IT’S a time of giving, understanding, coming together and rejoicing. So, to borrow from the great Bill Hicks, let us wade into the calm and soothing waters of Jersey’s property market and emerge together in a collective belly laugh.

The proposal by Housing Minister Terry Le Main to drop the qualification period from 12 years to ten is one of those subjects that’s all about which side of the fence you’re on. I don’t think there is any more divisive subject in Jersey than this.

If you don’t have the right to buy a home here, you’re going to be entirely in favour. And if you do, you probably won’t. Thankfully, there are a number of more sensible and logical arguments on both sides.
On the one hand, in an island which is just nine miles by five with a population of 90,000, you have to have some kind of limitation on housing, especi-ally if house prices are already beyond the reach of normal people, and especially at a time when developers are casting lascivious glances at the few green fields which are left.

That’s not a problem unique to Jersey — exactly the same thing has happened in places like Devon and the Lake Dist-rict, where ‘local peo-ple’ are being squee-zed out of the property market by newcomers. On the other hand, the end product of denying people the right to buy for 12 years does very little other than subsidise private sector landlords — partly at the expense of taxpayers through rent subsidies available to people who have been here for five years.

The accommodation on offer to those people isn’t necessarily anything that the rest of the Island could be all that proud of, and it often comes at the kind of prices that would make a Premiership footballer blush.
So a reduction to ten years sounds reasonable, no? Personally, I don’t care. I can live with it either way.
What bothers me is the motivation. Senator Le Main says that he wants to reduce the qualifying period because the housing market has stalled. And that’s just crazy.

Only this year a planned decrease down to 11 years was put off because the Housing department were worried about the demand created by an extra 300 to 400 buyers. Which is almost as if to say (and I’m sure that Senator Le Main doesn’t mean this) that the housing market is in a perfectly pitched state of equilibrium, or that it’s finely balanced on a knife-edge of fairness. But of course it’s not.

I bought a flat four years ago. I’ve probably made two-thirds as much money from that as I have from going to work. Not to sound ungrateful, but that’s really crazy. Flat-out crazy . . . Drawing-perfect-circles, keeping-more-cats-than-you-have-rooms and answering-back-to-the-voices-in-your-head crazy.

For if the housing market slows down, would that really be the end of the world? In case this all sounds a bit harsh on the boy Le Main, that wasn’t the idea at all. He has, after all, recently celebrated (?) more than 30 years in the States. That’s about as long as I’ve been able to walk. And while it pains me to be nice about a Spurs fan, even at this time of year, fair play to him.

A problem . . . we haven’t really had a Week in Politics. What we’ve had, most of us anyway, is a week of boozing, eating, presents and family. Not necessarily in that order, you understand, but very little of what’s gone on in the last seven days has been related to politics, or Jersey politics at any rate.

Which presents something of a problem for me, and also for the owners of the Jersey Evening Post in the hopefully unlikely event that this edition is sold anywhere within the borders of the United Kingdom to someone with a passing knowledge of the Trade Descriptions Act.

In a usual week, there’s plenty of material to work with. You just pick up seven days worth of news, grab one end of it, and . . . you know . . . squeeze it a bit. Say what you want about States Members, but for a combined salary of £2.2m per year they certainly provide enough raw material for a weekly column of between 800 and 1,000 words.
Happy New Year.