Dorset TLIO report: tax developers in LAND not cash!

[james armstrong]

SOLVING THE ENDEMIC UNDERSUPPLY OF ACCESSIBLY  PRICED HOUSES                 
Land Tax proposed - to be paid not in cash but in Land.
The land paid in to a national land bank
Building land to be leased (for cash payment) to qualifying self builder/occupiers.
 
SUMMARY
Potential Self builders, as non land owners and therefore non stake-holders are frozen out of the planning system  
With a broken housing supply sector, and no easy access to land  for building, their contribution to supply  is frozen out - this the group most ready to self provide houses at no cost to the state at the most accessible cost to themselves and independently of market prospects.
Access to housing is an existential human right  and every step to facilitate this is necessary to-day, since to delay further  extinguishes their right to life. 
 
(Letter to the Parliamentary Committee on Human Rights,Westminster.) 
Dear Sirs,                                                                                                  4th August 2009 
Lack of adequate access to housing  at accessible prices is a breach of human rights of the house-needy. Adequate access to housing is necessary for shelter and home-making and is co-existent with the most basic existential human right - the right to life.  A solution exists to increasing supply -  enabled self-building which sector HMG should enable. Please investigate.
 
SUMMARY 
The System of house provision  is broken and deteriorating further. 
Prices are out of reach,. New houses are not supplied in adequate quantities. The HMG  annual minimal supply target is 230,000 p.a. and achievement only 160,000. Waiting lists total some four million households of whom some wait for up to fifteen years.
Causes include the traditional monopoly of  landownership with 5% of people controlling two thirds of UK land: surplus and excessive landbanks held by national housebuilders, in one case equal thirty three years of current requirements: the Treasury and Bank of England have explicitly colluded since May 1997 to manipulated the housing market to raise prices, generate debt and stimulate  credit  and  High Street consumption: 
 
Self-build has been 'discovered' by O.F.T. Survey  to supply 16,000 units p.a.
Self build typically supplies houses at one third the price of market houses and less than half the cost of houses purchased by Housing Associations at public expense.(see the St Minver team self build project ,North Cornwall, which supplied twelve,  two- and three- bedroomed detached houses in fourteen months costing up to #83,000 each. Self build is judged the most dynamic sector with the greatest untapped potential..  
 
RECOMMENDATIONS - There exist readily available methods of increasing supply of houses  at accessible prices. As recommended by Barker ( Recomm, 26)  some of the windfall planning gains should be extracted from multiple unit developers in the form of a land tax, which we  propose, should be payable in building-land not in cash.  This is a logical adaptation in the present broken market conditions, of the existing  compulsory purchase powers which were introduced in 1947 for the  conditions in which land for housebuilding  was not available except at prohibitive prices.(see Hansard Nov 1947)
Held in regional land banks with leases sold  to self occupying- builders this addresses the bottleneck to self build.