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There's lots of stuff in the weekend press about the government's plans to tackle housing shortages. The Observer runs with "It's housing, housing, housing as Brown builds a new vision" and is typical of the genre...

"The new Prime Minister has signalled his intent by kick-starting what could be the biggest building programme for 30 years, writes Nick Mathiason

"Sunday July 15, 2007
"The Observer

"Since 2000 Labour has promised a major change in the number of new homes. Headline-grabbing announcements from ministers came and went. But though Britain is now in the midst of the most prolonged housing price boom ever seen, the number of homes built annually has hardly shifted from 80-year lows of about 185,000 a year. Meanwhile, whole swathes of the population have been priced off the housing ladder.

"To remedy a chronic supply shortage, last week Gordon Brown unveiled plans to build 3 million homes by 2020. While it is easy to dismiss his announcements as yet more froth, Whitehall officials, housebuilders and regeneration specialists say radical reform and even action is in the air."

Yet, as Tristram Hunt points out in his defense of nice views for the haves against housing for the have-nots (the BANANA argument), we are told by other government figures that there are at least 65,000 hectares of derelict or underused brownfield type sites in urban areas (which is space for 2.6 million of the three million Gordon wants to see built at current urban density guidelines of forty per hectare). While Anne Ashworth, in Friday's Times, reported that the PropertyFinder website claims that 420,000 homes stand empty in disrepair in England - enough, you will notice, with the underused urban land figure, to complete Gordon's 3 million properties without putting a single JCB into the greenbelt.

Low density	High density
Which would you prefer?

But also, we have to realize that there are not 1.5 million households (the council house waiting list) out on the streets. They are mostly living somewhere - often in overcrowded and/or unaffordable conditions. Whilst research also suggests that up to 46% of all housing is "underoccupied" - with 2 or more unused bedrooms, and that contrary to the usual cris du coeur that people should be allowed to stay in their family home regardless of how empty it is, 45% of households aged 50+ say they are open to the idea of downsizing before or after retirement - though most don't and cite a lack of suitable local properties to which to downsize into as the main factor.

All of this suggests that the better way to address current housing needs is not in fact to build net new units on virgin land at all, but to promote policies that bring empty homes into use, derelict land into bloom, and remodelling of existing communities so that the needs of different ages, for downsizing as well as for growing families, can better be accommodated without chucking anyone out to the farthest flung edges of a new suburban edge of city sprawl.

But, as the TV development programs tell us, location, location, location is what matters. We are a small island. It doesn't take long to get practically anywhere. We also need mechanisms to promote natural population movement to areas that are now economically down at heel and suffering from blight - since it would probably be a good guess that most of the empty homes and a high proportion of the unused urban land is in such areas.

And here it is not just land use policy that could make a huge difference. Many international inward investors want to be near to their global markets - which means proximity to ports and airports; much of the concentration of high tech businesses in the "western arc" of the South East region is put down to proximity to Heathrow - they are competing not with Hull, but with Silicon Valley or Osaka. A proper market in landing slots encompassing all airports in the UK could make a big difference to the viability of international traffic into regional airports, and so also attractiveness for international businesses to set up around those regional airports instead of around the London ones and bring employment, and therefore housing demand, out of the South East to those airport hosting regions.

But in the final analysis, the only measure that could achieve all of these in one, together with providing a replacement revenue stream for both local and national government, and recovering government and community financial inputs to localities from the beneficiaries who see their property values rise with regeneration money and so on (Sarah Beeney et al will explain it no doubt - it is fact not conjecture), is Land Value Tax.

All other things being equal, if your corporate tax bill (or even your competitor's) in, I don't know, Bolton, is a quarter what it would be in Bracknell, and your wage costs are a quarter less because your employees don't have to pay as much for that most basic of life's needs, a home, given the chance, wouldn't you, or rather your shareholders, jump at the chance for that extra post-tax profit? And, on top of that, your investment in that low value area would be far better for that area than continuing welfare payments because of a lack of economic opportunity for the people who live there - saving huge amounts of current government redistribution welfare payments.

Land values are by nature unearned by the occupier. They are created by the growth (or decline) in the popularity of a location, the expenditure of others, including government, that goes into the services and infrastructure that creates that popularity, and the effective monopoly current occupiers have in a location. Property values are also a "false" kind of wealth - for most people, those who live in their one and only property, they only really matter in relation to their next desired home. Those land values then, are a supremely appropriate thing on which to base a tax. And the non-doms, currently the fashionable whipping boys of the property market, cannot escape them to boot.

Who could possibly ignore an idea that claims to be able to achieve all of this with one simple reform. No more forcing urban expansions where people don't want them. Lower welfare transfer payments because of a more balanced regional economic outlook. Recovering money spent on an area from the people who benefit most from that expenditure. Lower housing costs. More efficient use of the housing we've got. And encouraging redevelopment of blighted areas or underused land. It's win-win. A no-brainer. A one size really does suit all package.

Technorati Tags: affordable housing, house building review, land value tax

Okay, so it's that time of year and the arguments are going on about whether A levels have got easier or harder since I/we/whoever did them.

However, in the discussion about whether to change the system, it doesn't matter whether they are easier or harder, they are simply not, it would appear, "fit for purpose" to use a favourite government phrase. Not "fit for purpose" in the sense that it is getting extremely difficult to differentiate between those with high grades and those with really high grades.

It shouldn't matter whether those high grades are being achieved because people are working harder, being better educated, meriting higher scores, or because the assessment is less rigourous allowing more people to pass them more easily. The fact that there is a tighter bunching of grades (and also partly because there are a whole load more higher education establishments now vying for the same pool of students), means that there needs to be a new way of defining the achievements, the rounded academic ability and potential that different institutions, employers and others will need and how to assess them.

Better I say to make a break in such a case; don't pretend that whatever develops is the same qualification as I did twenty odd years ago. It's no value judgement to say it needs replacing though.

Even back then, I was royally screwed by demands that I choose just three complimentary subjects. I started off wanting to study Physics (see my other comments on sciences today) but wanted to combine it with languages, so I chose English, German, Physics and Maths (pure maths was outside the "options" so you could take it as a fourth in those days when even the best generally only did three A levels). There was an outcry and I was soon - well it took half a school year or one quarter of my A level education - talked round to English, Latin and History because they were more consistent - even though I hadn't even done History amongst my twelve O levels (but had A grades in Maths, Physics, Chemistry and a B in Further Maths AO Level) because I didn't particularly enjoy it though I am rediscovering its enticements now thanks to folk like David Starkey, Niall Ferguson and Adam Hart-Davies. A Baccalaureate type mix and match qualification would no doubt have suited this polymath much better.

Technorati Tags: education

Whisky, and other spirits, specially distilled to take their alcohol (the chemical that provides the "high" - well, "low" actually in both cases!) content up from the usual 3-5% of beer to 40% or more, are dangerous.

Non sequitur? Indeed - we all know that you don't drink whisky by the pint by and large. But people still use spirits to get blotto as fast as they can on as little liquid as they can and for those people, yes, it is dangerous. Yet such a FUD mantra (fear, uncertainty and denial) is routinely trotted out by the twenty-first century's New Temperance League in their relentless attacks on other drugs, such as here at the First Post:

Cannabis growing hits a new high (was the pun intended I wonder?)

The plant most popular with illicit farmers is actually skunk, a hybrid cannabis plant specially bred to be more potent: whereas standard cannabis contains about one to five per cent of THC (tetrahydro- cannabinol - the chemical that provides the "high"), skunk can contain as much as 30 per cent THC, making it dangerous.

And yes, of course, like whisky when drunk by the pint it could be dangerous. Now of course, with the benefit of regulation, we know exactly what the alcohol content is of every alcoholic drink that is sold (except that scrumpy stuff that is still brewing when it hits your stomach!). But cannabis users do tend to know how to dose themselves - and you don't, indeed physically can't in most cases, sit there and smoke yourself comatose like people do with booze. Unlike with alcohol, there usually comes a point at which your body actually cannot take any more well before you're actually semi-conscious - you're "toked out" in the lingo - and you cannot for love nor money force yourself past that point, often even having to stub out a joint halfway through, so it seems much more self regulating than strong alcohol is where you can down a bottle of the stuff and pass out a few minutes later.

But all this FUD reminds me of the Untouchables and prohibition in the US. Of course in an underground market people produced the strongest most rancid hooch they could, because shipping bulk tankers of lite beer around the country was just not on. Prohibition didn't work then, so why do we think it should work now? And just like back then, there are other very real dangers - in cultivating the stronger stuff, in making it quickly and covertly, they use hydroponics with all sorts of chemicals that stick around after the plants are harvested. So not only are you consuming artificially strong stuff, but chemically tainted stuff as well. Double bad!

And thinking about strength of drugs they are fighting a losing battle on most of them - did you know, for example, that it is possible to concentrate the active ingredients of heroin to such an extent that you could pass around enough supply for an addict to live off for a month if he knew how to dilute it again properly under a postage stamp? How are you supposed to stop that sort of concentration getting past the authorities?

Conrad Russell suggested that when a law has a significant amount of the population either disregarding it or contemptuous of it, it has become de facto a bad law. The numbers of people that now appear to be involved in cannabis cultivation suggests this is now the case here if it wasn't already.

The best, nay the only way, to deal with this is to legalize and regulate it, and bugger the Temperance League ladies. Make sure that, as with tobacco and alcohol, everyone knows precisely how much of the active ingredient they are taking and then leave it up to individuals to decide whether they want a quick snifter of the strong stuff, or an evening's socializing with the old tongue loosener.

Technorati Tags: prohibition, liberty, drugs laws