Maidstone Weald Labour Party

'LET'S BUILD' by James Heartfield
Published Sept 06 by Audacity Press - £15.0 , 256 pages

Those of us who have been campaigning during the last few years over the issues related to the Housing Crisis and have wanted to ensure that our facts are accurate and our quotes genuine, would have been glad of this book along the way. But as the Crisis is on-going and no nearer to being solved, at least for working people, it will become one of the sources most consulted by those who are intent upon convincing the politicians, nationally and well as locally, that this is a core issue not just for the Labour Party's electoral chances but for the health of our Society.
Its sub-title is 'Why we need five million new homes in the next 10 years”; not only does it discuss the Reasons to answer that, and gives the statistics, but it goes over all the arguments needed to debate the NIMBY trends, the problems associated with the growth of Towns, the Green Belt and other land designations such as SSI and AONB and the effect of them upon land availability; it also discusses the demise of the small farmer, the industrialisation of farming and the agricultural uses the land – and shows how a new look at it would reveal space for people to live in.
In a chapter entitled “The phantom housing boom” the author argues that in the inverted world of housing 'the housing boom is not a housing boom at all, at least it is not a boom in new house production, rather it is a boom in house prices'. Putting it into perspective he argues that houses are in short supply relative to the increasing number of incomes chasing them and that the shortfall is in relation to growing expectations of home ownership (fostered by Tories and Labour alike). In discussing the continued growth of the numbers in Local Authority temporary accommodation he indicates how the low paid suffer from the shortage.
There is good discussion on the history of planning laws and he mentions the origin and reasons why Statutes have replaced the Great Landowners whose landownership ensured that their law controlled building in the villages and the countryside and how that has been replaced since 1947 by the 'contract' with the owners of land to extinguish their right to develop at will and replace it with the present regulatory system.
No Councillor should be without this book.

Leslie Turner Dec 06