Given that Starmer has selectively leaked that he is going to attack private schools in his big policy speech today, this probably means that he has absolutely nothing new to say otherwise they would be trailed all the juicy new stuff he is going to announce.
One area for cost saving - councils. Everyone needs a council, but noone needs more than that. Some upfront cost, but future savings as duplication is eliminated. Unitary system for all.
As if this hasn't been done to death for the last 10 years. If you want to save costs, you need to reduce the number of statutory functions that Council's are responsible for. Instead government has a habit of adding to them, without funding them. There are a lot of myths about duplication and efficiency savings from mergers, but they aren't always born out by reality; what typically happens is that they are incredibly disruptive and expensive.
What the government could do to save money and reinvigorate democracy is to give Council's more power to set whatever level of council tax they so desire. This will ultimately drive actual efficiency, because no one wants to pay £5000 per year in Council tax.
There is also an insane situation where the property industry has been unaminously lobbying government to increase planning fees for several years, and for this money to be 'ring fenced' for the planning service. Instead fees remain low, service is poor, delays are never ending, and the service is cross subsidised by Council tax.
Delays are never ending because anyone sane would leave a planning authority and go to the private sector - wages really haven't gone up for decades.
Except that is inconsistent with your claim before that the local Council had dodgily "put on the backburner" planning consent for a highly-demanded retail park, because they were worried it would be popular. Which is the worst possible reason to refuse consent.
"Don't build this, people might actually want it" - if that's why its getting "put on the backburner" then its a good thing that the people abusing their authority to stifle development are losing their ability to do so. And it doesn't mean that wages are the issue, it means that people having the ability to stand in the way of others doing some development is the problem.
The local council hadn't the developers had because they knew it was unlikely to be approved - no point wasting money.
But a change in how development was approved meant that it could be approved. That is a good thing then, thank goodness the change happened. 👍
We need to find out what other roadblocks are in the way of development being able to occur, and remove them too.
Clearly you haven't been to the wasteland that is Bishop Auckland's town centre nowadays.
The thing is retail is very much a zero sum game, money spent in St Helen's is money that was once spent in Bishop Auckland town centre.
In the same way that the forthcoming Scotch Corner Designer village (Richmondshire council) will be the death nail to Darlington town centre and Northallerton (Hambleton district council).
Oh boo frigging hoo.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
So, Sunak vs Truss/Mordaunt and not-Rishi wins? Is that the PB consensus? And Gove's support for Badenoch - he can't expect her to win so which of the credible candidates is it designed to help?
Given that Starmer has selectively leaked that he is going to attack private schools in his big policy speech today, this probably means that he has absolutely nothing new to say otherwise they would be trailed all the juicy new stuff he is going to announce.
It will be another of his pointless relaunches.
This one is worse than pointless.
A few weeks ago somebody posted a list of policies he'd announced, and I graded it 4/10 - a decent base to build from, but needed much more fleshing out.
One area for cost saving - councils. Everyone needs a council, but noone needs more than that. Some upfront cost, but future savings as duplication is eliminated. Unitary system for all.
As if this hasn't been done to death for the last 10 years. If you want to save costs, you need to reduce the number of statutory functions that Council's are responsible for. Instead government has a habit of adding to them, without funding them. There are a lot of myths about duplication and efficiency savings from mergers, but they aren't always born out by reality; what typically happens is that they are incredibly disruptive and expensive.
What the government could do to save money and reinvigorate democracy is to give Council's more power to set whatever level of council tax they so desire. This will ultimately drive actual efficiency, because no one wants to pay £5000 per year in Council tax.
There is also an insane situation where the property industry has been unaminously lobbying government to increase planning fees for several years, and for this money to be 'ring fenced' for the planning service. Instead fees remain low, service is poor, delays are never ending, and the service is cross subsidised by Council tax.
Delays are never ending because anyone sane would leave a planning authority and go to the private sector - wages really haven't gone up for decades.
Except that is inconsistent with your claim before that the local Council had dodgily "put on the backburner" planning consent for a highly-demanded retail park, because they were worried it would be popular. Which is the worst possible reason to refuse consent.
"Don't build this, people might actually want it" - if that's why its getting "put on the backburner" then its a good thing that the people abusing their authority to stifle development are losing their ability to do so. And it doesn't mean that wages are the issue, it means that people having the ability to stand in the way of others doing some development is the problem.
The local council hadn't the developers had because they knew it was unlikely to be approved - no point wasting money.
But a change in how development was approved meant that it could be approved. That is a good thing then, thank goodness the change happened. 👍
We need to find out what other roadblocks are in the way of development being able to occur, and remove them too.
Clearly you haven't been to the wasteland that is Bishop Auckland's town centre nowadays.
The thing is retail is very much a zero sum game, money spent in St Helen's is money that was once spent in Bishop Auckland town centre.
In the same way that the forthcoming Scotch Corner Designer village (Richmondshire council) will be the death nail to Darlington town centre and Northallerton (Hambleton district council).
Oh boo frigging hoo.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
What's being done to make Bishop Auckland more attractive
But in both cases it's fighting a losing battle because the out of town shopping centre has destroyed the basis of the local economy...
You can see the same thing in Sheffield (Meadowhall has gutted Sheffield town centre) and in Stockton / Boro where Teesside park first destroyed Stockton town centre and then over the last 3 years taken Boro with it.
One area for cost saving - councils. Everyone needs a council, but noone needs more than that. Some upfront cost, but future savings as duplication is eliminated. Unitary system for all.
As if this hasn't been done to death for the last 10 years. If you want to save costs, you need to reduce the number of statutory functions that Council's are responsible for. Instead government has a habit of adding to them, without funding them. There are a lot of myths about duplication and efficiency savings from mergers, but they aren't always born out by reality; what typically happens is that they are incredibly disruptive and expensive.
What the government could do to save money and reinvigorate democracy is to give Council's more power to set whatever level of council tax they so desire. This will ultimately drive actual efficiency, because no one wants to pay £5000 per year in Council tax.
There is also an insane situation where the property industry has been unaminously lobbying government to increase planning fees for several years, and for this money to be 'ring fenced' for the planning service. Instead fees remain low, service is poor, delays are never ending, and the service is cross subsidised by Council tax.
Delays are never ending because anyone sane would leave a planning authority and go to the private sector - wages really haven't gone up for decades.
Except that is inconsistent with your claim before that the local Council had dodgily "put on the backburner" planning consent for a highly-demanded retail park, because they were worried it would be popular. Which is the worst possible reason to refuse consent.
"Don't build this, people might actually want it" - if that's why its getting "put on the backburner" then its a good thing that the people abusing their authority to stifle development are losing their ability to do so. And it doesn't mean that wages are the issue, it means that people having the ability to stand in the way of others doing some development is the problem.
The local council hadn't the developers had because they knew it was unlikely to be approved - no point wasting money.
But a change in how development was approved meant that it could be approved. That is a good thing then, thank goodness the change happened. 👍
We need to find out what other roadblocks are in the way of development being able to occur, and remove them too.
Clearly you haven't been to the wasteland that is Bishop Auckland's town centre nowadays.
The thing is retail is very much a zero sum game, money spent in St Helen's is money that was once spent in Bishop Auckland town centre.
In the same way that the forthcoming Scotch Corner Designer village (Richmondshire council) will be the death nail to Darlington town centre and Northallerton (Hambleton district council).
Oh boo frigging hoo.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
One thing I've noticed from twitter about broad left US politics is the absolute hatred of cars. I think that's a big dividing line globally between right and left globally.
I think Truss is the best candidate, even though ideally I want Sunak to win for entirely selfish reasons. Hopefully we get a Sunak v Truss final two, in which case either I'll get a good payoff, or the best candidate becomes PM. 👍
If it was Sunak v Truss I would vote for Sunak with reservations. Though at least Truss is more conservative than she was
You mean from that time when she was a fully signed up Liberal Democrat.
Parents who sent children to private schools providing funding via taxation for state schools they do not even use while also funding their own children's education directly.
If there's a subsidy, it's from private school parents to state school children.
Not paying tax is not the same thing as receiving a subsidy.
If tax breaks can exist for religion they can certainly exist for education.
It is one thing to ask people to pay taxes so that other people's children can get the same education that their kids are getting. It is quite another to ask them to pay taxes to subsidise other people's children to get a better education than their children are getting. Why should I be subsidising other people's kids to push in front of my kids in the queue for university places or jobs? Forget it.
Usual Labour class envy mentality, even Blair's government abolished the assisted places scheme of course.
The not rich but bright child must not be allowed the best chance to get on and become a higher earning Tory voter
The not rich but bright child is precisely the one who is hurt most by the existence of private schools. Private education exists primarily to help the less bright but rich to jump the queue. It is the absolute antithesis of aspiration and meritocracy.
Utter rubbish, it was Wilson's Labour government which started the process of abolishing the state grammar schools which offered results at least as good as private schools. It was the Blair government which abolished assisted places which offered places to the bright but less well off in private schools and Starmer's policy on charitable status will have the same effect.
As so often with Labour class war, restricting choice and dumbing down to the lowest common denominator remains at its heart
Circular 10/65 was the result of a report that showed that there was structural problems within the 11 plus exams that biased towards middle class families.
Which is still the case now - those families who can afford pay for preparation prior to the exams do better than those who sit them blind.
The evidence is those working class children who get into grammar schools get better results than working class children of similar ability who don't
But that's as you would expect, since it is the cleverest which go to grammar schools. The relevant question is who makes the most progress? In Trafford, grammar schools are the most successful at pupil progress. I don't know whether you could say this is true of working class children at grammars vs non-selectives in Trafford - would expect so but don't have the data. I also think non- grammars in Trafford deliver progress which is above national average. But my data may be out of date, and I do know whether this is typical of selective authorities.
One area for cost saving - councils. Everyone needs a council, but noone needs more than that. Some upfront cost, but future savings as duplication is eliminated. Unitary system for all.
As if this hasn't been done to death for the last 10 years. If you want to save costs, you need to reduce the number of statutory functions that Council's are responsible for. Instead government has a habit of adding to them, without funding them. There are a lot of myths about duplication and efficiency savings from mergers, but they aren't always born out by reality; what typically happens is that they are incredibly disruptive and expensive.
What the government could do to save money and reinvigorate democracy is to give Council's more power to set whatever level of council tax they so desire. This will ultimately drive actual efficiency, because no one wants to pay £5000 per year in Council tax.
There is also an insane situation where the property industry has been unaminously lobbying government to increase planning fees for several years, and for this money to be 'ring fenced' for the planning service. Instead fees remain low, service is poor, delays are never ending, and the service is cross subsidised by Council tax.
Delays are never ending because anyone sane would leave a planning authority and go to the private sector - wages really haven't gone up for decades.
Except that is inconsistent with your claim before that the local Council had dodgily "put on the backburner" planning consent for a highly-demanded retail park, because they were worried it would be popular. Which is the worst possible reason to refuse consent.
"Don't build this, people might actually want it" - if that's why its getting "put on the backburner" then its a good thing that the people abusing their authority to stifle development are losing their ability to do so. And it doesn't mean that wages are the issue, it means that people having the ability to stand in the way of others doing some development is the problem.
The local council hadn't the developers had because they knew it was unlikely to be approved - no point wasting money.
But a change in how development was approved meant that it could be approved. That is a good thing then, thank goodness the change happened. 👍
We need to find out what other roadblocks are in the way of development being able to occur, and remove them too.
Clearly you haven't been to the wasteland that is Bishop Auckland's town centre nowadays.
The thing is retail is very much a zero sum game, money spent in St Helen's is money that was once spent in Bishop Auckland town centre.
In the same way that the forthcoming Scotch Corner Designer village (Richmondshire council) will be the death nail to Darlington town centre and Northallerton (Hambleton district council).
Oh boo frigging hoo.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
What's being done to make Bishop Auckland more attractive
But in both cases it's fighting a losing battle because the out of town shopping centre has destroyed the basis of the local economy...
You can see the same thing in Sheffield (Meadowhall has gutted Sheffield town centre) and in Stockton / Boro where Teesside park first destroyed Stockton town centre and then over the last 3 years taken Boro with it.
It's not the out of town shopping centre that has "destroyed the basis of the local economy" but that the local residents have preferred to go there.
A story which illustrates so many lies and misunderstandings about what is happening out there: 1kg of butter? Who in their right mind buys that for domestic use? So the basic proposition is silly. Whats more, other brands are available who do basically the same product for less cost per kilo.
But - and its a big but - read and understand the comments and analysis about the dairy industry. There have been some *whopping* price rises. So the industry can afford to pay people more. And yet cannot find staff. Because quite simply British workers do not want to work in agriculture / food. At any price. We continue to have a staff shortage. And the "point-based migration" system fails to do its job and bring people in.
You mean its not bringing in people who are being offered competitive salaries?
Or its not bringing in people at basically minimum wage?
The migration system is designed, rightly, now to bring people in if their starting salary is about £30k+ . . . we shouldn't be looking to bring people in who are earning less than that, because if they're on less than that they're a net drain not a positive.
So which jobs aren't being filled for a long time that are meeting that salary? Or do you mean that offering 10% over National Minimum Wage isn't enough?
I mean that in the real world there is no solution other than imported labour. There is no labour pool available in many rural areas to do the work. So you're looking at farmers having to offer incentives to get people to relocate from Widnes to Wisbech to work in their dairy. Which they can't and the people won't. And even if they did the price of milk would then be so crazy that we would switch to cheaper imports.
What you believe is great theory. Meanwhile in the real world...
There are people who live in Wisbech already. Why aren't they doing the work?
If you pay a competitive enough salary, then people will move to take the job. Or you can invest in somewhere there are people.
"Bringing in people" is just getting people to move.
There is no reason those people need to move from another country, rather than somewhere in this one, other than that National Minimum Wage will attract people to move from Eastern Europe to Wisbech but won't get people to move from Widnes to Wisbech. A decent salary and good terms and conditions on the other hand will do.
If anyone is struggling to hire because they aren't paying a good salary, that's their problem, not ours. They either need to pay a good salary, or invest in automation, or their business isn't viable.
People won't move from Widnes to Wisbech when there's nowhere to live in Wisbech, apart from a bed in a dorm room. So many of our economic and social issues come back to the housing crisis.
Well yes, but @RochdalePioneers is arguing people should move from Warsaw to Wisbech, but thinks its impossible to move from Widnes to Wisbech.
If you need people to move for a job, that job needs to pay a competitive enough salary to entice people to move. The problem is that some businesses thought they could entice people to move for National Minimum Wage, where they'd have 7 workers living in a three bedroom house.
That's no longer an option, but it never was healthy either.
Either pay a decent salary, or invest in automation, or your business isn't viable.
When did you last work in a dairy? Farmers receive very little thanks to the supermarkets forcing prices down. My brother-in-law went through a stage where he was pouring the milk down the drain because keeping it cold for collection and cleaning the diary to the regulated standards was costing more than he was paid from the processors. He was not the only farmer pouring milk away either.
What's that got to do with anything I said?
If people are quite literally pouring their product down the drain, then we presumably have an oversupply of the product, which is why the supermarkets are able to keep prices down.
If that's the case, then it sounds like we have too many people working in the dairy sector, as opposed to not enough.
That isn't the case. They are pouring it away because the storage / shipping cost is less than the revenue they will get from not pouring it away. Meanwhile we import cheap subsidised dairy.
If they're pouring it away, they shouldn't be generating it in the first place. Why the f**k are they producing it only to pour it away? Zero sympathy.
And its funny, all my milk I get from my supermarket tends to normally have a union flag on it and says its made in this country.
They have to produce it so the cows don’t burst
I spoke to my cousin recently who works on his Dad's dairy farm. Apparently herd numbers are down on farms in Ireland that overstock and rely on feed to support more cows then they have land to grow grass on. Some farms are buying less fertiliser, because it's so expensive, so expecting to grow less grass, and cutting their cow numbers as a result.
At the same time that input prices for feed, fertiliser and diesel are going up, the price paid for a cow carcass is also up, so it makes financial sense to cull the herd and produce less milk.
Dairy farms in Britain seem to rely a lot more on buying feed, rather than growing grass, so they will have more severe problems at the moment.
Precisely.
Some people are acting as if herd numbers are a fixed law of nature, they're not. If its not economic to produce milk, then fewer cows doing so is an option. If it is profitable, then more is an option.
Its bizarre and weird to simultaneously moan that there aren't enough staff to fill the sector, and also simultaneously complain the sector isn't getting enough money because its producing so much that product is literally being poured down the drain.
You asked "why are they producing so much product" - once you have the cow you don't have a choice. They might be able to make changes to herd size for the next year, but why they are throwing that milk away...?
Your market-uber-alles theory doesn't cope with reality.
A story which illustrates so many lies and misunderstandings about what is happening out there: 1kg of butter? Who in their right mind buys that for domestic use? So the basic proposition is silly. Whats more, other brands are available who do basically the same product for less cost per kilo.
But - and its a big but - read and understand the comments and analysis about the dairy industry. There have been some *whopping* price rises. So the industry can afford to pay people more. And yet cannot find staff. Because quite simply British workers do not want to work in agriculture / food. At any price. We continue to have a staff shortage. And the "point-based migration" system fails to do its job and bring people in.
You mean its not bringing in people who are being offered competitive salaries?
Or its not bringing in people at basically minimum wage?
The migration system is designed, rightly, now to bring people in if their starting salary is about £30k+ . . . we shouldn't be looking to bring people in who are earning less than that, because if they're on less than that they're a net drain not a positive.
So which jobs aren't being filled for a long time that are meeting that salary? Or do you mean that offering 10% over National Minimum Wage isn't enough?
I mean that in the real world there is no solution other than imported labour. There is no labour pool available in many rural areas to do the work. So you're looking at farmers having to offer incentives to get people to relocate from Widnes to Wisbech to work in their dairy. Which they can't and the people won't. And even if they did the price of milk would then be so crazy that we would switch to cheaper imports.
What you believe is great theory. Meanwhile in the real world...
There are people who live in Wisbech already. Why aren't they doing the work?
If you pay a competitive enough salary, then people will move to take the job. Or you can invest in somewhere there are people.
"Bringing in people" is just getting people to move.
There is no reason those people need to move from another country, rather than somewhere in this one, other than that National Minimum Wage will attract people to move from Eastern Europe to Wisbech but won't get people to move from Widnes to Wisbech. A decent salary and good terms and conditions on the other hand will do.
If anyone is struggling to hire because they aren't paying a good salary, that's their problem, not ours. They either need to pay a good salary, or invest in automation, or their business isn't viable.
People won't move from Widnes to Wisbech when there's nowhere to live in Wisbech, apart from a bed in a dorm room. So many of our economic and social issues come back to the housing crisis.
Well yes, but @RochdalePioneers is arguing people should move from Warsaw to Wisbech, but thinks its impossible to move from Widnes to Wisbech.
If you need people to move for a job, that job needs to pay a competitive enough salary to entice people to move. The problem is that some businesses thought they could entice people to move for National Minimum Wage, where they'd have 7 workers living in a three bedroom house.
That's no longer an option, but it never was healthy either.
Either pay a decent salary, or invest in automation, or your business isn't viable.
When did you last work in a dairy? Farmers receive very little thanks to the supermarkets forcing prices down. My brother-in-law went through a stage where he was pouring the milk down the drain because keeping it cold for collection and cleaning the diary to the regulated standards was costing more than he was paid from the processors. He was not the only farmer pouring milk away either.
What's that got to do with anything I said?
If people are quite literally pouring their product down the drain, then we presumably have an oversupply of the product, which is why the supermarkets are able to keep prices down.
If that's the case, then it sounds like we have too many people working in the dairy sector, as opposed to not enough.
That isn't the case. They are pouring it away because the storage / shipping cost is less than the revenue they will get from not pouring it away. Meanwhile we import cheap subsidised dairy.
If they're pouring it away, they shouldn't be generating it in the first place. Why the f**k are they producing it only to pour it away? Zero sympathy.
And its funny, all my milk I get from my supermarket tends to normally have a union flag on it and says its made in this country.
They have to produce it so the cows don’t burst
I spoke to my cousin recently who works on his Dad's dairy farm. Apparently herd numbers are down on farms in Ireland that overstock and rely on feed to support more cows then they have land to grow grass on. Some farms are buying less fertiliser, because it's so expensive, so expecting to grow less grass, and cutting their cow numbers as a result.
At the same time that input prices for feed, fertiliser and diesel are going up, the price paid for a cow carcass is also up, so it makes financial sense to cull the herd and produce less milk.
Dairy farms in Britain seem to rely a lot more on buying feed, rather than growing grass, so they will have more severe problems at the moment.
Precisely.
Some people are acting as if herd numbers are a fixed law of nature, they're not. If its not economic to produce milk, then fewer cows doing so is an option. If it is profitable, then more is an option.
Its bizarre and weird to simultaneously moan that there aren't enough staff to fill the sector, and also simultaneously complain the sector isn't getting enough money because its producing so much that product is literally being poured down the drain.
Well the corollary is that production is going down because the poorest people in the world can't afford to pay high enough prices to support the previous level of production - which means we potentially face a big food crisis.
Though, if we're seeing a shift from grain being used to feed cows to produce milk, to grain being used to feed people directly, perhaps that's the change we need in the short term to keep the world fed during the Ukraine War and its impact on grain harvest and distribution.
Parents who sent children to private schools providing funding via taxation for state schools they do not even use while also funding their own children's education directly.
If there's a subsidy, it's from private school parents to state school children.
Not paying tax is not the same thing as receiving a subsidy.
If tax breaks can exist for religion they can certainly exist for education.
It is one thing to ask people to pay taxes so that other people's children can get the same education that their kids are getting. It is quite another to ask them to pay taxes to subsidise other people's children to get a better education than their children are getting. Why should I be subsidising other people's kids to push in front of my kids in the queue for university places or jobs? Forget it.
Usual Labour class envy mentality, even Blair's government abolished the assisted places scheme of course.
The not rich but bright child must not be allowed the best chance to get on and become a higher earning Tory voter
The not rich but bright child is precisely the one who is hurt most by the existence of private schools. Private education exists primarily to help the less bright but rich to jump the queue. It is the absolute antithesis of aspiration and meritocracy.
That is Tony Blair's fault as he abolished the assisted places scheme, whereby poor children could get their fees paid at private schools. It was a classic New Labour move - political correctness achieving exactly the opposite effect to that presumably intended.
Given that Starmer has selectively leaked that he is going to attack private schools in his big policy speech today, this probably means that he has absolutely nothing new to say otherwise they would be trailed all the juicy new stuff he is going to announce.
It will be another of his pointless relaunches.
This one is worse than pointless.
A few weeks ago somebody posted a list of policies he'd announced, and I graded it 4/10 - a decent base to build from, but needed much more fleshing out.
Add this to the list, it's down to 3.5/10.
In fairness, it's not the new time for new Lab policies with all the focus on the Con leadership but Starmer needs to come up with something new for Labour conference.
One area for cost saving - councils. Everyone needs a council, but noone needs more than that. Some upfront cost, but future savings as duplication is eliminated. Unitary system for all.
As if this hasn't been done to death for the last 10 years. If you want to save costs, you need to reduce the number of statutory functions that Council's are responsible for. Instead government has a habit of adding to them, without funding them. There are a lot of myths about duplication and efficiency savings from mergers, but they aren't always born out by reality; what typically happens is that they are incredibly disruptive and expensive.
What the government could do to save money and reinvigorate democracy is to give Council's more power to set whatever level of council tax they so desire. This will ultimately drive actual efficiency, because no one wants to pay £5000 per year in Council tax.
There is also an insane situation where the property industry has been unaminously lobbying government to increase planning fees for several years, and for this money to be 'ring fenced' for the planning service. Instead fees remain low, service is poor, delays are never ending, and the service is cross subsidised by Council tax.
Delays are never ending because anyone sane would leave a planning authority and go to the private sector - wages really haven't gone up for decades.
Except that is inconsistent with your claim before that the local Council had dodgily "put on the backburner" planning consent for a highly-demanded retail park, because they were worried it would be popular. Which is the worst possible reason to refuse consent.
"Don't build this, people might actually want it" - if that's why its getting "put on the backburner" then its a good thing that the people abusing their authority to stifle development are losing their ability to do so. And it doesn't mean that wages are the issue, it means that people having the ability to stand in the way of others doing some development is the problem.
The local council hadn't the developers had because they knew it was unlikely to be approved - no point wasting money.
But a change in how development was approved meant that it could be approved. That is a good thing then, thank goodness the change happened. 👍
We need to find out what other roadblocks are in the way of development being able to occur, and remove them too.
Clearly you haven't been to the wasteland that is Bishop Auckland's town centre nowadays.
The thing is retail is very much a zero sum game, money spent in St Helen's is money that was once spent in Bishop Auckland town centre.
In the same way that the forthcoming Scotch Corner Designer village (Richmondshire council) will be the death nail to Darlington town centre and Northallerton (Hambleton district council).
Oh boo frigging hoo.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
What's being done to make Bishop Auckland more attractive
But in both cases it's fighting a losing battle because the out of town shopping centre has destroyed the basis of the local economy...
You can see the same thing in Sheffield (Meadowhall has gutted Sheffield town centre) and in Stockton / Boro where Teesside park first destroyed Stockton town centre and then over the last 3 years taken Boro with it.
It's not the out of town shopping centre that has "destroyed the basis of the local economy" but that the local residents have preferred to go there.
Yep but only because we've doubled the amount of space given over to retail to approximately twice that which was actually required.
Which means you have a lovely shopping area for those who can drive and have a car leaving once again nothing for those who use public transport..
One area for cost saving - councils. Everyone needs a council, but noone needs more than that. Some upfront cost, but future savings as duplication is eliminated. Unitary system for all.
As if this hasn't been done to death for the last 10 years. If you want to save costs, you need to reduce the number of statutory functions that Council's are responsible for. Instead government has a habit of adding to them, without funding them. There are a lot of myths about duplication and efficiency savings from mergers, but they aren't always born out by reality; what typically happens is that they are incredibly disruptive and expensive.
What the government could do to save money and reinvigorate democracy is to give Council's more power to set whatever level of council tax they so desire. This will ultimately drive actual efficiency, because no one wants to pay £5000 per year in Council tax.
There is also an insane situation where the property industry has been unaminously lobbying government to increase planning fees for several years, and for this money to be 'ring fenced' for the planning service. Instead fees remain low, service is poor, delays are never ending, and the service is cross subsidised by Council tax.
Delays are never ending because anyone sane would leave a planning authority and go to the private sector - wages really haven't gone up for decades.
Except that is inconsistent with your claim before that the local Council had dodgily "put on the backburner" planning consent for a highly-demanded retail park, because they were worried it would be popular. Which is the worst possible reason to refuse consent.
"Don't build this, people might actually want it" - if that's why its getting "put on the backburner" then its a good thing that the people abusing their authority to stifle development are losing their ability to do so. And it doesn't mean that wages are the issue, it means that people having the ability to stand in the way of others doing some development is the problem.
The local council hadn't the developers had because they knew it was unlikely to be approved - no point wasting money.
But a change in how development was approved meant that it could be approved. That is a good thing then, thank goodness the change happened. 👍
We need to find out what other roadblocks are in the way of development being able to occur, and remove them too.
Clearly you haven't been to the wasteland that is Bishop Auckland's town centre nowadays.
The thing is retail is very much a zero sum game, money spent in St Helen's is money that was once spent in Bishop Auckland town centre.
In the same way that the forthcoming Scotch Corner Designer village (Richmondshire council) will be the death nail to Darlington town centre and Northallerton (Hambleton district council).
Oh boo frigging hoo.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
What's being done to make Bishop Auckland more attractive
But in both cases it's fighting a losing battle because the out of town shopping centre has destroyed the basis of the local economy...
You can see the same thing in Sheffield (Meadowhall has gutted Sheffield town centre) and in Stockton / Boro where Teesside park first destroyed Stockton town centre and then over the last 3 years taken Boro with it.
It's not Meadowhall vs Sheffield city centre any more though, it's Meadowhall vs Amazon.
So, Sunak vs Truss/Mordaunt and not-Rishi wins? Is that the PB consensus? And Gove's support for Badenoch - he can't expect her to win so which of the credible candidates is it designed to help?
Yes, that's my feeling
If a fourth contender is going to break ahead of the pack, they need to do it soon
As for who wins the members between Sunak and Truss/Mordaunt, probably Sunak will lose BUT there will be more dirt dished. Do the Sunakites have anything on Liz or Penny?
Or is there more on Rishi?
The Times was hinting, deliciously, that there are revelations about BDSM sex and I've been trying to work out which candidate is the most likely kinkster. I wonder if it is Mordaunt, but that might just be because she's the only one that gives me teh tinglez
One area for cost saving - councils. Everyone needs a council, but noone needs more than that. Some upfront cost, but future savings as duplication is eliminated. Unitary system for all.
As if this hasn't been done to death for the last 10 years. If you want to save costs, you need to reduce the number of statutory functions that Council's are responsible for. Instead government has a habit of adding to them, without funding them. There are a lot of myths about duplication and efficiency savings from mergers, but they aren't always born out by reality; what typically happens is that they are incredibly disruptive and expensive.
What the government could do to save money and reinvigorate democracy is to give Council's more power to set whatever level of council tax they so desire. This will ultimately drive actual efficiency, because no one wants to pay £5000 per year in Council tax.
There is also an insane situation where the property industry has been unaminously lobbying government to increase planning fees for several years, and for this money to be 'ring fenced' for the planning service. Instead fees remain low, service is poor, delays are never ending, and the service is cross subsidised by Council tax.
Delays are never ending because anyone sane would leave a planning authority and go to the private sector - wages really haven't gone up for decades.
Except that is inconsistent with your claim before that the local Council had dodgily "put on the backburner" planning consent for a highly-demanded retail park, because they were worried it would be popular. Which is the worst possible reason to refuse consent.
"Don't build this, people might actually want it" - if that's why its getting "put on the backburner" then its a good thing that the people abusing their authority to stifle development are losing their ability to do so. And it doesn't mean that wages are the issue, it means that people having the ability to stand in the way of others doing some development is the problem.
The local council hadn't the developers had because they knew it was unlikely to be approved - no point wasting money.
But a change in how development was approved meant that it could be approved. That is a good thing then, thank goodness the change happened. 👍
We need to find out what other roadblocks are in the way of development being able to occur, and remove them too.
Clearly you haven't been to the wasteland that is Bishop Auckland's town centre nowadays.
The thing is retail is very much a zero sum game, money spent in St Helen's is money that was once spent in Bishop Auckland town centre.
In the same way that the forthcoming Scotch Corner Designer village (Richmondshire council) will be the death nail to Darlington town centre and Northallerton (Hambleton district council).
Oh boo frigging hoo.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
What's being done to make Bishop Auckland more attractive
But in both cases it's fighting a losing battle because the out of town shopping centre has destroyed the basis of the local economy...
You can see the same thing in Sheffield (Meadowhall has gutted Sheffield town centre) and in Stockton / Boro where Teesside park first destroyed Stockton town centre and then over the last 3 years taken Boro with it.
I didn't ask what's been done to make it "more attractive", I asked specifically what's been done to make it "more appealling to drive into and park at".
I've read both pages you've linked to, and I don't see parking mentioned once on either page. Instead I see easier "walking and cycling" being mentioned instead. So yes, more pedestrianisation from the look of it - and then you wonder why its dead? 🤦♂️
Why don't people want to go shopping where they can walk to, instead of drive to then load their shopping directly into their boot? The mystery continues . . . 🤦♂️
I think the Labour policy on charitable status for private schools misses the point.
The objection seems to be that it isn't fair for the rich to buy their children an advantage in the cut throat competition for decent middle class jobs by paying for a better education, and government should stop subsidising that advantage.
But the problem isn't that the rich can buy themselves an advantage in meritocratic competition. The problem is that the ideology of meritocracy is a sham used to justify obscene inequality, and even those people at the bottom of the educational pile should be able to contribute to society and live a life of dignity.
The point of the policy seems to be so that the children of Labour supporters in the middle class who don't use private schools out of principle get a better chance to compete for the secure middle class lifestyle that their peers are buying for their children, and so they can salve their conscience at the inequality between their children and working class children.
Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of harming the private school system, I doubt this policy will do anything for the kids who really need help: the 15-20% of children who leave school functionally illiterate and/or innumerate.
How can I say that, if the money is (allegedly) going to be spent on the state school system? The answer is simple: fixing illiteracy and innumeracy is difficult, and it won't work if it is tacked-on to existing policies. It really needs to be front and centre of our education policy.
I don't like calling this 'underachievement': it is kids who are let down by their families, the state, and the education system.
Therefore the concentration of policy has to be on them; not on how the money is raised. It is also multidisciplinary: not just in helping the kids in school, but outside school as well.
But I fear too many people - especially the middle classes - really don't care about this scandal.
So, Mr Starmer: let us have education and social policies that piles money onto helping those kids, and not the kids who will do well anyway. But the money will go on the latter kids, because it is much, much simpler.
Indeed. The number of adults unable to move onwards and upwards in their careers because they simply cannot read fairly simple documents nor recognise which of two numbers is bigger is a huge drag on our productivity. Having been through the system I favour "graduating High School". With kids failing years and being held back till they reach the requisite level. A High School diploma is basically turned up, can read, can write. It's pretty goddamn basic. But it focuses minds on those at the lower ends. The system at the moment focuses on the ones who can make 5 GCSE's.
Forget GCSEs and fix primary schools which is where reading and numeracy begin, or begin to go wrong.
I’m told directors at the foreign office are now looking at the Truss launch video, because some of the footage was filmed by civil servants not spads and they may not be allowed to use it https://twitter.com/ShippersUnbound/status/1546427236349247492
Looks as though there will be a members' ballot. Tory MP for Harrow East Bob Blackman, who is joint-executive secretary of the 1922 Committee, has said the threshold for support to enter the first round of the Conservative Party leadership race is likely to be 20.
He told Sky News: "The view is that candidates to get on the ballot paper should demonstrate a broad swathe of support amongst Conservative MPs.
"So we're looking at a proposer, a seconder and either 18 supporters or possibly more supporters in order to reduce that list.
He then says the "first ballot is likely to have a threshold of 10% of the votes, i.e. 36 MPs, supporting a candidate for them to go through to the second ballot. That once again is not confirmed yet, but I suspect that will be the case.
"After that we probably won't need thresholds because the list will shorten considerably."
Blackman also said it is a "condition of nomination" for candidates to agree that they will contest the final postal ballot of party members if they reach the last two, to avoid a situation as in 2016, when Theresa May became prime minister after her final rival, Andrea Leadsom, dropped out. (BBC)
One area for cost saving - councils. Everyone needs a council, but noone needs more than that. Some upfront cost, but future savings as duplication is eliminated. Unitary system for all.
As if this hasn't been done to death for the last 10 years. If you want to save costs, you need to reduce the number of statutory functions that Council's are responsible for. Instead government has a habit of adding to them, without funding them. There are a lot of myths about duplication and efficiency savings from mergers, but they aren't always born out by reality; what typically happens is that they are incredibly disruptive and expensive.
What the government could do to save money and reinvigorate democracy is to give Council's more power to set whatever level of council tax they so desire. This will ultimately drive actual efficiency, because no one wants to pay £5000 per year in Council tax.
There is also an insane situation where the property industry has been unaminously lobbying government to increase planning fees for several years, and for this money to be 'ring fenced' for the planning service. Instead fees remain low, service is poor, delays are never ending, and the service is cross subsidised by Council tax.
Delays are never ending because anyone sane would leave a planning authority and go to the private sector - wages really haven't gone up for decades.
Except that is inconsistent with your claim before that the local Council had dodgily "put on the backburner" planning consent for a highly-demanded retail park, because they were worried it would be popular. Which is the worst possible reason to refuse consent.
"Don't build this, people might actually want it" - if that's why its getting "put on the backburner" then its a good thing that the people abusing their authority to stifle development are losing their ability to do so. And it doesn't mean that wages are the issue, it means that people having the ability to stand in the way of others doing some development is the problem.
The local council hadn't the developers had because they knew it was unlikely to be approved - no point wasting money.
But a change in how development was approved meant that it could be approved. That is a good thing then, thank goodness the change happened. 👍
We need to find out what other roadblocks are in the way of development being able to occur, and remove them too.
Clearly you haven't been to the wasteland that is Bishop Auckland's town centre nowadays.
The thing is retail is very much a zero sum game, money spent in St Helen's is money that was once spent in Bishop Auckland town centre.
In the same way that the forthcoming Scotch Corner Designer village (Richmondshire council) will be the death nail to Darlington town centre and Northallerton (Hambleton district council).
Oh boo frigging hoo.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
What's being done to make Bishop Auckland more attractive
But in both cases it's fighting a losing battle because the out of town shopping centre has destroyed the basis of the local economy...
You can see the same thing in Sheffield (Meadowhall has gutted Sheffield town centre) and in Stockton / Boro where Teesside park first destroyed Stockton town centre and then over the last 3 years taken Boro with it.
It's not the out of town shopping centre that has "destroyed the basis of the local economy" but that the local residents have preferred to go there.
Yep but only because we've doubled the amount of space given over to retail to approximately twice that which was actually required.
Which means you have a lovely shopping area for those who can drive and have a car leaving once again nothing for those who use public transport..
One of my pet hates is the lack of mix. Huge retail or business parks without a residential property within walking distance. Sprawling new build estates without any commercial space at all. This is a relatively recent development.
So, Sunak vs Truss/Mordaunt and not-Rishi wins? Is that the PB consensus? And Gove's support for Badenoch - he can't expect her to win so which of the credible candidates is it designed to help?
Yes, that's my expectation. And I expect it to be Truss.
I'm not certain of this, obviously: just think this the most likely outcome out of a wide variety of possible outcomes. I reckon Truss is good value at anything better than 3-1.
As to what Gove means by backing Badenoch - maybe it means exactly what it looks like? But I'd say Badenoch fishes in the same pool as Truss, so it helps Mordaunt.
A story which illustrates so many lies and misunderstandings about what is happening out there: 1kg of butter? Who in their right mind buys that for domestic use? So the basic proposition is silly. Whats more, other brands are available who do basically the same product for less cost per kilo.
But - and its a big but - read and understand the comments and analysis about the dairy industry. There have been some *whopping* price rises. So the industry can afford to pay people more. And yet cannot find staff. Because quite simply British workers do not want to work in agriculture / food. At any price. We continue to have a staff shortage. And the "point-based migration" system fails to do its job and bring people in.
You mean its not bringing in people who are being offered competitive salaries?
Or its not bringing in people at basically minimum wage?
The migration system is designed, rightly, now to bring people in if their starting salary is about £30k+ . . . we shouldn't be looking to bring people in who are earning less than that, because if they're on less than that they're a net drain not a positive.
So which jobs aren't being filled for a long time that are meeting that salary? Or do you mean that offering 10% over National Minimum Wage isn't enough?
I mean that in the real world there is no solution other than imported labour. There is no labour pool available in many rural areas to do the work. So you're looking at farmers having to offer incentives to get people to relocate from Widnes to Wisbech to work in their dairy. Which they can't and the people won't. And even if they did the price of milk would then be so crazy that we would switch to cheaper imports.
What you believe is great theory. Meanwhile in the real world...
There are people who live in Wisbech already. Why aren't they doing the work?
If you pay a competitive enough salary, then people will move to take the job. Or you can invest in somewhere there are people.
"Bringing in people" is just getting people to move.
There is no reason those people need to move from another country, rather than somewhere in this one, other than that National Minimum Wage will attract people to move from Eastern Europe to Wisbech but won't get people to move from Widnes to Wisbech. A decent salary and good terms and conditions on the other hand will do.
If anyone is struggling to hire because they aren't paying a good salary, that's their problem, not ours. They either need to pay a good salary, or invest in automation, or their business isn't viable.
People won't move from Widnes to Wisbech when there's nowhere to live in Wisbech, apart from a bed in a dorm room. So many of our economic and social issues come back to the housing crisis.
Well yes, but @RochdalePioneers is arguing people should move from Warsaw to Wisbech, but thinks its impossible to move from Widnes to Wisbech.
If you need people to move for a job, that job needs to pay a competitive enough salary to entice people to move. The problem is that some businesses thought they could entice people to move for National Minimum Wage, where they'd have 7 workers living in a three bedroom house.
That's no longer an option, but it never was healthy either.
Either pay a decent salary, or invest in automation, or your business isn't viable.
When did you last work in a dairy? Farmers receive very little thanks to the supermarkets forcing prices down. My brother-in-law went through a stage where he was pouring the milk down the drain because keeping it cold for collection and cleaning the diary to the regulated standards was costing more than he was paid from the processors. He was not the only farmer pouring milk away either.
What's that got to do with anything I said?
If people are quite literally pouring their product down the drain, then we presumably have an oversupply of the product, which is why the supermarkets are able to keep prices down.
If that's the case, then it sounds like we have too many people working in the dairy sector, as opposed to not enough.
That isn't the case. They are pouring it away because the storage / shipping cost is less than the revenue they will get from not pouring it away. Meanwhile we import cheap subsidised dairy.
If they're pouring it away, they shouldn't be generating it in the first place. Why the f**k are they producing it only to pour it away? Zero sympathy.
And its funny, all my milk I get from my supermarket tends to normally have a union flag on it and says its made in this country.
They have to produce it so the cows don’t burst
I spoke to my cousin recently who works on his Dad's dairy farm. Apparently herd numbers are down on farms in Ireland that overstock and rely on feed to support more cows then they have land to grow grass on. Some farms are buying less fertiliser, because it's so expensive, so expecting to grow less grass, and cutting their cow numbers as a result.
At the same time that input prices for feed, fertiliser and diesel are going up, the price paid for a cow carcass is also up, so it makes financial sense to cull the herd and produce less milk.
Dairy farms in Britain seem to rely a lot more on buying feed, rather than growing grass, so they will have more severe problems at the moment.
Precisely.
Some people are acting as if herd numbers are a fixed law of nature, they're not. If its not economic to produce milk, then fewer cows doing so is an option. If it is profitable, then more is an option.
Its bizarre and weird to simultaneously moan that there aren't enough staff to fill the sector, and also simultaneously complain the sector isn't getting enough money because its producing so much that product is literally being poured down the drain.
You asked "why are they producing so much product" - once you have the cow you don't have a choice. They might be able to make changes to herd size for the next year, but why they are throwing that milk away...?
Your market-uber-alles theory doesn't cope with reality.
If they're routinely throwing away milk, then they have too many cows and downsizing would be the right response.
If they're not routinely throwing away milk, then its just natural wastage, which happens in almost all businesses handling fresh produce, so not a real problem.
So yes, my market theory does work for reality.
Though its weird to simultaneously argue there aren't enough staff for the sector and that there is so much oversupply in the sector that produce has to go down the drain instead. Which staff are generating the produce that is going down the drain, if there's supposedly a staff shortage? Your desire to make everything into a problem is self-defeating since you are simultaneously claiming the sector is too burnt and frozen at the same time.
One area for cost saving - councils. Everyone needs a council, but noone needs more than that. Some upfront cost, but future savings as duplication is eliminated. Unitary system for all.
As if this hasn't been done to death for the last 10 years. If you want to save costs, you need to reduce the number of statutory functions that Council's are responsible for. Instead government has a habit of adding to them, without funding them. There are a lot of myths about duplication and efficiency savings from mergers, but they aren't always born out by reality; what typically happens is that they are incredibly disruptive and expensive.
What the government could do to save money and reinvigorate democracy is to give Council's more power to set whatever level of council tax they so desire. This will ultimately drive actual efficiency, because no one wants to pay £5000 per year in Council tax.
There is also an insane situation where the property industry has been unaminously lobbying government to increase planning fees for several years, and for this money to be 'ring fenced' for the planning service. Instead fees remain low, service is poor, delays are never ending, and the service is cross subsidised by Council tax.
Delays are never ending because anyone sane would leave a planning authority and go to the private sector - wages really haven't gone up for decades.
Except that is inconsistent with your claim before that the local Council had dodgily "put on the backburner" planning consent for a highly-demanded retail park, because they were worried it would be popular. Which is the worst possible reason to refuse consent.
"Don't build this, people might actually want it" - if that's why its getting "put on the backburner" then its a good thing that the people abusing their authority to stifle development are losing their ability to do so. And it doesn't mean that wages are the issue, it means that people having the ability to stand in the way of others doing some development is the problem.
The local council hadn't the developers had because they knew it was unlikely to be approved - no point wasting money.
But a change in how development was approved meant that it could be approved. That is a good thing then, thank goodness the change happened. 👍
We need to find out what other roadblocks are in the way of development being able to occur, and remove them too.
Clearly you haven't been to the wasteland that is Bishop Auckland's town centre nowadays.
The thing is retail is very much a zero sum game, money spent in St Helen's is money that was once spent in Bishop Auckland town centre.
In the same way that the forthcoming Scotch Corner Designer village (Richmondshire council) will be the death nail to Darlington town centre and Northallerton (Hambleton district council).
Oh boo frigging hoo.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
What's being done to make Bishop Auckland more attractive
But in both cases it's fighting a losing battle because the out of town shopping centre has destroyed the basis of the local economy...
You can see the same thing in Sheffield (Meadowhall has gutted Sheffield town centre) and in Stockton / Boro where Teesside park first destroyed Stockton town centre and then over the last 3 years taken Boro with it.
It's not Meadowhall vs Sheffield city centre any more though, it's Meadowhall vs Amazon.
Well it's everywhere vs Amazon because Amazon has taken 10-20% of all retail expenditure. Which means that 80% of what was being spent in 2000 is now split between 2 different centres with 20% lost to online,
In an ideal world, the Conservatives would spend a bit of time thinking what they want to happen next. But they can't do that, becuase of the urgency of finally burying Dead Dog.
So, Sunak vs Truss/Mordaunt and not-Rishi wins? Is that the PB consensus? And Gove's support for Badenoch - he can't expect her to win so which of the credible candidates is it designed to help?
The last four look pretty clear- Mordaunt, Sunak, Truss, A Rightwinger. The "fun" bit is working out how those four become three, then two, and then who the party in the country go for.
A story which illustrates so many lies and misunderstandings about what is happening out there: 1kg of butter? Who in their right mind buys that for domestic use? So the basic proposition is silly. Whats more, other brands are available who do basically the same product for less cost per kilo.
But - and its a big but - read and understand the comments and analysis about the dairy industry. There have been some *whopping* price rises. So the industry can afford to pay people more. And yet cannot find staff. Because quite simply British workers do not want to work in agriculture / food. At any price. We continue to have a staff shortage. And the "point-based migration" system fails to do its job and bring people in.
You mean its not bringing in people who are being offered competitive salaries?
Or its not bringing in people at basically minimum wage?
The migration system is designed, rightly, now to bring people in if their starting salary is about £30k+ . . . we shouldn't be looking to bring people in who are earning less than that, because if they're on less than that they're a net drain not a positive.
So which jobs aren't being filled for a long time that are meeting that salary? Or do you mean that offering 10% over National Minimum Wage isn't enough?
I mean that in the real world there is no solution other than imported labour. There is no labour pool available in many rural areas to do the work. So you're looking at farmers having to offer incentives to get people to relocate from Widnes to Wisbech to work in their dairy. Which they can't and the people won't. And even if they did the price of milk would then be so crazy that we would switch to cheaper imports.
What you believe is great theory. Meanwhile in the real world...
There are people who live in Wisbech already. Why aren't they doing the work?
If you pay a competitive enough salary, then people will move to take the job. Or you can invest in somewhere there are people.
"Bringing in people" is just getting people to move.
There is no reason those people need to move from another country, rather than somewhere in this one, other than that National Minimum Wage will attract people to move from Eastern Europe to Wisbech but won't get people to move from Widnes to Wisbech. A decent salary and good terms and conditions on the other hand will do.
If anyone is struggling to hire because they aren't paying a good salary, that's their problem, not ours. They either need to pay a good salary, or invest in automation, or their business isn't viable.
People won't move from Widnes to Wisbech when there's nowhere to live in Wisbech, apart from a bed in a dorm room. So many of our economic and social issues come back to the housing crisis.
Well yes, but @RochdalePioneers is arguing people should move from Warsaw to Wisbech, but thinks its impossible to move from Widnes to Wisbech.
If you need people to move for a job, that job needs to pay a competitive enough salary to entice people to move. The problem is that some businesses thought they could entice people to move for National Minimum Wage, where they'd have 7 workers living in a three bedroom house.
That's no longer an option, but it never was healthy either.
Either pay a decent salary, or invest in automation, or your business isn't viable.
When did you last work in a dairy? Farmers receive very little thanks to the supermarkets forcing prices down. My brother-in-law went through a stage where he was pouring the milk down the drain because keeping it cold for collection and cleaning the diary to the regulated standards was costing more than he was paid from the processors. He was not the only farmer pouring milk away either.
What's that got to do with anything I said?
If people are quite literally pouring their product down the drain, then we presumably have an oversupply of the product, which is why the supermarkets are able to keep prices down.
If that's the case, then it sounds like we have too many people working in the dairy sector, as opposed to not enough.
That isn't the case. They are pouring it away because the storage / shipping cost is less than the revenue they will get from not pouring it away. Meanwhile we import cheap subsidised dairy.
If they're pouring it away, they shouldn't be generating it in the first place. Why the f**k are they producing it only to pour it away? Zero sympathy.
And its funny, all my milk I get from my supermarket tends to normally have a union flag on it and says its made in this country.
They have to produce it so the cows don’t burst
I spoke to my cousin recently who works on his Dad's dairy farm. Apparently herd numbers are down on farms in Ireland that overstock and rely on feed to support more cows then they have land to grow grass on. Some farms are buying less fertiliser, because it's so expensive, so expecting to grow less grass, and cutting their cow numbers as a result.
At the same time that input prices for feed, fertiliser and diesel are going up, the price paid for a cow carcass is also up, so it makes financial sense to cull the herd and produce less milk.
Dairy farms in Britain seem to rely a lot more on buying feed, rather than growing grass, so they will have more severe problems at the moment.
Precisely.
Some people are acting as if herd numbers are a fixed law of nature, they're not. If its not economic to produce milk, then fewer cows doing so is an option. If it is profitable, then more is an option.
Its bizarre and weird to simultaneously moan that there aren't enough staff to fill the sector, and also simultaneously complain the sector isn't getting enough money because its producing so much that product is literally being poured down the drain.
You asked "why are they producing so much product" - once you have the cow you don't have a choice. They might be able to make changes to herd size for the next year, but why they are throwing that milk away...?
Your market-uber-alles theory doesn't cope with reality.
That's not what is happening in Ireland. Dairy farmers have reduced the size of their herds this year. It's quite easy to quickly shrink the size of your herd - but it is harder to grow it again later.
Anyone holding on to cows and dumping milk is doing so in the hope that the market will rapidly improve and that they will want all their herd next year, or it might be that they can't cover their overheads with a smaller herd anyway, so if they shrink their herd they may as well close the farm. They're not locked in to having a certain number of cows for the whole year.
Edit: My guess is that if the Ukraine War ends and prices of fertiliser and feed return to previous levels, then the price of young dairy cows in Ireland will get to be very high, as farmers look to rebuild their herd numbers.
One area for cost saving - councils. Everyone needs a council, but noone needs more than that. Some upfront cost, but future savings as duplication is eliminated. Unitary system for all.
As if this hasn't been done to death for the last 10 years. If you want to save costs, you need to reduce the number of statutory functions that Council's are responsible for. Instead government has a habit of adding to them, without funding them. There are a lot of myths about duplication and efficiency savings from mergers, but they aren't always born out by reality; what typically happens is that they are incredibly disruptive and expensive.
What the government could do to save money and reinvigorate democracy is to give Council's more power to set whatever level of council tax they so desire. This will ultimately drive actual efficiency, because no one wants to pay £5000 per year in Council tax.
There is also an insane situation where the property industry has been unaminously lobbying government to increase planning fees for several years, and for this money to be 'ring fenced' for the planning service. Instead fees remain low, service is poor, delays are never ending, and the service is cross subsidised by Council tax.
Delays are never ending because anyone sane would leave a planning authority and go to the private sector - wages really haven't gone up for decades.
Except that is inconsistent with your claim before that the local Council had dodgily "put on the backburner" planning consent for a highly-demanded retail park, because they were worried it would be popular. Which is the worst possible reason to refuse consent.
"Don't build this, people might actually want it" - if that's why its getting "put on the backburner" then its a good thing that the people abusing their authority to stifle development are losing their ability to do so. And it doesn't mean that wages are the issue, it means that people having the ability to stand in the way of others doing some development is the problem.
The local council hadn't the developers had because they knew it was unlikely to be approved - no point wasting money.
But a change in how development was approved meant that it could be approved. That is a good thing then, thank goodness the change happened. 👍
We need to find out what other roadblocks are in the way of development being able to occur, and remove them too.
Clearly you haven't been to the wasteland that is Bishop Auckland's town centre nowadays.
The thing is retail is very much a zero sum game, money spent in St Helen's is money that was once spent in Bishop Auckland town centre.
In the same way that the forthcoming Scotch Corner Designer village (Richmondshire council) will be the death nail to Darlington town centre and Northallerton (Hambleton district council).
Oh boo frigging hoo.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
What's being done to make Bishop Auckland more attractive
But in both cases it's fighting a losing battle because the out of town shopping centre has destroyed the basis of the local economy...
You can see the same thing in Sheffield (Meadowhall has gutted Sheffield town centre) and in Stockton / Boro where Teesside park first destroyed Stockton town centre and then over the last 3 years taken Boro with it.
To be fair, I grew up locally to there (born in Bishop Auckland hospital) and come back to visit every few months. I never would have gone into Bishop Auckland town centre before but the retail park means I actually spend money around there rather than heading straight to Darlington or Teesside Park.
I get your point though as the centre looks even more derelict now but not sure how to solve it.
One area for cost saving - councils. Everyone needs a council, but noone needs more than that. Some upfront cost, but future savings as duplication is eliminated. Unitary system for all.
As if this hasn't been done to death for the last 10 years. If you want to save costs, you need to reduce the number of statutory functions that Council's are responsible for. Instead government has a habit of adding to them, without funding them. There are a lot of myths about duplication and efficiency savings from mergers, but they aren't always born out by reality; what typically happens is that they are incredibly disruptive and expensive.
What the government could do to save money and reinvigorate democracy is to give Council's more power to set whatever level of council tax they so desire. This will ultimately drive actual efficiency, because no one wants to pay £5000 per year in Council tax.
There is also an insane situation where the property industry has been unaminously lobbying government to increase planning fees for several years, and for this money to be 'ring fenced' for the planning service. Instead fees remain low, service is poor, delays are never ending, and the service is cross subsidised by Council tax.
Delays are never ending because anyone sane would leave a planning authority and go to the private sector - wages really haven't gone up for decades.
Except that is inconsistent with your claim before that the local Council had dodgily "put on the backburner" planning consent for a highly-demanded retail park, because they were worried it would be popular. Which is the worst possible reason to refuse consent.
"Don't build this, people might actually want it" - if that's why its getting "put on the backburner" then its a good thing that the people abusing their authority to stifle development are losing their ability to do so. And it doesn't mean that wages are the issue, it means that people having the ability to stand in the way of others doing some development is the problem.
The local council hadn't the developers had because they knew it was unlikely to be approved - no point wasting money.
But a change in how development was approved meant that it could be approved. That is a good thing then, thank goodness the change happened. 👍
We need to find out what other roadblocks are in the way of development being able to occur, and remove them too.
Clearly you haven't been to the wasteland that is Bishop Auckland's town centre nowadays.
The thing is retail is very much a zero sum game, money spent in St Helen's is money that was once spent in Bishop Auckland town centre.
In the same way that the forthcoming Scotch Corner Designer village (Richmondshire council) will be the death nail to Darlington town centre and Northallerton (Hambleton district council).
Oh boo frigging hoo.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
One thing I've noticed from twitter about broad left US politics is the absolute hatred of cars. I think that's a big dividing line globally between right and left globally.
In April I visited an upscale, purpose built "European style town center" in the richer northern burbs of Jackson Mississippi
It was designed to "get people out of their cars" and walking from cafe to shop to office to art gallery. It was mainly Italianate, with hints of France and Britain
It kinda worked, there were people walking around and - unusually for the deep south - plenty of places for people to sit outside and eat, drink under parasols
Except, the entire thing was surrounded by vast parking lots so people could DRIVE to the European style town center, and THEN walk
I think the Labour policy on charitable status for private schools misses the point.
The objection seems to be that it isn't fair for the rich to buy their children an advantage in the cut throat competition for decent middle class jobs by paying for a better education, and government should stop subsidising that advantage.
But the problem isn't that the rich can buy themselves an advantage in meritocratic competition. The problem is that the ideology of meritocracy is a sham used to justify obscene inequality, and even those people at the bottom of the educational pile should be able to contribute to society and live a life of dignity.
The point of the policy seems to be so that the children of Labour supporters in the middle class who don't use private schools out of principle get a better chance to compete for the secure middle class lifestyle that their peers are buying for their children, and so they can salve their conscience at the inequality between their children and working class children.
Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of harming the private school system, I doubt this policy will do anything for the kids who really need help: the 15-20% of children who leave school functionally illiterate and/or innumerate.
How can I say that, if the money is (allegedly) going to be spent on the state school system? The answer is simple: fixing illiteracy and innumeracy is difficult, and it won't work if it is tacked-on to existing policies. It really needs to be front and centre of our education policy.
I don't like calling this 'underachievement': it is kids who are let down by their families, the state, and the education system.
Therefore the concentration of policy has to be on them; not on how the money is raised. It is also multidisciplinary: not just in helping the kids in school, but outside school as well.
But I fear too many people - especially the middle classes - really don't care about this scandal.
So, Mr Starmer: let us have education and social policies that piles money onto helping those kids, and not the kids who will do well anyway. But the money will go on the latter kids, because it is much, much simpler.
Indeed. The number of adults unable to move onwards and upwards in their careers because they simply cannot read fairly simple documents nor recognise which of two numbers is bigger is a huge drag on our productivity. Having been through the system I favour "graduating High School". With kids failing years and being held back till they reach the requisite level. A High School diploma is basically turned up, can read, can write. It's pretty goddamn basic. But it focuses minds on those at the lower ends. The system at the moment focuses on the ones who can make 5 GCSE's.
Forget GCSEs and fix primary schools which is where reading and numeracy begin, or begin to go wrong.
Still too late - the current issues come from the closure of SureStart which Osborne destroyed for political reasons,
One area for cost saving - councils. Everyone needs a council, but noone needs more than that. Some upfront cost, but future savings as duplication is eliminated. Unitary system for all.
As if this hasn't been done to death for the last 10 years. If you want to save costs, you need to reduce the number of statutory functions that Council's are responsible for. Instead government has a habit of adding to them, without funding them. There are a lot of myths about duplication and efficiency savings from mergers, but they aren't always born out by reality; what typically happens is that they are incredibly disruptive and expensive.
What the government could do to save money and reinvigorate democracy is to give Council's more power to set whatever level of council tax they so desire. This will ultimately drive actual efficiency, because no one wants to pay £5000 per year in Council tax.
There is also an insane situation where the property industry has been unaminously lobbying government to increase planning fees for several years, and for this money to be 'ring fenced' for the planning service. Instead fees remain low, service is poor, delays are never ending, and the service is cross subsidised by Council tax.
Delays are never ending because anyone sane would leave a planning authority and go to the private sector - wages really haven't gone up for decades.
Except that is inconsistent with your claim before that the local Council had dodgily "put on the backburner" planning consent for a highly-demanded retail park, because they were worried it would be popular. Which is the worst possible reason to refuse consent.
"Don't build this, people might actually want it" - if that's why its getting "put on the backburner" then its a good thing that the people abusing their authority to stifle development are losing their ability to do so. And it doesn't mean that wages are the issue, it means that people having the ability to stand in the way of others doing some development is the problem.
The local council hadn't the developers had because they knew it was unlikely to be approved - no point wasting money.
But a change in how development was approved meant that it could be approved. That is a good thing then, thank goodness the change happened. 👍
We need to find out what other roadblocks are in the way of development being able to occur, and remove them too.
Clearly you haven't been to the wasteland that is Bishop Auckland's town centre nowadays.
The thing is retail is very much a zero sum game, money spent in St Helen's is money that was once spent in Bishop Auckland town centre.
In the same way that the forthcoming Scotch Corner Designer village (Richmondshire council) will be the death nail to Darlington town centre and Northallerton (Hambleton district council).
Oh boo frigging hoo.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
What's being done to make Bishop Auckland more attractive
But in both cases it's fighting a losing battle because the out of town shopping centre has destroyed the basis of the local economy...
You can see the same thing in Sheffield (Meadowhall has gutted Sheffield town centre) and in Stockton / Boro where Teesside park first destroyed Stockton town centre and then over the last 3 years taken Boro with it.
It's not the out of town shopping centre that has "destroyed the basis of the local economy" but that the local residents have preferred to go there.
Yep but only because we've doubled the amount of space given over to retail to approximately twice that which was actually required.
Which means you have a lovely shopping area for those who can drive and have a car leaving once again nothing for those who use public transport..
Try living in Oxford...
Our lovely county and city councils are pursuing a very aggressive anti car set of policies.
Whilst at the same time they are colluding with the bus companies to remove/reduce bus routes including one of the Park and Ride services.
They are also closing car parks and removing hundreds on-street parking spaces. And the hourly rate for the remaining on-street spaces has recently gone up to £6 per hour.
Not forgetting the new Zero Emissions Zone which they are planning on extending to most of the city centre
All of this is creating a toxic atmosphere for traders, service providers and residents.
You cannot simultaneously make it harder for car users and public transport users at the same time. It is all stick and no carrot.
Bus companies are complaining that recent changes are causing new delays. Taxi drivers are refusing to serve certain parts of the city.
Some post boxes were sealed because Royal Mail could no longer access them in a timely fashion.
It is creating so much anger and division.
And the man to blame.... Grant Shapps. If his department had not offered free money for so-called Active Travel schemes, most of these projects would never have happened.
So, Sunak vs Truss/Mordaunt and not-Rishi wins? Is that the PB consensus? And Gove's support for Badenoch - he can't expect her to win so which of the credible candidates is it designed to help?
Yes, that's my feeling
If a fourth contender is going to break ahead of the pack, they need to do it soon
As for who wins the members between Sunak and Truss/Mordaunt, probably Sunak will lose BUT there will be more dirt dished. Do the Sunakites have anything on Liz or Penny?
Or is there more on Rishi?
The Times was hinting, deliciously, that there are revelations about BDSM sex and I've been trying to work out which candidate is the most likely kinkster. I wonder if it is Mordaunt, but that might just be because she's the only one that gives me teh tinglez
So, Sunak vs Truss/Mordaunt and not-Rishi wins? Is that the PB consensus? And Gove's support for Badenoch - he can't expect her to win so which of the credible candidates is it designed to help?
Yes, that's my expectation. And I expect it to be Truss.
I'm not certain of this, obviously: just think this the most likely outcome out of a wide variety of possible outcomes. I reckon Truss is good value at anything better than 3-1.
As to what Gove means by backing Badenoch - maybe it means exactly what it looks like? But I'd say Badenoch fishes in the same pool as Truss, so it helps Mordaunt.
These are my feelings too.
I'd add that Mordaunt doesn't seem especially transfer friendly to me. Whan Badenoch, Braverman, Javid, Zahawi, Patel (if standing) get knocked out, Truss surely gets the lion's share of their support.
Similarly, the others on being knocked out are more likely to go for Sunak, IMO.
Whose voters might go to Penny? Shapps?
I think Penny's downfall will prove to be Self ID. It isn't popular amongst Tory members or, AFAICS, MPs.
One area for cost saving - councils. Everyone needs a council, but noone needs more than that. Some upfront cost, but future savings as duplication is eliminated. Unitary system for all.
As if this hasn't been done to death for the last 10 years. If you want to save costs, you need to reduce the number of statutory functions that Council's are responsible for. Instead government has a habit of adding to them, without funding them. There are a lot of myths about duplication and efficiency savings from mergers, but they aren't always born out by reality; what typically happens is that they are incredibly disruptive and expensive.
What the government could do to save money and reinvigorate democracy is to give Council's more power to set whatever level of council tax they so desire. This will ultimately drive actual efficiency, because no one wants to pay £5000 per year in Council tax.
There is also an insane situation where the property industry has been unaminously lobbying government to increase planning fees for several years, and for this money to be 'ring fenced' for the planning service. Instead fees remain low, service is poor, delays are never ending, and the service is cross subsidised by Council tax.
Delays are never ending because anyone sane would leave a planning authority and go to the private sector - wages really haven't gone up for decades.
Except that is inconsistent with your claim before that the local Council had dodgily "put on the backburner" planning consent for a highly-demanded retail park, because they were worried it would be popular. Which is the worst possible reason to refuse consent.
"Don't build this, people might actually want it" - if that's why its getting "put on the backburner" then its a good thing that the people abusing their authority to stifle development are losing their ability to do so. And it doesn't mean that wages are the issue, it means that people having the ability to stand in the way of others doing some development is the problem.
The local council hadn't the developers had because they knew it was unlikely to be approved - no point wasting money.
But a change in how development was approved meant that it could be approved. That is a good thing then, thank goodness the change happened. 👍
We need to find out what other roadblocks are in the way of development being able to occur, and remove them too.
Clearly you haven't been to the wasteland that is Bishop Auckland's town centre nowadays.
The thing is retail is very much a zero sum game, money spent in St Helen's is money that was once spent in Bishop Auckland town centre.
In the same way that the forthcoming Scotch Corner Designer village (Richmondshire council) will be the death nail to Darlington town centre and Northallerton (Hambleton district council).
Oh boo frigging hoo.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
What's being done to make Bishop Auckland more attractive
But in both cases it's fighting a losing battle because the out of town shopping centre has destroyed the basis of the local economy...
You can see the same thing in Sheffield (Meadowhall has gutted Sheffield town centre) and in Stockton / Boro where Teesside park first destroyed Stockton town centre and then over the last 3 years taken Boro with it.
It's not the out of town shopping centre that has "destroyed the basis of the local economy" but that the local residents have preferred to go there.
Yep but only because we've doubled the amount of space given over to retail to approximately twice that which was actually required.
Which means you have a lovely shopping area for those who can drive and have a car leaving once again nothing for those who use public transport..
Try living in Oxford...
Our lovely county and city councils are pursuing a very aggressive anti car set of policies.
Whilst at the same time they are colluding with the bus companies to remove/reduce bus routes including one of the Park and Ride services.
They are also closing car parks and removing hundreds on-street parking spaces. And the hourly rate for the remaining on-street spaces has recently gone up to £6 per hour.
Not forgetting the new Zero Emissions Zone which they are planning on extending to most of the city centre
All of this is creating a toxic atmosphere for traders, service providers and residents.
You cannot simultaneously make it harder for car users and public transport users at the same time. It is all stick and no carrot.
Bus companies are complaining that recent changes are causing new delays. Taxi drivers are refusing to serve certain parts of the city.
Some post boxes were sealed because Royal Mail could no longer access them in a timely fashion.
It is creating so much anger and division.
And the man to blame.... Grant Shapps. If his department had not offered free money for so-called Active Travel schemes, most of these projects would never have happened.
All of which said, I find going back to the High Street vs what it was in my day is like stepping into a 19th Century aquatint. It's lovely.
One area for cost saving - councils. Everyone needs a council, but noone needs more than that. Some upfront cost, but future savings as duplication is eliminated. Unitary system for all.
As if this hasn't been done to death for the last 10 years. If you want to save costs, you need to reduce the number of statutory functions that Council's are responsible for. Instead government has a habit of adding to them, without funding them. There are a lot of myths about duplication and efficiency savings from mergers, but they aren't always born out by reality; what typically happens is that they are incredibly disruptive and expensive.
What the government could do to save money and reinvigorate democracy is to give Council's more power to set whatever level of council tax they so desire. This will ultimately drive actual efficiency, because no one wants to pay £5000 per year in Council tax.
There is also an insane situation where the property industry has been unaminously lobbying government to increase planning fees for several years, and for this money to be 'ring fenced' for the planning service. Instead fees remain low, service is poor, delays are never ending, and the service is cross subsidised by Council tax.
Delays are never ending because anyone sane would leave a planning authority and go to the private sector - wages really haven't gone up for decades.
Except that is inconsistent with your claim before that the local Council had dodgily "put on the backburner" planning consent for a highly-demanded retail park, because they were worried it would be popular. Which is the worst possible reason to refuse consent.
"Don't build this, people might actually want it" - if that's why its getting "put on the backburner" then its a good thing that the people abusing their authority to stifle development are losing their ability to do so. And it doesn't mean that wages are the issue, it means that people having the ability to stand in the way of others doing some development is the problem.
The local council hadn't the developers had because they knew it was unlikely to be approved - no point wasting money.
But a change in how development was approved meant that it could be approved. That is a good thing then, thank goodness the change happened. 👍
We need to find out what other roadblocks are in the way of development being able to occur, and remove them too.
Clearly you haven't been to the wasteland that is Bishop Auckland's town centre nowadays.
The thing is retail is very much a zero sum game, money spent in St Helen's is money that was once spent in Bishop Auckland town centre.
In the same way that the forthcoming Scotch Corner Designer village (Richmondshire council) will be the death nail to Darlington town centre and Northallerton (Hambleton district council).
Oh boo frigging hoo.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
What's being done to make Bishop Auckland more attractive
But in both cases it's fighting a losing battle because the out of town shopping centre has destroyed the basis of the local economy...
You can see the same thing in Sheffield (Meadowhall has gutted Sheffield town centre) and in Stockton / Boro where Teesside park first destroyed Stockton town centre and then over the last 3 years taken Boro with it.
It's not the out of town shopping centre that has "destroyed the basis of the local economy" but that the local residents have preferred to go there.
Yep but only because we've doubled the amount of space given over to retail to approximately twice that which was actually required.
Which means you have a lovely shopping area for those who can drive and have a car leaving once again nothing for those who use public transport..
One of my pet hates is the lack of mix. Huge retail or business parks without a residential property within walking distance. Sprawling new build estates without any commercial space at all. This is a relatively recent development.
On this side of town we don't have that issue - the new Garden Village has a Co-op, Aldi (regional flagship as the warehouse is 1/2 mile away) and a M&S food. Nearby we are getting a Lidl and probably a Tesco if Tesco can fiddle the figures to meet the Retail impact assessment criteria.
Elsewhere, however where the development wasn't lead by the local developer none of those things are being done nor thought about.
I think the Labour policy on charitable status for private schools misses the point.
The objection seems to be that it isn't fair for the rich to buy their children an advantage in the cut throat competition for decent middle class jobs by paying for a better education, and government should stop subsidising that advantage.
But the problem isn't that the rich can buy themselves an advantage in meritocratic competition. The problem is that the ideology of meritocracy is a sham used to justify obscene inequality, and even those people at the bottom of the educational pile should be able to contribute to society and live a life of dignity.
The point of the policy seems to be so that the children of Labour supporters in the middle class who don't use private schools out of principle get a better chance to compete for the secure middle class lifestyle that their peers are buying for their children, and so they can salve their conscience at the inequality between their children and working class children.
Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of harming the private school system, I doubt this policy will do anything for the kids who really need help: the 15-20% of children who leave school functionally illiterate and/or innumerate.
How can I say that, if the money is (allegedly) going to be spent on the state school system? The answer is simple: fixing illiteracy and innumeracy is difficult, and it won't work if it is tacked-on to existing policies. It really needs to be front and centre of our education policy.
I don't like calling this 'underachievement': it is kids who are let down by their families, the state, and the education system.
Therefore the concentration of policy has to be on them; not on how the money is raised. It is also multidisciplinary: not just in helping the kids in school, but outside school as well.
But I fear too many people - especially the middle classes - really don't care about this scandal.
So, Mr Starmer: let us have education and social policies that piles money onto helping those kids, and not the kids who will do well anyway. But the money will go on the latter kids, because it is much, much simpler.
Indeed. The number of adults unable to move onwards and upwards in their careers because they simply cannot read fairly simple documents nor recognise which of two numbers is bigger is a huge drag on our productivity. Having been through the system I favour "graduating High School". With kids failing years and being held back till they reach the requisite level. A High School diploma is basically turned up, can read, can write. It's pretty goddamn basic. But it focuses minds on those at the lower ends. The system at the moment focuses on the ones who can make 5 GCSE's.
Forget GCSEs and fix primary schools which is where reading and numeracy begin, or begin to go wrong.
This is where holding kids back a year comes in. A friend at High School was a year older. Why? Because he'd failed grade one and had to repeat. As a result it was discovered he was massively dyslexic. He got help ASAP.
One area for cost saving - councils. Everyone needs a council, but noone needs more than that. Some upfront cost, but future savings as duplication is eliminated. Unitary system for all.
As if this hasn't been done to death for the last 10 years. If you want to save costs, you need to reduce the number of statutory functions that Council's are responsible for. Instead government has a habit of adding to them, without funding them. There are a lot of myths about duplication and efficiency savings from mergers, but they aren't always born out by reality; what typically happens is that they are incredibly disruptive and expensive.
What the government could do to save money and reinvigorate democracy is to give Council's more power to set whatever level of council tax they so desire. This will ultimately drive actual efficiency, because no one wants to pay £5000 per year in Council tax.
There is also an insane situation where the property industry has been unaminously lobbying government to increase planning fees for several years, and for this money to be 'ring fenced' for the planning service. Instead fees remain low, service is poor, delays are never ending, and the service is cross subsidised by Council tax.
Delays are never ending because anyone sane would leave a planning authority and go to the private sector - wages really haven't gone up for decades.
Except that is inconsistent with your claim before that the local Council had dodgily "put on the backburner" planning consent for a highly-demanded retail park, because they were worried it would be popular. Which is the worst possible reason to refuse consent.
"Don't build this, people might actually want it" - if that's why its getting "put on the backburner" then its a good thing that the people abusing their authority to stifle development are losing their ability to do so. And it doesn't mean that wages are the issue, it means that people having the ability to stand in the way of others doing some development is the problem.
The local council hadn't the developers had because they knew it was unlikely to be approved - no point wasting money.
But a change in how development was approved meant that it could be approved. That is a good thing then, thank goodness the change happened. 👍
We need to find out what other roadblocks are in the way of development being able to occur, and remove them too.
Clearly you haven't been to the wasteland that is Bishop Auckland's town centre nowadays.
The thing is retail is very much a zero sum game, money spent in St Helen's is money that was once spent in Bishop Auckland town centre.
In the same way that the forthcoming Scotch Corner Designer village (Richmondshire council) will be the death nail to Darlington town centre and Northallerton (Hambleton district council).
Oh boo frigging hoo.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
What's being done to make Bishop Auckland more attractive
But in both cases it's fighting a losing battle because the out of town shopping centre has destroyed the basis of the local economy...
You can see the same thing in Sheffield (Meadowhall has gutted Sheffield town centre) and in Stockton / Boro where Teesside park first destroyed Stockton town centre and then over the last 3 years taken Boro with it.
It's not the out of town shopping centre that has "destroyed the basis of the local economy" but that the local residents have preferred to go there.
Yep but only because we've doubled the amount of space given over to retail to approximately twice that which was actually required.
Which means you have a lovely shopping area for those who can drive and have a car leaving once again nothing for those who use public transport..
Try living in Oxford...
Our lovely county and city councils are pursuing a very aggressive anti car set of policies.
Whilst at the same time they are colluding with the bus companies to remove/reduce bus routes including one of the Park and Ride services.
They are also closing car parks and removing hundreds on-street parking spaces. And the hourly rate for the remaining on-street spaces has recently gone up to £6 per hour.
Not forgetting the new Zero Emissions Zone which they are planning on extending to most of the city centre
All of this is creating a toxic atmosphere for traders, service providers and residents.
You cannot simultaneously make it harder for car users and public transport users at the same time. It is all stick and no carrot.
Bus companies are complaining that recent changes are causing new delays. Taxi drivers are refusing to serve certain parts of the city.
Some post boxes were sealed because Royal Mail could no longer access them in a timely fashion.
It is creating so much anger and division.
And the man to blame.... Grant Shapps. If his department had not offered free money for so-called Active Travel schemes, most of these projects would never have happened.
All of which said, I find going back to the High Street vs what it was in my day is like stepping into a 19th Century aquatint. It's lovely.
High Street is one of the top 3 polluted streets in the city. It is beautiful but horrendous in terms of air quality.
One area for cost saving - councils. Everyone needs a council, but noone needs more than that. Some upfront cost, but future savings as duplication is eliminated. Unitary system for all.
As if this hasn't been done to death for the last 10 years. If you want to save costs, you need to reduce the number of statutory functions that Council's are responsible for. Instead government has a habit of adding to them, without funding them. There are a lot of myths about duplication and efficiency savings from mergers, but they aren't always born out by reality; what typically happens is that they are incredibly disruptive and expensive.
What the government could do to save money and reinvigorate democracy is to give Council's more power to set whatever level of council tax they so desire. This will ultimately drive actual efficiency, because no one wants to pay £5000 per year in Council tax.
There is also an insane situation where the property industry has been unaminously lobbying government to increase planning fees for several years, and for this money to be 'ring fenced' for the planning service. Instead fees remain low, service is poor, delays are never ending, and the service is cross subsidised by Council tax.
Delays are never ending because anyone sane would leave a planning authority and go to the private sector - wages really haven't gone up for decades.
Except that is inconsistent with your claim before that the local Council had dodgily "put on the backburner" planning consent for a highly-demanded retail park, because they were worried it would be popular. Which is the worst possible reason to refuse consent.
"Don't build this, people might actually want it" - if that's why its getting "put on the backburner" then its a good thing that the people abusing their authority to stifle development are losing their ability to do so. And it doesn't mean that wages are the issue, it means that people having the ability to stand in the way of others doing some development is the problem.
The local council hadn't the developers had because they knew it was unlikely to be approved - no point wasting money.
But a change in how development was approved meant that it could be approved. That is a good thing then, thank goodness the change happened. 👍
We need to find out what other roadblocks are in the way of development being able to occur, and remove them too.
Clearly you haven't been to the wasteland that is Bishop Auckland's town centre nowadays.
The thing is retail is very much a zero sum game, money spent in St Helen's is money that was once spent in Bishop Auckland town centre.
In the same way that the forthcoming Scotch Corner Designer village (Richmondshire council) will be the death nail to Darlington town centre and Northallerton (Hambleton district council).
Oh boo frigging hoo.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
What's being done to make Bishop Auckland more attractive
But in both cases it's fighting a losing battle because the out of town shopping centre has destroyed the basis of the local economy...
You can see the same thing in Sheffield (Meadowhall has gutted Sheffield town centre) and in Stockton / Boro where Teesside park first destroyed Stockton town centre and then over the last 3 years taken Boro with it.
To be fair, I grew up locally to there (born in Bishop Auckland hospital) and come back to visit every few months. I never would have gone into Bishop Auckland town centre before but the retail park means I actually spend money around there rather than heading straight to Darlington or Teesside Park.
I get your point though as the centre looks even more derelict now but not sure how to solve it.
Is the easy solution to charge double business rates on empty commercial property, and allow for more straightforward change-of-use permission?
One area for cost saving - councils. Everyone needs a council, but noone needs more than that. Some upfront cost, but future savings as duplication is eliminated. Unitary system for all.
As if this hasn't been done to death for the last 10 years. If you want to save costs, you need to reduce the number of statutory functions that Council's are responsible for. Instead government has a habit of adding to them, without funding them. There are a lot of myths about duplication and efficiency savings from mergers, but they aren't always born out by reality; what typically happens is that they are incredibly disruptive and expensive.
What the government could do to save money and reinvigorate democracy is to give Council's more power to set whatever level of council tax they so desire. This will ultimately drive actual efficiency, because no one wants to pay £5000 per year in Council tax.
There is also an insane situation where the property industry has been unaminously lobbying government to increase planning fees for several years, and for this money to be 'ring fenced' for the planning service. Instead fees remain low, service is poor, delays are never ending, and the service is cross subsidised by Council tax.
Delays are never ending because anyone sane would leave a planning authority and go to the private sector - wages really haven't gone up for decades.
Except that is inconsistent with your claim before that the local Council had dodgily "put on the backburner" planning consent for a highly-demanded retail park, because they were worried it would be popular. Which is the worst possible reason to refuse consent.
"Don't build this, people might actually want it" - if that's why its getting "put on the backburner" then its a good thing that the people abusing their authority to stifle development are losing their ability to do so. And it doesn't mean that wages are the issue, it means that people having the ability to stand in the way of others doing some development is the problem.
The local council hadn't the developers had because they knew it was unlikely to be approved - no point wasting money.
But a change in how development was approved meant that it could be approved. That is a good thing then, thank goodness the change happened. 👍
We need to find out what other roadblocks are in the way of development being able to occur, and remove them too.
Clearly you haven't been to the wasteland that is Bishop Auckland's town centre nowadays.
The thing is retail is very much a zero sum game, money spent in St Helen's is money that was once spent in Bishop Auckland town centre.
In the same way that the forthcoming Scotch Corner Designer village (Richmondshire council) will be the death nail to Darlington town centre and Northallerton (Hambleton district council).
Oh boo frigging hoo.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
What's being done to make Bishop Auckland more attractive
But in both cases it's fighting a losing battle because the out of town shopping centre has destroyed the basis of the local economy...
You can see the same thing in Sheffield (Meadowhall has gutted Sheffield town centre) and in Stockton / Boro where Teesside park first destroyed Stockton town centre and then over the last 3 years taken Boro with it.
It's not the out of town shopping centre that has "destroyed the basis of the local economy" but that the local residents have preferred to go there.
Yep but only because we've doubled the amount of space given over to retail to approximately twice that which was actually required.
Which means you have a lovely shopping area for those who can drive and have a car leaving once again nothing for those who use public transport..
Try living in Oxford...
Our lovely county and city councils are pursuing a very aggressive anti car set of policies.
Whilst at the same time they are colluding with the bus companies to remove/reduce bus routes including one of the Park and Ride services.
They are also closing car parks and removing hundreds on-street parking spaces. And the hourly rate for the remaining on-street spaces has recently gone up to £6 per hour.
Not forgetting the new Zero Emissions Zone which they are planning on extending to most of the city centre
All of this is creating a toxic atmosphere for traders, service providers and residents.
You cannot simultaneously make it harder for car users and public transport users at the same time. It is all stick and no carrot.
Bus companies are complaining that recent changes are causing new delays. Taxi drivers are refusing to serve certain parts of the city.
Some post boxes were sealed because Royal Mail could no longer access them in a timely fashion.
It is creating so much anger and division.
And the man to blame.... Grant Shapps. If his department had not offered free money for so-called Active Travel schemes, most of these projects would never have happened.
IMO it's not Grant Shapps to blame, it's that Oxfordshire County Council have some really weird policies that are, as you say, all stick and no carrot.
Combine the carrot of proper, safe cycle tracks with the stick of one LTN at a time, and you'd get to the same place with much less rancour.
But OCC have chosen not to deliver proper cycle tracks, they're just painting lines on roads instead. They're going for a big bang on LTNs. And they're implementing the Park & Ride fare reductions too late. It's being implemented really haphazardly and, even as someone who supports the broad thrust of it, I find it really frustrating.
One area for cost saving - councils. Everyone needs a council, but noone needs more than that. Some upfront cost, but future savings as duplication is eliminated. Unitary system for all.
As if this hasn't been done to death for the last 10 years. If you want to save costs, you need to reduce the number of statutory functions that Council's are responsible for. Instead government has a habit of adding to them, without funding them. There are a lot of myths about duplication and efficiency savings from mergers, but they aren't always born out by reality; what typically happens is that they are incredibly disruptive and expensive.
What the government could do to save money and reinvigorate democracy is to give Council's more power to set whatever level of council tax they so desire. This will ultimately drive actual efficiency, because no one wants to pay £5000 per year in Council tax.
There is also an insane situation where the property industry has been unaminously lobbying government to increase planning fees for several years, and for this money to be 'ring fenced' for the planning service. Instead fees remain low, service is poor, delays are never ending, and the service is cross subsidised by Council tax.
Delays are never ending because anyone sane would leave a planning authority and go to the private sector - wages really haven't gone up for decades.
Except that is inconsistent with your claim before that the local Council had dodgily "put on the backburner" planning consent for a highly-demanded retail park, because they were worried it would be popular. Which is the worst possible reason to refuse consent.
"Don't build this, people might actually want it" - if that's why its getting "put on the backburner" then its a good thing that the people abusing their authority to stifle development are losing their ability to do so. And it doesn't mean that wages are the issue, it means that people having the ability to stand in the way of others doing some development is the problem.
The local council hadn't the developers had because they knew it was unlikely to be approved - no point wasting money.
But a change in how development was approved meant that it could be approved. That is a good thing then, thank goodness the change happened. 👍
We need to find out what other roadblocks are in the way of development being able to occur, and remove them too.
Clearly you haven't been to the wasteland that is Bishop Auckland's town centre nowadays.
The thing is retail is very much a zero sum game, money spent in St Helen's is money that was once spent in Bishop Auckland town centre.
In the same way that the forthcoming Scotch Corner Designer village (Richmondshire council) will be the death nail to Darlington town centre and Northallerton (Hambleton district council).
Oh boo frigging hoo.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
One thing I've noticed from twitter about broad left US politics is the absolute hatred of cars. I think that's a big dividing line globally between right and left globally.
In April I visited an upscale, purpose built "European style town center" in the richer northern burbs of Jackson Mississippi
It was designed to "get people out of their cars" and walking from cafe to shop to office to art gallery. It was mainly Italianate, with hints of France and Britain
It kinda worked, there were people walking around and - unusually for the deep south - plenty of places for people to sit outside and eat, drink under parasols
Except, the entire thing was surrounded by vast parking lots so people could DRIVE to the European style town center, and THEN walk
There's no reason that can't be done in this country.
Liverpool One is a good example. Its helped revitalise the waterfront of Liverpool and there's many bustling shops and restaurants and entertainment all accessible and within walking distance. But there's also massive multistory, affordable, car parks. And the roads are [reasonably] accessible to them.
I can go shopping in Liverpool, in shops within walking distance of somewhere to park my car, and its busy and popular.
If a city can do that, there's no reason a town can't. Build multistory affordable car parks in your town centre and make traffic to those car parks flow, and people will choose to shop there. Make it all designed to be cyclist-friendly and treat drivers as contemptible devilspawn, then don't complain that you've got no customers.
He's trying to appeal to the Conservative Party of yore, a modern conservative cuts the taxes but also keeps spending the money. I'm sure that's what the rest of them will suggest.
I think the Labour policy on charitable status for private schools misses the point.
The objection seems to be that it isn't fair for the rich to buy their children an advantage in the cut throat competition for decent middle class jobs by paying for a better education, and government should stop subsidising that advantage.
But the problem isn't that the rich can buy themselves an advantage in meritocratic competition. The problem is that the ideology of meritocracy is a sham used to justify obscene inequality, and even those people at the bottom of the educational pile should be able to contribute to society and live a life of dignity.
The point of the policy seems to be so that the children of Labour supporters in the middle class who don't use private schools out of principle get a better chance to compete for the secure middle class lifestyle that their peers are buying for their children, and so they can salve their conscience at the inequality between their children and working class children.
Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of harming the private school system, I doubt this policy will do anything for the kids who really need help: the 15-20% of children who leave school functionally illiterate and/or innumerate.
How can I say that, if the money is (allegedly) going to be spent on the state school system? The answer is simple: fixing illiteracy and innumeracy is difficult, and it won't work if it is tacked-on to existing policies. It really needs to be front and centre of our education policy.
I don't like calling this 'underachievement': it is kids who are let down by their families, the state, and the education system.
Therefore the concentration of policy has to be on them; not on how the money is raised. It is also multidisciplinary: not just in helping the kids in school, but outside school as well.
But I fear too many people - especially the middle classes - really don't care about this scandal.
So, Mr Starmer: let us have education and social policies that piles money onto helping those kids, and not the kids who will do well anyway. But the money will go on the latter kids, because it is much, much simpler.
Indeed. The number of adults unable to move onwards and upwards in their careers because they simply cannot read fairly simple documents nor recognise which of two numbers is bigger is a huge drag on our productivity. Having been through the system I favour "graduating High School". With kids failing years and being held back till they reach the requisite level. A High School diploma is basically turned up, can read, can write. It's pretty goddamn basic. But it focuses minds on those at the lower ends. The system at the moment focuses on the ones who can make 5 GCSE's.
Forget GCSEs and fix primary schools which is where reading and numeracy begin, or begin to go wrong.
This is where holding kids back a year comes in. A friend at High School was a year older. Why? Because he'd failed grade one and had to repeat. As a result it was discovered he was massively dyslexic. He got help ASAP.
That might be an argument for screening for dyslexia rather than for holding people back.
I think the Labour policy on charitable status for private schools misses the point.
The objection seems to be that it isn't fair for the rich to buy their children an advantage in the cut throat competition for decent middle class jobs by paying for a better education, and government should stop subsidising that advantage.
But the problem isn't that the rich can buy themselves an advantage in meritocratic competition. The problem is that the ideology of meritocracy is a sham used to justify obscene inequality, and even those people at the bottom of the educational pile should be able to contribute to society and live a life of dignity.
The point of the policy seems to be so that the children of Labour supporters in the middle class who don't use private schools out of principle get a better chance to compete for the secure middle class lifestyle that their peers are buying for their children, and so they can salve their conscience at the inequality between their children and working class children.
Leaving aside the rights and wrongs of harming the private school system, I doubt this policy will do anything for the kids who really need help: the 15-20% of children who leave school functionally illiterate and/or innumerate.
How can I say that, if the money is (allegedly) going to be spent on the state school system? The answer is simple: fixing illiteracy and innumeracy is difficult, and it won't work if it is tacked-on to existing policies. It really needs to be front and centre of our education policy.
I don't like calling this 'underachievement': it is kids who are let down by their families, the state, and the education system.
Therefore the concentration of policy has to be on them; not on how the money is raised. It is also multidisciplinary: not just in helping the kids in school, but outside school as well.
But I fear too many people - especially the middle classes - really don't care about this scandal.
So, Mr Starmer: let us have education and social policies that piles money onto helping those kids, and not the kids who will do well anyway. But the money will go on the latter kids, because it is much, much simpler.
Indeed. The number of adults unable to move onwards and upwards in their careers because they simply cannot read fairly simple documents nor recognise which of two numbers is bigger is a huge drag on our productivity. Having been through the system I favour "graduating High School". With kids failing years and being held back till they reach the requisite level. A High School diploma is basically turned up, can read, can write. It's pretty goddamn basic. But it focuses minds on those at the lower ends. The system at the moment focuses on the ones who can make 5 GCSE's.
Forget GCSEs and fix primary schools which is where reading and numeracy begin, or begin to go wrong.
This is where holding kids back a year comes in. A friend at High School was a year older. Why? Because he'd failed grade one and had to repeat. As a result it was discovered he was massively dyslexic. He got help ASAP.
There is often no money in holding a child back - Eek twin A repeated 1 year in sixth form while the school got about zero for teaching her.
The ludicrous pledges being made by all the contenders show the folly of having this decision made by, what, 200,000 elderly Tories.
The person who wins will become PM. They should make at least a show of showing why they would be good at that. None of them see to have a clue, though some are marginally less bad than others.
One area for cost saving - councils. Everyone needs a council, but noone needs more than that. Some upfront cost, but future savings as duplication is eliminated. Unitary system for all.
As if this hasn't been done to death for the last 10 years. If you want to save costs, you need to reduce the number of statutory functions that Council's are responsible for. Instead government has a habit of adding to them, without funding them. There are a lot of myths about duplication and efficiency savings from mergers, but they aren't always born out by reality; what typically happens is that they are incredibly disruptive and expensive.
What the government could do to save money and reinvigorate democracy is to give Council's more power to set whatever level of council tax they so desire. This will ultimately drive actual efficiency, because no one wants to pay £5000 per year in Council tax.
There is also an insane situation where the property industry has been unaminously lobbying government to increase planning fees for several years, and for this money to be 'ring fenced' for the planning service. Instead fees remain low, service is poor, delays are never ending, and the service is cross subsidised by Council tax.
Delays are never ending because anyone sane would leave a planning authority and go to the private sector - wages really haven't gone up for decades.
Except that is inconsistent with your claim before that the local Council had dodgily "put on the backburner" planning consent for a highly-demanded retail park, because they were worried it would be popular. Which is the worst possible reason to refuse consent.
"Don't build this, people might actually want it" - if that's why its getting "put on the backburner" then its a good thing that the people abusing their authority to stifle development are losing their ability to do so. And it doesn't mean that wages are the issue, it means that people having the ability to stand in the way of others doing some development is the problem.
The local council hadn't the developers had because they knew it was unlikely to be approved - no point wasting money.
But a change in how development was approved meant that it could be approved. That is a good thing then, thank goodness the change happened. 👍
We need to find out what other roadblocks are in the way of development being able to occur, and remove them too.
Clearly you haven't been to the wasteland that is Bishop Auckland's town centre nowadays.
The thing is retail is very much a zero sum game, money spent in St Helen's is money that was once spent in Bishop Auckland town centre.
In the same way that the forthcoming Scotch Corner Designer village (Richmondshire council) will be the death nail to Darlington town centre and Northallerton (Hambleton district council).
Oh boo frigging hoo.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
What's being done to make Bishop Auckland more attractive
But in both cases it's fighting a losing battle because the out of town shopping centre has destroyed the basis of the local economy...
You can see the same thing in Sheffield (Meadowhall has gutted Sheffield town centre) and in Stockton / Boro where Teesside park first destroyed Stockton town centre and then over the last 3 years taken Boro with it.
It's not the out of town shopping centre that has "destroyed the basis of the local economy" but that the local residents have preferred to go there.
Yep but only because we've doubled the amount of space given over to retail to approximately twice that which was actually required.
Which means you have a lovely shopping area for those who can drive and have a car leaving once again nothing for those who use public transport..
Try living in Oxford...
Our lovely county and city councils are pursuing a very aggressive anti car set of policies.
Whilst at the same time they are colluding with the bus companies to remove/reduce bus routes including one of the Park and Ride services.
They are also closing car parks and removing hundreds on-street parking spaces. And the hourly rate for the remaining on-street spaces has recently gone up to £6 per hour.
Not forgetting the new Zero Emissions Zone which they are planning on extending to most of the city centre
All of this is creating a toxic atmosphere for traders, service providers and residents.
You cannot simultaneously make it harder for car users and public transport users at the same time. It is all stick and no carrot.
Bus companies are complaining that recent changes are causing new delays. Taxi drivers are refusing to serve certain parts of the city.
Some post boxes were sealed because Royal Mail could no longer access them in a timely fashion.
It is creating so much anger and division.
And the man to blame.... Grant Shapps. If his department had not offered free money for so-called Active Travel schemes, most of these projects would never have happened.
IMO it's not Grant Shapps to blame, it's that Oxfordshire County Council have some really weird policies that are, as you say, all stick and no carrot.
Combine the carrot of proper, safe cycle tracks with the stick of one LTN at a time, and you'd get to the same place with much less rancour.
But OCC have chosen not to deliver proper cycle tracks, they're just painting lines on roads instead. They're going for a big bang on LTNs. And they're implementing the Park & Ride fare reductions too late. It's being implemented really haphazardly and, even as someone who supports the broad thrust of it, I find it really frustrating.
Shapps approved the funding scheme that didn't allow time for research and proper consultations. So he has to be held largely responsible.
But the man driving all of this is Patrick Lingwood. A council officer and thus not democratically accountable to anyone.
He is a long time anti-car campaigner with close ties to a number of well funded lobby organisations.
Parents who sent children to private schools providing funding via taxation for state schools they do not even use while also funding their own children's education directly.
If there's a subsidy, it's from private school parents to state school children.
Not paying tax is not the same thing as receiving a subsidy.
If tax breaks can exist for religion they can certainly exist for education.
It is one thing to ask people to pay taxes so that other people's children can get the same education that their kids are getting. It is quite another to ask them to pay taxes to subsidise other people's children to get a better education than their children are getting. Why should I be subsidising other people's kids to push in front of my kids in the queue for university places or jobs? Forget it.
Usual Labour class envy mentality, even Blair's government abolished the assisted places scheme of course.
The not rich but bright child must not be allowed the best chance to get on and become a higher earning Tory voter
The not rich but bright child is precisely the one who is hurt most by the existence of private schools. Private education exists primarily to help the less bright but rich to jump the queue. It is the absolute antithesis of aspiration and meritocracy.
So what you're suggesting is that selection to the best schools would be better done via merit? Ability to learn, rather than ability to earn? That way the brightest pupils could go to the best schools, regardless of their parents income or ability to buy their way into the best schools catchment area, or pay the best schools fees.
i.e. grammar schools?
(I am firmly on nether one side nor the other on grammar schools, by the way, and indeed the issue is such a complex one of winners and losers that I am slightly baffled when anyone is able to land firmly and unambiguously on one side of the debate.)
I sympathise with that view.
The system in Kent - a two way divide between grammar schools and bog standard comps, with selection for all - is not an attractive one at all. But I think there is perhaps a place for selective highly academic schools in a more pluralistic system.
One thing I am a fan of is large non selective state sixth form colleges. Which are in my view underfunded.
There are no comprehensive schools in Kent, or indeed anywhere with selection.
True, about Kent. It was a lazy use of a hackneyed phrase, for which I apologise, but doesn't change my point which was an aversion to a system completely bifurcated by selection at the age of 11.
However, it's inaccurate to say there are no comprehensives where there's selection. The are several local authorities with only a handful of selective grammar schools, where the system is indeed mainly comprehensive.
One area for cost saving - councils. Everyone needs a council, but noone needs more than that. Some upfront cost, but future savings as duplication is eliminated. Unitary system for all.
As if this hasn't been done to death for the last 10 years. If you want to save costs, you need to reduce the number of statutory functions that Council's are responsible for. Instead government has a habit of adding to them, without funding them. There are a lot of myths about duplication and efficiency savings from mergers, but they aren't always born out by reality; what typically happens is that they are incredibly disruptive and expensive.
What the government could do to save money and reinvigorate democracy is to give Council's more power to set whatever level of council tax they so desire. This will ultimately drive actual efficiency, because no one wants to pay £5000 per year in Council tax.
There is also an insane situation where the property industry has been unaminously lobbying government to increase planning fees for several years, and for this money to be 'ring fenced' for the planning service. Instead fees remain low, service is poor, delays are never ending, and the service is cross subsidised by Council tax.
Delays are never ending because anyone sane would leave a planning authority and go to the private sector - wages really haven't gone up for decades.
Except that is inconsistent with your claim before that the local Council had dodgily "put on the backburner" planning consent for a highly-demanded retail park, because they were worried it would be popular. Which is the worst possible reason to refuse consent.
"Don't build this, people might actually want it" - if that's why its getting "put on the backburner" then its a good thing that the people abusing their authority to stifle development are losing their ability to do so. And it doesn't mean that wages are the issue, it means that people having the ability to stand in the way of others doing some development is the problem.
The local council hadn't the developers had because they knew it was unlikely to be approved - no point wasting money.
But a change in how development was approved meant that it could be approved. That is a good thing then, thank goodness the change happened. 👍
We need to find out what other roadblocks are in the way of development being able to occur, and remove them too.
Clearly you haven't been to the wasteland that is Bishop Auckland's town centre nowadays.
The thing is retail is very much a zero sum game, money spent in St Helen's is money that was once spent in Bishop Auckland town centre.
In the same way that the forthcoming Scotch Corner Designer village (Richmondshire council) will be the death nail to Darlington town centre and Northallerton (Hambleton district council).
Oh boo frigging hoo.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
One thing I've noticed from twitter about broad left US politics is the absolute hatred of cars. I think that's a big dividing line globally between right and left globally.
In April I visited an upscale, purpose built "European style town center" in the richer northern burbs of Jackson Mississippi
It was designed to "get people out of their cars" and walking from cafe to shop to office to art gallery. It was mainly Italianate, with hints of France and Britain
It kinda worked, there were people walking around and - unusually for the deep south - plenty of places for people to sit outside and eat, drink under parasols
Except, the entire thing was surrounded by vast parking lots so people could DRIVE to the European style town center, and THEN walk
There's no reason that can't be done in this country.
Liverpool One is a good example. Its helped revitalise the waterfront of Liverpool and there's many bustling shops and restaurants and entertainment all accessible and within walking distance. But there's also massive multistory, affordable, car parks. And the roads are [reasonably] accessible to them.
I can go shopping in Liverpool, in shops within walking distance of somewhere to park my car, and its busy and popular.
If a city can do that, there's no reason a town can't. Build multistory affordable car parks in your town centre and make traffic to those car parks flow, and people will choose to shop there. Make it all designed to be cyclist-friendly and treat drivers as contemptible devilspawn, then don't complain that you've got no customers.
Liverpool 1 was possible because it was land available within the city that could be cheaply bought and renovated (equally moving the town centre say 200metres in a different direction). Leeds and Manchester was the same, cheap and available land allowed retail to be built within the confines of the town centre with the consequence of the town centre moving x00 yards in a different direction.
That simply isn't possible in other places which is why Sheffield ended up with Meadowhall (out of town) rather than Sheffield One (within the City).
One thing about Kemi Badenoch is that she is a very nice and kind person. Which is certainly not true of some of the other more right orientated candidates. I am surprised that her odds are so short given her lack of experience but I suspect after so much nastiness some people want someone nicer.
I appreciate there's some correction going on post-Boris (and there are endless serious issues on the table) but none of the Conservative candidates have even a hint of fun in their launch vids. It's like a contest to become a funeral director. https://twitter.com/TomTugendhat/status/1546373725532041217
"This graph is a draft for a Long Covid paper I'm working on. The paper will be a while, but I think it's important that people - and policy makers - understand the implications now.
It is *very* serious."
This has been my lurking fear for a while. Covid seems to be easily reinfecting people, even the vaxxed, and every time you get an infection there is a new risk of Long Covid. The risk seems to be about 20% (CDC estimate), but even if it is 1% the implications are fairly horrific, given that Long Covid can easily disable you, for months or forever
Over time virtually everyone will get Long Covid: that is the statistical implication. So more and more people will be disabled, and there is sweet FA we can do about it. According to the thread, the Bank of England suspects this hidden issue is behind some inflation and the difficulties of finding workers: the workers have fallen out of the system due to Long Covid, and millions more will follow. Grim
"With current estimates of the risk of Long Covid at approx 20% at each infection (yellow line), and policies leading to an expected 2-3 infections per year, **the vast majority of people can expect to have suffered some form of Long Covid within the next 2-3 years**"
Further thought. China knows more about this wretched virus than any other country, they engineered it and accidentally leaked it ("probably"), and they are the only country pursuing Zero Covid. Is it because they know the threat of Long Covid?
So, Sunak vs Truss/Mordaunt and not-Rishi wins? Is that the PB consensus? And Gove's support for Badenoch - he can't expect her to win so which of the credible candidates is it designed to help?
Yes, that's my feeling
If a fourth contender is going to break ahead of the pack, they need to do it soon
As for who wins the members between Sunak and Truss/Mordaunt, probably Sunak will lose BUT there will be more dirt dished. Do the Sunakites have anything on Liz or Penny?
Or is there more on Rishi?
The Times was hinting, deliciously, that there are revelations about BDSM sex and I've been trying to work out which candidate is the most likely kinkster. I wonder if it is Mordaunt, but that might just be because she's the only one that gives me teh tinglez
The ludicrous pledges being made by all the contenders show the folly of having this decision made by, what, 200,000 elderly Tories.
The person who wins will become PM. They should make at least a show of showing why they would be good at that. None of them see to have a clue, though some are marginally less bad than others.
It's the third consecutive PM to be chosen in this way. It's like the Great Reform Act never happened.
Shapps approved the funding scheme that didn't allow time for research and proper consultations. So he has to be held largely responsible.
But the man driving all of this is Patrick Lingwood. A council officer and thus not democratically accountable to anyone.
He is a long time anti-car campaigner with close ties to a number of well funded lobby organisations.
I think if you were to ask cycling organisations around Oxfordshire their opinion of Mr Lingwood, you might be surprised how exasperated they are by him. I don't know of any lobby organisations that would endorse him, he's very much a lone ranger.
One area for cost saving - councils. Everyone needs a council, but noone needs more than that. Some upfront cost, but future savings as duplication is eliminated. Unitary system for all.
As if this hasn't been done to death for the last 10 years. If you want to save costs, you need to reduce the number of statutory functions that Council's are responsible for. Instead government has a habit of adding to them, without funding them. There are a lot of myths about duplication and efficiency savings from mergers, but they aren't always born out by reality; what typically happens is that they are incredibly disruptive and expensive.
What the government could do to save money and reinvigorate democracy is to give Council's more power to set whatever level of council tax they so desire. This will ultimately drive actual efficiency, because no one wants to pay £5000 per year in Council tax.
There is also an insane situation where the property industry has been unaminously lobbying government to increase planning fees for several years, and for this money to be 'ring fenced' for the planning service. Instead fees remain low, service is poor, delays are never ending, and the service is cross subsidised by Council tax.
Delays are never ending because anyone sane would leave a planning authority and go to the private sector - wages really haven't gone up for decades.
Except that is inconsistent with your claim before that the local Council had dodgily "put on the backburner" planning consent for a highly-demanded retail park, because they were worried it would be popular. Which is the worst possible reason to refuse consent.
"Don't build this, people might actually want it" - if that's why its getting "put on the backburner" then its a good thing that the people abusing their authority to stifle development are losing their ability to do so. And it doesn't mean that wages are the issue, it means that people having the ability to stand in the way of others doing some development is the problem.
The local council hadn't the developers had because they knew it was unlikely to be approved - no point wasting money.
But a change in how development was approved meant that it could be approved. That is a good thing then, thank goodness the change happened. 👍
We need to find out what other roadblocks are in the way of development being able to occur, and remove them too.
Clearly you haven't been to the wasteland that is Bishop Auckland's town centre nowadays.
The thing is retail is very much a zero sum game, money spent in St Helen's is money that was once spent in Bishop Auckland town centre.
In the same way that the forthcoming Scotch Corner Designer village (Richmondshire council) will be the death nail to Darlington town centre and Northallerton (Hambleton district council).
Oh boo frigging hoo.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
One thing I've noticed from twitter about broad left US politics is the absolute hatred of cars. I think that's a big dividing line globally between right and left globally.
In April I visited an upscale, purpose built "European style town center" in the richer northern burbs of Jackson Mississippi
It was designed to "get people out of their cars" and walking from cafe to shop to office to art gallery. It was mainly Italianate, with hints of France and Britain
It kinda worked, there were people walking around and - unusually for the deep south - plenty of places for people to sit outside and eat, drink under parasols
Except, the entire thing was surrounded by vast parking lots so people could DRIVE to the European style town center, and THEN walk
There's no reason that can't be done in this country.
Liverpool One is a good example. Its helped revitalise the waterfront of Liverpool and there's many bustling shops and restaurants and entertainment all accessible and within walking distance. But there's also massive multistory, affordable, car parks. And the roads are [reasonably] accessible to them.
I can go shopping in Liverpool, in shops within walking distance of somewhere to park my car, and its busy and popular.
If a city can do that, there's no reason a town can't. Build multistory affordable car parks in your town centre and make traffic to those car parks flow, and people will choose to shop there. Make it all designed to be cyclist-friendly and treat drivers as contemptible devilspawn, then don't complain that you've got no customers.
Liverpool 1 was possible because it was land available within the city that could be cheaply bought and renovated (equally moving the town centre say 200metres in a different direction). Leeds and Manchester was the same, cheap and available land allowed retail to be built within the confines of the town centre with the consequence of the town centre moving x00 yards in a different direction.
That simply isn't possible in other places which is why Sheffield ended up with Meadowhall (out of town) rather than Sheffield One (within the City).
It doesn't take that much land to build a multistory car park. Too many Councils are trying to eliminate parking and make it harder to drive into, rather than make it easier. Then they act horrified that the High Street is dead.
I repeat again, for the umpteenth time, you complain that Bishop Auckland's High Street is dead but what has the Council done to make it easier to drive to and park at? Not vaguely more attractive, but specifically more attractive for cars?
It doesn't matter how "attractive" something is, if you can't drive there, many people won't want to go there. If you spend a fortune on an anticar vendetta then don't whinge afterwards that people are driving somewhere else instead. Maybe Meadowhall has done more to make itself attractive for cars than Sheffield has?
One area for cost saving - councils. Everyone needs a council, but noone needs more than that. Some upfront cost, but future savings as duplication is eliminated. Unitary system for all.
As if this hasn't been done to death for the last 10 years. If you want to save costs, you need to reduce the number of statutory functions that Council's are responsible for. Instead government has a habit of adding to them, without funding them. There are a lot of myths about duplication and efficiency savings from mergers, but they aren't always born out by reality; what typically happens is that they are incredibly disruptive and expensive.
What the government could do to save money and reinvigorate democracy is to give Council's more power to set whatever level of council tax they so desire. This will ultimately drive actual efficiency, because no one wants to pay £5000 per year in Council tax.
There is also an insane situation where the property industry has been unaminously lobbying government to increase planning fees for several years, and for this money to be 'ring fenced' for the planning service. Instead fees remain low, service is poor, delays are never ending, and the service is cross subsidised by Council tax.
Delays are never ending because anyone sane would leave a planning authority and go to the private sector - wages really haven't gone up for decades.
Except that is inconsistent with your claim before that the local Council had dodgily "put on the backburner" planning consent for a highly-demanded retail park, because they were worried it would be popular. Which is the worst possible reason to refuse consent.
"Don't build this, people might actually want it" - if that's why its getting "put on the backburner" then its a good thing that the people abusing their authority to stifle development are losing their ability to do so. And it doesn't mean that wages are the issue, it means that people having the ability to stand in the way of others doing some development is the problem.
The local council hadn't the developers had because they knew it was unlikely to be approved - no point wasting money.
But a change in how development was approved meant that it could be approved. That is a good thing then, thank goodness the change happened. 👍
We need to find out what other roadblocks are in the way of development being able to occur, and remove them too.
Clearly you haven't been to the wasteland that is Bishop Auckland's town centre nowadays.
The thing is retail is very much a zero sum game, money spent in St Helen's is money that was once spent in Bishop Auckland town centre.
In the same way that the forthcoming Scotch Corner Designer village (Richmondshire council) will be the death nail to Darlington town centre and Northallerton (Hambleton district council).
Oh boo frigging hoo.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
What's being done to make Bishop Auckland more attractive
But in both cases it's fighting a losing battle because the out of town shopping centre has destroyed the basis of the local economy...
You can see the same thing in Sheffield (Meadowhall has gutted Sheffield town centre) and in Stockton / Boro where Teesside park first destroyed Stockton town centre and then over the last 3 years taken Boro with it.
It's not the out of town shopping centre that has "destroyed the basis of the local economy" but that the local residents have preferred to go there.
Yep but only because we've doubled the amount of space given over to retail to approximately twice that which was actually required.
Which means you have a lovely shopping area for those who can drive and have a car leaving once again nothing for those who use public transport..
One of my pet hates is the lack of mix. Huge retail or business parks without a residential property within walking distance. Sprawling new build estates without any commercial space at all. This is a relatively recent development.
Visit Colchester; absolutely classic example of what you describe!
So, Sunak vs Truss/Mordaunt and not-Rishi wins? Is that the PB consensus? And Gove's support for Badenoch - he can't expect her to win so which of the credible candidates is it designed to help?
Yes, that's my feeling
If a fourth contender is going to break ahead of the pack, they need to do it soon
As for who wins the members between Sunak and Truss/Mordaunt, probably Sunak will lose BUT there will be more dirt dished. Do the Sunakites have anything on Liz or Penny?
Or is there more on Rishi?
The Times was hinting, deliciously, that there are revelations about BDSM sex and I've been trying to work out which candidate is the most likely kinkster. I wonder if it is Mordaunt, but that might just be because she's the only one that gives me teh tinglez
The ludicrous pledges being made by all the contenders show the folly of having this decision made by, what, 200,000 elderly Tories.
The person who wins will become PM. They should make at least a show of showing why they would be good at that. None of them see to have a clue, though some are marginally less bad than others.
It's the third consecutive PM to be chosen in this way. It's like the Great Reform Act never happened.
The problem is that we vote for our MP not the PM which was fine when it was the responsibility of MPs to pick their leader - it's a problem when the power to pick their leader has been removed from those MPs.
I struggle to understand why those in favour of grammar schools aren't happy with streaming in a comprehensive school. Surely this gives you what you desire plus with the benefit of catering for late starters and those who peaked early. It also has the benefit of selection by subject so catering for kids who are for instance good at maths but rubbish at English (like me).
Shapps approved the funding scheme that didn't allow time for research and proper consultations. So he has to be held largely responsible.
But the man driving all of this is Patrick Lingwood. A council officer and thus not democratically accountable to anyone.
He is a long time anti-car campaigner with close ties to a number of well funded lobby organisations.
I think if you were to ask cycling organisations around Oxfordshire their opinion of Mr Lingwood, you might be surprised how exasperated they are by him.
Oh I am well aware of the infighting going on because the cycling lobby groups aren't getting everything they want NOW.
I struggle to understand why those in favour of grammar schools aren't happy with streaming in a comprehensive school. Surely this gives you what you desire plus with the benefit of catering for late starters and those who peaked early. It also has the benefit of selection by subject so catering for kids who are for instance good at maths but rubbish at English (like me).
That's simple - because of the structural "flaws" within the 11 plus exam, very few working class children end up in Grammar schools so those in favour of them don't have to mix with the working classes...
One thing about Kemi Badenoch is that she is a very nice and kind person. Which is certainly not true of some of the other more right orientated candidates. I am surprised that her odds are so short given her lack of experience but I suspect after so much nastiness some people want someone nicer.
Kemi's odds are not "so short" and are drifting back out after the Gove boost. According to the betting it is a three horse race, although political betting markets are often wrong. Here are Betfair's prices for next PM right now (again note that next PM and next party leader prices might be slightly different).
I struggle to understand why those in favour of grammar schools aren't happy with streaming in a comprehensive school. Surely this gives you what you desire plus with the benefit of catering for late starters and those who peaked early. It also has the benefit of selection by subject so catering for kids who are for instance good at maths but rubbish at English (like me).
Who's unhappy with streaming? I struggle to think of a secondary school which doesn't. There may be one.
Shapps approved the funding scheme that didn't allow time for research and proper consultations. So he has to be held largely responsible.
But the man driving all of this is Patrick Lingwood. A council officer and thus not democratically accountable to anyone.
He is a long time anti-car campaigner with close ties to a number of well funded lobby organisations.
I think if you were to ask cycling organisations around Oxfordshire their opinion of Mr Lingwood, you might be surprised how exasperated they are by him.
Oh I am well aware of the infighting going on because the cycling lobby groups aren't getting everything they want NOW.
That's not a fair characterisation. There's no infighting, the groups are more united than I've ever known them. They are pointing out that Mr Lingwood is delivering infrastructure which isn't compliant with what the (Conservative) Government requires, and is much worse what other cities - London, Manchester, Birmingham, Cambridge - are delivering.
I appreciate there's some correction going on post-Boris (and there are endless serious issues on the table) but none of the Conservative candidates have even a hint of fun in their launch vids. It's like a contest to become a funeral director. https://twitter.com/TomTugendhat/status/1546373725532041217
How can any major party in Britain offer voters a more prosperous future tight now? how are things going to get better via any of them?
All the main parties are geared up to manage the sacrifices net zero will bring. Much more expensive food. Less foreign travel. Hugely expensive energy. Slow or no growth. A vast monitoring state. Give up your car and your boiler. Power rationing.
Sri Lanka is going to happen in other parts of the world as people get to breaking point.
I had some cyclists annoy me for the first time in years whilst driving yesterday. Four of them with about 20 feet between each cyclist in their pace line. Now I don't expect Team Sky/Ineos discipline but it was the worst pace line I've come across yet. Made passing a bit of a nightmare.
"Keep a gap of less than one cycle length in a pace line" for the Highway code.
One thing about Kemi Badenoch is that she is a very nice and kind person. Which is certainly not true of some of the other more right orientated candidates. I am surprised that her odds are so short given her lack of experience but I suspect after so much nastiness some people want someone nicer.
Kemi's odds are not "so short" and are drifting back out after the Gove boost. According to the betting it is a three horse race, although political betting markets are often wrong. Here are Betfair's prices for next PM right now (again note that next PM and next party leader prices might be slightly different).
Any country other than China would've gotten a lot more flak for this (while retaliation against the US would be just as minimal, criticism would be way louder).
The fools meddled with something entirely unnecessarily and didn't even safeguard it, infecting the whole world.
Weaning ourselves away from Chinese economic integration is not only a useful logistical safeguard, it's also a justified response given their stupidity over this.
One area for cost saving - councils. Everyone needs a council, but noone needs more than that. Some upfront cost, but future savings as duplication is eliminated. Unitary system for all.
As if this hasn't been done to death for the last 10 years. If you want to save costs, you need to reduce the number of statutory functions that Council's are responsible for. Instead government has a habit of adding to them, without funding them. There are a lot of myths about duplication and efficiency savings from mergers, but they aren't always born out by reality; what typically happens is that they are incredibly disruptive and expensive.
What the government could do to save money and reinvigorate democracy is to give Council's more power to set whatever level of council tax they so desire. This will ultimately drive actual efficiency, because no one wants to pay £5000 per year in Council tax.
There is also an insane situation where the property industry has been unaminously lobbying government to increase planning fees for several years, and for this money to be 'ring fenced' for the planning service. Instead fees remain low, service is poor, delays are never ending, and the service is cross subsidised by Council tax.
Delays are never ending because anyone sane would leave a planning authority and go to the private sector - wages really haven't gone up for decades.
Except that is inconsistent with your claim before that the local Council had dodgily "put on the backburner" planning consent for a highly-demanded retail park, because they were worried it would be popular. Which is the worst possible reason to refuse consent.
"Don't build this, people might actually want it" - if that's why its getting "put on the backburner" then its a good thing that the people abusing their authority to stifle development are losing their ability to do so. And it doesn't mean that wages are the issue, it means that people having the ability to stand in the way of others doing some development is the problem.
The local council hadn't the developers had because they knew it was unlikely to be approved - no point wasting money.
But a change in how development was approved meant that it could be approved. That is a good thing then, thank goodness the change happened. 👍
We need to find out what other roadblocks are in the way of development being able to occur, and remove them too.
Clearly you haven't been to the wasteland that is Bishop Auckland's town centre nowadays.
The thing is retail is very much a zero sum game, money spent in St Helen's is money that was once spent in Bishop Auckland town centre.
In the same way that the forthcoming Scotch Corner Designer village (Richmondshire council) will be the death nail to Darlington town centre and Northallerton (Hambleton district council).
Oh boo frigging hoo.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
One thing I've noticed from twitter about broad left US politics is the absolute hatred of cars. I think that's a big dividing line globally between right and left globally.
In April I visited an upscale, purpose built "European style town center" in the richer northern burbs of Jackson Mississippi
It was designed to "get people out of their cars" and walking from cafe to shop to office to art gallery. It was mainly Italianate, with hints of France and Britain
It kinda worked, there were people walking around and - unusually for the deep south - plenty of places for people to sit outside and eat, drink under parasols
Except, the entire thing was surrounded by vast parking lots so people could DRIVE to the European style town center, and THEN walk
There's no reason that can't be done in this country.
Liverpool One is a good example. Its helped revitalise the waterfront of Liverpool and there's many bustling shops and restaurants and entertainment all accessible and within walking distance. But there's also massive multistory, affordable, car parks. And the roads are [reasonably] accessible to them.
I can go shopping in Liverpool, in shops within walking distance of somewhere to park my car, and its busy and popular.
If a city can do that, there's no reason a town can't. Build multistory affordable car parks in your town centre and make traffic to those car parks flow, and people will choose to shop there. Make it all designed to be cyclist-friendly and treat drivers as contemptible devilspawn, then don't complain that you've got no customers.
Liverpool 1 was possible because it was land available within the city that could be cheaply bought and renovated (equally moving the town centre say 200metres in a different direction). Leeds and Manchester was the same, cheap and available land allowed retail to be built within the confines of the town centre with the consequence of the town centre moving x00 yards in a different direction.
That simply isn't possible in other places which is why Sheffield ended up with Meadowhall (out of town) rather than Sheffield One (within the City).
It doesn't take that much land to build a multistory car park. Too many Councils are trying to eliminate parking and make it harder to drive into, rather than make it easier. Then they act horrified that the High Street is dead.
I repeat again, for the umpteenth time, you complain that Bishop Auckland's High Street is dead but what has the Council done to make it easier to drive to and park at? Not vaguely more attractive, but specifically more attractive for cars?
It doesn't matter how "attractive" something is, if you can't drive there, many people won't want to go there. If you spend a fortune on an anticar vendetta then don't whinge afterwards that people are driving somewhere else instead. Maybe Meadowhall has done more to make itself attractive for cars than Sheffield has?
In 2010 there was enough parking in Bishop Auckland - now there is even more because fewer people visit.
The reality is that unless you have major wastelands within a town centre you just don't have the ability to improve access as you can't afford to buy the land needed to build the road.
On the scale of Dreadfully Unscrupulous Things That Parties do, I don't think that even competes with the Tory culture wars and LibDem barcharts. A little bit of bite is not unwelcome.
"Starmer to confirm pledge to end charitable status of private schools like Eton in speech today in Gateshead. He will say:”When I say we are going to pay for kids to catch up at school, I also say it’ll be funded by removing private schools’ charitable status."
Taxing aspiration is never a good look.
The problem is not the private schools “Like Eton”, it’s the hundreds of small community private schools up and down the country, to whom the middle classes aspire to send their children, many of whom rely on charitable status to survive. Tax them, to target schools “Like Eton”, and they’ll close, adding to the burden on the State and upsetting tens of thousands of parents.
While leaving the actual Eton able to put their fees up a bit and not notice too much. It’s the worst class politics.
The issue is not just that. Under charity law, AIUI it is education which is a charitable objective not simply schools. So a lot of educational purposes which depend in part on being a charity will get affected unless you can somehow distinguish between the two. Now you probably can do that but it will be a complicated piece of legislation with the potential for a lot of unintended consequences, edge cases and it will take up a fair amount of Parliamentary time.
The Law Commission last reviewed charity law in 2017 and a new Charities Act was passed earlier this year. I don't think Labour even have a shadow Charities Minister at the moment.
The issue for Labour is whether expending a lot of time on complicated charity law is necessarily the most important priority or the best use of its Parliamentary time. It risks having a whiff of the hunting bill about it.
One area for cost saving - councils. Everyone needs a council, but noone needs more than that. Some upfront cost, but future savings as duplication is eliminated. Unitary system for all.
As if this hasn't been done to death for the last 10 years. If you want to save costs, you need to reduce the number of statutory functions that Council's are responsible for. Instead government has a habit of adding to them, without funding them. There are a lot of myths about duplication and efficiency savings from mergers, but they aren't always born out by reality; what typically happens is that they are incredibly disruptive and expensive.
What the government could do to save money and reinvigorate democracy is to give Council's more power to set whatever level of council tax they so desire. This will ultimately drive actual efficiency, because no one wants to pay £5000 per year in Council tax.
There is also an insane situation where the property industry has been unaminously lobbying government to increase planning fees for several years, and for this money to be 'ring fenced' for the planning service. Instead fees remain low, service is poor, delays are never ending, and the service is cross subsidised by Council tax.
Delays are never ending because anyone sane would leave a planning authority and go to the private sector - wages really haven't gone up for decades.
Except that is inconsistent with your claim before that the local Council had dodgily "put on the backburner" planning consent for a highly-demanded retail park, because they were worried it would be popular. Which is the worst possible reason to refuse consent.
"Don't build this, people might actually want it" - if that's why its getting "put on the backburner" then its a good thing that the people abusing their authority to stifle development are losing their ability to do so. And it doesn't mean that wages are the issue, it means that people having the ability to stand in the way of others doing some development is the problem.
The local council hadn't the developers had because they knew it was unlikely to be approved - no point wasting money.
But a change in how development was approved meant that it could be approved. That is a good thing then, thank goodness the change happened. 👍
We need to find out what other roadblocks are in the way of development being able to occur, and remove them too.
Clearly you haven't been to the wasteland that is Bishop Auckland's town centre nowadays.
The thing is retail is very much a zero sum game, money spent in St Helen's is money that was once spent in Bishop Auckland town centre.
In the same way that the forthcoming Scotch Corner Designer village (Richmondshire council) will be the death nail to Darlington town centre and Northallerton (Hambleton district council).
Oh boo frigging hoo.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
One thing I've noticed from twitter about broad left US politics is the absolute hatred of cars. I think that's a big dividing line globally between right and left globally.
In April I visited an upscale, purpose built "European style town center" in the richer northern burbs of Jackson Mississippi
It was designed to "get people out of their cars" and walking from cafe to shop to office to art gallery. It was mainly Italianate, with hints of France and Britain
It kinda worked, there were people walking around and - unusually for the deep south - plenty of places for people to sit outside and eat, drink under parasols
Except, the entire thing was surrounded by vast parking lots so people could DRIVE to the European style town center, and THEN walk
There's no reason that can't be done in this country.
Liverpool One is a good example. Its helped revitalise the waterfront of Liverpool and there's many bustling shops and restaurants and entertainment all accessible and within walking distance. But there's also massive multistory, affordable, car parks. And the roads are [reasonably] accessible to them.
I can go shopping in Liverpool, in shops within walking distance of somewhere to park my car, and its busy and popular.
If a city can do that, there's no reason a town can't. Build multistory affordable car parks in your town centre and make traffic to those car parks flow, and people will choose to shop there. Make it all designed to be cyclist-friendly and treat drivers as contemptible devilspawn, then don't complain that you've got no customers.
One area for cost saving - councils. Everyone needs a council, but noone needs more than that. Some upfront cost, but future savings as duplication is eliminated. Unitary system for all.
As if this hasn't been done to death for the last 10 years. If you want to save costs, you need to reduce the number of statutory functions that Council's are responsible for. Instead government has a habit of adding to them, without funding them. There are a lot of myths about duplication and efficiency savings from mergers, but they aren't always born out by reality; what typically happens is that they are incredibly disruptive and expensive.
What the government could do to save money and reinvigorate democracy is to give Council's more power to set whatever level of council tax they so desire. This will ultimately drive actual efficiency, because no one wants to pay £5000 per year in Council tax.
There is also an insane situation where the property industry has been unaminously lobbying government to increase planning fees for several years, and for this money to be 'ring fenced' for the planning service. Instead fees remain low, service is poor, delays are never ending, and the service is cross subsidised by Council tax.
Delays are never ending because anyone sane would leave a planning authority and go to the private sector - wages really haven't gone up for decades.
Except that is inconsistent with your claim before that the local Council had dodgily "put on the backburner" planning consent for a highly-demanded retail park, because they were worried it would be popular. Which is the worst possible reason to refuse consent.
"Don't build this, people might actually want it" - if that's why its getting "put on the backburner" then its a good thing that the people abusing their authority to stifle development are losing their ability to do so. And it doesn't mean that wages are the issue, it means that people having the ability to stand in the way of others doing some development is the problem.
The local council hadn't the developers had because they knew it was unlikely to be approved - no point wasting money.
But a change in how development was approved meant that it could be approved. That is a good thing then, thank goodness the change happened. 👍
We need to find out what other roadblocks are in the way of development being able to occur, and remove them too.
Clearly you haven't been to the wasteland that is Bishop Auckland's town centre nowadays.
The thing is retail is very much a zero sum game, money spent in St Helen's is money that was once spent in Bishop Auckland town centre.
In the same way that the forthcoming Scotch Corner Designer village (Richmondshire council) will be the death nail to Darlington town centre and Northallerton (Hambleton district council).
Oh boo frigging hoo.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
One thing I've noticed from twitter about broad left US politics is the absolute hatred of cars. I think that's a big dividing line globally between right and left globally.
In April I visited an upscale, purpose built "European style town center" in the richer northern burbs of Jackson Mississippi
It was designed to "get people out of their cars" and walking from cafe to shop to office to art gallery. It was mainly Italianate, with hints of France and Britain
It kinda worked, there were people walking around and - unusually for the deep south - plenty of places for people to sit outside and eat, drink under parasols
Except, the entire thing was surrounded by vast parking lots so people could DRIVE to the European style town center, and THEN walk
There's no reason that can't be done in this country.
Liverpool One is a good example. Its helped revitalise the waterfront of Liverpool and there's many bustling shops and restaurants and entertainment all accessible and within walking distance. But there's also massive multistory, affordable, car parks. And the roads are [reasonably] accessible to them.
I can go shopping in Liverpool, in shops within walking distance of somewhere to park my car, and its busy and popular.
If a city can do that, there's no reason a town can't. Build multistory affordable car parks in your town centre and make traffic to those car parks flow, and people will choose to shop there. Make it all designed to be cyclist-friendly and treat drivers as contemptible devilspawn, then don't complain that you've got no customers.
Liverpool One is great not least because Everton opened a club shop there called "Everton Two"...
At the moment in terms of MP endorsements it looks like Sunak and Mordaunt as the final 2 sent to the membership unless things change dramatically in the next few days.
Though Tugendhat and Truss are not far behind in joint 3rd
I am surprised that Sunak is not further ahead on declarations. He is certainly still in range of a redistribution stitch up, that keeps him out the top two.
I agree Mark, Sunaks effort has the feel of classic front runner who gets tripped up.
My dad reckons Truss wins the first ballot, and he fears a Truss coronation before the recess. I know HY will be about to jump in members won’t stand for being by passed again, but, and it’s a big but, who do membership wave their fists at? Hardly Truss fault if there’s no opposition left, hardly 1922 fault if MPs decide on coronation. Besides the argument will come back, it’s not just having lost an election and selecting LOTO, it’s needing a PM to tackle land war in Europe and economic crisis. And a lot of the 100K membership might not be upset by Truss coronation anyway.
Don’t dislike the messenger if you don’t like sound of this scenario!
One area for cost saving - councils. Everyone needs a council, but noone needs more than that. Some upfront cost, but future savings as duplication is eliminated. Unitary system for all.
As if this hasn't been done to death for the last 10 years. If you want to save costs, you need to reduce the number of statutory functions that Council's are responsible for. Instead government has a habit of adding to them, without funding them. There are a lot of myths about duplication and efficiency savings from mergers, but they aren't always born out by reality; what typically happens is that they are incredibly disruptive and expensive.
What the government could do to save money and reinvigorate democracy is to give Council's more power to set whatever level of council tax they so desire. This will ultimately drive actual efficiency, because no one wants to pay £5000 per year in Council tax.
There is also an insane situation where the property industry has been unaminously lobbying government to increase planning fees for several years, and for this money to be 'ring fenced' for the planning service. Instead fees remain low, service is poor, delays are never ending, and the service is cross subsidised by Council tax.
Delays are never ending because anyone sane would leave a planning authority and go to the private sector - wages really haven't gone up for decades.
Except that is inconsistent with your claim before that the local Council had dodgily "put on the backburner" planning consent for a highly-demanded retail park, because they were worried it would be popular. Which is the worst possible reason to refuse consent.
"Don't build this, people might actually want it" - if that's why its getting "put on the backburner" then its a good thing that the people abusing their authority to stifle development are losing their ability to do so. And it doesn't mean that wages are the issue, it means that people having the ability to stand in the way of others doing some development is the problem.
The local council hadn't the developers had because they knew it was unlikely to be approved - no point wasting money.
But a change in how development was approved meant that it could be approved. That is a good thing then, thank goodness the change happened. 👍
We need to find out what other roadblocks are in the way of development being able to occur, and remove them too.
Clearly you haven't been to the wasteland that is Bishop Auckland's town centre nowadays.
The thing is retail is very much a zero sum game, money spent in St Helen's is money that was once spent in Bishop Auckland town centre.
In the same way that the forthcoming Scotch Corner Designer village (Richmondshire council) will be the death nail to Darlington town centre and Northallerton (Hambleton district council).
Oh boo frigging hoo.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
One thing I've noticed from twitter about broad left US politics is the absolute hatred of cars. I think that's a big dividing line globally between right and left globally.
In April I visited an upscale, purpose built "European style town center" in the richer northern burbs of Jackson Mississippi
It was designed to "get people out of their cars" and walking from cafe to shop to office to art gallery. It was mainly Italianate, with hints of France and Britain
It kinda worked, there were people walking around and - unusually for the deep south - plenty of places for people to sit outside and eat, drink under parasols
Except, the entire thing was surrounded by vast parking lots so people could DRIVE to the European style town center, and THEN walk
There's no reason that can't be done in this country.
Liverpool One is a good example. Its helped revitalise the waterfront of Liverpool and there's many bustling shops and restaurants and entertainment all accessible and within walking distance. But there's also massive multistory, affordable, car parks. And the roads are [reasonably] accessible to them.
I can go shopping in Liverpool, in shops within walking distance of somewhere to park my car, and its busy and popular.
If a city can do that, there's no reason a town can't. Build multistory affordable car parks in your town centre and make traffic to those car parks flow, and people will choose to shop there. Make it all designed to be cyclist-friendly and treat drivers as contemptible devilspawn, then don't complain that you've got no customers.
Liverpool 1 was possible because it was land available within the city that could be cheaply bought and renovated (equally moving the town centre say 200metres in a different direction). Leeds and Manchester was the same, cheap and available land allowed retail to be built within the confines of the town centre with the consequence of the town centre moving x00 yards in a different direction.
That simply isn't possible in other places which is why Sheffield ended up with Meadowhall (out of town) rather than Sheffield One (within the City).
Meadowhall is easy to reach via public transport too which makes the problem worse with Sheffield city centre.
One example of cities and big shopping centres co-existing is Newcastle. Newcastle city centre seems to thrive despite the MetroCentre existing just a few miles away. The MetroCentre is easy to get to by car with it being directly off the A1 but Tyne and Wear's metro system means that for public transport users it's way easier to get to Newcastle city centre.
With my own city of Leeds, I live 35-40 mins walk from the centre of the city, 2 mins from the local station into Leeds (6 minute train journey) and often find myself driving in in poorer weather due to cheap parking on the outskirts of the centre at £1.40 for 2 hours. The train isn't appealing as it's only every 30 minutes and I can park 5 minutes further walk past the station for half the price of a return ticket.
One area for cost saving - councils. Everyone needs a council, but noone needs more than that. Some upfront cost, but future savings as duplication is eliminated. Unitary system for all.
As if this hasn't been done to death for the last 10 years. If you want to save costs, you need to reduce the number of statutory functions that Council's are responsible for. Instead government has a habit of adding to them, without funding them. There are a lot of myths about duplication and efficiency savings from mergers, but they aren't always born out by reality; what typically happens is that they are incredibly disruptive and expensive.
What the government could do to save money and reinvigorate democracy is to give Council's more power to set whatever level of council tax they so desire. This will ultimately drive actual efficiency, because no one wants to pay £5000 per year in Council tax.
There is also an insane situation where the property industry has been unaminously lobbying government to increase planning fees for several years, and for this money to be 'ring fenced' for the planning service. Instead fees remain low, service is poor, delays are never ending, and the service is cross subsidised by Council tax.
Delays are never ending because anyone sane would leave a planning authority and go to the private sector - wages really haven't gone up for decades.
Except that is inconsistent with your claim before that the local Council had dodgily "put on the backburner" planning consent for a highly-demanded retail park, because they were worried it would be popular. Which is the worst possible reason to refuse consent.
"Don't build this, people might actually want it" - if that's why its getting "put on the backburner" then its a good thing that the people abusing their authority to stifle development are losing their ability to do so. And it doesn't mean that wages are the issue, it means that people having the ability to stand in the way of others doing some development is the problem.
The local council hadn't the developers had because they knew it was unlikely to be approved - no point wasting money.
But a change in how development was approved meant that it could be approved. That is a good thing then, thank goodness the change happened. 👍
We need to find out what other roadblocks are in the way of development being able to occur, and remove them too.
Clearly you haven't been to the wasteland that is Bishop Auckland's town centre nowadays.
The thing is retail is very much a zero sum game, money spent in St Helen's is money that was once spent in Bishop Auckland town centre.
In the same way that the forthcoming Scotch Corner Designer village (Richmondshire council) will be the death nail to Darlington town centre and Northallerton (Hambleton district council).
Oh boo frigging hoo.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
One thing I've noticed from twitter about broad left US politics is the absolute hatred of cars. I think that's a big dividing line globally between right and left globally.
In April I visited an upscale, purpose built "European style town center" in the richer northern burbs of Jackson Mississippi
It was designed to "get people out of their cars" and walking from cafe to shop to office to art gallery. It was mainly Italianate, with hints of France and Britain
It kinda worked, there were people walking around and - unusually for the deep south - plenty of places for people to sit outside and eat, drink under parasols
Except, the entire thing was surrounded by vast parking lots so people could DRIVE to the European style town center, and THEN walk
There's no reason that can't be done in this country.
Liverpool One is a good example. Its helped revitalise the waterfront of Liverpool and there's many bustling shops and restaurants and entertainment all accessible and within walking distance. But there's also massive multistory, affordable, car parks. And the roads are [reasonably] accessible to them.
I can go shopping in Liverpool, in shops within walking distance of somewhere to park my car, and its busy and popular.
If a city can do that, there's no reason a town can't. Build multistory affordable car parks in your town centre and make traffic to those car parks flow, and people will choose to shop there. Make it all designed to be cyclist-friendly and treat drivers as contemptible devilspawn, then don't complain that you've got no customers.
Liverpool 1 was possible because it was land available within the city that could be cheaply bought and renovated (equally moving the town centre say 200metres in a different direction). Leeds and Manchester was the same, cheap and available land allowed retail to be built within the confines of the town centre with the consequence of the town centre moving x00 yards in a different direction.
That simply isn't possible in other places which is why Sheffield ended up with Meadowhall (out of town) rather than Sheffield One (within the City).
It doesn't take that much land to build a multistory car park. Too many Councils are trying to eliminate parking and make it harder to drive into, rather than make it easier. Then they act horrified that the High Street is dead.
I repeat again, for the umpteenth time, you complain that Bishop Auckland's High Street is dead but what has the Council done to make it easier to drive to and park at? Not vaguely more attractive, but specifically more attractive for cars?
It doesn't matter how "attractive" something is, if you can't drive there, many people won't want to go there. If you spend a fortune on an anticar vendetta then don't whinge afterwards that people are driving somewhere else instead. Maybe Meadowhall has done more to make itself attractive for cars than Sheffield has?
In 2010 there was enough parking in Bishop Auckland - now there is even more because fewer people visit.
The reality is that unless you have major wastelands within a town centre you just don't have the ability to improve access as you can't afford to buy the land needed to build the road.
I find that really hard to believe, most towns have a bit of countryside or similar around them they can expand into if needed.
Looking at the webpage you linked to, it doesn't even mention parking or access as something being marked for improvement. Instead it specifically mentions "walking and cycling". I don't know about Bishop Auckland specifically, but typically "cycling routes" make it harder, not easier, to drive so looks like they're doubling down on the pedestrianisation efforts that are hollowing out and killing town centres in much of the country.
Has Bishop Auckland done anything pro-car to make driving and parking easier, rather than harder? Or has it done the opposite?
If its done the opposite, then don't be shocked that cars aren't going there and are going where they're welcome instead.
I struggle to understand why those in favour of grammar schools aren't happy with streaming in a comprehensive school. Surely this gives you what you desire plus with the benefit of catering for late starters and those who peaked early. It also has the benefit of selection by subject so catering for kids who are for instance good at maths but rubbish at English (like me).
Who's unhappy with streaming? I struggle to think of a secondary school which doesn't. There may be one.
Point of pedantry. Streaming is where you set pupils for all subjects. We had that in Year 7, which kind of made sense for the first year of big school. But we were mixed up thereafter (known as setting, I think).
One area for cost saving - councils. Everyone needs a council, but noone needs more than that. Some upfront cost, but future savings as duplication is eliminated. Unitary system for all.
As if this hasn't been done to death for the last 10 years. If you want to save costs, you need to reduce the number of statutory functions that Council's are responsible for. Instead government has a habit of adding to them, without funding them. There are a lot of myths about duplication and efficiency savings from mergers, but they aren't always born out by reality; what typically happens is that they are incredibly disruptive and expensive.
What the government could do to save money and reinvigorate democracy is to give Council's more power to set whatever level of council tax they so desire. This will ultimately drive actual efficiency, because no one wants to pay £5000 per year in Council tax.
There is also an insane situation where the property industry has been unaminously lobbying government to increase planning fees for several years, and for this money to be 'ring fenced' for the planning service. Instead fees remain low, service is poor, delays are never ending, and the service is cross subsidised by Council tax.
Delays are never ending because anyone sane would leave a planning authority and go to the private sector - wages really haven't gone up for decades.
Except that is inconsistent with your claim before that the local Council had dodgily "put on the backburner" planning consent for a highly-demanded retail park, because they were worried it would be popular. Which is the worst possible reason to refuse consent.
"Don't build this, people might actually want it" - if that's why its getting "put on the backburner" then its a good thing that the people abusing their authority to stifle development are losing their ability to do so. And it doesn't mean that wages are the issue, it means that people having the ability to stand in the way of others doing some development is the problem.
The local council hadn't the developers had because they knew it was unlikely to be approved - no point wasting money.
But a change in how development was approved meant that it could be approved. That is a good thing then, thank goodness the change happened. 👍
We need to find out what other roadblocks are in the way of development being able to occur, and remove them too.
Clearly you haven't been to the wasteland that is Bishop Auckland's town centre nowadays.
The thing is retail is very much a zero sum game, money spent in St Helen's is money that was once spent in Bishop Auckland town centre.
In the same way that the forthcoming Scotch Corner Designer village (Richmondshire council) will be the death nail to Darlington town centre and Northallerton (Hambleton district council).
Oh boo frigging hoo.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
One thing I've noticed from twitter about broad left US politics is the absolute hatred of cars. I think that's a big dividing line globally between right and left globally.
In April I visited an upscale, purpose built "European style town center" in the richer northern burbs of Jackson Mississippi
It was designed to "get people out of their cars" and walking from cafe to shop to office to art gallery. It was mainly Italianate, with hints of France and Britain
It kinda worked, there were people walking around and - unusually for the deep south - plenty of places for people to sit outside and eat, drink under parasols
Except, the entire thing was surrounded by vast parking lots so people could DRIVE to the European style town center, and THEN walk
There's no reason that can't be done in this country.
Liverpool One is a good example. Its helped revitalise the waterfront of Liverpool and there's many bustling shops and restaurants and entertainment all accessible and within walking distance. But there's also massive multistory, affordable, car parks. And the roads are [reasonably] accessible to them.
I can go shopping in Liverpool, in shops within walking distance of somewhere to park my car, and its busy and popular.
If a city can do that, there's no reason a town can't. Build multistory affordable car parks in your town centre and make traffic to those car parks flow, and people will choose to shop there. Make it all designed to be cyclist-friendly and treat drivers as contemptible devilspawn, then don't complain that you've got no customers.
Any country other than China would've gotten a lot more flak for this (while retaliation against the US would be just as minimal, criticism would be way louder).
The fools meddled with something entirely unnecessarily and didn't even safeguard it, infecting the whole world.
Weaning ourselves away from Chinese economic integration is not only a useful logistical safeguard, it's also a justified response given their stupidity over this.
Perhaps the world might ask China for reparations, if Donald Trump hadn't already done that. They can hardly be seen to be following him...
Shapps approved the funding scheme that didn't allow time for research and proper consultations. So he has to be held largely responsible.
But the man driving all of this is Patrick Lingwood. A council officer and thus not democratically accountable to anyone.
He is a long time anti-car campaigner with close ties to a number of well funded lobby organisations.
I think if you were to ask cycling organisations around Oxfordshire their opinion of Mr Lingwood, you might be surprised how exasperated they are by him.
Oh I am well aware of the infighting going on because the cycling lobby groups aren't getting everything they want NOW.
That's not a fair characterisation. There's no infighting, the groups are more united than I've ever known them. They are pointing out that Mr Lingwood is delivering infrastructure which isn't compliant with what the (Conservative) Government requires, and is much worse what other cities - London, Manchester, Birmingham, Cambridge - are delivering.
I meant between the groups and Lingwood.
The whole thing has been rushed and divisive. Too much imposing and too little listening.
If they had done proper survey work and modelling to show the reality of the current situation and what difference their plans might make them they could be persuasive.
But they are refusing to do business impact assessments. They aren't doing doing full equality impact assessments. There is no baseline data for any of the schemes. There has been no traffic modelling.
It is a woeful attempt at policymaking and implementation. Paternalistic and arrogant.
It comes as no surprise that the newly installed LTNs in East Oxford are being attacked and removed by frustrated residents. A more measured approach would have avoided the anger that has been created.
Comments
It will be another of his pointless relaunches.
Make the town centre more appealling then.
What's been done to make Bishop Auckland more appealling to drive into and park at? Or have the Council been spending years trying to pedestrianise the town centre, make it difficult to drive into or park at?
For too many years braindead anti-car zealots have been trying to make town centres a nightmare to drive into, then they whinge about why are town centres dying and people are choosing to drive into out of town shopping centres they can easily park at and load any shopping into the boot of their car at.
Senior Tory MP says 20 MPs is too high for leadership candidate threshold
They say candidates who are not frontrunners need time to build up support, and point out that things can change very quickly
They suggest a threshold of 15 would be fairer
https://twitter.com/Steven_Swinford/status/1546435466232201216
And Gove's support for Badenoch - he can't expect her to win so which of the credible candidates is it designed to help?
A few weeks ago somebody posted a list of policies he'd announced, and I graded it 4/10 - a decent base to build from, but needed much more fleshing out.
Add this to the list, it's down to 3.5/10.
Well there is the Auckland Project https://aucklandproject.org/ and £20m of Government money https://bishopaucklandtownteam.org/almost-20m-will-be-invested-into-bishop-auckland/
But in both cases it's fighting a losing battle because the out of town shopping centre has destroyed the basis of the local economy...
You can see the same thing in Sheffield (Meadowhall has gutted Sheffield town centre) and in Stockton / Boro where Teesside park first destroyed Stockton town centre and then over the last 3 years taken Boro with it.
But what about Sebastian Fox?
That's really going to make the party look fresh and innovative.
Given that the BBC are looking for a permanent replacement for Richard Osman, Starmer would be a perfect fit for Pointless
The relevant question is who makes the most progress?
In Trafford, grammar schools are the most successful at pupil progress. I don't know whether you could say this is true of working class children at grammars vs non-selectives in Trafford - would expect so but don't have the data.
I also think non- grammars in Trafford deliver progress which is above national average. But my data may be out of date, and I do know whether this is typical of selective authorities.
Your market-uber-alles theory doesn't cope with reality.
Though, if we're seeing a shift from grain being used to feed cows to produce milk, to grain being used to feed people directly, perhaps that's the change we need in the short term to keep the world fed during the Ukraine War and its impact on grain harvest and distribution.
Which means you have a lovely shopping area for those who can drive and have a car leaving once again nothing for those who use public transport..
If a fourth contender is going to break ahead of the pack, they need to do it soon
As for who wins the members between Sunak and Truss/Mordaunt, probably Sunak will lose BUT there will be more dirt dished. Do the Sunakites have anything on Liz or Penny?
Or is there more on Rishi?
The Times was hinting, deliciously, that there are revelations about BDSM sex and I've been trying to work out which candidate is the most likely kinkster. I wonder if it is Mordaunt, but that might just be because she's the only one that gives me teh tinglez
I've read both pages you've linked to, and I don't see parking mentioned once on either page. Instead I see easier "walking and cycling" being mentioned instead. So yes, more pedestrianisation from the look of it - and then you wonder why its dead? 🤦♂️
Why don't people want to go shopping where they can walk to, instead of drive to then load their shopping directly into their boot? The mystery continues . . . 🤦♂️
He has converted a barn into a restaurant, and the pitch is that they will slaughter a single cow and cook every part of it.
The diners will each get a bit, but they don't know which bit. Some will get fillet steak, some will get tripe.
https://mobile.twitter.com/SholaMos1/status/1545709219114110978
Could be 78% say Keir who??
but the dirty tricks brigade are in full flow
I’m told directors at the foreign office are now looking at the Truss launch video, because some of the footage was filmed by civil servants not spads and they may not be allowed to use it
https://twitter.com/ShippersUnbound/status/1546427236349247492
Huge retail or business parks without a residential property within walking distance.
Sprawling new build estates without any commercial space at all.
This is a relatively recent development.
Austerity is back by the looks of it
Riots nailed on if so methinks
I'm not certain of this, obviously: just think this the most likely outcome out of a wide variety of possible outcomes. I reckon Truss is good value at anything better than 3-1.
As to what Gove means by backing Badenoch - maybe it means exactly what it looks like? But I'd say Badenoch fishes in the same pool as Truss, so it helps Mordaunt.
And have even come up with a funky new logo: https://twitter.com/thejonnyreilly/status/1546438213371305985/photo/1
If they're not routinely throwing away milk, then its just natural wastage, which happens in almost all businesses handling fresh produce, so not a real problem.
So yes, my market theory does work for reality.
Though its weird to simultaneously argue there aren't enough staff for the sector and that there is so much oversupply in the sector that produce has to go down the drain instead. Which staff are generating the produce that is going down the drain, if there's supposedly a staff shortage? Your desire to make everything into a problem is self-defeating since you are simultaneously claiming the sector is too burnt and frozen at the same time.
Anyone holding on to cows and dumping milk is doing so in the hope that the market will rapidly improve and that they will want all their herd next year, or it might be that they can't cover their overheads with a smaller herd anyway, so if they shrink their herd they may as well close the farm. They're not locked in to having a certain number of cows for the whole year.
Edit: My guess is that if the Ukraine War ends and prices of fertiliser and feed return to previous levels, then the price of young dairy cows in Ireland will get to be very high, as farmers look to rebuild their herd numbers.
I get your point though as the centre looks even more derelict now but not sure how to solve it.
It was designed to "get people out of their cars" and walking from cafe to shop to office to art gallery. It was mainly Italianate, with hints of France and Britain
It kinda worked, there were people walking around and - unusually for the deep south - plenty of places for people to sit outside and eat, drink under parasols
Except, the entire thing was surrounded by vast parking lots so people could DRIVE to the European style town center, and THEN walk
Like an Olympic 800 metres heat, the majority of the field will see making the next round as their target.
Our lovely county and city councils are pursuing a very aggressive anti car set of policies.
Whilst at the same time they are colluding with the bus companies to remove/reduce bus routes including one of the Park and Ride services.
They are also closing car parks and removing hundreds on-street parking spaces. And the hourly rate for the remaining on-street spaces has recently gone up to £6 per hour.
Not forgetting the new Zero Emissions Zone which they are planning on extending to most of the city centre
All of this is creating a toxic atmosphere for traders, service providers and residents.
You cannot simultaneously make it harder for car users and public transport users at the same time. It is all stick and no carrot.
Bus companies are complaining that recent changes are causing new delays. Taxi drivers are refusing to serve certain parts of the city.
Some post boxes were sealed because Royal Mail could no longer access them in a timely fashion.
It is creating so much anger and division.
And the man to blame.... Grant Shapps. If his department had not offered free money for so-called Active Travel schemes, most of these projects would never have happened.
I'd add that Mordaunt doesn't seem especially transfer friendly to me. Whan Badenoch, Braverman, Javid, Zahawi, Patel (if standing) get knocked out, Truss surely gets the lion's share of their support.
Similarly, the others on being knocked out are more likely to go for Sunak, IMO.
Whose voters might go to Penny? Shapps?
I think Penny's downfall will prove to be Self ID. It isn't popular amongst Tory members or, AFAICS, MPs.
Elsewhere, however where the development wasn't lead by the local developer none of those things are being done nor thought about.
A friend at High School was a year older. Why? Because he'd failed grade one and had to repeat. As a result it was discovered he was massively dyslexic. He got help ASAP.
Combine the carrot of proper, safe cycle tracks with the stick of one LTN at a time, and you'd get to the same place with much less rancour.
But OCC have chosen not to deliver proper cycle tracks, they're just painting lines on roads instead. They're going for a big bang on LTNs. And they're implementing the Park & Ride fare reductions too late. It's being implemented really haphazardly and, even as someone who supports the broad thrust of it, I find it really frustrating.
Liverpool One is a good example. Its helped revitalise the waterfront of Liverpool and there's many bustling shops and restaurants and entertainment all accessible and within walking distance. But there's also massive multistory, affordable, car parks. And the roads are [reasonably] accessible to them.
I can go shopping in Liverpool, in shops within walking distance of somewhere to park my car, and its busy and popular.
If a city can do that, there's no reason a town can't. Build multistory affordable car parks in your town centre and make traffic to those car parks flow, and people will choose to shop there. Make it all designed to be cyclist-friendly and treat drivers as contemptible devilspawn, then don't complain that you've got no customers.
But Kemi...
No TRUE black person...
The person who wins will become PM. They should make at least a show of showing why they would be good at that. None of them see to have a clue, though some are marginally less bad than others.
In the meantime, I'll settle for the latest 11% YouGov Labour poll lead under Keir Starmer's leadership.
As opposed to the 24% Conservative poll lead in the final YouGov poll before Corbyn left.
But the man driving all of this is Patrick Lingwood. A council officer and thus not democratically accountable to anyone.
He is a long time anti-car campaigner with close ties to a number of well funded lobby organisations.
That simply isn't possible in other places which is why Sheffield ended up with Meadowhall (out of town) rather than Sheffield One (within the City).
https://twitter.com/DavidSteadson/status/1546308765171224576?s=20&t=SQ-2_hTWfeFe6RKebWvLZQ
"This graph is a draft for a Long Covid paper I'm working on. The paper will be a while, but I think it's important that people - and policy makers - understand the implications now.
It is *very* serious."
This has been my lurking fear for a while. Covid seems to be easily reinfecting people, even the vaxxed, and every time you get an infection there is a new risk of Long Covid. The risk seems to be about 20% (CDC estimate), but even if it is 1% the implications are fairly horrific, given that Long Covid can easily disable you, for months or forever
Over time virtually everyone will get Long Covid: that is the statistical implication. So more and more people will be disabled, and there is sweet FA we can do about it. According to the thread, the Bank of England suspects this hidden issue is behind some inflation and the difficulties of finding workers: the workers have fallen out of the system due to Long Covid, and millions more will follow. Grim
"With current estimates of the risk of Long Covid at approx 20% at each infection (yellow line), and policies leading to an expected 2-3 infections per year, **the vast majority of people can expect to have suffered some form of Long Covid within the next 2-3 years**"
Further thought. China knows more about this wretched virus than any other country, they engineered it and accidentally leaked it ("probably"), and they are the only country pursuing Zero Covid. Is it because they know the threat of Long Covid?
I repeat again, for the umpteenth time, you complain that Bishop Auckland's High Street is dead but what has the Council done to make it easier to drive to and park at? Not vaguely more attractive, but specifically more attractive for cars?
It doesn't matter how "attractive" something is, if you can't drive there, many people won't want to go there. If you spend a fortune on an anticar vendetta then don't whinge afterwards that people are driving somewhere else instead. Maybe Meadowhall has done more to make itself attractive for cars than Sheffield has?
2.78 Rishi Sunak
4.8 Penny Mordaunt
6 Liz Truss
13.5 Tom Tugendhat
19.5 Jeremy Hunt
20 Kemi Badenoch
32 Sajid Javid
46 Nadhim Zahawi
50 Priti Patel
60 Dominic Raab
60 Suella Braverman
There may be one.
All the main parties are geared up to manage the sacrifices net zero will bring. Much more expensive food. Less foreign travel. Hugely expensive energy. Slow or no growth. A vast monitoring state. Give up your car and your boiler. Power rationing.
Sri Lanka is going to happen in other parts of the world as people get to breaking point.
"Keep a gap of less than one cycle length in a pace line" for the Highway code.
Any country other than China would've gotten a lot more flak for this (while retaliation against the US would be just as minimal, criticism would be way louder).
The fools meddled with something entirely unnecessarily and didn't even safeguard it, infecting the whole world.
Weaning ourselves away from Chinese economic integration is not only a useful logistical safeguard, it's also a justified response given their stupidity over this.
The reality is that unless you have major wastelands within a town centre you just don't have the ability to improve access as you can't afford to buy the land needed to build the road.
The Law Commission last reviewed charity law in 2017 and a new Charities Act was passed earlier this year. I don't think Labour even have a shadow Charities Minister at the moment.
The issue for Labour is whether expending a lot of time on complicated charity law is necessarily the most important priority or the best use of its Parliamentary time. It risks having a whiff of the hunting bill about it.
My dad reckons Truss wins the first ballot, and he fears a Truss coronation before the recess. I know HY will be about to jump in members won’t stand for being by passed again, but, and it’s a big but, who do membership wave their fists at? Hardly Truss fault if there’s no opposition left, hardly 1922 fault if MPs decide on coronation. Besides the argument will come back, it’s not just having lost an election and selecting LOTO, it’s needing a PM to tackle land war in Europe and economic crisis. And a lot of the 100K membership might not be upset by Truss coronation anyway.
Don’t dislike the messenger if you don’t like sound of this scenario!
One example of cities and big shopping centres co-existing is Newcastle. Newcastle city centre seems to thrive despite the MetroCentre existing just a few miles away. The MetroCentre is easy to get to by car with it being directly off the A1 but Tyne and Wear's metro system means that for public transport users it's way easier to get to Newcastle city centre.
With my own city of Leeds, I live 35-40 mins walk from the centre of the city, 2 mins from the local station into Leeds (6 minute train journey) and often find myself driving in in poorer weather due to cheap parking on the outskirts of the centre at £1.40 for 2 hours. The train isn't appealing as it's only every 30 minutes and I can park 5 minutes further walk past the station for half the price of a return ticket.
Looking at the webpage you linked to, it doesn't even mention parking or access as something being marked for improvement. Instead it specifically mentions "walking and cycling". I don't know about Bishop Auckland specifically, but typically "cycling routes" make it harder, not easier, to drive so looks like they're doubling down on the pedestrianisation efforts that are hollowing out and killing town centres in much of the country.
Has Bishop Auckland done anything pro-car to make driving and parking easier, rather than harder? Or has it done the opposite?
If its done the opposite, then don't be shocked that cars aren't going there and are going where they're welcome instead.
The whole thing has been rushed and divisive. Too much imposing and too little listening.
If they had done proper survey work and modelling to show the reality of the current situation and what difference their plans might make them they could be persuasive.
But they are refusing to do business impact assessments. They aren't doing doing full equality impact assessments. There is no baseline data for any of the schemes. There has been no traffic modelling.
It is a woeful attempt at policymaking and implementation. Paternalistic and arrogant.
It comes as no surprise that the newly installed LTNs in East Oxford are being attacked and removed by frustrated residents. A more measured approach would have avoided the anger that has been created.
This one would!