Let go Mr and Mrs Balls

As Economic Secretary to the Treasury and Minister for Housing and Planning respectively you clearly want to increase housing supply. You recognise that housing is becoming increasingly unaffordable.

I am an architect, not an economist or a planner. However I am concerned that between the Treasury and the department for Communities and Local Government the residential property market is being needlessly inflated.

You seem to want to strengthen the presumption for developing brownfield land at a time when farmland could be retired for development, and land prices reduced.

The cost of construction is important but not decisive today in British housing. The technology and the creativity exists to build superbly, but will only be applied and advanced if we are able to build more widely.

It is the needlessly high cost of developable land that frustrates residential development. Releasing more greenfield land will stimulate new building everywhere, because it will deflate the speculative market in the existing building stock. New building should be encouraged, and at all densities.

Please let go of your presumption against greenfield development. Please let go of the ballooning property market.

Attached is a paper that I will be discussing at Superbia - The case for suburbia, at the Centre for Suburban Studies, Kingston University, on Saturday 23 September. I hope you find it interesting.

James Heartfield, my colleague at audacity, is speaking at Superbia and launching Let's Build! - Why we need five million new homes in the next 10 years. If you would like a copy, Ed and Yvette, I will be pleased to send you one each. Similarly the Centre for Suburban Studies is launching Suburban Futures, and Nick Hubble will be pleased to send you each a copy of that report.

Regards

Ian Abley 22.09.2006

Let go Mr and Mrs Balls, because here comes Superbia (September 2006) 685KB

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