C P Act?
They have done so and  it is time to amend it. 
    THE PLANNING  REGIME REQUIRES RADICAL CHANGE
Planning  permission is now granted to the land owner. It should be 
changed and granted to the  would-be house occupier and preference 
given to the self or community builder /occupier.
The inspiration  for the  Town and Country Planning Act  of 1947 was 
for central Government to step in and secure for the people adequate 
houses  and to preclude unscrupulous people  from exploiting their 
need .
The Act has failed in this. It should either be withdrawn completely 
allowing people in housing need to build anywhere they want- housing 
being  more  critical than ogling the landscape in a utilitarian 
society.
Or, a new Act should be introduced meeting the needs of the homeless 
not the pockets of the wealthy and  the share prices of Banks, 
Building Societies and Builders in the city .
Planning permission for house-building should be granted to the house-
needy and  not to the landowner who is already well housed.
This needs supervision at a local level- here the proposed  Local 
Works communities have a role.  In deciding where houses should be 
built,  how many, of what design and by whom. They can give preference 
to sustainable building for sustainable communities by encouraging 
local families to undertake building  the houses they require.  
In the present  bizarre and unsatisfactory  situation the planning 
regime instead of promoting the building of houses with the interests 
of the house needy in mind, it rewards landowners with unearned  and 
unheard riches, landowners  either hereditary or in their guise as   
land-banking  building corporations  whose interest is restricting the 
supply of new houses, driving up their prices and catering for the 
most affluent speculators in houses to the detriment of both those in 
greatest need and the beauty of the countryside and the character of 
our villages and towns.    Planning Permission Punishes the Poor.
 'SOCIAL HOUSING' IS 'PAST IT'. SUPER SELF-BUILD  HOUSING IS JUST GOOD 
ENOUGH  
Within the range of products displayed by such builders are included  
purposely non-designed houses whose role  is to show off the 
desirability  of the up-market 'estates'(sic).  Easily recognisable  
non-designs  of four apartments to the block turn up in myriads in 
every town and County in the country.  Another role is to build a 
'social house'  which profitably attracts Housing Corporation funds - 
presented by the developer  as a standard design sold at 'cost'  to 
contrast the additional design features of the  non-standard house as  
justifying the enormously inflated (and speculative) price demanded of 
the public.     
'Social houses' then both offer a sop to the conscience of local and 
central government otherwise apparently helpless before the 
machinations of the builders. The house-needy are stigmatised by their 
post-code .  To the advantage of the speculative builder the otherwise 
often poorly appointed and unremarkable standard  show house is  set-
off  to its advantage.  This is a definition of social housing you 
will not  find in the Barker Report.  'Social Housing' extracted from 
developers is a  puncture repair solution to a defective sticking- 
plaster. Council houses were built in thousands in the 1950's. Now  
HMG funding has been withdrawn .
The alternative is better houses and  savings by building houses by 
the Community-build method -  so great that those unable to wholly 
finance their own house can be part financed by the others benefiting 
from the new regime, and  part by the labour the would-be occupier  
contributes to the community build project.
THE TOWN & COUNTRY  PLANNING ACTS NEED TOTAL REVISION AND REDIRECTION 
The purpose of introducing in 1947  the Town and Country Planning Act, 
which controls where houses are built by issuing permits to build,  
was to compensate landowners with £300million  for their development  
rights taken away  when formerly  they  benefited  from the increase 
in value as agricultural land was acquired when needed for housing 
development. The war destruction, the resumption after  the hiatus in 
building and the demob of  a million servicemen stimulated this 
central government initiative.

Providing 'land fit for heroes' in 1947,  would  inevitably be an 
expensive, £m300 , sticking plaster, without confronting the Powerful. 
It was designed to cover the wound left by the missing land on which 
to build the urgently needed  houses, land  torn away from cottagers,  
small  farmers and squatters  in the previous century under the  
Enclosure Acts. The 1947 Act  took for granted that  private agencies 
would otherwise exploit people's needs. Central to the current housing 
problem is land.  Again and again the Barker Report states this. It  
is  the  scarcity of land with planning permission-  not of  land in 
absolute terms which is the root cause of the housing crisis.  There 
is no shortage of land in a territory with 60million acres - 
sufficient  for Puck to circle the globe with a ribbon of British land 
four miles wide (and return in forty minutes.) 
The recipients of planning permission should be the house-needy not 
the landowner. There is no alternative way to  make  housing provision 
match people's needs and means. This will  at a stroke destroy  
windfall gains,  introduce an alternative to buying a house, replace 
speculative land value with lower existing -use value,  and  
significantly and crucially reduce  the cost of providing  new houses. 
It will also free tenant farmers from ruin. If it  reduces the income 
of the predatory rich few, they are a tiny privileged well-housed 
selfish coterie  satiated with past undeserved  gains and  it will 
increase the felicity and happiness of the many,  the  long suffering 
badly housed and the young  house-needy.  The  1947 Act has proved a 
disastrous license to exploit people's needs.   Associated with the 
Proposed New Act is  a reserved compulsory purchase power to bring 
forward land required for manifest public need. Providing land for 
houses requires  these powers more than  do roads, railways & defence. 
Why defend an inequitable society?
Such an Act , by reducing the price of land from speculative/ monopoly 
-to commercial- levels will make it possible at any future date  to  
de-privatise land so that its use reverts to the public whose 
existence and needs give it value and taking it from the status of a 
commodity open to speculation to that of a utility and a national 
resource not a private treasure hoard.. The public interest and 
dependence on land , shown  by the  amount of public taxes required to 
control its use, buy it for houses, roads and airports and  subsidise 
it for farming , suggests  the time has come to prevent  it's 
exploitation  against the public interest.  Winston Churchill 
castigated the landowners' monopoly as 'the worst of all monopolies' 
to  the House of Commons in 1909 and advocated ending it.  Churchill 
and Lloyd George  were sidetracked by  local  trouble in Sarajevo.
THE LANDOWNERS COUP    THE  STATE WITHIN THE STATE
There is no  polite way of saying that a small group of wealthy, 
powerful and politically entrenched people,  the traditional land 
lords , the N.F.U.,  and builder/developers-the ariviste landowners  
with giant land banks, maliciously spread a campaign of misinformation 
to protect their  ill gained profits amounting to £billions annually.  
They inflate the cost of the largest item in household expenditure- 
housing, and  via  mortgages they  influence the amount of consumer 
spending - which regulates the economy.  They have more control than 
the Exchequer !  The myth is that there is a shortage of land, that 
the green belt is in danger, that the countryside will be concreted-
over if the required houses are built,  that development is spoliation 
 and that   they are custodians  and guardians of something called  ' 
heritage..'  There are infinite variations of this theme. Land 
arrangements are no more ancient than the Tudor pillagers and lordly 
enclosers of the 1800's 
   This group  long ago captured political power in Parliament and now 
concentrate on  manipulating their monopoly of landownership (see 
Kevin Cahill's book, ' Who Owns Britain?') in our arrested  democracy.
This coup  was   achieved by promoting advantageous laws  shifting the 
burden of tax from Land tax to Income tax, now to Council tax. This is 
done  through securing massive state subsidies to agriculture,  and 
increased land values through both  EU grants and  by manipulating the 
Planning Laws in their favour.  
The CAP Regime now replaces the Corn laws. Exploiting housing need is 
the latest scam.   Plus ca change
Exercising a monopoly (on land with p.p.) against the public interest  
is illegal. Although (so far) it escapes the prosecution of the 
Competition Commission this is  not a reason to preserve misdirected 
Planning regime and the private taxation system dependent on it which 
operate in exactly the  opposite fashion to which  it was  intended 
and  is an affront to open democracy.  The truth is that there is 
plenty of land, that  houses of appropriate design complement the 
landscape as  John Constable showed,  that it is the developers' 
ghastly commercial non-designs in which the minimum architectural 
input and maximum environmental damage  is  involved which are 
inappropriate and attract valid nimby resentment. Their universal 
product  sits ill at ease  with vernacular designed houses , 
themselves  a well-loved feature of the British landscape.    
Exploiting vulnerable people is a vicious and illegal abuse of the  
monopoly of land, wealth and privilege. Changing the planning regime 
and promoting self and community build housing with the help of an 
amended   Sustainable Communities Bill can right this pernicious abuse 
which will be changed because democracy cannot survive entrenched 
injustice.    900words    James Armstrong,        3rd Feb 2006    
james36armstrong at hotmail.com               





Features Editor

Planning Magazine.





Dear Sir,                                                              
                                        4th Feb 2006

I enclose an article of  792 words, ' Local Works- without houses for 
local workers?'
On the subject of the Sustainable Commuities Bill  For consideration 
for your publication  'Planning'.

A further 900 word article 'The £300million sticking plaster' , the 
1947 T & C P Act '
goes on to trace the original intention of the  present planning 
regime and suggest radical changes.
The message is :
"A scarce resource, building land with planning permission, is being  
used to make profit, not to meet needs.        
  This scarce resource, land with p.p. or with potential planning 
permission, has been bought up long ago..
This is where the name 'spec. builder' comes from. .
Monopolies  used against the public interest are illegal under UK and 
EU law..
The monopoly (land with p.p.) of an existential need (shelter-houses) 
used against the public interest ( to raise prices ) is illegal, evil, 
 unpardonable and unsupportable in a democracy- yet  this is the 
result of the present planning regime. "

You will have seen that Messrs Sainsbury have appealed to the 
Competition Commission against the monopoly of out of town sites for 
supermarkets. Last year I followed the same thinking and asked  CC to  
 consider the monopoly of building land.

I made a submission to the Barker Report and have found glaring 
oversights in the method and findings.


Yours faithfully,


James Armstrong 
22 Harveys Terrace, 
Dorchester DT1 ILE                             tel 01305 265510













                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                            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