It's nothing new or exciting, what is worthy of note is that he smuggled it into the Daily Telegraph readers' letters:
SIR – Tom Welsh (Comment, August 30) is quite right to say that updating our infrastructure doesn’t mean taxpayers should foot the bill.
Well-planned infrastructure improvements result in higher land values, which, if properly exploited, are nearly always sufficient to pay for them. Thus the public receives back the higher value created by public expenditure, and the Government does not have to borrow or levy taxes to fund the projects.
We need infrastructure investment. We don’t want it to be a burden on taxpayers. If we take advantage of the increased land value created by improvements, we can plan with confidence, knowing the costs will be met free of public debt.
Michael J Hawes, Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire
Of course the Homeys will argue that making landowners pay for the benefits society bestows upon them is a tax; actually it's a user charge. And on a cash flow basis, the government would run up a debt to pay for the infrastructure and repay it out of the future user charges. But hey.
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