An up-and-coming issue in England: housing. Okay, this has been an issue for a while, but it's starting to reach crisis point. Here's the problem: the south-east of England is vastly over-populated. London is mainly to blame. Just about every business, pressure group, charity, you name it is headquartered in London. As a result, house prices in the south-east, and anywhere that is within commuting distance of the south-east, have shot up over recent years. They've got to the stage where, if you're in an ordinary paid job, such as teaching, nursing, fire or police service, let alone shop-assistant, secretary, whatever, there is no way in the world you'll ever afford a house.

That's causing a crisis for London and the south-east. If teachers and nurses and service workers are being shouldered out by lawyers, stock brokers, lobbyists, business men and so on, who's going to teach the kids, clean the streets, treat the sick? Answer: no one.

So, the government comes up with this great solution: they'll build several enormous towns of affordable housing in the countryside outside London. Great. Problem solved. All done.

But, of course, it isn't. For a start, there isn't much countryside around London anymore. Decades of building have covered it. Prices are high and people in towns and villages don't want to be rolled over by an ever-expanding London dormitory. And all these people have to get out of these dormitory towns into London where they'll work. That means hours of commuting, at best. And, quite frankly, London can't handle any more the commuters coming in. The trains are bursting, the roads are jammed. The government continually widens the M25 orbital motorway. The mayor of London wants a new 6 lane bridge right into London (where are all those cars going to go when they get into London? This isn't Los Angeles; London was never designed for cars. It's already a massively polluted city, too.) The bridge alone will cost £500 million. And all that ignores the fact that the few remaining bits of countryside remain because they are important green areas, either for wildlife or for the people who live in the area.

So what's to be done? Well, there's a fairly simple solution. While London has high employment, too few workers and no space, much of the north of England, Wales, Scotland and so on have exactly the opposite. There's lots of derelict land, there's unemployment. Now, the government can't force companies to move away from London (although it thinks nothing of taking the planning process away from the democratically elected councils and putting it in the hands of a quango). But there is a reason everything concentrates in London: almost every government department is based in London. This costs the government, and thus the taxpayer, a hell of a lot of money in taxes, rental, higher pay rates, and so on. Others cluster around government in order to have influence. So: move some government departments to other parts of the country. This isn't the Victorian age. It doesn't take days by horse and carriage to get to London. It's only a few hours by train from most of England. And then there's telephones, video links, email, and a whole host of other technologies. This move would immediately remove the pressure on the south-east. It would reinvigorate stagnant areas of the country. It would allow people to actually buy houses near where they worked.

Of course, those government ministers who rarely leave London to visit other parts of the country would be a bit put out, but it might do them and the whole democratic process a little good.