New Homes Online

Artist's impression of Binary New Town

The UK is experiencing a deepening housing crisis due, in part, to the lack of affordable homes. The private sector favours high-end property developments, in which profits can be maximised, and new social housing projects fail to get off the ground due to lack of funds and whiney not-in-my-backyard types who froth at the mouth and tell you that the country is being overrun by foreigners, which they know for a fact because last week they saw someone who looked a bit swarthy buying avocados in Tesco's.

But a solution may at last have been found, with an innovative plan to build new homes online. "We have yet to fully realise the potential of cyberspace, " said government spokesman Gary Panic, speaking from his office on the fourth floor of a USB flash drive in Whitehall. "But with cloud storage being relatively cheap it offers a near limitless quantity of virtual real estate on which to build affordable family homes. It's the perfect solution: it's free of the red tape and regulation that dogs building on traditional sites, and whole streets can be built quickly and cheaply simply by copying and pasting."

However, the idea is not as new as you might think. Some people still remember the tragic fate of Fortran-cum-Basic - a new town built in the '80s on a Commodore 64 and sadly lost forever in a power surge, despite being backed up on a Betamax video tape.

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