The Netherlands’ dozens of housing associations are accused of investing in the wrong things in Monday’s Financieele Dagblad. Coen Teulings, director of the government’s bureau for economic policy analysis CPB says there is too little supervision of the roughly €200bn in their coffers.

Teulings says the housing groups are building too few houses and putting their money instead into fibreglass communications networks and developing forms of care.
Either politicians should have a say in how the money is spent or they should be subject to the discipline of the capital market, Teulings says. They would then need to be split into a commercial arm and a social housing division.