McLaren v. Barratt and Others — and the Architecture That May Have Made Homebuyers Pay for Competition That Was Never Fully Competing

Competitors Are Often Rooms Beneath the Same Industry Roof

The public is taught to understand competition as separation.

Company A competes against Company B.

One wants the customer instead of the other.

One wants the sale, the contract, the market share, the attention and the loyalty.

From the outside, they appear to be standing on opposite sides.

But competitors are not only rivals.

They are also members of the same industry.

And when the industry itself grows, becomes more profitable, more respected, more culturally necessary or more difficult to challenge, every major company within that industry benefits.

Coca-Cola and Pepsi may compete for the same customer, but neither benefits from the soft-drink industry becoming socially undesirable. Luxury houses may compete for prestige, but they do not usually strengthen themselves by convincing the public that luxury itself is fraudulent, exploitative or without value. Their brands may occupy different rooms, but the industry remains the roof above them all.

That roof matters.

Competitors understand that they can fight over who receives the largest room while still cooperating to protect the house.

They may compete publicly and coordinate privately.

They may differentiate through branding while sharing an interest in keeping prices high, preserving demand, protecting the reputation of the sector, resisting regulation and preventing outsiders from understanding how much of the structure is connected behind the walls.

The customer enters through one door believing every room is independent.

The customer sees separate names.

Separate advertisements.

Separate sales teams.

Separate developments.

Separate offers.

Separate promises.

But the rooms may still connect behind the customer’s line of sight.

The people inside them may speak the same commercial language, attend the same industry meetings, use the same consultants, rely upon the same market intelligence, move between the same companies, respond to the same investors and protect the same general conditions from which they all profit.

The competition may be real in some respects.

But so is the shared interest.

And when the shared interest becomes stronger than the responsibility to the customer, competitors can become collaborators against the person they publicly claim to be competing to serve.

They Compete for the Customer While Cooperating Over the Customer

This is why it is not difficult to understand how competing housebuilders could become willing to exchange information.

They may compete over which company receives the buyer’s money, but they share an interest in how much money buyers can be made to pay.

They may compete for land, sales and market position, but they also benefit from a housing market in which scarcity remains profitable, prices continue rising and homeownership is treated as something buyers must stretch themselves to obtain.

The customer is therefore both the prize and the resource.

Each company wants the customer.

But the industry collectively wants the customer to accept the highest possible price as normal.

That creates a second relationship behind the visible competition.

The companies ask publicly:

Which one of us will win this buyer?

But behind the structure, the industry may also be asking:

How much can buyers collectively be made to carry?

That is where customers become numbers.

The buyer is no longer primarily seen as a person attempting to secure shelter, stability, family continuity or a place from which to build a life.

They become purchasing capacity.

Mortgage eligibility.

Demand.

Conversion.

Market appetite.

Revenue.

Once the person has been translated into a number, sharing information with competitors can begin to appear commercially reasonable.

The industry no longer sees itself as exchanging information against the people paying.

It sees itself as becoming more intelligent about the market.

But the market is made of people.

So when companies increase their intelligence about what customers can be made to absorb while customers remain ignorant of how companies are coordinating, one side becomes more informed by making the other side more exposed.

That is not balance.

It is asymmetric intelligence.

The Industry Smiles Through Marketing and Coordinates Behind the Customer’s Back

The dramatic image is simple.

Smile in the customer’s face through marketing.

Stab the customer in the back through coordination.

The public-facing message says:

We want your trust.

We are different.

We understand your needs.

We are competing to provide the best home, the best price and the best experience.

The private commercial logic may say:

How do we protect margins?

How do we preserve pricing?

How do we avoid damaging the wider industry?

How much can the market carry?

How do we ensure that competition does not become so aggressive that all of us lose?

The marketing creates the appearance of separation.

The information-sharing reveals the shared roof.

One company may tell the buyer that it is offering something unique while using knowledge gained from supposed competitors to position its price, release strategy, incentives or development plans.

The customer is asked to make an individual decision in a market whose major actors may possess collective visibility.

That means the buyer participates alone while the companies participate with knowledge of one another.

The customer believes they are negotiating with one room.

They do not realise the rooms may share corridors.

A Win-Win Between Competitors Can Become a Loss for Everyone Outside the Industry

The phrase “win-win” is usually presented as inherently positive.

But every win-win must be examined from outside the two participants declaring victory.

If two competitors cooperate in a way that protects both of their profits, improves both of their positions and strengthens the industry, who pays for that cooperation?

The two companies may win.

The industry may win.

Investors may win.

Executives may win.

Land values may rise.

Margins may be protected.

But the buyer may pay more.

Supply may remain restricted.

Choice may become performative.

The risk may be transferred into a mortgage lasting decades.

A win-win between powerful actors can be financed through a loss carried by the person excluded from the agreement.

So the law should never accept the language of commercial cooperation without asking whose interests were missing from the room.

Collaboration is not automatically ethical because more than one company benefits.

Sometimes the agreement between competitors is precisely how the public loses.

Competitors Understand Systems Better Than Customers Are Allowed To

Industries understand that every individual company is part of a larger system.

They understand that one major scandal can damage public trust across the whole sector.

They understand that aggressive criticism of a competitor can expose weaknesses that also exist in their own company.

They understand that regulation imposed upon one may eventually reach all.

They understand that a collapse in public confidence can reduce demand beyond a single brand.

That is why industries often protect themselves collectively.

They form associations.

They lobby.

They establish common standards.

They share legal strategies.

They circulate personnel.

They coordinate responses to political scrutiny.

They fund research.

They influence public language.

They understand the whole while presenting the customer with fragments.

The customer sees a product.

The industry sees the ecosystem.

The customer sees one contract.

The industry sees regulation, investment, pricing, supply, reputation, political influence and long-term market control.

The customer sees a house.

The industry sees land, release rates, planning, borrowing, margins, demand elasticity, investor expectations and national housing policy.

The public therefore often enters the market with less systemic understanding than the actors selling into it.

That makes transparency more important, not less.

Because the more interconnected the industry is behind the scenes, the less reasonable it becomes to treat every harmful outcome as a collection of independent business decisions.

Learning the Rooms Is Necessary to Understand the House

There is also a wider distinction here between entering industries to exploit them and entering industries to understand how they connect.

I have moved through different roles and industries that I would not necessarily choose to remain within under their present standards.

That does not make the experience without value.

It means I have allowed myself to learn the language, behaviour, incentives, blind spots and internal logic of each room so that I can understand the larger house.

It would be ignorant to claim responsibility for systems that affect human life globally without first examining the individual systems from which the larger structure is made.

You cannot redesign the house by refusing to enter the rooms.

You cannot raise standards across systems whose language you have never learned.

You cannot identify where responsibility travels if you do not understand how each institution protects itself, passes decisions onward, measures success and translates people into data.

So I study the rooms.

Recruitment.

Hospitality.

Sales.

Law.

Housing.

Technology.

Government.

Media.

Healthcare.

Each may appear separate from the outside.

But they share foundations.

They borrow methods from one another.

They reproduce similar hierarchies.

They offload responsibility through similar language.

They protect themselves through similar procedures.

They reward similar forms of emotional distance.

They turn human beings into applicants, customers, tenants, users, voters, patients, employees and case numbers.

Learning each system is not surrendering to it.

It is gathering evidence of how the larger architecture functions.

The difference is that I am not learning their language merely to profit within their present standards.

I am learning it to demonstrate why those standards must rise.

The Government Also Protects Its Roof

Government uses the same architecture.

Departments may appear separate.

Ministers may disagree.

Political parties may compete.

Public bodies may defend their individual mandates.

But they remain beneath the same governmental roof.

They share an interest in preserving institutional authority.

They protect procedural legitimacy.

They resist forms of accountability that might weaken the wider architecture.

They may publicly blame individual departments while avoiding questions that would expose the shared foundations beneath all of them.

Like an industry, government understands that confidence in one part can affect confidence in the whole.

So it may isolate failures.

Call them exceptional.

Describe them as administrative errors.

Move responsibility into inquiries, committees, independent reviews and future reforms.

The appearance of internal separation allows the larger structure to avoid being judged as one connected system.

But the public does not experience government in isolated rooms.

The public experiences the accumulation.

Housing failure affects health.

Health failures affect employment.

Employment affects income.

Income affects housing.

Legal delays affect all of them.

Regulatory failure permits corporate harm.

Corporate harm creates new public costs.

The rooms are connected whether government openly acknowledges it or not.

Governmental Secrecy Weakens Its Moral Authority to Regulate Corporate Secrecy

This is where the government becomes arrogantly hypocritical.

Government demands transparency from companies while remaining insufficiently transparent about its own decisions, allocations, relationships and use of public money.

It tells companies they must disclose.

It tells industries they must be accountable.

It tells boards they must explain how decisions were made.

It tells businesses they must not hide material information from consumers.

Yet citizens frequently cannot see clearly how their own compulsory contributions were allocated, what negotiations shaped government policy, which commercial interests influenced legislation, how contracts were awarded, why one need was prioritised over another or what internal knowledge existed before public harm became undeniable.

Government then points at corporations for withholding information from the public while living through its own culture of controlled disclosure.

That is arrogantly hypocritical.

It is arrogant because government places itself above the standards it applies to others.

It is hypocritical because it condemns the very conduct through which it often preserves its own power.

And it is audacious because the government’s duty should be higher, not lower.

A company receives voluntary purchases.

Government receives compulsory contributions and possesses legal authority over the population.

If any body should be required to demonstrate the highest transparency, it is the body that collects public money, creates law, controls enforcement and decides which harms deserve priority.

Government cannot credibly say:

Companies must not conceal information from consumers,

while also saying:

Citizens do not need full visibility into how we use their money, make our decisions or coordinate with the industries we regulate.

The contradiction weakens regulation at its foundation.

You Cannot Punish Your Reflection Without Examining Yourself

When government punishes companies for conduct it also practises structurally, accountability becomes selective.

The government accuses a company of withholding information.

But government also withholds.

It accuses an industry of avoiding responsibility through procedural language.

But government also does this.

It accuses boards of protecting institutional reputation above public welfare.

But governmental bodies also protect themselves.

It accuses companies of failing to listen to consumers.

But government ignores taxpayers, civilians, petitioners and complainants until the numbers become politically inconvenient.

It accuses competitors of coordinating behind the public’s back.

But governments coordinate with industries, foreign states, contractors and institutions through processes the public may never meaningfully see.

The point is not that companies should therefore escape accountability.

The point is that government must be accountable at the same time.

It cannot bypass its own reflection while pointing at everyone else.

It cannot punish the room while protecting the roof from the same scrutiny.

The existence of governmental hypocrisy does not make corporate misconduct acceptable.

It reveals that the standards must be applied upward as well as downward.

Integrity Without Self-Application Becomes Performance

Integrity is not the ability to identify wrongdoing in another person.

It is the willingness to apply the same standard to oneself.

A government that demands transparency but resists transparency does not have an integrity-based regulatory system.

It has a performance of integrity.

A regulator that condemns information asymmetry in private markets while citizens remain unable to understand public allocation is not completing its duty of care.

A legislature that restricts corporate coordination while maintaining opaque relationships with industry has not fully separated public interest from private influence.

A public body that requires businesses to treat customers fairly while taxpayers cannot meaningfully refuse, redirect or scrutinise governmental spending has not resolved the imbalance within its own relationship.

Integrity hurts duty of care when it is selectively performed rather than structurally lived.

The institution becomes more concerned with appearing principled than with ensuring the principle governs every level of the system.

That selective morality creates confusion.

Companies look upward and see government using the same distance, secrecy and procedural protection it condemns below.

Government then expects industries to reach a standard it has not embodied.

That does not excuse the industries.

It explains why weak standards reproduce themselves.

The highest visible authority teaches everyone beneath it what can be normalised.

A Standard Cannot Be Credible When Its Author Lives Outside It

Government is supposed to reflect the standards of the jurisdiction.

Not merely announce them.

Reflect them.

That means transparency cannot be something government requires only from private bodies.

Accountability cannot be something government activates only when another institution fails.

Duty of care cannot be a phrase applied externally while public systems continue ignoring early warnings, misallocating resources and hiding behind departmental boundaries.

A legal standard loses moral authority when the institution enforcing it behaves through the same pattern.

The law may retain formal power.

But the public will recognise the contradiction.

A government cannot demand honesty from companies while offering citizens curated visibility.

It cannot demand independent decision-making from competitors while maintaining relationships that allow industry interests to shape public policy without equal public access.

It cannot demand that businesses serve consumers while government treats taxpayers as compulsory sources of revenue rather than participants in allocation.

The government should not ask industries to become what government refuses to model.

Testing a System Is Not the Same as Choosing to Live by Its Failure

There is also a difference between entering a system to understand it and choosing to exist permanently through its weaknesses.

A person can enter an industry, test its conditions, study its culture and decide that the water is not fit to remain in.

That is different from building one’s identity, profit and authority around those conditions.

The person who tests the water may emerge and warn others.

The people who remain in it may point at the person for ever having entered.

But the two actions are not equal.

One is investigation.

The other is habitation.

One learns in order to assess.

The other normalises in order to benefit.

The same distinction applies institutionally.

A government may temporarily use an imperfect method while evaluating it.

That is different from embedding secrecy, selective accountability and fragmented responsibility into the permanent architecture of governance.

A company may test a commercial strategy and abandon it when harm becomes visible.

That is different from continuing after warnings because the strategy remains profitable.

The real question is not whether an institution ever entered the water.

It is whether, after discovering what was in it, the institution chose to remain and then condemned others for getting wet.

The Housebuilders Case Is About More Than Information-Sharing

This is why the housebuilders case should not be reduced to whether particular pieces of information were technically sensitive.

The larger issue is the relationship between:

• public competition and private alignment;
• separate branding and shared industry interest;
• customer choice and hidden informational advantage;
• housing as a basic need and housing as a coordinated profit structure;
• corporate secrecy and governmental secrecy;
• regulation and the regulator’s own integrity;
• and the buyer’s belief in an independent market versus the industry’s understanding of itself as one connected house.

The public should be allowed to see the architecture it is paying into.

If companies coordinate to protect the industry, that coordination must not come at the expense of the people whose money sustains it.

If government regulates that conduct, it must submit its own structures to the same standard of transparency.

And if both government and industry understand that their rooms connect behind the public’s view, then they cannot continue treating the public as though it is unreasonable for asking to see the floor plan.

The Central Principles

Competitors may fight over customers while cooperating to protect the industry from the customers themselves.

Separate brands do not prove separate interests. Sometimes they are simply different rooms beneath the same commercial roof.

A win-win between competitors must be examined for the person excluded from the win.

Government cannot hold companies accountable for secrecy while practising secrecy through public authority. That is arrogantly hypocritical.

The highest institution cannot demand standards it refuses to embody.

When the customer sees separate doors but the companies share corridors behind them, the law must investigate the house—not only the room where the sale occurred.

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Okay, um, just remember the next one, we’ll tap into the diesel emission litigation one. But from just a couple of points that you gave me here, it just makes me think of how industries recognize that their competitors are their friends as well, because competitors are still part of your industry, which means that if both you and your competitors are doing good, just like Coca-Cola and Pepsi, the industry itself does well. I mean, that’s why also major luxury chains don’t necessarily badmouth their competitors because they understand that it makes the industry look bad. And in doing so, it appalls people’s perception of the industry itself. So I’m not surprised of competitors sharing information with each other against their customers, because they see customers, they see people as customers and customers as numbers. So for them, it’s just an opportunity to make more money, and they are willing to share information with their competitors in order to do so. The same way that I’m going into all these industries that I wouldn’t necessarily want to stay in at this current stage, based on the standards of those industries, yet I still allow myself to learn from those industries in order to invest in the larger picture. All these individual industries could be seen as my competitors, simply because I’m creating a system that could possibly, well, I’m creating, investing, and advocating, and stewarding, and eventually will, well, the future again, just because I’m speaking to AI and AI is not going to necessarily pick that up or trust in time, whatever. But because the system that I’m advocating for, it’s of higher standards, higher responsibilities, and these individual industries that I’m tapping into have shown not to want to raise their own bars because it raises the level of responsibility, I’m still willing to learn their language as their ways in order to, I guess, win over evidence to support the cause that I’m supporting. And it would be ignorant of me to try and hold systems that affect global lives without actually tapping into the individual systems that make it. So, because I’m smart enough to realize how it all works, how it all pans out, how it all affects itself, and the same thing competitors in those industries understand that their industry is their roof, and no matter in which room they exist in, every room is still part of the house hold of which the industry is the roof. So, they take care of their roofs, and in doing so, the customer, which is the outsider, doesn’t necessarily know what’s behind every single individual house or how the rooms are connected with each other. One just walks in the industry thinking and assuming that each and every individual room is separate to itself, but really and truly, they’re all connected because they’re connecting behind the lenses of the customer. It’s, to use a dramatic example, it’s the backstabbing example, smile up in your face and then stab you in the back. Smile in your face with marketing and stab you in the back by collaborating with the competitors in order to raise prices on both because then both win. It’s the win-win mentality. If you’re my competitor and we are discussing ways to make the industry itself look more appealing, no matter whether we compete, we both look good, we both raise, we both elevate, we both grow, you know? And governments use that as well. And that’s why they don’t want to put legislations on it. They don’t want to put boundaries to it because it benefits them to do so. So here is where integrity then hurts duty of care. Because the government itself isn’t transparent with its consumers. If the government itself isn’t transparent to consumers and the government is the highest quote-unquote body to reflect back the standards to a country, then all the companies that abide by the same ways that the government goes shouldn’t be held accountable by the government if the government is doing the exact same, you know? If the government is not giving us transparency on how our money is used, they should not hold accountable those companies that hold information away from the public. It’s hypocritical and quite audaciously arrogant because it’s like completely bypassing your own ways to point the finger at whoever has those ways when you’re doing the exact same. And you live in by it. You know, necessarily, it’s not like a season, it’s not a phase like many people say for LGBTism. This is a way that a company, a board, an industry, a government has chosen to exist by. The two are different because one could test waters and realize, nope, I do not want to swim in those waters. But then the same ones that are in the waters will point the finger at you for testing the waters. Do you understand? Like, and I want you to make sure that you put this in there as well and also use the words that I use, like calling the government arrogant because by the definition of what the word arrogant is, that’s the behavior that the government goes by when it holds accountable others for things that it does itself. That’s arrogantly hypocritical.