The government has finally acted to ease the South-east's crippling housing shortage.
A £1.5bn package unveiled by John Prescott last week included a promise to build 200,000 new homes, most of them in the vast Thames Gateway area east of the capital.

But wait a minute. Ministers have been promising to build a new city on the Thames for years – and nothing has happened. More than a decade after Michael Heseltine set out his vision for the same area, there is still no masterplan, no co-ordinated approach to land assembly and remediation and no powerful delivery agency to oversee the transformation. As a result, 4000 ha of brownfield land is being developed willy-nilly, at densities far below the government's guidelines.

The government has to address these issues. Above all, it must provide what everybody is crying out for: a decent transport system. If that happens, developers will happily build high-quality schemes. But athough there are proposals for state-of-the-art systems, including the £10bn CrossRail project, nobody knows where the money will come from.

In the Netherlands, the government would have predicted the need for housing, identified locations and paid for infrastructure to be put in place before selling off the sites. But we do things differently here. Labour is dogmatically committed to public-private partnerships and expects the private sector to shoulder the risk on projects vital to the public need. Some creative thinking is required – and fast. Why not borrow another good idea from the Dutch and impose a windfall tax on development sites whose values are boosted by the new line? The Jubilee Line extension is estimated to have increased land values along its route by 400%.

London mayor Ken Livingstone is examining the idea, and is willing to drop his long-standing opposition to PPP to get CrossRail built. The government must adopt a similar conciliatory stance; or it risks being known as the administration that promised so much, but delivered so little.

Union blues

Should construction be bracing itself for increasing union discontent? In the last week there have been some worrying signs. First, there was the farcical election at electrical union Amicus AEEU, in which Derek Simpson was voted in as general secretary. Simpson, a former Communist, hinted that the union’s pro-PFI stance may be reversed (see news), which could mean it falls in line with public service union and PFI-basher Unison. Then there were predictions of a strike at postal firm Consignia over plans to hive off the its facilities management arm. Although nobody is suggesting a return to the bad old days of the 1970s, the mood seems to be hardening. With skills at a premium and safety a key concern, the power of the workforce – and therefore the unions – is quietly growing.

Postscript

Marcus Fairs, assistant editor

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