Right To Build – Crisis or no crisis, the right to your own home is for many the ultimate asset. The present slump in the housing market shows how dangerous it is to depend entirely on the corporate oligopoly market to create these goods: both affordable and market-sector housing currently face a shortfall. And despite Government rhetoric about design quality, standards of architecture, construction and energy performance have remained woefully low over the past 10 years.

What if we gave people the Right To Build? Publicly owned land assets – whether held by the Homes and Communities Agency or local authorities, and perhaps indeed the cheap assets that the public sector could still snap up from debt-crippled developers – could be devolved to Community Land Trusts (CLTs). Small or large-scale co-design projects could be configured with relatively limited seed-funding and deliver co-procured or actually co-built homes which are personalised and affordable because of the elimination of developer profit, typically 20-25% of development cost. Sweat equity input can be off-set against eventual ‘sale price’ of the home to the end user; this ‘sale’ could occur through memberships in the CLT or on the basis of a normal sharehold mortgage (allowing CLT’s long-term control over land) with a re-sale clause guaranteeing the CLT a share of value uplift.