Letter in Guardian:
“There is a lack of political will to fix our broken housing market,” says your leader (28 March). In fact, there is political will not to fix it, because to offer any degree of stability to today’s nascent and growing families would need more than “flatlining” house prices; it would need prices to fall back to a realistic multiplier of local earnings, which is something this government will not have, as evidenced by the outrageous shovelling of public money to development-sector shareholders through Help to Buy.
There should, as you say, be public control over development land, and greater security for tenants, including rent control. You could add penal taxing of vacant property; a separate-use class for second homes; and the taxing of inherited property wealth which continues to widen social division.
But none of this will happen until Generation Rent is sufficiently populous to be electorally threatening and plausible politicians are putting its case. On present indications, that won’t be in time for the 2020 election (and there won’t be one sooner because the Tories are comfortable with a derelict opposition). “
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2017/apr/02/decent-housing-a-necessity-for-a-healthy-society
East Devon Watch 
Decent housing …. now there’s an area which needs architectural intellectuals to get involved.
Building houses in this country hasn’t fundamentally changed for a century.
There are opportunities to build house with the potential for home owners to expand , at their own expense, into roof space, however roof trusses are still built to make thus a difficult, if not impossible venture.
Plumbing and electrics could be channelled in a way to make them easier to update or modify, yet the UK building trade makes houses based on , these days, the standard size of plasterboard, and how simple it is t build to a pattern based on standard off the shelf dimensions of components.
John Lewis sell very nice lighting, as do other retailers, but you’d need a room height of over 3metres to put these fittings in!
The whole bloody system needs to be rethought , as at present, the UK are continuing to build slums of the not too distant future.
Where are the thinkers, the innovators, those who think outside the proverbial box!
They ‘ain’t in East Devon, that’s for sure.
The problem here is that councillors, given the portfolio for planning and building have no F****** idea what to do. They are inept, unfit for purpose, a waste of space.
Don’t get me started, ‘cos these ar**holes are supposed to be working on our behalves.
House building,planning in the hands of these inept East Devon Councillors is a recipe for future calamity.
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