I'm sure John Coleman can name these developers who supposedly like working with housing associations, but frankly as a small developer of new housing in the South-East, it's the last thing I would want to do. I've looked into sites with more than 15 units in my area (the threshold for affordable homes defined by the council), and the local housing associations were only prepared to pay me little more than the cost of construction for "their" one-third of the site. I had therefore to fund the land cost, the Section 106 taxes, and all the development costs for seven of the houses from the sale value of the remaining fourteen that I was allowed to sell to private buyers. This was bad enough in a rising market, where new houses were already significantly more expensive than second-hand ones, but now in a fallng market, the figures simply don't stack up. I can't rise my prices or charge a premium price for my new private houses just because the site is lumbered with one-third affordable homes - I have to take what the market will bear - and that's lower prices, whereas the costs remain the same and one is crippled with having to build free houses for members of the client state and people on benefits on top of everything else.

The Government has been milking private developers for years now with Section 106 and affordable homes - they've been reliant on squeezing their profits again and again to fund their affordable homes programme, and the whole thing has just become impossible, uneconomic. You either have to be a huge developer working on big sites, where the cost of land per house can be made proportionately less, or you have to stay small, under the 15-unit limit. On top of this housing associations now demand higher build standards than are used on the private houses, with Lifetime Homes and "zero-carbon" buildings still to come, all of which drives build costs ever-higher, while the housing associations refuse to pay a fair price to reflect the quality of what they are demanding. I accept of course that they are hobbled by government limits on what an "affordable" rent or price should be, based on the purchasers' incomes, all of which completely ignores the realities on the ground of what it actually costs to buy the land, develop the site, and build the ever-more-complex new homes to the approved standards.

Lastly I dread working with housing associations because of the stories I've heard from other builders and developers, about HA jobsworths sticking their noses in and examining every last detail of "their" houses, smug with entitlement and virtuous feeling about now having housing for "their" people, and never having to worry about the cost and trouble of running a real-life taxpaying business. They live in a parallel world, a public-sector world where everything comes for free courtesy of taxes and the private market, and there is a chasm of understanding between them and the ordinary private businessman trying to make a living and build nice homes for people to live in.