Land bank rebuttal
Stewart Baseley of the Home Builders Federation is reckless to claim (Letters, November 5) that land-banking by developers is a myth.
The Royal Town Planning Institute issued figures in June 2007 showing that developers were sitting on enough land with planning permission for 225,000 houses.
The information is easily checked. Persimmon plc is on the internet boasting of a “long high-quality land bank … of over 53,000 plots with planning permission”, though if you scroll down you see a later report that the same firm cut £600m off its land bank’s value last week.
The government needs to wait till land values bottom out, then institute a land value tax to stop them going up again, so encouraging firms to make money by building.
DBC Reed
Labour Land Campaign