THE £1,000 CHEAP HOUSE

The trouble with making homes affordable by making them worse.

You can make nearly anything cheaper if you leave bits out. Remove the engine from a family hatchback and it becomes a wonderfully economical garden ornament. Sell someone a coat without sleeves and it's practically half price. The question is whether we have made a bargain or simply moved the bill somewhere less visible.

The housing argument keeps wandering into this trap. Building standards, insulation, low-carbon heating and rooftop solar are increasingly discussed in the language of burdens: things developers must somehow be persuaded to endure so the rest of us can have a roof. In October, Conservative proposals to scrap the Future Homes Standard brought the question into sharp focus. Their supporters argue that reducing requirements can lower the cost of delivering homes. Critics point out that the families living in those homes could then pay more to heat and power them, year after year.

Both sides can be sincere about the housing shortage. We plainly need more homes, and a perfect house that never gets built is no use to the people currently living with their parents or handing a landlord half their wages. But we also need to stop pretending that the purchase price is the price. The purchaser pays once at completion and again, every month, for decades.

Say a change saves a builder several thousand pounds up front but saddles the occupier with a substantially higher annual energy bill. Depending on how the saving is shared, the buyer might not even get the full reduction in the sale price. Yet they'll certainly get the bills. We call it affordability because the painful number appears later, on someone else's spreadsheet.

This is an especially British talent: turn a long-term problem into a short-term saving and congratulate ourselves on our discipline. We have done variations on it with maintenance, insulation, transport and water infrastructure. The next owner inherits the ingenuity. So does the next taxpayer.

Houses, unlike a fair number of things sold to us as investments, actually have to perform. They must be warm in February, bearable in August and dry when Devon decides to become an inland sea. They need ventilation that works, components that can be repaired, roofs facing directions other than the estate agent's preferred photograph, and somewhere sensible to put a battery or solar panels when it becomes affordable. None of this is particularly glamorous. Nor is a heating bill that doesn't make you swear into your cornflakes.

It's possible to dislike clumsy regulation without believing the answer is no standards. A good requirement should be clear, achievable and tested against actual performance. It should encourage good design rather than tick-box theatre. We should ask whether a particular technology is genuinely appropriate for the building, not insist that every household needs precisely the same collection of expensive boxes fixed to a wall. But the principle — a newly built home should be cheap to run, comfortable and ready for an unpredictable climate — is a staggeringly modest one.

Developers have real costs. Land is expensive. Planning is slow and complicated. Infrastructure agreements, finance charges and delayed approvals all matter. If the system needs fixing, fix those things too. Don't start by downgrading the finished product and claiming the buyer has won.

There is an odd economic assumption underneath all this: that people have endless capacity to bear tomorrow's bills but cannot possibly withstand today's build costs. Many don't. If you are stretching to get a mortgage, you are probably also the person least able to absorb a nasty surprise from your energy supplier. The apparently cheaper house can become the more expensive home.

It shouldn't be a radical ambition that the building we complete in 2026 is still a decent place to live in 2076. The mortgage might be gone by then. The draughts shouldn't still be arriving.

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