MP @JamesAsser says it's "absolutely infuriating" that 200+ of his constituents have been forced out of three Canning Town towers overnight. He should be. But his party has known about this crisis for years. Royal Gateway is about 10 years old and already run by residents under Right to Manage. Leasehold tenure reform wouldn't have saved anyone. This is England's unspoken housing crisis: too much new-build stock isn't built to the standard it was sold and mortgaged on. When it fails, the bill lands on buyers who've put everything into a deposit and can't fund repairs or years of litigation. So most absorb it, and stay quiet. In 2023, @Keir_Starmer pressed Michael Gove over @dannybster's new-build in his own Camden constituency, a block its own developer's survey said might need demolishing. His constituents, he said, "cannot be left paying the cost of a broken system." He never came to see it. Then Labour took power, and his office offered Dan help only within existing law. Dan's new Labour MP, @Sagal_AW, hasn't visited yet either. Green leader @ZackPolanski has. Seven years and more than £500,000 in legal costs later, Dan's flat is uninsurable and unmortgageable, with still no viable plan to fix it. Meanwhile the government's Your First Home scheme is nudging more buyers into new builds. So, @JamesAsser: you asked who's at fault. Part of the answer is your own government. Labour has had more than two years to give new-build buyers real protection and still hasn't. Will you push it to make developers, contractors, inspectors and warranty providers pay, or just stay infuriated? Infuriating isn't a policy.

I think this post missed a crucial and most important economic point: people do not want to invest hundreds of thousands of pounds in new builds at a high risk of defects. The producer (developer) needs to realise market consumers (buyers) do not want substandard products (defect-ridden flats).

This has been enabled by a political system that does not understand the issues and won’t tackle them. The fundamental problem is the terrible standard of construction in residential new builds. A great planning permission on paper is often a defective nightmare in reality!