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I've got family members in the army and I was aware that there was a constant on-going problem with military housing.

I mean even today there are still huge issues around just the standard of military houses and that's where their families live as well.

So I was very aware of it as an issue and then I started looking at it and it just was to be quite honest crazy.

Essentially the MoD had done this horrendous steal and it's going to cost billions and billions of pounds.

That's the taxpayer paying for that and still the houses were not in a great condition.

And what I also found fascinating about this is very much the dawn of private equity which obviously has become such a completely dominant force in the UK and worldwide economics and finance.

And people like Guy Hans who's now runs Terra firmer when the biggest private equity companies in the world was then discovering the potential of it and at the same time all the way through the very much the losers on this whole thing was the MoD and by extension of the taxpayer.

They were just so far ahead of the people negotiating on behalf of the MoD that they just ran circles around them.

And I think first of all it was a terrible deal at this time but I think it's also interesting how little we've learned from it now.

You're always dealing with the situation where the people on one side are the world leaders and experts on finance and politicians aren't necessarily experts in this field.

And yet civil servants do their best they possibly can but again they're not necessarily the best in their field for this sort of thing.

What's interesting about this story is it does a very much operate as a microcosm because we can all understand houses and how they work everybody will know somebody being terribly affected by the housing crisis at the moment.

One of the things that really hit me when I was researching this was the MoD sold off these properties to private equity company and now you're in a situation where councils are bidding against each other to try and get these houses back into the public sector.

You can really see example after example of people in effects in different ways this couple in Cornwall who are desperate for a house and Cornwall has been particularly badly hit by the housing crisis of recent years.

And yet something that could have been life changing for them they could have bought a house for essentially a tiny amount compared to what is worth which is what Annington Holmes paid for them.

And instead they can't see second the cycle of renting and you know we will know the consequences of that.

Welcome to the Guardian Long Read showcasing the best long form journalism covering culture, politics and new thinking for the text version of this and all our long reads go to the Guardian.com forward slash long read.

How the MoD's plan to privatize military housing ended in disaster by Hollywood.

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The former officers houses a grand and generous looking out over the village green.

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