MP @JamesAsser says it's "absolutely infuriating" that 200+ of his constituents have been forced out of three Canning Town towers overnight. He should be. But his party has known about this crisis for years. Royal Gateway is about 10 years old and already run by residents under Right to Manage. Leasehold tenure reform wouldn't have saved anyone. This is England's unspoken housing crisis: too much new-build stock isn't built to the standard it was sold and mortgaged on. When it fails, the bill lands on buyers who've put everything into a deposit and can't fund repairs or years of litigation. So most absorb it, and stay quiet. In 2023, @Keir_Starmer pressed Michael Gove over @dannybster's new-build in his own Camden constituency, a block its own developer's survey said might need demolishing. His constituents, he said, "cannot be left paying the cost of a broken system." He never came to see it. Then Labour took power, and his office offered Dan help only within existing law. Dan's new Labour MP, @Sagal_AW, hasn't visited yet either. Green leader @ZackPolanski has. Seven years and more than £500,000 in legal costs later, Dan's flat is uninsurable and unmortgageable, with still no viable plan to fix it. Meanwhile the government's Your First Home scheme is nudging more buyers into new builds. So, @JamesAsser: you asked who's at fault. Part of the answer is your own government. Labour has had more than two years to give new-build buyers real protection and still hasn't. Will you push it to make developers, contractors, inspectors and warranty providers pay, or just stay infuriated? Infuriating isn't a policy.

Alternative headline: Business struggles to sell low-demand product forced to rethink market strategy. In what other sector would there be any sympathy? Consumers rightfully fear inadvertently buying, for lack of a better phrase “new-build shite”, spending years and hundreds of thousands of pounds litigating and remediating.

The "quality" of new build developments in London and across the country is a huge problem affecting our generation seeking to buy their first homes. Defect-ridden flats appear to be everywhere. The housing crisis needs an honest debate on what we build, not how many we build.