This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
Yes, it works
"House prices remain buoyant, and Conibear believes it’s not simply the high standard of building but the “favourability of the environment”. Depending on access to garages and private gardens, two-bedroom apartments and semi-detached homes in Poundbury can start anywhere between £190,000 and £275,000. Many of the three-bedroom detached homes go for somewhere between £325,000 and £400,000."
This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
Yes, it works
"House prices remain buoyant, and Conibear believes it’s not simply the high standard of building but the “favourability of the environment”. Depending on access to garages and private gardens, two-bedroom apartments and semi-detached homes in Poundbury can start anywhere between £190,000 and £275,000. Many of the three-bedroom detached homes go for somewhere between £325,000 and £400,000."
It does depend on having an established county town - Dorchester - with its facilities as an appendix, rather like Cowley has Oxford as an appendix ... it's not built out in the middle of FA, but is within walking distance of the centre/rail stations, 30 mins or so.
Sure, and it's not perfect, and it is quiet (but the residents presumably like it that way)
The point is it is 3000% better than much of the crap being thrown up around the UK, which has no regard for aesthetics or urbanism at all. And is all in hideous cheap red brick
Not in red brick, but (for some) covered in harling, you know, the stuff you don't like when it is in Scotland. Do you call it rendering or what? Or at least the first part of the project was, though the harling was coming off at least one fairly new house [edit] only a few years on.
The thing that makes the skin on my back creep, as I have I think mentioned here befo,e is the use of different building stones from different bands of the Jurassic belt - normally not found together. Which, to me, gives it the same sort of feeling of transplantation into alien contiguity that one also gets (for laudable reasons) at St Fagans Folk Museum or the Weald and Downland Museum.
But that is a quibble. Most wouldn't even notice it.
The problem is, you kind of do notice. Because living in England, you subconsciously soak up “what goes with what”.
Poundbury is an interesting experiment, a success on some measures and a failure on others.
But it is a living experiment, so hopefully it’s failures can be addressed over time.
More successful than Skelmersdale or that Scottish one which essentially need to be completely demolished.
But, it works
If I took 20 large, random yet comparable new developments (including Poundbury) and asked you which one would you live in, almost certainly it would be Poundbury
Look at all these. Poundbury is nicer than all of them
Soulless boring redbrick mediocrity. At best. Actively horrible at worst
UK housebuilders are lazy and cheapskates. They want to drop the same design of house on different developments across the country, because it is cheaper. At the same time they are also looking for every possible way to pinch pennies.
I live in a 4 year old new build. It wasn't a cheap house. They used the cheapest baths, work surfaces etc. that they could possibly get away with. They even used plastic chrome-effect edging to put around copper pipes so they wouldn't have to use short sections of real chrome pipes for towel radiators.
The houses are all the same as they can then have the same materials list for the same house wherever it is in the country. We agreed to buy our house when it was still early in construction. We asked for some minor changes. The only thing they would agree to was to install network cabling.
There is no incentive to design houses in the UK that are in keeping with the local community and with well thought out connections and infrastructure.
It *was* a cheap house and you have set out why - that you paid a lot is because they made a huge profit. Remember that the proposed shake-up of planning laws will enable Barratt et al to keep building unsuitable cheapo ugly shitboxes for large profits, only this time without having to worry about consent or local democracy.
BTW I bought my own Barratt shitbox in 2005 sold it for a loss in 2021, so I do know how bad some of these are - and the other builder putting up other phases of our huge estate was even worse.
Serious question, how on earth did the house lose value in that period of massive house price rises?
This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
Yes, it works
"House prices remain buoyant, and Conibear believes it’s not simply the high standard of building but the “favourability of the environment”. Depending on access to garages and private gardens, two-bedroom apartments and semi-detached homes in Poundbury can start anywhere between £190,000 and £275,000. Many of the three-bedroom detached homes go for somewhere between £325,000 and £400,000."
This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
Yes, it works
"House prices remain buoyant, and Conibear believes it’s not simply the high standard of building but the “favourability of the environment”. Depending on access to garages and private gardens, two-bedroom apartments and semi-detached homes in Poundbury can start anywhere between £190,000 and £275,000. Many of the three-bedroom detached homes go for somewhere between £325,000 and £400,000."
It does depend on having an established county town - Dorchester - with its facilities as an appendix, rather like Cowley has Oxford as an appendix ... it's not built out in the middle of FA, but is within walking distance of the centre/rail stations, 30 mins or so.
Sure, and it's not perfect, and it is quiet (but the residents presumably like it that way)
The point is it is 3000% better than much of the crap being thrown up around the UK, which has no regard for aesthetics or urbanism at all. And is all in hideous cheap red brick
Not in red brick, but (for some) covered in harling, you know, the stuff you don't like when it is in Scotland. Do you call it rendering or what? Or at least the first part of the project was, though the harling was coming off at least one fairly new house [edit] only a few years on.
The thing that makes the skin on my back creep, as I have I think mentioned here befo,e is the use of different building stones from different bands of the Jurassic belt - normally not found together. Which, to me, gives it the same sort of feeling of transplantation into alien contiguity that one also gets (for laudable reasons) at St Fagans Folk Museum or the Weald and Downland Museum.
But that is a quibble. Most wouldn't even notice it.
The problem is, you kind of do notice. Because living in England, you subconsciously soak up “what goes with what”.
Poundbury is an interesting experiment, a success on some measures and a failure on others.
But it is a living experiment, so hopefully it’s failures can be addressed over time.
More successful than Skelmersdale or that Scottish one which essentially need to be completely demolished.
But, it works
If I took 20 large, random yet comparable new developments (including Poundbury) and asked you which one would you live in, almost certainly it would be Poundbury
Look at all these. Poundbury is nicer than all of them
Soulless boring redbrick mediocrity. At best. Actively horrible at worst
UK housebuilders are lazy and cheapskates. They want to drop the same design of house on different developments across the country, because it is cheaper. At the same time they are also looking for every possible way to pinch pennies.
I live in a 4 year old new build. It wasn't a cheap house. They used the cheapest baths, work surfaces etc. that they could possibly get away with. They even used plastic chrome-effect edging to put around copper pipes so they wouldn't have to use short sections of real chrome pipes for towel radiators.
The houses are all the same as they can then have the same materials list for the same house wherever it is in the country. We agreed to buy our house when it was still early in construction. We asked for some minor changes. The only thing they would agree to was to install network cabling.
There is no incentive to design houses in the UK that are in keeping with the local community and with well thought out connections and infrastructure.
As per the discussion a week or so ago, the cost of building houses (not including the land) is not expensive because of the cheap and shoddy materials and methods. On new estates electricians are not used for the electrical works, just labourers with an electrician checking some of the works. The small power (sockets and switches) are made from the cheapest plastic and the wiring is just thrown in.
I would never recoomend anyone buys a new house due to the remedial works that will be required.
The problem is, you kind of do notice. Because living in England, you subconsciously soak up “what goes with what”.
Poundbury is an interesting experiment, a success on some measures and a failure on others.
But it is a living experiment, so hopefully it’s failures can be addressed over time.
More successful than Skelmersdale or that Scottish one which essentially need to be completely demolished.
But, it works
If I took 20 large, random yet comparable new developments (including Poundbury) and asked you which one would you live in, almost certainly it would be Poundbury
Look at all these. Poundbury is nicer than all of them
Soulless boring redbrick mediocrity. At best. Actively horrible at worst
The reason all of these, including Poundbury, have an uncanny, soulless feeling is that they are too planned. We need to let development happen more organically with a local vernacular.
This will come as a shock to PB-ers, but I have a very bad feeling about the Ukraine War
And I believe we need a negotiated peace, because the risk of nuclear war is too great
But just saying that without suggesting how doesn't get us very far
Maybe something like this
In some highly public place, the G7 leaders get together and offer peace terms to Putin along these lines
1. An immediate ceasefire 2. Both sides withdraw military to pre-Feb 2022 lines 3. Sanctions are progressively dropped over the ensuing two years, pipelines reopened (but EU countries can obviously decide if they still want to rely on Russian energy, I doubt they will) 4. Refugees return to Ukraine 5. UN organised referendums are held in the four provinces on whether they wish to be part of Ukraine or Russia 6. Ukraine will join NATO but will agree not to station nukes on Uke soil 7. The world will recognise Russian possession of Crimea 8. The G20 will create a fund to rebuild Ukraine AND Russian infrastructure damaged in the war (eg Kerch Bridge) 9. Aaaand..... everyone relax
That's essentially what Dynamo proposed, before Elon got wind of it and repeated it.
We can assume the territories vote to stay in Russia. So as for the nuke-free thing we can even achieve some symmetry: no nukes in Ukraine; no nukes in the Russian territories, except Crimea and Sevastopol. Russia is a Black Sea naval power after all. Crimea doesn't even border Ukraine.
Best if Ukraine stays out of NATO. Ditto Sweden and Finland.
The no nukes requirement can be made stronger in both areas: reduce militarisation more than that.
And on 5 and 7, if the UN is organising referendum reruns then the veto powers at least can recognise sovereignty according to the results. Suggest China as the best principal monitoring power. Bear in mind that a majority of the veto powers are in NATO and have been arming Ukraine.
You realise the Azov Regiment won't like this? Something has to be done about the Azov Regiment.
That has got to be the most unconvincing lie since Vladimir Putin said he wasn't a war criminal.
I agree about the Azov Regiment. How about they and their fellow neo-Nazis in the Wagner regiment are trapped on an uninhabited island together? Any survivors after twelve months to be given amnesty and a new life in Kazakhstan.
I meant we can assume it for the sake of this discussion. I am in favour of genuinely fair internationally-monitored referendum reruns, where everyone from the territories can vote however they like, without fear of experiencing any kind of hassle for how they've voted. As I understand it, so are the other supporters of Dynamo's plan such as those whose names are anagrams of ELNO.
Whatever the referendum result in each territory, it may turn out that the borders of the four territories have to be adjusted here and there in order to give residents what they want and to maximise security and minimise the chance of clashes. It will be a fantastic step forward if that is the kind of thing people are arguing about rather than killing each other.
No we can't. Because it would not happen. Let's make assumptions based on realism not on the fantasies of Nazis like Vladimir Putin or everyone's favourite demented anti-Semite Dynamo.
There is at least a reasonable - as in, around one in three - chance that a democratic referendum in the Crimea would vote to join with Russia. It's about the same as the odds of Northern Ireland voting to join Ireland, and for much the same reason.
But any of the others? Forget it. It's about the same chance as Yorkshire voting to join an independent Scotland.
Hard to know how such a referendum might fairly be held, given recent history and current conditions. But nonetheless, it's not the most ridiculous of ideas.
Coincidentally, there's a new (longish read) Snyder article up on the history of Crimea. While it's part polemic against Putin's anti-history, it's also quite informative. https://snyder.substack.com/p/russias-crimea-disconnect
I was thinking.... wow Will Schryver's changed his tune.
On topic the loopiest idea EVER from Team Truss was that Liz Truss would ever be anything other than a completely shite Prime Minister.
Nothing will top that doozy.
Apart from the Daily Mail, was there much expectation that Truss would be brilliant? She largely got the gig by not being Sunak (too worried about the numbers adding up), Mordaunt (too woke) or Badenoch (too bonkers, even for desperate Conservative MPs).
That she would be this bad this quickly, that was something of a surprise, I'll grant you.
This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
Yes, it works
"House prices remain buoyant, and Conibear believes it’s not simply the high standard of building but the “favourability of the environment”. Depending on access to garages and private gardens, two-bedroom apartments and semi-detached homes in Poundbury can start anywhere between £190,000 and £275,000. Many of the three-bedroom detached homes go for somewhere between £325,000 and £400,000."
This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
Yes, it works
"House prices remain buoyant, and Conibear believes it’s not simply the high standard of building but the “favourability of the environment”. Depending on access to garages and private gardens, two-bedroom apartments and semi-detached homes in Poundbury can start anywhere between £190,000 and £275,000. Many of the three-bedroom detached homes go for somewhere between £325,000 and £400,000."
It does depend on having an established county town - Dorchester - with its facilities as an appendix, rather like Cowley has Oxford as an appendix ... it's not built out in the middle of FA, but is within walking distance of the centre/rail stations, 30 mins or so.
Sure, and it's not perfect, and it is quiet (but the residents presumably like it that way)
The point is it is 3000% better than much of the crap being thrown up around the UK, which has no regard for aesthetics or urbanism at all. And is all in hideous cheap red brick
Not in red brick, but (for some) covered in harling, you know, the stuff you don't like when it is in Scotland. Do you call it rendering or what? Or at least the first part of the project was, though the harling was coming off at least one fairly new house [edit] only a few years on.
The thing that makes the skin on my back creep, as I have I think mentioned here befo,e is the use of different building stones from different bands of the Jurassic belt - normally not found together. Which, to me, gives it the same sort of feeling of transplantation into alien contiguity that one also gets (for laudable reasons) at St Fagans Folk Museum or the Weald and Downland Museum.
But that is a quibble. Most wouldn't even notice it.
The problem is, you kind of do notice. Because living in England, you subconsciously soak up “what goes with what”.
Poundbury is an interesting experiment, a success on some measures and a failure on others.
But it is a living experiment, so hopefully it’s failures can be addressed over time.
More successful than Skelmersdale or that Scottish one which essentially need to be completely demolished.
But, it works
If I took 20 large, random yet comparable new developments (including Poundbury) and asked you which one would you live in, almost certainly it would be Poundbury
Look at all these. Poundbury is nicer than all of them
Soulless boring redbrick mediocrity. At best. Actively horrible at worst
UK housebuilders are lazy and cheapskates. They want to drop the same design of house on different developments across the country, because it is cheaper. At the same time they are also looking for every possible way to pinch pennies.
I live in a 4 year old new build. It wasn't a cheap house. They used the cheapest baths, work surfaces etc. that they could possibly get away with. They even used plastic chrome-effect edging to put around copper pipes so they wouldn't have to use short sections of real chrome pipes for towel radiators.
The houses are all the same as they can then have the same materials list for the same house wherever it is in the country. We agreed to buy our house when it was still early in construction. We asked for some minor changes. The only thing they would agree to was to install network cabling.
There is no incentive to design houses in the UK that are in keeping with the local community and with well thought out connections and infrastructure.
Yes
I'd like to think Starmer's Labour is on to stuff like this, but depressingly I bet they're not, even though these are obvious ways to make the UK better
Incremental improvements to daily life. Clean the streets. Flowers. Do it
The solution is to allow councils/LHAs to build houses to local needs at rental levels that the local economy can sustain. That is obviously communism though and goes against the interests of large housebuilders who donate to the Tories.
I do think this is the feeling of most people - why should the Tory party be allowed failure after failure without the public chiming in. And for once, the public do want an early GE (although this was pre Truss' really absolutely terrible awful month from hell):
Someone putting panels up, who is going to just be a taker of spot electricity rates, is taking an enormous risk. Panels, right now, are expensive - and so is electricity. The business case of panels is a 30 year one: you hand over money now, and for 30 years (or a little more) you get a gently diminishing flow of electricity.
If the price of energy were to come down - either because lots of people have put panels up, or some other reason - then you could be absolutely hammered. In particular, it's not impossible that on sunny days in June, you might easily see spot electricity prices flirting with the big zero.
But that's not a decision for governments. It's a decision for farmers choosing what to use their land for.
I personally think they would be mad to put panels up on productive land (marginal land is a different issue), but it isn't mine (or the government's) call.
So the government are prioritizing food security over energy security.
I suppose the point is you can build a nuclear plant or a wind farm and it doesn't take up any agricultural space, but turning our farmland into energy generating land isn't necessarily the best use of it if we believe imported food supplies may be disrupted.
What does it take up then?
I'm not in favour of this ban, but they (Wind, nuclear) do take up less footprint than solar per MW of capability. The main thing with power is that we've got to be careful not to fight the last war. Gas prices through LNG expansion driven by US/Europe/Asia arbitrage should fall in the coming years.
Since these farms are taking up potentially valuable agricultural land I'd propose reduction factors on these installations such that if the grid is saturated with renewable energy then payouts per kwh are reduced. Banning them is not correct.
But it isn't zero sum. You build a nuclear plant, you can't also grow on the land, whereas solar you can still grow some crops within the same space.
Sizewell C is 915 acres for 3.2 GW plated capacity 3.2 GW plated capacity from solar would require 16,000 acres.
UK nuclear capacity factor is around 60%, whereas solar is 10% - so you'd need 96,000 acres to effectively replicate sizewell C. That does make sense since uranium is quite energy err dense and sunlight less so.
Now you might be able to farm on that land but it can't produce as much yield as un-solar farmed land.
It doesn't on it's own kill the argument for solar but it's a simple fact that nuclear power is a far more efficient use of land for power generation than solar.
I would sincerely hope that HPC exceeds a 60% capacity factor.
I'm sure it has been pointed out already, but it looks like Truss has dumped the 'growth' vision, and is now just doing anything to please the crowd and try and cling to power. Perhaps it is for the best.
If she has, she'll lose the votes of people like me who liked her growth agenda, while probably still not being trusted by those who already opposed her.
The opposition to solar panels shows that we are perhaps back to benign incompetence, which for me at least is a bit of a relief. The solar panels are not a bad idea, neither were its predecessor (onshore wind turbines), but you have to be quite careful about where you put them to avoid decimating the landscape, which we have just spent a hundred years preserving.
Trouble is the markets are not heaving a sigh of relief, they are pursuing UK debt and turning this into a rout. Which ends where?
With the ERM debacle there was an endpoint. We fell out of the ERM and equilibrium was restored
How do we restore equilibrium here? I am minded that this is more than just a UK issue, this is systemic doubt on a global scale, and the UK is targeted first simply because our stupid government was first out of the trenches into the bullets
It's easy to say it's a global issue, but I think there are some countries currently running a budget surplus. The solution is obvious. The government has to stop borrowing money.
Had it not been for the mini-budget we would have been able to do this over the course of several years, but the catastrophic loss of credibility thanks to Truss and Kwarteng, means that we now need to achieve the same thing more quickly.
Normally when a country gets into a pickle like this it ends up having to increase taxes and cut spending at the same time. The sooner we act the easier it will be to protect spending that will increase our future prosperity (such as scientific research and infrastructure investment), but we're rapidly running out of time to exercise discretion.
If there ever were an "antigrowth coalition" proposal, you're looking at it.
Completely backwards from the government's professed agenda.
100% agreed.
Utter nonsense pandering to the anti growth coalition of NIMBYs. Inexcusable.
Its the raging hypocrisy which is most funny.
They propose a bonfire of red tape for planning applications for housing and fracking They propose a burden of red tape to dictate planning decisions on private land
What do they want? If they are so against red tape why are they proposing red tape? They are in favour of easier planning whilst proposing a dictatorial planning regime?
This is bullshit. If it weren't for a framework of Government incentives, do you really think it would be more profitable for farmers in rainy Britain to put solar panels all over their land than, you know, grow stuff?
However he gets one thing wrong: he thinks it will be a eurozone dollar debt crisis, not UK. And his resolution feels a bit optimistic, in the present circs
The market wants the UK to deliver fiscal austerity, and that is what is going to happen, under Truss or otherwise.
Sadly, it’s not in the UK’s economic (absent bond market pressure) to do so, but that’s the ultimate cost of Truss-Kwarteng specifically and Tory delusions more broadly.
Think Greece, post bail-out, or Ireland, if you want a closer analogy.
This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
Yes, it works
"House prices remain buoyant, and Conibear believes it’s not simply the high standard of building but the “favourability of the environment”. Depending on access to garages and private gardens, two-bedroom apartments and semi-detached homes in Poundbury can start anywhere between £190,000 and £275,000. Many of the three-bedroom detached homes go for somewhere between £325,000 and £400,000."
This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
Yes, it works
"House prices remain buoyant, and Conibear believes it’s not simply the high standard of building but the “favourability of the environment”. Depending on access to garages and private gardens, two-bedroom apartments and semi-detached homes in Poundbury can start anywhere between £190,000 and £275,000. Many of the three-bedroom detached homes go for somewhere between £325,000 and £400,000."
It does depend on having an established county town - Dorchester - with its facilities as an appendix, rather like Cowley has Oxford as an appendix ... it's not built out in the middle of FA, but is within walking distance of the centre/rail stations, 30 mins or so.
Sure, and it's not perfect, and it is quiet (but the residents presumably like it that way)
The point is it is 3000% better than much of the crap being thrown up around the UK, which has no regard for aesthetics or urbanism at all. And is all in hideous cheap red brick
Not in red brick, but (for some) covered in harling, you know, the stuff you don't like when it is in Scotland. Do you call it rendering or what? Or at least the first part of the project was, though the harling was coming off at least one fairly new house [edit] only a few years on.
The thing that makes the skin on my back creep, as I have I think mentioned here befo,e is the use of different building stones from different bands of the Jurassic belt - normally not found together. Which, to me, gives it the same sort of feeling of transplantation into alien contiguity that one also gets (for laudable reasons) at St Fagans Folk Museum or the Weald and Downland Museum.
But that is a quibble. Most wouldn't even notice it.
The problem is, you kind of do notice. Because living in England, you subconsciously soak up “what goes with what”.
Poundbury is an interesting experiment, a success on some measures and a failure on others.
But it is a living experiment, so hopefully it’s failures can be addressed over time.
More successful than Skelmersdale or that Scottish one which essentially need to be completely demolished.
But, it works
If I took 20 large, random yet comparable new developments (including Poundbury) and asked you which one would you live in, almost certainly it would be Poundbury
Look at all these. Poundbury is nicer than all of them
Soulless boring redbrick mediocrity. At best. Actively horrible at worst
UK housebuilders are lazy and cheapskates. They want to drop the same design of house on different developments across the country, because it is cheaper. At the same time they are also looking for every possible way to pinch pennies.
I live in a 4 year old new build. It wasn't a cheap house. They used the cheapest baths, work surfaces etc. that they could possibly get away with. They even used plastic chrome-effect edging to put around copper pipes so they wouldn't have to use short sections of real chrome pipes for towel radiators.
The houses are all the same as they can then have the same materials list for the same house wherever it is in the country. We agreed to buy our house when it was still early in construction. We asked for some minor changes. The only thing they would agree to was to install network cabling.
There is no incentive to design houses in the UK that are in keeping with the local community and with well thought out connections and infrastructure.
It *was* a cheap house and you have set out why - that you paid a lot is because they made a huge profit. Remember that the proposed shake-up of planning laws will enable Barratt et al to keep building unsuitable cheapo ugly shitboxes for large profits, only this time without having to worry about consent or local democracy.
BTW I bought my own Barratt shitbox in 2005 sold it for a loss in 2021, so I do know how bad some of these are - and the other builder putting up other phases of our huge estate was even worse.
Serious question, how on earth did the house lose value in that period of massive house price rises?
The total collapse of house prices on Teesside. BR always demands the concreting over pf everywhere to build 14 million new houses. Well thats pretty much what happened on Teesside. I lived on part of a development that eventually stretched to 1,400 homes in a small area. Across the border in Boro swathes of new homes. Across the river in Stockton the same. Many thousands of homes added, most of which are "executive-style".
The market fell out of housing in 08/09 and the developers simply undercut the market. So you couldn't sell your house without making a massive loss for more than a decade as new prices were so much lower. Eventually we moved back into positive equity and were lucky to only lose a paper £45k - at least we were able to sell.
So many were vacant repossessions (6 on my street alone at one point) - nobody could afford to buy, and the ones that went for rental brought in various scumbags until the BTL landlords gave up as rental income didn't cover the mortgage. And those went empty. Only the final completion of the development brought stability back to the local market, with prices rebounding thanks to the post-Covid boom (our paper loss would have been £60k without this...)
On topic: No idea why this is being discouraged when we're gas limited.
Well for one thing it will have no impact on the demand for gas on cold January evenings when the sun doesn't shine.
We will have more supply of gas though as we'll have burnt less in the CCGTs when the sun is out and solar is generating power. Your comments would be correct if we solely used gas for heating and not for electricity generation AND domestic heating. What's needed are carefully written contracts for when we're producing excess electricity to the grid from renewables. Or you will end up with excessive solar.
Yes, the solar will reduce gas consumption for a few hours in the middle of the January day when the sun is poking above the horizon, and we can ramp down some CCGT output. But in the grand scheme of things, the impact on gas consumption will be small during the season of maximum demand.
But it would mean that we would burn much less gas over the course of the year, and could use the summer lulls to fill storage.
The problem is, you kind of do notice. Because living in England, you subconsciously soak up “what goes with what”.
Poundbury is an interesting experiment, a success on some measures and a failure on others.
But it is a living experiment, so hopefully it’s failures can be addressed over time.
More successful than Skelmersdale or that Scottish one which essentially need to be completely demolished.
But, it works
If I took 20 large, random yet comparable new developments (including Poundbury) and asked you which one would you live in, almost certainly it would be Poundbury
Look at all these. Poundbury is nicer than all of them
Soulless boring redbrick mediocrity. At best. Actively horrible at worst
The reason all of these, including Poundbury, have an uncanny, soulless feeling is that they are too planned. We need to let development happen more organically with a local vernacular.
Ideally, yes, but there are goodish reasons to get a new place up to its final size reasonably quicky as well. For a start, we really need the houses. Also, all the other stuff that makes up a community (shops, transport, schools, clubs...) works a lot better once a new place is full-sized. If a neighbourhood stays too small for too long, people just get into the habit of doing the rest of their lives elsewhere and the place never becomes a place.
It takes time, and intention, for a place to develop its soul. (The Church of England has started to recognise that being vicar in a new place is a different kettle of fish to taking over in an established community. It needs different training and temperaments to do well.) Poundbury, at least, is trying to do that.
Can it be done without the intervention of a royal? Given the emaciated state of local councils, I rather doubt it.
I’m doubtful a final peace deal can be done in Ukraine. The interests of the two parties are too opposed right now.
What is more likely is an uneasy ceasefire leaving the territories in question either side of a line of control with periodic skirmishes and provocations, similar to India/Pakistan.
A stalemate where Russia holds on to Crimea is unstable. Ukraine would hold the water supply to it.
After the invasion of Crimea a second conflict was inevitable because Crimea is an implausible place for the line to be drawn, which is why we have spent years training the Ukrainian army.
Now either we support Ukraine to liberate Crimea and end the war, or we'll be looking at a third conflict after this one because the line will still be toxic and unstable.
With the Russian military weak and defeated, and Ukraine soon to liberate Kherson and control the water supply into Crimea, now is the time to get the Russians out of Crimea and end this war once and for all.
Very plausible arguments, but of course Russia has successfully held onto Crimea for 8 years - whilst this has caused problems and helped lead us down the path to the current situation, if I were to predict any outcome of this conflict (rather than my own preferred outcome) it would be that we will be seeing a ceasefire with Russia either fully or almost-fully withdrawn from its 2022 incursions, but with Crimea still in Russian hands.
I have no doubt the Ukrainians want to force Russia out of Crimea and I believe that Russia should leave Crimea, but I suspect that there will be not be a neat resolution to this conflict.
Well of course Russia has held onto Crimea for eight years because there's been no further fighting in those eight years, and Ukraine wasn't going to start a conflict in that time.
But having had one started on them, and when they're winning it and liberating their lost territory, why would they agree to stop at liberating all but Crimea, leaving an unstable situation that will see them at loggerheads with Russia again in the future? Why not press the advantage to end this war now, while they can?
If Russia withdraws from Crimea and the rest of Ukraine, then Ukraine joins NATO, this is over. We have stable borders returned to their pre-war point, and the conflict can slowly be put behind us. Any stalemate will just drag the war on and be a thorn in the side that keeps an ongoing risk of new fighting and more nuclear threats but with Russia having had time to regroup and retrain and reequip their forces.
Interesting that Erdogan has told Russia to return Crimea to Ukraine.
Interesting in the sense of what he might have extracted from NATO to say that and whether we're on the hook for any of it you mean.
"BREAKING: Ukraine’s GUR says Russian forces received instructions to attack civilian infrastructure on October 2-3. These attacks were pre planned and not a spontaneous response to the Crimea bridge"
"This shows the Lyman defeat and domestic backlash was the catalyst for today’s events. The Kremlin is nevertheless framing this as a counterterrorism operation"
If there ever were an "antigrowth coalition" proposal, you're looking at it.
Completely backwards from the government's professed agenda.
100% agreed.
Utter nonsense pandering to the anti growth coalition of NIMBYs. Inexcusable.
Its the raging hypocrisy which is most funny.
They propose a bonfire of red tape for planning applications for housing and fracking They propose a burden of red tape to dictate planning decisions on private land
What do they want? If they are so against red tape why are they proposing red tape? They are in favour of easier planning whilst proposing a dictatorial planning regime?
This is bullshit. If it weren't for a framework of Government incentives, do you really think it would be more profitable for farmers in rainy Britain to put solar panels all over their land than, you know, grow stuff?
Bravo. How to demonstrate your total lack of understanding of the economics of farming.
This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
The people who live there seem to like it (with some criticisms) and say that it is improving as it grows.
This day is fairly anecdotal - but supported by the house values. Which are above the area in general and seem to hold their value better than other new developments.
Poundsbury appears to be a moderate success: prices are higher, but so are construction costs. I think the most positive indicator is that the discount to newbuild price is only about 8-9% there, against around 12% in most new developments.
If there ever were an "antigrowth coalition" proposal, you're looking at it.
Completely backwards from the government's professed agenda.
100% agreed.
Utter nonsense pandering to the anti growth coalition of NIMBYs. Inexcusable.
Its the raging hypocrisy which is most funny.
They propose a bonfire of red tape for planning applications for housing and fracking They propose a burden of red tape to dictate planning decisions on private land
What do they want? If they are so against red tape why are they proposing red tape? They are in favour of easier planning whilst proposing a dictatorial planning regime?
This is bullshit. If it weren't for a framework of Government incentives, do you really think it would be more profitable for farmers in rainy Britain to put solar panels all over their land than, you know, grow stuff?
I mean, if we removed agri subsidies and solar subsidies, than maybe. I know the few I've put on my roof have managed to turn into profit, and are really making me not worried about the electric prices at the moment.
Also, this is epitome of mountains from mole hills:
"BREAKING: Ukraine’s GUR says Russian forces received instructions to attack civilian infrastructure on October 2-3. These attacks were pre planned and not a spontaneous response to the Crimea bridge"
"This shows the Lyman defeat and domestic backlash was the catalyst for today’s events. The Kremlin is nevertheless framing this as a counterterrorism operation"
Yes, today’s events are primarily following on from the “referenda” - the Russian domestic view is that half of Ukraine is now Russian, and any attacks on Russians there are terrorist attacks against Russia by the “Nazis”. What we have seen today, is the response to that, rather than a direct response to events in Kerch the other day.
That there has to be several weeks’ planning, into launching a volley of fewer than a hundred missiles, says everything about the lack of decent capability remaining with the Russian military.
Yes, there’s a lot of media, especially in the States, now wanting Ukraine to sue to peace, and saying that it’s not in the US interest to keep arming the defenders against a nuclear threat.
This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
Yes, it works
"House prices remain buoyant, and Conibear believes it’s not simply the high standard of building but the “favourability of the environment”. Depending on access to garages and private gardens, two-bedroom apartments and semi-detached homes in Poundbury can start anywhere between £190,000 and £275,000. Many of the three-bedroom detached homes go for somewhere between £325,000 and £400,000."
This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
Yes, it works
"House prices remain buoyant, and Conibear believes it’s not simply the high standard of building but the “favourability of the environment”. Depending on access to garages and private gardens, two-bedroom apartments and semi-detached homes in Poundbury can start anywhere between £190,000 and £275,000. Many of the three-bedroom detached homes go for somewhere between £325,000 and £400,000."
It does depend on having an established county town - Dorchester - with its facilities as an appendix, rather like Cowley has Oxford as an appendix ... it's not built out in the middle of FA, but is within walking distance of the centre/rail stations, 30 mins or so.
Sure, and it's not perfect, and it is quiet (but the residents presumably like it that way)
The point is it is 3000% better than much of the crap being thrown up around the UK, which has no regard for aesthetics or urbanism at all. And is all in hideous cheap red brick
Not in red brick, but (for some) covered in harling, you know, the stuff you don't like when it is in Scotland. Do you call it rendering or what? Or at least the first part of the project was, though the harling was coming off at least one fairly new house [edit] only a few years on.
The thing that makes the skin on my back creep, as I have I think mentioned here befo,e is the use of different building stones from different bands of the Jurassic belt - normally not found together. Which, to me, gives it the same sort of feeling of transplantation into alien contiguity that one also gets (for laudable reasons) at St Fagans Folk Museum or the Weald and Downland Museum.
But that is a quibble. Most wouldn't even notice it.
The problem is, you kind of do notice. Because living in England, you subconsciously soak up “what goes with what”.
Poundbury is an interesting experiment, a success on some measures and a failure on others.
But it is a living experiment, so hopefully it’s failures can be addressed over time.
More successful than Skelmersdale or that Scottish one which essentially need to be completely demolished.
But, it works
If I took 20 large, random yet comparable new developments (including Poundbury) and asked you which one would you live in, almost certainly it would be Poundbury
Look at all these. Poundbury is nicer than all of them
Soulless boring redbrick mediocrity. At best. Actively horrible at worst
UK housebuilders are lazy and cheapskates. They want to drop the same design of house on different developments across the country, because it is cheaper. At the same time they are also looking for every possible way to pinch pennies.
I live in a 4 year old new build. It wasn't a cheap house. They used the cheapest baths, work surfaces etc. that they could possibly get away with. They even used plastic chrome-effect edging to put around copper pipes so they wouldn't have to use short sections of real chrome pipes for towel radiators.
The houses are all the same as they can then have the same materials list for the same house wherever it is in the country. We agreed to buy our house when it was still early in construction. We asked for some minor changes. The only thing they would agree to was to install network cabling.
There is no incentive to design houses in the UK that are in keeping with the local community and with well thought out connections and infrastructure.
It *was* a cheap house and you have set out why - that you paid a lot is because they made a huge profit. Remember that the proposed shake-up of planning laws will enable Barratt et al to keep building unsuitable cheapo ugly shitboxes for large profits, only this time without having to worry about consent or local democracy.
BTW I bought my own Barratt shitbox in 2005 sold it for a loss in 2021, so I do know how bad some of these are - and the other builder putting up other phases of our huge estate was even worse.
Serious question, how on earth did the house lose value in that period of massive house price rises?
The total collapse of house prices on Teesside. BR always demands the concreting over pf everywhere to build 14 million new houses. Well thats pretty much what happened on Teesside. I lived on part of a development that eventually stretched to 1,400 homes in a small area. Across the border in Boro swathes of new homes. Across the river in Stockton the same. Many thousands of homes added, most of which are "executive-style".
The market fell out of housing in 08/09 and the developers simply undercut the market. So you couldn't sell your house without making a massive loss for more than a decade as new prices were so much lower. Eventually we moved back into positive equity and were lucky to only lose a paper £45k - at least we were able to sell.
So many were vacant repossessions (6 on my street alone at one point) - nobody could afford to buy, and the ones that went for rental brought in various scumbags until the BTL landlords gave up as rental income didn't cover the mortgage. And those went empty. Only the final completion of the development brought stability back to the local market, with prices rebounding thanks to the post-Covid boom (our paper loss would have been £60k without this...)
So house prices were kept affordable - good.
And houses people wanted to buy were sold, while those whom people didn't want to but weren't. Good.
Scale this up, and we will have any shoeboxes left unsold because nobody will want them, and quality, affordable homes everywhere. Win/win.
If you lose equity, then that's not the end of the world, housing should be a home not an investment.
If there ever were an "antigrowth coalition" proposal, you're looking at it.
Completely backwards from the government's professed agenda.
100% agreed.
Utter nonsense pandering to the anti growth coalition of NIMBYs. Inexcusable.
Its the raging hypocrisy which is most funny.
They propose a bonfire of red tape for planning applications for housing and fracking They propose a burden of red tape to dictate planning decisions on private land
What do they want? If they are so against red tape why are they proposing red tape? They are in favour of easier planning whilst proposing a dictatorial planning regime?
This is bullshit. If it weren't for a framework of Government incentives, do you really think it would be more profitable for farmers in rainy Britain to put solar panels all over their land than, you know, grow stuff?
Given most make only marginal profit or more often losses when they grow stuff, even with the framework of government (and previously EU) incentives, I suspect the answer is yes.
I already showed further down how much more money I calculate I could make from erecting solar on my vineyard site instead of growing grapes and making wine. That's without any government subsidy and using very conservative estimates. As it stands I power the equipment on site: weather station, caravan, internet, electric fencing etc with a couple of pretty small PV panels.
Think Greece, post bail-out, or Ireland, if you want a closer analogy.
If we'd done something more like Ireland in 2008, we'd probably be in a better position now.
Your prediction that Liz Tress would surprise us all with her political skill and intelligence, and win three terms as PM, is turning out to be suboptimal
Genocidal scheming on Russian state TV: Andrey Sidorov, Deputy Dean of world politics at the MSU urges Russia not to miss the right moment to cause a massive refugee crisis in Europe, exacerbating economic and political tensions by causing a massive influx of Ukrainian refugees. https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1579279261592354817
These are the nutters who will take this to nukes. Putin is relatively level headed compared to them. They WANT all-out war
Which is one reason we need to find a peace that both sides can reluctantly accept
Bleak
While I find a lot of what you say a bit bonkers, I'm with you on this. I really don't understand how so many otherwise rational posters on this board are apparently able to completely disregard the fact that Russia has a very large number of nuclear weapons while calling for its complete surrender.
Does a demand for withdrawal following one country's invasion of another really amount to calling for "complete surrender"? Pretty ominous for any country bordering a nuclear power, if so.
No - though pragmatically, there is space for negotiation over the postwar status of Crimea. @Leon's suggestion that the G20 contribute to Russia's postwar rebuilding costs is either a joke, or an insult. I haven't yet worked out which.
In about three weeks we won't be able to afford sheds, let alone new houses, so this will all be academic
The UK is about to implode
I'm going to have another coffee
Define implode. OK so its an improvement from "explode" thanks to Russian re-entry vehicles raining down from the SS18 warhead bus which was your previous flap.
Implode from...? I have a long list of reasons why we are fucked and who fucked up. Perhaps we share some issues though perhaps from opposite sides of the fence.
The problem is, you kind of do notice. Because living in England, you subconsciously soak up “what goes with what”.
Poundbury is an interesting experiment, a success on some measures and a failure on others.
But it is a living experiment, so hopefully it’s failures can be addressed over time.
More successful than Skelmersdale or that Scottish one which essentially need to be completely demolished.
But, it works
If I took 20 large, random yet comparable new developments (including Poundbury) and asked you which one would you live in, almost certainly it would be Poundbury
Look at all these. Poundbury is nicer than all of them
Soulless boring redbrick mediocrity. At best. Actively horrible at worst
The reason all of these, including Poundbury, have an uncanny, soulless feeling is that they are too planned. We need to let development happen more organically with a local vernacular.
Except as has been pointed out, that's usually a lowest common denominator large housebuilder vernacular.
Genocidal scheming on Russian state TV: Andrey Sidorov, Deputy Dean of world politics at the MSU urges Russia not to miss the right moment to cause a massive refugee crisis in Europe, exacerbating economic and political tensions by causing a massive influx of Ukrainian refugees. https://twitter.com/JuliaDavisNews/status/1579279261592354817
These are the nutters who will take this to nukes. Putin is relatively level headed compared to them. They WANT all-out war
Which is one reason we need to find a peace that both sides can reluctantly accept
Bleak
While I find a lot of what you say a bit bonkers, I'm with you on this. I really don't understand how so many otherwise rational posters on this board are apparently able to completely disregard the fact that Russia has a very large number of nuclear weapons while calling for its complete surrender.
Does a demand for withdrawal following one country's invasion of another really amount to calling for "complete surrender"? Pretty ominous for any country bordering a nuclear power, if so.
No - though pragmatically, there is space for negotiation over the postwar status of Crimea. @Leon's suggestion that the G20 contribute to Russia's postwar rebuilding costs is either a joke, or an insult. I haven't yet worked out which.
I said the G20 for a reason. Get the Chinese and the Indians to pay for a new Kerch Bridge, seeing as they are so keen on Putin. And want peace (which they do)
If there ever were an "antigrowth coalition" proposal, you're looking at it.
Completely backwards from the government's professed agenda.
100% agreed.
Utter nonsense pandering to the anti growth coalition of NIMBYs. Inexcusable.
Its the raging hypocrisy which is most funny.
They propose a bonfire of red tape for planning applications for housing and fracking They propose a burden of red tape to dictate planning decisions on private land
What do they want? If they are so against red tape why are they proposing red tape? They are in favour of easier planning whilst proposing a dictatorial planning regime?
This is bullshit. If it weren't for a framework of Government incentives, do you really think it would be more profitable for farmers in rainy Britain to put solar panels all over their land than, you know, grow stuff?
I mean, if we removed agri subsidies and solar subsidies, than maybe. I know the few I've put on my roof have managed to turn into profit, and are really making me not worried about the electric prices at the moment.
Also, this is epitome of mountains from mole hills:
Just look at the photo at the top of that? Either the sheep have been brought in for the photo op, or rspca case nailed on.
Your other searches have thrown up results from japan, South Korea and Colorado. You might want to think of ways those places relevantly differ from the UK.
In Scotland, the new housing estates look shit because developers:
- flatten fields so there is no natural undulation - plant zero trees - build houses 2 inches apart (just do colonies!) - make room for two cars in front of every house (do a communal car park in middle) - no cycle/pedestrian provision to town centre so school run has to be done by car
On topic: No idea why this is being discouraged when we're gas limited.
Well for one thing it will have no impact on the demand for gas on cold January evenings when the sun doesn't shine.
We will have more supply of gas though as we'll have burnt less in the CCGTs when the sun is out and solar is generating power. Your comments would be correct if we solely used gas for heating and not for electricity generation AND domestic heating. What's needed are carefully written contracts for when we're producing excess electricity to the grid from renewables. Or you will end up with excessive solar.
Yes, the solar will reduce gas consumption for a few hours in the middle of the January day when the sun is poking above the horizon, and we can ramp down some CCGT output. But in the grand scheme of things, the impact on gas consumption will be small during the season of maximum demand.
But it would mean that we would burn much less gas over the course of the year, and could use the summer lulls to fill storage.
This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
Yes, it works
"House prices remain buoyant, and Conibear believes it’s not simply the high standard of building but the “favourability of the environment”. Depending on access to garages and private gardens, two-bedroom apartments and semi-detached homes in Poundbury can start anywhere between £190,000 and £275,000. Many of the three-bedroom detached homes go for somewhere between £325,000 and £400,000."
This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
Yes, it works
"House prices remain buoyant, and Conibear believes it’s not simply the high standard of building but the “favourability of the environment”. Depending on access to garages and private gardens, two-bedroom apartments and semi-detached homes in Poundbury can start anywhere between £190,000 and £275,000. Many of the three-bedroom detached homes go for somewhere between £325,000 and £400,000."
It does depend on having an established county town - Dorchester - with its facilities as an appendix, rather like Cowley has Oxford as an appendix ... it's not built out in the middle of FA, but is within walking distance of the centre/rail stations, 30 mins or so.
Sure, and it's not perfect, and it is quiet (but the residents presumably like it that way)
The point is it is 3000% better than much of the crap being thrown up around the UK, which has no regard for aesthetics or urbanism at all. And is all in hideous cheap red brick
Not in red brick, but (for some) covered in harling, you know, the stuff you don't like when it is in Scotland. Do you call it rendering or what? Or at least the first part of the project was, though the harling was coming off at least one fairly new house [edit] only a few years on.
The thing that makes the skin on my back creep, as I have I think mentioned here befo,e is the use of different building stones from different bands of the Jurassic belt - normally not found together. Which, to me, gives it the same sort of feeling of transplantation into alien contiguity that one also gets (for laudable reasons) at St Fagans Folk Museum or the Weald and Downland Museum.
But that is a quibble. Most wouldn't even notice it.
The problem is, you kind of do notice. Because living in England, you subconsciously soak up “what goes with what”.
Poundbury is an interesting experiment, a success on some measures and a failure on others.
But it is a living experiment, so hopefully it’s failures can be addressed over time.
More successful than Skelmersdale or that Scottish one which essentially need to be completely demolished.
But, it works
If I took 20 large, random yet comparable new developments (including Poundbury) and asked you which one would you live in, almost certainly it would be Poundbury
Look at all these. Poundbury is nicer than all of them
Soulless boring redbrick mediocrity. At best. Actively horrible at worst
UK housebuilders are lazy and cheapskates. They want to drop the same design of house on different developments across the country, because it is cheaper. At the same time they are also looking for every possible way to pinch pennies.
I live in a 4 year old new build. It wasn't a cheap house. They used the cheapest baths, work surfaces etc. that they could possibly get away with. They even used plastic chrome-effect edging to put around copper pipes so they wouldn't have to use short sections of real chrome pipes for towel radiators.
The houses are all the same as they can then have the same materials list for the same house wherever it is in the country. We agreed to buy our house when it was still early in construction. We asked for some minor changes. The only thing they would agree to was to install network cabling.
There is no incentive to design houses in the UK that are in keeping with the local community and with well thought out connections and infrastructure.
It *was* a cheap house and you have set out why - that you paid a lot is because they made a huge profit. Remember that the proposed shake-up of planning laws will enable Barratt et al to keep building unsuitable cheapo ugly shitboxes for large profits, only this time without having to worry about consent or local democracy.
BTW I bought my own Barratt shitbox in 2005 sold it for a loss in 2021, so I do know how bad some of these are - and the other builder putting up other phases of our huge estate was even worse.
Serious question, how on earth did the house lose value in that period of massive house price rises?
The total collapse of house prices on Teesside. BR always demands the concreting over pf everywhere to build 14 million new houses. Well thats pretty much what happened on Teesside. I lived on part of a development that eventually stretched to 1,400 homes in a small area. Across the border in Boro swathes of new homes. Across the river in Stockton the same. Many thousands of homes added, most of which are "executive-style".
The market fell out of housing in 08/09 and the developers simply undercut the market. So you couldn't sell your house without making a massive loss for more than a decade as new prices were so much lower. Eventually we moved back into positive equity and were lucky to only lose a paper £45k - at least we were able to sell.
So many were vacant repossessions (6 on my street alone at one point) - nobody could afford to buy, and the ones that went for rental brought in various scumbags until the BTL landlords gave up as rental income didn't cover the mortgage. And those went empty. Only the final completion of the development brought stability back to the local market, with prices rebounding thanks to the post-Covid boom (our paper loss would have been £60k without this...)
So house prices were kept affordable - good.
And houses people wanted to buy were sold, while those whom people didn't want to but weren't. Good.
Scale this up, and we will have any shoeboxes left unsold because nobody will want them, and quality, affordable homes everywhere. Win/win.
If you lose equity, then that's not the end of the world, housing should be a home not an investment.
I think you miss the point. I specifically said "paper loss" because its a home not an investment. But for a decade so many of us had no chance to sell. We were trapped. That is not a functioning market. Nor was the choice offered to people - the same old 3-4 bed "executive-style" homes which could only be sold at a discount yet still remained out of reach of the people who needed genuinely affordable and smaller homes.
Give developers a free reign and they build what makes them the most money. What people want or need is not their concern. Its ours - and your ideas would absolutely cripple large areas.
In Scotland, the new housing estates look shit because developers:
- flatten fields so there is no natural undulation - plant zero trees - build houses 2 inches apart (just do colonies!) - make room for two cars in front of every house (do a communal car park in middle) - no cycle/pedestrian provision to town centre so school run has to be done by car
In summary, cars ruined our cities (Glasgow best example) and we haven't learnt our lesson
I'm sure it has been pointed out already, but it looks like Truss has dumped the 'growth' vision, and is now just doing anything to please the crowd and try and cling to power. Perhaps it is for the best.
If she has, she'll lose the votes of people like me who liked her growth agenda, while probably still not being trusted by those who already opposed her.
The opposition to solar panels shows that we are perhaps back to benign incompetence, which for me at least is a bit of a relief. The solar panels are not a bad idea, neither were its predecessor (onshore wind turbines), but you have to be quite careful about where you put them to avoid decimating the landscape, which we have just spent a hundred years preserving.
Trouble is the markets are not heaving a sigh of relief, they are pursuing UK debt and turning this into a rout. Which ends where?
With the ERM debacle there was an endpoint. We fell out of the ERM and equilibrium was restored
How do we restore equilibrium here? I am minded that this is more than just a UK issue, this is systemic doubt on a global scale, and the UK is targeted first simply because our stupid government was first out of the trenches into the bullets
It's easy to say it's a global issue, but I think there are some countries currently running a budget surplus. The solution is obvious. The government has to stop borrowing money.
Had it not been for the mini-budget we would have been able to do this over the course of several years, but the catastrophic loss of credibility thanks to Truss and Kwarteng, means that we now need to achieve the same thing more quickly.
Normally when a country gets into a pickle like this it ends up having to increase taxes and cut spending at the same time. The sooner we act the easier it will be to protect spending that will increase our future prosperity (such as scientific research and infrastructure investment), but we're rapidly running out of time to exercise discretion.
If we're to ease back into sound money and public finances (which of course should be the aim), we must do it slowly and the Government and the Bank of England must be aligned, in favour of a strategy that promotes growth whilst minimising the shock to the economy.
What I find rather silly about posts like the above is that they ignore nearly 10 years of the BOE pumping the system full of money, buying up Government debt, and keeping interest rates super low, and the Bank's current volte face of swerving into the contraction by switching to selling Government debt, and threatening to whack up interest rates, and tries to pin the whole lot on Truss, for reasons which seem entirely politically motivated rather than being based on any known concept of economics. Rather transparent wouldn't you say?
This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
Yes, it works
"House prices remain buoyant, and Conibear believes it’s not simply the high standard of building but the “favourability of the environment”. Depending on access to garages and private gardens, two-bedroom apartments and semi-detached homes in Poundbury can start anywhere between £190,000 and £275,000. Many of the three-bedroom detached homes go for somewhere between £325,000 and £400,000."
This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
Yes, it works
"House prices remain buoyant, and Conibear believes it’s not simply the high standard of building but the “favourability of the environment”. Depending on access to garages and private gardens, two-bedroom apartments and semi-detached homes in Poundbury can start anywhere between £190,000 and £275,000. Many of the three-bedroom detached homes go for somewhere between £325,000 and £400,000."
It does depend on having an established county town - Dorchester - with its facilities as an appendix, rather like Cowley has Oxford as an appendix ... it's not built out in the middle of FA, but is within walking distance of the centre/rail stations, 30 mins or so.
Sure, and it's not perfect, and it is quiet (but the residents presumably like it that way)
The point is it is 3000% better than much of the crap being thrown up around the UK, which has no regard for aesthetics or urbanism at all. And is all in hideous cheap red brick
Not in red brick, but (for some) covered in harling, you know, the stuff you don't like when it is in Scotland. Do you call it rendering or what? Or at least the first part of the project was, though the harling was coming off at least one fairly new house [edit] only a few years on.
The thing that makes the skin on my back creep, as I have I think mentioned here befo,e is the use of different building stones from different bands of the Jurassic belt - normally not found together. Which, to me, gives it the same sort of feeling of transplantation into alien contiguity that one also gets (for laudable reasons) at St Fagans Folk Museum or the Weald and Downland Museum.
But that is a quibble. Most wouldn't even notice it.
The problem is, you kind of do notice. Because living in England, you subconsciously soak up “what goes with what”.
Poundbury is an interesting experiment, a success on some measures and a failure on others.
But it is a living experiment, so hopefully it’s failures can be addressed over time.
More successful than Skelmersdale or that Scottish one which essentially need to be completely demolished.
But, it works
If I took 20 large, random yet comparable new developments (including Poundbury) and asked you which one would you live in, almost certainly it would be Poundbury
Look at all these. Poundbury is nicer than all of them
Soulless boring redbrick mediocrity. At best. Actively horrible at worst
UK housebuilders are lazy and cheapskates. They want to drop the same design of house on different developments across the country, because it is cheaper. At the same time they are also looking for every possible way to pinch pennies.
I live in a 4 year old new build. It wasn't a cheap house. They used the cheapest baths, work surfaces etc. that they could possibly get away with. They even used plastic chrome-effect edging to put around copper pipes so they wouldn't have to use short sections of real chrome pipes for towel radiators.
The houses are all the same as they can then have the same materials list for the same house wherever it is in the country. We agreed to buy our house when it was still early in construction. We asked for some minor changes. The only thing they would agree to was to install network cabling.
There is no incentive to design houses in the UK that are in keeping with the local community and with well thought out connections and infrastructure.
It *was* a cheap house and you have set out why - that you paid a lot is because they made a huge profit. Remember that the proposed shake-up of planning laws will enable Barratt et al to keep building unsuitable cheapo ugly shitboxes for large profits, only this time without having to worry about consent or local democracy.
BTW I bought my own Barratt shitbox in 2005 sold it for a loss in 2021, so I do know how bad some of these are - and the other builder putting up other phases of our huge estate was even worse.
Serious question, how on earth did the house lose value in that period of massive house price rises?
The total collapse of house prices on Teesside. BR always demands the concreting over pf everywhere to build 14 million new houses. Well thats pretty much what happened on Teesside. I lived on part of a development that eventually stretched to 1,400 homes in a small area. Across the border in Boro swathes of new homes. Across the river in Stockton the same. Many thousands of homes added, most of which are "executive-style".
The market fell out of housing in 08/09 and the developers simply undercut the market. So you couldn't sell your house without making a massive loss for more than a decade as new prices were so much lower. Eventually we moved back into positive equity and were lucky to only lose a paper £45k - at least we were able to sell.
So many were vacant repossessions (6 on my street alone at one point) - nobody could afford to buy, and the ones that went for rental brought in various scumbags until the BTL landlords gave up as rental income didn't cover the mortgage. And those went empty. Only the final completion of the development brought stability back to the local market, with prices rebounding thanks to the post-Covid boom (our paper loss would have been £60k without this...)
So house prices were kept affordable - good.
And houses people wanted to buy were sold, while those whom people didn't want to but weren't. Good.
Scale this up, and we will have any shoeboxes left unsold because nobody will want them, and quality, affordable homes everywhere. Win/win.
If you lose equity, then that's not the end of the world, housing should be a home not an investment.
I think you miss the point. I specifically said "paper loss" because its a home not an investment. But for a decade so many of us had no chance to sell. We were trapped. That is not a functioning market. Nor was the choice offered to people - the same old 3-4 bed "executive-style" homes which could only be sold at a discount yet still remained out of reach of the people who needed genuinely affordable and smaller homes.
Give developers a free reign and they build what makes them the most money. What people want or need is not their concern. Its ours - and your ideas would absolutely cripple large areas.
In about three weeks we won't be able to afford sheds, let alone new houses, so this will all be academic
The UK is about to implode
I'm going to have another coffee
Define implode. OK so its an improvement from "explode" thanks to Russian re-entry vehicles raining down from the SS18 warhead bus which was your previous flap.
Implode from...? I have a long list of reasons why we are fucked and who fucked up. Perhaps we share some issues though perhaps from opposite sides of the fence.
"Implode" as in sovereign debt crisis - as @kyf_100 said earlier
"A sovereign debt crisis occurs when a country is unable to pay its bills. But this doesn't happen overnight—there are plenty of warning signs. It usually becomes a crisis when the country's leaders ignore these indicators for political reasons.
The first sign appears when the country finds it cannot get a low interest rate from lenders. Amid concerns the country will go into debt default, investors become concerned that the country cannot afford to pay the bonds.
As lenders start to worry, they require higher and higher yields to offset their risk. The higher the yields, the more it costs the country to refinance its sovereign debt. In time, it cannot afford to keep rolling over debt. Consequently, it defaults. Investors' fears become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That happened to Greece, Italy, and Spain. It led to the European debt crisis. It also happened when Iceland took over the country's bank debt, causing the value of its currency to plummet."
Unfortunately, that sounds like the UK right now, hopefully we can steer away from the nastiest rocks
The problem is, you kind of do notice. Because living in England, you subconsciously soak up “what goes with what”.
Poundbury is an interesting experiment, a success on some measures and a failure on others.
But it is a living experiment, so hopefully it’s failures can be addressed over time.
More successful than Skelmersdale or that Scottish one which essentially need to be completely demolished.
But, it works
If I took 20 large, random yet comparable new developments (including Poundbury) and asked you which one would you live in, almost certainly it would be Poundbury
Look at all these. Poundbury is nicer than all of them
Soulless boring redbrick mediocrity. At best. Actively horrible at worst
The reason all of these, including Poundbury, have an uncanny, soulless feeling is that they are too planned. We need to let development happen more organically with a local vernacular.
Except as has been pointed out, that's usually a lowest common denominator large housebuilder vernacular.
Lowest common denominator large housebuilders only exist because of the way we choose to constrain the market.
In Scotland, the new housing estates look shit because developers:
- flatten fields so there is no natural undulation - plant zero trees - build houses 2 inches apart (just do colonies!) - make room for two cars in front of every house (do a communal car park in middle) - no cycle/pedestrian provision to town centre so school run has to be done by car
To be fair, it was mostly like that in England. The only difference being that we did have cycle / pedestrian routes through the developments. Perfect for scumbags on quad bikes to escape the police down.
Think Greece, post bail-out, or Ireland, if you want a closer analogy.
If we'd done something more like Ireland in 2008, we'd probably be in a better position now.
Your prediction that Liz Tress would surprise us all with her political skill and intelligence, and win three terms as PM, is turning out to be suboptimal
I was hoping everyone had forgotten that. In my defence it was tongue in cheek.
This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
Yes, it works
"House prices remain buoyant, and Conibear believes it’s not simply the high standard of building but the “favourability of the environment”. Depending on access to garages and private gardens, two-bedroom apartments and semi-detached homes in Poundbury can start anywhere between £190,000 and £275,000. Many of the three-bedroom detached homes go for somewhere between £325,000 and £400,000."
This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
Yes, it works
"House prices remain buoyant, and Conibear believes it’s not simply the high standard of building but the “favourability of the environment”. Depending on access to garages and private gardens, two-bedroom apartments and semi-detached homes in Poundbury can start anywhere between £190,000 and £275,000. Many of the three-bedroom detached homes go for somewhere between £325,000 and £400,000."
It does depend on having an established county town - Dorchester - with its facilities as an appendix, rather like Cowley has Oxford as an appendix ... it's not built out in the middle of FA, but is within walking distance of the centre/rail stations, 30 mins or so.
Sure, and it's not perfect, and it is quiet (but the residents presumably like it that way)
The point is it is 3000% better than much of the crap being thrown up around the UK, which has no regard for aesthetics or urbanism at all. And is all in hideous cheap red brick
Not in red brick, but (for some) covered in harling, you know, the stuff you don't like when it is in Scotland. Do you call it rendering or what? Or at least the first part of the project was, though the harling was coming off at least one fairly new house [edit] only a few years on.
The thing that makes the skin on my back creep, as I have I think mentioned here befo,e is the use of different building stones from different bands of the Jurassic belt - normally not found together. Which, to me, gives it the same sort of feeling of transplantation into alien contiguity that one also gets (for laudable reasons) at St Fagans Folk Museum or the Weald and Downland Museum.
But that is a quibble. Most wouldn't even notice it.
The problem is, you kind of do notice. Because living in England, you subconsciously soak up “what goes with what”.
Poundbury is an interesting experiment, a success on some measures and a failure on others.
But it is a living experiment, so hopefully it’s failures can be addressed over time.
More successful than Skelmersdale or that Scottish one which essentially need to be completely demolished.
But, it works
If I took 20 large, random yet comparable new developments (including Poundbury) and asked you which one would you live in, almost certainly it would be Poundbury
Look at all these. Poundbury is nicer than all of them
Soulless boring redbrick mediocrity. At best. Actively horrible at worst
UK housebuilders are lazy and cheapskates. They want to drop the same design of house on different developments across the country, because it is cheaper. At the same time they are also looking for every possible way to pinch pennies.
I live in a 4 year old new build. It wasn't a cheap house. They used the cheapest baths, work surfaces etc. that they could possibly get away with. They even used plastic chrome-effect edging to put around copper pipes so they wouldn't have to use short sections of real chrome pipes for towel radiators.
The houses are all the same as they can then have the same materials list for the same house wherever it is in the country. We agreed to buy our house when it was still early in construction. We asked for some minor changes. The only thing they would agree to was to install network cabling.
There is no incentive to design houses in the UK that are in keeping with the local community and with well thought out connections and infrastructure.
It *was* a cheap house and you have set out why - that you paid a lot is because they made a huge profit. Remember that the proposed shake-up of planning laws will enable Barratt et al to keep building unsuitable cheapo ugly shitboxes for large profits, only this time without having to worry about consent or local democracy.
BTW I bought my own Barratt shitbox in 2005 sold it for a loss in 2021, so I do know how bad some of these are - and the other builder putting up other phases of our huge estate was even worse.
Serious question, how on earth did the house lose value in that period of massive house price rises?
The total collapse of house prices on Teesside. BR always demands the concreting over pf everywhere to build 14 million new houses. Well thats pretty much what happened on Teesside. I lived on part of a development that eventually stretched to 1,400 homes in a small area. Across the border in Boro swathes of new homes. Across the river in Stockton the same. Many thousands of homes added, most of which are "executive-style".
The market fell out of housing in 08/09 and the developers simply undercut the market. So you couldn't sell your house without making a massive loss for more than a decade as new prices were so much lower. Eventually we moved back into positive equity and were lucky to only lose a paper £45k - at least we were able to sell.
So many were vacant repossessions (6 on my street alone at one point) - nobody could afford to buy, and the ones that went for rental brought in various scumbags until the BTL landlords gave up as rental income didn't cover the mortgage. And those went empty. Only the final completion of the development brought stability back to the local market, with prices rebounding thanks to the post-Covid boom (our paper loss would have been £60k without this...)
In other parts of Europe it is quite common, expected even, for newbuild houses to depreciate in value. The sqm valuation is based on how old the building is and if it is and old building, how much maintainence it needs, with the highest value being the first time it is sold. Sometimes the underlying land appreciates in value, other times it depreciates. It seems to me that residential valuations in the UK severely neglect the actual quality of the building.
For what it's worth . . . speaking of the environment and (apologies to anti-woke brigade) climate change, note that as of 8am PDT, Seattle has the 3rd worst air quality of any major urban center in the world.
For the past month or more, local air quality has ranged from middling to outright unhealthy, due to the Bolt Creek wildfire in the Cascade Mountains northwest of Seattle:
The past few days have been some of the worst for smoke here this summer, thanks to "offshore" winds blowing east to west that pushes the smoke our direction. Today we actually have "onshore" winds from the north that are slowly helping to improve air quality in Puget Sound.
However, what we are NOT getting today, or according to forecast for next two weeks, is a significant amount of RAIN, which would not only clear the air at least temporarily, but also help to put out or at least significantly curtail the Bolt Creek and other wildfires in Pacific Northwest.
Call me woke as folk, but I do NOT appreciate chocking on the air I'm breathing. Indeed, one reason I moved to Seattle in the first place was because of it's (formerly) good air quality.
In Scotland, the new housing estates look shit because developers:
- flatten fields so there is no natural undulation - plant zero trees - build houses 2 inches apart (just do colonies!) - make room for two cars in front of every house (do a communal car park in middle) - no cycle/pedestrian provision to town centre so school run has to be done by car
In Scotland, the new housing estates look shit because developers:
- flatten fields so there is no natural undulation - plant zero trees - build houses 2 inches apart (just do colonies!) - make room for two cars in front of every house (do a communal car park in middle) - no cycle/pedestrian provision to town centre so school run has to be done by car
It’s astonishing in a way that such developments are still the preferred model in 2022.
We know so much more about what makes for liveable, sustainable, and even productive development than we did in, say, 1982.
This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
Yes, it works
"House prices remain buoyant, and Conibear believes it’s not simply the high standard of building but the “favourability of the environment”. Depending on access to garages and private gardens, two-bedroom apartments and semi-detached homes in Poundbury can start anywhere between £190,000 and £275,000. Many of the three-bedroom detached homes go for somewhere between £325,000 and £400,000."
This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
Yes, it works
"House prices remain buoyant, and Conibear believes it’s not simply the high standard of building but the “favourability of the environment”. Depending on access to garages and private gardens, two-bedroom apartments and semi-detached homes in Poundbury can start anywhere between £190,000 and £275,000. Many of the three-bedroom detached homes go for somewhere between £325,000 and £400,000."
It does depend on having an established county town - Dorchester - with its facilities as an appendix, rather like Cowley has Oxford as an appendix ... it's not built out in the middle of FA, but is within walking distance of the centre/rail stations, 30 mins or so.
Sure, and it's not perfect, and it is quiet (but the residents presumably like it that way)
The point is it is 3000% better than much of the crap being thrown up around the UK, which has no regard for aesthetics or urbanism at all. And is all in hideous cheap red brick
Not in red brick, but (for some) covered in harling, you know, the stuff you don't like when it is in Scotland. Do you call it rendering or what? Or at least the first part of the project was, though the harling was coming off at least one fairly new house [edit] only a few years on.
The thing that makes the skin on my back creep, as I have I think mentioned here befo,e is the use of different building stones from different bands of the Jurassic belt - normally not found together. Which, to me, gives it the same sort of feeling of transplantation into alien contiguity that one also gets (for laudable reasons) at St Fagans Folk Museum or the Weald and Downland Museum.
But that is a quibble. Most wouldn't even notice it.
The problem is, you kind of do notice. Because living in England, you subconsciously soak up “what goes with what”.
Poundbury is an interesting experiment, a success on some measures and a failure on others.
But it is a living experiment, so hopefully it’s failures can be addressed over time.
More successful than Skelmersdale or that Scottish one which essentially need to be completely demolished.
But, it works
If I took 20 large, random yet comparable new developments (including Poundbury) and asked you which one would you live in, almost certainly it would be Poundbury
Look at all these. Poundbury is nicer than all of them
Soulless boring redbrick mediocrity. At best. Actively horrible at worst
UK housebuilders are lazy and cheapskates. They want to drop the same design of house on different developments across the country, because it is cheaper. At the same time they are also looking for every possible way to pinch pennies.
I live in a 4 year old new build. It wasn't a cheap house. They used the cheapest baths, work surfaces etc. that they could possibly get away with. They even used plastic chrome-effect edging to put around copper pipes so they wouldn't have to use short sections of real chrome pipes for towel radiators.
The houses are all the same as they can then have the same materials list for the same house wherever it is in the country. We agreed to buy our house when it was still early in construction. We asked for some minor changes. The only thing they would agree to was to install network cabling.
There is no incentive to design houses in the UK that are in keeping with the local community and with well thought out connections and infrastructure.
It *was* a cheap house and you have set out why - that you paid a lot is because they made a huge profit. Remember that the proposed shake-up of planning laws will enable Barratt et al to keep building unsuitable cheapo ugly shitboxes for large profits, only this time without having to worry about consent or local democracy.
BTW I bought my own Barratt shitbox in 2005 sold it for a loss in 2021, so I do know how bad some of these are - and the other builder putting up other phases of our huge estate was even worse.
Serious question, how on earth did the house lose value in that period of massive house price rises?
The total collapse of house prices on Teesside. BR always demands the concreting over pf everywhere to build 14 million new houses. Well thats pretty much what happened on Teesside. I lived on part of a development that eventually stretched to 1,400 homes in a small area. Across the border in Boro swathes of new homes. Across the river in Stockton the same. Many thousands of homes added, most of which are "executive-style".
The market fell out of housing in 08/09 and the developers simply undercut the market. So you couldn't sell your house without making a massive loss for more than a decade as new prices were so much lower. Eventually we moved back into positive equity and were lucky to only lose a paper £45k - at least we were able to sell.
So many were vacant repossessions (6 on my street alone at one point) - nobody could afford to buy, and the ones that went for rental brought in various scumbags until the BTL landlords gave up as rental income didn't cover the mortgage. And those went empty. Only the final completion of the development brought stability back to the local market, with prices rebounding thanks to the post-Covid boom (our paper loss would have been £60k without this...)
In other parts of Europe it is quite common, expected even, for newbuild houses to depreciate in value. The sqm valuation is based on how old the building is and if it is and old building, how much maintainence it needs, with the highest value being the first time it is sold. Sometimes the underlying land appreciates in value, other times it depreciates. It seems to me that residential valuations in the UK severely neglect the actual quality of the building.
If there ever were an "antigrowth coalition" proposal, you're looking at it.
Completely backwards from the government's professed agenda.
100% agreed.
Utter nonsense pandering to the anti growth coalition of NIMBYs. Inexcusable.
Its the raging hypocrisy which is most funny.
They propose a bonfire of red tape for planning applications for housing and fracking They propose a burden of red tape to dictate planning decisions on private land
What do they want? If they are so against red tape why are they proposing red tape? They are in favour of easier planning whilst proposing a dictatorial planning regime?
This is bullshit. If it weren't for a framework of Government incentives, do you really think it would be more profitable for farmers in rainy Britain to put solar panels all over their land than, you know, grow stuff?
Well let's think about this. Agriculture is heavily subsidised. Solar panels are not.
Think Greece, post bail-out, or Ireland, if you want a closer analogy.
If we'd done something more like Ireland in 2008, we'd probably be in a better position now.
Your prediction that Liz Tress would surprise us all with her political skill and intelligence, and win three terms as PM, is turning out to be suboptimal
I was hoping everyone had forgotten that. In my defence it was tongue in cheek.
Was it really tongue in cheek? The wit was very subtle, if so
At times I am pretty sure you meant it. eg when you noted that her presentation improved through the debates (which it did, tho it turns out the first awful Truss is the real one)
This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
Yes, it works
"House prices remain buoyant, and Conibear believes it’s not simply the high standard of building but the “favourability of the environment”. Depending on access to garages and private gardens, two-bedroom apartments and semi-detached homes in Poundbury can start anywhere between £190,000 and £275,000. Many of the three-bedroom detached homes go for somewhere between £325,000 and £400,000."
This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
Yes, it works
"House prices remain buoyant, and Conibear believes it’s not simply the high standard of building but the “favourability of the environment”. Depending on access to garages and private gardens, two-bedroom apartments and semi-detached homes in Poundbury can start anywhere between £190,000 and £275,000. Many of the three-bedroom detached homes go for somewhere between £325,000 and £400,000."
It does depend on having an established county town - Dorchester - with its facilities as an appendix, rather like Cowley has Oxford as an appendix ... it's not built out in the middle of FA, but is within walking distance of the centre/rail stations, 30 mins or so.
Sure, and it's not perfect, and it is quiet (but the residents presumably like it that way)
The point is it is 3000% better than much of the crap being thrown up around the UK, which has no regard for aesthetics or urbanism at all. And is all in hideous cheap red brick
Not in red brick, but (for some) covered in harling, you know, the stuff you don't like when it is in Scotland. Do you call it rendering or what? Or at least the first part of the project was, though the harling was coming off at least one fairly new house [edit] only a few years on.
The thing that makes the skin on my back creep, as I have I think mentioned here befo,e is the use of different building stones from different bands of the Jurassic belt - normally not found together. Which, to me, gives it the same sort of feeling of transplantation into alien contiguity that one also gets (for laudable reasons) at St Fagans Folk Museum or the Weald and Downland Museum.
But that is a quibble. Most wouldn't even notice it.
The problem is, you kind of do notice. Because living in England, you subconsciously soak up “what goes with what”.
Poundbury is an interesting experiment, a success on some measures and a failure on others.
But it is a living experiment, so hopefully it’s failures can be addressed over time.
More successful than Skelmersdale or that Scottish one which essentially need to be completely demolished.
But, it works
If I took 20 large, random yet comparable new developments (including Poundbury) and asked you which one would you live in, almost certainly it would be Poundbury
Look at all these. Poundbury is nicer than all of them
Soulless boring redbrick mediocrity. At best. Actively horrible at worst
UK housebuilders are lazy and cheapskates. They want to drop the same design of house on different developments across the country, because it is cheaper. At the same time they are also looking for every possible way to pinch pennies.
I live in a 4 year old new build. It wasn't a cheap house. They used the cheapest baths, work surfaces etc. that they could possibly get away with. They even used plastic chrome-effect edging to put around copper pipes so they wouldn't have to use short sections of real chrome pipes for towel radiators.
The houses are all the same as they can then have the same materials list for the same house wherever it is in the country. We agreed to buy our house when it was still early in construction. We asked for some minor changes. The only thing they would agree to was to install network cabling.
There is no incentive to design houses in the UK that are in keeping with the local community and with well thought out connections and infrastructure.
It *was* a cheap house and you have set out why - that you paid a lot is because they made a huge profit. Remember that the proposed shake-up of planning laws will enable Barratt et al to keep building unsuitable cheapo ugly shitboxes for large profits, only this time without having to worry about consent or local democracy.
BTW I bought my own Barratt shitbox in 2005 sold it for a loss in 2021, so I do know how bad some of these are - and the other builder putting up other phases of our huge estate was even worse.
Serious question, how on earth did the house lose value in that period of massive house price rises?
The total collapse of house prices on Teesside. BR always demands the concreting over pf everywhere to build 14 million new houses. Well thats pretty much what happened on Teesside. I lived on part of a development that eventually stretched to 1,400 homes in a small area. Across the border in Boro swathes of new homes. Across the river in Stockton the same. Many thousands of homes added, most of which are "executive-style".
The market fell out of housing in 08/09 and the developers simply undercut the market. So you couldn't sell your house without making a massive loss for more than a decade as new prices were so much lower. Eventually we moved back into positive equity and were lucky to only lose a paper £45k - at least we were able to sell.
So many were vacant repossessions (6 on my street alone at one point) - nobody could afford to buy, and the ones that went for rental brought in various scumbags until the BTL landlords gave up as rental income didn't cover the mortgage. And those went empty. Only the final completion of the development brought stability back to the local market, with prices rebounding thanks to the post-Covid boom (our paper loss would have been £60k without this...)
In other parts of Europe it is quite common, expected even, for newbuild houses to depreciate in value. The sqm valuation is based on how old the building is and if it is and old building, how much maintainence it needs, with the highest value being the first time it is sold. Sometimes the underlying land appreciates in value, other times it depreciates. It seems to me that residential valuations in the UK severely neglect the actual quality of the building.
Think Greece, post bail-out, or Ireland, if you want a closer analogy.
If we'd done something more like Ireland in 2008, we'd probably be in a better position now.
Your prediction that Liz Tress would surprise us all with her political skill and intelligence, and win three terms as PM, is turning out to be suboptimal
I was hoping everyone had forgotten that. In my defence it was tongue in cheek.
I take all your gnomic postings as tongue in cheek. They certainly contain no explanatory or predictive power.
Sovereign debt crisis nailed on, IMHO. But if UK is first domino, it probably won't be the last.
True, yet the UK has got loads of UK only issues wrt debt and pension funding. As I said this morning, I'm not the only person in the City and Wall Street who is thinking about what company and state DB pension liabilities are and wondering what the chances of fully funding them really are. Add in DB schemes chasing yield with LDI having to liquidate and suddenly there's very little market for long term UK debt with one half of the market being turned into forced sellers and the other half wondering whether the UK will go bankrupt attempting to pay pensions it can't afford.
Think Greece, post bail-out, or Ireland, if you want a closer analogy.
If we'd done something more like Ireland in 2008, we'd probably be in a better position now.
Your prediction that Liz Tress would surprise us all with her political skill and intelligence, and win three terms as PM, is turning out to be suboptimal
I was hoping everyone had forgotten that. In my defence it was tongue in cheek.
Was it really tongue in cheek? The wit was very subtle, if so
At times I am pretty sure you meant it. eg when you noted that her presentation improved through the debates (which it did, tho it turns out the first awful Truss is the real one)
Tbf @williamglenn wouldn't be the first to fall back on the 'well, I was joking of course' defence.
I am pretty sure I may have done it (though I was only joking of course!). And I think a well-known flint-knapper may have done that once or twice ;-)
If there ever were an "antigrowth coalition" proposal, you're looking at it.
Completely backwards from the government's professed agenda.
100% agreed.
Utter nonsense pandering to the anti growth coalition of NIMBYs. Inexcusable.
Its the raging hypocrisy which is most funny.
They propose a bonfire of red tape for planning applications for housing and fracking They propose a burden of red tape to dictate planning decisions on private land
What do they want? If they are so against red tape why are they proposing red tape? They are in favour of easier planning whilst proposing a dictatorial planning regime?
This is bullshit. If it weren't for a framework of Government incentives, do you really think it would be more profitable for farmers in rainy Britain to put solar panels all over their land than, you know, grow stuff?
Bravo. How to demonstrate your total lack of understanding of the economics of farming.
My understanding is that you plant stuff, it grows, and you get a price for it that is negotiated year by year with supermarkets and other retailers. And my understanding of the solar market is that you build your solar farm, and due to a system of bill-payer funded incentives, you get a guaranteed price year on year. Hardly comparing apples with apples. Or am I wrong?
This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
Yes, it works
"House prices remain buoyant, and Conibear believes it’s not simply the high standard of building but the “favourability of the environment”. Depending on access to garages and private gardens, two-bedroom apartments and semi-detached homes in Poundbury can start anywhere between £190,000 and £275,000. Many of the three-bedroom detached homes go for somewhere between £325,000 and £400,000."
This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
Yes, it works
"House prices remain buoyant, and Conibear believes it’s not simply the high standard of building but the “favourability of the environment”. Depending on access to garages and private gardens, two-bedroom apartments and semi-detached homes in Poundbury can start anywhere between £190,000 and £275,000. Many of the three-bedroom detached homes go for somewhere between £325,000 and £400,000."
It does depend on having an established county town - Dorchester - with its facilities as an appendix, rather like Cowley has Oxford as an appendix ... it's not built out in the middle of FA, but is within walking distance of the centre/rail stations, 30 mins or so.
Sure, and it's not perfect, and it is quiet (but the residents presumably like it that way)
The point is it is 3000% better than much of the crap being thrown up around the UK, which has no regard for aesthetics or urbanism at all. And is all in hideous cheap red brick
Not in red brick, but (for some) covered in harling, you know, the stuff you don't like when it is in Scotland. Do you call it rendering or what? Or at least the first part of the project was, though the harling was coming off at least one fairly new house [edit] only a few years on.
The thing that makes the skin on my back creep, as I have I think mentioned here befo,e is the use of different building stones from different bands of the Jurassic belt - normally not found together. Which, to me, gives it the same sort of feeling of transplantation into alien contiguity that one also gets (for laudable reasons) at St Fagans Folk Museum or the Weald and Downland Museum.
But that is a quibble. Most wouldn't even notice it.
The problem is, you kind of do notice. Because living in England, you subconsciously soak up “what goes with what”.
Poundbury is an interesting experiment, a success on some measures and a failure on others.
But it is a living experiment, so hopefully it’s failures can be addressed over time.
More successful than Skelmersdale or that Scottish one which essentially need to be completely demolished.
But, it works
If I took 20 large, random yet comparable new developments (including Poundbury) and asked you which one would you live in, almost certainly it would be Poundbury
Look at all these. Poundbury is nicer than all of them
Soulless boring redbrick mediocrity. At best. Actively horrible at worst
UK housebuilders are lazy and cheapskates. They want to drop the same design of house on different developments across the country, because it is cheaper. At the same time they are also looking for every possible way to pinch pennies.
I live in a 4 year old new build. It wasn't a cheap house. They used the cheapest baths, work surfaces etc. that they could possibly get away with. They even used plastic chrome-effect edging to put around copper pipes so they wouldn't have to use short sections of real chrome pipes for towel radiators.
The houses are all the same as they can then have the same materials list for the same house wherever it is in the country. We agreed to buy our house when it was still early in construction. We asked for some minor changes. The only thing they would agree to was to install network cabling.
There is no incentive to design houses in the UK that are in keeping with the local community and with well thought out connections and infrastructure.
It *was* a cheap house and you have set out why - that you paid a lot is because they made a huge profit. Remember that the proposed shake-up of planning laws will enable Barratt et al to keep building unsuitable cheapo ugly shitboxes for large profits, only this time without having to worry about consent or local democracy.
BTW I bought my own Barratt shitbox in 2005 sold it for a loss in 2021, so I do know how bad some of these are - and the other builder putting up other phases of our huge estate was even worse.
Serious question, how on earth did the house lose value in that period of massive house price rises?
The total collapse of house prices on Teesside. BR always demands the concreting over pf everywhere to build 14 million new houses. Well thats pretty much what happened on Teesside. I lived on part of a development that eventually stretched to 1,400 homes in a small area. Across the border in Boro swathes of new homes. Across the river in Stockton the same. Many thousands of homes added, most of which are "executive-style".
The market fell out of housing in 08/09 and the developers simply undercut the market. So you couldn't sell your house without making a massive loss for more than a decade as new prices were so much lower. Eventually we moved back into positive equity and were lucky to only lose a paper £45k - at least we were able to sell.
So many were vacant repossessions (6 on my street alone at one point) - nobody could afford to buy, and the ones that went for rental brought in various scumbags until the BTL landlords gave up as rental income didn't cover the mortgage. And those went empty. Only the final completion of the development brought stability back to the local market, with prices rebounding thanks to the post-Covid boom (our paper loss would have been £60k without this...)
So house prices were kept affordable - good.
And houses people wanted to buy were sold, while those whom people didn't want to but weren't. Good.
Scale this up, and we will have any shoeboxes left unsold because nobody will want them, and quality, affordable homes everywhere. Win/win.
If you lose equity, then that's not the end of the world, housing should be a home not an investment.
I think you miss the point. I specifically said "paper loss" because its a home not an investment. But for a decade so many of us had no chance to sell. We were trapped. That is not a functioning market. Nor was the choice offered to people - the same old 3-4 bed "executive-style" homes which could only be sold at a discount yet still remained out of reach of the people who needed genuinely affordable and smaller homes.
Give developers a free reign and they build what makes them the most money. What people want or need is not their concern. Its ours - and your ideas would absolutely cripple large areas.
Give developers free rein and anyone who doesn't build what people don't want will lose business to those who build what they do want.
It's only our current planning regime which hands power to the developers to make these decisions. Since developers are the only ones to manage the planning process.
If there ever were an "antigrowth coalition" proposal, you're looking at it.
Completely backwards from the government's professed agenda.
100% agreed.
Utter nonsense pandering to the anti growth coalition of NIMBYs. Inexcusable.
Its the raging hypocrisy which is most funny.
They propose a bonfire of red tape for planning applications for housing and fracking They propose a burden of red tape to dictate planning decisions on private land
What do they want? If they are so against red tape why are they proposing red tape? They are in favour of easier planning whilst proposing a dictatorial planning regime?
This is bullshit. If it weren't for a framework of Government incentives, do you really think it would be more profitable for farmers in rainy Britain to put solar panels all over their land than, you know, grow stuff?
Bravo. How to demonstrate your total lack of understanding of the economics of farming.
My understanding is that you plant stuff, it grows, and you get a price for it that is negotiated year by year with supermarkets and other retailers. And my understanding of the solar market is that you build your solar farm, and due to a system of bill-payer funded incentives, you get a guaranteed price year on year. Hardly comparing apples with apples. Or am I wrong?
In about three weeks we won't be able to afford sheds, let alone new houses, so this will all be academic
The UK is about to implode
I'm going to have another coffee
Define implode. OK so its an improvement from "explode" thanks to Russian re-entry vehicles raining down from the SS18 warhead bus which was your previous flap.
Implode from...? I have a long list of reasons why we are fucked and who fucked up. Perhaps we share some issues though perhaps from opposite sides of the fence.
"Implode" as in sovereign debt crisis - as @kyf_100 said earlier
"A sovereign debt crisis occurs when a country is unable to pay its bills. But this doesn't happen overnight—there are plenty of warning signs. It usually becomes a crisis when the country's leaders ignore these indicators for political reasons.
The first sign appears when the country finds it cannot get a low interest rate from lenders. Amid concerns the country will go into debt default, investors become concerned that the country cannot afford to pay the bonds.
As lenders start to worry, they require higher and higher yields to offset their risk. The higher the yields, the more it costs the country to refinance its sovereign debt. In time, it cannot afford to keep rolling over debt. Consequently, it defaults. Investors' fears become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That happened to Greece, Italy, and Spain. It led to the European debt crisis. It also happened when Iceland took over the country's bank debt, causing the value of its currency to plummet."
Unfortunately, that sounds like the UK right now, hopefully we can steer away from the nastiest rocks
I do have to laugh. That moron Liam Byrne left the infamous "there is no money left" note which the Tories still think was factual. We couldn't run out of cash then and we can't do so now - we print the money our debt is denominated in.
Our problem isn't a sovereign debt crisis, its a sovereign borrowing crisis. We can pay every penny of debt we hold. And some isn't debt as we owe it to ourselves. The problem is we can't sell new debt or at least not at a price we're willing to accept...
The only point in Truss Braverman (other than shitting the bed on the economy) is tackling this. Numbers are doubling year on year, soon it will be in the hundreds of thousands at this rate. A proper invasion
Yet they are spineless on this as on so much else. But really good at cracking down on cannabis use, or not, who the F knows
Scenes
I remember when @rcs1000 told us this was just a function of airport closures during Covid and it would all go away after that as people sought out easier and regular asylum routes.
You are mischaracterising what I said.
But let's start off with the elephant in the room: there is absolutely no evidence that there are more people coming illegally to the UK. There were very large numbers of people living and working illegally in the UK before the boats, and there continue to be very large numbers.
What is different about the boats, is that they are visible.
20 guys in the back of a TEU is not visible. Fifty people overstaying their Albanian tourist visa every day is not visible. The reuse of a Nigerian passport with visa to get 30 or 40 people across the border is not visible. Close to a hundred people a day claiming asylum at a dozen airports across the UK is not visible. An extra couple of passengers on a Megabus, or in the luggage compartment below is not visible.
So long as there is demand for illegal immigrants, then there will continue to be illegal immigrants.
And illegal immigrants are economically rational: they will find the cheapest, most pleasant, least dangerous way into the country.
Brexit has made traditional ways harder: that container sitting for 20 hours for processing makes that a much less attractive route. The end of booze cruises, ditto. And yes, the big slowdown in international travel.
But lets not pretend that what we are seeing is unprecedented in terms of numbers: what has changed is what is visible.
I'm sure it has been pointed out already, but it looks like Truss has dumped the 'growth' vision, and is now just doing anything to please the crowd and try and cling to power. Perhaps it is for the best.
If she has, she'll lose the votes of people like me who liked her growth agenda, while probably still not being trusted by those who already opposed her.
The opposition to solar panels shows that we are perhaps back to benign incompetence, which for me at least is a bit of a relief. The solar panels are not a bad idea, neither were its predecessor (onshore wind turbines), but you have to be quite careful about where you put them to avoid decimating the landscape, which we have just spent a hundred years preserving.
Trouble is the markets are not heaving a sigh of relief, they are pursuing UK debt and turning this into a rout. Which ends where?
With the ERM debacle there was an endpoint. We fell out of the ERM and equilibrium was restored
How do we restore equilibrium here? I am minded that this is more than just a UK issue, this is systemic doubt on a global scale, and the UK is targeted first simply because our stupid government was first out of the trenches into the bullets
It's easy to say it's a global issue, but I think there are some countries currently running a budget surplus. The solution is obvious. The government has to stop borrowing money.
Had it not been for the mini-budget we would have been able to do this over the course of several years, but the catastrophic loss of credibility thanks to Truss and Kwarteng, means that we now need to achieve the same thing more quickly.
Normally when a country gets into a pickle like this it ends up having to increase taxes and cut spending at the same time. The sooner we act the easier it will be to protect spending that will increase our future prosperity (such as scientific research and infrastructure investment), but we're rapidly running out of time to exercise discretion.
If we're to ease back into sound money and public finances (which of course should be the aim), we must do it slowly and the Government and the Bank of England must be aligned, in favour of a strategy that promotes growth whilst minimising the shock to the economy.
What I find rather silly about posts like the above is that they ignore nearly 10 years of the BOE pumping the system full of money, buying up Government debt, and keeping interest rates super low, and the Bank's current volte face of swerving into the contraction by switching to selling Government debt, and threatening to whack up interest rates, and tries to pin the whole lot on Truss, for reasons which seem entirely politically motivated rather than being based on any known concept of economics. Rather transparent wouldn't you say?
This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
Yes, it works
"House prices remain buoyant, and Conibear believes it’s not simply the high standard of building but the “favourability of the environment”. Depending on access to garages and private gardens, two-bedroom apartments and semi-detached homes in Poundbury can start anywhere between £190,000 and £275,000. Many of the three-bedroom detached homes go for somewhere between £325,000 and £400,000."
This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
Yes, it works
"House prices remain buoyant, and Conibear believes it’s not simply the high standard of building but the “favourability of the environment”. Depending on access to garages and private gardens, two-bedroom apartments and semi-detached homes in Poundbury can start anywhere between £190,000 and £275,000. Many of the three-bedroom detached homes go for somewhere between £325,000 and £400,000."
It does depend on having an established county town - Dorchester - with its facilities as an appendix, rather like Cowley has Oxford as an appendix ... it's not built out in the middle of FA, but is within walking distance of the centre/rail stations, 30 mins or so.
Sure, and it's not perfect, and it is quiet (but the residents presumably like it that way)
The point is it is 3000% better than much of the crap being thrown up around the UK, which has no regard for aesthetics or urbanism at all. And is all in hideous cheap red brick
Not in red brick, but (for some) covered in harling, you know, the stuff you don't like when it is in Scotland. Do you call it rendering or what? Or at least the first part of the project was, though the harling was coming off at least one fairly new house [edit] only a few years on.
The thing that makes the skin on my back creep, as I have I think mentioned here befo,e is the use of different building stones from different bands of the Jurassic belt - normally not found together. Which, to me, gives it the same sort of feeling of transplantation into alien contiguity that one also gets (for laudable reasons) at St Fagans Folk Museum or the Weald and Downland Museum.
But that is a quibble. Most wouldn't even notice it.
The problem is, you kind of do notice. Because living in England, you subconsciously soak up “what goes with what”.
Poundbury is an interesting experiment, a success on some measures and a failure on others.
But it is a living experiment, so hopefully it’s failures can be addressed over time.
More successful than Skelmersdale or that Scottish one which essentially need to be completely demolished.
But, it works
If I took 20 large, random yet comparable new developments (including Poundbury) and asked you which one would you live in, almost certainly it would be Poundbury
Look at all these. Poundbury is nicer than all of them
Soulless boring redbrick mediocrity. At best. Actively horrible at worst
UK housebuilders are lazy and cheapskates. They want to drop the same design of house on different developments across the country, because it is cheaper. At the same time they are also looking for every possible way to pinch pennies.
I live in a 4 year old new build. It wasn't a cheap house. They used the cheapest baths, work surfaces etc. that they could possibly get away with. They even used plastic chrome-effect edging to put around copper pipes so they wouldn't have to use short sections of real chrome pipes for towel radiators.
The houses are all the same as they can then have the same materials list for the same house wherever it is in the country. We agreed to buy our house when it was still early in construction. We asked for some minor changes. The only thing they would agree to was to install network cabling.
There is no incentive to design houses in the UK that are in keeping with the local community and with well thought out connections and infrastructure.
It *was* a cheap house and you have set out why - that you paid a lot is because they made a huge profit. Remember that the proposed shake-up of planning laws will enable Barratt et al to keep building unsuitable cheapo ugly shitboxes for large profits, only this time without having to worry about consent or local democracy.
BTW I bought my own Barratt shitbox in 2005 sold it for a loss in 2021, so I do know how bad some of these are - and the other builder putting up other phases of our huge estate was even worse.
Serious question, how on earth did the house lose value in that period of massive house price rises?
The total collapse of house prices on Teesside. BR always demands the concreting over pf everywhere to build 14 million new houses. Well thats pretty much what happened on Teesside. I lived on part of a development that eventually stretched to 1,400 homes in a small area. Across the border in Boro swathes of new homes. Across the river in Stockton the same. Many thousands of homes added, most of which are "executive-style".
The market fell out of housing in 08/09 and the developers simply undercut the market. So you couldn't sell your house without making a massive loss for more than a decade as new prices were so much lower. Eventually we moved back into positive equity and were lucky to only lose a paper £45k - at least we were able to sell.
So many were vacant repossessions (6 on my street alone at one point) - nobody could afford to buy, and the ones that went for rental brought in various scumbags until the BTL landlords gave up as rental income didn't cover the mortgage. And those went empty. Only the final completion of the development brought stability back to the local market, with prices rebounding thanks to the post-Covid boom (our paper loss would have been £60k without this...)
In other parts of Europe it is quite common, expected even, for newbuild houses to depreciate in value. The sqm valuation is based on how old the building is and if it is and old building, how much maintainence it needs, with the highest value being the first time it is sold. Sometimes the underlying land appreciates in value, other times it depreciates. It seems to me that residential valuations in the UK severely neglect the actual quality of the building.
Instruct 3 valuers to come and value your property and you will likely get 3 wildly different answers. It strikes me that very little thought goes into it.
Generally speaking I think there is a lot of reliance on getting purchasers to self-police the value, particularly by reviewing their building survey and negotiating deductions as appropriate. In a bonkers housing market like we’ve had in recent years though, the ability to do so is constrained by the fact that for most houses there has been (at least!) 4 or 5 competing bids that are ready to go if you’re not happy.
If there ever were an "antigrowth coalition" proposal, you're looking at it.
Completely backwards from the government's professed agenda.
100% agreed.
Utter nonsense pandering to the anti growth coalition of NIMBYs. Inexcusable.
Its the raging hypocrisy which is most funny.
They propose a bonfire of red tape for planning applications for housing and fracking They propose a burden of red tape to dictate planning decisions on private land
What do they want? If they are so against red tape why are they proposing red tape? They are in favour of easier planning whilst proposing a dictatorial planning regime?
This is bullshit. If it weren't for a framework of Government incentives, do you really think it would be more profitable for farmers in rainy Britain to put solar panels all over their land than, you know, grow stuff?
Bravo. How to demonstrate your total lack of understanding of the economics of farming.
My understanding is that you plant stuff, it grows, and you get a price for it that is negotiated year by year with supermarkets and other retailers. And my understanding of the solar market is that you build your solar farm, and due to a system of bill-payer funded incentives, you get a guaranteed price year on year. Hardly comparing apples with apples. Or am I wrong?
The problem with your Young Ones quote ("first we sow the seed, then nature grows the seed, then we eat the seed") is that the price for what grows is too often lower than the cost of growing it.
Hence the need for subsidy. To stop farms going bust.
This will come as a shock to PB-ers, but I have a very bad feeling about the Ukraine War
And I believe we need a negotiated peace, because the risk of nuclear war is too great
But just saying that without suggesting how doesn't get us very far
Maybe something like this
In some highly public place, the G7 leaders get together and offer peace terms to Putin along these lines
1. An immediate ceasefire 2. Both sides withdraw military to pre-Feb 2022 lines 3. Sanctions are progressively dropped over the ensuing two years, pipelines reopened (but EU countries can obviously decide if they still want to rely on Russian energy, I doubt they will) 4. Refugees return to Ukraine 5. UN organised referendums are held in the four provinces on whether they wish to be part of Ukraine or Russia 6. Ukraine will join NATO but will agree not to station nukes on Uke soil 7. The world will recognise Russian possession of Crimea 8. The G20 will create a fund to rebuild Ukraine AND Russian infrastructure damaged in the war (eg Kerch Bridge) 9. Aaaand..... everyone relax
That's essentially what Dynamo proposed, before Elon got wind of it and repeated it.
We can assume the territories vote to stay in Russia. So as for the nuke-free thing we can even achieve some symmetry: no nukes in Ukraine; no nukes in the Russian territories, except Crimea and Sevastopol. Russia is a Black Sea naval power after all. Crimea doesn't even border Ukraine.
Best if Ukraine stays out of NATO. Ditto Sweden and Finland.
The no nukes requirement can be made stronger in both areas: reduce militarisation more than that.
And on 5 and 7, if the UN is organising referendum reruns then the veto powers at least can recognise sovereignty according to the results. Suggest China as the best principal monitoring power. Bear in mind that a majority of the veto powers are in NATO and have been arming Ukraine.
You realise the Azov Regiment won't like this? Something has to be done about the Azov Regiment.
That has got to be the most unconvincing lie since Vladimir Putin said he wasn't a war criminal.
I agree about the Azov Regiment. How about they and their fellow neo-Nazis in the Wagner regiment are trapped on an uninhabited island together? Any survivors after twelve months to be given amnesty and a new life in Kazakhstan.
I meant we can assume it for the sake of this discussion. I am in favour of genuinely fair internationally-monitored referendum reruns, where everyone from the territories can vote however they like, without fear of experiencing any kind of hassle for how they've voted. As I understand it, so are the other supporters of Dynamo's plan such as those whose names are anagrams of ELNO.
Whatever the referendum result in each territory, it may turn out that the borders of the four territories have to be adjusted here and there in order to give residents what they want and to maximise security and minimise the chance of clashes. It will be a fantastic step forward if that is the kind of thing people are arguing about rather than killing each other.
No we can't. Because it would not happen. Let's make assumptions based on realism not on the fantasies of Nazis like Vladimir Putin or everyone's favourite demented anti-Semite Dynamo.
There is at least a reasonable - as in, around one in three - chance that a democratic referendum in the Crimea would vote to join with Russia. It's about the same as the odds of Northern Ireland voting to join Ireland, and for much the same reason.
But any of the others? Forget it. It's about the same chance as Yorkshire voting to join an independent Scotland.
Hard to know how such a referendum might fairly be held, given recent history and current conditions. But nonetheless, it's not the most ridiculous of ideas.
Coincidentally, there's a new (longish read) Snyder article up on the history of Crimea. While it's part polemic against Putin's anti-history, it's also quite informative. https://snyder.substack.com/p/russias-crimea-disconnect
I was thinking.... wow Will Schryver's changed his tune.
Then.
Wait.
Oh.
Yes, I can see that. ...In one respect, though, our imaginary Italian or Lithuanian claims are less nonsensical than the Russian one. Even if we were to accept every other Putinesque oddity, including the profound fallacy of the legitimation of present borders by ancient baptisms, we would be brought to a halt by geography. Putin's mythical structure is based upon the restoration of Rus, an east European entity centered in Kyiv whose high point was a thousand years ago. The Lithuanian and Italian governments are based in Vilnius and Rome, which were also the ancient capitals. Putin is talking about a state that is distant not only in time but in space. Moscow was not the capital of Rus; it did not exist when Valdimar was baptized.
And even if we bend our brains to accept Putin’s odd scheme, we can't avoid another basic geographical fact: the Crimean peninsula was never part of the lands of Rus. Neither shore of the present-day Kerch Bridge was in Rus. None of the southern Ukrainian territories, for that matter, were in Rus. Kherson region, for example, was not in Rus. Very little of the land that Russia occupies now in Ukraine was part of Rus.
History, as we work to see it, is ever so much more interesting than the myths that bring senseless wars. The political fantasies of tyrants, which claim to encapsulate some eternal truth, draw our attention away from the actual territory and the actual peoples who inhabited it and the actual institutions they built.
This is the essence of colonial logic: only we, the colonizers, have a history; anyone whom we encounter along the way does not....
Trouble is, what if the Tories dump Truss and install Sunak and that doesn't fix anything - and debt still spirals out of control?
Reverse the tax cuts, extend NI to all income and introduce some wealth taxes.
Now I know a lot of people will scream 'wot, more taxes?' but there's a simple triangle: tax - public spending - borrowing. If we want to bring down borrowing while not cutting public spending, there's only one corner left.
Trouble is, what if the Tories dump Truss and install Sunak and that doesn't fix anything - and debt still spirals out of control?
I'm not sure anything is going to work, financial markets are now uncovering trillions in DB pension liabilities that looked far away 10-20 years ago but now don't look that far off and the government has got no idea how to fund them, the state pension and rising healthcare costs without pushing taxes up to stifling rates.
In the end an IMF bailout with the condition of forcing a 30-50% haricut on DB pensioners might be the only way out.
I'm sure it has been pointed out already, but it looks like Truss has dumped the 'growth' vision, and is now just doing anything to please the crowd and try and cling to power. Perhaps it is for the best.
If she has, she'll lose the votes of people like me who liked her growth agenda, while probably still not being trusted by those who already opposed her.
The opposition to solar panels shows that we are perhaps back to benign incompetence, which for me at least is a bit of a relief. The solar panels are not a bad idea, neither were its predecessor (onshore wind turbines), but you have to be quite careful about where you put them to avoid decimating the landscape, which we have just spent a hundred years preserving.
Trouble is the markets are not heaving a sigh of relief, they are pursuing UK debt and turning this into a rout. Which ends where?
With the ERM debacle there was an endpoint. We fell out of the ERM and equilibrium was restored
How do we restore equilibrium here? I am minded that this is more than just a UK issue, this is systemic doubt on a global scale, and the UK is targeted first simply because our stupid government was first out of the trenches into the bullets
It's easy to say it's a global issue, but I think there are some countries currently running a budget surplus. The solution is obvious. The government has to stop borrowing money.
Had it not been for the mini-budget we would have been able to do this over the course of several years, but the catastrophic loss of credibility thanks to Truss and Kwarteng, means that we now need to achieve the same thing more quickly.
Normally when a country gets into a pickle like this it ends up having to increase taxes and cut spending at the same time. The sooner we act the easier it will be to protect spending that will increase our future prosperity (such as scientific research and infrastructure investment), but we're rapidly running out of time to exercise discretion.
If we're to ease back into sound money and public finances (which of course should be the aim), we must do it slowly and the Government and the Bank of England must be aligned, in favour of a strategy that promotes growth whilst minimising the shock to the economy.
What I find rather silly about posts like the above is that they ignore nearly 10 years of the BOE pumping the system full of money, buying up Government debt, and keeping interest rates super low, and the Bank's current volte face of swerving into the contraction by switching to selling Government debt, and threatening to whack up interest rates, and tries to pin the whole lot on Truss, for reasons which seem entirely politically motivated rather than being based on any known concept of economics. Rather transparent wouldn't you say?
Still think Truss is great Lucky?
Yes. I think it's sad how she seems not to have played the politics of it very well, and not chosen well with Kwarteng, but as PM she's dead on.
Trouble is, what if the Tories dump Truss and install Sunak and that doesn't fix anything - and debt still spirals out of control?
I'm not sure anything is going to work, financial markets are now uncovering trillions in DB pension liabilities that looked far away 10-20 years ago but now don't look that far off and the government has got no idea how to fund them, the state pension and rising healthcare costs without pushing taxes up to stifling rates.
In the end an IMF bailout with the condition of forcing a 30-50% haricut on DB pensioners might be the only way out.
You focus on DB pensions is becoming and obsession Max. It's not DB pensions that have caused the public finance crisis it's this f*cking awful, inept, neoliberal government.
This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
Yes, it works
"House prices remain buoyant, and Conibear believes it’s not simply the high standard of building but the “favourability of the environment”. Depending on access to garages and private gardens, two-bedroom apartments and semi-detached homes in Poundbury can start anywhere between £190,000 and £275,000. Many of the three-bedroom detached homes go for somewhere between £325,000 and £400,000."
This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
Yes, it works
"House prices remain buoyant, and Conibear believes it’s not simply the high standard of building but the “favourability of the environment”. Depending on access to garages and private gardens, two-bedroom apartments and semi-detached homes in Poundbury can start anywhere between £190,000 and £275,000. Many of the three-bedroom detached homes go for somewhere between £325,000 and £400,000."
It does depend on having an established county town - Dorchester - with its facilities as an appendix, rather like Cowley has Oxford as an appendix ... it's not built out in the middle of FA, but is within walking distance of the centre/rail stations, 30 mins or so.
Sure, and it's not perfect, and it is quiet (but the residents presumably like it that way)
The point is it is 3000% better than much of the crap being thrown up around the UK, which has no regard for aesthetics or urbanism at all. And is all in hideous cheap red brick
Not in red brick, but (for some) covered in harling, you know, the stuff you don't like when it is in Scotland. Do you call it rendering or what? Or at least the first part of the project was, though the harling was coming off at least one fairly new house [edit] only a few years on.
The thing that makes the skin on my back creep, as I have I think mentioned here befo,e is the use of different building stones from different bands of the Jurassic belt - normally not found together. Which, to me, gives it the same sort of feeling of transplantation into alien contiguity that one also gets (for laudable reasons) at St Fagans Folk Museum or the Weald and Downland Museum.
But that is a quibble. Most wouldn't even notice it.
The problem is, you kind of do notice. Because living in England, you subconsciously soak up “what goes with what”.
Poundbury is an interesting experiment, a success on some measures and a failure on others.
But it is a living experiment, so hopefully it’s failures can be addressed over time.
More successful than Skelmersdale or that Scottish one which essentially need to be completely demolished.
But, it works
If I took 20 large, random yet comparable new developments (including Poundbury) and asked you which one would you live in, almost certainly it would be Poundbury
Look at all these. Poundbury is nicer than all of them
Soulless boring redbrick mediocrity. At best. Actively horrible at worst
UK housebuilders are lazy and cheapskates. They want to drop the same design of house on different developments across the country, because it is cheaper. At the same time they are also looking for every possible way to pinch pennies.
I live in a 4 year old new build. It wasn't a cheap house. They used the cheapest baths, work surfaces etc. that they could possibly get away with. They even used plastic chrome-effect edging to put around copper pipes so they wouldn't have to use short sections of real chrome pipes for towel radiators.
The houses are all the same as they can then have the same materials list for the same house wherever it is in the country. We agreed to buy our house when it was still early in construction. We asked for some minor changes. The only thing they would agree to was to install network cabling.
There is no incentive to design houses in the UK that are in keeping with the local community and with well thought out connections and infrastructure.
It *was* a cheap house and you have set out why - that you paid a lot is because they made a huge profit. Remember that the proposed shake-up of planning laws will enable Barratt et al to keep building unsuitable cheapo ugly shitboxes for large profits, only this time without having to worry about consent or local democracy.
BTW I bought my own Barratt shitbox in 2005 sold it for a loss in 2021, so I do know how bad some of these are - and the other builder putting up other phases of our huge estate was even worse.
Serious question, how on earth did the house lose value in that period of massive house price rises?
The total collapse of house prices on Teesside. BR always demands the concreting over pf everywhere to build 14 million new houses. Well thats pretty much what happened on Teesside. I lived on part of a development that eventually stretched to 1,400 homes in a small area. Across the border in Boro swathes of new homes. Across the river in Stockton the same. Many thousands of homes added, most of which are "executive-style".
The market fell out of housing in 08/09 and the developers simply undercut the market. So you couldn't sell your house without making a massive loss for more than a decade as new prices were so much lower. Eventually we moved back into positive equity and were lucky to only lose a paper £45k - at least we were able to sell.
So many were vacant repossessions (6 on my street alone at one point) - nobody could afford to buy, and the ones that went for rental brought in various scumbags until the BTL landlords gave up as rental income didn't cover the mortgage. And those went empty. Only the final completion of the development brought stability back to the local market, with prices rebounding thanks to the post-Covid boom (our paper loss would have been £60k without this...)
So house prices were kept affordable - good.
And houses people wanted to buy were sold, while those whom people didn't want to but weren't. Good.
Scale this up, and we will have any shoeboxes left unsold because nobody will want them, and quality, affordable homes everywhere. Win/win.
If you lose equity, then that's not the end of the world, housing should be a home not an investment.
I think you miss the point. I specifically said "paper loss" because its a home not an investment. But for a decade so many of us had no chance to sell. We were trapped. That is not a functioning market. Nor was the choice offered to people - the same old 3-4 bed "executive-style" homes which could only be sold at a discount yet still remained out of reach of the people who needed genuinely affordable and smaller homes.
Give developers a free reign and they build what makes them the most money. What people want or need is not their concern. Its ours - and your ideas would absolutely cripple large areas.
Give developers free rein and anyone who doesn't build what people don't want will lose business to those who build what they do want.
It's only our current planning regime which hands power to the developers to make these decisions. Since developers are the only ones to manage the planning process.
What you describe is the housing equivalent of Douglas Adams' Great Shoe Event Horizon.
Housing developers are a cartel. They get planning permission but don't actually start building. That fucks the local plan because not enough houses are being built, which means they automatically get to build the places they really want.
And they all build the same thing. Crammed in houses with too many small bedrooms and crappy gardens and insufficient parking. As all the developers as a cartel build the same thing the choice to the market is no choice. You can buy this one or that one or the other one and they are all awful and they are all overpriced. Or rent. Your choice.
I want councils and the housing associations to cut the developer cartel out of the loop. Build houses that people actually want at a price they can afford. Then we get choice.
In about three weeks we won't be able to afford sheds, let alone new houses, so this will all be academic
The UK is about to implode
I'm going to have another coffee
Define implode. OK so its an improvement from "explode" thanks to Russian re-entry vehicles raining down from the SS18 warhead bus which was your previous flap.
Implode from...? I have a long list of reasons why we are fucked and who fucked up. Perhaps we share some issues though perhaps from opposite sides of the fence.
"Implode" as in sovereign debt crisis - as @kyf_100 said earlier
"A sovereign debt crisis occurs when a country is unable to pay its bills. But this doesn't happen overnight—there are plenty of warning signs. It usually becomes a crisis when the country's leaders ignore these indicators for political reasons.
The first sign appears when the country finds it cannot get a low interest rate from lenders. Amid concerns the country will go into debt default, investors become concerned that the country cannot afford to pay the bonds.
As lenders start to worry, they require higher and higher yields to offset their risk. The higher the yields, the more it costs the country to refinance its sovereign debt. In time, it cannot afford to keep rolling over debt. Consequently, it defaults. Investors' fears become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That happened to Greece, Italy, and Spain. It led to the European debt crisis. It also happened when Iceland took over the country's bank debt, causing the value of its currency to plummet."
Unfortunately, that sounds like the UK right now, hopefully we can steer away from the nastiest rocks
I do have to laugh. That moron Liam Byrne left the infamous "there is no money left" note which the Tories still think was factual. We couldn't run out of cash then and we can't do so now - we print the money our debt is denominated in.
Our problem isn't a sovereign debt crisis, its a sovereign borrowing crisis. We can pay every penny of debt we hold. And some isn't debt as we owe it to ourselves. The problem is we can't sell new debt or at least not at a price we're willing to accept...
A sovereign debt crisis is simply a country which can't pay its bills, as the definition say. Being able to create pounds does not really solve the problem
If the markets totally lose faith in the UK economy then we can't just print eighty jizillion spunk-quids, because then we would become Zimbabwe
She's a much smarter politician than handy Alex. He was like the Blues Brothers advertising their gig, offering anything to everyone and who cares if its contradictory or misleading as long as they vote yes. Nippie has more of a view about the challenges. Which is why the SNP continue to do so very well with voters.
If there ever were an "antigrowth coalition" proposal, you're looking at it.
Completely backwards from the government's professed agenda.
100% agreed.
Utter nonsense pandering to the anti growth coalition of NIMBYs. Inexcusable.
Its the raging hypocrisy which is most funny.
They propose a bonfire of red tape for planning applications for housing and fracking They propose a burden of red tape to dictate planning decisions on private land
What do they want? If they are so against red tape why are they proposing red tape? They are in favour of easier planning whilst proposing a dictatorial planning regime?
This is bullshit. If it weren't for a framework of Government incentives, do you really think it would be more profitable for farmers in rainy Britain to put solar panels all over their land than, you know, grow stuff?
Bravo. How to demonstrate your total lack of understanding of the economics of farming.
My understanding is that you plant stuff, it grows, and you get a price for it that is negotiated year by year with supermarkets and other retailers. And my understanding of the solar market is that you build your solar farm, and due to a system of bill-payer funded incentives, you get a guaranteed price year on year. Hardly comparing apples with apples. Or am I wrong?
The problem with your Young Ones quote ("first we sow the seed, then nature grows the seed, then we eat the seed") is that the price for what grows is too often lower than the cost of growing it.
Hence the need for subsidy. To stop farms going bust.
I think you're inventing a disagreement beteeen us where there is none. What I am arguing against is the notion that the Government is going against their free market principles when they seek to promote the growing of food and discourage the idea of putting up solar farms. The fact is that these solar projects are incentivised by the Government/billpayers. So it wasn't a free market anyway. If there were a totally free market system, I don't know what we'd get, but it sure as shit wouldn't be solar farms sprouting up in Scotland.
I'm sure it has been pointed out already, but it looks like Truss has dumped the 'growth' vision, and is now just doing anything to please the crowd and try and cling to power. Perhaps it is for the best.
If she has, she'll lose the votes of people like me who liked her growth agenda, while probably still not being trusted by those who already opposed her.
The opposition to solar panels shows that we are perhaps back to benign incompetence, which for me at least is a bit of a relief. The solar panels are not a bad idea, neither were its predecessor (onshore wind turbines), but you have to be quite careful about where you put them to avoid decimating the landscape, which we have just spent a hundred years preserving.
Trouble is the markets are not heaving a sigh of relief, they are pursuing UK debt and turning this into a rout. Which ends where?
With the ERM debacle there was an endpoint. We fell out of the ERM and equilibrium was restored
How do we restore equilibrium here? I am minded that this is more than just a UK issue, this is systemic doubt on a global scale, and the UK is targeted first simply because our stupid government was first out of the trenches into the bullets
It's easy to say it's a global issue, but I think there are some countries currently running a budget surplus. The solution is obvious. The government has to stop borrowing money.
Had it not been for the mini-budget we would have been able to do this over the course of several years, but the catastrophic loss of credibility thanks to Truss and Kwarteng, means that we now need to achieve the same thing more quickly.
Normally when a country gets into a pickle like this it ends up having to increase taxes and cut spending at the same time. The sooner we act the easier it will be to protect spending that will increase our future prosperity (such as scientific research and infrastructure investment), but we're rapidly running out of time to exercise discretion.
If we're to ease back into sound money and public finances (which of course should be the aim), we must do it slowly and the Government and the Bank of England must be aligned, in favour of a strategy that promotes growth whilst minimising the shock to the economy.
What I find rather silly about posts like the above is that they ignore nearly 10 years of the BOE pumping the system full of money, buying up Government debt, and keeping interest rates super low, and the Bank's current volte face of swerving into the contraction by switching to selling Government debt, and threatening to whack up interest rates, and tries to pin the whole lot on Truss, for reasons which seem entirely politically motivated rather than being based on any known concept of economics. Rather transparent wouldn't you say?
Still think Truss is great Lucky?
Yes. I think it's sad how she seems not to have played the politics of it very well, and not chosen well with Kwarteng, but as PM she's dead on.
On topic: No idea why this is being discouraged when we're gas limited.
Well for one thing it will have no impact on the demand for gas on cold January evenings when the sun doesn't shine.
We will have more supply of gas though as we'll have burnt less in the CCGTs when the sun is out and solar is generating power. Your comments would be correct if we solely used gas for heating and not for electricity generation AND domestic heating. What's needed are carefully written contracts for when we're producing excess electricity to the grid from renewables. Or you will end up with excessive solar.
Yes, the solar will reduce gas consumption for a few hours in the middle of the January day when the sun is poking above the horizon, and we can ramp down some CCGT output. But in the grand scheme of things, the impact on gas consumption will be small during the season of maximum demand.
But it would mean that we would burn much less gas over the course of the year, and could use the summer lulls to fill storage.
That is what happens anyway. However, as we don't have that much storage capacity (certainly compared to other European countries), you soon run out of places to put the gas.
IF we used zero gas for power generation, we'd still be burning a heck of a lot for heating. We can displace this through electrification of heat, either directly or via the vector of electrolytic hydrogen. Do it directly we need the power on cold winter evenings again, so solar is no good. Do it via hydrogen, and we hit the storage problem again if it is generated from solar in the summer.
Build the solar in the southern USA, where they need the power in summer for A/C. Not in the north of England, where we don't.
If we are about to go into a recession/depression/nuclear war, Indyref2 doesn't look quite as sensible as before.
I think it's quite a smart pivot. Also, cannot be seen to be too aggro with the SC decision round the corner; must not be seen to put overt political pressure on them.
Trouble is, what if the Tories dump Truss and install Sunak and that doesn't fix anything - and debt still spirals out of control?
I'm not sure anything is going to work, financial markets are now uncovering trillions in DB pension liabilities that looked far away 10-20 years ago but now don't look that far off and the government has got no idea how to fund them, the state pension and rising healthcare costs without pushing taxes up to stifling rates.
In the end an IMF bailout with the condition of forcing a 30-50% haricut on DB pensioners might be the only way out.
You focus on DB pensions is becoming and obsession Max. It's not DB pensions that have caused the public finance crisis it's this f*cking awful, inept, neoliberal government.
The idea that our current travails have not been in the making for more than a decade is an embarrassment for anyone who aims to be seen as an intelligent adult commentor to express.
"The blast and fire sent part of the 12-mile Kerch Strait Bridge tumbling into the sea and killed at least three people, according to the Russian authorities. A senior Ukrainian official corroborated Russian reports that Ukraine was behind the attack. The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of a government ban on discussing the blast, added that Ukraine’s intelligence services had orchestrated the explosion, using a bomb loaded onto a TRUCK being driven across the bridge."
"The blast and fire sent part of the 12-mile Kerch Strait Bridge tumbling into the sea and killed at least three people, according to the Russian authorities. A senior Ukrainian official corroborated Russian reports that Ukraine was behind the attack. The official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of a government ban on discussing the blast, added that Ukraine’s intelligence services had orchestrated the explosion, using a bomb loaded onto a TRUCK being driven across the bridge."
Banning solar from farms - lol! But there's gotta be method to it.
1. She keeps a chunk of the membership from flouncing to the Hang The Marxist Greenowokers party should one come about in certain eventualities.
2. She also - and this is surely by far the more important consideration - puts it in people's minds that the government really cares about the food supply. People will remember this in those crucial first few weeks of bodyweight drop, before they get too whacked out to do anything. "Can't blame the government - circumstances - they always tried their best - remember how they said food was more important than electricity" ... as people seal their garage doors and let the carbon monoxide do its job.
In about three weeks we won't be able to afford sheds, let alone new houses, so this will all be academic
The UK is about to implode
I'm going to have another coffee
Define implode. OK so its an improvement from "explode" thanks to Russian re-entry vehicles raining down from the SS18 warhead bus which was your previous flap.
Implode from...? I have a long list of reasons why we are fucked and who fucked up. Perhaps we share some issues though perhaps from opposite sides of the fence.
"Implode" as in sovereign debt crisis - as @kyf_100 said earlier
"A sovereign debt crisis occurs when a country is unable to pay its bills. But this doesn't happen overnight—there are plenty of warning signs. It usually becomes a crisis when the country's leaders ignore these indicators for political reasons.
The first sign appears when the country finds it cannot get a low interest rate from lenders. Amid concerns the country will go into debt default, investors become concerned that the country cannot afford to pay the bonds.
As lenders start to worry, they require higher and higher yields to offset their risk. The higher the yields, the more it costs the country to refinance its sovereign debt. In time, it cannot afford to keep rolling over debt. Consequently, it defaults. Investors' fears become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That happened to Greece, Italy, and Spain. It led to the European debt crisis. It also happened when Iceland took over the country's bank debt, causing the value of its currency to plummet."
Unfortunately, that sounds like the UK right now, hopefully we can steer away from the nastiest rocks
I do have to laugh. That moron Liam Byrne left the infamous "there is no money left" note which the Tories still think was factual. We couldn't run out of cash then and we can't do so now - we print the money our debt is denominated in.
Our problem isn't a sovereign debt crisis, its a sovereign borrowing crisis. We can pay every penny of debt we hold. And some isn't debt as we owe it to ourselves. The problem is we can't sell new debt or at least not at a price we're willing to accept...
A sovereign debt crisis is simply a country which can't pay its bills, as the definition say. Being able to create pounds does not really solve the problem
If the markets totally lose faith in the UK economy then we can't just print eighty jizillion spunk-quids, because then we would become Zimbabwe
We can to pay the current creditors. We just then lose our ability to sell any future debt. So we can't go bust now, but we can face a serious cash flow crisis...
The reality is simple. Our government and their plans are not trusted. We need a new government who talks sense and has plans which don't fuck over working people to benefit Tory donors and don't collapse the markets. The only choice is Rishi Sunak who identified all of these problems and had a plan.
This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
Yes, it works
"House prices remain buoyant, and Conibear believes it’s not simply the high standard of building but the “favourability of the environment”. Depending on access to garages and private gardens, two-bedroom apartments and semi-detached homes in Poundbury can start anywhere between £190,000 and £275,000. Many of the three-bedroom detached homes go for somewhere between £325,000 and £400,000."
This is the only idea of theirs that I've instantly thought: Yes, good
There is something ugly about farmland being used in this way. Literally and morally
Why is it worse than using it for building houses?
After all, it's less damaging to the land and considerably more easily reversed.
Moreover, they look prettier than most modern housing developments.
The ugliness of modern UK housing developments is one of the most depressing aspects of a depressing time
All that sludgy red brick, the poxy cul de sacs with their pathetic driveways, the total inability to develop proper European urbanism: shops bars places squares. And we used to be great at this!
Let King Charles design everything
Poundbry is not very good. But it is better than many “expert” designs.
Congratulations to British town planners - more shit at their job than a bloke with no training.
I know little about Poundbury (drove past when I think is a new part being built over the summer, but have never visited). From pictures it seems a little whimsical and a mish-mash architecturally (as is my own village), but the important question is:
Does it work as a settlement? Is it a good, livable community?
Yes, it works
"House prices remain buoyant, and Conibear believes it’s not simply the high standard of building but the “favourability of the environment”. Depending on access to garages and private gardens, two-bedroom apartments and semi-detached homes in Poundbury can start anywhere between £190,000 and £275,000. Many of the three-bedroom detached homes go for somewhere between £325,000 and £400,000."
It does depend on having an established county town - Dorchester - with its facilities as an appendix, rather like Cowley has Oxford as an appendix ... it's not built out in the middle of FA, but is within walking distance of the centre/rail stations, 30 mins or so.
Sure, and it's not perfect, and it is quiet (but the residents presumably like it that way)
The point is it is 3000% better than much of the crap being thrown up around the UK, which has no regard for aesthetics or urbanism at all. And is all in hideous cheap red brick
Not in red brick, but (for some) covered in harling, you know, the stuff you don't like when it is in Scotland. Do you call it rendering or what? Or at least the first part of the project was, though the harling was coming off at least one fairly new house [edit] only a few years on.
The thing that makes the skin on my back creep, as I have I think mentioned here befo,e is the use of different building stones from different bands of the Jurassic belt - normally not found together. Which, to me, gives it the same sort of feeling of transplantation into alien contiguity that one also gets (for laudable reasons) at St Fagans Folk Museum or the Weald and Downland Museum.
But that is a quibble. Most wouldn't even notice it.
The problem is, you kind of do notice. Because living in England, you subconsciously soak up “what goes with what”.
Poundbury is an interesting experiment, a success on some measures and a failure on others.
But it is a living experiment, so hopefully it’s failures can be addressed over time.
More successful than Skelmersdale or that Scottish one which essentially need to be completely demolished.
But, it works
If I took 20 large, random yet comparable new developments (including Poundbury) and asked you which one would you live in, almost certainly it would be Poundbury
Look at all these. Poundbury is nicer than all of them
Soulless boring redbrick mediocrity. At best. Actively horrible at worst
UK housebuilders are lazy and cheapskates. They want to drop the same design of house on different developments across the country, because it is cheaper. At the same time they are also looking for every possible way to pinch pennies.
I live in a 4 year old new build. It wasn't a cheap house. They used the cheapest baths, work surfaces etc. that they could possibly get away with. They even used plastic chrome-effect edging to put around copper pipes so they wouldn't have to use short sections of real chrome pipes for towel radiators.
The houses are all the same as they can then have the same materials list for the same house wherever it is in the country. We agreed to buy our house when it was still early in construction. We asked for some minor changes. The only thing they would agree to was to install network cabling.
There is no incentive to design houses in the UK that are in keeping with the local community and with well thought out connections and infrastructure.
It *was* a cheap house and you have set out why - that you paid a lot is because they made a huge profit. Remember that the proposed shake-up of planning laws will enable Barratt et al to keep building unsuitable cheapo ugly shitboxes for large profits, only this time without having to worry about consent or local democracy.
BTW I bought my own Barratt shitbox in 2005 sold it for a loss in 2021, so I do know how bad some of these are - and the other builder putting up other phases of our huge estate was even worse.
Serious question, how on earth did the house lose value in that period of massive house price rises?
The total collapse of house prices on Teesside. BR always demands the concreting over pf everywhere to build 14 million new houses. Well thats pretty much what happened on Teesside. I lived on part of a development that eventually stretched to 1,400 homes in a small area. Across the border in Boro swathes of new homes. Across the river in Stockton the same. Many thousands of homes added, most of which are "executive-style".
The market fell out of housing in 08/09 and the developers simply undercut the market. So you couldn't sell your house without making a massive loss for more than a decade as new prices were so much lower. Eventually we moved back into positive equity and were lucky to only lose a paper £45k - at least we were able to sell.
So many were vacant repossessions (6 on my street alone at one point) - nobody could afford to buy, and the ones that went for rental brought in various scumbags until the BTL landlords gave up as rental income didn't cover the mortgage. And those went empty. Only the final completion of the development brought stability back to the local market, with prices rebounding thanks to the post-Covid boom (our paper loss would have been £60k without this...)
So house prices were kept affordable - good.
And houses people wanted to buy were sold, while those whom people didn't want to but weren't. Good.
Scale this up, and we will have any shoeboxes left unsold because nobody will want them, and quality, affordable homes everywhere. Win/win.
If you lose equity, then that's not the end of the world, housing should be a home not an investment.
I think you miss the point. I specifically said "paper loss" because its a home not an investment. But for a decade so many of us had no chance to sell. We were trapped. That is not a functioning market. Nor was the choice offered to people - the same old 3-4 bed "executive-style" homes which could only be sold at a discount yet still remained out of reach of the people who needed genuinely affordable and smaller homes.
Give developers a free reign and they build what makes them the most money. What people want or need is not their concern. Its ours - and your ideas would absolutely cripple large areas.
Give developers free rein and anyone who doesn't build what people don't want will lose business to those who build what they do want.
It's only our current planning regime which hands power to the developers to make these decisions. Since developers are the only ones to manage the planning process.
What you describe is the housing equivalent of Douglas Adams' Great Shoe Event Horizon.
Housing developers are a cartel. They get planning permission but don't actually start building. That fucks the local plan because not enough houses are being built, which means they automatically get to build the places they really want.
And they all build the same thing. Crammed in houses with too many small bedrooms and crappy gardens and insufficient parking. As all the developers as a cartel build the same thing the choice to the market is no choice. You can buy this one or that one or the other one and they are all awful and they are all overpriced. Or rent. Your choice.
I want councils and the housing associations to cut the developer cartel out of the loop. Build houses that people actually want at a price they can afford. Then we get choice.
So do I.
Abolish planning restrictions, you smash the cartel. People can choose any developer, any builder, or self-build to their hearts consent, because permission isn't restricted to only the developers.
Trouble is, what if the Tories dump Truss and install Sunak and that doesn't fix anything - and debt still spirals out of control?
I'm not sure anything is going to work, financial markets are now uncovering trillions in DB pension liabilities that looked far away 10-20 years ago but now don't look that far off and the government has got no idea how to fund them, the state pension and rising healthcare costs without pushing taxes up to stifling rates.
In the end an IMF bailout with the condition of forcing a 30-50% haricut on DB pensioners might be the only way out.
You focus on DB pensions is becoming and obsession Max. It's not DB pensions that have caused the public finance crisis it's this f*cking awful, inept, neoliberal government.
It's the single issue that will define the next 10 years of state finance in this country. How does the government keep the plates spinning and keep the markets on side? I'm honestly not sure. I understand you have skin in the game as a DB pension holder but something will have to be cut, the early numbers look absolutely appalling for the private sector, loads of big names seem completely and utterly uninvestible.
I think state sector liabilities are even larger, especially after adding in local government liabilities.
If you don't believe me then take a look at long dated gilts, there are only sellers. Or UK corporate bonds, another sea of red.
Currently my best estimate is that somewhere around 3% of GDP per year is being spent by the state and corporations to meet DB commitments.
I'm beginning to think that the low CT and low investment is correlation rather than causation, companies have been spending money that would be otherwise be spent on capital on meeting DB pension commitments.
The UK economy is on fire and DB pensions are fuelling that fire. Whatever tax rises you throw at it to put it out won't make a difference, the solution will inevitably be some brave government deciding to turn off the fuel taps.
Team truss keep surprising me with their unconsidered ignorance.
To keep our countryside productive it needs to be biodiverse. Monocultures are vulnerable.
Solar farms in the south of England are good for biodiversity. As the South East becomes more arid the ground will becomes less able to sustain life. One of the (unexpected) bounties of a solar farm is regular dew fall. The ground below each panel is irrigated, lightly. And that will allow many of our more marginal plants to thrive.
Stopping solar farms restricts farm diversification and effectively removes a simple support for biodiversity.
Comments
I would never recoomend anyone buys a new house due to the remedial works that will be required.
https://twitter.com/DavidLammy/status/1579123871948869632?s=20&t=B4FjY_lpIJJHqPB2-ugk3A
Then.
Wait.
Oh.
That she would be this bad this quickly, that was something of a surprise, I'll grant you.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/half-support-election-taking-place-once-new-prime-minister-place
https://twitter.com/RSPBNews/status/1579449530013351938
Someone putting panels up, who is going to just be a taker of spot electricity rates, is taking an enormous risk. Panels, right now, are expensive - and so is electricity. The business case of panels is a 30 year one: you hand over money now, and for 30 years (or a little more) you get a gently diminishing flow of electricity.
If the price of energy were to come down - either because lots of people have put panels up, or some other reason - then you could be absolutely hammered. In particular, it's not impossible that on sunny days in June, you might easily see spot electricity prices flirting with the big zero.
But that's not a decision for governments. It's a decision for farmers choosing what to use their land for.
I personally think they would be mad to put panels up on productive land (marginal land is a different issue), but it isn't mine (or the government's) call.
Had it not been for the mini-budget we would have been able to do this over the course of several years, but the catastrophic loss of credibility thanks to Truss and Kwarteng, means that we now need to achieve the same thing more quickly.
Normally when a country gets into a pickle like this it ends up having to increase taxes and cut spending at the same time. The sooner we act the easier it will be to protect spending that will increase our future prosperity (such as scientific research and infrastructure investment), but we're rapidly running out of time to exercise discretion.
"We're about to experience a sovereign debt crisis caused by the Europe energy crisis, all a capstone on the 100 year fiat expirement.
Here's how I think the next 6-8 months go down:"
https://twitter.com/fejau_inc/status/1566657303784263681?s=20&t=6aXEm0OH4UTRsWNL_wXZxQ
However he gets one thing wrong: he thinks it will be a eurozone dollar debt crisis, not UK. And his resolution feels a bit optimistic, in the present circs
Sadly, it’s not in the UK’s economic (absent bond market pressure) to do so, but that’s the ultimate cost of Truss-Kwarteng specifically and Tory delusions more broadly.
Think Greece, post bail-out, or Ireland, if you want a closer analogy.
The market fell out of housing in 08/09 and the developers simply undercut the market. So you couldn't sell your house without making a massive loss for more than a decade as new prices were so much lower. Eventually we moved back into positive equity and were lucky to only lose a paper £45k - at least we were able to sell.
So many were vacant repossessions (6 on my street alone at one point) - nobody could afford to buy, and the ones that went for rental brought in various scumbags until the BTL landlords gave up as rental income didn't cover the mortgage. And those went empty. Only the final completion of the development brought stability back to the local market, with prices rebounding thanks to the post-Covid boom (our paper loss would have been £60k without this...)
It takes time, and intention, for a place to develop its soul. (The Church of England has started to recognise that being vicar in a new place is a different kettle of fish to taking over in an established community. It needs different training and temperaments to do well.) Poundbury, at least, is trying to do that.
Can it be done without the intervention of a royal? Given the emaciated state of local councils, I rather doubt it.
https://twitter.com/SamRamani2/status/1579451751668666368?s=20&t=B4FjY_lpIJJHqPB2-ugk3A
"BREAKING: Ukraine’s GUR says Russian forces received instructions to attack civilian infrastructure on October 2-3. These attacks were pre planned and not a spontaneous response to the Crimea bridge"
"This shows the Lyman defeat and domestic backlash was the catalyst for today’s events. The Kremlin is nevertheless framing this as a counterterrorism operation"
The UK is about to implode
I'm going to have another coffee
I mean, if we removed agri subsidies and solar subsidies, than maybe. I know the few I've put on my roof have managed to turn into profit, and are really making me not worried about the electric prices at the moment.
Also, this is epitome of mountains from mole hills:
https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-is-solar-power-a-threat-to-uk-farmland/
That there has to be several weeks’ planning, into launching a volley of fewer than a hundred missiles, says everything about the lack of decent capability remaining with the Russian military.
Yes, there’s a lot of media, especially in the States, now wanting Ukraine to sue to peace, and saying that it’s not in the US interest to keep arming the defenders against a nuclear threat.
And houses people wanted to buy were sold, while those whom people didn't want to but weren't. Good.
Scale this up, and we will have any shoeboxes left unsold because nobody will want them, and quality, affordable homes everywhere. Win/win.
If you lose equity, then that's not the end of the world, housing should be a home not an investment.
I already showed further down how much more money I calculate I could make from erecting solar on my vineyard site instead of growing grapes and making wine. That's without any government subsidy and using very conservative estimates. As it stands I power the equipment on site: weather station, caravan, internet, electric fencing etc with a couple of pretty small PV panels.
@Leon's suggestion that the G20 contribute to Russia's postwar rebuilding costs is either a joke, or an insult. I haven't yet worked out which.
Implode from...? I have a long list of reasons why we are fucked and who fucked up. Perhaps we share some issues though perhaps from opposite sides of the fence.
Your other searches have thrown up results from japan, South Korea and Colorado. You might want to think of ways those places relevantly differ from the UK.
- flatten fields so there is no natural undulation
- plant zero trees
- build houses 2 inches apart (just do colonies!)
- make room for two cars in front of every house (do a communal car park in middle)
- no cycle/pedestrian provision to town centre so school run has to be done by car
Give developers a free reign and they build what makes them the most money. What people want or need is not their concern. Its ours - and your ideas would absolutely cripple large areas.
What I find rather silly about posts like the above is that they ignore nearly 10 years of the BOE pumping the system full of money, buying up Government debt, and keeping interest rates super low, and the Bank's current volte face of swerving into the contraction by switching to selling Government debt, and threatening to whack up interest rates, and tries to pin the whole lot on Truss, for reasons which seem entirely politically motivated rather than being based on any known concept of economics. Rather transparent wouldn't you say?
https://huggingface.co/spaces/stabilityai/stable-diffusion
"A sovereign debt crisis occurs when a country is unable to pay its bills. But this doesn't happen overnight—there are plenty of warning signs. It usually becomes a crisis when the country's leaders ignore these indicators for political reasons.
The first sign appears when the country finds it cannot get a low interest rate from lenders. Amid concerns the country will go into debt default, investors become concerned that the country cannot afford to pay the bonds.
As lenders start to worry, they require higher and higher yields to offset their risk. The higher the yields, the more it costs the country to refinance its sovereign debt. In time, it cannot afford to keep rolling over debt. Consequently, it defaults. Investors' fears become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
That happened to Greece, Italy, and Spain. It led to the European debt crisis. It also happened when Iceland took over the country's bank debt, causing the value of its currency to plummet."
Unfortunately, that sounds like the UK right now, hopefully we can steer away from the nastiest rocks
https://www.iqair.com/us/air-quality-map?lat=47.568236&lng=-122.308628&zoomLevel=10
For the past month or more, local air quality has ranged from middling to outright unhealthy, due to the Bolt Creek wildfire in the Cascade Mountains northwest of Seattle:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2022_Washington_wildfires
The past few days have been some of the worst for smoke here this summer, thanks to "offshore" winds blowing east to west that pushes the smoke our direction. Today we actually have "onshore" winds from the north that are slowly helping to improve air quality in Puget Sound.
However, what we are NOT getting today, or according to forecast for next two weeks, is a significant amount of RAIN, which would not only clear the air at least temporarily, but also help to put out or at least significantly curtail the Bolt Creek and other wildfires in Pacific Northwest.
Call me woke as folk, but I do NOT appreciate chocking on the air I'm breathing. Indeed, one reason I moved to Seattle in the first place was because of it's (formerly) good air quality.
We know so much more about what makes for liveable, sustainable, and even productive development than we did in, say, 1982.
I prompted one of those AI drawing tools (Stable Diffusion) with the name "Geddy Lee" @RushFamTourneys @rushisaband @rushtheband and this is what it came back with https://twitter.com/sciencebase/status/1579387759051309057/photo/1
...and then Alex Lifeson. Look at that index finger! https://twitter.com/sciencebase/status/1579387764218691585/photo/1
Then, Neil Peart https://twitter.com/sciencebase/status/1579387769075675136/photo/1
Hmm, which has an incentive? 🤔
At times I am pretty sure you meant it. eg when you noted that her presentation improved through the debates (which it did, tho it turns out the first awful Truss is the real one)
I am pretty sure I may have done it (though I was only joking of course!). And I think a well-known flint-knapper may have done that once or twice ;-)
It's only our current planning regime which hands power to the developers to make these decisions. Since developers are the only ones to manage the planning process.
Our problem isn't a sovereign debt crisis, its a sovereign borrowing crisis. We can pay every penny of debt we hold. And some isn't debt as we owe it to ourselves. The problem is we can't sell new debt or at least not at a price we're willing to accept...
@Samfr
·
29m
Starting to think the Tories might be forced by the markets to change leader sooner rather than later."
https://twitter.com/Samfr/status/1579485840241496066?s=20&t=SaebdsRbqrw23DhqqtRgwg
Trouble is, what if the Tories dump Truss and install Sunak and that doesn't fix anything - and debt still spirals out of control?
But let's start off with the elephant in the room: there is absolutely no evidence that there are more people coming illegally to the UK. There were very large numbers of people living and working illegally in the UK before the boats, and there continue to be very large numbers.
What is different about the boats, is that they are visible.
20 guys in the back of a TEU is not visible. Fifty people overstaying their Albanian tourist visa every day is not visible. The reuse of a Nigerian passport with visa to get 30 or 40 people across the border is not visible. Close to a hundred people a day claiming asylum at a dozen airports across the UK is not visible. An extra couple of passengers on a Megabus, or in the luggage compartment below is not visible.
So long as there is demand for illegal immigrants, then there will continue to be illegal immigrants.
And illegal immigrants are economically rational: they will find the cheapest, most pleasant, least dangerous way into the country.
Brexit has made traditional ways harder: that container sitting for 20 hours for processing makes that a much less attractive route. The end of booze cruises, ditto. And yes, the big slowdown in international travel.
But lets not pretend that what we are seeing is unprecedented in terms of numbers: what has changed is what is visible.
Generally speaking I think there is a lot of reliance on getting purchasers to self-police the value, particularly by reviewing their building survey and negotiating deductions as appropriate. In a bonkers housing market like we’ve had in recent years though, the ability to do so is constrained by the fact that for most houses there has been (at least!) 4 or 5 competing bids that are ready to go if you’re not happy.
Hence the need for subsidy. To stop farms going bust.
Interesting lines on Indyref2 with the court case starting tomorrow.
Sounds like she has no intention of standing down any time soon.
...In one respect, though, our imaginary Italian or Lithuanian claims are less nonsensical than the Russian one. Even if we were to accept every other Putinesque oddity, including the profound fallacy of the legitimation of present borders by ancient baptisms, we would be brought to a halt by geography. Putin's mythical structure is based upon the restoration of Rus, an east European entity centered in Kyiv whose high point was a thousand years ago. The Lithuanian and Italian governments are based in Vilnius and Rome, which were also the ancient capitals. Putin is talking about a state that is distant not only in time but in space. Moscow was not the capital of Rus; it did not exist when Valdimar was baptized.
And even if we bend our brains to accept Putin’s odd scheme, we can't avoid another basic geographical fact: the Crimean peninsula was never part of the lands of Rus. Neither shore of the present-day Kerch Bridge was in Rus. None of the southern Ukrainian territories, for that matter, were in Rus. Kherson region, for example, was not in Rus. Very little of the land that Russia occupies now in Ukraine was part of Rus.
History, as we work to see it, is ever so much more interesting than the myths that bring senseless wars. The political fantasies of tyrants, which claim to encapsulate some eternal truth, draw our attention away from the actual territory and the actual peoples who inhabited it and the actual institutions they built.
This is the essence of colonial logic: only we, the colonizers, have a history; anyone whom we encounter along the way does not....
Now I know a lot of people will scream 'wot, more taxes?' but there's a simple triangle: tax - public spending - borrowing. If we want to bring down borrowing while not cutting public spending, there's only one corner left.
- "not a miracle economic cure"
- "not a panacea"
- "many challenges along the way"
Definite shift in tone #SNP22
https://twitter.com/paulhutcheon/status/1579492511298428928
She marched them up to the top of the hill...
In the end an IMF bailout with the condition of forcing a 30-50% haricut on DB pensioners might be the only way out.
Not the worst idea in a nuclear apocalypse.
Housing developers are a cartel. They get planning permission but don't actually start building. That fucks the local plan because not enough houses are being built, which means they automatically get to build the places they really want.
And they all build the same thing. Crammed in houses with too many small bedrooms and crappy gardens and insufficient parking. As all the developers as a cartel build the same thing the choice to the market is no choice. You can buy this one or that one or the other one and they are all awful and they are all overpriced. Or rent. Your choice.
I want councils and the housing associations to cut the developer cartel out of the loop. Build houses that people actually want at a price they can afford. Then we get choice.
If the markets totally lose faith in the UK economy then we can't just print eighty jizillion spunk-quids, because then we would become Zimbabwe
IF we used zero gas for power generation, we'd still be burning a heck of a lot for heating. We can displace this through electrification of heat, either directly or via the vector of electrolytic hydrogen. Do it directly we need the power on cold winter evenings again, so solar is no good. Do it via hydrogen, and we hit the storage problem again if it is generated from solar in the summer.
Build the solar in the southern USA, where they need the power in summer for A/C. Not in the north of England, where we don't.
I think it's quite a smart pivot. Also, cannot be seen to be too aggro with the SC decision round the corner; must not be seen to put overt political pressure on them.
The numbers don't add up and never will, but once you inhale that doesn't matter.
BoZo couldn't run a bath, Nippy and crew are even worse at the stuff that actually affects people, but she doesn't talk about those bits.
1. She keeps a chunk of the membership from flouncing to the Hang The Marxist Greenowokers party should one come about in certain eventualities.
2. She also - and this is surely by far the more important consideration - puts it in people's minds that the government really cares about the food supply. People will remember this in those crucial first few weeks of bodyweight drop, before they get too whacked out to do anything. "Can't blame the government - circumstances - they always tried their best - remember how they said food was more important than electricity" ... as people seal their garage doors and let the carbon monoxide do its job.
The reality is simple. Our government and their plans are not trusted. We need a new government who talks sense and has plans which don't fuck over working people to benefit Tory donors and don't collapse the markets. The only choice is Rishi Sunak who identified all of these problems and had a plan.
Abolish planning restrictions, you smash the cartel. People can choose any developer, any builder, or self-build to their hearts consent, because permission isn't restricted to only the developers.
I think state sector liabilities are even larger, especially after adding in local government liabilities.
If you don't believe me then take a look at long dated gilts, there are only sellers. Or UK corporate bonds, another sea of red.
Currently my best estimate is that somewhere around 3% of GDP per year is being spent by the state and corporations to meet DB commitments.
I'm beginning to think that the low CT and low investment is correlation rather than causation, companies have been spending money that would be otherwise be spent on capital on meeting DB pension commitments.
The UK economy is on fire and DB pensions are fuelling that fire. Whatever tax rises you throw at it to put it out won't make a difference, the solution will inevitably be some brave government deciding to turn off the fuel taps.
To keep our countryside productive it needs to be biodiverse. Monocultures are vulnerable.
Solar farms in the south of England are good for biodiversity. As the South East becomes more arid the ground will becomes less able to sustain life. One of the (unexpected) bounties of a solar farm is regular dew fall. The ground below each panel is irrigated, lightly. And that will allow many of our more marginal plants to thrive.
Stopping solar farms restricts farm diversification and effectively removes a simple support for biodiversity.
You have to wonder how they got their jobs.