Happened to be reading about Warren Buffet’s imminent retirement, at aged 95. What vigorously caught my attention is a quote attributed to him. Its message goes far to identify where responsibility for England’s broken housing supply system lies.. Here it is
’The single most important decision in evaluating a business is pricing power. If you’ve got the power to raise prices without losing business to a competitor, you have got a very good business. ………If you’ve got a good enough business, if you have a monopoly newspaper or if you have a network television station, your idiot nephew could run it”.
Reading this stark, unadorned statement about the free market in action, whether we like it or not that he is correct, is powerful. It pulls me up I can say. The crude, unsentimental reality of his comment immediately made me think again about the bonanza English house builders and home owners have enjoyed in the last two decades. House prices have soared. But they are not the culprits. But this unforeseen outcome, making house builders shareholders and their executives, and even more significantly home owners lottery winners is plainly the dividend Buffet identifies. Prices have gone up, and up, and up, but …. now pause, and think about it…..supply has not changed! We are living in an economic Alice in Wonderland.,Thank you Warren Buffet for punching me in the face. Of course it is lack of supply. Like water in a clogged pipe, the supply is being strangled. Decades of under supply. These two lucky groups, house builders and home owners, have naturally taken advantage of the failed supply system. The system is to blame. It must now be made to respond to demand.
Few deny the housing supply system is clogged up with regulations and controls. Most of all simply getting planning consent on a piece of land, sites big or small. Getting around these regulatory barriers is ultra difficult for builders. But once you have a consent, the passage of time and the certain return of house price inflation will make you a member of an exclusive small club of building land owners who have got a good business…Not sure if you can persuade the bank, your financing partner? Just ask them to look at four plus decades of housing price history. Instead of taking steps to increase supply each government, until Starmer came along has either ignored a difficult and contentious electoral problem, or added yet more regulations. Even big builders are now complaining, about nutrient deficiency which I do not understand.
Where are we today on supply? It is very interesting. Starmer is determined to bring about a big boost in supply. So is Steve Reid and Michael Pennycook: the two ministers are trying their best. They have my good will, but they will fail. They only have another four years to deliver change.If by then no cross-party political consensus in Westminster exists the political manifestos in 2029 will not share a common theme: that economic growth, of which house building is a big part comes first. For investors looking for politically stable investment openings this omission will be soaked in another douse of uncertainty. Which landowners protected by regulationary rules love, and investors abhore. Once again I see stasis ahead. Sorry kids…. Your time has not come.
So this government must use its energy and zeal for change which matches long term reality, by thinking g and planning 30 and 60 years ahead, not 5 years or even 15 local plan cycles.This ambitious vision based spatial thinking sounds aired fairy. It is not. To understand why, not please read the quote above again. We cannot build the homes new generations need, the nation needs, to secure. growth all with local support in 5 or 15 years. First we must adopt a spatial vision first all areas, showing where we might build and where we certainly won’t, andsecond we must place responsibility for the locations to build and its delivery upon local councils. So they must made ready for this new and enriching role. Lots of training ahead, perhaps starting with secondments to the Crown Estate or the long established London family estates.
Perhaps we can call the revolution the WB revolution?
Ian Campbell7
11 November 2025
