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The Office of Fair Trading today announced that it was to conduct a review of the UK's house-building sector. One of the aspects of the market it will be looking at is:

how land that is suitable for development is brought through the
planning process...and...how land with planning approval is
converted into new homes.

In the TV interview this evening with John Fingleton, the OFT's Chief Executive, he expanded on this a little, explaining that they will be looking at evidence as to whether, and if so why, the development industry "banks" land with permissions and whether incentives can be created for them developing such land more quickly once permission is given.

The OFT is an ideal body to investigate this, as it deals with matters of competition and monopoly, and, as we all understand, land, or at least location in this case, is a monopoly and developers holding land with permission out of the market for any period is an abuse of their position as monopoly owners of a commodity that the rest of the community need merely to subsist.

Long standing Liberal Democrat policy on the National Non-Domestic Rate (Business Rates) provides the only fair answer to this issue. We would charge Site Value Rating on all land not currently occupied as housing or zoned as agricultural. So owners of sites or potential sites with permission for housing would be taxed on the value of such land for that planning use whether they develop them or not, giving them a huge incentive to get on and build the homes and transfer that tax liability to the new occupiers.

The review will accept unsolicited comments, suggestions and evidence until 17th August, 2007 (see the PDF for more details)

Technorati Tags: Office of fair trading, land banks, house building review, lib dems, land value tax

Not a lot of people know this, such is the popular perception of the city of Kingston upon Hull that I rarely even admit it to myself, but Haltemprice and Howden is my place of birth. To be more precise, Woodgates Nursing Home, North Ferriby. At the time my folks lived in Woodlands Drive, Anlaby and my dad worked for Northern Foods.

We returned to the area when I was eight and lived in West End, South Cave for a year or so. I went to Hymers, dad worked as Finance Director at Moore's of Hull (then an Opel and Colt main dealer), with a chap who would become a life-long friend, Ben Moore. I remember the school bus from Elloughton into town, getting a taste of silage when on a school trip to Bishop Burton Agricultural College, the (much tastier) Stroganoff at the Cave Castle Restaurant, the horses in the field behind the house (I see it's been developed now for housing from Google Earth), standing in a crowd around Hull Parish Church to see the queen on her Silver Jubilee tour of Britain (and the beacon on the hill up behind South Cave come to think of it that was lit on Jubilee day tiself) and discovering snails of all things down the lane leading to the A63 (we were allowed to play near the dual carriageway in them days without being taken into care!).

Ah! The A63. Blessed road, for it leads you away from Hull! The landmarks along the way - Howden Abbey, the high bridge over the Humber before Goole, Drax power station are all signs that you are approaching civilisation!

And then, inexorably it seems, it draws you back too, and so, with me just a year or so into a boarding school career, my folks moved back to Hull, and I find the street we lived in there, Maplewood Avenue - one of the worst hit in last years flooding I believe - is more or less the very easterly most road in the Haltemprice and Howden constituency. I remember big rows between my mother and father during school holidays. I remember finally uncovering the fact I had suspected for some time - that Santa Claus was actually my mother with a bag of Boots cotton wool stuck to her chin. But dad was back at Moore's meeting the new wife, so I remember divorce. And depression. I remember getting caught smoking by my mum the first time. I remember trying to make lager from a Boots kit. And her wondering why she had found a condom in my coat pocket when she washed it!

My sister did most of her secondary schooling at Willerby, and they went to church at St Luke's in Willerby. I learned to swim at the Haltemprice Leisure Centre. I discovered a friend at school 200 miles away (and not a mile too many!) who at the time lived in Malton so we shared most of our train journeys to and from school as far as York. When I got back in touch with him after school, my father was living in Driffield and his in Cottingham, so I've spent a good few nights out in Cottingham on Sam Smiths and Hull Brewery Co beers.

So actually, a pretty significant place for so much of my formative life. But the days when a boy from Hull had to deny his city and support Leeds if he wanted to support a top flight football team are over. I still managed to feel a little glow of pride on hearing that Hull City FC had made it into the premiership!

Courtesy of the Libertarian Alliance blog, I am drawn to a commentary on the Libertarian Party UK blog about an article by someone called Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr. at mises.org (how's all that for being damned by the company I keep, or in this case the blogs I read!) about the relationship between the "state", the politicians who try to make us believe they are "running" it and the people in whose name they are supposed to be doing so.

It introduces me at least to the idea of the "personal" and the "impersonal" state.

The personal state is where the regime in power for the time being is synonymous with the state. Most obviously this is an absolute monarchy for example. The monarch is the state. When the monarch dies the regime dies with them and another replaces it. It may be largely the same but it is still a personal fiefdom if you like of the monarch in charge.

In the impersonal state, the predominant form for the past several centuries (ironically in Britain probably traced to the "Protectorate" or at least the Restoration), the state, its bureaucracy, apparatus and most of its policy direction go rumbling on from one regime to the next. The leader is the manager not the owner, if you will.

He says the political system, of parties, elections and so on, are a chimera, making us believe we are in a personal state. That is we elect a manager who cocks up somehow we just elect another one and everything will be different. But who is really in control?

I'm sure most of us active in politics used to chuckle at "Yes, [Prime] Minister", but we all know there is more than a grain of truth in the message that the bureaucracy just rumbles on, sometimes even deliberately frustrating the will of the current elected managers, knowing that if they hold out for long enough another lot of managers will come along who may be more to their tastes.

And I don't mean that this is a personal thing - that there is some conspiracy between individuals wielding power in smokey rooms and dark corridors. It's just the way the thing works in a big state. Look at the comment the other day by a Labour minister that she thought that by the time of the next General Election the ID card system would be so far down the line that it would be impossible for any new government, even one elected purely on a platform of opposing ID cards, to stop it.

Okay, I think, I hope at least, we can take that example with a large bucket of salt - after all, unless it's been designed by Cyberdine Systems to become "self-aware" on or before 5th May 2010, there will still be an "off switch" on the mainframe! But you get the idea. And if you've been a local councillor, you see it every day in the workings of your council bureaucracy - the same old surly faces, sometimes frustrating the ideas of the politicians and so on. We have come to know some of that as the "can't do" culture.

Rockwell's conclusion is that the political "game" is futile. Ideas can move the world, but they can't shift the bureaucratic apparatus of the state at the same rate. And I have to say, since I combine my party political presence with real action on alternative structures such as Community Land Trusts and social enterprise, that bears out. Indeed, whenever we need the imprimatur of the state, such as in planning issues and so on, the byzantine apparatus seems to do its utmost to frustrate or delay us.

I tend to disagree. Obviously, I suppose, since I remain involved in party politics. But I do recognize that for all the "change" we talk about, Nick Clegg talks about, Obama talks about, whoever talks about, it does seem that most things will just grind on the way they always have. We will complain about them. We may even blame Gordon Brown or someone else for them personally. But if we continue to play that same game we will never really change them.

I am in politics because I believe those big ideas can be introduced through the political system. So did our political forebears like Lloyd-George with his 1909 budget - he at least had the balls also to go head to head with the establishment that rejected his big ideas but still, essentially, lost. I don't advocate violent revolution, though at times it seems that little short of that will actually achieve the change necessary. But I do want us to grow the cojones to be radical, to propose the "ideals" not the "manageables", to aim high and be different. And to demolish this all powerful leviathan and start from the ground up again.

I return again to the idea that we are in an age of epochal change. Of the unprecedented ability for us individually to communicate with others all round the world. We have to begin to ask just how much of that "impersonal state" we need any longer. Cobden had it about right when he said that "peace will come to the earth when people have more to do with each other and governments less." Politicians, let humanity grow up. Realize your limits. Let go and do something productive for a change instead!