and stagnation # in wake of Bill ESTATE TIMES i Major changes in Crushed Land Bill Tory MPs give Land Wer Bill an easy passage L Property men urge Tories to drop Bill repeal pledge bad BPF throws its Ait weight behind -the Land Act The Community Land Bill started life as an attemot to stoo seculaton in dever opment land. It was castrated to ine extent of finally acheiving support from the British Propert Federation! Profits Against Houses will be one of the last reports to come from the National Community Development Project - an achon-research project covering twelve urban and rural areas seen as deprived. From October the central information and intelligence unit which has produced the inter-project reports will be closed down by the Home Office.
The reasons are political rather than economic — to keep the central unit open till the end of the national project in September 1977 would cost just £10,000. But now the national project, established by Callaghan in 1969, will not have the opportunity to centralise its experiences. Profits Against Houses gives some idea why the Labour Government and Whitehall bureaucrats will feel happier with these troublesome people out of their Although based on the experience of Enree Dro ecism Birmingham. Tyneside and Newcastle, Profits Against Houses is a damning indictment of a system which will never produce a decent house for all in need. From land use capital market and house buying the report shows how profit, not need, is the KeVI It dictates where houses are built, what tney look like, wnal tney whether they are built at all. The result is 100,000 homeless and hundreds of thouThe report itself is divided into four sections. nat on land snows that De neath the jargon of plot ratios, yields and income the landowners are in it for profit. The measure that was meant to curb lanc speculation, the Community Land Bill, was usell degutted by tne landowners before it even reached the statute book tne state Dals you out logical development.
Once the construction industry gets the land, it rides the boom-slump roller coaster taster tan any omer maustry. puts them out of business.
The hostility of the Home Office towards the CDP is clearly no accident. Originally conceived as missionaries being sent into the darker regions of Britain's inner cities, they rejected notions of individual pathology as an explanation of social deprivation and insisted on its structural cause. As the CDP Forward Plan (1975-76) puts it, the only way to rectify this situation is 'fundamental changes in the distribution of wealth and