By Alistair McIntosh, chief executive, HQN

Just say no to housing regulation. That’s the message from the dynamic duo of James Cleverly and Simon Dudley. What’s it all about?

The market for flats in London has collapsed. No one wants them. So, the developer lobby has sprung into action.

“Building in London is impossible, warns housing giant” – screams a headline in the Telegraph. This is a classic case of physician heal thyself. Berkeley Homes are moaning that Big Yellow storage is outbidding them for land. No wonder! Many new blocks are but an advertising billboard for Big Yellow. Look at the balconies festooned with flotsam and jetsam. Berkeley and others offer small homes so enterprising capitalists push storage. One thing automatically leads to the other. Rather than mending their ways, our housing geniuses blame the state.

What they should be doing is restoring faith in flats. That means convincing the public that service charges will be cheaper and that homes will be safe. It’s as simple as that. Dudley didn’t reflect on the great success Mercedes and Volvo enjoyed by building solid cars in an era where fatal crashes were common. Safety was at the heart of their adverts. You would have thought that was the way to go after Grenfell.

It will be a long haul given the reputation of the housing industry. How many Tik Tok films of shoddy new homes are there? So, to hear Cleverly and Dudley calling for less regulation was just bizarre. Perhaps they are Britain’s dumbest capitalists.

How did such smart men make such a silly mistake. The answer is obvious. What they said makes sense in the context of GB News, political meetings and curry nights. No one saw the banana skin. They call it group think. Listening to actual tenants in blocks, such as those at Grenfell, would have been like an antiseptic. On this occasion free speech would have been better than paid for speech.

It says it all that no journalist asked tenants for their opinion on what Dudley said. That, my friends, is the case for a national tenant voice.