The real problem is rising land costs in areas where people want to live.

It is helping Government policy of high density housing, and the environmental groups who also want to see an end to urban sprawl probably welcome this as well, since rising land costs are forcing developers to look at sites in inner cities, for instance.

The rising land prices are particularly affecting cathedral and university cities, such as Oxford, Cambridge and Winchester, anywhere where there are some historic sites and protected status on land or existing buildings.

Something like 75 per cent of all open space in south-east England has some form of protection from development, whether it be something like a site of special scientific interest, or playing fields.

Cambridge is a good example of the dynamics of this situation: the city has a population in working age groups of 40,000, yet it has 80,000 jobs. There is no where for the people who work in Cambridge to find homes in the city, and this is the basic economic rule that sees house prices there on the rise.

The opposite is true in many areas of industrial decline, often in the north of England, such as Hull, the coalfields of South Yorkshire, the Lancashire coastal towns and city centres such as Liverpool.

For all the talk of the renaissance of city centres, in many areas where property prices have tumbled, the housing stock has often become derelict, and the value of the land virtually worthless.