The Cost of Building

I do not know if it's true but I was told this afternoon that one reason why new house builds have been so disappointing in recent years is because Prescott introduced a requirement that a significant percentage of new housing developments had to be for affordable housing and that the housing associations to whom the affordable housing was to be transferred had to be sold at a significant discount to market price. This apparently has so skewed the economics of developing a site that, in the present financial state we find ourselves in, many developers are not prepared to risk their financial future by carrying out a development, particularly on brown field sites which can be expensive to prepare for building. It is thought however that developers will be likely to take the risk of carrying out a development on a green field site once the changes to the planning laws proposed by the government have gone through as the cost of acquiring and preparing a green field site for development is often significantly less than the cost of buying and preparing a brown field site. If this is so and in order to encourage further house building on brown field sites why doesn't the government change Prescott's policy so that the cost of building on brown field sites is made sufficiently profitable to attract the developers? The government could at the same time make building on green field sites more expensive and thereby mollify its opponents to its plan to make our planning laws less prescriptive. Perhaps the government already have changes to Prescott's regulation in mind. I do hope so. The government did not change the planning permission though for the tower being built near Vauxhall Bridge (known locally I'm told as Prescott's Prick) and reduce its height to something more reasonable. I suppose we have to be thankful that it had already been reduced from 63 floors to 50 but once built it will alter London's skyline as will the other towers for which permission to build cannot now be refused. The huge site in and around Nine Elms Lane and now being prepared for development will no doubt contain many tall buildings.