Marconi may have been an exception and in any case, the true villain in Marconi’s collapse was the City, which encouraged the madness rather than constraining it. It never makes sense to take a sledgehammer to crack a nut, but Higgs hardly amounts to a sledgehammer if appropriately applied.There’s as much vested interest in the campaign against Higgs as there is legitimate criticism. Broadly speaking, it is executive chairmen and chief executives who are against the reforms while shareholders are in general in favour of them. Investors perhaps know not what they do in insisting that the reforms be implemented, but they are the owners and custodians of these companies and it seems to me not unreasonable that they should demand a greater degree of control after the bust we’ve just been through. Affordable housingKen Livingstone, the London Mayor, is threatening to halt redevelopment of the site of the Millennium Dome unless the plans are redrawn to include more extensive cheap housing for key London workers, such as nurses and teachers.

Most local authorities build an affordable housing element into any major residential planning consent, but it is a moot point as to whether the policy achieves the desired results.Mr Livingstone would argue that in a city where rents and prices are high and the market cannot compensate because of planning restrictions, the only way forward is to provide a large element of “social” housing, where rents and prices are controlled for the benefit of key workers. The downside is that such stipulations act as a further deterrent to development, limiting supply and increasing the pressure on the existing housing stock. It also creates a two-tier structure of affordable and expensive housing, with often arbitrary or corrupt qualifying procedures for the affordable housing it creates. At worst, it may lead to new ghettos on a par with the sub-standard council estates of the past.By forcing developers to subsidise one class of housing from another, you only succeed in pushing up the price of the expensive housing even further and devaluing the budget accommodation accordingly. Mr Livingstone is probably right to challenge the detail of the Meridian Delta plans for the Dome. The Government was desperate for a solution when Meridian came along, which meant Meridian almost certainly got a blinder of a deal.

But as far as the principle is concerned, he’s wrong.I doubt whether affordable housing provisions are the biggest barrier to new housing development in London and the South-east or even a major one, but when Kate Barker comes to conduct her government-sponsored review of Britain’s poor housing supply, she’ll almost certainly find it’s a part of the problem. Housing benefit further distorts the market by creating a floor beneath which rents cannot fall. If all Mr Livingstone succeeds in doing by objecting to Meridian’s plans is halting the whole development ad infinitum, he’ll only have cut off his nose to spite his face. One of the few decent justifications for the lottery money spent on the Dome is that it at least cleaned up the site for future development. Or perhaps not.jeremy.warner independent.co.uk.

The crisis enveloping the airline industry deepened yesterday after the Hong Kong-based carrier Cathay Pacific warned it may have to ground its entire fleet next month and Germany’s Lufthansa said it was facing its gravest threat since before the 1991 Gulf War. But traffic levels have fallen to 10,000 a day and Nick Rhodes, Cathay’s director of flight operations, said in the memo: “We forecast that the number of passengers could fall to less than 6,000 a day in May in which case we will have to consider grounding the entire passenger fleet.”Cathay is partly insulated from Sars by the fact that cargo business makes up a third of total revenues and continues to grow strongly while the airline has more than $1bn in cash and short-term liquid assets. But that has not been enough to prevent its market capitalisation plunging by 20 per cent in the last month, wiping $1.3bn from its value.Other carriers such as Singapore Airlines, Qantas of Australia and EVA Airways and China Airlines of Taiwan have also been hit. Shares in the two Taiwanese carriers shed up to 6 per cent of their value yesterday while Qantas is cutting 1,000 jobs to help combat the downturn in passenger demand.Lufthansa’s gloomy assessment of the market was spelt out by its chief financial officer in an interview with the company magazine. Karl-Ludwig Kley said that weekly sales were lower than the seasonal average and in the first quarter of the year the airline had suffered an “unexpectedly high” loss. “Without exaggeration, the situation with passenger traffic is worse than most realise,” he added.The airline added that it was in a deeper crisis than after either the 1991 Gulf War or the 11 September attacks.