Apologists for land bankers at work.

More nonsense from Centre for Cities, the opening sentence contradicts the headline just to warn you that you are about to ride the rollercoaster of flawed logic:

No, landbanking does not cause the housing crisis – here’s why

Landbanking is caused by the current discretionary planning system. A new flexible zoning system will end landbanking and the housing crisis.

So, er, landbanking does not cause the housing crisis (which is not a crisis, it's deliberate); but the planning system causes landbanking... which in turn causes the housing crisis?

The key paragraph appears to be this:

The rational strategy for developers is to build at a slow rate which maintains high prices for their product and avoids swamping the local market with new supply. Crucially, this behaviour is possible because every other competitor faces the same bottleneck on accessing land for development. They are not able to swoop in, buy another piece of land, and quickly build and sell homes for a cheaper price... If a new flexible zoning system were introduced those behaviours would disappear.

Land is land, whether it is owned by a farmer, a speculator or a home-builder/land banker; whether it has planning; is likely to get it or is just a long shot. Whoever owns it is the landowner. They all have the same incentive, to drip-feed it onto the market.

It's like having money in the bank which is earning interest (those were the days!). You only withdraw what you need when you need to, and you leave the rest in the bank. You don't earn interest when you withdraw it, you earn interest by not withdrawing it. In the same way, landowners maximise their long-term wealth by not selling land while it is steadily increasing in value (earning interest).

So in their neo-liberal fantasy world, let's assume the government grants blanket planning for all land within a mile or two of each town or city, enough to build tens of millions of homes.

What is the profit maximising strategy of Barratts et al now? It is to continue drip-feeding their existing land bank onto the market*. No change there.

Once Barratts et al have used up their land banks, they'll have to go to farmers and speculators to buy more. And the farmers and speculators will adopt exactly the same profit maximising drip-feed strategy. So the 'land' bottle-neck just moves up one level and the 'labour and materials' bottle-neck is unchanged.

It's not a cartel or collusion, all landowners have the same incentives and they all behave the same. If one landowner breaks ranks and decides to sell all his land and buy a Ferrari or a yacht, it will just be bought by somebody else with exactly the same drip-feed incentives.

* It's not just that new-prices fall slightly if they build 'too many', it's also that their inputs are very inelastic, a small increase in demand for labour, bricks, timber sees wages and prices shoot up. I remember chatting to plasterers and electricians in east London in the years after Canary Wharf was completed and they reminisced fondly about earning silly amounts of money at the time.
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They also trot out the usual nosense about seventy percent of homes in Austria being 'self-built'. They are nothing of the sort! It's a tax reduction strategy - instead of buying land-plus-house from a builder as one package and incurring stamp duty and VAT on both elements, people buy the land from the builder as one transaction (stamp duty, but no VAT) and then get the same builder to build the house (VAT but no stamp duty) as a separate transaction. And it's not like houses in Austria are cheap either. So they haven't given it much original thought.

Help to Buy Pay Dividends

George Osborne introduced 'Help to Buy' in March 2013.

Here are the changes in dividends per share paid 2013 (or 2014 if I can't find 2013) vs dividend per share paid 2018 by the UK's biggest 'home builders'.

Barratts: 5.7p - 26.5p
Bellway: 37p - 227.5p
Berkeley (earnings per share): 221.8p - 562.7p
Bovis: 21.5p - 98.5p
Crest Nicholson: 10.6p - 33p
Persimmon: 65p - 110p
Redrow: 3p - 28p
Galliford Try: 53p - 77p
Taylor Wimpey: 0.6p - 4.8p
Telford Homes: 4.8p - 17p

Enough said?

Novel way of building a new roof - update

I posted this two months ago:

We were back again today, and it looks like this:

I had assumed the wooden frame was a new roof, and they'd get rid of the existing one, it appears not.
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Re Dinero's comment, here's a screenshot from Google maps of what it used to look like:

Meaningless Statistic Of The Day

From an article by a Faux Lib cheerleader in City AM, in short, everything would be fine if it weren't for those pesky councils!*

This a problem that has been decades in the making, largely thanks to our draconian planning laws. The passage of the Town and Country Planning Act in 1947 and the creation of the green belt has slowed the pace of housing development, and resulted in houses being built in the wrong places.

As an example, it is remarkable to me that between 2008 and 2013 twice as many houses were built in the towns of South Yorkshire, where prices were lower in 2014 than they were in 2004, than in Oxford and Cambridge, where property prices almost doubled over the same period.

Population of South Yorkshire, 1.4 million.

It's not clear whether means Oxford/Cambridge *city* or the larger *metropolitan areas* so let's give him the benefit of the doubt:

Population of Cambridge metropolitan area, 280,000.
Population of Oxford metropolitan area, 244,000

It's hardly surprising that more homes were built in South Yorkshire than in the other two towns, there is three times the population to start with. If it was only twice as many new homes, then per capita, more were being built in Oxford and Cambridge.

* NIMBYism and land banking don't exist on Planet Faux Lib. Neither does the acceptance that in pure numbers terms, new supply is more than keeping up with population growth; or that home builders have a profit maximising level and nothing on earth will make them build more. And even if they did, it would not have any marked downward effect on selling prices.

"New-build homes aren't the answer to rising house prices"

Interesting albeit slightly confused article in This Is Money:

New-build homes make property even more unaffordable, according to research from a leading academic shared exclusively with This is Money.

Every 1 per cent increase in the supply of new homes causes the ratio between an individual's mortgage payments and their income to worsen by 9 per cent.

The finding of Dr Alla Koblyakova, of the real estate economics and investment research group at Nottingham Trent University, dispels the assumption that the supply of new-build properties alone helps to stem unsustainable growth in house prices.

"The Government thinks that by increasing the supply of new homes, the overall cost of owning a property will come down," says Dr Koblyakova, from the university's school of architecture, design and the built environment.

"But this research shows us that the mortgage market behaves differently. When new housing comes on to the market, lenders relax their conditions and lend more money. And when consumers are more able to buy a property for a higher price, the price of property doesn’t come down.

"This is a significant finding and is the opposite of what’s generally expected. It’s important, therefore, that future affordability programmes focus not only on the supply of affordable housing, but also on the supply of housing finance."

The study - based on a sample of more than 1,700 mortgage holders between 2010 and 2014 -considered analysis that homes in the UK were categorised as ‘seriously unaffordable’ last year. The house price to income ratio nationally was 4.6 and 8.5 in Greater London. Affordable housing is graded as 3 or less.

"The main issue that property values in the UK go up faster than wages. It’s not possible for the Government to control house prices. But it is possible for politicians to motivate lenders to offer longer mortgage contracts to reduce the size of monthly mortgage payments. By increasing the duration of a mortgage to 30 years, for instance, it’s possible to make owning a property more affordable for those on average incomes."

There's a lot of confusion between cause and effect here but hey, she's noticed that house prices have been increasing faster than wages. Extending mortgage terms would - using her own correct logic - just push up prices even more so it's not clear why she even suggested it. And of course the government can control house prices, they did it for most of the 20th century, albeit indirectly.

But interesting nonetheless.

Economic Myths: Small developers need finance to buy public land.

There was a nice advertorial in today's City AM:

Hearing that the Prime Minister plans to open up public sector land for small-scale developments was a great way to start the year. Gaining access to land is a major hurdle that keeps too many small property development companies out of the market. All initiatives to correct that should be welcomed.

Yet lack of land isn’t the only barrier facing small developers. Accessing finance to purchase that land and put it to work is an even greater challenge; one that’s pushed as many as three in four small-scale property developers out of business in recent years...

No, we've done this before, small developers do not need a single penny of 'finance' to acquire publicly owned land.

Assuming public bodies were rational, they would sell their land for whatever they can get, and cut out the finance middleman by deferring payment of the purchase price until the units and finished and sold.

In the interim, the public body can charge the developer interest, which to all intents and purposes is the same as Land Value Tax. Either the developer pays the LVT interest on the outstanding amount as he goes along, or defers payment of that as well. From the point of view of the public body, whether they get their money today or in a couple of years' time is neither here nor.

Sorted. And there's no reason why the same principle can't apply to subsequent purchasers. Instead of borrowing money to buy the land and buildings, they just need to borrow money to pay for the value of the buildings and they can take over the existing notional loan on the land element and pay 'interest' to the public body on that.

"That's partly down to ... the way property developers work."

On the subject of new towns, the BBC states the obvious:

In a revealing article [page 72 onwards of this] published last year, Francis Salway, former chief executive of the largest listed property company in the UK, Land Securities, explained that developers don't relish huge empty sites like the former quarries at Ebbsfleet.

They like "established demand" and "existing communities", he wrote, which prove people really do want to live there. The developers like to "limit the forthcoming supply" - that is, to ration how many homes come on to the market at one time so that the market is not flooded.*

Exactly. Apart from providing shelter, when you buy a house, you are paying for access to an "established community" i.e. jobs, shops, schools, neighbours good or bad, transport links to other towns etc.

The developers - i.e. the bricklayers, roofers, architects and the material suppliers - have to be paid for their inputs to the finished house, of course. But who is 'providing' the "established community"? The developers? The landowners? Methinks not. So why do they get paid for its existence? And if you buy an existing home from somebody who is moving away, what contribution is he going to make to the "established community" in future? Precisely nothing, of course. So why should he get paid for it?

Ho hum.

* Which puts the developer in a tricky position, on the one hand they like to drip feed new homes onto the market, but on the other hand, the more homes already exist, the easier the new ones are to sell. Prisoners' dilemma with one prisoner.

They own land! Give them money!

From City AM:

Calls for more properties to be built in London to slow rampant price growth are being partly answered. The capital is leading the way in the Build to Rent scheme, with the number of rental developments in the pipeline more than double that in the rest of the UK.

The scheme allows developers to build properties for rent with the government sharing risk in order to encourage new housing investments....

“The momentum behind Build to Rent continues. It is moving firmly beyond theory and into reality. With continued support from both national and local government this progress can continue,” said Andrew Stanford, residential fund manager at LaSalle Investment Management.

“The growing number of long-term institutional investors in the sector will then find a suitable home for their capital, ensuring that housing supply and tenant choice can increase.”

We now appear to be in some bizarre parallel universe.

Bovis Homes - unit sales and land bank 2005 to 2014

Prompted by an article in City AM, I did a quick summary (from here) of units sold, plots with planning consent and 'strategic land', i.e. plots where they are likely to get planning permission in the near future.

Total units sold over ten years = 25,124
Land bank in 2005 = 35,304 plots
Land bank in 2014 = 39,412 plots

So assuming typical annual sales of 2,500, they own enough land to keep them going for, er, sixteen years.

The Faux Libs and socialists both insist that if we liberalise planning restrictions i.e. grant these people more planning permission, they will increase output. The Faux Libs blame it on the government; the socialists blame it on the 'greedy developers'. Both sides blame it on the NIMBYs.

It strikes me that Bovis et al have a profit-maximising level of output and they will stick to it. If they get more planning permission for more, they will just park it to one side. Clearly they aren't too worried about planning permission lapsing again after three years, or else they wouldn't be holding onto 18,062 plots which already have planning.

Please also note:

The Group employed 928 staff directly at the end of 2014 and up to a further 3,000 sub-contractors work on its sites on a daily basis. In 2014, the Group legally completed 3,635 homes predominately on greenfield sites.

I have got the impression that it takes at least two man-years to build a house, so some of those sub-contractors will be medium sized businesses (with their own sub-sub-contractors) in their own right. Either way, they have off-loaded all their risks onto their sub-contractors, if they want to curtail supply because of falling prices*, they just lay them off.

* 2007: 2,930 units sold; 2009: 1,803 units sold.

Please sir, the dog ate my homework. And may I have some more?

From the Evening Standard:

The Government’s announcement about changes to the planning system is a step in the right direction.

Yet policy-makers still fail to address the fundamental issue of development capacity across the industry and the ever-increasing cost of materials. From bricklayers to site managers, the lack of skilled construction workers and professionals in Britain is one of the largest factors that continues to constrain the supply of new homes. Until this is addressed, it is unlikely that we will see a marked difference.

Justin Gaze, Knight Frank’s joint head of residential development.

Land banking? Us?

From an infographic in the paper version of this article:

Berkeley land bank plots: 37,473
Homes sold last year: 3,355

Economic Myths: Profit maximisation

Exhibit A: from Wikipedia:

In economics, profit maximization is the short run or long run process by which a firm determines the price and output level that returns the greatest profit.

Which is of course not a myth at all. By trial and error and on the basis of very incomplete information, this is what businesses do - they tweak price and/or output levels.

Clearly, there is a sliding scale between perfect competition, where the market sets the price and all you can do is vary output levels; and a monopoly or cartel situation, where you can choose the best price/output combination to maximise profits.

It appears that the UK land bankers home builders have discovered that their profit maximising output level is somewhere in the region of 120,000 - 150,000 new residential units per year; they know that their own inputs (skilled labour, building materials) are price-insensitive, so an increase in demand for those means that their costs would go up disproportionately and profits would go down. Fair enough.

Exhibit 2: So why do all the Faux Libertarian twats in the City AM believe that if we "liberalise planning laws" that they will suddenly increase output? Why would they?

Which is why the six largest home builders own enough land with planning or outline planning for eight years' supply. If the government gave them planning permission for another million units or another ten million units, this would not change their profit-maximising level of output by a single unit.

(Of course, the whole notion that increasing supply of housing in high demand/high price areas would reduce house prices overall is nonsense anyway - there is simply no evidence for it or else house/land prices in large cities would be lower than in the countryside and they would be giving away apartments on Manhattan for free.

And don't give me "Spanish and Irish ghost estates", those were not built in areas of high demand/high prices and are thus irrelevant. They might as well have built them in the middle of the Australian outback for all the difference they make.)

Vanity, ingenuity.

The Good Developer

What really hacks me off about all this anti LVT stuff is the claim made by many antis that applying LVT would kill 'development' stone dead.

Well peoples, let me tell you about one developer. My dad. He railed against land price inflation and objected to being taxed on it, because all such increases he then spent on buying his next site.  That is he never factored land price increases into his profits.  He realised that this was not actually a 'profit' but a result of 'inflation' that in fact made his job much more difficult. Not in the least because it made all sorts of idiots think that being a developer was an easy way to big money.  He actually ran a development business - not a rent seeking operation.

I reckon he'd have loved LVT.

This could go either way...

Article by London's Deputy Mayor for Housing in City AM:

It is time legislation was introduced to enable that land to be transferred direct to the mayor for disposal, providing homes for Londoners rather than being left to waste. At City Hall, we have a “Domesday Book” of Greater London Authority assets. It offers more transparency and could be expanded to include everything from the public sector.

And instead of auctioning assets off, consideration should be given by public bodies to how to extract more value over the longer term, by partnering with developers. This sort of thinking is happening at some big landowners like Transport for London. These bodies have the potential to be the Great Estates of the future, like those who built large parts of central and west London.

Ho hum.

"Partnership" always sounds so cuddly and nice and is oft wheeled out by the UK government to justify giving large sums of money to its mates i.e. Private Finance Initiative and so on.

But if you take his words "extract more value over the longer term" literally, the blindingly obvious thing to do would be for the GLA (or whichever government body) to retain ownership of the land and ask a developer to build the building.

Whether the GLA and the developer split the future income in proportion to the relative value of the land (about three-quarters) and the cost of the building + profit margin (about one-quarter), or whether the construction costs are just paid off out of the first few years rental income* is minor details.

* Rents per square foot per annum = bare minimum of £10 in outer London fringe, all the way up to £100 and beyond in the top decile.

Build costs per square foot = £100.

Miller Homes - Land Bankers Of The Week

From their Intention To Float Announcement:

Distinctive regional exposure
• In the six months to 30 June 2014, core completions of: 257 units in the Midlands & South; 359 units in the North and 229 units in Scotland.
•Strategic land bank concentrated within chosen geographic locations to benefit from growth opportunities.

Clear strategy to increase margin and ROCE by enhancing quality of land bank and product mix
• completions from legacy land, as a percentage of core completions, are expected to continue to decline relative to completions on sites from new and strategic land (which typically produce higher margins).
• Growing consented land bank (30 June 2014: 8,987 plots).

Significant opportunity from large and well‑located strategic land bank
• Strong track record of delivering planning consents for strategic land bank sites.
• Strategic land bank of 16,553 plots on 56 separate sites held under options with an estimated gross development value (“GDV”) of £3.7 billion at 30 June 2014.
• Strategic land bank represents 8.9 years of supply at 30 June 2014.
• At 30 June 2014, 24% of the strategic land bank was located in the Midlands, 45% in the South of England, 25% in the North of England and 6% in Scotland.

Killer Arguments Against LVT, Not (336, 337)

I was given the opportunity to wheel out my usual talk recently i.e. we could replace a whole load of 'regressive', 'progressive'* and downright fiddly taxes on residential land and private wealth** etc with a flat tax of about 25% of site-only rental values (or 0.9% of current selling prices, as an approximation) and by and large and over a lifetime, most households would pay much the same.

1. One nay-sayer who was at least well-informed pointed out that s106 Agreements and the Community Infrastructure Levy (aka 'roof tax') raised about £4 billion a year.

I admitted that I hadn't added it to the list because I simply couldn't track down the total figure, which is indeed correct, £3.7 billion for 2011-12 according to the DCLG (if you including notional payments). But I agreed that in principle, s106/CIL, being a transaction 'tax' should be on the list.

2. We also happen to know that the landbankers aka home builders have enough land for about 400,000 homes and there are about 150,000 homes under construction at any one time = 550,000 plots.

3. But... land bankers also get a valuable tax break - their output is zero-rated, meaning that they can reclaim all input VAT but don't have to charge output VAT. HMRC gives the value of this at around £8 billion, but the cash refunded by HMRC to homebuilders is approx. £2.5 billion (150,000 homes a year x £80,000 costs x 20%?). So we can chuck this in the pot as well and knock it off from the £4.8 billion s106/CIL. We can argue the toss about whether that additional input cost is borne by home buyers, builders' yards, the builders themselves or the land bankers, it's a minor issue.

4. So the land bankers are currently paying £3.7 bn and receiving £2.5 bn, net cost £1.2 bn. So we could scrap all this s106/CIL nonsense and the VAT refunds, and just ask them to pay LVT from the day they get planning permission at the same rate as the LVT on each home when finished, i.e. on average about £2,000 per potential home per year.

5. This would level the playing field between buying an existing home (VAT-exempt), having your existing home renovated (with VAT on the cost) and buying a new home (currently zero-rated); the LVT and the VAT would be the same in all three situations.

6. 550,000 plus x £2,000 = £1.1 bn, much the same as what they pay now. Central London land bankers might end up paying a bit more, so what?

7. But unlike s106/CIL net of VAT refunds, LVT would encourage the land bankers to release more land for building, and it would encourage councils to grant more planning (to raise the same amount of money they'd have to grant five or six times as many building permits). But there would not be a flood of new construction because LVT encourages more efficient use of existing land and buildings so we would end up far closer to the optimum i.e. market clearing level, whatever that is.

Win-win!

* I don't really like these terms except in a strict mathematical sense, i.e. 'regressive' means that the tax rate on people with 'not much' is higher than the tax rate on people with 'a lot', although apart from straight poll taxes, people with 'a lot' still pay more in absolute terms than those with 'not much'.

** The usual list: Council Tax less CT Benefit, SDLT, Capital Gains Tax, TV licence fee, Inheritance Tax, Stamp Duty, Insurance Premium Tax, ATED, the non-dom levy and AFAIC income tax paid by residential landlords. Total revenues £52 billion. The longer list includes s106 agreements, the Community Infrastucture Levy and the VAT refunds as a minus, of course.
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Another KLN was that we didn't know what the 'distributional' aspects would be. Firstly, as I illustrated with diagrams and tables, it wouldn't be very much, but that is not the point.

The points are that

1. Collecting taxes from land values (rather than transactions in land or anything else) always makes things better for everybody overall. It's like taxes on pollution or any other user charges or price rationing. Yes, motorists pay fuel duty, but this means that they pay less in other taxes, air quality is slightly better and the roads are less clogged (so quicker journeys). Simiarly, does it matter if somebody pays £1,000 more tax a year, if as a result of the shift, his earnings increase by £2,000 and his cost of living goes down by £1,000?

2. Some people were squinting at the bottom end of the chart and saying "It looks to me as if people in £100,000 homes will be paying a couple of hundred quid more than now" and others were squinting the top end and saying "It looks to me as if people in £1 million homes will be paying a bit less than now".

Well, whether that is true depends on how you set the rate or the nil rate band, but so what? As long as the tax on a £1 million home is about ten times as much as on a £100,000 home, that seems right and proper to me. The VAT on an £80,000 Range Rover is four times as much as the VAT on a £20,000 family saloon, nobody complains about that. And what about the one-third of adults who don't even own a £100,000 home? Under LVT, they pay nothing (directly) which also seems right and proper to me. Nobody mentioned them.

3. Of course there would be 'distributional impacts' but a) these would be surprisingly small and b) primarily the transfer would be from people in expensive homes with nothing in savings or with a big mortgage; to people in lower value homes with a lot of savings and other investments with a low or no mortgage. LVT encourages thrift and savings.

So it wouldn't be up- or downward redistribution, it would be sideways. The net transfers between these groups would only be a couple of billion either way as most people would pay the same overall, what they gain on the swings they lose on the roundabouts. And simplicity is always good for everybody except for lawyers and accountants.

4. Just about everything the government does redistributes wealth somehow or other. They can increase teachers' pay or reduce it. They can increase VAT and cut Council Tax. They can run a modest surplus or massive deficits. They can subsidise banks or tax banks etc etc. So a modest sideways redistribution from the rentier economy to the productive economy/people with real savings and investments can hardly be chalked up as a negative.

Public and private sector residential construction

We have now established beyond reasonable doubt that the so-called home builders, Barratts, Taylor Wimpey and the like are nothing of the sort, see e.g. here and here.

The construction is carried out by subcontractors and Barratts et al are a cartel of land bankers who dribble a few new homes onto the market each year in order to realise part of the value of their "investment portfolio" (as Taylor Wimpey describe their land bank) without depressing its overall value.

The official stat's for completions in public and private sectors show that private sector completions have averaged 167,000 a year since 1960 (once austerity had ended and the economy was going again); and until Thatcher more or less shut down construction in the public sector in 1980, an average of 167,000 new units of social housing were built.

It's actually difficult to pin down the role of NIMBYs in all this (as despicable as their motives usually are); they are clearly behind the fall in construction of social housing, and the biggest cheerleaders for selling it off at huge discounts, but it's doubtful whether they have any influence on how many homes the land bankers dribble onto the market.

"Ministry of Sound club in deal with developer over noise"

From The Evening Standard:

The boss of the Ministry of Sound nightclub today said a “groundbreaking” deal over noise would help the much-needed development of other areas of London close to major entertainment venues. The Elephant & Castle club reached an agreement with developer Englewood last week over a planned 41-storey tower yards from the Ministry of Sound’s main entrance.

Bosses, including co-founder James Palumbo, feared that construction noise would put off its clientele and could threaten the club's survival. But under the terms of the deal, developers have agreed to restrict hammering, drilling, deliveries and crane movements to outside the club's normal opening hours and provide the club with high levels of noise insulation features including acoustic glazing, sealed windows and internal “winter gardens” to address the club’s concerns.

Land banking

According to the Local Government Association, the total number of plots of land with residential planning permission is 400,000.

The land bankers (i.e. the large house building companies) bleat that they need to have a couple of years' supply in hand because it is so difficult to get planning permission. At current rates of 100,000 new homes per year that's enough for four years and I do wonder whether they also buy up four years' worth of bricks, timber and pipes.

But in their accounts they tell a different story, from Taylor Woodrow (link below) page 7:

Our landbank is an investment portfolio which is critical to our success and underpins the future performance of our business. We have continued to enhance the quality of our short term landbank by actively managing our portfolio: taking advantage of the attractive opportunities we are currently seeing at this point in the cycle and continuously adding value to our existing landbank.

But land with planning is only part of it. Let's take the top five house builders from here and look at how much land they own on which they hope to get planning permission aka "strategic land".

They publish the following figures in their annual accounts with varying degrees of fine detail:

Barratts
18,536 plots with planning, value £1,047m
11,400 acres strategic land = 59,800 plots, value £1,080m
Sales 13,663

Taylor Wimpey
65,409 plots with planning
Strategic land = 100,340 plots
Total value £2,051m
Sales 10,886

Persimmon
Landbank 68,200 plots, which they say is "6.9 years of output at current levels of supply"
Total value £1,496m
Sales 9,903

Berkeley
25,685 plots with planning, value £861m.
Strategic land = 10,000 plots, value £310m
Sales 3,712

Bellway
17,636 plots with detailed planning,
13,500 plots "in the pipeline" i.e. will get planning very soon.
Long term land holdings 2,800 acres
Total value £853m
Sales 5,226

That means that these five builders have got enough land for 400,000 homes and the total cost/value of that is £7,000 million.

In their last accounts year, they sold 43,390 homes, so overall, that looks like nine years' worth of land to me.

So yes, they are land banking and they make no secret about it in their accounts.