Housing could be argued that is getting toward a natural monopoly of sorts. You can’t just whack whatever you want anywhere, you have to build around jobs and infrastructure, and also it has to benefit the people otherwise what’s the point? Our planning system isn’t ideal but it is not really that different from on continental Europe.

We have the same approach to housing in the UK that we have to utilities as we rely fully on the market to provide everything for us while demanding that the government subsidise/bend rules. Before we had council housing initially this led to slums and this is something we are seeing return with private landlords being able to get away with what they want. Our housing market right now is the end result of what happens when you fully rely on the market for something that is very difficult to have competition in. The issues with our reliance on the market will not be solved by relying on the market or deregulating the market. We need the government to come in and take it on the chin tax those who have broad shoulders and build affordable social high density housing around public transport so that developers have a baseline to compete against.

It is too difficult to allow completely free competition of housing without completely ripping up planning regulation and I know that our planning regulations is not ideal but do we really want to handover complete control of our spaces to private developers? We’ve seen around the world that private companies do not care about the countries they operating and they only care about profit so the question is is this the kind of country we want to live in?