This does not square with the fact that private builders are leaving nearly half of approved developments unbuilt. It's almost like private builders are incentivised to squeeze the market rather than bring prices down.
> The same number of people would need housing, regardless of whether the houses were privately owned or state owned.
Publicly owned housing: The state makes an initial capital investment which it recoups through a low monthly rent payment. After 30 years the state only pays maintenance costs for the property, covered by the monthly rent. Any excess rent can be reinvested towards the cost of another unit.
Privately rented housing: The state pays market rate rents forever, burning the money. The private landlord pays off the mortgage and gets to pocket more of the money. There's no benefit to the state.
It's the same with social care. The government could build social care, instead we're paying up to £50k/week per child[0] towards some cunt's yacht.
And it's the same with the NHS. Nurses have a hard time and poor pay and some quit. The government then bring in an agency nurse, paying the agency 2-4x the salary of the NHS nurse that will have to babysit them because they aren't familiar with their ward and refusing to raise the rate of pay for their own nurses. The remaining nurses see this and some more quit, agency work pays more and you get to choose when you work. This spirals into a very avoidable staffing crisis.
> I don't understand this. I didn't say no regulation. But there's a huge gap between that and making it incredibly difficult to build. Citing some basic anti-zero regulation argument in response to what I said is disheartening.
I didn't claim you were arguing for no regulation, arguing that regulations should be made more lax in the face of those events is what's disheartening. Those disasters occurred because existing regulations were not sufficiently strict/enforced.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/apr/18/english-coun...