In the South Hams, the ability to build houses faces an initial question: is the location supported by a bus service? As there are no buses outside the main roads between towns, that kills the ability to build. Apart from some inexplicable examples, like 40 houses (then upped to 67) built in our village, a village not supported by any bus services.
The other thing pissing folk off is the planners trying to squash rural business and push them into the towns. Our dog groomer has a lovely set up in some old barns. The planners are trying to say it should be in a local town where "people can wait for their dog to be clipped - and a have a cup of coffee whilst they do". Unquote. If you could actually park in the towns for two hours - you can spend an hour trying to find a parking spot. They have required a user survey to be completed, on how many dog owners use electric vehicles for their journey to the barns. There is no recharging infrastructure round here, so electric vehicles are scarce as free-range hens teeth. And for many of us, it is a shorter journey than the 7 miles to the nearest town.
There are numerous other examples. It looks like a strategy designed by someone still in college who has never been within 200 miles of the place.
Rishi should not have abandoned housing targets but instead modified them with a policy of new towns or at least refurbished streets in left behind areas. Yes, it panders to nimbyism but more importantly delivers levelling up (to be sold as a Brexit benefit) and rebalances the economy. It creates shovel-ready jobs and should lead to an influx of entrepreneurially-minded new homeowners.
New housing is needed in places of greatest economic activity, because that’s where there are jobs and people want to live.
That is the point. By supplying cheap new houses (or whole new towns) away from overheated areas, the government diverts economic activity and jobs to run-down or left-behind districts.
I don’t know the figures and am happy to listen to those with more expertise here. However, if there are existing cheap houses in an area, doesn’t that demonstrate that cheap housing alone isn’t going to bring economic activity to an area? Building more homes in such areas isn’t going to work.
Yes, government (central and local) should be trying to divert economic activity and jobs to left-behind areas, but it will take something other than housebuilding to do that.
Hertsmere is one of the few places where the Tories did markedly worse in the 2021 County council elections than in in the 2019 borough elections. The reason? Labour and the Lib Dem’s whipped up a successful campaign against new house building. So, the Conservative administration dropped their local plan in response.
Politicians want new housing, but not in their constituencies/boroughs/wards.
Councils are happy enough to do some things their residents hate - all four parties just agree that they're going to do them and the voters don't get a choice.
I deal with housing in a professional context. The thing with this 'tory members going mad about housing targets' is that it is not a trivial concern of 0.8% of the population, there is mass disillusionment with the system of planning the Conservatives introduced in 2012. In very simple terms, the government directed that Council's have to plan for, approve and deliver X houses or else developers can build anywhere as long as there is no significant harm. The actual system of making a plan is a byzantine, adversarial process that is picked apart at every stage by warring land speculators/private interests and their KCs. It takes about 5 years, costs millions and many never happen at all. While you are making a plan, the government keep changing the rules, the 'mutant algorhythm' thing that you sometimes hear about, ie doubling the amount of housing you have to provide, with a flick of a pen, etc. Then of course the government also defund the local authorities that have to make these plans through 'austerity', just to make it even more impossible. It was really just a cynical ploy on the part of government to get housing delivered without taking any responsibility for the difficult decisions: a dysfunctional bureaucracy to make seemingly absurd decisions in the hope that people would blame Council's or planning Inspectors for it. The current thing that you hear about 'saving the housing targets' is best interpreted as a campaign by the development industry and their professional advisors to keep the current system going because they have built an entire industry around how to profit from the existing structural uncertainty. The actual solution is to resolve the structural uncertainty by government taking and owning difficult political decisions about where new housing and associated development goes.
An interesting different perspective. I would be more than happy if housing targets are abolished and replaced with something better that facilitates more housebuilding than the current set up. But we cannot afford a slow down in construction for a whole variety of reasons both macro and need based.
Yes but I think that the slowdown in construction will happen anyway because of excessive build costs. This is something I will keep bringing up so sorry if I am boring people. There is currently a disproportionate rise in the cost of building houses due increases material and labour costs and the compliance with new regulation (largely environmental based). The experience of the last recession is that new build development will just stop completely in large parts of the country because there is no profit in it, the industry will be mothballed. In Housing targets just fade in to irrelevance in this context. This is a political debate concentrated in the south east and home counties.
London and in the South East is about 20 million people. Add in prosperous cities and areas around the country and it will be more like 30 million people living in areas of critical lack of housing. Not everywhere by any means but almost half the country by population.
Indeed but a slowdown in housebuilding will have a big economic impact outside the south east, that is a big problem. It won't be because of 'housing targets', it will be due to the economics of housebuilding in a recession. The 'housing targets' debate is largely confined to the south, where the tories are trying to fight off challenges from lib dems, who often play a 'stop housebuilding' card.
On housing, my position is no building on greenfield sites.
If Labour's position differs from that it will piss me off.
This is one area of policy where I am probably closer to the other parties.
Conversely I'm totally fine with building on green fields. Prioritise brownfield? Sure. But I've seen far too many absurdities where people complain about perfectly decent extensions onto some unattractive, useless 'greenfield' as though it were the most stellar land in the Green Belt and not some marginal piece of well connected scrub land.
Talking about abandoning election pledges, I note with amusement that Sunak ditching the small boats pledge has generated little coverage.
STOP THE BOATS was massive headline news, with supporting commentariat pieces denouncing anyone traitorous enough to object.
The policy has been dropped. They can't stop the boats. Its now actively what we knew it always was - an empty slogan.
The problem for the Tories is that their client media have worked very hard to protect people from this new news. no massive headline coverage of the u-turn. And going off the comments from that one Daily Mail article that was buried down the page I can see why - a lot of morons very angry.
So we have angry voters being promised the moon on a stick. The government realising they can't deliver. But people still whipped into a frenzy awaiting their stick. When they realise - probably quite late in the day - that there will be no moons on sticks, what will they do?
I deal with housing in a professional context. The thing with this 'tory members going mad about housing targets' is that it is not a trivial concern of 0.8% of the population, there is mass disillusionment with the system of planning the Conservatives introduced in 2012. In very simple terms, the government directed that Council's have to plan for, approve and deliver X houses or else developers can build anywhere as long as there is no significant harm. The actual system of making a plan is a byzantine, adversarial process that is picked apart at every stage by warring land speculators/private interests and their KCs. It takes about 5 years, costs millions and many never happen at all. While you are making a plan, the government keep changing the rules, the 'mutant algorhythm' thing that you sometimes hear about, ie doubling the amount of housing you have to provide, with a flick of a pen, etc. Then of course the government also defund the local authorities that have to make these plans through 'austerity', just to make it even more impossible. It was really just a cynical ploy on the part of government to get housing delivered without taking any responsibility for the difficult decisions: a dysfunctional bureaucracy to make seemingly absurd decisions in the hope that people would blame Council's or planning Inspectors for it. The current thing that you hear about 'saving the housing targets' is best interpreted as a campaign by the development industry and their professional advisors to keep the current system going because they have built an entire industry around how to profit from the existing structural uncertainty. The actual solution is to resolve the structural uncertainty by government taking and owning difficult political decisions about where new housing and associated development goes.
I'd add that a good deal of NIMBYism comes from the kind of development.
- Giant developments are good for the developers and (to a certain extent) the planners. They crash house prices locally for years, and building them results in years of noise etc as they are built in phases. - The properties built. Given the love of ugly rabbit hutches, both by the developers and those specifying density, it's not surprising what gets built. Nor should it surprise that people don't want a zillion ugly rabbit hutches near them.
Most planning officials in my experience would be classed as development hawks by those opposed to development - they're just hamstrung by byzantine policy, which is not their fault. Of course that leads to casusl accusations of corruption, but you'd have to bribe quite a few people to see results, it just would not be worth it in most cases.
In the South Hams, the ability to build houses faces an initial question: is the location supported by a bus service? As there are no buses outside the main roads between towns, that kills the ability to build. Apart from some inexplicable examples, like 40 houses (then upped to 67) built in our village, a village not supported by any bus services.
The other thing pissing folk off is the planners trying to squash rural business and push them into the towns. Our dog groomer has a lovely set up in some old barns. The planners are trying to say it should be in a local town where "people can wait for their dog to be clipped - and a have a cup of coffee whilst they do". Unquote. If you could actually park in the towns for two hours - you can spend an hour trying to find a parking spot. They have required a user survey to be completed, on how many dog owners use electric vehicles for their journey to the barns. There is no recharging infrastructure round here, so electric vehicles are scarce as free-range hens teeth. And for many of us, it is a shorter journey than the 7 miles to the nearest town.
There are numerous other examples. It looks like a strategy designed by someone still in college who has never been within 200 miles of the place.
I am not 100% convinced that people who use "dog groomers" should be afforded any kind of convenience or accommodation by anyone. It is probably someone in the planners' office who feels likewise that dog grooming shouldn't be a thing.
I deal with housing in a professional context. The thing with this 'tory members going mad about housing targets' is that it is not a trivial concern of 0.8% of the population, there is mass disillusionment with the system of planning the Conservatives introduced in 2012. In very simple terms, the government directed that Council's have to plan for, approve and deliver X houses or else developers can build anywhere as long as there is no significant harm. The actual system of making a plan is a byzantine, adversarial process that is picked apart at every stage by warring land speculators/private interests and their KCs. It takes about 5 years, costs millions and many never happen at all. While you are making a plan, the government keep changing the rules, the 'mutant algorhythm' thing that you sometimes hear about, ie doubling the amount of housing you have to provide, with a flick of a pen, etc. Then of course the government also defund the local authorities that have to make these plans through 'austerity', just to make it even more impossible. It was really just a cynical ploy on the part of government to get housing delivered without taking any responsibility for the difficult decisions: a dysfunctional bureaucracy to make seemingly absurd decisions in the hope that people would blame Council's or planning Inspectors for it. The current thing that you hear about 'saving the housing targets' is best interpreted as a campaign by the development industry and their professional advisors to keep the current system going because they have built an entire industry around how to profit from the existing structural uncertainty. The actual solution is to resolve the structural uncertainty by government taking and owning difficult political decisions about where new housing and associated development goes.
An interesting different perspective. I would be more than happy if housing targets are abolished and replaced with something better that facilitates more housebuilding than the current set up. But we cannot afford a slow down in construction for a whole variety of reasons both macro and need based.
Yes but I think that the slowdown in construction will happen anyway because of excessive build costs. This is something I will keep bringing up so sorry if I am boring people. There is currently a disproportionate rise in the cost of building houses due increases material and labour costs and the compliance with new regulation (largely environmental based). The experience of the last recession is that new build development will just stop completely in large parts of the country because there is no profit in it, the industry will be mothballed. In Housing targets just fade in to irrelevance in this context. This is a political debate concentrated in the south east and home counties.
So how do we improve supply of materials and reduce costs? So many of the trees we grow seem to end up producing pellets for biofuels but surely we can redirect timber to construction with the right incentives. Why is it so hard to make bricks at a profit in this country? This is something the government should be looking at. I agree the new housebuilding I want has to be profitable.
I think the materials issue is a consequence of Ukraine and Covid legacy supply chain issues. The answer to labour costs rising is either through cutting the minimum wage (unlikely) or automation. Regarding the latter, the prefab/factory houses idea is a good one but the costs are higher than traditional blockwork construction. The reason developers go for it is certainty and speed rather than cost.
In the South Hams, the ability to build houses faces an initial question: is the location supported by a bus service? As there are no buses outside the main roads between towns, that kills the ability to build. Apart from some inexplicable examples, like 40 houses (then upped to 67) built in our village, a village not supported by any bus services.
The other thing pissing folk off is the planners trying to squash rural business and push them into the towns. Our dog groomer has a lovely set up in some old barns. The planners are trying to say it should be in a local town where "people can wait for their dog to be clipped - and a have a cup of coffee whilst they do". Unquote. If you could actually park in the towns for two hours - you can spend an hour trying to find a parking spot. They have required a user survey to be completed, on how many dog owners use electric vehicles for their journey to the barns. There is no recharging infrastructure round here, so electric vehicles are scarce as free-range hens teeth. And for many of us, it is a shorter journey than the 7 miles to the nearest town.
There are numerous other examples. It looks like a strategy designed by someone still in college who has never been within 200 miles of the place.
The last time I looked, South Hams was run by the Conservatives. The planners, whom you deride, give professional advice and guidance, but it is the councillors who take the decisions. If there are inexplicable planning permissions, the first idea that would come to mind is corruption.
But there is never any corruption where Conservatives are concrned. Is there? All very mysterious.
One problem is that everyone has examples of bad housing developments, there's far too many, which means people simply refuse to believe issues can indeed be successfully mitigated. Things like access problems or site flooding, they can usually be overcome but locals are wary of bad examples so dont want to risk it.
A long-awaited spate of dealmaking broke out last night with a flurry of private equity-backed takeover approaches for mid-cap London companies worth more than £6 billion.
Dechra Pharmaceuticals said after the market had closed that it was in talks over a possible £4.6 billion cash bid from EQT, a Swedish private equity firm, in a deal backed by the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.
The approach for Dechra came after Network International had confirmed earlier that it had received a “preliminary and conditional” proposal from CVC Capital Partners and Francisco Partners, the private equity firms. Shares in the emerging markets-focused payments company closed up 23.1 per cent, or 56½p, at 300p, valuing the company at £1.6 billion, still below its float price of four years ago.
A wave of bids for London-listed companies from overseas buyers had been expected after the pound weakened last year against the dollar. A poll by Numis, the investment bank, found that 88 per cent of FTSE directors regarded British companies as vulnerable to takeovers, with private equity groups tipped to target medium-sized firms with strong cashflow generation trading at depressed valuations.
Any reform of planning law should come hand in hand with reform of English land law, which is f*cking insane, and appears designed to put as much money into lawyers pockets as possible, and I say this as a lawyer.
Streamline and modernise the buying and selling of property and competition can then flourish.
I deal with housing in a professional context. The thing with this 'tory members going mad about housing targets' is that it is not a trivial concern of 0.8% of the population, there is mass disillusionment with the system of planning the Conservatives introduced in 2012. In very simple terms, the government directed that Council's have to plan for, approve and deliver X houses or else developers can build anywhere as long as there is no significant harm. The actual system of making a plan is a byzantine, adversarial process that is picked apart at every stage by warring land speculators/private interests and their KCs. It takes about 5 years, costs millions and many never happen at all. While you are making a plan, the government keep changing the rules, the 'mutant algorhythm' thing that you sometimes hear about, ie doubling the amount of housing you have to provide, with a flick of a pen, etc. Then of course the government also defund the local authorities that have to make these plans through 'austerity', just to make it even more impossible. It was really just a cynical ploy on the part of government to get housing delivered without taking any responsibility for the difficult decisions: a dysfunctional bureaucracy to make seemingly absurd decisions in the hope that people would blame Council's or planning Inspectors for it. The current thing that you hear about 'saving the housing targets' is best interpreted as a campaign by the development industry and their professional advisors to keep the current system going because they have built an entire industry around how to profit from the existing structural uncertainty. The actual solution is to resolve the structural uncertainty by government taking and owning difficult political decisions about where new housing and associated development goes.
An interesting different perspective. I would be more than happy if housing targets are abolished and replaced with something better that facilitates more housebuilding than the current set up. But we cannot afford a slow down in construction for a whole variety of reasons both macro and need based.
Yes but I think that the slowdown in construction will happen anyway because of excessive build costs. This is something I will keep bringing up so sorry if I am boring people. There is currently a disproportionate rise in the cost of building houses due increases material and labour costs and the compliance with new regulation (largely environmental based). The experience of the last recession is that new build development will just stop completely in large parts of the country because there is no profit in it, the industry will be mothballed. In Housing targets just fade in to irrelevance in this context. This is a political debate concentrated in the south east and home counties.
So how do we improve supply of materials and reduce costs? So many of the trees we grow seem to end up producing pellets for biofuels but surely we can redirect timber to construction with the right incentives. Why is it so hard to make bricks at a profit in this country? This is something the government should be looking at. I agree the new housebuilding I want has to be profitable.
David , you have seen the state of the clowns and crooks running teh country, majority struggle to tie their shoelaces. We are led by donkeys, their pals and relatives etc. When dross like that can get total control of teh country and the great unwashed think they are great it is not hard to see why we are in the crap.
Curiously, Wings is struggling to find any reference to this £110k motorhome in either the accounts or the election expenses: https://wingsoverscotland.com/ It's almost as if they were running 2 sets of accounts.
In the South Hams, the ability to build houses faces an initial question: is the location supported by a bus service? As there are no buses outside the main roads between towns, that kills the ability to build. Apart from some inexplicable examples, like 40 houses (then upped to 67) built in our village, a village not supported by any bus services.
The other thing pissing folk off is the planners trying to squash rural business and push them into the towns. Our dog groomer has a lovely set up in some old barns. The planners are trying to say it should be in a local town where "people can wait for their dog to be clipped - and a have a cup of coffee whilst they do". Unquote. If you could actually park in the towns for two hours - you can spend an hour trying to find a parking spot. They have required a user survey to be completed, on how many dog owners use electric vehicles for their journey to the barns. There is no recharging infrastructure round here, so electric vehicles are scarce as free-range hens teeth. And for many of us, it is a shorter journey than the 7 miles to the nearest town.
There are numerous other examples. It looks like a strategy designed by someone still in college who has never been within 200 miles of the place.
The last time I looked, South Hams was run by the Conservatives. The planners, whom you deride, give professional advice and guidance, but it is the councillors who take the decisions. If there are inexplicable planning permissions, the first idea that would come to mind is corruption.
But there is never any corruption where Conservatives are concrned. Is there? All very mysterious.
Probably the same Tory councillors who are busy cutting the bus routes too.
I deal with housing in a professional context. The thing with this 'tory members going mad about housing targets' is that it is not a trivial concern of 0.8% of the population, there is mass disillusionment with the system of planning the Conservatives introduced in 2012. In very simple terms, the government directed that Council's have to plan for, approve and deliver X houses or else developers can build anywhere as long as there is no significant harm. The actual system of making a plan is a byzantine, adversarial process that is picked apart at every stage by warring land speculators/private interests and their KCs. It takes about 5 years, costs millions and many never happen at all. While you are making a plan, the government keep changing the rules, the 'mutant algorhythm' thing that you sometimes hear about, ie doubling the amount of housing you have to provide, with a flick of a pen, etc. Then of course the government also defund the local authorities that have to make these plans through 'austerity', just to make it even more impossible. It was really just a cynical ploy on the part of government to get housing delivered without taking any responsibility for the difficult decisions: a dysfunctional bureaucracy to make seemingly absurd decisions in the hope that people would blame Council's or planning Inspectors for it. The current thing that you hear about 'saving the housing targets' is best interpreted as a campaign by the development industry and their professional advisors to keep the current system going because they have built an entire industry around how to profit from the existing structural uncertainty. The actual solution is to resolve the structural uncertainty by government taking and owning difficult political decisions about where new housing and associated development goes.
I'd add that a good deal of NIMBYism comes from the kind of development.
- Giant developments are good for the developers and (to a certain extent) the planners. They crash house prices locally for years, and building them results in years of noise etc as they are built in phases. - The properties built. Given the love of ugly rabbit hutches, both by the developers and those specifying density, it's not surprising what gets built. Nor should it surprise that people don't want a zillion ugly rabbit hutches near them.
There are other issues. I'd argue my 'village' was well designed: I'd give them 8.5 or 9 out of 10 for it. The road layout, nature of the parks, and the cycle and footpath network are good. (*) The original concept of the place was solid.
But there's a massive failing: shops. We lack shops. We have a massive supermarket and three big retail units, but under ten small shops, not including two Co-ops (neither in the 'High Street'). The small shop units allegedly have massive ground rents. A large grassy area lies where the shops should have been built, over twenty years ago.
The High Street is not a High Street. The supermarket dominates and the retail units don't fit in well. What we need are: *) A couple of dozen small shop units, cheap to rent on short leases to 'try out' business ideas. *) Some medium-sized industrial units.
We also have a business park that has free land on which some of this can be built, and is zoned for business. But the local council want to cram even more houses onto it, further skewing the person-shop ratio.
(*) I'd also argue that some of these lessons are being unlearnt as other local developments are built...
One problem is that everyone has examples of bad housing developments, there's far too many, which means people simply refuse to believe issues can indeed be successfully mitigated. Things like access problems or site flooding, they can usually be overcome but locals are wary of bad examples so dont want to risk it.
Not many new builds are attractive or well situated. Past experience is also that supposed improvements in traffic and infrastructure rarely actually get built.
I deal with housing in a professional context. The thing with this 'tory members going mad about housing targets' is that it is not a trivial concern of 0.8% of the population, there is mass disillusionment with the system of planning the Conservatives introduced in 2012. In very simple terms, the government directed that Council's have to plan for, approve and deliver X houses or else developers can build anywhere as long as there is no significant harm. The actual system of making a plan is a byzantine, adversarial process that is picked apart at every stage by warring land speculators/private interests and their KCs. It takes about 5 years, costs millions and many never happen at all. While you are making a plan, the government keep changing the rules, the 'mutant algorhythm' thing that you sometimes hear about, ie doubling the amount of housing you have to provide, with a flick of a pen, etc. Then of course the government also defund the local authorities that have to make these plans through 'austerity', just to make it even more impossible. It was really just a cynical ploy on the part of government to get housing delivered without taking any responsibility for the difficult decisions: a dysfunctional bureaucracy to make seemingly absurd decisions in the hope that people would blame Council's or planning Inspectors for it. The current thing that you hear about 'saving the housing targets' is best interpreted as a campaign by the development industry and their professional advisors to keep the current system going because they have built an entire industry around how to profit from the existing structural uncertainty. The actual solution is to resolve the structural uncertainty by government taking and owning difficult political decisions about where new housing and associated development goes.
An interesting different perspective. I would be more than happy if housing targets are abolished and replaced with something better that facilitates more housebuilding than the current set up. But we cannot afford a slow down in construction for a whole variety of reasons both macro and need based.
Yes but I think that the slowdown in construction will happen anyway because of excessive build costs. This is something I will keep bringing up so sorry if I am boring people. There is currently a disproportionate rise in the cost of building houses due increases material and labour costs and the compliance with new regulation (largely environmental based). The experience of the last recession is that new build development will just stop completely in large parts of the country because there is no profit in it, the industry will be mothballed. In Housing targets just fade in to irrelevance in this context. This is a political debate concentrated in the south east and home counties.
So how do we improve supply of materials and reduce costs? So many of the trees we grow seem to end up producing pellets for biofuels but surely we can redirect timber to construction with the right incentives. Why is it so hard to make bricks at a profit in this country? This is something the government should be looking at. I agree the new housebuilding I want has to be profitable.
I think the materials issue is a consequence of Ukraine and Covid legacy supply chain issues. The answer to labour costs rising is either through cutting the minimum wage (unlikely) or automation. Regarding the latter, the prefab/factory houses idea is a good one but the costs are higher than traditional blockwork construction. The reason developers go for it is certainty and speed rather than cost.
The question is the services - electrical, water, gas. And, I should add*, network. These are where money gets spent and a lot of time on fit out. Throwing up block walls takes very little time. As does covering walls with insulation boards.
*If you are doing a property yourself, hardwire with Cat 6.
In the South Hams, the ability to build houses faces an initial question: is the location supported by a bus service? As there are no buses outside the main roads between towns, that kills the ability to build. Apart from some inexplicable examples, like 40 houses (then upped to 67) built in our village, a village not supported by any bus services.
The other thing pissing folk off is the planners trying to squash rural business and push them into the towns. Our dog groomer has a lovely set up in some old barns. The planners are trying to say it should be in a local town where "people can wait for their dog to be clipped - and a have a cup of coffee whilst they do". Unquote. If you could actually park in the towns for two hours - you can spend an hour trying to find a parking spot. They have required a user survey to be completed, on how many dog owners use electric vehicles for their journey to the barns. There is no recharging infrastructure round here, so electric vehicles are scarce as free-range hens teeth. And for many of us, it is a shorter journey than the 7 miles to the nearest town.
There are numerous other examples. It looks like a strategy designed by someone still in college who has never been within 200 miles of the place.
I am not 100% convinced that people who use "dog groomers" should be afforded any kind of convenience or accommodation by anyone. It is probably someone in the planners' office who feels likewise that dog grooming shouldn't be a thing.
Let's abolish hairdressers as well, while we are about it. In this day and age, people should really be able to cut their own, and people burning carbon driving into town merely for a hair cut is destroying the environment.
On housing, my position is no building on greenfield sites.
If Labour's position differs from that it will piss me off.
This is one area of policy where I am probably closer to the other parties.
Conversely I'm totally fine with building on green fields. Prioritise brownfield? Sure. But I've seen far too many absurdities where people complain about perfectly decent extensions onto some unattractive, useless 'greenfield' as though it were the most stellar land in the Green Belt and not some marginal piece of well connected scrub land.
The trouble is that building on green fields is nearly always easy money for developers and building on brownfield is too hard, risky and expensive. Developers will just instinctively just roll out a cul-de-sac in a field with the standard house types surrounded by a few bushes, justified by the maxim that 'it is what our customers want'. A whole industry of consultants and lawyers is based around pandering to this philistine instinct, but recently the government have started to ask them to do better and back this up with changes to policy.
Governments can set whatever house targets they can pluck out of their arses, but there is one truth they can't deny. In this country, we don't have anywhere near enough skilled trades people to build 'em. Successive Governments have encouraged university over apprenticeships, steered our youth into easy, comfortable jobs rather than getting their hands dirty building something. Another factor is a stupid focus on creating narrow expertise jobs. Years ago, a chippy would be a general purpose wood butcher, in at the very start doing shuttering for the foundations to the very end doing second fixing of skirting and architrave. Now we have different trades for different tasks. Window fitters don't touch anything else, a roofer won't fancy doing architrave. There is a massive construction skills desert in this country, and we just don't encourage people to go into the trade.
I deal with housing in a professional context. The thing with this 'tory members going mad about housing targets' is that it is not a trivial concern of 0.8% of the population, there is mass disillusionment with the system of planning the Conservatives introduced in 2012. In very simple terms, the government directed that Council's have to plan for, approve and deliver X houses or else developers can build anywhere as long as there is no significant harm. The actual system of making a plan is a byzantine, adversarial process that is picked apart at every stage by warring land speculators/private interests and their KCs. It takes about 5 years, costs millions and many never happen at all. While you are making a plan, the government keep changing the rules, the 'mutant algorhythm' thing that you sometimes hear about, ie doubling the amount of housing you have to provide, with a flick of a pen, etc. Then of course the government also defund the local authorities that have to make these plans through 'austerity', just to make it even more impossible. It was really just a cynical ploy on the part of government to get housing delivered without taking any responsibility for the difficult decisions: a dysfunctional bureaucracy to make seemingly absurd decisions in the hope that people would blame Council's or planning Inspectors for it. The current thing that you hear about 'saving the housing targets' is best interpreted as a campaign by the development industry and their professional advisors to keep the current system going because they have built an entire industry around how to profit from the existing structural uncertainty. The actual solution is to resolve the structural uncertainty by government taking and owning difficult political decisions about where new housing and associated development goes.
An interesting different perspective. I would be more than happy if housing targets are abolished and replaced with something better that facilitates more housebuilding than the current set up. But we cannot afford a slow down in construction for a whole variety of reasons both macro and need based.
Yes but I think that the slowdown in construction will happen anyway because of excessive build costs. This is something I will keep bringing up so sorry if I am boring people. There is currently a disproportionate rise in the cost of building houses due increases material and labour costs and the compliance with new regulation (largely environmental based). The experience of the last recession is that new build development will just stop completely in large parts of the country because there is no profit in it, the industry will be mothballed. In Housing targets just fade in to irrelevance in this context. This is a political debate concentrated in the south east and home counties.
So how do we improve supply of materials and reduce costs? So many of the trees we grow seem to end up producing pellets for biofuels but surely we can redirect timber to construction with the right incentives. Why is it so hard to make bricks at a profit in this country? This is something the government should be looking at. I agree the new housebuilding I want has to be profitable.
I think the materials issue is a consequence of Ukraine and Covid legacy supply chain issues. The answer to labour costs rising is either through cutting the minimum wage (unlikely) or automation. Regarding the latter, the prefab/factory houses idea is a good one but the costs are higher than traditional blockwork construction. The reason developers go for it is certainty and speed rather than cost.
The question is the services - electrical, water, gas. And, I should add*, network. These are where money gets spent and a lot of time on fit out. Throwing up block walls takes very little time. As does covering walls with insulation boards.
*If you are doing a property yourself, hardwire with Cat 6.
My dad used to say you could never fully accurately cost a job until you were out of the ground; once you had the foundations done, you could fairly accurately estimate the cost of a build. But problems 'in the ground' could easily add 50% or more onto the price of a build - and that includes services.
Building a common structure such as a house is relatively easy. The groundworks and services can be *very* troublesome - yet people rarely think of them.
Mr. Brooke, Germany ending its nuclear power plants after the Japanese tsunami/earthquake was obviously nuts at the time.
Mr. F, blimey, I was only vaguely aware of Sporus, didn't realise he suffered at the hands of Otho and Vitellius as well.
For all its achievements, the Roman Empire was a place of appalling cruelty, and definitely not the kind of liberal paradise that Gibbon envisaged. Gibbon, however, was completely uninterested in women, the lower classes, slaves, and simply saw himself reflected in the elite.
I've always thought life in the Roman Empire would have been pretty shit unless you were part of the elite or landed gentry. But, that and the legions are all we ever hear about.
That was why when the Legions left England the people abandoned the towns and industry, and went back to subsistence farming. Once the state violence stopped, people could live as they wanted.
Rishi should not have abandoned housing targets but instead modified them with a policy of new towns or at least refurbished streets in left behind areas. Yes, it panders to nimbyism but more importantly delivers levelling up (to be sold as a Brexit benefit) and rebalances the economy. It creates shovel-ready jobs and should lead to an influx of entrepreneurially-minded new homeowners.
New housing is needed in places of greatest economic activity, because that’s where there are jobs and people want to live.
That is the point. By supplying cheap new houses (or whole new towns) away from overheated areas, the government diverts economic activity and jobs to run-down or left-behind districts.
I don’t know the figures and am happy to listen to those with more expertise here. However, if there are existing cheap houses in an area, doesn’t that demonstrate that cheap housing alone isn’t going to bring economic activity to an area? Building more homes in such areas isn’t going to work.
Yes, government (central and local) should be trying to divert economic activity and jobs to left-behind areas, but it will take something other than housebuilding to do that.
By and large the very cheap housing in these places needs refurbishment.
I deal with housing in a professional context. The thing with this 'tory members going mad about housing targets' is that it is not a trivial concern of 0.8% of the population, there is mass disillusionment with the system of planning the Conservatives introduced in 2012. In very simple terms, the government directed that Council's have to plan for, approve and deliver X houses or else developers can build anywhere as long as there is no significant harm. The actual system of making a plan is a byzantine, adversarial process that is picked apart at every stage by warring land speculators/private interests and their KCs. It takes about 5 years, costs millions and many never happen at all. While you are making a plan, the government keep changing the rules, the 'mutant algorhythm' thing that you sometimes hear about, ie doubling the amount of housing you have to provide, with a flick of a pen, etc. Then of course the government also defund the local authorities that have to make these plans through 'austerity', just to make it even more impossible. It was really just a cynical ploy on the part of government to get housing delivered without taking any responsibility for the difficult decisions: a dysfunctional bureaucracy to make seemingly absurd decisions in the hope that people would blame Council's or planning Inspectors for it. The current thing that you hear about 'saving the housing targets' is best interpreted as a campaign by the development industry and their professional advisors to keep the current system going because they have built an entire industry around how to profit from the existing structural uncertainty. The actual solution is to resolve the structural uncertainty by government taking and owning difficult political decisions about where new housing and associated development goes.
An interesting different perspective. I would be more than happy if housing targets are abolished and replaced with something better that facilitates more housebuilding than the current set up. But we cannot afford a slow down in construction for a whole variety of reasons both macro and need based.
Yes but I think that the slowdown in construction will happen anyway because of excessive build costs. This is something I will keep bringing up so sorry if I am boring people. There is currently a disproportionate rise in the cost of building houses due increases material and labour costs and the compliance with new regulation (largely environmental based). The experience of the last recession is that new build development will just stop completely in large parts of the country because there is no profit in it, the industry will be mothballed. In Housing targets just fade in to irrelevance in this context. This is a political debate concentrated in the south east and home counties.
So how do we improve supply of materials and reduce costs? So many of the trees we grow seem to end up producing pellets for biofuels but surely we can redirect timber to construction with the right incentives. Why is it so hard to make bricks at a profit in this country? This is something the government should be looking at. I agree the new housebuilding I want has to be profitable.
I think the materials issue is a consequence of Ukraine and Covid legacy supply chain issues. The answer to labour costs rising is either through cutting the minimum wage (unlikely) or automation. Regarding the latter, the prefab/factory houses idea is a good one but the costs are higher than traditional blockwork construction. The reason developers go for it is certainty and speed rather than cost.
The question is the services - electrical, water, gas. And, I should add*, network. These are where money gets spent and a lot of time on fit out. Throwing up block walls takes very little time. As does covering walls with insulation boards.
*If you are doing a property yourself, hardwire with Cat 6.
Wifi is now good enough for most families, and indeed most companies.
As well has not having enough trades workers to build the bloody houses, that also means we don't have enough of them to refurb the current housing stock. Or lay your new patio, replace your garden fence, install a couple of extra sockets in your kitchen...or even paint your bedroom. If you can't do these fairly simple jobs yourself, you'll have to wait for someone who can, and pay them their going rate.
Dr. Foxy, Britannia went absolutely backwards when the Romans left. The de-urbanisation was not a matter of success and choice, as fear and consequence.
London was briefly replaced/surpassed by Londonwic[sp], a little along the river. This was in Anglo-Saxon times, if memory serves, but the Viking threat meant it was easier to return to London and repair the walls for safety.
Also, the absence of the Romans led to a massive collapse in both trade and coinage.
Ditching the housing targets will likely help the Tories in the local elections in May. Especially in the Home counties where the Nimby vote might otherwise have gone LD, Independent or Green.
However at the next general election and longer term it won't help the Conservatives, especially in terms of regaining the 30 to 40 vote which mostly votes Labour as most of them are still renters not home owners
I am in two.minds. a permanent Tory majority on my local council isn't a good thing for democracy but the Lib Dems are a shower and Labour are virtually extinct. I think I will vote for Sunak... that sorts my conscience.
Mr Sunak is your local councillor? Remarkably busy chap, then.
I am voting for him, not the local council. It salves my conscience somewhat.
Mr. Brooke, Germany ending its nuclear power plants after the Japanese tsunami/earthquake was obviously nuts at the time.
Mr. F, blimey, I was only vaguely aware of Sporus, didn't realise he suffered at the hands of Otho and Vitellius as well.
For all its achievements, the Roman Empire was a place of appalling cruelty, and definitely not the kind of liberal paradise that Gibbon envisaged. Gibbon, however, was completely uninterested in women, the lower classes, slaves, and simply saw himself reflected in the elite.
I've always thought life in the Roman Empire would have been pretty shit unless you were part of the elite or landed gentry. But, that and the legions are all we ever hear about.
That was why when the Legions left England the people abandoned the towns and industry, and went back to subsistence farming. Once the state violence stopped, people could live as they wanted.
That said, 5th/6th century Britain sounds like the world of Mad Max, with bands of thugs roaming a depopulated hellhole.
I deal with housing in a professional context. The thing with this 'tory members going mad about housing targets' is that it is not a trivial concern of 0.8% of the population, there is mass disillusionment with the system of planning the Conservatives introduced in 2012. In very simple terms, the government directed that Council's have to plan for, approve and deliver X houses or else developers can build anywhere as long as there is no significant harm. The actual system of making a plan is a byzantine, adversarial process that is picked apart at every stage by warring land speculators/private interests and their KCs. It takes about 5 years, costs millions and many never happen at all. While you are making a plan, the government keep changing the rules, the 'mutant algorhythm' thing that you sometimes hear about, ie doubling the amount of housing you have to provide, with a flick of a pen, etc. Then of course the government also defund the local authorities that have to make these plans through 'austerity', just to make it even more impossible. It was really just a cynical ploy on the part of government to get housing delivered without taking any responsibility for the difficult decisions: a dysfunctional bureaucracy to make seemingly absurd decisions in the hope that people would blame Council's or planning Inspectors for it. The current thing that you hear about 'saving the housing targets' is best interpreted as a campaign by the development industry and their professional advisors to keep the current system going because they have built an entire industry around how to profit from the existing structural uncertainty. The actual solution is to resolve the structural uncertainty by government taking and owning difficult political decisions about where new housing and associated development goes.
An interesting different perspective. I would be more than happy if housing targets are abolished and replaced with something better that facilitates more housebuilding than the current set up. But we cannot afford a slow down in construction for a whole variety of reasons both macro and need based.
Yes but I think that the slowdown in construction will happen anyway because of excessive build costs. This is something I will keep bringing up so sorry if I am boring people. There is currently a disproportionate rise in the cost of building houses due increases material and labour costs and the compliance with new regulation (largely environmental based). The experience of the last recession is that new build development will just stop completely in large parts of the country because there is no profit in it, the industry will be mothballed. In Housing targets just fade in to irrelevance in this context. This is a political debate concentrated in the south east and home counties.
So how do we improve supply of materials and reduce costs? So many of the trees we grow seem to end up producing pellets for biofuels but surely we can redirect timber to construction with the right incentives. Why is it so hard to make bricks at a profit in this country? This is something the government should be looking at. I agree the new housebuilding I want has to be profitable.
David , you have seen the state of the clowns and crooks running teh country, majority struggle to tie their shoelaces. We are led by donkeys, their pals and relatives etc. When dross like that can get total control of teh country and the great unwashed think they are great it is not hard to see why we are in the crap.
Dr. Foxy, Britannia went absolutely backwards when the Romans left. The de-urbanisation was not a matter of success and choice, as fear and consequence.
London was briefly replaced/surpassed by Londonwic[sp], a little along the river. This was in Anglo-Saxon times, if memory serves, but the Viking threat meant it was easier to return to London and repair the walls for safety.
Also, the absence of the Romans led to a massive collapse in both trade and coinage.
Wiki lists it as "Lundenwic" (London port) - where Aldwych ("old port") now is.
Governments can set whatever house targets they can pluck out of their arses, but there is one truth they can't deny. In this country, we don't have anywhere near enough skilled trades people to build 'em. Successive Governments have encouraged university over apprenticeships, steered our youth into easy, comfortable jobs rather than getting their hands dirty building something. Another factor is a stupid focus on creating narrow expertise jobs. Years ago, a chippy would be a general purpose wood butcher, in at the very start doing shuttering for the foundations to the very end doing second fixing of skirting and architrave. Now we have different trades for different tasks. Window fitters don't touch anything else, a roofer won't fancy doing architrave. There is a massive construction skills desert in this country, and we just don't encourage people to go into the trade.
At current trade rates it should not be a problem enticing young people to go into these trades with a higher starting salary...
Dr. Foxy, Britannia went absolutely backwards when the Romans left. The de-urbanisation was not a matter of success and choice, as fear and consequence.
London was briefly replaced/surpassed by Londonwic[sp], a little along the river. This was in Anglo-Saxon times, if memory serves, but the Viking threat meant it was easier to return to London and repair the walls for safety.
Also, the absence of the Romans led to a massive collapse in both trade and coinage.
It very much depends on what you mean by backwards. No longer being oppressed and being able to take back control of their lands was a positive reason to go back to small scale farming. The lives of many improved when they lost their brutal overlords.
Mr. Brooke, Germany ending its nuclear power plants after the Japanese tsunami/earthquake was obviously nuts at the time.
Mr. F, blimey, I was only vaguely aware of Sporus, didn't realise he suffered at the hands of Otho and Vitellius as well.
For all its achievements, the Roman Empire was a place of appalling cruelty, and definitely not the kind of liberal paradise that Gibbon envisaged. Gibbon, however, was completely uninterested in women, the lower classes, slaves, and simply saw himself reflected in the elite.
I've always thought life in the Roman Empire would have been pretty shit unless you were part of the elite or landed gentry. But, that and the legions are all we ever hear about.
That was why when the Legions left England the people abandoned the towns and industry, and went back to subsistence farming. Once the state violence stopped, people could live as they wanted.
They didn't "go back to subsistence farming" so much as the the ones who weren't subsistence farming under the Romans (quite a few), found that the support base for non-subsistence farming contracted massively. And had to do substance farming or starve to death.
No one *choses* subsistence farming. Even when the alternatives are quite horrible.
On Mr firestoppers point I am now being visited by two nurses. One to deal with the bedsore inherited from the hospital, one for advice on post -operative incontinence. Once upon a time one dealt with both. I’m happy to say, incidentally, that both conditions are improving!
Mr. Brooke, Germany ending its nuclear power plants after the Japanese tsunami/earthquake was obviously nuts at the time.
Mr. F, blimey, I was only vaguely aware of Sporus, didn't realise he suffered at the hands of Otho and Vitellius as well.
For all its achievements, the Roman Empire was a place of appalling cruelty, and definitely not the kind of liberal paradise that Gibbon envisaged. Gibbon, however, was completely uninterested in women, the lower classes, slaves, and simply saw himself reflected in the elite.
I've always thought life in the Roman Empire would have been pretty shit unless you were part of the elite or landed gentry. But, that and the legions are all we ever hear about.
That was why when the Legions left England the people abandoned the towns and industry, and went back to subsistence farming. Once the state violence stopped, people could live as they wanted.
That said, 5th/6th century Britain sounds like the world of Mad Max, with bands of thugs roaming a depopulated hellhole.
Dr. Foxy, Britannia went absolutely backwards when the Romans left. The de-urbanisation was not a matter of success and choice, as fear and consequence.
London was briefly replaced/surpassed by Londonwic[sp], a little along the river. This was in Anglo-Saxon times, if memory serves, but the Viking threat meant it was easier to return to London and repair the walls for safety.
Also, the absence of the Romans led to a massive collapse in both trade and coinage.
It very much depends on what you mean by backwards. No longer being oppressed and being able to take back control of their lands was a positive reason to go back to small scale farming. The lives of many improved when they lost their brutal overlords.
The overlords were brutal.
The idea that subsistence farming was a batter option - nope. The reason that it became a thing was the collapse of the economic structure.
Ever wonder where all the missing population went? Hint, they didn't all pull out their Roman Empire Passports and head for Italy.
Governments can set whatever house targets they can pluck out of their arses, but there is one truth they can't deny. In this country, we don't have anywhere near enough skilled trades people to build 'em. Successive Governments have encouraged university over apprenticeships, steered our youth into easy, comfortable jobs rather than getting their hands dirty building something. Another factor is a stupid focus on creating narrow expertise jobs. Years ago, a chippy would be a general purpose wood butcher, in at the very start doing shuttering for the foundations to the very end doing second fixing of skirting and architrave. Now we have different trades for different tasks. Window fitters don't touch anything else, a roofer won't fancy doing architrave. There is a massive construction skills desert in this country, and we just don't encourage people to go into the trade.
At current trade rates it should not be a problem enticing young people to go into these trades with a higher starting salary...
I'm lucky that for my project, I can do most work myself but have a tame sparky and plumber on call for the regulated work. If I didn't, I'd be paying top dollar and having to chase them up. But these are time served, middle aged ex fire fighter colleagues so I'm in the gang. As to enticing youngsters into the trades....government and the big employers aren't selling it.
On housing, my position is no building on greenfield sites.
If Labour's position differs from that it will piss me off.
This is one area of policy where I am probably closer to the other parties.
Conversely I'm totally fine with building on green fields. Prioritise brownfield? Sure. But I've seen far too many absurdities where people complain about perfectly decent extensions onto some unattractive, useless 'greenfield' as though it were the most stellar land in the Green Belt and not some marginal piece of well connected scrub land.
Indeed.
A lot of low quality greenfield land is improved environmentally by turning it into outer suburbia.
Likewise a lot of brownfield land would be better being rewilded rather than being developed.
Mr. Brooke, Germany ending its nuclear power plants after the Japanese tsunami/earthquake was obviously nuts at the time.
Mr. F, blimey, I was only vaguely aware of Sporus, didn't realise he suffered at the hands of Otho and Vitellius as well.
For all its achievements, the Roman Empire was a place of appalling cruelty, and definitely not the kind of liberal paradise that Gibbon envisaged. Gibbon, however, was completely uninterested in women, the lower classes, slaves, and simply saw himself reflected in the elite.
I've always thought life in the Roman Empire would have been pretty shit unless you were part of the elite or landed gentry. But, that and the legions are all we ever hear about.
That was why when the Legions left England the people abandoned the towns and industry, and went back to subsistence farming. Once the state violence stopped, people could live as they wanted.
They didn't "go back to subsistence farming" so much as the the ones who weren't subsistence farming under the Romans (quite a few), found that the support base for non-subsistence farming contracted massively. And had to do substance farming or starve to death.
No one *choses* subsistence farming. Even when the alternatives are quite horrible.
One of the main differences was the end of systematic extraction of surplus production. Have a vague memory of reading that there's evidence from graves that the general nutritional health of the rural population improved as a result. Of course systematic expropriation was replaced by random pillaging, but overall extraction rates were lower.
One of the big changes in the later Anglo-Saxon period was an intensification of extraction rates from rural farmers, as social organisation became more complicated again.
Mr. Brooke, Germany ending its nuclear power plants after the Japanese tsunami/earthquake was obviously nuts at the time.
Mr. F, blimey, I was only vaguely aware of Sporus, didn't realise he suffered at the hands of Otho and Vitellius as well.
For all its achievements, the Roman Empire was a place of appalling cruelty, and definitely not the kind of liberal paradise that Gibbon envisaged. Gibbon, however, was completely uninterested in women, the lower classes, slaves, and simply saw himself reflected in the elite.
I've always thought life in the Roman Empire would have been pretty shit unless you were part of the elite or landed gentry. But, that and the legions are all we ever hear about.
That was why when the Legions left England the people abandoned the towns and industry, and went back to subsistence farming. Once the state violence stopped, people could live as they wanted.
That said, 5th/6th century Britain sounds like the world of Mad Max, with bands of thugs roaming a depopulated hellhole.
Distinct lack of big block V8s, though.
Distinct lack of manually activated superchargers as well.
As well has not having enough trades workers to build the bloody houses, that also means we don't have enough of them to refurb the current housing stock. Or lay your new patio, replace your garden fence, install a couple of extra sockets in your kitchen...or even paint your bedroom. If you can't do these fairly simple jobs yourself, you'll have to wait for someone who can, and pay them their going rate.
Dr. Foxy, Britannia went absolutely backwards when the Romans left. The de-urbanisation was not a matter of success and choice, as fear and consequence.
London was briefly replaced/surpassed by Londonwic[sp], a little along the river. This was in Anglo-Saxon times, if memory serves, but the Viking threat meant it was easier to return to London and repair the walls for safety.
Also, the absence of the Romans led to a massive collapse in both trade and coinage.
Hm. I'm loathe to quibble with you on matters of ancient history, as I know this is a specialist area of yours. But.
While I'd agree that to outward appearances Britannia went backwards - de-urbanisation, etc. - I'd argue that the picture is a little more ambiguous. If you were outside of society's elite - as most people were - the departure of the Romans lifted quite an onerous burden of taxation (by whatever means) and perhaps increased your quality of life. And while the threat of raids grew, for most villages peace remained common - and it's not as if the Romans had ever been that good at preventing raids anyway.
History reports a sense of living in a time of after the fall - but I suspect that is partly because history was written by the urban classes, for whom decline was visible. But was yer average peasant better off before or after Roman occupation? My guess is after (plague and crop failure aside). Even many bigwigs would have been better off post-Rome as they were under the Roman yoke, when their bigwiggery was by design temporary, with the Roman empire inheriting half of what they owned until family wealth dwindled away. (Of course, it would in many cases have been different bigwigs.)
Possibly the main source of misery in the early middle ages was crop failure and plague - but that wasn't really down to who was in charge, if anyone.
Locally there is a lot of house building near me. Conservatives are going highly negative on "Labour's house-building plans for Bassetlaw" in the election material. Labour's leaflets are more of a positive campaign.
On housing, my position is no building on greenfield sites.
If Labour's position differs from that it will piss me off.
This is one area of policy where I am probably closer to the other parties.
Conversely I'm totally fine with building on green fields. Prioritise brownfield? Sure. But I've seen far too many absurdities where people complain about perfectly decent extensions onto some unattractive, useless 'greenfield' as though it were the most stellar land in the Green Belt and not some marginal piece of well connected scrub land.
The trouble is that building on green fields is nearly always easy money for developers and building on brownfield is too hard, risky and expensive. Developers will just instinctively just roll out a cul-de-sac in a field with the standard house types surrounded by a few bushes, justified by the maxim that 'it is what our customers want'. A whole industry of consultants and lawyers is based around pandering to this philistine instinct, but recently the government have started to ask them to do better and back this up with changes to policy.
One suggestion for the "brown fields" problem, is to separate the foundations, base services, etc from the construction. As in, subsidise/provide/(get done) getting plots to the stage of a foundation slab with drains, electrical etc connected, and sell to buyers. All the unknown are in the ground.....
I seem to recall this kind of development was popular in some parts of the US - you got to self build on the slab, basically.
Mr. Brooke, Germany ending its nuclear power plants after the Japanese tsunami/earthquake was obviously nuts at the time.
Mr. F, blimey, I was only vaguely aware of Sporus, didn't realise he suffered at the hands of Otho and Vitellius as well.
For all its achievements, the Roman Empire was a place of appalling cruelty, and definitely not the kind of liberal paradise that Gibbon envisaged. Gibbon, however, was completely uninterested in women, the lower classes, slaves, and simply saw himself reflected in the elite.
I've always thought life in the Roman Empire would have been pretty shit unless you were part of the elite or landed gentry. But, that and the legions are all we ever hear about.
That was why when the Legions left England the people abandoned the towns and industry, and went back to subsistence farming. Once the state violence stopped, people could live as they wanted.
They didn't "go back to subsistence farming" so much as the the ones who weren't subsistence farming under the Romans (quite a few), found that the support base for non-subsistence farming contracted massively. And had to do substance farming or starve to death.
No one *choses* subsistence farming. Even when the alternatives are quite horrible.
One of the main differences was the end of systematic extraction of surplus production. Have a vague memory of reading that there's evidence from graves that the general nutritional health of the rural population improved as a result. Of course systematic expropriation was replaced by random pillaging, but overall extraction rates were lower.
One of the big changes in the later Anglo-Saxon period was an intensification of extraction rates from rural farmers, as social organisation became more complicated again.
Indeed. There is a massive bias in the history that we have towards complex urban cultures, due to their artefacts and literature. Whether simpler cultures were more sustainable, liveable and happier is not addressed.
Were the Anglo-Saxons pleased to be organised by their new Norman feudal lords any more than Ukranian Kulaks were by Soviet collectivisation? I think not.
Governments can set whatever house targets they can pluck out of their arses, but there is one truth they can't deny. In this country, we don't have anywhere near enough skilled trades people to build 'em. Successive Governments have encouraged university over apprenticeships, steered our youth into easy, comfortable jobs rather than getting their hands dirty building something. Another factor is a stupid focus on creating narrow expertise jobs. Years ago, a chippy would be a general purpose wood butcher, in at the very start doing shuttering for the foundations to the very end doing second fixing of skirting and architrave. Now we have different trades for different tasks. Window fitters don't touch anything else, a roofer won't fancy doing architrave. There is a massive construction skills desert in this country, and we just don't encourage people to go into the trade.
At current trade rates it should not be a problem enticing young people to go into these trades with a higher starting salary...
I have long thought many who feel peer pressure to go to university would be far better taking an apprenticeship and learning while earning
I hear labour's grand idea of spending 28 billion a year over 5 years insulating 19 million homes but this is another promise that is undeliverable.
Indeed why should the taxpayer subsidise homeowners to insulating their homes when many can afford to do it themselves
I understand there have been suggestions that mortgage companies may restrict their mortgages only to homes in energy efficient band c or better and of course that would see lots of price renegotiation if those homes were not insulated accordingly
A long-awaited spate of dealmaking broke out last night with a flurry of private equity-backed takeover approaches for mid-cap London companies worth more than £6 billion.
Dechra Pharmaceuticals said after the market had closed that it was in talks over a possible £4.6 billion cash bid from EQT, a Swedish private equity firm, in a deal backed by the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.
The approach for Dechra came after Network International had confirmed earlier that it had received a “preliminary and conditional” proposal from CVC Capital Partners and Francisco Partners, the private equity firms. Shares in the emerging markets-focused payments company closed up 23.1 per cent, or 56½p, at 300p, valuing the company at £1.6 billion, still below its float price of four years ago.
A wave of bids for London-listed companies from overseas buyers had been expected after the pound weakened last year against the dollar. A poll by Numis, the investment bank, found that 88 per cent of FTSE directors regarded British companies as vulnerable to takeovers, with private equity groups tipped to target medium-sized firms with strong cashflow generation trading at depressed valuations.
However, there was a huge amount of warfare in what had been Britannia, and that was before the Vikings showed up. Roman urban centres were more defensible and this degree of security probably wasn't returned to until Alfred's burhs (although these may have existed before his policy, it was that decision which made them a regular mainstay of defence).
There was also a breakdown in law and a return to might makes right, which saw minor kings squabble then consolidate their realms into larger kingdoms. The return to unity (for England) took about four or five centuries and had a ton of war in between.
And the population declined in a way that would not be repeated until the Black Death.
In the early 1930s when a fairly useful chap called John Maynard Keynes was largely in control of UK economic policy housebuilding was absolutely central to his plans for growth, reducing unemployment and getting the economy moving again. The legacy of that housebuilding is still around us today.
I really think we should be doing something similar now. The demand is there, it is an economic activity which does not undermine our precarious balance of payments as much as other boosts to the economy (we would probably import some of the materials) and it can improve our skill base.
I agree that some new towns would be a good start for this but we need to do so much more. Rather than losing housing targets Rishi should have been looking at doubling them and allowing either local authorities or housing associations to get in on the act by allowing them to borrow more for this particular purpose with Treasury backing.
Even on the most self interested level new generations of home owners will be rich in new Conservative voters, people stuck in insecure rented accommodation will not. I agree with Mike that this is a major mistake by Rishi and Hunt.
Hmm, rather like the SNP started doing in 2010 or so with council houses in Scotland (and at some point banning further sales to tenants without grandfathered rights). With some useful developments locally, decent though not enormous or luxurious houses. Though more infill on derelict brownfield and similar sites, inevitably not enough to meet the demand, nothing to compare with the major 1920s-30s council schemes, with some very decent houses in generous spaced grounds.
There was also that remarkable map of satisfaction with the planning system which one of us [edit: posted ] some years back. It showed a stark border along Solway and Tweed - general satisfaction to the north, outrage to the south. We were surprised by this and discussed it a bit at the time on PB but couldn't get to the root of the matter to decide why that might be.
The pressure for new housing is nothing like as great in Scotland because we have not had anything like the same level of immigration. The new building in East Lothian and south Fife has probably been sufficient for much of the country although there are problems for youngsters in the north where second homes are an issue.
In Dundee there have been a series of very small but pleasant developments by housing associations in brown field sites. It has definitely improved run down parts of the town. Maintenance of existing stock has been more problematic given the restrictions on local authority spending but I would agree it is something we seem to have done a bit better, if not with the same pressures.
Of course, barring the very nicest areas such as Broughty Ferry, the New Town of Edinburgh, and so on, that does mean you and I aren't making so much money as Home Counties folk sitting on our backsides as the houses appreciate in value around us, as I have been realising from a look at the ESPC listings the other day. Which is, on balance, a good thing for the polity.
People with ordinary jobs can't afford to live in Edinburgh unless they flat share. So it is the same problem, albeit applying to just one city.
I noticed the other day the *average* price of a house in Edinburgh as a whole is around 325K or so.
As regards flats in the inner area there is a particular problem in inner Edinburgh - the short let/AirBNB market. Though controls have been brought in. Don't know how much impact they have had.
I deal with housing in a professional context. The thing with this 'tory members going mad about housing targets' is that it is not a trivial concern of 0.8% of the population, there is mass disillusionment with the system of planning the Conservatives introduced in 2012. In very simple terms, the government directed that Council's have to plan for, approve and deliver X houses or else developers can build anywhere as long as there is no significant harm. The actual system of making a plan is a byzantine, adversarial process that is picked apart at every stage by warring land speculators/private interests and their KCs. It takes about 5 years, costs millions and many never happen at all. While you are making a plan, the government keep changing the rules, the 'mutant algorhythm' thing that you sometimes hear about, ie doubling the amount of housing you have to provide, with a flick of a pen, etc. Then of course the government also defund the local authorities that have to make these plans through 'austerity', just to make it even more impossible. It was really just a cynical ploy on the part of government to get housing delivered without taking any responsibility for the difficult decisions: a dysfunctional bureaucracy to make seemingly absurd decisions in the hope that people would blame Council's or planning Inspectors for it. The current thing that you hear about 'saving the housing targets' is best interpreted as a campaign by the development industry and their professional advisors to keep the current system going because they have built an entire industry around how to profit from the existing structural uncertainty. The actual solution is to resolve the structural uncertainty by government taking and owning difficult political decisions about where new housing and associated development goes.
An interesting different perspective. I would be more than happy if housing targets are abolished and replaced with something better that facilitates more housebuilding than the current set up. But we cannot afford a slow down in construction for a whole variety of reasons both macro and need based.
Yes but I think that the slowdown in construction will happen anyway because of excessive build costs. This is something I will keep bringing up so sorry if I am boring people. There is currently a disproportionate rise in the cost of building houses due increases material and labour costs and the compliance with new regulation (largely environmental based). The experience of the last recession is that new build development will just stop completely in large parts of the country because there is no profit in it, the industry will be mothballed. In Housing targets just fade in to irrelevance in this context. This is a political debate concentrated in the south east and home counties.
So how do we improve supply of materials and reduce costs? So many of the trees we grow seem to end up producing pellets for biofuels but surely we can redirect timber to construction with the right incentives. Why is it so hard to make bricks at a profit in this country? This is something the government should be looking at. I agree the new housebuilding I want has to be profitable.
I think the materials issue is a consequence of Ukraine and Covid legacy supply chain issues. The answer to labour costs rising is either through cutting the minimum wage (unlikely) or automation. Regarding the latter, the prefab/factory houses idea is a good one but the costs are higher than traditional blockwork construction. The reason developers go for it is certainty and speed rather than cost.
The question is the services - electrical, water, gas. And, I should add*, network. These are where money gets spent and a lot of time on fit out. Throwing up block walls takes very little time. As does covering walls with insulation boards.
*If you are doing a property yourself, hardwire with Cat 6.
Wifi is now good enough for most families, and indeed most companies.
Have fun with installing foil layered insulation in your home. Also, unless your house is tiny, the wifi mesh solutions are rubbish.
I'm reworking a house at the moment. The plan is Cat 6 to every room. With a combined PoE Wifi point/mini switch (4 ethernet sockets) in each room.
Then all you need is a network switch to plug the Cat 6 into....
If you do it while you are building, it costs pretty much nothing. A bit of cable, and an extra socket in each room.
A long-awaited spate of dealmaking broke out last night with a flurry of private equity-backed takeover approaches for mid-cap London companies worth more than £6 billion.
Dechra Pharmaceuticals said after the market had closed that it was in talks over a possible £4.6 billion cash bid from EQT, a Swedish private equity firm, in a deal backed by the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.
The approach for Dechra came after Network International had confirmed earlier that it had received a “preliminary and conditional” proposal from CVC Capital Partners and Francisco Partners, the private equity firms. Shares in the emerging markets-focused payments company closed up 23.1 per cent, or 56½p, at 300p, valuing the company at £1.6 billion, still below its float price of four years ago.
A wave of bids for London-listed companies from overseas buyers had been expected after the pound weakened last year against the dollar. A poll by Numis, the investment bank, found that 88 per cent of FTSE directors regarded British companies as vulnerable to takeovers, with private equity groups tipped to target medium-sized firms with strong cashflow generation trading at depressed valuations.
On housing, my position is no building on greenfield sites.
If Labour's position differs from that it will piss me off.
This is one area of policy where I am probably closer to the other parties.
Conversely I'm totally fine with building on green fields. Prioritise brownfield? Sure. But I've seen far too many absurdities where people complain about perfectly decent extensions onto some unattractive, useless 'greenfield' as though it were the most stellar land in the Green Belt and not some marginal piece of well connected scrub land.
The trouble is that building on green fields is nearly always easy money for developers and building on brownfield is too hard, risky and expensive. Developers will just instinctively just roll out a cul-de-sac in a field with the standard house types surrounded by a few bushes, justified by the maxim that 'it is what our customers want'. A whole industry of consultants and lawyers is based around pandering to this philistine instinct, but recently the government have started to ask them to do better and back this up with changes to policy.
One suggestion for the "brown fields" problem, is to separate the foundations, base services, etc from the construction. As in, subsidise/provide/(get done) getting plots to the stage of a foundation slab with drains, electrical etc connected, and sell to buyers. All the unknown are in the ground.....
I seem to recall this kind of development was popular in some parts of the US - you got to self build on the slab, basically.
Yeah that happens, there are grants for that, at least for the decontamination and site preperation. IE I have recently worked with a site which was an unregulated municipal landfill. The Council got £2 million to prepare it for 20,000 sqm commercial development. It owned the site which helps. I guess the difficulties kick in with smaller urban sites in private ownership.
A good example of this is Barking Riverside, they auction off serviced plots to developers to derisk the development, it is the biggest construction site in Europe. Incidentally, and in advance of any possible debate about affordable housing in London, Barking Riverside is proof that high quality affordable housing does actually exist in London if you can hold your nose and live in Barking. There is an overground train station in the development, and it is served by the UBER boat along the thames, it has a school that is outstanding, and the flats start at £265k with various first time buyer incentives. If I was to move to London that is where I would go.
I deal with housing in a professional context. The thing with this 'tory members going mad about housing targets' is that it is not a trivial concern of 0.8% of the population, there is mass disillusionment with the system of planning the Conservatives introduced in 2012. In very simple terms, the government directed that Council's have to plan for, approve and deliver X houses or else developers can build anywhere as long as there is no significant harm. The actual system of making a plan is a byzantine, adversarial process that is picked apart at every stage by warring land speculators/private interests and their KCs. It takes about 5 years, costs millions and many never happen at all. While you are making a plan, the government keep changing the rules, the 'mutant algorhythm' thing that you sometimes hear about, ie doubling the amount of housing you have to provide, with a flick of a pen, etc. Then of course the government also defund the local authorities that have to make these plans through 'austerity', just to make it even more impossible. It was really just a cynical ploy on the part of government to get housing delivered without taking any responsibility for the difficult decisions: a dysfunctional bureaucracy to make seemingly absurd decisions in the hope that people would blame Council's or planning Inspectors for it. The current thing that you hear about 'saving the housing targets' is best interpreted as a campaign by the development industry and their professional advisors to keep the current system going because they have built an entire industry around how to profit from the existing structural uncertainty. The actual solution is to resolve the structural uncertainty by government taking and owning difficult political decisions about where new housing and associated development goes.
An interesting different perspective. I would be more than happy if housing targets are abolished and replaced with something better that facilitates more housebuilding than the current set up. But we cannot afford a slow down in construction for a whole variety of reasons both macro and need based.
Yes but I think that the slowdown in construction will happen anyway because of excessive build costs. This is something I will keep bringing up so sorry if I am boring people. There is currently a disproportionate rise in the cost of building houses due increases material and labour costs and the compliance with new regulation (largely environmental based). The experience of the last recession is that new build development will just stop completely in large parts of the country because there is no profit in it, the industry will be mothballed. In Housing targets just fade in to irrelevance in this context. This is a political debate concentrated in the south east and home counties.
So how do we improve supply of materials and reduce costs? So many of the trees we grow seem to end up producing pellets for biofuels but surely we can redirect timber to construction with the right incentives. Why is it so hard to make bricks at a profit in this country? This is something the government should be looking at. I agree the new housebuilding I want has to be profitable.
I think the materials issue is a consequence of Ukraine and Covid legacy supply chain issues. The answer to labour costs rising is either through cutting the minimum wage (unlikely) or automation. Regarding the latter, the prefab/factory houses idea is a good one but the costs are higher than traditional blockwork construction. The reason developers go for it is certainty and speed rather than cost.
The question is the services - electrical, water, gas. And, I should add*, network. These are where money gets spent and a lot of time on fit out. Throwing up block walls takes very little time. As does covering walls with insulation boards.
*If you are doing a property yourself, hardwire with Cat 6.
Wifi is now good enough for most families, and indeed most companies.
Have fun with installing foil layered insulation in your home. Also, unless your house is tiny, the wifi mesh solutions are rubbish.
I'm reworking a house at the moment. The plan is Cat 6 to every room. With a combined PoE Wifi point/mini switch (4 ethernet sockets) in each room.
Then all you need is a network switch to plug the Cat 6 into....
If you do it while you are building, it costs pretty much nothing. A bit of cable, and an extra socket in each room.
Eh? Orbi is great and I live in a fairly big three storey house. I do hardwire to the garden room however.
In the early 1930s when a fairly useful chap called John Maynard Keynes was largely in control of UK economic policy housebuilding was absolutely central to his plans for growth, reducing unemployment and getting the economy moving again. The legacy of that housebuilding is still around us today.
I really think we should be doing something similar now. The demand is there, it is an economic activity which does not undermine our precarious balance of payments as much as other boosts to the economy (we would probably import some of the materials) and it can improve our skill base.
I agree that some new towns would be a good start for this but we need to do so much more. Rather than losing housing targets Rishi should have been looking at doubling them and allowing either local authorities or housing associations to get in on the act by allowing them to borrow more for this particular purpose with Treasury backing.
Even on the most self interested level new generations of home owners will be rich in new Conservative voters, people stuck in insecure rented accommodation will not. I agree with Mike that this is a major mistake by Rishi and Hunt.
Hmm, rather like the SNP started doing in 2010 or so with council houses in Scotland (and at some point banning further sales to tenants without grandfathered rights). With some useful developments locally, decent though not enormous or luxurious houses. Though more infill on derelict brownfield and similar sites, inevitably not enough to meet the demand, nothing to compare with the major 1920s-30s council schemes, with some very decent houses in generous spaced grounds.
There was also that remarkable map of satisfaction with the planning system which one of us [edit: posted ] some years back. It showed a stark border along Solway and Tweed - general satisfaction to the north, outrage to the south. We were surprised by this and discussed it a bit at the time on PB but couldn't get to the root of the matter to decide why that might be.
The pressure for new housing is nothing like as great in Scotland because we have not had anything like the same level of immigration. The new building in East Lothian and south Fife has probably been sufficient for much of the country although there are problems for youngsters in the north where second homes are an issue.
In Dundee there have been a series of very small but pleasant developments by housing associations in brown field sites. It has definitely improved run down parts of the town. Maintenance of existing stock has been more problematic given the restrictions on local authority spending but I would agree it is something we seem to have done a bit better, if not with the same pressures.
Of course, barring the very nicest areas such as Broughty Ferry, the New Town of Edinburgh, and so on, that does mean you and I aren't making so much money as Home Counties folk sitting on our backsides as the houses appreciate in value around us, as I have been realising from a look at the ESPC listings the other day. Which is, on balance, a good thing for the polity.
People with ordinary jobs can't afford to live in Edinburgh unless they flat share. So it is the same problem, albeit applying to just one city.
I noticed the other day the *average* price of a house in Edinburgh as a whole is around 325K or so.
As regards flats in the inner area there is a particular problem in inner Edinburgh - the short let/AirBNB market. Though controls have been brought in. Don't know how much impact they have had.
We bought our first home in Edinburgh in 1964 in Comely Bank being a third floor flat for £1,500
In the early 1930s when a fairly useful chap called John Maynard Keynes was largely in control of UK economic policy housebuilding was absolutely central to his plans for growth, reducing unemployment and getting the economy moving again. The legacy of that housebuilding is still around us today.
I really think we should be doing something similar now. The demand is there, it is an economic activity which does not undermine our precarious balance of payments as much as other boosts to the economy (we would probably import some of the materials) and it can improve our skill base.
I agree that some new towns would be a good start for this but we need to do so much more. Rather than losing housing targets Rishi should have been looking at doubling them and allowing either local authorities or housing associations to get in on the act by allowing them to borrow more for this particular purpose with Treasury backing.
Even on the most self interested level new generations of home owners will be rich in new Conservative voters, people stuck in insecure rented accommodation will not. I agree with Mike that this is a major mistake by Rishi and Hunt.
Hmm, rather like the SNP started doing in 2010 or so with council houses in Scotland (and at some point banning further sales to tenants without grandfathered rights). With some useful developments locally, decent though not enormous or luxurious houses. Though more infill on derelict brownfield and similar sites, inevitably not enough to meet the demand, nothing to compare with the major 1920s-30s council schemes, with some very decent houses in generous spaced grounds.
There was also that remarkable map of satisfaction with the planning system which one of us [edit: posted ] some years back. It showed a stark border along Solway and Tweed - general satisfaction to the north, outrage to the south. We were surprised by this and discussed it a bit at the time on PB but couldn't get to the root of the matter to decide why that might be.
The pressure for new housing is nothing like as great in Scotland because we have not had anything like the same level of immigration. The new building in East Lothian and south Fife has probably been sufficient for much of the country although there are problems for youngsters in the north where second homes are an issue.
In Dundee there have been a series of very small but pleasant developments by housing associations in brown field sites. It has definitely improved run down parts of the town. Maintenance of existing stock has been more problematic given the restrictions on local authority spending but I would agree it is something we seem to have done a bit better, if not with the same pressures.
Of course, barring the very nicest areas such as Broughty Ferry, the New Town of Edinburgh, and so on, that does mean you and I aren't making so much money as Home Counties folk sitting on our backsides as the houses appreciate in value around us, as I have been realising from a look at the ESPC listings the other day. Which is, on balance, a good thing for the polity.
People with ordinary jobs can't afford to live in Edinburgh unless they flat share. So it is the same problem, albeit applying to just one city.
I noticed the other day the *average* price of a house in Edinburgh as a whole is around 325K or so.
As regards flats in the inner area there is a particular problem in inner Edinburgh - the short let/AirBNB market. Though controls have been brought in. Don't know how much impact they have had.
My brother and his partner have a flat in central Edinburgh. The air bnb situation is out of control there, it causes a lot of problems in terms of antisocial behaviour.
However, there was a huge amount of warfare in what had been Britannia, and that was before the Vikings showed up. Roman urban centres were more defensible and this degree of security probably wasn't returned to until Alfred's burhs (although these may have existed before his policy, it was that decision which made them a regular mainstay of defence).
There was also a breakdown in law and a return to might makes right, which saw minor kings squabble then consolidate their realms into larger kingdoms. The return to unity (for England) took about four or five centuries and had a ton of war in between.
And the population declined in a way that would not be repeated until the Black Death.
My understanding is that population decline largely happened at the start of the post-Roman period and was driven by plague. Which is obviously bad, but can't really be attributed to the departure of the Romans. When would you have rather been a British peasant? 100 BC or 200 AD or 500 AD? For me, I think, the latter. But my knowledge of this time is based on imperfect understanding of imperfect history.
Hertsmere is one of the few places where the Tories did markedly worse in the 2021 County council elections than in in the 2019 borough elections. The reason? Labour and the Lib Dem’s whipped up a successful campaign against new house building. So, the Conservative administration dropped their local plan in response.
Politicians want new housing, but not in their constituencies/boroughs/wards.
There seems to be a lot lower opposition to new housing further north.
Perhaps because new housing here is seen as an improvement whereas in the Waitrose belt it isn't ?
Former mining villages are certainly not downgraded by new housing plus there's vast tracts of old abandoned agricultural / mining railway / military land that does need to be redeveloped.
Maybe because housing values are a significantly lower proportion of an individual's overall wealth.
Or does being a home owner in an area of unaffordable housing bring a social smugness and exclusivity ?
A long-awaited spate of dealmaking broke out last night with a flurry of private equity-backed takeover approaches for mid-cap London companies worth more than £6 billion.
Dechra Pharmaceuticals said after the market had closed that it was in talks over a possible £4.6 billion cash bid from EQT, a Swedish private equity firm, in a deal backed by the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.
The approach for Dechra came after Network International had confirmed earlier that it had received a “preliminary and conditional” proposal from CVC Capital Partners and Francisco Partners, the private equity firms. Shares in the emerging markets-focused payments company closed up 23.1 per cent, or 56½p, at 300p, valuing the company at £1.6 billion, still below its float price of four years ago.
A wave of bids for London-listed companies from overseas buyers had been expected after the pound weakened last year against the dollar. A poll by Numis, the investment bank, found that 88 per cent of FTSE directors regarded British companies as vulnerable to takeovers, with private equity groups tipped to target medium-sized firms with strong cashflow generation trading at depressed valuations.
Dr. Foxy, Britannia went absolutely backwards when the Romans left. The de-urbanisation was not a matter of success and choice, as fear and consequence.
London was briefly replaced/surpassed by Londonwic[sp], a little along the river. This was in Anglo-Saxon times, if memory serves, but the Viking threat meant it was easier to return to London and repair the walls for safety.
Also, the absence of the Romans led to a massive collapse in both trade and coinage.
It very much depends on what you mean by backwards. No longer being oppressed and being able to take back control of their lands was a positive reason to go back to small scale farming. The lives of many improved when they lost their brutal overlords.
It was more that they exchanged one group of brutal overlords for another. The Roman upper classes exacted heavily from them. The warlords and pirates that replaced them pillaged from them and enslaved them.
In the early 1930s when a fairly useful chap called John Maynard Keynes was largely in control of UK economic policy housebuilding was absolutely central to his plans for growth, reducing unemployment and getting the economy moving again. The legacy of that housebuilding is still around us today.
I really think we should be doing something similar now. The demand is there, it is an economic activity which does not undermine our precarious balance of payments as much as other boosts to the economy (we would probably import some of the materials) and it can improve our skill base.
I agree that some new towns would be a good start for this but we need to do so much more. Rather than losing housing targets Rishi should have been looking at doubling them and allowing either local authorities or housing associations to get in on the act by allowing them to borrow more for this particular purpose with Treasury backing.
Even on the most self interested level new generations of home owners will be rich in new Conservative voters, people stuck in insecure rented accommodation will not. I agree with Mike that this is a major mistake by Rishi and Hunt.
Hmm, rather like the SNP started doing in 2010 or so with council houses in Scotland (and at some point banning further sales to tenants without grandfathered rights). With some useful developments locally, decent though not enormous or luxurious houses. Though more infill on derelict brownfield and similar sites, inevitably not enough to meet the demand, nothing to compare with the major 1920s-30s council schemes, with some very decent houses in generous spaced grounds.
There was also that remarkable map of satisfaction with the planning system which one of us [edit: posted ] some years back. It showed a stark border along Solway and Tweed - general satisfaction to the north, outrage to the south. We were surprised by this and discussed it a bit at the time on PB but couldn't get to the root of the matter to decide why that might be.
The pressure for new housing is nothing like as great in Scotland because we have not had anything like the same level of immigration. The new building in East Lothian and south Fife has probably been sufficient for much of the country although there are problems for youngsters in the north where second homes are an issue.
In Dundee there have been a series of very small but pleasant developments by housing associations in brown field sites. It has definitely improved run down parts of the town. Maintenance of existing stock has been more problematic given the restrictions on local authority spending but I would agree it is something we seem to have done a bit better, if not with the same pressures.
Of course, barring the very nicest areas such as Broughty Ferry, the New Town of Edinburgh, and so on, that does mean you and I aren't making so much money as Home Counties folk sitting on our backsides as the houses appreciate in value around us, as I have been realising from a look at the ESPC listings the other day. Which is, on balance, a good thing for the polity.
People with ordinary jobs can't afford to live in Edinburgh unless they flat share. So it is the same problem, albeit applying to just one city.
I noticed the other day the *average* price of a house in Edinburgh as a whole is around 325K or so.
As regards flats in the inner area there is a particular problem in inner Edinburgh - the short let/AirBNB market. Though controls have been brought in. Don't know how much impact they have had.
My brother and his partner have a flat in central Edinburgh. The air bnb situation is out of control there, it causes a lot of problems in terms of antisocial behaviour.
I think the airbnb thing will be regulated out of existence, at least in England. The government are consulting on a 'register' at the moment. It will probably get ruined through tax and licenses. I've already gone through this once in another country, it is not a reliable long or even medium term business. The unfortunate thing is that it will be the tourism industry in these places that suffers and won't really change the 'second homes' problem.
Hertsmere is one of the few places where the Tories did markedly worse in the 2021 County council elections than in in the 2019 borough elections. The reason? Labour and the Lib Dem’s whipped up a successful campaign against new house building. So, the Conservative administration dropped their local plan in response.
Politicians want new housing, but not in their constituencies/boroughs/wards.
There seems to be a lot lower opposition to new housing further north.
Perhaps because new housing here is seen as an improvement whereas in the Waitrose belt it isn't ?
Former mining villages are certainly not downgraded by new housing plus there's vast tracts of old abandoned agricultural / mining railway / military land that does need to be redeveloped.
Maybe because housing values are a significantly lower proportion of an individual's overall wealth.
Or does being a home owner in an area of unaffordable housing bring a social smugness and exclusivity ?
On housing, my position is no building on greenfield sites.
If Labour's position differs from that it will piss me off.
This is one area of policy where I am probably closer to the other parties.
Conversely I'm totally fine with building on green fields. Prioritise brownfield? Sure. But I've seen far too many absurdities where people complain about perfectly decent extensions onto some unattractive, useless 'greenfield' as though it were the most stellar land in the Green Belt and not some marginal piece of well connected scrub land.
The trouble is that building on green fields is nearly always easy money for developers and building on brownfield is too hard, risky and expensive. Developers will just instinctively just roll out a cul-de-sac in a field with the standard house types surrounded by a few bushes, justified by the maxim that 'it is what our customers want'. A whole industry of consultants and lawyers is based around pandering to this philistine instinct, but recently the government have started to ask them to do better and back this up with changes to policy.
One suggestion for the "brown fields" problem, is to separate the foundations, base services, etc from the construction. As in, subsidise/provide/(get done) getting plots to the stage of a foundation slab with drains, electrical etc connected, and sell to buyers. All the unknown are in the ground.....
I seem to recall this kind of development was popular in some parts of the US - you got to self build on the slab, basically.
Yeah that happens, there are grants for that, at least for the decontamination and site preperation. IE I have recently worked with a site which was an unregulated municipal landfill. The Council got £2 million to prepare it for 20,000 sqm commercial development. It owned the site which helps. I guess the difficulties kick in with smaller urban sites in private ownership.
A good example of this is Barking Riverside, they auction off serviced plots to developers to derisk the development, it is the biggest construction site in Europe. Incidentally, and in advance of any possible debate about affordable housing in London, Barking Riverside is proof that high quality affordable housing does actually exist in London if you can hold your nose and live in Barking. There is an overground train station in the development, and it is served by the UBER boat along the thames, it has a school that is outstanding, and the flats start at £265k with various first time buyer incentives. If I was to move to London that is where I would go.
A couple of years back, Hounslow council forced Thames Tradesmen Rowing club out of the site they rented from the council.
The building was godawful ugly. But more importantly, low rise
The plot has sat empty (building demolished), since the council got caught talking to developers. After encouraging a footbridge to the site to be built at vast public expense.
Now they are claiming to be talking about "river accessibility" - which is bollocks, since Tradesmen hosted a canoe club and paddle boarders etc. The only people who want to get to the river are rowers, canoeists and paddle boarders. There's not even a shortage of public slips in the general area - river access available by law...
When I asked why they didn't do what has been done on the rest of the river - build a block of flats above a boat house, and rent the boat house to Tradesmen - there was an awkward silence. Take the payment from the developer in the form of flats for social housing, if they can't raise the money themselves.....
Hertsmere is one of the few places where the Tories did markedly worse in the 2021 County council elections than in in the 2019 borough elections. The reason? Labour and the Lib Dem’s whipped up a successful campaign against new house building. So, the Conservative administration dropped their local plan in response.
Politicians want new housing, but not in their constituencies/boroughs/wards.
There seems to be a lot lower opposition to new housing further north.
Perhaps because new housing here is seen as an improvement whereas in the Waitrose belt it isn't ?
Former mining villages are certainly not downgraded by new housing plus there's vast tracts of old abandoned agricultural / mining railway / military land that does need to be redeveloped.
Maybe because housing values are a significantly lower proportion of an individual's overall wealth.
Or does being a home owner in an area of unaffordable housing bring a social smugness and exclusivity ?
Greater Manchester is currently going through the protracted process of trying to adopt a combined local plan (the Greater Manchester Spatial Framework). It's the single biggest local political issue, and has resulted in dozens of lost seats: Tories losing seats in Altrincham to the Greens, Labour losing seats in Bolton to independents, and so on. Even in Central Manchester development is a big political issue (Piccadilly ward has acquired some Momentum flavoured Labour members who make a big thing of flats being provided for affluent people). We have Nimbies here too, and they are electorally consequential.
A long-awaited spate of dealmaking broke out last night with a flurry of private equity-backed takeover approaches for mid-cap London companies worth more than £6 billion.
Dechra Pharmaceuticals said after the market had closed that it was in talks over a possible £4.6 billion cash bid from EQT, a Swedish private equity firm, in a deal backed by the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.
The approach for Dechra came after Network International had confirmed earlier that it had received a “preliminary and conditional” proposal from CVC Capital Partners and Francisco Partners, the private equity firms. Shares in the emerging markets-focused payments company closed up 23.1 per cent, or 56½p, at 300p, valuing the company at £1.6 billion, still below its float price of four years ago.
A wave of bids for London-listed companies from overseas buyers had been expected after the pound weakened last year against the dollar. A poll by Numis, the investment bank, found that 88 per cent of FTSE directors regarded British companies as vulnerable to takeovers, with private equity groups tipped to target medium-sized firms with strong cashflow generation trading at depressed valuations.
67% think Brexit has gone very badly or fairly badly. Only 2% "very well" and 20% "fairly well".
I think it is beyond dispute that majority public opinion is unhappy with brexit which makes it astonishing that Starmer has been more Brexiteer than most everyone would have expected and including ruling out the single market
Indeed I believe both Sunak and Hunt recognise the need for closer cooperation with the EU and of course the WF is a good start and hopefully better trading relationships going forward
In the early 1930s when a fairly useful chap called John Maynard Keynes was largely in control of UK economic policy housebuilding was absolutely central to his plans for growth, reducing unemployment and getting the economy moving again. The legacy of that housebuilding is still around us today.
I really think we should be doing something similar now. The demand is there, it is an economic activity which does not undermine our precarious balance of payments as much as other boosts to the economy (we would probably import some of the materials) and it can improve our skill base.
I agree that some new towns would be a good start for this but we need to do so much more. Rather than losing housing targets Rishi should have been looking at doubling them and allowing either local authorities or housing associations to get in on the act by allowing them to borrow more for this particular purpose with Treasury backing.
Even on the most self interested level new generations of home owners will be rich in new Conservative voters, people stuck in insecure rented accommodation will not. I agree with Mike that this is a major mistake by Rishi and Hunt.
Hmm, rather like the SNP started doing in 2010 or so with council houses in Scotland (and at some point banning further sales to tenants without grandfathered rights). With some useful developments locally, decent though not enormous or luxurious houses. Though more infill on derelict brownfield and similar sites, inevitably not enough to meet the demand, nothing to compare with the major 1920s-30s council schemes, with some very decent houses in generous spaced grounds.
There was also that remarkable map of satisfaction with the planning system which one of us [edit: posted ] some years back. It showed a stark border along Solway and Tweed - general satisfaction to the north, outrage to the south. We were surprised by this and discussed it a bit at the time on PB but couldn't get to the root of the matter to decide why that might be.
The pressure for new housing is nothing like as great in Scotland because we have not had anything like the same level of immigration. The new building in East Lothian and south Fife has probably been sufficient for much of the country although there are problems for youngsters in the north where second homes are an issue.
In Dundee there have been a series of very small but pleasant developments by housing associations in brown field sites. It has definitely improved run down parts of the town. Maintenance of existing stock has been more problematic given the restrictions on local authority spending but I would agree it is something we seem to have done a bit better, if not with the same pressures.
Of course, barring the very nicest areas such as Broughty Ferry, the New Town of Edinburgh, and so on, that does mean you and I aren't making so much money as Home Counties folk sitting on our backsides as the houses appreciate in value around us, as I have been realising from a look at the ESPC listings the other day. Which is, on balance, a good thing for the polity.
People with ordinary jobs can't afford to live in Edinburgh unless they flat share. So it is the same problem, albeit applying to just one city.
I noticed the other day the *average* price of a house in Edinburgh as a whole is around 325K or so.
As regards flats in the inner area there is a particular problem in inner Edinburgh - the short let/AirBNB market. Though controls have been brought in. Don't know how much impact they have had.
My brother and his partner have a flat in central Edinburgh. The air bnb situation is out of control there, it causes a lot of problems in terms of antisocial behaviour.
Same in central Brighton. Flats in many blocks, and sometimes whole houses, are being let out to holidaymakers and, frequently, groups on stag/hen weekends, even when leases technically forbid sub-letting. It needs to be tackled, but also needs actual staff to enforce the rules. There aren't any staff, though.
Hertsmere is one of the few places where the Tories did markedly worse in the 2021 County council elections than in in the 2019 borough elections. The reason? Labour and the Lib Dem’s whipped up a successful campaign against new house building. So, the Conservative administration dropped their local plan in response.
Politicians want new housing, but not in their constituencies/boroughs/wards.
There seems to be a lot lower opposition to new housing further north.
Perhaps because new housing here is seen as an improvement whereas in the Waitrose belt it isn't ?
Former mining villages are certainly not downgraded by new housing plus there's vast tracts of old abandoned agricultural / mining railway / military land that does need to be redeveloped.
Maybe because housing values are a significantly lower proportion of an individual's overall wealth.
Or does being a home owner in an area of unaffordable housing bring a social smugness and exclusivity ?
I'll go for that option.
If the plan is to build enough houses to significantly reduce house prices in the Home Counties, then the policy is to transfer a massive amount of wealth from existing homeowners to housing developers. It's not surprising it arouses opposition.
pg22 - the most dramatic period of social and economic collapse in British history/food would have been in short supply
But some had a greater sense of sovereignty. Until dropping dead from starvation and plague.
I almost can't believe we're having this conversation, but starvation was down to a series of poor summers, and plague was down to plague. Neither were consequences of the Romans leaving and more than covid and war in Ukraine were consequences of Brexit.
Dr. Foxy, Britannia went absolutely backwards when the Romans left. The de-urbanisation was not a matter of success and choice, as fear and consequence.
London was briefly replaced/surpassed by Londonwic[sp], a little along the river. This was in Anglo-Saxon times, if memory serves, but the Viking threat meant it was easier to return to London and repair the walls for safety.
Also, the absence of the Romans led to a massive collapse in both trade and coinage.
Hm. I'm loathe to quibble with you on matters of ancient history, as I know this is a specialist area of yours. But.
While I'd agree that to outward appearances Britannia went backwards - de-urbanisation, etc. - I'd argue that the picture is a little more ambiguous. If you were outside of society's elite - as most people were - the departure of the Romans lifted quite an onerous burden of taxation (by whatever means) and perhaps increased your quality of life. And while the threat of raids grew, for most villages peace remained common - and it's not as if the Romans had ever been that good at preventing raids anyway.
History reports a sense of living in a time of after the fall - but I suspect that is partly because history was written by the urban classes, for whom decline was visible. But was yer average peasant better off before or after Roman occupation? My guess is after (plague and crop failure aside). Even many bigwigs would have been better off post-Rome as they were under the Roman yoke, when their bigwiggery was by design temporary, with the Roman empire inheriting half of what they owned until family wealth dwindled away. (Of course, it would in many cases have been different bigwigs.)
Possibly the main source of misery in the early middle ages was crop failure and plague - but that wasn't really down to who was in charge, if anyone.
There was probably a sweet spot, when the British were spared the cost of maintaining the legions and imperial civil service, but before the raids and civil strife began.
But, ultimately, the breakdown of trade meant that all kinds of goods that could be cheaply mass-produced like tiles and pottery, had to be homemade, and that communities had to become entirely self-sufficient, rather than being able to specialise. Bryan Ward Perkins and Brett Devereaux demonstrate convincingly (at least to me) that Western European living standards took a dive after 400. They say the archaeological evidence shows that diets gradually got worse, and livestock grew smaller.
Mr. Cookie, disease, famine, war. The population fell very significantly, as did industry and coinage.
Dr. Foxy, weren't you arguing a moment ago that things were better for most people when the Romans had gone?
No, not arguing that things were better for most people, just that when given the choice of escaping state violence and reverting to independent family life the British people did. I believe that in the early post Roman period people lived in dispersed housing with few clusters more than mere hamlets. That they were seen as soft targets by other oppressors is not their fault, and indeed evidence that they had stuff worth stealing.
pg22 - the most dramatic period of social and economic collapse in British history/food would have been in short supply
But some had a greater sense of sovereignty. Until dropping dead from starvation and plague.
I almost can't believe we're having this conversation, but starvation was down to a series of poor summers, and plague was down to plague. Neither were consequences of the Romans leaving and more than covid and war in Ukraine were consequences of Brexit.
Correlation <> causation.
Of course, Cookie, of course. See SeanT’s post before this one.
Mr. Cookie, the industrial/economic dislocation and politico-military fragmentation co-occuring is something I would definitely describe as a causal factor, though.
However, it's also worth noting the English population was declining in the 14th century *before* the Black Death. Population declines could, and did, happen for the mundane reason of bad weather meaning bad harvests.
Governments can set whatever house targets they can pluck out of their arses, but there is one truth they can't deny. In this country, we don't have anywhere near enough skilled trades people to build 'em. Successive Governments have encouraged university over apprenticeships, steered our youth into easy, comfortable jobs rather than getting their hands dirty building something. Another factor is a stupid focus on creating narrow expertise jobs. Years ago, a chippy would be a general purpose wood butcher, in at the very start doing shuttering for the foundations to the very end doing second fixing of skirting and architrave. Now we have different trades for different tasks. Window fitters don't touch anything else, a roofer won't fancy doing architrave. There is a massive construction skills desert in this country, and we just don't encourage people to go into the trade.
At current trade rates it should not be a problem enticing young people to go into these trades with a higher starting salary...
I wonder how much social class expectations affect this.
Even only a generation ago it was quite normal for middle class kids not to go to university whereas now its regarded as almost obligatory, especially if their parents did so.
Mr. Cookie, disease, famine, war. The population fell very significantly, as did industry and coinage.
Dr. Foxy, weren't you arguing a moment ago that things were better for most people when the Romans had gone?
No, not arguing that things were better for most people, just that when given the choice of escaping state violence and reverting to independent family life the British people did. I believe that in the early post Roman period people lived in dispersed housing with few clusters more than mere hamlets. That they were seen as soft targets by other oppressors is not their fault, and indeed evidence that they had stuff worth stealing.
Dr. Foxy, Britannia went absolutely backwards when the Romans left. The de-urbanisation was not a matter of success and choice, as fear and consequence.
London was briefly replaced/surpassed by Londonwic[sp], a little along the river. This was in Anglo-Saxon times, if memory serves, but the Viking threat meant it was easier to return to London and repair the walls for safety.
Also, the absence of the Romans led to a massive collapse in both trade and coinage.
Hm. I'm loathe to quibble with you on matters of ancient history, as I know this is a specialist area of yours. But.
While I'd agree that to outward appearances Britannia went backwards - de-urbanisation, etc. - I'd argue that the picture is a little more ambiguous. If you were outside of society's elite - as most people were - the departure of the Romans lifted quite an onerous burden of taxation (by whatever means) and perhaps increased your quality of life. And while the threat of raids grew, for most villages peace remained common - and it's not as if the Romans had ever been that good at preventing raids anyway.
History reports a sense of living in a time of after the fall - but I suspect that is partly because history was written by the urban classes, for whom decline was visible. But was yer average peasant better off before or after Roman occupation? My guess is after (plague and crop failure aside). Even many bigwigs would have been better off post-Rome as they were under the Roman yoke, when their bigwiggery was by design temporary, with the Roman empire inheriting half of what they owned until family wealth dwindled away. (Of course, it would in many cases have been different bigwigs.)
Possibly the main source of misery in the early middle ages was crop failure and plague - but that wasn't really down to who was in charge, if anyone.
There was probably a sweet spot, when the British were spared the cost of maintaining the legions and imperial civil service, but before the raids and civil strife began.
But, ultimately, the breakdown of trade meant that all kinds of goods that could be cheaply mass-produced like tiles and pottery, had to be homemade, and that communities had to become entirely self-sufficient, rather than being able to specialise. Bryan Ward Perkins and Brett Devereaux demonstrate convincingly (at least to me) that Western European living standards took a dive after 400. They say the archaeological evidence shows that diets gradually got worse, and livestock grew smaller.
Dr. Foxy, I think you're very wrong because you've forgotten, or appear to have forgotten, that 'stuff worth stealing' very much included people at this point in history.
If the plan is to build enough houses to significantly reduce house prices in the Home Counties, then the policy is to transfer a massive amount of wealth from existing homeowners to housing developers. It's not surprising it arouses opposition.
It's completely bonkers that a non-productive asset is seen as a great investment by so many people, and we even celebrate the prices going up! I'd vote for almost anyone who could bring house prices crashing down and get people off of the "my house is my pension" mindset. It's an insane way to run an economy.
Dr. Foxy, Britannia went absolutely backwards when the Romans left. The de-urbanisation was not a matter of success and choice, as fear and consequence.
London was briefly replaced/surpassed by Londonwic[sp], a little along the river. This was in Anglo-Saxon times, if memory serves, but the Viking threat meant it was easier to return to London and repair the walls for safety.
Also, the absence of the Romans led to a massive collapse in both trade and coinage.
Hm. I'm loathe to quibble with you on matters of ancient history, as I know this is a specialist area of yours. But.
While I'd agree that to outward appearances Britannia went backwards - de-urbanisation, etc. - I'd argue that the picture is a little more ambiguous. If you were outside of society's elite - as most people were - the departure of the Romans lifted quite an onerous burden of taxation (by whatever means) and perhaps increased your quality of life. And while the threat of raids grew, for most villages peace remained common - and it's not as if the Romans had ever been that good at preventing raids anyway.
History reports a sense of living in a time of after the fall - but I suspect that is partly because history was written by the urban classes, for whom decline was visible. But was yer average peasant better off before or after Roman occupation? My guess is after (plague and crop failure aside). Even many bigwigs would have been better off post-Rome as they were under the Roman yoke, when their bigwiggery was by design temporary, with the Roman empire inheriting half of what they owned until family wealth dwindled away. (Of course, it would in many cases have been different bigwigs.)
Possibly the main source of misery in the early middle ages was crop failure and plague - but that wasn't really down to who was in charge, if anyone.
There was probably a sweet spot, when the British were spared the cost of maintaining the legions and imperial civil service, but before the raids and civil strife began.
But, ultimately, the breakdown of trade meant that all kinds of goods that could be cheaply mass-produced like tiles and pottery, had to be homemade, and that communities had to become entirely self-sufficient, rather than being able to specialise. Bryan Ward Perkins and Brett Devereaux demonstrate convincingly (at least to me) that Western European living standards took a dive after 400. They say the archaeological evidence shows that diets gradually got worse, and livestock grew smaller.
Mr. Cookie, the industrial/economic dislocation and politico-military fragmentation co-occuring is something I would definitely describe as a causal factor, though.
However, it's also worth noting the English population was declining in the 14th century *before* the Black Death. Population declines could, and did, happen for the mundane reason of bad weather meaning bad harvests.
Because, when you have the majority of the population depending on substance, or near substance farming, there is little or no buffer.
Notably, one of the main things that Kings remembered as "good" did, was invest in food storage. To release in time of famine...
On housing, my position is no building on greenfield sites.
If Labour's position differs from that it will piss me off.
This is one area of policy where I am probably closer to the other parties.
Conversely I'm totally fine with building on green fields. Prioritise brownfield? Sure. But I've seen far too many absurdities where people complain about perfectly decent extensions onto some unattractive, useless 'greenfield' as though it were the most stellar land in the Green Belt and not some marginal piece of well connected scrub land.
The trouble is that building on green fields is nearly always easy money for developers and building on brownfield is too hard, risky and expensive. Developers will just instinctively just roll out a cul-de-sac in a field with the standard house types surrounded by a few bushes, justified by the maxim that 'it is what our customers want'. A whole industry of consultants and lawyers is based around pandering to this philistine instinct, but recently the government have started to ask them to do better and back this up with changes to policy.
One suggestion for the "brown fields" problem, is to separate the foundations, base services, etc from the construction. As in, subsidise/provide/(get done) getting plots to the stage of a foundation slab with drains, electrical etc connected, and sell to buyers. All the unknown are in the ground.....
I seem to recall this kind of development was popular in some parts of the US - you got to self build on the slab, basically.
Yeah that happens, there are grants for that, at least for the decontamination and site preperation. IE I have recently worked with a site which was an unregulated municipal landfill. The Council got £2 million to prepare it for 20,000 sqm commercial development. It owned the site which helps. I guess the difficulties kick in with smaller urban sites in private ownership.
A good example of this is Barking Riverside, they auction off serviced plots to developers to derisk the development, it is the biggest construction site in Europe. Incidentally, and in advance of any possible debate about affordable housing in London, Barking Riverside is proof that high quality affordable housing does actually exist in London if you can hold your nose and live in Barking. There is an overground train station in the development, and it is served by the UBER boat along the thames, it has a school that is outstanding, and the flats start at £265k with various first time buyer incentives. If I was to move to London that is where I would go.
A couple of years back, Hounslow council forced Thames Tradesmen Rowing club out of the site they rented from the council.
The building was godawful ugly. But more importantly, low rise
The plot has sat empty (building demolished), since the council got caught talking to developers. After encouraging a footbridge to the site to be built at vast public expense.
Now they are claiming to be talking about "river accessibility" - which is bollocks, since Tradesmen hosted a canoe club and paddle boarders etc. The only people who want to get to the river are rowers, canoeists and paddle boarders. There's not even a shortage of public slips in the general area - river access available by law...
When I asked why they didn't do what has been done on the rest of the river - build a block of flats above a boat house, and rent the boat house to Tradesmen - there was an awkward silence. Take the payment from the developer in the form of flats for social housing, if they can't raise the money themselves.....
Not sure about this example, but generally it is quite difficult for a public authority to abandon a decision like this once it is taken, however absurd it gets. It is different to a commercial venture where more rational considerations kick in because of the need to report to shareholders etc.
In the early 1930s when a fairly useful chap called John Maynard Keynes was largely in control of UK economic policy housebuilding was absolutely central to his plans for growth, reducing unemployment and getting the economy moving again. The legacy of that housebuilding is still around us today.
I really think we should be doing something similar now. The demand is there, it is an economic activity which does not undermine our precarious balance of payments as much as other boosts to the economy (we would probably import some of the materials) and it can improve our skill base.
I agree that some new towns would be a good start for this but we need to do so much more. Rather than losing housing targets Rishi should have been looking at doubling them and allowing either local authorities or housing associations to get in on the act by allowing them to borrow more for this particular purpose with Treasury backing.
Even on the most self interested level new generations of home owners will be rich in new Conservative voters, people stuck in insecure rented accommodation will not. I agree with Mike that this is a major mistake by Rishi and Hunt.
Hmm, rather like the SNP started doing in 2010 or so with council houses in Scotland (and at some point banning further sales to tenants without grandfathered rights). With some useful developments locally, decent though not enormous or luxurious houses. Though more infill on derelict brownfield and similar sites, inevitably not enough to meet the demand, nothing to compare with the major 1920s-30s council schemes, with some very decent houses in generous spaced grounds.
There was also that remarkable map of satisfaction with the planning system which one of us [edit: posted ] some years back. It showed a stark border along Solway and Tweed - general satisfaction to the north, outrage to the south. We were surprised by this and discussed it a bit at the time on PB but couldn't get to the root of the matter to decide why that might be.
The pressure for new housing is nothing like as great in Scotland because we have not had anything like the same level of immigration. The new building in East Lothian and south Fife has probably been sufficient for much of the country although there are problems for youngsters in the north where second homes are an issue.
In Dundee there have been a series of very small but pleasant developments by housing associations in brown field sites. It has definitely improved run down parts of the town. Maintenance of existing stock has been more problematic given the restrictions on local authority spending but I would agree it is something we seem to have done a bit better, if not with the same pressures.
Of course, barring the very nicest areas such as Broughty Ferry, the New Town of Edinburgh, and so on, that does mean you and I aren't making so much money as Home Counties folk sitting on our backsides as the houses appreciate in value around us, as I have been realising from a look at the ESPC listings the other day. Which is, on balance, a good thing for the polity.
People with ordinary jobs can't afford to live in Edinburgh unless they flat share. So it is the same problem, albeit applying to just one city.
I noticed the other day the *average* price of a house in Edinburgh as a whole is around 325K or so.
As regards flats in the inner area there is a particular problem in inner Edinburgh - the short let/AirBNB market. Though controls have been brought in. Don't know how much impact they have had.
My brother and his partner have a flat in central Edinburgh. The air bnb situation is out of control there, it causes a lot of problems in terms of antisocial behaviour.
Same in central Brighton. Flats in many blocks, and sometimes whole houses, are being let out to holidaymakers and, frequently, groups on stag/hen weekends, even when leases technically forbid sub-letting. It needs to be tackled, but also needs actual staff to enforce the rules. There aren't any staff, though.
Easy fix - make fhl pay 3 to 5 times council tax and there will be a very big incentive for councils to investigate.
pg22 - the most dramatic period of social and economic collapse in British history/food would have been in short supply
But some had a greater sense of sovereignty. Until dropping dead from starvation and plague.
I almost can't believe we're having this conversation, but starvation was down to a series of poor summers, and plague was down to plague. Neither were consequences of the Romans leaving and more than covid and war in Ukraine were consequences of Brexit.
Correlation <> causation.
I think you can make a case that central organisation in food storage and distribution can make a society more resistant to famine etc. It depends on the government of course, as some governments have either been callous about inflicting famine, or even use it as a weapon.
In the Anglo-Saxon period the Church had a 10% tithe on crops, and priests were from the local village, so had a primitive welfare state. It was when the Church became centralised that the tithes were diverted to support wealthy abbots rather than poor peasants.
Comments
The other thing pissing folk off is the planners trying to squash rural business and push them into the towns. Our dog groomer has a lovely set up in some old barns. The planners are trying to say it should be in a local town where "people can wait for their dog to be clipped - and a have a cup of coffee whilst they do". Unquote. If you could actually park in the towns for two hours - you can spend an hour trying to find a parking spot. They have required a user survey to be completed, on how many dog owners use electric vehicles for their journey to the barns. There is no recharging infrastructure round here, so electric vehicles are scarce as free-range hens teeth. And for many of us, it is a shorter journey than the 7 miles to the nearest town.
There are numerous other examples. It looks like a strategy designed by someone still in college who has never been within 200 miles of the place.
Yes, government (central and local) should be trying to divert economic activity and jobs to left-behind areas, but it will take something other than housebuilding to do that.
So why not with this?
STOP THE BOATS was massive headline news, with supporting commentariat pieces denouncing anyone traitorous enough to object.
The policy has been dropped. They can't stop the boats. Its now actively what we knew it always was - an empty slogan.
The problem for the Tories is that their client media have worked very hard to protect people from this new news. no massive headline coverage of the u-turn. And going off the comments from that one Daily Mail article that was buried down the page I can see why - a lot of morons very angry.
So we have angry voters being promised the moon on a stick. The government realising they can't deliver. But people still whipped into a frenzy awaiting their stick. When they realise - probably quite late in the day - that there will be no moons on sticks, what will they do?
- Giant developments are good for the developers and (to a certain extent) the planners. They crash house prices locally for years, and building them results in years of noise etc as they are built in phases.
- The properties built. Given the love of ugly rabbit hutches, both by the developers and those specifying density, it's not surprising what gets built. Nor should it surprise that people don't want a zillion ugly rabbit hutches near them.
Unrest is stirring in Britain’s holiday home havens
Cornwall has 16,000 holiday lets and 15,000 families on its social housing list
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/16-000-holiday-airbnb-lets-cornwall-alone-swtnlkt7m
But there is never any corruption where Conservatives are concrned. Is there? All very mysterious.
A long-awaited spate of dealmaking broke out last night with a flurry of private equity-backed takeover approaches for mid-cap London companies worth more than £6 billion.
Dechra Pharmaceuticals said after the market had closed that it was in talks over a possible £4.6 billion cash bid from EQT, a Swedish private equity firm, in a deal backed by the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority.
The approach for Dechra came after Network International had confirmed earlier that it had received a “preliminary and conditional” proposal from CVC Capital Partners and Francisco Partners, the private equity firms. Shares in the emerging markets-focused payments company closed up 23.1 per cent, or 56½p, at 300p, valuing the company at £1.6 billion, still below its float price of four years ago.
A wave of bids for London-listed companies from overseas buyers had been expected after the pound weakened last year against the dollar. A poll by Numis, the investment bank, found that 88 per cent of FTSE directors regarded British companies as vulnerable to takeovers, with private equity groups tipped to target medium-sized firms with strong cashflow generation trading at depressed valuations.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/dechra-pharmaceuticals-in-talks-over-possible-4-6bn-bid-from-swedens-eqt-h9rs6lpmv
Streamline and modernise the buying and selling of property and competition can then flourish.
It's almost as if they were running 2 sets of accounts.
But there's a massive failing: shops. We lack shops. We have a massive supermarket and three big retail units, but under ten small shops, not including two Co-ops (neither in the 'High Street'). The small shop units allegedly have massive ground rents. A large grassy area lies where the shops should have been built, over twenty years ago.
The High Street is not a High Street. The supermarket dominates and the retail units don't fit in well. What we need are:
*) A couple of dozen small shop units, cheap to rent on short leases to 'try out' business ideas.
*) Some medium-sized industrial units.
We also have a business park that has free land on which some of this can be built, and is zoned for business. But the local council want to cram even more houses onto it, further skewing the person-shop ratio.
(*) I'd also argue that some of these lessons are being unlearnt as other local developments are built...
*If you are doing a property yourself, hardwire with Cat 6.
Developers will just instinctively just roll out a cul-de-sac in a field with the standard house types surrounded by a few bushes, justified by the maxim that 'it is what our customers want'. A whole industry of consultants and lawyers is based around pandering to this philistine instinct, but recently the government have started to ask them to do better and back this up with changes to policy.
Building a common structure such as a house is relatively easy. The groundworks and services can be *very* troublesome - yet people rarely think of them.
The top 8 apps in the Russian App Store are all VPNs
https://mobile.twitter.com/jonnytickle/status/1646768213508669440
London was briefly replaced/surpassed by Londonwic[sp], a little along the river. This was in Anglo-Saxon times, if memory serves, but the Viking threat meant it was easier to return to London and repair the walls for safety.
Also, the absence of the Romans led to a massive collapse in both trade and coinage.
No one *choses* subsistence farming. Even when the alternatives are quite horrible.
I’m happy to say, incidentally, that both conditions are improving!
The idea that subsistence farming was a batter option - nope. The reason that it became a thing was the collapse of the economic structure.
Ever wonder where all the missing population went? Hint, they didn't all pull out their Roman Empire Passports and head for Italy.
As to enticing youngsters into the trades....government and the big employers aren't selling it.
A lot of low quality greenfield land is improved environmentally by turning it into outer suburbia.
Likewise a lot of brownfield land would be better being rewilded rather than being developed.
One of the big changes in the later Anglo-Saxon period was an intensification of extraction rates from rural farmers, as social organisation became more complicated again.
While I'd agree that to outward appearances Britannia went backwards - de-urbanisation, etc. - I'd argue that the picture is a little more ambiguous. If you were outside of society's elite - as most people were - the departure of the Romans lifted quite an onerous burden of taxation (by whatever means) and perhaps increased your quality of life. And while the threat of raids grew, for most villages peace remained common - and it's not as if the Romans had ever been that good at preventing raids anyway.
History reports a sense of living in a time of after the fall - but I suspect that is partly because history was written by the urban classes, for whom decline was visible. But was yer average peasant better off before or after Roman occupation? My guess is after (plague and crop failure aside). Even many bigwigs would have been better off post-Rome as they were under the Roman yoke, when their bigwiggery was by design temporary, with the Roman empire inheriting half of what they owned until family wealth dwindled away. (Of course, it would in many cases have been different bigwigs.)
Possibly the main source of misery in the early middle ages was crop failure and plague - but that wasn't really down to who was in charge, if anyone.
Nobody has been sent to Rwanda.
I seem to recall this kind of development was popular in some parts of the US - you got to self build on the slab, basically.
Were the Anglo-Saxons pleased to be organised by their new Norman feudal lords any more than Ukranian Kulaks were by Soviet collectivisation? I think not.
I hear labour's grand idea of spending 28 billion a year over 5 years insulating 19 million homes but this is another promise that is undeliverable.
Indeed why should the taxpayer subsidise homeowners to insulating their homes when many can afford to do it themselves
I understand there have been suggestions that mortgage companies may restrict their mortgages only to homes in energy efficient band c or better and of course that would see lots of price renegotiation if those homes were not insulated accordingly
BP trades at half the p/e valuation of Exxon.
Sadly this will increase the trade deficit even further. Britain is becoming a branch economy, owned overseas.
However, there was a huge amount of warfare in what had been Britannia, and that was before the Vikings showed up. Roman urban centres were more defensible and this degree of security probably wasn't returned to until Alfred's burhs (although these may have existed before his policy, it was that decision which made them a regular mainstay of defence).
There was also a breakdown in law and a return to might makes right, which saw minor kings squabble then consolidate their realms into larger kingdoms. The return to unity (for England) took about four or five centuries and had a ton of war in between.
And the population declined in a way that would not be repeated until the Black Death.
I noticed the other day the *average* price of a house in Edinburgh as a whole is around 325K or so.
As regards flats in the inner area there is a particular problem in inner Edinburgh - the short let/AirBNB market. Though controls have been brought in. Don't know how much impact they have had.
I'm reworking a house at the moment. The plan is Cat 6 to every room. With a combined PoE Wifi point/mini switch (4 ethernet sockets) in each room.
Then all you need is a network switch to plug the Cat 6 into....
If you do it while you are building, it costs pretty much nothing. A bit of cable, and an extra socket in each room.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/04/14/rishi-sunak-news-latest-labour-dup-snp-brexit-poll/
67% think Brexit has gone very badly or fairly badly. Only 2% "very well" and 20% "fairly well".
A good example of this is Barking Riverside, they auction off serviced plots to developers to derisk the development, it is the biggest construction site in Europe. Incidentally, and in advance of any possible debate about affordable housing in London, Barking Riverside is proof that high quality affordable housing does actually exist in London if you can hold your nose and live in Barking. There is an overground train station in the development, and it is served by the UBER boat along the thames, it has a school that is outstanding, and the flats start at £265k with various first time buyer incentives. If I was to move to London that is where I would go.
@Bournville
pg22 - the most dramatic period of social and economic collapse in British history/food would have been in short supply
Until dropping dead from starvation and plague.
When would you have rather been a British peasant? 100 BC or 200 AD or 500 AD? For me, I think, the latter. But my knowledge of this time is based on imperfect understanding of imperfect history.
Perhaps because new housing here is seen as an improvement whereas in the Waitrose belt it isn't ?
Former mining villages are certainly not downgraded by new housing plus there's vast tracts of old abandoned agricultural / mining railway / military land that does need to be redeveloped.
Maybe because housing values are a significantly lower proportion of an individual's overall wealth.
Or does being a home owner in an area of unaffordable housing bring a social smugness and exclusivity ?
Mr. Cookie, disease, famine, war. The population fell very significantly, as did industry and coinage.
Dr. Foxy, weren't you arguing a moment ago that things were better for most people when the Romans had gone?
A couple of years back, Hounslow council forced Thames Tradesmen Rowing club out of the site they rented from the council.
The building was godawful ugly. But more importantly, low rise
The plot has sat empty (building demolished), since the council got caught talking to developers. After encouraging a footbridge to the site to be built at vast public expense.
Now they are claiming to be talking about "river accessibility" - which is bollocks, since Tradesmen hosted a canoe club and paddle boarders etc. The only people who want to get to the river are rowers, canoeists and paddle boarders. There's not even a shortage of public slips in the general area - river access available by law...
When I asked why they didn't do what has been done on the rest of the river - build a block of flats above a boat house, and rent the boat house to Tradesmen - there was an awkward silence. Take the payment from the developer in the form of flats for social housing, if they can't raise the money themselves.....
Instead we have a bridge https://www.hounslow.gov.uk/news/article/2795/new_footbridge_in_chiswick_opens_along_the_river_thames that leads to an empty building site.
Indeed I believe both Sunak and Hunt recognise the need for closer cooperation with the EU and of course the WF is a good start and hopefully better trading relationships going forward
https://twitter.com/resi_analyst/status/1646769169214455809
If the plan is to build enough houses to significantly reduce house prices in the Home Counties, then the policy is to transfer a massive amount of wealth from existing homeowners to housing developers. It's not surprising it arouses opposition.
Correlation <> causation.
But, ultimately, the breakdown of trade meant that all kinds of goods that could be cheaply mass-produced like tiles and pottery, had to be homemade, and that communities had to become entirely self-sufficient, rather than being able to specialise. Bryan Ward Perkins and Brett Devereaux demonstrate convincingly (at least to me) that Western European living standards took a dive after 400. They say the archaeological evidence shows that diets gradually got worse, and livestock grew smaller.
However, it's also worth noting the English population was declining in the 14th century *before* the Black Death. Population declines could, and did, happen for the mundane reason of bad weather meaning bad harvests.
Even only a generation ago it was quite normal for middle class kids not to go to university whereas now its regarded as almost obligatory, especially if their parents did so.
Notably, one of the main things that Kings remembered as "good" did, was invest in food storage. To release in time of famine...
It is different to a commercial venture where more rational considerations kick in because of the need to report to shareholders etc.
In the Anglo-Saxon period the Church had a 10% tithe on crops, and priests were from the local village, so had a primitive welfare state. It was when the Church became centralised that the tithes were diverted to support wealthy abbots rather than poor peasants.