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Viability assessments are a mess. Making them public won't make things any better. Like other investors and businesses, developers do what they do according to each site and their own business models. They are simply an invitation to highly competitive people to do the best they can out of a system which encourages competitive behaviour. And why should a competing business give away its business secrets? They won't do that in any case because they know it will be a negotiation. May the best-prepared party win. Better to remove the uncertainty and replace this system of measuring tax with one that is more readily achievable and certain. Affordable housing tax is ideologically sound but has destroyed the delivery of supply of housing. It should be scrapped if we want to increase supply and replaced with a much simpler tariff. Which is what I thought, and the whole industry thought, the Community Infrastructure Levy was designed precisely to do. And if we want housing that is subsidised, then we should subsidise it, not tax it out of existence.

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