Tomorrow is the Lib Dems' South Central Regional Conference at Newbury. Since there is now a leadership election, and both candidates (I still hope for more but it's looking increasingly a remote possibility) will be there and will effectively make a first "hustings" in the campaign the other bbusiness of the conference may well get curtailed. I was hoping to have the floor in the Affordable Housing debate, so in case I do not get to speak after all I thought it worth while putting my three minutes' worth online. So here it is:

"Make no mistake, colleagues, I do not believe it is ultimately possible to have sustainable, equitable and affordable housing without radical land reform, by which I usually mean Land Value Tax. There is no shortage of land - if all of us in this region lived at the same density as the population of Singapore or New York City we'd all fit easily onto the Isle of Wight. And, by and large, there is also no real shortage of housing; the vast majority of households in housing need are in fact housed somewhere, just it is often either beyond their means, hopelessly cramped, or both. And yet up to 45% of our housing stock is UNDER-occupied while 2-3% is over crowded. Only LVT can solve this kind of mismatch. And trying to build ourselves out of the problem in popular areas is going to do nothing longer term for regional equilibrium as it increases the capacity in, for example, the south east, to absorb yet more of the rest of the country's economic activity.

But there's another, more localized, land reform that could help. It's party policy, though hasn't received much promotion or support, and our local councils do not seem to be encouraging it terribly enthusiastically. Community Land Trusts are a practical and immediate measure that party members can take home from here today and get their members and councils working on. A Community Land Trust is a vehicle established to hold land on behalf of a defined community - it could be a city, an individual neighbourhood, a rural parish or a countty-wide umbrella organization. The idea is that we acquire land, either through the planning process, by outright purchase or donation by philanthropic land owners (there actually are such creatures!) and lock it up in a trust. This way we do not need to pass the cost or developed value of the land onto the buyers of the housing we build on it, built, always, with community buy in and if possible self-management of the specification and design process.

We then bundle the whole development up and turn it over to a "Mutual Home Ownership Society" which the occupiers join by paying a share of the borrowing used to develop the properties. The share they pay is based on what they earn, not the housing they need and they don't pay any extra rent as with shared ownership schemes. If the development is itself large enough, we hope the incomes across all the households involved will between them cover the repayments, and each gets a share they can sell when they want to move on based on the proportion of the borrowing they have committed to, plus (or minus I suppose these days) an adjustment based on an agreed local property index. When they want to sell up, they need to find a buyer for their share. If the incoming household has not as high an income, they can place the balance of their share with other member households whose incomes have risen since they joined - and who by the terms of their lease are bound to buy additional shares when required up to a commitment of around 30% of their household incomes.

The model can be tweaked for use in many different scenarios - a small scale rural exception site where there is as yet no subsidy for developing social rented housing, an urban development where we want 100% affordable - as in sub-market - housing instead of 50:50 posh:poor for the same land cost, or even an existing mature suburban neighborhood willing to club together, pool the new found wealth of their existing housing equity and take charge themselves of the regeneration of their neighbourrhood, instead of leaving it to the buy-to-let absentee landlord or the local developer of flats crammed into the corner plot.

Schemes can be financed by conventional borrowing backed by the freehold land value, or, we hope, by a new vehicle christened an "Open Capital Partnership" which would allow ordinary investors to yield an index linked return for investing in their local communities. As a side-bar at that point to finish with, we might want to look at Building Society legislation: being a mutual ownership system many of us CLT promoters would like to work with mutual financing organizations, but your local Newbury Building Society tells me they are prohibited by law from investing in something that is not an individual taking out a mortgage for a single house, despite the movement's origins as mutual savings clubs building local neighbourhood housing."