Good news and bad news here:

A house that can be built in four hours could help to solve
Britain’s affordable homes crisis. The shell of the two-storey building
was put up by five men at the Eden Project in a demonstration by
Advantage South West, a group of housing associations. The outside can
be finished with brick, stone or timber.

The buildings cost £60,000. Land Registry figures show that the
average price of a home in Cornwall has reached £200,000 for the first
time.

The good news is of course that by using a great deal of prefabrication we can bring down the cost of building a house. The bad news that this is clearly an increase in industrialisation, a massacring of a cottage industry once again by the forces of global capitalism and profit seeking.

Shame.

The true problem of course is that those two numbers quoted are not in fact for the same thing. The second price includes the cost of the land (not, in fact, a very expensive thing, £5,000 an acre in many parts of the country). And it also includes something much, much more expensive. Planning permissions to build upon that land. Reducing the cost of building a house is fine, but we should also be working, if we actually want to lower house prices, to lower the cost of gaining planning permission, don’t you think?