Absolutely everything you need to know about the absurd cost of English housing is contained in these few paragraphs:

A farmer has rejected a £275million offer for his land from housing developers wanting to build a new town.

Robert Worsley said he would be ‘doing a massive disfavour’ to the community where he has lived all his life if he ‘took the money and ran’.

The 48-year-old father of two has run 550-acre farm for the last 15 years.

He was approached by agents for housebuilder Mayfield more than two years ago. Other landowners on adjoining sites in Twineham, near Haywards Heath, West Sussex, are also believed to have been offered large sums.

The multi-million pound potential offer is 100 times the farm’s current value, even though it covers only one-seventh of the proposed 10,000-home development.

It's Mr. Worsley's land, he can do as he wishes with it.

But there's the reason that English housing is so expensive. Land that may potentially be built upon is worth 100 times that same land that cannot potentially be built upon. That is, the chitty that is issued to allow building upon a piece of land is at least 99% of the cost of the land plus chitty. It is therefore the planning system that makes housing so expensive.

Thus, as we've pointed out ad nauseam, the answer is to issue more chittys so as to bring down the cost of them. There's no mystery here, no problem. If something is expensive because it is in artificially short supply then the answer is to increase the supply of it.

Perhaps we might suggest abolishing the Town and Country Planning Acts?