Professor Ambrose begins to sum up with the observation that long term finances and long term planning have to be the bedrock of an holistic housing policy. Short term political interest has strangled the economic sense of the development of a long term plan for one of the fundamentals of infrastructure: housing. The cost to the tax payer of the political inability to look after the interest of the country and its citizens before party political interest is massive, costs in health, costs in environment, costs in crime and its prevention and costs in social services and benefits all accrue from bad housing. The ‘use it or lose it’ principle works at a small scale – Peter suggests we need a much stronger source of public investment for infrastructural purposes – like the Public Works Loans Board initiated in the Victorian era – one of the nationalised banks could fulfil this role – and the HCA needs to be ’beefed up’ to facilitate the development process – it is also up to Local Authorities to do this again – so they need to be properly resourced to do this

See the Z2K Response to the 2009 UK Budget

Z2K Housing Review April 2009 Issue One: Contents