WE may admire young Harvey Millington for seeing a use for a marketable product and selling it successfully (Teenager makes £2m from business deals, Gazette, November 17).
Good luck to him if he works at other ideas and can make a success of those too.
The £2 million he is said to have been offered for a piece of land that he bought for £40,000 is a different matter.
He intended to use this land to market another product that he thought would be successful and no doubt bring its due reward.
Accepting the offer from a developer of £2 million for this land would just be a piece of luck – he would have done nothing to create that extra ‘value’.
The prices being offered for land for housing are shocking and contribute considerably to the high cost of homes.
It is most unjust that those who are lucky enough to own land which becomes available for building houses can make these ridiculously huge profits through no effort on their part.
An area worth no more than half a million as undeveloped land, if it becomes approved for building, can be worth £10 million with little or no effort on the part of the owner.
It is high time that the government took action on this, if it really wants to help young people to have their own homes, as it says.
A free market in a scarce commodity doesn’t work if that commodity is essential to everyone.
Of course releasing more land would eventually bring down the price, but this would take time even with goodwill on the part of developers and the ‘nimbys’.
Taxing these transactions may transfer part of the profits to the government but it does nothing to keep down the cost of housing (neither does “help to buy” – an unimaginative move on the part of government).
Perhaps we should look at some form of control in which land owners are allowed a reasonable but not extortionate profit, i.e. a limit on the price of the land?
Builders should be doing what it says on the tin – building, not speculating.
Land is a limited and essential commodity which should be used for the public benefit.
A visitor from another world would be amazed that individual natives could profit from “owning” pieces of the planet.
GEOFFREY BAILEY
Taunton
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