A sensible proposal here for dealing with the housing problem we have in Britain:

A thousand "commuter villages" providing 2.1 million new homes should be built in the green belt near train stations to help solve Britain's housing crisis, says a leading Government adviser and academic.

LSE professor Paul Cheshire, who has been a Government adviser for over a decade, said building the villages within 10 minutes walk of the 1,035 under-developed rail stations would offer easy and quick commutes to urban jobs while producing as many new houses as have been built in the last 15 years.

The idea that we should build housing where we know people desire to live seems to have a certain good sense to it.

How do we know people desire to live there? Because we’ve a law against people doing so. We wouldn’t have such a law against building in the Green Belt if we didn’t think that people would like to live in houses built in the Green Belt now, would we?

Therefore, obviously enough, we can solve the problem of building houses where people would like to live by building those houses where we know people would like to live.

The only flaw we see with the plan is that there are still restrictions being imposed. Why not just say that we’re going to blow up the Town and Country Planning Act 1947 and successors? After all, the very reason we’ve got the laws is to stop the development of housing where we know people would like housing to be developed. And why are we doing that?