You may recall some months back that I and others were criticising John Prescott and his plans to knock down then rebuild swathes of housing across the North of England. Why plan such things centrally rather than allow the market to work? We even had a successful campaign to get him google bombed as "fuckwit" (now sadly decayed). Perhaps it’s time for an update:

John Prescott’s department is paying home-owners up to £80,000 a house in Victorian streets that are to be demolished in parts of the Midlands and the North.

That is more than double what comparable houses were
worth three years ago, according to the latest figures released by the
Office of the Deputy Prime Minister.

The intention
of Mr Prescott’s £1.3 billion programme of demolition and new build is
to kick-start the housing market in areas where it has collapsed and
properties have been abandoned.

But the latest
figures show that a recovery is under way even in the most deprived
industrial areas of the Midlands and the North before public money has
been spent.
….

At the time Mr Prescott’s HMRI scheme was drawn up in
2002, the median price of a house in run-down areas of Merseyside was
£30,000.

Now it is £61,000, doubling the cost to
the taxpayer of buying up swathes of Victorian terraces and knocking
them down and taking the cost of demolishing and rebuilding a single
terrace house to more than £160,000.

The latest
figures, obtained by the magazine Regeneration and Renewal, show that
the median price in the nine Pathfinder areas has risen from £32,894 in
2002 to £65,216 in 2005.

The rise in prices has already led to at least one of the Pathfinder schemes scaling back its plans for demolition.

Merseyside’s
Newheartlands scheme put in revised plans to the Office of the Deputy
Prime Minister for 11,000 demolitions across its area instead of 20,000
mooted earlier this year.

Despite the recovery of
the market, and the opposition of heritage groups and almost all the
members of Mr Prescott’s former Urban Task Force, the demolition goes
on.
…
Mr Prescott’s department admitted that a long-term recovery of house
prices was under way across many areas but offered no hope that the
first phase of demolitions would be stopped.

And there we have it, a classic example of why centralised planning is such a bad idea. Political pressure "to do something" leads to a silly plan to knock down perfectly repairable housing. It takes a sufficient number of years to actually get the bureaucratic machinery moving that the market solves the problem first (if a house is worth 80k then  we can’t really use that as evidence of a lack of demand now can we?) . And now that the market has solved the problem, we’ll still destroy them anyway because it takes a sufficient number of years to stop the bureaucratic machinery.

Well done sir, yes, oh, very well done.