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A couple of years ago I was, albeit not very assiduously, on the Liberal Democrat Federal Housing Policy Working Party. We produced a very good policy paper in my opinion. From my perspective it was good in particular because it included Community Land Trusts that I had already been working on for a couple of years before that.

At the time I suspected that the working party, or perhaps the wider party, did not fully understand the model, despite having heard it directly from the horse's mouth, so to speak, in the form of David Rodgers, Executive Director of CDS Co-operatives who commissioned the research that led to the model we are working to in groups around the country. But the wording in the final document was such that for those who knew about CLTs it was enough to show we supported them, and for those who didn't to give a flavour of them.

But we appear to have done absolutely nothing, as a party at least, to promote our policy in this regard (nor, to be fair, have we pursued Tim Leunig's idea of Community Land Auctions). And worse, over the past six months to a year, there has been a drip-drip of statements about housing that seem to suggest that even the most influential in housing in the party, our DCLG shadow team, do not understand CLTs' potential. And, if it could get even worse, I have once or twice offered to give them a briefing and been turned down.

There are new policy discussions springing up all over the place - at the Centre Forum, and in our Tackling Poverty and Inequality consultation for example - that seem completely to ignore our existing and not terribly old policy paper. I've even had more positive response from Michael Gove, whom I am still hoping to meet sometime after the conference season is over, because I believe that CLTs can help deliver David Cameron's stated aim of providing lots more affordable housing for local people in property hotspots "that are beautiful".

So, if the rest of the Lib Dems are happy tearing up our housing policy, or at least doing absolutely nothing to promote it, and plod away rewriting it willy nilly, then so will I. And believe me, I am radical when it comes to housing. Not, perhaps, as radical as the Bolsheviks, but not far off.

Readers will know that I am a Georgist Land Value Taxer. The Community Land Trust model actually shares a great deal with LVT. The CLT holds the land in perpetuity for the community. The residents buy shares in houses built on that land leasehold. So the value of the land can be used first to borrow against to build the housing without subsidy, and second the land remains locked up in the CLT so you don't need to crystalise out its changes in value but use it effectively to subsidise those who cannot afford a whole house complete with the land.

But I would go further. We conventionally talk of our homes as the "biggest investment" we will make in their lives. But they are generally only a "good investment" if the value of the site on which they are built rises. In practice, over the lifetime of the house itself, it is a cost. So much of a cost, in fact, that the Housing Corporation calculates that the whole life cost of housing is nearly double its headline build cost, in real terms. Think about it. That 1920s terrace; it's maybe had a new roof, new wiring, new plumbing, and all sorts of less ambitious maintenance jobs carried out on it in its lifetime. Any one of those bigger jobs carried out today is probably worth many times what it cost to build.

But if you didn't do those essential maintenance jobs to maintain its worth as a home, over decades you'd probably still end up making money, simply because of the rise in the value of the land it sits on. Value the owner or occupier does little if anything to create. It is in fact created by all sorts of interactions going on around it - public spending on transport (in particular) infrastructure but also other public services like schools; private expenditure like that new centre of employment down the road that suddenly makes that area desirable for professional high earners rather than the working class labourers for whom the area was originally developed.

And what is it an investment for? For leaving to our children? Even that is increasingly in question as more and more people find themselves releasing at least some of the equity in their property to see them through retirement. Is a home, then, a good investment for your retirement? Well, if you own it outright of course it will save you having any direct housing costs when you are no longer earning quite so much as when you are working. Many of the equity release schemes do not give rise to payments while you are alive but take the value of the lien out of sale value on death, but then you are leaving less to any family or other beneficiaries.

Even the way we pay for our homes in the first place does not tend to suggest they are an "investment" in the same way as we think of other investments. We borrow huge sums of money to buy them. We pay for them over 25 (and more now) years (although I do recognise that the average life of a mortgage is just eight years as people near the beginning of their careers and lives as home owners sell up, move and pay the first one off to take out another mortgage.

Wouldn't it be better, say, to be able to pay the costs of our housing as we go along, and put any spare into more genuinely economically productive investments? In Oxford there is, I worked out a couple of years ago now, about £9bn worth of owner occupied housing, of which about £6bn is "clear" equity and £3bn current mortgage debt. Think of the great things we could achieve collectively if we were able to put that £6bn let alone the remaining £3bn into investments in activities that will ensure the economic success of Oxford for generations to come?

And then there is the community fragmentation aspect of the twentieth century freehold revolution. In many cases these are really coming to the fore now, as the huge amount of suburban inter-war housing is getting past its design life. Once upon a time someone was lucky enough to buy up tracts of land and lay out estates that people wanted to live in. But they subdivided those estates into individual plots forever and now, when the old lady down the street dies a mini-developer moves in and wants to convert that corner plot into seventeen flats with no open space and little connection with the rest of the estate. People feel vulnerable to piece-meal change, with little control or influence as planning authorities often have different objectives - new density levels, different housing demand than when these suburbs were laid out and so on.

It seems also that the next "phase" of land enclosure is going to be enclosing communities, excluding the passer-by. Oh it will start out as a measured response to evidence of community problems, but once they have caught on you can bet it will become more commonplace to seek exclusivity alone.

If we as a party are going to embrace Land Value Tax, as I hope we shall, eventually, we will be admitting that the state does have an interest in what most of us thought was our "own property". There is a balancing act to ensure that people in that process do not lose out inequitably. We have existing housing policy that would enable more people to afford the housing security of owning the home they live in, while making a contribution to the state, based not on their incomes but on the added value the community and the state creates in their area.

What is the nation state after all? A territorial entity, a bundle of natural resources that has to be stewarded for the future? Or a collection of incomes to be harvested at a more or less arbitrary rate when the need arises?

I can show you a financing mechanism for housing that lets us buy shares in our communities. Shares in the income that the ongoing costs of housing produces. When you retire and can no longer buy any more shares, the people coming after you are beginning to buy theirs and you get an income from yours. You could trade your "empty nest" down and enjoy the surplus as you please, or hold onto it and continue with a home costing you nothing and any other investment and pension income you may have. Since you've been paying for the home, and not twice the price for the land, you've had years of lower costs that you can invest in productive investments to pass on for your children. As a shareholder in that neighbourhood you have a real say in what happens to the area.

Coupled with low, or no, other taxes, wouldn't that be quite an attractive, and more equitable, way of arranging our shared resources?

Do they still have "army surplus stores"? All the ones in Oxford were priced out of the retail property market years ago. Or maybe their stock was raided to send to our boys in Iraq.

Anyway, the reason I ask is that there's this assumption going about that Bliar will this week get his commission to go sort out the middle east, and, whilst the Guardian is here talking about "popular anger" in the middle east itself, I'm afraid that to my mind such is the inappropriateness of sending the man who has colluded shoulder to shoulder with George Bush in the continuing murder of so many in the Arab world that maybe now is the time to get prepared for WWIII.

I despair for the world when the global old-boys clubs of ex-leaders think Bliar is a suitable envoy to piss on the fire he helped stoke. Actually, it makes me feel physically sick. I was only just warming to the idea of some time without his smarmy spin-wracked cynical grin peering out at me from newspapers or television screens. If Bliar wants to do some community service I'd suggest limiting him to working with President Carter and Habitat for Humanity. Though the state he's left the UK affordable housing scene in probably means he'd have to start right here anyway.

Mind you, I'd hope the new Attorney General would see sense to appeal such a light sentence. Maybe a stint as an "internally displaced person" will instill some humility in him?

Technorati Tags: tony blair, iraq, middle east envoy

Thanks to James Robertson for pointing me to this site in response to a call for fresh thinking on how to fund the EU after 2008. I'll no doubt return to this in the future but for now just have a look. How we can finance the EU and get a dividend back.

Technorati Tags: EU, monetary reform

University fees. Oh dear, what a sensitive subject. I've just watched Question Time's "Next Generation" edition and the biggest applause came for a question on scrapping tuition fees, and today I had my last Academic Board here in which we were treated to a presentation on the National Student Satisfaction Survey initial results.

I'm reminded that Stephen Tall takes an apparently very un-Lib Dem position on tuition fees and that we are currently thinking about the party's future policy on Higher Education funding. But, horror of horrors, I think I'm beginning to agree. I suppose I ought to be careful about what I say here. I am one of the elected staff governors of my institution, and at some point in my four year term I dare say we're going to have to take a position on the future of university fees in order to feed into the process of deciding what happens next when the £3,000 annual cap on fees is debated around 2010.

Next academic year, as the elected governor, I am hoping to host a series of events for staff and students to help inform any decision I might have to participate in on this and some other pressing issues, such as the pressures universities face to bring in corporate "partners" (privatise to most people I suspect) in various areas of operation. So for now, these thoughts are just musings on what might be one line of reasoning.

Back to the National Student Satisfaction Survey. We were presented with a very pretty colourful document showing a table with red blobs for where the university scored in the lower quartile of student responses nationally and green ones where we scored in the top quartile, and yellows for he in-between areas. There's a huge project going on nationally to collect and interpret these data and eventually the "results" will be on the UCAS website supposedly to help prospective students decide where to go.

I have to say they seem pretty subjective - for a start universities themselves can't control in what groups, and some of them seem pretty counter-intuitivie, particular subjects may be placed. And then the raw figures do not seem to reflect the numbers of students on a course. So you could have a hundred courses with three students on each, where one student completed the survey and gave you a bad mark and you'd end up with a hundred rows of "red" squares and one course with a thousand students on where 700 completed the survey and gave you top marks and you'd end up with a mostly red page.

And I suddenly realized where in my varied career I had seen such a chart before. It looked just like the old Stock Exchange FTSE-100 SEAQ/Ceefax prices screen with reds for falling shares and in that case blue for rising prices. And it got me thinking...someone is expending an awful lot of effort to translate student perceptions into some pseudo-objective rating for an institution or subject that is intended to give a guide on which basis people will choose what institution or course to go to.

But because there's no real market in fees - practically nobody has decided to charge less than the £3,070 "maximum" fee (mainly because it is nothing like enough to make up for the 60% real terms drop in state funding over the past couple of decades) - this perceptual information cannot translate into prospective students' value judgment about where to spend their money. This effectively compulsory tax on learning cannot put a price on any particular course or institution or any number of factors why someone might want to study somewhere.

There seems to be an assumption, from my observations of conversations of other governors and senior management of universities, that the fees cap will need to be completely abandoned when the next decision date comes along in 2010. And they're right, to an extent. This muddle cannot continue. It is serving nobody. We either have to bite the bullet and fully fund free higher education, in which case you either give all institutions the same unit funding and those in which excellence comes at a price will descend to mediocrity, or we have to open up the market so universities charge their full costs in fees and make their own decisions about who to assist to afford their prices, to whom to offer discounts and for what subjects and so on.

This latter will be painful - we do not have a culture of people saving up front for college as they do in the US for example, or the incentive that though they may be not well off, they can make it onto their desired course if they achieve the grade to stand out and get a scholarship. And of course in my ideal world of land taxes paying for a citizens income there would be something to save for college, even for the least well off families. But we cannot lurch from one government decision to another every few years. This next decision in 2010 needs to be the last. It needs to set out a longer term target - either to return to full funding or to aim for a totally open market, over the course of, say, a decade, so that youngsters only just entering education now, and their families, know what to expect by the time they get to deciding on university courses.

I started to write this on Thursday evening. As I come to complete it, this story is just breaking in the Guardian. QED?

Technorati Tags: higher education, tuition fees, radicalism