Leading Article: A few rules please, in life's windfall lottery

Traditionally, elections revolve around pocket-book issues and a large part of the polling booth calculation in the past has been, "How much better off will I be?" Yesterday's contest was different, with neither main party promising immediate changes in personal taxation. Funny that, isn't it? After all, there is suddenly an awful lot of money about to be blown by because of the astonishing pounds 20bn cash windfall that building societies are about to drop on to the doormats of the nation. More than half of it is going to be spent on homes, holidays and cars.

So, instead of a great political transfer of wealth, we are witnessing a completely commercial transfer of wealth equivalent to all income tax bills being halved for a year. As the Halifax, Woolwich and Northern Rock building societies cease to be mutual funds owned by their savers and borrowers, and become public limited companies owned by shareholders, 15 million people are about to become, on average, more than pounds 1,000 richer.

This strange and largely unremarked enrichment illustrates how election debates can never really touch everything that drives our daily lives - in this case, some of the more arbitrary factors that underlie national and personal prosperity, and the distribution of personal wealth.

There is an awful air of neo-Thatcherism hanging over the country, a premonition of the return of the yuppie and the conspicuous consumer. Then, as now, there was a strong "to him that hath" element in the accumulation of wealth, as well as an element of chance. The building society windfall is a gearing up for those who already have significant savings. Then there are the stirrings in the housing market, which bring back memories of gazumping, huge profits on houses changing hands within months, champagne consumption in City bars, and all the other epiphenomena of the Lawson Boom. No wonder Kenneth Clarke never used the b-word blazoned on Conservative adverts.

The lotteriness of life has been less evident in the Major years, years of low inflation and a flat housing market. But now questions of the distribution of wealth, power and life-chances could come to the fore. The trickle of reports of selective rises in house prices is turning into a flood, and the injection of cash from the floating of building societies will add to the upwards pressure. Regional, local and personal variations will ensure the same combination of arbitrary gains and the enrichment of the already-rich. Only this week, there was melancholy head-shaking at the European Commission over the stark division in Britain between the South- east, one of the wealthiest regions of Europe, and many areas in the rest of the country which are among the most deprived.

The Independent has long argued that the dominance of houses as a stock of national wealth has been a fundamental weakness of the British economy, acting as an automatic destabiliser to push any up-trend into runaway inflation. But it has also acted as an engine of inequality, dividing the nation into haves, have-not-very-much, and have-lots.

And yet, as a nation and as individuals, we are remarkably casual about the forces which decide how rich we are. The two most important stores of wealth are our homes and pension funds, and yet the markets for them are riddled with ignorance, restrictive practices and chance. The Conservatives tried to raise pensions as an election issue, only to be blown away by a ruthlessly effective Labour scare campaign. The housing market did not feature at all, although the last government had started to do the right thing by cutting the tax subsidy for mortgage payments.

As individuals we are penny wise and pound foolish, knowing the price of petrol or beer, and prepared to switch to the cheapest outlet, but often happy to operate in the dark when it comes to buying a house or choosing a pension, making decisions which could cost thousands. Want to switch to a cheaper mortgage lender? Well, there is very often a penalty clause in the contract you either did not know about, or forgot about, and all that insurance stuff is tied up in knots around it too. And the scandal of pensions mis-selling has exposed the dangers of partial liberation there.

Nevertheless, fair competition is the right approach. The housing market needs to be freed from the anti-competitive practices of conveyancing, mortgage finance and estate agencies, while pension funds need to be tightly regulated and made more accountable to their members.

Of course, it was the very forces of competition which led to the "privatisation" of building societies and mutual insurance funds, a process which has lost a valuable principle - that of mutuality - and also a valuable element of variety. It is important that there should be some forms of economic organisation other than the limited company, but the sloping playing field of the law needs to be levelled in favour of co-operative structures.

The principle of the level playing field needs to be applied more widely. It is not possible, of course, for public policy to compensate for the vicissitudes of luck in life, but the unfair advantages enjoyed by those who are already fortunate ought to be suppressed in favour of the unfortunate.

The remaining subsidy for mortgage payments should be phased out, and the tax advantages of pensions should be tilted towards those with smaller second pensions or none at all.

The lottery of inheritance, in which the value of property plays such an enormous role, is the final key issue in the distribution of wealth. This is a sensitive issue touching on the primal human instinct to safeguard our young; but a society which wants to give real meaning to the concept of open, meritocratic opportunity has to try harder to distribute jackpots more evenly.