readers' letters

Sirs,

       I am thoroughly fed up with people spouting the popular mantra "we must build more houses" and when I say, "WHY"?, they are quite perplexed.  There are thousands of houses on the market. What has to be clarified, but never is, is that we need housing that the people who are not home owners, can actually afford. This will never come about until the Government, it can only be the Government, tackle the admittedly extremely thorny question of land values.  The whole planning system needs turning on its head.  

    If all the unused land currently owned by government and councils had housing built on it without the outrageous additional price generated by "Planning Permission" for the land and developers were removed from the scene, houses could almost become AFFORDABLE which is what everyone means when they say "we must build more houses". 

There is plenty of land available on brown field sites, which usually means that a fair proportion of the necessary infrastructure is already in place, which would bring down the cost considerably, at the same time doing away with the notorious 106 schemes that adds cost tremendously to the final selling price. Do people really think that the money a developer contributes to the locality around his development comes from his own pocket, dream on.  It is the homeless that pay for it, inflated by the profit a bank makes on a mortgage. 

   Near where I live there is an area considered to be one of the most underprivileged in the country and it is crying out for housing for the younger generation.  A developer is building houses not terribly far away and before he got planning permission he stated that there would be "affordable housing" to the statutory level available for purchase.  Try explaining that to the youngsters round here who will have to find a quarter of a million pounds to "Get on the Housing Ladder" 

    The five million people on countrywide waiting lists, are waiting for the price of housing to come down and this will not happen unless Government addresses the whole financial equation that creates the ridiculous prices currently being asked.

THE GREAT SURGERY
SWINDLE

On the evening of 22^nd November  Havant Borough Councils’ housing development committee, after 7 hours of deputations, decided by 4 votes to 3 that a Developer would be given planning permission to build 280 houses on land known as Hampshire Farm, and this was to include the unusual lure of a new Doctors’ Surgery plus Pharmacy 

MYSTERIOUSLY, only during the last few minutes, was it becoming publicly clear that this wonderful doctors’ new surgery, had not actually been offered to the Emsworth GP Partnership on any specific financial terms in relation to their occupancy. It was further revealed that if the Partnership did not contract to take on the new building within a set time-scale, including the Pharmacy presumably, the land would revert back to Havant Borough Council. They may then feel it would be expedient to build the surgery themselves, out of Council Tax Funds of course, rather than have a derelict plot at the entrance to this grand development which will definitely not be affordable to anyone on the housing list!!!!

I wonder if the Housing Committee had been made thoroughly aware of that, if not, THE COUNCIL HAS BEEN TRICKED

                                                                                                                     Jim Cottis,
25-Nov-10