Douglas Carswell's Blog

House building - what might a free market look like?

Individual homeowners built more homes last year than the big developers, according to the Financial Times.

What does this tell us about Britain's home building market?

Perhaps it suggests that the big developers tend to build homes not so much to satisfy what paying punters are willing to buy. Maybe they construct in compliance with what the regulations permit. If you want a home built the way you want, build your own.

That at least might help explain why 15,000 plus did just that, rather then buy what Barratt, Taylor Wimpey and the rest provide.

As a libertarian, I have real difficulty with rules that prevent people spending their own money building a place to call home.

The trouble is that without genuine liberalisation of the housing market, granting planning permission to corporate developers to build more homes is the twenty first century equivalent of a granting a medieval monopoly. It licenses economic activity, but does not ensure it happens in response to what a free market wants.

Getting the design of a house approved today is a costly business. It is one of the key reasons developers tend to use their planning permission to construct so much identikit housing.

Why not repeal the prescriptive rules about design, and let developers build houses shaped by what the person paying for it wants?

The government's talk of freeing the housing market will, I fear, give us the worst of all worlds. Freedom for corporatist construction projects. No free market to ensure what goes up is what the paying punter prefers.

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