House Swap

From The Guardian

The government is to launch a "house swap" programme, reminiscent of Norman Tebbit's call for the jobless to "get on your bike", in an attempt to encourage people to move around the country to find work. 

The controversial plan to tackle the unemployment crisis means people living in social housing will be helped to uproot their families in order to chase jobs. Details of the scheme are yet to be finalised, but it is understood the plan would involve a nationwide database of house swaps and the removal of any barriers to people in social housingmoving between regions.

This sounds like a good idea, but there's only one problem: who is going to volunteer to move out of London to say, Manchester? You're an elderly couple, why are you going to do that?

This is one way in which council housing is a mess. With the private sector, people downsize and realise some capital by moving house. They have an incentive to move out of London and go to Somerset when they retire. For someone living in London in a council estate it means moving away from family.

Little Billionaire Bastard

From the Telegraph:-

Tory MP and environment campaigner Zac Goldsmith told the programme: "If you lump gardens and wasteland in the same category, developers will always go for gardens because it's easier and cheaper.

"We are not saying there shouldn't be development, there are other alternatives. There are a lot of empty homes.

"We want to protect gardens so that instead of being top of the list for developers, they are at the bottom."

1. No, the fact is that we have just about run out of wasteland. Labour (to their credit) did a lot to ease building on wasteland in their time in power and builders responded. As a result, we have a map like this: http://www.londonbrownfieldsites.org/Mapping/. No, don't look at the pinkish bits. It's the brown specs on that map which show derelict land/buildings. See them? Good luck with that. In London, there just isn't any. The builders have used it up. 
2. No, there aren't lots of empty homes. In the South of England, less than 2.5% of homes are empty.The Empty Homes Agency estimate that if all Britain's empty houses were brought back into use, it would meet 2 years of the government's growth needs. In the South of England, less than 2.5% of homes are empty.
3. The problem is that there is little derelict land, the government have taken away local building targets and so there will not be much land made available.

We are going to enter into a housing crisis after 5 or 10 years because of these stupid, NIMBY policies