I think it's an example of something I said a while back- to get big changes to happen, you can either excite the public by emphasising the bigness, or soothe them by making them sound boring and technical.
This sounds dull, but is probably dead important. After all, the money that goes to owners of arbitrarily rationed developable land is one of the big reasons we can't afford nice things.
It sounds like a very large transfer of power to councils - which is (depending on the details) probably a very good thing.
And possibly makes them more significant players in the housing market than they have been since Thatcher.
Definitely not boring.
All building is good at this point, but how many people aspire to be allocated a council house?
Would this change allow Councils to purchase land cheaply and then sell off the houses under a right to buy? Could be a powerful money spinner for the Council.
I'm quite pleased by this policy announcement.
All serious policies have winners and losers, of course, and governing is just about balancing them appropriately. But non-homeowners have been getting the shitty end of the stick pretty much ever since I can remember.
My view is that we need more housing of all tenures. If all this does is build big council estates, it's still a positive. But (with apologies for rehashing a hobbyhorse of mine) what I'd really like to see if the public sector as private developer - or, rather, as developer of mixed neighbourhoods. One problem with the current model of delivery is that all building impacts the existing population: visual impact, environmental impact, severance, increased traffic, and so on - but developers - quite reasonably - have an interest only in what they sell to their customers; they need planning permission, but that is pretty binary. If councils were able to develop themselves, they could not only provide the housing stock (of all tenures) that they require but also improve the lot of the existing population. And also, as noted above, recycle revenues back into the public purse.
As with any potentially good policy, there are risks and there are downsides: the risk is that the public sector hasn't got the best of records for developing lovely neighbourhoods. But I think we have moved on sufficiently since the 60s that that risk can at least be managed. And the downside is that less profit will go to landowners. I'm trying to think of a way of phrasing this which doesn't sound like 'hooray, the baddies lose out' because that is not what I mean; it's genuinely to be regretted, because profit provides incentive to do things, and also because landowners [sorry - f key has packed in] oten aren't top-hatted baddies but are broadly owned companies in which many pension unds have shares. It's just that in my view loss o proit to devlopers is to be regretted less than a serious shortage o housing.
It's not clear from the reports I've seen, but the council estate redevelopments around here are mixed for sale/for rent/social rent. And in theory, new private developments are meant to have a social housing element to them. Council house monoculture was definitely a mistake made in the 1950s/60s, and Right to Buy did a good thing in mixing things up a bit.
The recent developments that have worked- Poundbury and the like- have had a single mind controlling the masterplan, the mix of what gets built where and growing the community facilities as you go along. They've also not had to worry too much about the price of the land. It would be good to extend that model beyond benevolent aristrocracy.
And the landowners? I'm sure they will still make a tidy sum from converting undeveloped land into developed. Without these changes in the rules, they might not be allowed to build anything. It's just the profits will be less huge but more certain.
There are two moving targets: SNP losses and Lib Dem gains. Both are now the central case.
The question is how many seats change hands in each category.
If the SNP lose net 15 seats, they are down to 30. If the Lib Dems gain 16, they are up to 30.
Even leaving aside the "Blue Wall" in the Home Counties, there are quite a few ex Lib Dem seats in Devon and Somerset, plus places like Cheltenham, that look nailed on for the Lib Dems next time. Equally, there are at least 15 seats that look like Labour gains from the SNP, especially in the the greater Glasgow area, and I see no SNP surge against the Tories in the North East and the Borders, so no likely SNP gains.
If counties like Surrey also swing Lib Dem, then Ed Davey will outdo Paddy Ashdown for gains.
I think the odds favour the Lib Dems over the SNP at this point.
In a change from 1997, it looks likely the LDs will win more MPs in Surrey, Oxfordshire and Hertfordshire than Cornwall, Devon and Somerset. The Brexit effect
Which seats do you think are likely to fall to the Lib Dems in each group, young HY?
Guildford, Esher and Walton, Surrey SW, Woking and Mole Valley in Surrey. Wantage and Henley in Oxfordshire and in Hertfordshire the LDs could gain Hitchen and Harpenden to add to their gain of St Albans in 2019
Excellent list (I would say that because it aligns with mine as far as Surrey is concerned).Surrey SW will now be 2 seats so another one as both would be targeted. As an outside shot Surrey Heath. LDs appear very well organised and did spectacularly well in the locals
There are two moving targets: SNP losses and Lib Dem gains. Both are now the central case.
The question is how many seats change hands in each category.
If the SNP lose net 15 seats, they are down to 30. If the Lib Dems gain 16, they are up to 30.
Even leaving aside the "Blue Wall" in the Home Counties, there are quite a few ex Lib Dem seats in Devon and Somerset, plus places like Cheltenham, that look nailed on for the Lib Dems next time. Equally, there are at least 15 seats that look like Labour gains from the SNP, especially in the the greater Glasgow area, and I see no SNP surge against the Tories in the North East and the Borders, so no likely SNP gains.
If counties like Surrey also swing Lib Dem, then Ed Davey will outdo Paddy Ashdown for gains.
I think the odds favour the Lib Dems over the SNP at this point.
In a change from 1997, it looks likely the LDs will win more MPs in Surrey, Oxfordshire and Hertfordshire than Cornwall, Devon and Somerset. The Brexit effect
Which seats do you think are likely to fall to the Lib Dems in each group, young HY?
Guildford, Esher and Walton, Surrey SW, Woking and Mole Valley in Surrey. Wantage and Henley in Oxfordshire and in Hertfordshire the LDs could gain Hitchen and Harpenden to add to their gain of St Albans in 2019
Excellent list (I would say that because it aligns with mine as far as Surrey is concerned).Surrey SW will now be 2 seats so another one as both would be targeted. As an outside shot Surrey Heath. LDs appear very well organised and did spectacularly well in the locals
Surrey Heath is Camberley, Gove’s seat? That must be pretty safe.
Surrey SW is Hunt’s seat - Farnham, Godalming and a lot of expensive countyside. What will it look like after the boundary changes? @NickPalmer ?
There are two moving targets: SNP losses and Lib Dem gains. Both are now the central case.
The question is how many seats change hands in each category.
If the SNP lose net 15 seats, they are down to 30. If the Lib Dems gain 16, they are up to 30.
Even leaving aside the "Blue Wall" in the Home Counties, there are quite a few ex Lib Dem seats in Devon and Somerset, plus places like Cheltenham, that look nailed on for the Lib Dems next time. Equally, there are at least 15 seats that look like Labour gains from the SNP, especially in the the greater Glasgow area, and I see no SNP surge against the Tories in the North East and the Borders, so no likely SNP gains.
If counties like Surrey also swing Lib Dem, then Ed Davey will outdo Paddy Ashdown for gains.
I think the odds favour the Lib Dems over the SNP at this point.
In a change from 1997, it looks likely the LDs will win more MPs in Surrey, Oxfordshire and Hertfordshire than Cornwall, Devon and Somerset. The Brexit effect
Which seats do you think are likely to fall to the Lib Dems in each group, young HY?
It would be good to hear @HYUFD list and his comments on my list posted below. It isn't often I am aligned with @hyufd but I think I am on this topic. My area in Surrey is all blue, every seat around me will be a LD target. At least 6 of them.
Surrey voted 52% Remain, indeed I would expect it to be the county with the most LD gains in the country
This line sums up everything that is broken with our planning system.
An analysis by the Centre for Progressive Policy in 2018 found that planning permission inflated the price of agricultural land by 275 times, pushing it up from £22,520 per hectare to £6.2m per hectare.
And still we have people on this site pushing the myth that planning is not the root of the problem.
Planning permission being granted should not inflate the price of land. The fact that it does by a factor of 27,500% sums up everything wrong with the system.
On that basis if the govt mandated the auctioning off of 2% of agricultural land for housing, and attached a 50% windfall tax gain on the profits, we could halve the national debt.
That’s like saying that if we doubled the income tax rates to 40%, 80%, and 90%, we’d double the tax take.
The total land area covered in housing is around 5% at the moment, so you’d be adding 40% to housing land, which would dramatically reduce the uplift, while still adding about £50k in tax to the average cost of a new-build house.
Obviously doesn't need to be done in one go, could be over a generation or two, and numbers just for illustration of tax opportunity than a suggestion.
Given we are really struggling for areas that can generate significant tax, and need to build shedloads of houses, windfall gains on planning permission should absolutely be shared with the state instead of split between farmers, developers and dodgy councillors.
Or reform the system to eliminate the windfall gains so that buyers pay less.
Just a suggestion.
Absolutely happy for some reforms to make it easier to build, penalise land banking so that buyers pay less. Not happy with virtually abandoning the idea of planning and leaving it entirely to the market as you have at times advocated for. As with everyone else, pretty convinced that would be a nightmare.
You don't need to be as gung-ho as I am. You can have a rational zonal planning system as almost every developed country in the world has, which means that planning exists but the legal nightmare and thus costs that exist in this country are largely eliminated.
If there is a zoning area for development then anywhere in that zone ought to be able to be developed easily and thus getting consent in that area should not artificially inflate the value of the land with a huge windfall.
There are two moving targets: SNP losses and Lib Dem gains. Both are now the central case.
The question is how many seats change hands in each category.
If the SNP lose net 15 seats, they are down to 30. If the Lib Dems gain 16, they are up to 30.
Even leaving aside the "Blue Wall" in the Home Counties, there are quite a few ex Lib Dem seats in Devon and Somerset, plus places like Cheltenham, that look nailed on for the Lib Dems next time. Equally, there are at least 15 seats that look like Labour gains from the SNP, especially in the the greater Glasgow area, and I see no SNP surge against the Tories in the North East and the Borders, so no likely SNP gains.
If counties like Surrey also swing Lib Dem, then Ed Davey will outdo Paddy Ashdown for gains.
I think the odds favour the Lib Dems over the SNP at this point.
In a change from 1997, it looks likely the LDs will win more MPs in Surrey, Oxfordshire and Hertfordshire than Cornwall, Devon and Somerset. The Brexit effect
Which seats do you think are likely to fall to the Lib Dems in each group, young HY?
Guildford, Esher and Walton, Surrey SW, Woking and Mole Valley in Surrey. Wantage and Henley in Oxfordshire and in Hertfordshire the LDs could gain Hitchen and Harpenden to add to their gain of St Albans in 2019
Excellent list (I would say that because it aligns with mine as far as Surrey is concerned).Surrey SW will now be 2 seats so another one as both would be targeted. As an outside shot Surrey Heath. LDs appear very well organised and did spectacularly well in the locals
Thanks. Surrey Heath though narrowly voted Leave against the Surrey trend, I expect Gove may well hold on even if fellow Brexiteers IDS, Redwood and Boris lose their seats. Hunt is also more at risk than Gove in my view whichever of the 2 new seats he ends up in. Raab sensibly has decided not to stand again as Esher and Walton almost certain to go LD too
I think it's an example of something I said a while back- to get big changes to happen, you can either excite the public by emphasising the bigness, or soothe them by making them sound boring and technical.
This sounds dull, but is probably dead important. After all, the money that goes to owners of arbitrarily rationed developable land is one of the big reasons we can't afford nice things.
It sounds like a very large transfer of power to councils - which is (depending on the details) probably a very good thing.
And possibly makes them more significant players in the housing market than they have been since Thatcher.
Definitely not boring.
All building is good at this point, but how many people aspire to be allocated a council house?
Would this change allow Councils to purchase land cheaply and then sell off the houses under a right to buy? Could be a powerful money spinner for the Council.
I'm quite pleased by this policy announcement.
All serious policies have winners and losers, of course, and governing is just about balancing them appropriately. But non-homeowners have been getting the shitty end of the stick pretty much ever since I can remember.
My view is that we need more housing of all tenures. If all this does is build big council estates, it's still a positive. But (with apologies for rehashing a hobbyhorse of mine) what I'd really like to see if the public sector as private developer - or, rather, as developer of mixed neighbourhoods. One problem with the current model of delivery is that all building impacts the existing population: visual impact, environmental impact, severance, increased traffic, and so on - but developers - quite reasonably - have an interest only in what they sell to their customers; they need planning permission, but that is pretty binary. If councils were able to develop themselves, they could not only provide the housing stock (of all tenures) that they require but also improve the lot of the existing population. And also, as noted above, recycle revenues back into the public purse.
As with any potentially good policy, there are risks and there are downsides: the risk is that the public sector hasn't got the best of records for developing lovely neighbourhoods. But I think we have moved on sufficiently since the 60s that that risk can at least be managed. And the downside is that less profit will go to landowners. I'm trying to think of a way of phrasing this which doesn't sound like 'hooray, the baddies lose out' because that is not what I mean; it's genuinely to be regretted, because profit provides incentive to do things, and also because landowners [sorry - f key has packed in] oten aren't top-hatted baddies but are broadly owned companies in which many pension unds have shares. It's just that in my view loss o proit to devlopers is to be regretted less than a serious shortage o housing.
It's not clear from the reports I've seen, but the council estate redevelopments around here are mixed for sale/for rent/social rent. And in theory, new private developments are meant to have a social housing element to them. Council house monoculture was definitely a mistake made in the 1950s/60s, and Right to Buy did a good thing in mixing things up a bit.
The recent developments that have worked- Poundbury and the like- have had a single mind controlling the masterplan, the mix of what gets built where and growing the community facilities as you go along. They've also not had to worry too much about the price of the land. It would be good to extend that model beyond benevolent aristrocracy.
And the landowners? I'm sure they will still make a tidy sum from converting undeveloped land into developed. Without these changes in the rules, they might not be allowed to build anything. It's just the profits will be less huge but more certain.
More Poundburys is probably the answer.
But one Poundbury is only 2,000 houses, so we need at least 300 new Poundburys every year.
There are two moving targets: SNP losses and Lib Dem gains. Both are now the central case.
The question is how many seats change hands in each category.
If the SNP lose net 15 seats, they are down to 30. If the Lib Dems gain 16, they are up to 30.
Even leaving aside the "Blue Wall" in the Home Counties, there are quite a few ex Lib Dem seats in Devon and Somerset, plus places like Cheltenham, that look nailed on for the Lib Dems next time. Equally, there are at least 15 seats that look like Labour gains from the SNP, especially in the the greater Glasgow area, and I see no SNP surge against the Tories in the North East and the Borders, so no likely SNP gains.
If counties like Surrey also swing Lib Dem, then Ed Davey will outdo Paddy Ashdown for gains.
I think the odds favour the Lib Dems over the SNP at this point.
In a change from 1997, it looks likely the LDs will win more MPs in Surrey, Oxfordshire and Hertfordshire than Cornwall, Devon and Somerset. The Brexit effect
Which seats do you think are likely to fall to the Lib Dems in each group, young HY?
Guildford, Esher and Walton, Surrey SW, Woking and Mole Valley in Surrey. Wantage and Henley in Oxfordshire and in Hertfordshire the LDs could gain Hitchen and Harpenden to add to their gain of St Albans in 2019
Thanks for the reply, young HY. But that answers only half of my question...
How about Devon, Cornwall, Somerset? Only Devon had local elections this year, but the Lib Dems did very well there. Presumably they are also working hard in Cornwall and Somerset.
So as yet, I do not see why you think the Surrey-Oxford area would be more fruitful territory for them.
In other news. The RFU looks like it will get its 10 team Premiership, with London Irish facing a 5 pm deadline. Not sure 3 teams going bust in a season was their preferred route, but hey ho. Rumours abound about Newcastle too. "Failure on an epic scale."
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning. Face down the NIMBYs.
Build. More. Houses.
Building more houses isn't really the answer. There are 1/4 million long term empty homes in the UK (figure from Nov 2022). The issue is the housing market is broken and more supply won't help. Housing in this country is broken by hugely inflated prices, an excess of landlordism and a refusal from the government to really deal with that. Along with the fact that wages have not risen with inflation, it means that people of my generation (I was born in '91) have no real chance of getting on the housing ladder unless we have rich parents.
The house my parents moved into in their 20s was £55k; in my 20s it was worth £360k. It is an ex council house. Allowing more private developers (whose profits are protected in legislation) to build more high price houses (which is what they always do) and flog them off to landlords or people who use them as "investments" (see money laundering) will not help my generation.
Taking back unused houses from landlords and investors, bringing back affordable housing as a domain of the state and not housing associations, and defining affordable housing as something people can actually afford (instead of 80% of local market prices) is what is really needed.
Because there are maybe a dozen or so significant causes of our housing problems, people often assume it is only a subset of them. All the things you listed are broken and significant. As is the shortage of new homes being built.
What issues does building new houses solve? It increases supply, but we obviously don't have a real supply issue if over 1/4 million homes are empty. We have an affordability crisis, which again doesn't make sense if supply isn't an issue. So who owns those 250,000 homes? Landlords, second home owners, "investors" etc. If you build more homes, do you stop the same kind of people snapping them up? No.
Out of university I worked for a few years at a housing association and then in local government on regeneration - essentially replacing old stock with new stock. And every time developers would promise x amount of affordable housing, then once the first shovel hit the ground and everything had been approved, they would turn around, say that the profits they projected had gone down due to factors outside their control, and the affordable housing had to be reduced to allow for more houses that could make them money.
You see this everywhere. Every local council will have a housing needs assessment document somewhere, which will almost always say the same thing - we need more affordable homes, one and two bedroom homes for single people and old people, and we don't really need more large family homes. Developers, on the other hand, want to build 3 or 4 bedroom homes because they can be sold to wealthy families or landlords who will rent out the rooms individually and pay of their mortgage for them, as well as make a profit. And successive governments since the coalition years have protected developers over the needs of average people.
This line sums up everything that is broken with our planning system.
An analysis by the Centre for Progressive Policy in 2018 found that planning permission inflated the price of agricultural land by 275 times, pushing it up from £22,520 per hectare to £6.2m per hectare.
And still we have people on this site pushing the myth that planning is not the root of the problem.
Planning permission being granted should not inflate the price of land. The fact that it does by a factor of 27,500% sums up everything wrong with the system.
On that basis if the govt mandated the auctioning off of 2% of agricultural land for housing, and attached a 50% windfall tax gain on the profits, we could halve the national debt.
It was a common joke/comment at the end of the 80s that if the Japanese Emperor sold the palace grounds in Tokyo, he could buy Hawai…
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning.
Build. More. Houses.
Not really.
The main swing to Labour since 2019 is from 40-65 year olds who own their own home with a mortgage after the cost of living rise and Truss and Kwarteng budget disaster. Most under 40 renters voted Labour in 2019 even when the Tories won a landslide nationally.
Yes it might be nice to get more 30 to 40 year olds on the housing ladder and win a few more Tory voters from younger age groups at general elections but as 2019 proved the Tories can win without them. Building more homes in the greenbelt also sees more over 50s vote LD or Independent locally, as the local elections this month proved when the Tories lost control of most of their southern and home counties councils in a NIMBY revolt over Tory councils local plans to allow more homes to be built on green fields near them
The calculation of voting at a GE is different to that a local elections though.
Unless one thinks that the price of the LDs going into coalition with Labour, will be to bend over to the NIMBYs, the LDs having learned their lesson when they bent over on tuition fees last time out?
IMHO, as someone generally preferring of a Conservative government, there’s plenty of evidence that today’s 30 somethings are not getting more conservative as they grow older, because they aren’t buying houses and not having children.
As life expectancy rises, so people don’t inherit until their 50s and 60s, there’s at least as many pensioners worried about their children not being able to buy a house, as there are worried about their children’s inheritance. Which leads to the explosion in reverse mortgages, the next massive mis-selling scandal, and something I’ve just had to talk my own parents out of doing.
Most still own a property by 39 at least with a mortgage, hence 39s and over voted Tory in 2019.
The LDs certainly would block Starmer building on the greenbelt if they were Kingmakers in a hung parliament, they learnt from the tuition fees debacle yes they cannot offend their core vote
I think it's an example of something I said a while back- to get big changes to happen, you can either excite the public by emphasising the bigness, or soothe them by making them sound boring and technical.
This sounds dull, but is probably dead important. After all, the money that goes to owners of arbitrarily rationed developable land is one of the big reasons we can't afford nice things.
It sounds like a very large transfer of power to councils - which is (depending on the details) probably a very good thing.
And possibly makes them more significant players in the housing market than they have been since Thatcher.
Definitely not boring.
All building is good at this point, but how many people aspire to be allocated a council house?
Would this change allow Councils to purchase land cheaply and then sell off the houses under a right to buy? Could be a powerful money spinner for the Council.
I'm quite pleased by this policy announcement.
All serious policies have winners and losers, of course, and governing is just about balancing them appropriately. But non-homeowners have been getting the shitty end of the stick pretty much ever since I can remember.
My view is that we need more housing of all tenures. If all this does is build big council estates, it's still a positive. But (with apologies for rehashing a hobbyhorse of mine) what I'd really like to see if the public sector as private developer - or, rather, as developer of mixed neighbourhoods. One problem with the current model of delivery is that all building impacts the existing population: visual impact, environmental impact, severance, increased traffic, and so on - but developers - quite reasonably - have an interest only in what they sell to their customers; they need planning permission, but that is pretty binary. If councils were able to develop themselves, they could not only provide the housing stock (of all tenures) that they require but also improve the lot of the existing population. And also, as noted above, recycle revenues back into the public purse.
As with any potentially good policy, there are risks and there are downsides: the risk is that the public sector hasn't got the best of records for developing lovely neighbourhoods. But I think we have moved on sufficiently since the 60s that that risk can at least be managed. And the downside is that less profit will go to landowners. I'm trying to think of a way of phrasing this which doesn't sound like 'hooray, the baddies lose out' because that is not what I mean; it's genuinely to be regretted, because profit provides incentive to do things, and also because landowners [sorry - f key has packed in] oten aren't top-hatted baddies but are broadly owned companies in which many pension unds have shares. It's just that in my view loss o proit to devlopers is to be regretted less than a serious shortage o housing.
It's not clear from the reports I've seen, but the council estate redevelopments around here are mixed for sale/for rent/social rent. And in theory, new private developments are meant to have a social housing element to them. Council house monoculture was definitely a mistake made in the 1950s/60s, and Right to Buy did a good thing in mixing things up a bit.
The recent developments that have worked- Poundbury and the like- have had a single mind controlling the masterplan, the mix of what gets built where and growing the community facilities as you go along. They've also not had to worry too much about the price of the land. It would be good to extend that model beyond benevolent aristrocracy.
And the landowners? I'm sure they will still make a tidy sum from converting undeveloped land into developed. Without these changes in the rules, they might not be allowed to build anything. It's just the profits will be less huge but more certain.
More Poundburys is probably the answer.
But one Poundbury is only 2,000 houses, so we need at least 300 new Poundburys every year.
Poundbury, when all's said and done, is just an urban extension. A nice urban extension, but an urban extension nonetheless. Saying we need 300 new urban extensions a year is also quite a challenge, but is less surprising news.
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning. Face down the NIMBYs.
Build. More. Houses.
Building more houses isn't really the answer. There are 1/4 million long term empty homes in the UK (figure from Nov 2022). The issue is the housing market is broken and more supply won't help. Housing in this country is broken by hugely inflated prices, an excess of landlordism and a refusal from the government to really deal with that. Along with the fact that wages have not risen with inflation, it means that people of my generation (I was born in '91) have no real chance of getting on the housing ladder unless we have rich parents.
The house my parents moved into in their 20s was £55k; in my 20s it was worth £360k. It is an ex council house. Allowing more private developers (whose profits are protected in legislation) to build more high price houses (which is what they always do) and flog them off to landlords or people who use them as "investments" (see money laundering) will not help my generation.
Taking back unused houses from landlords and investors, bringing back affordable housing as a domain of the state and not housing associations, and defining affordable housing as something people can actually afford (instead of 80% of local market prices) is what is really needed.
A quarter of a million long term empty homes in the UK is not very many at all and long term empty homes is a healthy thing that should exist in a healthy economic system. We need more, not less, empty homes.
A limited supply of homes means that slum BTL landlords can neglect their property, not pay their own mortgage out of their own money, and still expect to get a healthy income and their mortgage paid by their tenants because there's nowhere else for people to go.
It means people selling houses can demand a high price, because there's nowhere else to go.
More empty homes are needed so anyone asking too much, or offering too little, is told by purchasers/tenants "not interested" and has to shoulder the costs themselves.
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning.
Build. More. Houses.
Not really.
The main swing to Labour since 2019 is from 40-65 year olds who own their own home with a mortgage after the cost of living rise and Truss and Kwarteng budget disaster. Most under 40 renters voted Labour in 2019 even when the Tories won a landslide nationally.
Yes it might be nice to get more 30 to 40 year olds on the housing ladder and win a few more Tory voters from younger age groups at general elections but as 2019 proved the Tories can win without them. Building more homes in the greenbelt also sees more over 50s vote LD or Independent locally, as the local elections this month proved when the Tories lost control of most of their southern and home counties councils in a NIMBY revolt over Tory councils local plans to allow more homes to be built on green fields near them
The calculation of voting at a GE is different to that a local elections though.
Unless one thinks that the price of the LDs going into coalition with Labour, will be to bend over to the NIMBYs, the LDs having learned their lesson when they bent over on tuition fees last time out?
IMHO, as someone generally preferring of a Conservative government, there’s plenty of evidence that today’s 30 somethings are not getting more conservative as they grow older, because they aren’t buying houses and not having children.
As life expectancy rises, so people don’t inherit until their 50s and 60s, there’s at least as many pensioners worried about their children not being able to buy a house, as there are worried about their children’s inheritance. Which leads to the explosion in reverse mortgages, the next massive mis-selling scandal, and something I’ve just had to talk my own parents out of doing.
Most still own a property by 39 at least with a mortgage, hence 39s and over voted Tory in 2019.
The LDs certainly would block Starmer building on the greenbelt if they were Kingmakers in a hung parliament, they learnt from the tuition fees debacle yes they cannot offend their core vote
I'm in my early 30s and cannot see how I would possibly get a mortgage by 39. And my generation are getting less Tory with age, not moreso.
There are two moving targets: SNP losses and Lib Dem gains. Both are now the central case.
The question is how many seats change hands in each category.
If the SNP lose net 15 seats, they are down to 30. If the Lib Dems gain 16, they are up to 30.
Even leaving aside the "Blue Wall" in the Home Counties, there are quite a few ex Lib Dem seats in Devon and Somerset, plus places like Cheltenham, that look nailed on for the Lib Dems next time. Equally, there are at least 15 seats that look like Labour gains from the SNP, especially in the the greater Glasgow area, and I see no SNP surge against the Tories in the North East and the Borders, so no likely SNP gains.
If counties like Surrey also swing Lib Dem, then Ed Davey will outdo Paddy Ashdown for gains.
I think the odds favour the Lib Dems over the SNP at this point.
In a change from 1997, it looks likely the LDs will win more MPs in Surrey, Oxfordshire and Hertfordshire than Cornwall, Devon and Somerset. The Brexit effect
Which seats do you think are likely to fall to the Lib Dems in each group, young HY?
Guildford, Esher and Walton, Surrey SW, Woking and Mole Valley in Surrey. Wantage and Henley in Oxfordshire and in Hertfordshire the LDs could gain Hitchen and Harpenden to add to their gain of St Albans in 2019
Thanks for the reply, young HY. But that answers only half of my question...
How about Devon, Cornwall, Somerset? Only Devon had local elections this year, but the Lib Dems did very well there. Presumably they are also working hard in Cornwall and Somerset.
So as yet, I do not see why you think the Surry-Oxford area would be more fruitful territory for them.
I only see St Ives in Cornwall and Wells in Somerset (plus Taunton Deane if they have a very good night) as possible LD gains there. I don't think the LDs will gain any seats in Devon, it wasn't that great for them in the locals there, the Tories gained Torbay council for instance. Yet in 1997 Torbay went LD
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning.
Build. More. Houses.
Not really.
The main swing to Labour since 2019 is from 40-65 year olds who own their own home with a mortgage after the cost of living rise and Truss and Kwarteng budget disaster. Most under 40 renters voted Labour in 2019 even when the Tories won a landslide nationally.
Yes it might be nice to get more 30 to 40 year olds on the housing ladder and win a few more Tory voters from younger age groups at general elections but as 2019 proved the Tories can win without them. Building more homes in the greenbelt also sees more over 50s vote LD or Independent locally, as the local elections this month proved when the Tories lost control of most of their southern and home counties councils in a NIMBY revolt over Tory councils local plans to allow more homes to be built on green fields near them
The calculation of voting at a GE is different to that a local elections though.
Unless one thinks that the price of the LDs going into coalition with Labour, will be to bend over to the NIMBYs, the LDs having learned their lesson when they bent over on tuition fees last time out?
IMHO, as someone generally preferring of a Conservative government, there’s plenty of evidence that today’s 30 somethings are not getting more conservative as they grow older, because they aren’t buying houses and not having children.
As life expectancy rises, so people don’t inherit until their 50s and 60s, there’s at least as many pensioners worried about their children not being able to buy a house, as there are worried about their children’s inheritance. Which leads to the explosion in reverse mortgages, the next massive mis-selling scandal, and something I’ve just had to talk my own parents out of doing.
Most still own a property by 39 at least with a mortgage, hence 39s and over voted Tory in 2019.
The LDs certainly would block Starmer building on the greenbelt if they were Kingmakers in a hung parliament, they learnt from the tuition fees debacle yes they cannot offend their core vote
Most, let’s say 51%, own a property with a mortgage by age 39.
A couple of decades ago, that figure was closer to 2/3 of people. That’s the massive gap in 30-something Tory voters right there.
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
If Sunak wants to win a chunk of Millennials then siding with retirees and NIMBYs every time doesn't seem to be a good way to go about it.
Sunak is running a hardcore core vote strategy. He's not aiming for the middle. Its a losing strategy and it deserves to lose unless he changes course.
Sunak could change course and appeal to me and my peers but based on HYUFD's comments yesterday, they aren't interested because I voted Remain? What?
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning. Face down the NIMBYs.
Build. More. Houses.
Building more houses isn't really the answer. There are 1/4 million long term empty homes in the UK (figure from Nov 2022). The issue is the housing market is broken and more supply won't help. Housing in this country is broken by hugely inflated prices, an excess of landlordism and a refusal from the government to really deal with that. Along with the fact that wages have not risen with inflation, it means that people of my generation (I was born in '91) have no real chance of getting on the housing ladder unless we have rich parents.
The house my parents moved into in their 20s was £55k; in my 20s it was worth £360k. It is an ex council house. Allowing more private developers (whose profits are protected in legislation) to build more high price houses (which is what they always do) and flog them off to landlords or people who use them as "investments" (see money laundering) will not help my generation.
Taking back unused houses from landlords and investors, bringing back affordable housing as a domain of the state and not housing associations, and defining affordable housing as something people can actually afford (instead of 80% of local market prices) is what is really needed.
Because there are maybe a dozen or so significant causes of our housing problems, people often assume it is only a subset of them. All the things you listed are broken and significant. As is the shortage of new homes being built.
What issues does building new houses solve? It increases supply, but we obviously don't have a real supply issue if over 1/4 million homes are empty. We have an affordability crisis, which again doesn't make sense if supply isn't an issue. So who owns those 250,000 homes? Landlords, second home owners, "investors" etc. If you build more homes, do you stop the same kind of people snapping them up? No.
Out of university I worked for a few years at a housing association and then in local government on regeneration - essentially replacing old stock with new stock. And every time developers would promise x amount of affordable housing, then once the first shovel hit the ground and everything had been approved, they would turn around, say that the profits they projected had gone down due to factors outside their control, and the affordable housing had to be reduced to allow for more houses that could make them money.
You see this everywhere. Every local council will have a housing needs assessment document somewhere, which will almost always say the same thing - we need more affordable homes, one and two bedroom homes for single people and old people, and we don't really need more large family homes. Developers, on the other hand, want to build 3 or 4 bedroom homes because they can be sold to wealthy families or landlords who will rent out the rooms individually and pay of their mortgage for them, as well as make a profit. And successive governments since the coalition years have protected developers over the needs of average people.
Your second sentence is making an incorrect assumption based on 1/4 million being a big number. The rest I broadly concur with.
Sounds like quite a 'heavy' attack: some reports say over 30 drones; plus, of course, the remains of Russian anti-air missiles coming down as well.
Which all leads to interesting speculation. A false flag by Russia? Ukraine giving back some of what they've been given? And attempt by Ukraine to get Russia to move more air defence from the front lines to rear areas such as Moscow or St Petersburg?
What's interesting is that Moscow is hundreds of kilometres from the Ukrainian border, and yet the Russia air-defence systems only take them out over Moscow, despite Russia's much-vaunted detection systems. Shades of Mathias Rust?
It does seem rather unlikely that a wave of drones launched from Ukraine, managed to make it close to Moscow undetected.
Therefore the more likely options are some sort of Ukranian special forces operation, a pro-Ukraine Russian terrorist organisation, or a false flag by the Russian military.
The bigger the scale, the more likely the latter options - I doubt that UA special forces can get 30 drones close to Moscow, unless they’ve been buying up DJIs from China and bringing them in that way.
An interesting feature of Ukranian social media in the last few days, is that there are official posts telling people not to share photos online, the suggestion being that such photos can help the enemy calibrate and better target their attacks.
A commercial drone will fold up into a kitbag.
Unless you search every car and person carrying a bag, how do you stop the following - guy brings drone in a bag. Gets a hotel room (say). Unfolds the drone, opens the window. Leaves the do not disturb sign on the door. Leaves, takes a plane out of the country.
X hours later, the drone powers up on a timer, flies out the window on a pre-programmed mission.
Fancier version - shipping container of drones sent to destination X. When a GPS sensor verified the location of the container, hatch ok top pops open, drones launch through it.
This is why drone panic became a thing - Heathrow etc.
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning. Face down the NIMBYs.
Build. More. Houses.
Building more houses isn't really the answer. There are 1/4 million long term empty homes in the UK (figure from Nov 2022). The issue is the housing market is broken and more supply won't help. Housing in this country is broken by hugely inflated prices, an excess of landlordism and a refusal from the government to really deal with that. Along with the fact that wages have not risen with inflation, it means that people of my generation (I was born in '91) have no real chance of getting on the housing ladder unless we have rich parents.
The house my parents moved into in their 20s was £55k; in my 20s it was worth £360k. It is an ex council house. Allowing more private developers (whose profits are protected in legislation) to build more high price houses (which is what they always do) and flog them off to landlords or people who use them as "investments" (see money laundering) will not help my generation.
Taking back unused houses from landlords and investors, bringing back affordable housing as a domain of the state and not housing associations, and defining affordable housing as something people can actually afford (instead of 80% of local market prices) is what is really needed.
A quarter of a million long term empty homes in the UK is not very many at all and long term empty homes is a healthy thing that should exist in a healthy economic system. We need more, not less, empty homes.
A limited supply of homes means that slum BTL landlords can neglect their property, not pay their own mortgage out of their own money, and still expect to get a healthy income and their mortgage paid by their tenants because there's nowhere else for people to go.
It means people selling houses can demand a high price, because there's nowhere else to go.
More empty homes are needed so anyone asking too much, or offering too little, is told by purchasers/tenants "not interested" and has to shoulder the costs themselves.
"A limited supply of homes means that slum BTL landlords can neglect their property, not pay their own mortgage out of their own money, and still expect to get a healthy income and their mortgage paid by their tenants because there's nowhere else for people to go."
This is the current reality, not because of the lack of empty housing, but because of the artificial strength of property ownership versus renters. Homes aren't empty because people don't want to move into them; they are empty because the owner either makes enough money to not need or want to rent it out, isn't using it to rent but rather as an investment, or because the way landlords price rent is insane.
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning.
Build. More. Houses.
Not really.
The main swing to Labour since 2019 is from 40-65 year olds who own their own home with a mortgage after the cost of living rise and Truss and Kwarteng budget disaster. Most under 40 renters voted Labour in 2019 even when the Tories won a landslide nationally.
Yes it might be nice to get more 30 to 40 year olds on the housing ladder and win a few more Tory voters from younger age groups at general elections but as 2019 proved the Tories can win without them. Building more homes in the greenbelt also sees more over 50s vote LD or Independent locally, as the local elections this month proved when the Tories lost control of most of their southern and home counties councils in a NIMBY revolt over Tory councils local plans to allow more homes to be built on green fields near them
The calculation of voting at a GE is different to that a local elections though.
Unless one thinks that the price of the LDs going into coalition with Labour, will be to bend over to the NIMBYs, the LDs having learned their lesson when they bent over on tuition fees last time out?
IMHO, as someone generally preferring of a Conservative government, there’s plenty of evidence that today’s 30 somethings are not getting more conservative as they grow older, because they aren’t buying houses and not having children.
As life expectancy rises, so people don’t inherit until their 50s and 60s, there’s at least as many pensioners worried about their children not being able to buy a house, as there are worried about their children’s inheritance. Which leads to the explosion in reverse mortgages, the next massive mis-selling scandal, and something I’ve just had to talk my own parents out of doing.
Most still own a property by 39 at least with a mortgage, hence 39s and over voted Tory in 2019.
The LDs certainly would block Starmer building on the greenbelt if they were Kingmakers in a hung parliament, they learnt from the tuition fees debacle yes they cannot offend their core vote
I'm in my early 30s and cannot see how I would possibly get a mortgage by 39. And my generation are getting less Tory with age, not moreso.
No they aren't and certainly not less Tory with age, each decade of age the Tory voteshare rose in 2019 exactly as it almost always does.
This line sums up everything that is broken with our planning system.
An analysis by the Centre for Progressive Policy in 2018 found that planning permission inflated the price of agricultural land by 275 times, pushing it up from £22,520 per hectare to £6.2m per hectare.
And still we have people on this site pushing the myth that planning is not the root of the problem.
Planning permission being granted should not inflate the price of land. The fact that it does by a factor of 27,500% sums up everything wrong with the system.
On that basis if the govt mandated the auctioning off of 2% of agricultural land for housing, and attached a 50% windfall tax gain on the profits, we could halve the national debt.
It was a common joke/comment at the end of the 80s that if the Japanese Emperor sold the palace grounds in Tokyo, he could buy Hawai…
Around the time we bought our house, there was an island off the coast of Ireland (complete with 3-4 houses, two of which recently lived in) going for about the same price.
We would have been tempted if there had been a suitable job available! (The lack of such presumably explaining the price)
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning. Face down the NIMBYs.
Build. More. Houses.
Building more houses isn't really the answer. There are 1/4 million long term empty homes in the UK (figure from Nov 2022). The issue is the housing market is broken and more supply won't help. Housing in this country is broken by hugely inflated prices, an excess of landlordism and a refusal from the government to really deal with that. Along with the fact that wages have not risen with inflation, it means that people of my generation (I was born in '91) have no real chance of getting on the housing ladder unless we have rich parents.
The house my parents moved into in their 20s was £55k; in my 20s it was worth £360k. It is an ex council house. Allowing more private developers (whose profits are protected in legislation) to build more high price houses (which is what they always do) and flog them off to landlords or people who use them as "investments" (see money laundering) will not help my generation.
Taking back unused houses from landlords and investors, bringing back affordable housing as a domain of the state and not housing associations, and defining affordable housing as something people can actually afford (instead of 80% of local market prices) is what is really needed.
Because there are maybe a dozen or so significant causes of our housing problems, people often assume it is only a subset of them. All the things you listed are broken and significant. As is the shortage of new homes being built.
What issues does building new houses solve? It increases supply, but we obviously don't have a real supply issue if over 1/4 million homes are empty. We have an affordability crisis, which again doesn't make sense if supply isn't an issue. So who owns those 250,000 homes? Landlords, second home owners, "investors" etc. If you build more homes, do you stop the same kind of people snapping them up? No.
Out of university I worked for a few years at a housing association and then in local government on regeneration - essentially replacing old stock with new stock. And every time developers would promise x amount of affordable housing, then once the first shovel hit the ground and everything had been approved, they would turn around, say that the profits they projected had gone down due to factors outside their control, and the affordable housing had to be reduced to allow for more houses that could make them money.
You see this everywhere. Every local council will have a housing needs assessment document somewhere, which will almost always say the same thing - we need more affordable homes, one and two bedroom homes for single people and old people, and we don't really need more large family homes. Developers, on the other hand, want to build 3 or 4 bedroom homes because they can be sold to wealthy families or landlords who will rent out the rooms individually and pay of their mortgage for them, as well as make a profit. And successive governments since the coalition years have protected developers over the needs of average people.
Your second sentence is making an incorrect assumption based on 1/4 million being a big number. The rest I broadly concur with.
Across Europe the average empty home rate is about 10%. That's much healthier. We should aspire to 2.5 million empty homes to get to that rate and if we did both rent and property prices would be much, much lower. And rental conditions would be much better, as people wouldn't be required to let neglected properties anymore.
England only having 1% of properties empty is part of the problem. More supply would fix that problem.
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning. Face down the NIMBYs.
Build. More. Houses.
Building more houses isn't really the answer. There are 1/4 million long term empty homes in the UK (figure from Nov 2022). The issue is the housing market is broken and more supply won't help. Housing in this country is broken by hugely inflated prices, an excess of landlordism and a refusal from the government to really deal with that. Along with the fact that wages have not risen with inflation, it means that people of my generation (I was born in '91) have no real chance of getting on the housing ladder unless we have rich parents.
The house my parents moved into in their 20s was £55k; in my 20s it was worth £360k. It is an ex council house. Allowing more private developers (whose profits are protected in legislation) to build more high price houses (which is what they always do) and flog them off to landlords or people who use them as "investments" (see money laundering) will not help my generation.
Taking back unused houses from landlords and investors, bringing back affordable housing as a domain of the state and not housing associations, and defining affordable housing as something people can actually afford (instead of 80% of local market prices) is what is really needed.
A quarter of a million long term empty homes in the UK is not very many at all and long term empty homes is a healthy thing that should exist in a healthy economic system. We need more, not less, empty homes.
A limited supply of homes means that slum BTL landlords can neglect their property, not pay their own mortgage out of their own money, and still expect to get a healthy income and their mortgage paid by their tenants because there's nowhere else for people to go.
It means people selling houses can demand a high price, because there's nowhere else to go.
More empty homes are needed so anyone asking too much, or offering too little, is told by purchasers/tenants "not interested" and has to shoulder the costs themselves.
"A limited supply of homes means that slum BTL landlords can neglect their property, not pay their own mortgage out of their own money, and still expect to get a healthy income and their mortgage paid by their tenants because there's nowhere else for people to go."
This is the current reality, not because of the lack of empty housing, but because of the artificial strength of property ownership versus renters. Homes aren't empty because people don't want to move into them; they are empty because the owner either makes enough money to not need or want to rent it out, isn't using it to rent but rather as an investment, or because the way landlords price rent is insane.
It absolutely is due to the lack of empty housing. We have 99% housing occupancy, 99% is far too high and an outlier for how high it is.
You are under a misapprehension that 1% of properties being empty is a problem. Only 1% of properties being empty is the problem, it means that people who need somewhere to live are short of choice.
There are two moving targets: SNP losses and Lib Dem gains. Both are now the central case.
The question is how many seats change hands in each category.
If the SNP lose net 15 seats, they are down to 30. If the Lib Dems gain 16, they are up to 30.
Even leaving aside the "Blue Wall" in the Home Counties, there are quite a few ex Lib Dem seats in Devon and Somerset, plus places like Cheltenham, that look nailed on for the Lib Dems next time. Equally, there are at least 15 seats that look like Labour gains from the SNP, especially in the the greater Glasgow area, and I see no SNP surge against the Tories in the North East and the Borders, so no likely SNP gains.
If counties like Surrey also swing Lib Dem, then Ed Davey will outdo Paddy Ashdown for gains.
I think the odds favour the Lib Dems over the SNP at this point.
In a change from 1997, it looks likely the LDs will win more MPs in Surrey, Oxfordshire and Hertfordshire than Cornwall, Devon and Somerset. The Brexit effect
Which seats do you think are likely to fall to the Lib Dems in each group, young HY?
Guildford, Esher and Walton, Surrey SW, Woking and Mole Valley in Surrey. Wantage and Henley in Oxfordshire and in Hertfordshire the LDs could gain Hitchen and Harpenden to add to their gain of St Albans in 2019
Excellent list (I would say that because it aligns with mine as far as Surrey is concerned).Surrey SW will now be 2 seats so another one as both would be targeted. As an outside shot Surrey Heath. LDs appear very well organised and did spectacularly well in the locals
Surrey Heath is Camberley, Gove’s seat? That must be pretty safe.
Surrey SW is Hunt’s seat - Farnham, Godalming and a lot of expensive countyside. What will it look like after the boundary changes? @NickPalmer ?
I was heavily involved in both seats in the past. I can't give more details without giving my identity. Yes SHeath is Gove's seat. I remember it being 100% Tory council. It was slaughter in the locals. 3 more seats will be added to the LD total on 15/5. It is now 21/6 LD/Tory. It will be 24/6 on 15/5. I don't expect the LDs to win it in the GE but it is possible.
Nick will be more upto date than me on SW Surrey. I understand that both seats will be targets for the LDs. I was significantly involved when we missed SW Surrey by 800 odd votes. After that the local party went into infighting. I had to oversee the expulsion of several members. Sigh. Not something I joined to get involved in.
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
If Sunak wants to win a chunk of Millennials then siding with retirees and NIMBYs every time doesn't seem to be a good way to go about it.
Sunak is running a hardcore core vote strategy. He's not aiming for the middle. Its a losing strategy and it deserves to lose unless he changes course.
Sunak could change course and appeal to me and my peers but based on HYUFD's comments yesterday, they aren't interested because I voted Remain? What?
If the Tories tried to appeal to Remainers in London like you by say reversing Brexit to Rejoin or rejoining the single market they would probably end up 3rd or even 4th, they wouldn't win over more than a trickle of you from Labour or the LDs but would lose Leavers en masse to RefUK and Farage who would end up Leader of the Opposition to PM Starmer in a Canada 1993 style Tory wipeout
Is there anything that prevents a council buying land now?
Is the enormous differential in land price between land with and without planning permission really news to anyone?
If you actually read the linked article, this is less of a story than it appears. Taking the hope value out of compulsory purchase is in Gove's Levelling Up bill. Labour are just tweaking it so the hope value yes/no decision is made locally, not by the Secretary of State.
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
If Sunak wants to win a chunk of Millennials then siding with retirees and NIMBYs every time doesn't seem to be a good way to go about it.
Sunak is running a hardcore core vote strategy. He's not aiming for the middle. Its a losing strategy and it deserves to lose unless he changes course.
Sunak could change course and appeal to me and my peers but based on HYUFD's comments yesterday, they aren't interested because I voted Remain? What?
If the Tories tried to appeal to Remainers in London like you by say reversing Brexit to Rejoin or rejoining the single market they would probably end up 3rd or even 4th, they wouldn't win over more than a trickle of you from Labour or the LDs but would lose Leavers en masse to RefUK and Farage who would end up Leader of the Opposition to PM Starmer in a Canada 1993 style Tory wipeout
HYUFD mate, I suggest you read my posts. I am in favour of making Brexit work in some form, not rejoining, so rejoin wouldn't appeal to me or others.
What I referred to is housing, which your party isn't interested in building for me. Why not?
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning.
Build. More. Houses.
Not really.
The main swing to Labour since 2019 is from 40-65 year olds who own their own home with a mortgage after the cost of living rise and Truss and Kwarteng budget disaster. Most under 40 renters voted Labour in 2019 even when the Tories won a landslide nationally.
Yes it might be nice to get more 30 to 40 year olds on the housing ladder and win a few more Tory voters from younger age groups at general elections but as 2019 proved the Tories can win without them. Building more homes in the greenbelt also sees more over 50s vote LD or Independent locally, as the local elections this month proved when the Tories lost control of most of their southern and home counties councils in a NIMBY revolt over Tory councils local plans to allow more homes to be built on green fields near them
The calculation of voting at a GE is different to that a local elections though.
Unless one thinks that the price of the LDs going into coalition with Labour, will be to bend over to the NIMBYs, the LDs having learned their lesson when they bent over on tuition fees last time out?
IMHO, as someone generally preferring of a Conservative government, there’s plenty of evidence that today’s 30 somethings are not getting more conservative as they grow older, because they aren’t buying houses and not having children.
As life expectancy rises, so people don’t inherit until their 50s and 60s, there’s at least as many pensioners worried about their children not being able to buy a house, as there are worried about their children’s inheritance. Which leads to the explosion in reverse mortgages, the next massive mis-selling scandal, and something I’ve just had to talk my own parents out of doing.
Most still own a property by 39 at least with a mortgage, hence 39s and over voted Tory in 2019.
The LDs certainly would block Starmer building on the greenbelt if they were Kingmakers in a hung parliament, they learnt from the tuition fees debacle yes they cannot offend their core vote
Most, let’s say 51%, own a property with a mortgage by age 39.
A couple of decades ago, that figure was closer to 2/3 of people. That’s the massive gap in 30-something Tory voters right there.
Yes, I think 39 is quite a high age to be a irst time buyer. That has you paying your mortgage until you're 64.
And it's the type of house too. I have a quite high-flying friend who works in London and has just bought his first house at the age of 39. He's saved like a bastard and mortgaged himself to the hilt. It's quite depressingly low quality compared to the irst house I bought at the age of 30 on a much more modest income. That means the non-high-flyers are buying even sketchier houses or not buying at all.
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning.
Build. More. Houses.
Not really.
The main swing to Labour since 2019 is from 40-65 year olds who own their own home with a mortgage after the cost of living rise and Truss and Kwarteng budget disaster. Most under 40 renters voted Labour in 2019 even when the Tories won a landslide nationally.
Yes it might be nice to get more 30 to 40 year olds on the housing ladder and win a few more Tory voters from younger age groups at general elections but as 2019 proved the Tories can win without them. Building more homes in the greenbelt also sees more over 50s vote LD or Independent locally, as the local elections this month proved when the Tories lost control of most of their southern and home counties councils in a NIMBY revolt over Tory councils local plans to allow more homes to be built on green fields near them
The calculation of voting at a GE is different to that a local elections though.
Unless one thinks that the price of the LDs going into coalition with Labour, will be to bend over to the NIMBYs, the LDs having learned their lesson when they bent over on tuition fees last time out?
IMHO, as someone generally preferring of a Conservative government, there’s plenty of evidence that today’s 30 somethings are not getting more conservative as they grow older, because they aren’t buying houses and not having children.
As life expectancy rises, so people don’t inherit until their 50s and 60s, there’s at least as many pensioners worried about their children not being able to buy a house, as there are worried about their children’s inheritance. Which leads to the explosion in reverse mortgages, the next massive mis-selling scandal, and something I’ve just had to talk my own parents out of doing.
Most still own a property by 39 at least with a mortgage, hence 39s and over voted Tory in 2019.
The LDs certainly would block Starmer building on the greenbelt if they were Kingmakers in a hung parliament, they learnt from the tuition fees debacle yes they cannot offend their core vote
Most, let’s say 51%, own a property with a mortgage by age 39.
A couple of decades ago, that figure was closer to 2/3 of people. That’s the massive gap in 30-something Tory voters right there.
Yes but the Tories do better with over 65s in turn, in 1997 Blair actually won over 65s
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning. Face down the NIMBYs.
Build. More. Houses.
Building more houses isn't really the answer. There are 1/4 million long term empty homes in the UK (figure from Nov 2022). The issue is the housing market is broken and more supply won't help. Housing in this country is broken by hugely inflated prices, an excess of landlordism and a refusal from the government to really deal with that. Along with the fact that wages have not risen with inflation, it means that people of my generation (I was born in '91) have no real chance of getting on the housing ladder unless we have rich parents.
The house my parents moved into in their 20s was £55k; in my 20s it was worth £360k. It is an ex council house. Allowing more private developers (whose profits are protected in legislation) to build more high price houses (which is what they always do) and flog them off to landlords or people who use them as "investments" (see money laundering) will not help my generation.
Taking back unused houses from landlords and investors, bringing back affordable housing as a domain of the state and not housing associations, and defining affordable housing as something people can actually afford (instead of 80% of local market prices) is what is really needed.
A quarter of a million long term empty homes in the UK is not very many at all and long term empty homes is a healthy thing that should exist in a healthy economic system. We need more, not less, empty homes.
A limited supply of homes means that slum BTL landlords can neglect their property, not pay their own mortgage out of their own money, and still expect to get a healthy income and their mortgage paid by their tenants because there's nowhere else for people to go.
It means people selling houses can demand a high price, because there's nowhere else to go.
More empty homes are needed so anyone asking too much, or offering too little, is told by purchasers/tenants "not interested" and has to shoulder the costs themselves.
Stopping residential property from becoming primarily a store of wealth, or the best appreciating asset an average investor can pick up, will make a huge difference to the market.
In fact, there’s already quite a bit of evidence for this, as retail landlords are now exiting the market at record pace. Unfortunately, that means there’s now a shortage of private rental accommodation, which means that rents are going up.
In an ideal world, house prices start to fall in money terms by about 5% pa, such that individual investment goes elsewhere, replaced by corporate investment, and there’s little negative equity, which can screw up labour markets.
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
If Sunak wants to win a chunk of Millennials then siding with retirees and NIMBYs every time doesn't seem to be a good way to go about it.
Sunak is running a hardcore core vote strategy. He's not aiming for the middle. Its a losing strategy and it deserves to lose unless he changes course.
Sunak could change course and appeal to me and my peers but based on HYUFD's comments yesterday, they aren't interested because I voted Remain? What?
If the Tories tried to appeal to Remainers in London like you by say reversing Brexit to Rejoin or rejoining the single market they would probably end up 3rd or even 4th, they wouldn't win over more than a trickle of you from Labour or the LDs but would lose Leavers en masse to RefUK and Farage who would end up Leader of the Opposition to PM Starmer in a Canada 1993 style Tory wipeout
HYUFD mate, I suggest you read my posts. I am in favour of making Brexit work in some form, not rejoining, so rejoin wouldn't appeal to me or others.
What I referred to is housing, which your party isn't interested in building for me. Why not?
It was locally. Tory councils across the home counties had local plans with lots of new housing proposed in greenfields for first time buyers. Their reward on May 4th? Wipeout as most Tory councils went NOC or Independent or LD in a Nimby revolt
Sounds like quite a 'heavy' attack: some reports say over 30 drones; plus, of course, the remains of Russian anti-air missiles coming down as well.
Which all leads to interesting speculation. A false flag by Russia? Ukraine giving back some of what they've been given? And attempt by Ukraine to get Russia to move more air defence from the front lines to rear areas such as Moscow or St Petersburg?
What's interesting is that Moscow is hundreds of kilometres from the Ukrainian border, and yet the Russia air-defence systems only take them out over Moscow, despite Russia's much-vaunted detection systems. Shades of Mathias Rust?
It does seem rather unlikely that a wave of drones launched from Ukraine, managed to make it close to Moscow undetected.
Therefore the more likely options are some sort of Ukranian special forces operation, a pro-Ukraine Russian terrorist organisation, or a false flag by the Russian military.
The bigger the scale, the more likely the latter options - I doubt that UA special forces can get 30 drones close to Moscow, unless they’ve been buying up DJIs from China and bringing them in that way.
An interesting feature of Ukranian social media in the last few days, is that there are official posts telling people not to share photos online, the suggestion being that such photos can help the enemy calibrate and better target their attacks.
A commercial drone will fold up into a kitbag.
Unless you search every car and person carrying a bag, how do you stop the following - guy brings drone in a bag. Gets a hotel room (say). Unfolds the drone, opens the window. Leaves the do not disturb sign on the door. Leaves, takes a plane out of the country.
X hours later, the drone powers up on a timer, flies out the window on a pre-programmed mission.
Fancier version - shipping container of drones sent to destination X. When a GPS sensor verified the location of the container, hatch ok top pops open, drones launch through it.
This is why drone panic became a thing - Heathrow etc.
And is the kind of thing we might expect the Russians to do to disrupt the West in response. I may be completely wrong, and simple countermeasures are effective against this kind of thing, but surely it doesn't take many special forces tourists to fly drones about and seriously disrupt domestic transport?
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning.
Build. More. Houses.
Not really.
The main swing to Labour since 2019 is from 40-65 year olds who own their own home with a mortgage after the cost of living rise and Truss and Kwarteng budget disaster. Most under 40 renters voted Labour in 2019 even when the Tories won a landslide nationally.
Yes it might be nice to get more 30 to 40 year olds on the housing ladder and win a few more Tory voters from younger age groups at general elections but as 2019 proved the Tories can win without them. Building more homes in the greenbelt also sees more over 50s vote LD or Independent locally, as the local elections this month proved when the Tories lost control of most of their southern and home counties councils in a NIMBY revolt over Tory councils local plans to allow more homes to be built on green fields near them
I think the worm has turned on this issue. Thatcher's iconic RTB policy had its merits but because of the failure to reinvest in council housing it also seeded the dysfunctional divisive system we have today whereby homes are seen as investments, the main route to wealth accumulation, but at the same time are in short supply and prohibitively expensive, therefore unattainable for very many people.
We need to start going the other way. Houses viewed primarily as places to live, more of them built, and a rebalancing towards the social sector; long term, secure, modestly priced rentals for people who can't afford to buy or don't wish to. I think this is where Labour are heading and as well as being the right thing to do it has a chance of being popular (an unusual combination).
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning.
Build. More. Houses.
Not really.
The main swing to Labour since 2019 is from 40-65 year olds who own their own home with a mortgage after the cost of living rise and Truss and Kwarteng budget disaster. Most under 40 renters voted Labour in 2019 even when the Tories won a landslide nationally.
Yes it might be nice to get more 30 to 40 year olds on the housing ladder and win a few more Tory voters from younger age groups at general elections but as 2019 proved the Tories can win without them. Building more homes in the greenbelt also sees more over 50s vote LD or Independent locally, as the local elections this month proved when the Tories lost control of most of their southern and home counties councils in a NIMBY revolt over Tory councils local plans to allow more homes to be built on green fields near them
The calculation of voting at a GE is different to that a local elections though.
Unless one thinks that the price of the LDs going into coalition with Labour, will be to bend over to the NIMBYs, the LDs having learned their lesson when they bent over on tuition fees last time out?
IMHO, as someone generally preferring of a Conservative government, there’s plenty of evidence that today’s 30 somethings are not getting more conservative as they grow older, because they aren’t buying houses and not having children.
As life expectancy rises, so people don’t inherit until their 50s and 60s, there’s at least as many pensioners worried about their children not being able to buy a house, as there are worried about their children’s inheritance. Which leads to the explosion in reverse mortgages, the next massive mis-selling scandal, and something I’ve just had to talk my own parents out of doing.
Most still own a property by 39 at least with a mortgage, hence 39s and over voted Tory in 2019.
The LDs certainly would block Starmer building on the greenbelt if they were Kingmakers in a hung parliament, they learnt from the tuition fees debacle yes they cannot offend their core vote
I'm in my early 30s and cannot see how I would possibly get a mortgage by 39. And my generation are getting less Tory with age, not moreso.
No they aren't and certainly not less Tory with age, each decade of age the Tory voteshare rose in 2019 exactly as it almost always does.
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning.
Build. More. Houses.
Not really.
The main swing to Labour since 2019 is from 40-65 year olds who own their own home with a mortgage after the cost of living rise and Truss and Kwarteng budget disaster. Most under 40 renters voted Labour in 2019 even when the Tories won a landslide nationally.
Yes it might be nice to get more 30 to 40 year olds on the housing ladder and win a few more Tory voters from younger age groups at general elections but as 2019 proved the Tories can win without them. Building more homes in the greenbelt also sees more over 50s vote LD or Independent locally, as the local elections this month proved when the Tories lost control of most of their southern and home counties councils in a NIMBY revolt over Tory councils local plans to allow more homes to be built on green fields near them
The calculation of voting at a GE is different to that a local elections though.
Unless one thinks that the price of the LDs going into coalition with Labour, will be to bend over to the NIMBYs, the LDs having learned their lesson when they bent over on tuition fees last time out?
IMHO, as someone generally preferring of a Conservative government, there’s plenty of evidence that today’s 30 somethings are not getting more conservative as they grow older, because they aren’t buying houses and not having children.
As life expectancy rises, so people don’t inherit until their 50s and 60s, there’s at least as many pensioners worried about their children not being able to buy a house, as there are worried about their children’s inheritance. Which leads to the explosion in reverse mortgages, the next massive mis-selling scandal, and something I’ve just had to talk my own parents out of doing.
Most still own a property by 39 at least with a mortgage, hence 39s and over voted Tory in 2019.
The LDs certainly would block Starmer building on the greenbelt if they were Kingmakers in a hung parliament, they learnt from the tuition fees debacle yes they cannot offend their core vote
Most, let’s say 51%, own a property with a mortgage by age 39.
A couple of decades ago, that figure was closer to 2/3 of people. That’s the massive gap in 30-something Tory voters right there.
Yes but the Tories do better with over 65s in turn, in 1997 Blair actually won over 65s
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
If Sunak wants to win a chunk of Millennials then siding with retirees and NIMBYs every time doesn't seem to be a good way to go about it.
Sunak is running a hardcore core vote strategy. He's not aiming for the middle. Its a losing strategy and it deserves to lose unless he changes course.
Sunak could change course and appeal to me and my peers but based on HYUFD's comments yesterday, they aren't interested because I voted Remain? What?
If the Tories tried to appeal to Remainers in London like you by say reversing Brexit to Rejoin or rejoining the single market they would probably end up 3rd or even 4th, they wouldn't win over more than a trickle of you from Labour or the LDs but would lose Leavers en masse to RefUK and Farage who would end up Leader of the Opposition to PM Starmer in a Canada 1993 style Tory wipeout
HYUFD mate, I suggest you read my posts. I am in favour of making Brexit work in some form, not rejoining, so rejoin wouldn't appeal to me or others.
What I referred to is housing, which your party isn't interested in building for me. Why not?
It was locally. Tory councils across the home counties had local plans with lots of new housing proposed in greenfields for first time buyers. Their reward on May 4th? Wipeout as most Tory councils went NOC or Independent or LD in a Nimby revolt
But hold on, you are ALREADY losing. Surely you want to win in the future?
There are two moving targets: SNP losses and Lib Dem gains. Both are now the central case.
The question is how many seats change hands in each category.
If the SNP lose net 15 seats, they are down to 30. If the Lib Dems gain 16, they are up to 30.
Even leaving aside the "Blue Wall" in the Home Counties, there are quite a few ex Lib Dem seats in Devon and Somerset, plus places like Cheltenham, that look nailed on for the Lib Dems next time. Equally, there are at least 15 seats that look like Labour gains from the SNP, especially in the the greater Glasgow area, and I see no SNP surge against the Tories in the North East and the Borders, so no likely SNP gains.
If counties like Surrey also swing Lib Dem, then Ed Davey will outdo Paddy Ashdown for gains.
I think the odds favour the Lib Dems over the SNP at this point.
In a change from 1997, it looks likely the LDs will win more MPs in Surrey, Oxfordshire and Hertfordshire than Cornwall, Devon and Somerset. The Brexit effect
Which seats do you think are likely to fall to the Lib Dems in each group, young HY?
Guildford, Esher and Walton, Surrey SW, Woking and Mole Valley in Surrey. Wantage and Henley in Oxfordshire and in Hertfordshire the LDs could gain Hitchen and Harpenden to add to their gain of St Albans in 2019
Excellent list (I would say that because it aligns with mine as far as Surrey is concerned).Surrey SW will now be 2 seats so another one as both would be targeted. As an outside shot Surrey Heath. LDs appear very well organised and did spectacularly well in the locals
Surrey Heath is Camberley, Gove’s seat? That must be pretty safe.
Surrey SW is Hunt’s seat - Farnham, Godalming and a lot of expensive countyside. What will it look like after the boundary changes? @NickPalmer ?
I was heavily involved in both seats in the past. I can't give more details without giving my identity. Yes SHeath is Gove's seat. I remember it being 100% Tory council. It was slaughter in the locals. 3 more seats will be added to the LD total on 15/5. It is now 21/6 LD/Tory. It will be 24/6 on 15/5. I don't expect the LDs to win it in the GE but it is possible.
Nick will be more upto date than me on SW Surrey. I understand that both seats will be targets for the LDs. I was significantly involved when we missed SW Surrey by 800 odd votes. After that the local party went into infighting. I had to oversee the expulsion of several members. Sigh. Not something I joined to get involved in.
PS correction 15/6.
Virginia Bottomley was the MP who almost lost in 2001.
I thought the only way the Lib Dems become the third party was if the SNP imploded but the way the blue wall is going it is entirely possible for the Lib Dems to become the third party even if the SNP don't lose many seats.
They would need to win 38 to overtake the SNP.
Have they ever gained that many in one election? I'm pretty sure the answer's 'not since 1923.'
28 in 1997 is the most recent record.
See, I've started to do some deep dives, and I've started wondering if seats like Epsom & Ewell might be in play, add in tactical ABC voting, with Labour voters voting tactically en masse and you'd need only a 7.5% swing on top of that to overturn a near 18,000 majority.
You only have to look at that very seat in 1997 to see that tactical voting is tricky in such seats.
Labour aren’t going to soft-pedal seats like that, at least not if they are thinking about a majority. They’ll want to split the Con/LD vote and hope to come through the middle.
If Labour ever win Epsom and Ewell there won't be a single Tory left in the rest of the country.
I disagree. Labour winning in Epsom and Ewell would be reminiscent of Labour winning Hastings and Rye in 1997.
In Hasting and Rye in 1992, the Tories had a 12.3 percentage point lead over the Lib Dems and a 31.8 percentage point lead over Labour.
In Epsom and Ewell in 2019, the Tories had a 30.1 percentage point lead over the Lib Dems and a 36.3 percentage point lead over Labour.
So whilst Labour start further back in Epsom and Ewell, the Lib Dems are much further back than they were in Hasting and Rye.
Yes, I know, boundary changes etc., but I think the point stands.
Overall, there were 235 seats with a bigger Tory share of the vote in 2019 than Epsom and Ewell. It really isn't Tory heartland.
@tlg86 I think they are very different. Hastings and Rye went through some significant social changes. There definitely are seats where Labour power through from 3rd like H&R. I don't see E&E being one.
I know there were boundary changes, but perhaps St Albans is a better example:
Out of university I worked for a few years at a housing association and then in local government on regeneration - essentially replacing old stock with new stock. And every time developers would promise x amount of affordable housing, then once the first shovel hit the ground and everything had been approved, they would turn around, say that the profits they projected had gone down due to factors outside their control, and the affordable housing had to be reduced to allow for more houses that could make them money.
You see this everywhere. Every local council will have a housing needs assessment document somewhere, which will almost always say the same thing - we need more affordable homes, one and two bedroom homes for single people and old people, and we don't really need more large family homes. Developers, on the other hand, want to build 3 or 4 bedroom homes because they can be sold to wealthy families or landlords who will rent out the rooms individually and pay of their mortgage for them, as well as make a profit. And successive governments since the coalition years have protected developers over the needs of average people.
Protecting developers has been a side-effect of protecting asset prices. If you abandoned all mandatory "affordable housing" requirements but also made planning easier, especially for small or individual developers, then overall supply would go up and the problem of affordability would begin to take care of itself.
At the moment the problem that a would-be buyer of affordable housing faces is more that the type of properties that would normally be affordable - 2-up, 2-down terraces, doer-uppers, etc - are bid up by people who would not normally be interested in that part of the market because there isn't enough supply of more desirable properties.
This line sums up everything that is broken with our planning system.
An analysis by the Centre for Progressive Policy in 2018 found that planning permission inflated the price of agricultural land by 275 times, pushing it up from £22,520 per hectare to £6.2m per hectare.
And still we have people on this site pushing the myth that planning is not the root of the problem.
Planning permission being granted should not inflate the price of land. The fact that it does by a factor of 27,500% sums up everything wrong with the system.
On that basis if the govt mandated the auctioning off of 2% of agricultural land for housing, and attached a 50% windfall tax gain on the profits, we could halve the national debt.
It was a common joke/comment at the end of the 80s that if the Japanese Emperor sold the palace grounds in Tokyo, he could buy Hawai…
Around the time we bought our house, there was an island off the coast of Ireland (complete with 3-4 houses, two of which recently lived in) going for about the same price.
We would have been tempted if there had been a suitable job available! (The lack of such presumably explaining the price)
Imagine what Starlink does to the desirability of an island like that today.
Remote island living like that is hard work though, everything else costs a fortune to supply.
There are two moving targets: SNP losses and Lib Dem gains. Both are now the central case.
The question is how many seats change hands in each category.
If the SNP lose net 15 seats, they are down to 30. If the Lib Dems gain 16, they are up to 30.
Even leaving aside the "Blue Wall" in the Home Counties, there are quite a few ex Lib Dem seats in Devon and Somerset, plus places like Cheltenham, that look nailed on for the Lib Dems next time. Equally, there are at least 15 seats that look like Labour gains from the SNP, especially in the the greater Glasgow area, and I see no SNP surge against the Tories in the North East and the Borders, so no likely SNP gains.
If counties like Surrey also swing Lib Dem, then Ed Davey will outdo Paddy Ashdown for gains.
I think the odds favour the Lib Dems over the SNP at this point.
In a change from 1997, it looks likely the LDs will win more MPs in Surrey, Oxfordshire and Hertfordshire than Cornwall, Devon and Somerset. The Brexit effect
Which seats do you think are likely to fall to the Lib Dems in each group, young HY?
Guildford, Esher and Walton, Surrey SW, Woking and Mole Valley in Surrey. Wantage and Henley in Oxfordshire and in Hertfordshire the LDs could gain Hitchen and Harpenden to add to their gain of St Albans in 2019
Excellent list (I would say that because it aligns with mine as far as Surrey is concerned).Surrey SW will now be 2 seats so another one as both would be targeted. As an outside shot Surrey Heath. LDs appear very well organised and did spectacularly well in the locals
Surrey Heath is Camberley, Gove’s seat? That must be pretty safe.
Surrey SW is Hunt’s seat - Farnham, Godalming and a lot of expensive countyside. What will it look like after the boundary changes? @NickPalmer ?
I was heavily involved in both seats in the past. I can't give more details without giving my identity. Yes SHeath is Gove's seat. I remember it being 100% Tory council. It was slaughter in the locals. 3 more seats will be added to the LD total on 15/5. It is now 21/6 LD/Tory. It will be 24/6 on 15/5. I don't expect the LDs to win it in the GE but it is possible.
Nick will be more upto date than me on SW Surrey. I understand that both seats will be targets for the LDs. I was significantly involved when we missed SW Surrey by 800 odd votes. After that the local party went into infighting. I had to oversee the expulsion of several members. Sigh. Not something I joined to get involved in.
PS correction 15/6.
Surrey Heath is only 58th on the LD target list and voted Leave (and Gove is a relative Nimby unlike ex Tory councillors in his patch). I expect him to hang on.
Surrey SW is 19th on the LD target list and voted Remain. Hunt is much more at risk whichever of the 2 seats it splits into he ends up in
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning. Face down the NIMBYs.
Build. More. Houses.
Building more houses isn't really the answer. There are 1/4 million long term empty homes in the UK (figure from Nov 2022). The issue is the housing market is broken and more supply won't help. Housing in this country is broken by hugely inflated prices, an excess of landlordism and a refusal from the government to really deal with that. Along with the fact that wages have not risen with inflation, it means that people of my generation (I was born in '91) have no real chance of getting on the housing ladder unless we have rich parents.
The house my parents moved into in their 20s was £55k; in my 20s it was worth £360k. It is an ex council house. Allowing more private developers (whose profits are protected in legislation) to build more high price houses (which is what they always do) and flog them off to landlords or people who use them as "investments" (see money laundering) will not help my generation.
Taking back unused houses from landlords and investors, bringing back affordable housing as a domain of the state and not housing associations, and defining affordable housing as something people can actually afford (instead of 80% of local market prices) is what is really needed.
The main reason is high levels of immigration, which this generation tends to support. So they support a policy which makes affordable housing very unlikely.
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning.
Build. More. Houses.
Not really.
The main swing to Labour since 2019 is from 40-65 year olds who own their own home with a mortgage after the cost of living rise and Truss and Kwarteng budget disaster. Most under 40 renters voted Labour in 2019 even when the Tories won a landslide nationally.
Yes it might be nice to get more 30 to 40 year olds on the housing ladder and win a few more Tory voters from younger age groups at general elections but as 2019 proved the Tories can win without them. Building more homes in the greenbelt also sees more over 50s vote LD or Independent locally, as the local elections this month proved when the Tories lost control of most of their southern and home counties councils in a NIMBY revolt over Tory councils local plans to allow more homes to be built on green fields near them
I think the worm has turned on this issue. Thatcher's iconic RTB policy had its merits but because of the failure to reinvest in council housing it also seeded the dysfunctional divisive system we have today whereby homes are seen as investments, the main route to wealth accumulation, but at the same time are in short supply and prohibitively expensive, therefore unattainable for very many people.
We need to start going the other way. Houses viewed primarily as places to live, more of them built, and a rebalancing towards the social sector; long term, secure, modestly priced rentals for people who can't afford to buy or don't wish to. I think this is where Labour are heading and as well as being the right thing to do it has a chance of being popular (an unusual combination).
I agree with all of that except the rebalancing towards the social sector.
We should still aspire to have almost everyone having their own home, so keep RTB, but having a social sector as a safety net is not a bad thing.
It seems to me the logical solution is to keep RTB but to mandate that Councils reinvest the proceeds of RTB back into new houses on a 1:1 basis.
If a social tenant wants to own their home they should be able to do so. And the Council ensures a new home is built with the proceeds so the supply doesn't change and the aggregate supply of houses increases.
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning.
Build. More. Houses.
Not really.
The main swing to Labour since 2019 is from 40-65 year olds who own their own home with a mortgage after the cost of living rise and Truss and Kwarteng budget disaster. Most under 40 renters voted Labour in 2019 even when the Tories won a landslide nationally.
Yes it might be nice to get more 30 to 40 year olds on the housing ladder and win a few more Tory voters from younger age groups at general elections but as 2019 proved the Tories can win without them. Building more homes in the greenbelt also sees more over 50s vote LD or Independent locally, as the local elections this month proved when the Tories lost control of most of their southern and home counties councils in a NIMBY revolt over Tory councils local plans to allow more homes to be built on green fields near them
The calculation of voting at a GE is different to that a local elections though.
Unless one thinks that the price of the LDs going into coalition with Labour, will be to bend over to the NIMBYs, the LDs having learned their lesson when they bent over on tuition fees last time out?
IMHO, as someone generally preferring of a Conservative government, there’s plenty of evidence that today’s 30 somethings are not getting more conservative as they grow older, because they aren’t buying houses and not having children.
As life expectancy rises, so people don’t inherit until their 50s and 60s, there’s at least as many pensioners worried about their children not being able to buy a house, as there are worried about their children’s inheritance. Which leads to the explosion in reverse mortgages, the next massive mis-selling scandal, and something I’ve just had to talk my own parents out of doing.
Most still own a property by 39 at least with a mortgage, hence 39s and over voted Tory in 2019.
The LDs certainly would block Starmer building on the greenbelt if they were Kingmakers in a hung parliament, they learnt from the tuition fees debacle yes they cannot offend their core vote
I'm in my early 30s and cannot see how I would possibly get a mortgage by 39. And my generation are getting less Tory with age, not moreso.
No they aren't and certainly not less Tory with age, each decade of age the Tory voteshare rose in 2019 exactly as it almost always does.
I think it's an example of something I said a while back- to get big changes to happen, you can either excite the public by emphasising the bigness, or soothe them by making them sound boring and technical.
This sounds dull, but is probably dead important. After all, the money that goes to owners of arbitrarily rationed developable land is one of the big reasons we can't afford nice things.
It sounds like a very large transfer of power to councils - which is (depending on the details) probably a very good thing.
And possibly makes them more significant players in the housing market than they have been since Thatcher.
Definitely not boring.
All building is good at this point, but how many people aspire to be allocated a council house?
Would this change allow Councils to purchase land cheaply and then sell off the houses under a right to buy? Could be a powerful money spinner for the Council.
I'm quite pleased by this policy announcement.
All serious policies have winners and losers, of course, and governing is just about balancing them appropriately. But non-homeowners have been getting the shitty end of the stick pretty much ever since I can remember.
My view is that we need more housing of all tenures. If all this does is build big council estates, it's still a positive. But (with apologies for rehashing a hobbyhorse of mine) what I'd really like to see if the public sector as private developer - or, rather, as developer of mixed neighbourhoods. One problem with the current model of delivery is that all building impacts the existing population: visual impact, environmental impact, severance, increased traffic, and so on - but developers - quite reasonably - have an interest only in what they sell to their customers; they need planning permission, but that is pretty binary. If councils were able to develop themselves, they could not only provide the housing stock (of all tenures) that they require but also improve the lot of the existing population. And also, as noted above, recycle revenues back into the public purse.
As with any potentially good policy, there are risks and there are downsides: the risk is that the public sector hasn't got the best of records for developing lovely neighbourhoods. But I think we have moved on sufficiently since the 60s that that risk can at least be managed. And the downside is that less profit will go to landowners. I'm trying to think of a way of phrasing this which doesn't sound like 'hooray, the baddies lose out' because that is not what I mean; it's genuinely to be regretted, because profit provides incentive to do things, and also because landowners [sorry - f key has packed in] oten aren't top-hatted baddies but are broadly owned companies in which many pension unds have shares. It's just that in my view loss o proit to devlopers is to be regretted less than a serious shortage o housing.
It's not clear from the reports I've seen, but the council estate redevelopments around here are mixed for sale/for rent/social rent. And in theory, new private developments are meant to have a social housing element to them. Council house monoculture was definitely a mistake made in the 1950s/60s, and Right to Buy did a good thing in mixing things up a bit.
The recent developments that have worked- Poundbury and the like- have had a single mind controlling the masterplan, the mix of what gets built where and growing the community facilities as you go along. They've also not had to worry too much about the price of the land. It would be good to extend that model beyond benevolent aristrocracy.
And the landowners? I'm sure they will still make a tidy sum from converting undeveloped land into developed. Without these changes in the rules, they might not be allowed to build anything. It's just the profits will be less huge but more certain.
More Poundburys is probably the answer.
But one Poundbury is only 2,000 houses, so we need at least 300 new Poundburys every year.
You could get that from one Milton Keynes every five years, or one Telford every three years, or one Redditch every year and a half.
When it was first introduced, the green belt worked well in partnership with planned development of self-sufficient new towns, which ensured that there would continue to be an adequate supply of land for housebuilding. It's the new town element that was been lost.
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning.
Build. More. Houses.
Not really.
The main swing to Labour since 2019 is from 40-65 year olds who own their own home with a mortgage after the cost of living rise and Truss and Kwarteng budget disaster. Most under 40 renters voted Labour in 2019 even when the Tories won a landslide nationally.
Yes it might be nice to get more 30 to 40 year olds on the housing ladder and win a few more Tory voters from younger age groups at general elections but as 2019 proved the Tories can win without them. Building more homes in the greenbelt also sees more over 50s vote LD or Independent locally, as the local elections this month proved when the Tories lost control of most of their southern and home counties councils in a NIMBY revolt over Tory councils local plans to allow more homes to be built on green fields near them
The calculation of voting at a GE is different to that a local elections though.
Unless one thinks that the price of the LDs going into coalition with Labour, will be to bend over to the NIMBYs, the LDs having learned their lesson when they bent over on tuition fees last time out?
IMHO, as someone generally preferring of a Conservative government, there’s plenty of evidence that today’s 30 somethings are not getting more conservative as they grow older, because they aren’t buying houses and not having children.
As life expectancy rises, so people don’t inherit until their 50s and 60s, there’s at least as many pensioners worried about their children not being able to buy a house, as there are worried about their children’s inheritance. Which leads to the explosion in reverse mortgages, the next massive mis-selling scandal, and something I’ve just had to talk my own parents out of doing.
Most still own a property by 39 at least with a mortgage, hence 39s and over voted Tory in 2019.
The LDs certainly would block Starmer building on the greenbelt if they were Kingmakers in a hung parliament, they learnt from the tuition fees debacle yes they cannot offend their core vote
Most, let’s say 51%, own a property with a mortgage by age 39.
A couple of decades ago, that figure was closer to 2/3 of people. That’s the massive gap in 30-something Tory voters right there.
Yes but the Tories do better with over 65s in turn, in 1997 Blair actually won over 65s
But the question is how much better?
Tories won 64% of over 65s in 2019, in 1997 Tories only won 36% of over 65s. Even now most polls still have the Tories ahead with pensioners
Another thought on the Moscow attacks. Could the Ukranians be playing the Russians at their own game here, by flying a bunch of cheap hobby drones around, attracting expensive and depletable air defences to shoot them down?
Using a $1m S400 to hit a $10k DJI drone, is a good way to quickly run out of air defence capability.
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning. Face down the NIMBYs.
Build. More. Houses.
Building more houses isn't really the answer. There are 1/4 million long term empty homes in the UK (figure from Nov 2022). The issue is the housing market is broken and more supply won't help. Housing in this country is broken by hugely inflated prices, an excess of landlordism and a refusal from the government to really deal with that. Along with the fact that wages have not risen with inflation, it means that people of my generation (I was born in '91) have no real chance of getting on the housing ladder unless we have rich parents.
The house my parents moved into in their 20s was £55k; in my 20s it was worth £360k. It is an ex council house. Allowing more private developers (whose profits are protected in legislation) to build more high price houses (which is what they always do) and flog them off to landlords or people who use them as "investments" (see money laundering) will not help my generation.
Taking back unused houses from landlords and investors, bringing back affordable housing as a domain of the state and not housing associations, and defining affordable housing as something people can actually afford (instead of 80% of local market prices) is what is really needed.
Because there are maybe a dozen or so significant causes of our housing problems, people often assume it is only a subset of them. All the things you listed are broken and significant. As is the shortage of new homes being built.
What issues does building new houses solve? It increases supply, but we obviously don't have a real supply issue if over 1/4 million homes are empty. We have an affordability crisis, which again doesn't make sense if supply isn't an issue. So who owns those 250,000 homes? Landlords, second home owners, "investors" etc. If you build more homes, do you stop the same kind of people snapping them up? No.
Out of university I worked for a few years at a housing association and then in local government on regeneration - essentially replacing old stock with new stock. And every time developers would promise x amount of affordable housing, then once the first shovel hit the ground and everything had been approved, they would turn around, say that the profits they projected had gone down due to factors outside their control, and the affordable housing had to be reduced to allow for more houses that could make them money.
You see this everywhere. Every local council will have a housing needs assessment document somewhere, which will almost always say the same thing - we need more affordable homes, one and two bedroom homes for single people and old people, and we don't really need more large family homes. Developers, on the other hand, want to build 3 or 4 bedroom homes because they can be sold to wealthy families or landlords who will rent out the rooms individually and pay of their mortgage for them, as well as make a profit. And successive governments since the coalition years have protected developers over the needs of average people.
So what, if the developer says that the profits they projected had gone down due to factors outside their control? That’s the risk they took, the problem is councils bending over to a small number of large developers.
Better to have a larger number of smaller developers.
This line sums up everything that is broken with our planning system.
An analysis by the Centre for Progressive Policy in 2018 found that planning permission inflated the price of agricultural land by 275 times, pushing it up from £22,520 per hectare to £6.2m per hectare.
And still we have people on this site pushing the myth that planning is not the root of the problem.
Planning permission being granted should not inflate the price of land. The fact that it does by a factor of 27,500% sums up everything wrong with the system.
On that basis if the govt mandated the auctioning off of 2% of agricultural land for housing, and attached a 50% windfall tax gain on the profits, we could halve the national debt.
It was a common joke/comment at the end of the 80s that if the Japanese Emperor sold the palace grounds in Tokyo, he could buy Hawai…
Around the time we bought our house, there was an island off the coast of Ireland (complete with 3-4 houses, two of which recently lived in) going for about the same price.
We would have been tempted if there had been a suitable job available! (The lack of such presumably explaining the price)
Imagine what Starlink does to the desirability of an island like that today.
Very little because who the fuck wants that level of isolation and hassle.
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
If Sunak wants to win a chunk of Millennials then siding with retirees and NIMBYs every time doesn't seem to be a good way to go about it.
Sunak is running a hardcore core vote strategy. He's not aiming for the middle. Its a losing strategy and it deserves to lose unless he changes course.
Sunak could change course and appeal to me and my peers but based on HYUFD's comments yesterday, they aren't interested because I voted Remain? What?
If the Tories tried to appeal to Remainers in London like you by say reversing Brexit to Rejoin or rejoining the single market they would probably end up 3rd or even 4th, they wouldn't win over more than a trickle of you from Labour or the LDs but would lose Leavers en masse to RefUK and Farage who would end up Leader of the Opposition to PM Starmer in a Canada 1993 style Tory wipeout
HYUFD mate, I suggest you read my posts. I am in favour of making Brexit work in some form, not rejoining, so rejoin wouldn't appeal to me or others.
What I referred to is housing, which your party isn't interested in building for me. Why not?
It was locally. Tory councils across the home counties had local plans with lots of new housing proposed in greenfields for first time buyers. Their reward on May 4th? Wipeout as most Tory councils went NOC or Independent or LD in a Nimby revolt
But hold on, you are ALREADY losing. Surely you want to win in the future?
Tories won't win back the councils they have lost promising to build all over the greenbelt
Out of university I worked for a few years at a housing association and then in local government on regeneration - essentially replacing old stock with new stock. And every time developers would promise x amount of affordable housing, then once the first shovel hit the ground and everything had been approved, they would turn around, say that the profits they projected had gone down due to factors outside their control, and the affordable housing had to be reduced to allow for more houses that could make them money.
You see this everywhere. Every local council will have a housing needs assessment document somewhere, which will almost always say the same thing - we need more affordable homes, one and two bedroom homes for single people and old people, and we don't really need more large family homes. Developers, on the other hand, want to build 3 or 4 bedroom homes because they can be sold to wealthy families or landlords who will rent out the rooms individually and pay of their mortgage for them, as well as make a profit. And successive governments since the coalition years have protected developers over the needs of average people.
Protecting developers has been a side-effect of protecting asset prices. If you abandoned all mandatory "affordable housing" requirements but also made planning easier, especially for small or individual developers, then overall supply would go up and the problem of affordability would begin to take care of itself.
At the moment the problem that a would-be buyer of affordable housing faces is more that the type of properties that would normally be affordable - 2-up, 2-down terraces, doer-uppers, etc - are bid up by people who would not normally be interested in that part of the market because there isn't enough supply of more desirable properties.
"Affordable" housing is a misnomer, all increased housing supply boosts affordability as people can move up the ladder freeing up the lower rungs of the ladder.
Building shitty homes to be "affordable" just means more shit homes. That's not a good thing in the long run.
Though the tide does seem to have changed somewhat. Increasing numbers of affordable homes seem to be not by building crap homes, but by building the same quality home but funding it differently eg shared-equity.
On my new estate you couldn't visually tell looking at them which houses are the 'affordable' ones and which ones aren't as they've all been built to the same spec. The only difference is the affordable ones are shared equity, but the brick work and specs aren't any lower. That is a much better solution than building slummy flats.
I thought the only way the Lib Dems become the third party was if the SNP imploded but the way the blue wall is going it is entirely possible for the Lib Dems to become the third party even if the SNP don't lose many seats.
They would need to win 38 to overtake the SNP.
Have they ever gained that many in one election? I'm pretty sure the answer's 'not since 1923.'
28 in 1997 is the most recent record.
See, I've started to do some deep dives, and I've started wondering if seats like Epsom & Ewell might be in play, add in tactical ABC voting, with Labour voters voting tactically en masse and you'd need only a 7.5% swing on top of that to overturn a near 18,000 majority.
You only have to look at that very seat in 1997 to see that tactical voting is tricky in such seats.
Labour aren’t going to soft-pedal seats like that, at least not if they are thinking about a majority. They’ll want to split the Con/LD vote and hope to come through the middle.
If Labour ever win Epsom and Ewell there won't be a single Tory left in the rest of the country.
I disagree. Labour winning in Epsom and Ewell would be reminiscent of Labour winning Hastings and Rye in 1997.
In Hasting and Rye in 1992, the Tories had a 12.3 percentage point lead over the Lib Dems and a 31.8 percentage point lead over Labour.
In Epsom and Ewell in 2019, the Tories had a 30.1 percentage point lead over the Lib Dems and a 36.3 percentage point lead over Labour.
So whilst Labour start further back in Epsom and Ewell, the Lib Dems are much further back than they were in Hasting and Rye.
Yes, I know, boundary changes etc., but I think the point stands.
Overall, there were 235 seats with a bigger Tory share of the vote in 2019 than Epsom and Ewell. It really isn't Tory heartland.
@tlg86 I think they are very different. Hastings and Rye went through some significant social changes. There definitely are seats where Labour power through from 3rd like H&R. I don't see E&E being one.
I know there were boundary changes, but perhaps St Albans is a better example:
As a St A resident, I would say that the shift to LD in St A is essentially due to Brexit - we were pretty much the only seat in Herts that voted Remain, we're much more akin to a London suburb than a home county spot, and the LDs have managed to turn a lot of switched off people politically into activists who door knock, deliver etc. Now the LDs have a huge majority on the local council, I would imagine that St A could be competitive in the future between LDs and Cons; not at the next GE, but after that if the Cons embrace a Cameroon type agenda. I don't see a lot of people going to Labour - the local party is non existent, with 0 cllrs, and the most active members left due to Starmer, and whilst some people might still vote Labour, they don't have the people power to capitalise on it.
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning. Face down the NIMBYs.
Build. More. Houses.
Building more houses isn't really the answer. There are 1/4 million long term empty homes in the UK (figure from Nov 2022). The issue is the housing market is broken and more supply won't help. Housing in this country is broken by hugely inflated prices, an excess of landlordism and a refusal from the government to really deal with that. Along with the fact that wages have not risen with inflation, it means that people of my generation (I was born in '91) have no real chance of getting on the housing ladder unless we have rich parents.
The house my parents moved into in their 20s was £55k; in my 20s it was worth £360k. It is an ex council house. Allowing more private developers (whose profits are protected in legislation) to build more high price houses (which is what they always do) and flog them off to landlords or people who use them as "investments" (see money laundering) will not help my generation.
Taking back unused houses from landlords and investors, bringing back affordable housing as a domain of the state and not housing associations, and defining affordable housing as something people can actually afford (instead of 80% of local market prices) is what is really needed.
Because there are maybe a dozen or so significant causes of our housing problems, people often assume it is only a subset of them. All the things you listed are broken and significant. As is the shortage of new homes being built.
What issues does building new houses solve? It increases supply, but we obviously don't have a real supply issue if over 1/4 million homes are empty. We have an affordability crisis, which again doesn't make sense if supply isn't an issue. So who owns those 250,000 homes? Landlords, second home owners, "investors" etc. If you build more homes, do you stop the same kind of people snapping them up? No.
Out of university I worked for a few years at a housing association and then in local government on regeneration - essentially replacing old stock with new stock. And every time developers would promise x amount of affordable housing, then once the first shovel hit the ground and everything had been approved, they would turn around, say that the profits they projected had gone down due to factors outside their control, and the affordable housing had to be reduced to allow for more houses that could make them money.
You see this everywhere. Every local council will have a housing needs assessment document somewhere, which will almost always say the same thing - we need more affordable homes, one and two bedroom homes for single people and old people, and we don't really need more large family homes. Developers, on the other hand, want to build 3 or 4 bedroom homes because they can be sold to wealthy families or landlords who will rent out the rooms individually and pay of their mortgage for them, as well as make a profit. And successive governments since the coalition years have protected developers over the needs of average people.
So what, if the developer says that the profits they projected had gone down due to factors outside their control? That’s the risk they took, the problem is councils bending over to a small number of large developers.
Better to have a larger number of smaller developers.
Their profit margin was protected by legislation, so if they projected less profit, they were allowed to change the plans.
There are two moving targets: SNP losses and Lib Dem gains. Both are now the central case.
The question is how many seats change hands in each category.
If the SNP lose net 15 seats, they are down to 30. If the Lib Dems gain 16, they are up to 30.
Even leaving aside the "Blue Wall" in the Home Counties, there are quite a few ex Lib Dem seats in Devon and Somerset, plus places like Cheltenham, that look nailed on for the Lib Dems next time. Equally, there are at least 15 seats that look like Labour gains from the SNP, especially in the the greater Glasgow area, and I see no SNP surge against the Tories in the North East and the Borders, so no likely SNP gains.
If counties like Surrey also swing Lib Dem, then Ed Davey will outdo Paddy Ashdown for gains.
I think the odds favour the Lib Dems over the SNP at this point.
In a change from 1997, it looks likely the LDs will win more MPs in Surrey, Oxfordshire and Hertfordshire than Cornwall, Devon and Somerset. The Brexit effect
Which seats do you think are likely to fall to the Lib Dems in each group, young HY?
Guildford, Esher and Walton, Surrey SW, Woking and Mole Valley in Surrey. Wantage and Henley in Oxfordshire and in Hertfordshire the LDs could gain Hitchen and Harpenden to add to their gain of St Albans in 2019
Excellent list (I would say that because it aligns with mine as far as Surrey is concerned).Surrey SW will now be 2 seats so another one as both would be targeted. As an outside shot Surrey Heath. LDs appear very well organised and did spectacularly well in the locals
Surrey Heath is Camberley, Gove’s seat? That must be pretty safe.
Surrey SW is Hunt’s seat - Farnham, Godalming and a lot of expensive countyside. What will it look like after the boundary changes? @NickPalmer ?
I was heavily involved in both seats in the past. I can't give more details without giving my identity. Yes SHeath is Gove's seat. I remember it being 100% Tory council. It was slaughter in the locals. 3 more seats will be added to the LD total on 15/5. It is now 21/6 LD/Tory. It will be 24/6 on 15/5. I don't expect the LDs to win it in the GE but it is possible.
Nick will be more upto date than me on SW Surrey. I understand that both seats will be targets for the LDs. I was significantly involved when we missed SW Surrey by 800 odd votes. After that the local party went into infighting. I had to oversee the expulsion of several members. Sigh. Not something I joined to get involved in.
PS correction 15/6.
Surrey Heath is only 58th on the LD target list and voted Leave (and Gove is a relative Nimby unlike ex Tory councillors in his patch). I expect him to hang on.
Surrey SW is 19th on the LD target list and voted Remain. Hunt is much more at risk whichever of the 2 seats it splits into he ends up in
Hunt has been selected for the new seat which includes Godalming (and I think also extends into Hampshire), rather than that incorporating Farnham. Both are notional 7-8k Tory majorities in 2019 and so also LibDem targets. He is an assiduous constituency member as @Nick Palmer has testified, so I think he will win.
I thought the only way the Lib Dems become the third party was if the SNP imploded but the way the blue wall is going it is entirely possible for the Lib Dems to become the third party even if the SNP don't lose many seats.
They would need to win 38 to overtake the SNP.
Have they ever gained that many in one election? I'm pretty sure the answer's 'not since 1923.'
28 in 1997 is the most recent record.
See, I've started to do some deep dives, and I've started wondering if seats like Epsom & Ewell might be in play, add in tactical ABC voting, with Labour voters voting tactically en masse and you'd need only a 7.5% swing on top of that to overturn a near 18,000 majority.
Do you think the Liberals in Woking might have a chance 😃😃😃😃😃😃😃😃😃😃
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning.
Build. More. Houses.
Not really.
The main swing to Labour since 2019 is from 40-65 year olds who own their own home with a mortgage after the cost of living rise and Truss and Kwarteng budget disaster. Most under 40 renters voted Labour in 2019 even when the Tories won a landslide nationally.
Yes it might be nice to get more 30 to 40 year olds on the housing ladder and win a few more Tory voters from younger age groups at general elections but as 2019 proved the Tories can win without them. Building more homes in the greenbelt also sees more over 50s vote LD or Independent locally, as the local elections this month proved when the Tories lost control of most of their southern and home counties councils in a NIMBY revolt over Tory councils local plans to allow more homes to be built on green fields near them
The calculation of voting at a GE is different to that a local elections though.
Unless one thinks that the price of the LDs going into coalition with Labour, will be to bend over to the NIMBYs, the LDs having learned their lesson when they bent over on tuition fees last time out?
IMHO, as someone generally preferring of a Conservative government, there’s plenty of evidence that today’s 30 somethings are not getting more conservative as they grow older, because they aren’t buying houses and not having children.
As life expectancy rises, so people don’t inherit until their 50s and 60s, there’s at least as many pensioners worried about their children not being able to buy a house, as there are worried about their children’s inheritance. Which leads to the explosion in reverse mortgages, the next massive mis-selling scandal, and something I’ve just had to talk my own parents out of doing.
Most still own a property by 39 at least with a mortgage, hence 39s and over voted Tory in 2019.
The LDs certainly would block Starmer building on the greenbelt if they were Kingmakers in a hung parliament, they learnt from the tuition fees debacle yes they cannot offend their core vote
I'm in my early 30s and cannot see how I would possibly get a mortgage by 39. And my generation are getting less Tory with age, not moreso.
No they aren't and certainly not less Tory with age, each decade of age the Tory voteshare rose in 2019 exactly as it almost always does.
That actually shows Millenials stop shifting left at 40 in the UK ie average age most first own property with a mortgage
Only because the Millenial generation has only just started to enter their 40s, and the oldest Millenials are more likely to look like the previous generation.
This line sums up everything that is broken with our planning system.
An analysis by the Centre for Progressive Policy in 2018 found that planning permission inflated the price of agricultural land by 275 times, pushing it up from £22,520 per hectare to £6.2m per hectare.
And still we have people on this site pushing the myth that planning is not the root of the problem.
Planning permission being granted should not inflate the price of land. The fact that it does by a factor of 27,500% sums up everything wrong with the system.
On that basis if the govt mandated the auctioning off of 2% of agricultural land for housing, and attached a 50% windfall tax gain on the profits, we could halve the national debt.
It was a common joke/comment at the end of the 80s that if the Japanese Emperor sold the palace grounds in Tokyo, he could buy Hawai…
Around the time we bought our house, there was an island off the coast of Ireland (complete with 3-4 houses, two of which recently lived in) going for about the same price.
We would have been tempted if there had been a suitable job available! (The lack of such presumably explaining the price)
Imagine what Starlink does to the desirability of an island like that today.
Remote island living like that is hard work though, everything else costs a fortune to supply.
Yeah, it was everything in by boat, probably your own boat!
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning. Face down the NIMBYs.
Build. More. Houses.
Building more houses isn't really the answer. There are 1/4 million long term empty homes in the UK (figure from Nov 2022). The issue is the housing market is broken and more supply won't help. Housing in this country is broken by hugely inflated prices, an excess of landlordism and a refusal from the government to really deal with that. Along with the fact that wages have not risen with inflation, it means that people of my generation (I was born in '91) have no real chance of getting on the housing ladder unless we have rich parents.
The house my parents moved into in their 20s was £55k; in my 20s it was worth £360k. It is an ex council house. Allowing more private developers (whose profits are protected in legislation) to build more high price houses (which is what they always do) and flog them off to landlords or people who use them as "investments" (see money laundering) will not help my generation.
Taking back unused houses from landlords and investors, bringing back affordable housing as a domain of the state and not housing associations, and defining affordable housing as something people can actually afford (instead of 80% of local market prices) is what is really needed.
Because there are maybe a dozen or so significant causes of our housing problems, people often assume it is only a subset of them. All the things you listed are broken and significant. As is the shortage of new homes being built.
What issues does building new houses solve? It increases supply, but we obviously don't have a real supply issue if over 1/4 million homes are empty. We have an affordability crisis, which again doesn't make sense if supply isn't an issue. So who owns those 250,000 homes? Landlords, second home owners, "investors" etc. If you build more homes, do you stop the same kind of people snapping them up? No.
Out of university I worked for a few years at a housing association and then in local government on regeneration - essentially replacing old stock with new stock. And every time developers would promise x amount of affordable housing, then once the first shovel hit the ground and everything had been approved, they would turn around, say that the profits they projected had gone down due to factors outside their control, and the affordable housing had to be reduced to allow for more houses that could make them money.
You see this everywhere. Every local council will have a housing needs assessment document somewhere, which will almost always say the same thing - we need more affordable homes, one and two bedroom homes for single people and old people, and we don't really need more large family homes. Developers, on the other hand, want to build 3 or 4 bedroom homes because they can be sold to wealthy families or landlords who will rent out the rooms individually and pay of their mortgage for them, as well as make a profit. And successive governments since the coalition years have protected developers over the needs of average people.
So what, if the developer says that the profits they projected had gone down due to factors outside their control? That’s the risk they took, the problem is councils bending over to a small number of large developers.
Better to have a larger number of smaller developers.
Their profit margin was protected by legislation, so if they projected less profit, they were allowed to change the plans.
Tories won't win back the councils they have lost promising to build all over the greenbelt
The Tories won't win any future election if nobody under the age of 50 now votes for you. Do you not care?
QTWAIN.
He wants those who are already well off to vote for him and screw anyone else.
Its a losing strategy and it deserves to lose.
The Tories at their best are the party of aspiration. People who have done well vote for them and people who want to do well. The party forgets that, it deserves to lose.
This line sums up everything that is broken with our planning system.
An analysis by the Centre for Progressive Policy in 2018 found that planning permission inflated the price of agricultural land by 275 times, pushing it up from £22,520 per hectare to £6.2m per hectare.
And still we have people on this site pushing the myth that planning is not the root of the problem.
Planning permission being granted should not inflate the price of land. The fact that it does by a factor of 27,500% sums up everything wrong with the system.
On that basis if the govt mandated the auctioning off of 2% of agricultural land for housing, and attached a 50% windfall tax gain on the profits, we could halve the national debt.
It was a common joke/comment at the end of the 80s that if the Japanese Emperor sold the palace grounds in Tokyo, he could buy Hawai…
Around the time we bought our house, there was an island off the coast of Ireland (complete with 3-4 houses, two of which recently lived in) going for about the same price.
We would have been tempted if there had been a suitable job available! (The lack of such presumably explaining the price)
Imagine what Starlink does to the desirability of an island like that today.
Remote island living like that is hard work though, everything else costs a fortune to supply.
Yeah, it was everything in by boat, probably your own boat!
And even starlink only works if you generate enough electricity to power a router and PC.
“Susie Green, the former chief executive of Mermaids, who stood down “unexpectedly” last year, has been hiding in plain sight for so long that I sincerely hope we can see her clearly now. How this woman was ever allowed to have so much influence over vulnerable children, never mind medical professionals, is frankly disturbing. She is a former IT consultant with no medical training – unless you count the fact that she won 2016’s Sparkle Diversity Champion of the Year as a specialised qualification. I certainly don’t. The story of how much power she came to have remains shocking.
“The organisation she ran was once not controversial; it was a support group for children and parents of kids with gender issues until she got her hands on it. It became an activist and lobby group receiving hundreds of thousands of pounds in lottery funding and grants and was hired by the Department for Education to provide training on “gender identity” in schools. As with Stonewall, it had huge reach into key institutions and the usual gormless celebrity support.
“We now find that Green herself had direct influence on policy at the gender identity development service (GIDS) at the Tavistock. After being told that the Tavistock did not have any records of meeting with Green, when threatened by court action, miraculously it found 300 pages of them.
“They reveal that Green spoke directly to the director Dr Polly Carmichael, had advisory roles on two studies and – most scandalous of all – could refer children for treatment at the clinic even when their own GPs had repeatedly advised against it. The Cass Review, remember, effectively shut down GIDS as it was not fit for purpose. ”
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning. Face down the NIMBYs.
Build. More. Houses.
Building more houses isn't really the answer. There are 1/4 million long term empty homes in the UK (figure from Nov 2022). The issue is the housing market is broken and more supply won't help. Housing in this country is broken by hugely inflated prices, an excess of landlordism and a refusal from the government to really deal with that. Along with the fact that wages have not risen with inflation, it means that people of my generation (I was born in '91) have no real chance of getting on the housing ladder unless we have rich parents.
The house my parents moved into in their 20s was £55k; in my 20s it was worth £360k. It is an ex council house. Allowing more private developers (whose profits are protected in legislation) to build more high price houses (which is what they always do) and flog them off to landlords or people who use them as "investments" (see money laundering) will not help my generation.
Taking back unused houses from landlords and investors, bringing back affordable housing as a domain of the state and not housing associations, and defining affordable housing as something people can actually afford (instead of 80% of local market prices) is what is really needed.
Because there are maybe a dozen or so significant causes of our housing problems, people often assume it is only a subset of them. All the things you listed are broken and significant. As is the shortage of new homes being built.
What issues does building new houses solve? It increases supply, but we obviously don't have a real supply issue if over 1/4 million homes are empty. We have an affordability crisis, which again doesn't make sense if supply isn't an issue. So who owns those 250,000 homes? Landlords, second home owners, "investors" etc. If you build more homes, do you stop the same kind of people snapping them up? No.
Out of university I worked for a few years at a housing association and then in local government on regeneration - essentially replacing old stock with new stock. And every time developers would promise x amount of affordable housing, then once the first shovel hit the ground and everything had been approved, they would turn around, say that the profits they projected had gone down due to factors outside their control, and the affordable housing had to be reduced to allow for more houses that could make them money.
You see this everywhere. Every local council will have a housing needs assessment document somewhere, which will almost always say the same thing - we need more affordable homes, one and two bedroom homes for single people and old people, and we don't really need more large family homes. Developers, on the other hand, want to build 3 or 4 bedroom homes because they can be sold to wealthy families or landlords who will rent out the rooms individually and pay of their mortgage for them, as well as make a profit. And successive governments since the coalition years have protected developers over the needs of average people.
So what, if the developer says that the profits they projected had gone down due to factors outside their control? That’s the risk they took, the problem is councils bending over to a small number of large developers.
Better to have a larger number of smaller developers.
Their profit margin was protected by legislation, so if they projected less profit, they were allowed to change the plans.
Ooh, go on…
I mean, there is little more to say. I think it was the Cameron years that brought in that legislation, but essentially if a developer thinks they'll make less money, that's unacceptable, so they can change the original spec of housing stock (say 15% affordable v 85% market changes to 5% affordable v 95% market) and the local council can't really do anything about it. So councils giving planning permission and working with developers essentially just became rubber stamps for whatever developers really wanted to build.
I was involved in a big redevelopment of a pre existing council estate where the plan was to move everyone out, build everyone who currently lived there a new home, and then create new private stock on the same land for a mixed use estate of about 30% market to 70% social housing. Once development started, that percentage changed closer to 50/50, and lots of people who were moved out and promised a new home were permanently displaced from that estate. Because the developer said they needed more market homes to make up the new projected loss. This was around 2016?
This line sums up everything that is broken with our planning system.
An analysis by the Centre for Progressive Policy in 2018 found that planning permission inflated the price of agricultural land by 275 times, pushing it up from £22,520 per hectare to £6.2m per hectare.
And still we have people on this site pushing the myth that planning is not the root of the problem.
Planning permission being granted should not inflate the price of land. The fact that it does by a factor of 27,500% sums up everything wrong with the system.
On that basis if the govt mandated the auctioning off of 2% of agricultural land for housing, and attached a 50% windfall tax gain on the profits, we could halve the national debt.
It was a common joke/comment at the end of the 80s that if the Japanese Emperor sold the palace grounds in Tokyo, he could buy Hawai…
Around the time we bought our house, there was an island off the coast of Ireland (complete with 3-4 houses, two of which recently lived in) going for about the same price.
We would have been tempted if there had been a suitable job available! (The lack of such presumably explaining the price)
Imagine what Starlink does to the desirability of an island like that today.
Remote island living like that is hard work though, everything else costs a fortune to supply.
Yeah, it was everything in by boat, probably your own boat!
And even starlink only works if you generate enough electricity to power a router and PC.
We reckoned we could easily manage a 100Mbit balanced connection even with intermittent power*
*average speed, based on transporting a boatload of hard drives as required once per week
Who could’ve predicted this, of the lovely dinghy people?!
“Eighty Albanian migrants have been sentenced to 130 years in jail in the first four months of this year alone, as the scale of the crime wave from the surge in Channel crossings can be revealed for the first time.
They have been convicted of murder, manslaughter, rape, violent disorder, firearms offences, kidnap, causing death by dangerous driving, burglary and producing cannabis in gang-run farms in houses and disused industrial sites.”
This line sums up everything that is broken with our planning system.
An analysis by the Centre for Progressive Policy in 2018 found that planning permission inflated the price of agricultural land by 275 times, pushing it up from £22,520 per hectare to £6.2m per hectare.
And still we have people on this site pushing the myth that planning is not the root of the problem.
Planning permission being granted should not inflate the price of land. The fact that it does by a factor of 27,500% sums up everything wrong with the system.
On that basis if the govt mandated the auctioning off of 2% of agricultural land for housing, and attached a 50% windfall tax gain on the profits, we could halve the national debt.
It was a common joke/comment at the end of the 80s that if the Japanese Emperor sold the palace grounds in Tokyo, he could buy Hawai…
Around the time we bought our house, there was an island off the coast of Ireland (complete with 3-4 houses, two of which recently lived in) going for about the same price.
We would have been tempted if there had been a suitable job available! (The lack of such presumably explaining the price)
Imagine what Starlink does to the desirability of an island like that today.
Very little because who the fuck wants that level of isolation and hassle.
Ensures there are no Tories* within X miles at all times
*replace as appropriate with political persuasion of choice...
I was involved in a big redevelopment of a pre existing council estate where the plan was to move everyone out, build everyone who currently lived there a new home, and then create new private stock on the same land for a mixed use estate of about 30% market to 70% social housing. Once development started, that percentage changed closer to 50/50, and lots of people who were moved out and promised a new home were permanently displaced from that estate. Because the developer said they needed more market homes to make up the new projected loss. This was around 2016?
That sounds like a mess and not the kind of situation I was thinking of in my original reply to you. Perhaps the council should have made it 100% social housing instead of trying to subsidise it by acting like property developers.
“Susie Green, the former chief executive of Mermaids, who stood down “unexpectedly” last year, has been hiding in plain sight for so long that I sincerely hope we can see her clearly now. How this woman was ever allowed to have so much influence over vulnerable children, never mind medical professionals, is frankly disturbing. She is a former IT consultant with no medical training – unless you count the fact that she won 2016’s Sparkle Diversity Champion of the Year as a specialised qualification. I certainly don’t. The story of how much power she came to have remains shocking.
“The organisation she ran was once not controversial; it was a support group for children and parents of kids with gender issues until she got her hands on it. It became an activist and lobby group receiving hundreds of thousands of pounds in lottery funding and grants and was hired by the Department for Education to provide training on “gender identity” in schools. As with Stonewall, it had huge reach into key institutions and the usual gormless celebrity support.
“We now find that Green herself had direct influence on policy at the gender identity development service (GIDS) at the Tavistock. After being told that the Tavistock did not have any records of meeting with Green, when threatened by court action, miraculously it found 300 pages of them.
“They reveal that Green spoke directly to the director Dr Polly Carmichael, had advisory roles on two studies and – most scandalous of all – could refer children for treatment at the clinic even when their own GPs had repeatedly advised against it. The Cass Review, remember, effectively shut down GIDS as it was not fit for purpose. ”
Charity that specialised in treatment for a condition is in consultation with healthcare that specialises in that treatment shocker. Next we'll learn that Cancer Research UK spoke to the NHS about cancer treatments.
And the Cass review said GIDS was not fit for purpose not because it referred too many young people to treatment, but because it was too slow and centralised, hence why the new model is looking at regional hubs rather than treatment centralised in London. Indeed, the current interim report says that children suffering "gender incongruence or dysphoria must receive the same standards of clinical care, assessment and treatment as every other child or young person accessing health services" including "timely and appropriate care for children and young people needing support around their gender identity." Considering current waiting lists for trans children, and trans adults, currently outstrip cis waiting lists, that can only be read to me as needing to speed up healthcare, not slow it down.
“Susie Green, the former chief executive of Mermaids, who stood down “unexpectedly” last year, has been hiding in plain sight for so long that I sincerely hope we can see her clearly now. How this woman was ever allowed to have so much influence over vulnerable children, never mind medical professionals, is frankly disturbing. She is a former IT consultant with no medical training – unless you count the fact that she won 2016’s Sparkle Diversity Champion of the Year as a specialised qualification. I certainly don’t. The story of how much power she came to have remains shocking.
I was involved in a big redevelopment of a pre existing council estate where the plan was to move everyone out, build everyone who currently lived there a new home, and then create new private stock on the same land for a mixed use estate of about 30% market to 70% social housing. Once development started, that percentage changed closer to 50/50, and lots of people who were moved out and promised a new home were permanently displaced from that estate. Because the developer said they needed more market homes to make up the new projected loss. This was around 2016?
That sounds like a mess and not the kind of situation I was thinking of in my original reply to you. Perhaps the council should have made it 100% social housing instead of trying to subsidise it by acting like property developers.
So it is the council's fault that the actual property developers breached their contract?
“Susie Green, the former chief executive of Mermaids, who stood down “unexpectedly” last year, has been hiding in plain sight for so long that I sincerely hope we can see her clearly now. How this woman was ever allowed to have so much influence over vulnerable children, never mind medical professionals, is frankly disturbing. She is a former IT consultant with no medical training – unless you count the fact that she won 2016’s Sparkle Diversity Champion of the Year as a specialised qualification. I certainly don’t. The story of how much power she came to have remains shocking.
“The organisation she ran was once not controversial; it was a support group for children and parents of kids with gender issues until she got her hands on it. It became an activist and lobby group receiving hundreds of thousands of pounds in lottery funding and grants and was hired by the Department for Education to provide training on “gender identity” in schools. As with Stonewall, it had huge reach into key institutions and the usual gormless celebrity support.
“We now find that Green herself had direct influence on policy at the gender identity development service (GIDS) at the Tavistock. After being told that the Tavistock did not have any records of meeting with Green, when threatened by court action, miraculously it found 300 pages of them.
“They reveal that Green spoke directly to the director Dr Polly Carmichael, had advisory roles on two studies and – most scandalous of all – could refer children for treatment at the clinic even when their own GPs had repeatedly advised against it. The Cass Review, remember, effectively shut down GIDS as it was not fit for purpose. ”
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning. Face down the NIMBYs.
Build. More. Houses.
Building more houses isn't really the answer. There are 1/4 million long term empty homes in the UK (figure from Nov 2022). The issue is the housing market is broken and more supply won't help. Housing in this country is broken by hugely inflated prices, an excess of landlordism and a refusal from the government to really deal with that. Along with the fact that wages have not risen with inflation, it means that people of my generation (I was born in '91) have no real chance of getting on the housing ladder unless we have rich parents.
The house my parents moved into in their 20s was £55k; in my 20s it was worth £360k. It is an ex council house. Allowing more private developers (whose profits are protected in legislation) to build more high price houses (which is what they always do) and flog them off to landlords or people who use them as "investments" (see money laundering) will not help my generation.
Taking back unused houses from landlords and investors, bringing back affordable housing as a domain of the state and not housing associations, and defining affordable housing as something people can actually afford (instead of 80% of local market prices) is what is really needed.
Because there are maybe a dozen or so significant causes of our housing problems, people often assume it is only a subset of them. All the things you listed are broken and significant. As is the shortage of new homes being built.
What issues does building new houses solve? It increases supply, but we obviously don't have a real supply issue if over 1/4 million homes are empty. We have an affordability crisis, which again doesn't make sense if supply isn't an issue. So who owns those 250,000 homes? Landlords, second home owners, "investors" etc. If you build more homes, do you stop the same kind of people snapping them up? No.
Out of university I worked for a few years at a housing association and then in local government on regeneration - essentially replacing old stock with new stock. And every time developers would promise x amount of affordable housing, then once the first shovel hit the ground and everything had been approved, they would turn around, say that the profits they projected had gone down due to factors outside their control, and the affordable housing had to be reduced to allow for more houses that could make them money.
You see this everywhere. Every local council will have a housing needs assessment document somewhere, which will almost always say the same thing - we need more affordable homes, one and two bedroom homes for single people and old people, and we don't really need more large family homes. Developers, on the other hand, want to build 3 or 4 bedroom homes because they can be sold to wealthy families or landlords who will rent out the rooms individually and pay of their mortgage for them, as well as make a profit. And successive governments since the coalition years have protected developers over the needs of average people.
So what, if the developer says that the profits they projected had gone down due to factors outside their control? That’s the risk they took, the problem is councils bending over to a small number of large developers.
Better to have a larger number of smaller developers.
Their profit margin was protected by legislation, so if they projected less profit, they were allowed to change the plans.
Ooh, go on…
I mean, there is little more to say. I think it was the Cameron years that brought in that legislation, but essentially if a developer thinks they'll make less money, that's unacceptable, so they can change the original spec of housing stock (say 15% affordable v 85% market changes to 5% affordable v 95% market) and the local council can't really do anything about it. So councils giving planning permission and working with developers essentially just became rubber stamps for whatever developers really wanted to build.
I was involved in a big redevelopment of a pre existing council estate where the plan was to move everyone out, build everyone who currently lived there a new home, and then create new private stock on the same land for a mixed use estate of about 30% market to 70% social housing. Once development started, that percentage changed closer to 50/50, and lots of people who were moved out and promised a new home were permanently displaced from that estate. Because the developer said they needed more market homes to make up the new projected loss. This was around 2016?
I was involved in a big redevelopment of a pre existing council estate where the plan was to move everyone out, build everyone who currently lived there a new home, and then create new private stock on the same land for a mixed use estate of about 30% market to 70% social housing. Once development started, that percentage changed closer to 50/50, and lots of people who were moved out and promised a new home were permanently displaced from that estate. Because the developer said they needed more market homes to make up the new projected loss. This was around 2016?
That sounds like a mess and not the kind of situation I was thinking of in my original reply to you. Perhaps the council should have made it 100% social housing instead of trying to subsidise it by acting like property developers.
So it is the council's fault that the actual property developers breached their contract?
If it was a breach of contract then why are we talking about rules allowing them to do it?
This line sums up everything that is broken with our planning system.
An analysis by the Centre for Progressive Policy in 2018 found that planning permission inflated the price of agricultural land by 275 times, pushing it up from £22,520 per hectare to £6.2m per hectare.
And still we have people on this site pushing the myth that planning is not the root of the problem.
Planning permission being granted should not inflate the price of land. The fact that it does by a factor of 27,500% sums up everything wrong with the system.
On that basis if the govt mandated the auctioning off of 2% of agricultural land for housing, and attached a 50% windfall tax gain on the profits, we could halve the national debt.
It was a common joke/comment at the end of the 80s that if the Japanese Emperor sold the palace grounds in Tokyo, he could buy Hawai…
Around the time we bought our house, there was an island off the coast of Ireland (complete with 3-4 houses, two of which recently lived in) going for about the same price.
We would have been tempted if there had been a suitable job available! (The lack of such presumably explaining the price)
Imagine what Starlink does to the desirability of an island like that today.
Remote island living like that is hard work though, everything else costs a fortune to supply.
Yeah, it was everything in by boat, probably your own boat!
The recent book by Chris Whatley, Pabay, was quite a revelation as to the realities of island life. Well recommended for anyone interested in the Skye area, and more generally the western islands of the Isles of Britain and Ireland.
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning. Face down the NIMBYs.
Build. More. Houses.
Building more houses isn't really the answer. There are 1/4 million long term empty homes in the UK (figure from Nov 2022). The issue is the housing market is broken and more supply won't help. Housing in this country is broken by hugely inflated prices, an excess of landlordism and a refusal from the government to really deal with that. Along with the fact that wages have not risen with inflation, it means that people of my generation (I was born in '91) have no real chance of getting on the housing ladder unless we have rich parents.
The house my parents moved into in their 20s was £55k; in my 20s it was worth £360k. It is an ex council house. Allowing more private developers (whose profits are protected in legislation) to build more high price houses (which is what they always do) and flog them off to landlords or people who use them as "investments" (see money laundering) will not help my generation.
Taking back unused houses from landlords and investors, bringing back affordable housing as a domain of the state and not housing associations, and defining affordable housing as something people can actually afford (instead of 80% of local market prices) is what is really needed.
Because there are maybe a dozen or so significant causes of our housing problems, people often assume it is only a subset of them. All the things you listed are broken and significant. As is the shortage of new homes being built.
What issues does building new houses solve? It increases supply, but we obviously don't have a real supply issue if over 1/4 million homes are empty. We have an affordability crisis, which again doesn't make sense if supply isn't an issue. So who owns those 250,000 homes? Landlords, second home owners, "investors" etc. If you build more homes, do you stop the same kind of people snapping them up? No.
Out of university I worked for a few years at a housing association and then in local government on regeneration - essentially replacing old stock with new stock. And every time developers would promise x amount of affordable housing, then once the first shovel hit the ground and everything had been approved, they would turn around, say that the profits they projected had gone down due to factors outside their control, and the affordable housing had to be reduced to allow for more houses that could make them money.
You see this everywhere. Every local council will have a housing needs assessment document somewhere, which will almost always say the same thing - we need more affordable homes, one and two bedroom homes for single people and old people, and we don't really need more large family homes. Developers, on the other hand, want to build 3 or 4 bedroom homes because they can be sold to wealthy families or landlords who will rent out the rooms individually and pay of their mortgage for them, as well as make a profit. And successive governments since the coalition years have protected developers over the needs of average people.
So what, if the developer says that the profits they projected had gone down due to factors outside their control? That’s the risk they took, the problem is councils bending over to a small number of large developers.
Better to have a larger number of smaller developers.
Their profit margin was protected by legislation, so if they projected less profit, they were allowed to change the plans.
Ooh, go on…
I mean, there is little more to say. I think it was the Cameron years that brought in that legislation, but essentially if a developer thinks they'll make less money, that's unacceptable, so they can change the original spec of housing stock (say 15% affordable v 85% market changes to 5% affordable v 95% market) and the local council can't really do anything about it. So councils giving planning permission and working with developers essentially just became rubber stamps for whatever developers really wanted to build.
I was involved in a big redevelopment of a pre existing council estate where the plan was to move everyone out, build everyone who currently lived there a new home, and then create new private stock on the same land for a mixed use estate of about 30% market to 70% social housing. Once development started, that percentage changed closer to 50/50, and lots of people who were moved out and promised a new home were permanently displaced from that estate. Because the developer said they needed more market homes to make up the new projected loss. This was around 2016?
That sounds like a mess and not the kind of situation I was thinking of in my original reply to you. Perhaps the council should have made it 100% social housing instead of trying to subsidise it by acting like property developers.
It's what they have to do. Councils were no longer allowed to develop themselves, so had to turn to private developers, and infrastructure spending was linked to development - you weren't allowed to build new GPs or schools or whatever until you had approved development. So, when councils commissioned new projects, they would have to go to private developers who would essentially bid on projects because the local council couldn't do it themselves, but once they had done that the council essentially became in hock to the developer and not the other way around. I remember having officers in regeneration bending backwards to accommodate the changes the developers proposed because otherwise they would lose money needed for infrastructure. And, of course, when parts of council services are also hived off to private companies (like Capita), if you have Capita running the council and Capita also bidding on development... then the incentive is not for quick and good development...
I was involved in a big redevelopment of a pre existing council estate where the plan was to move everyone out, build everyone who currently lived there a new home, and then create new private stock on the same land for a mixed use estate of about 30% market to 70% social housing. Once development started, that percentage changed closer to 50/50, and lots of people who were moved out and promised a new home were permanently displaced from that estate. Because the developer said they needed more market homes to make up the new projected loss. This was around 2016?
That sounds like a mess and not the kind of situation I was thinking of in my original reply to you. Perhaps the council should have made it 100% social housing instead of trying to subsidise it by acting like property developers.
So it is the council's fault that the actual property developers breached their contract?
If it was a breach of contract then why are we talking about rules allowing them to do it?
Same happens too often with promises of money for sewerage, schools, etc. (Which should have been built *first* to keep everyone happy.)
“Susie Green, the former chief executive of Mermaids, who stood down “unexpectedly” last year, has been hiding in plain sight for so long that I sincerely hope we can see her clearly now. How this woman was ever allowed to have so much influence over vulnerable children, never mind medical professionals, is frankly disturbing. She is a former IT consultant with no medical training – unless you count the fact that she won 2016’s Sparkle Diversity Champion of the Year as a specialised qualification. I certainly don’t. The story of how much power she came to have remains shocking.
As someone who isn't very interested in the controversy, this sort of slanted axe-grinding article makes me more sympathetic to the target.
The issue is that someone with no medical training, was working as a clinical advisor for the charity, apparently with permission to over-rule the patient’s own GP on the subject of their diagnosis, all within the NHS framework.
“Susie Green, the former chief executive of Mermaids, who stood down “unexpectedly” last year, has been hiding in plain sight for so long that I sincerely hope we can see her clearly now. How this woman was ever allowed to have so much influence over vulnerable children, never mind medical professionals, is frankly disturbing. She is a former IT consultant with no medical training – unless you count the fact that she won 2016’s Sparkle Diversity Champion of the Year as a specialised qualification. I certainly don’t. The story of how much power she came to have remains shocking.
“The organisation she ran was once not controversial; it was a support group for children and parents of kids with gender issues until she got her hands on it. It became an activist and lobby group receiving hundreds of thousands of pounds in lottery funding and grants and was hired by the Department for Education to provide training on “gender identity” in schools. As with Stonewall, it had huge reach into key institutions and the usual gormless celebrity support.
“We now find that Green herself had direct influence on policy at the gender identity development service (GIDS) at the Tavistock. After being told that the Tavistock did not have any records of meeting with Green, when threatened by court action, miraculously it found 300 pages of them.
“They reveal that Green spoke directly to the director Dr Polly Carmichael, had advisory roles on two studies and – most scandalous of all – could refer children for treatment at the clinic even when their own GPs had repeatedly advised against it. The Cass Review, remember, effectively shut down GIDS as it was not fit for purpose. ”
Charity that specialised in treatment for a condition is in consultation with healthcare that specialises in that treatment shocker. Next we'll learn that Cancer Research UK spoke to the NHS about cancer treatments.
Mermaids did not 'specialise in treatment for a condition'. It is an advocacy and support group - that is according to its own website and publicity. The comparison with Cancer Research UK is laughable.
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning. Face down the NIMBYs.
Build. More. Houses.
Building more houses isn't really the answer. There are 1/4 million long term empty homes in the UK (figure from Nov 2022). The issue is the housing market is broken and more supply won't help. Housing in this country is broken by hugely inflated prices, an excess of landlordism and a refusal from the government to really deal with that. Along with the fact that wages have not risen with inflation, it means that people of my generation (I was born in '91) have no real chance of getting on the housing ladder unless we have rich parents.
The house my parents moved into in their 20s was £55k; in my 20s it was worth £360k. It is an ex council house. Allowing more private developers (whose profits are protected in legislation) to build more high price houses (which is what they always do) and flog them off to landlords or people who use them as "investments" (see money laundering) will not help my generation.
Taking back unused houses from landlords and investors, bringing back affordable housing as a domain of the state and not housing associations, and defining affordable housing as something people can actually afford (instead of 80% of local market prices) is what is really needed.
Because there are maybe a dozen or so significant causes of our housing problems, people often assume it is only a subset of them. All the things you listed are broken and significant. As is the shortage of new homes being built.
What issues does building new houses solve? It increases supply, but we obviously don't have a real supply issue if over 1/4 million homes are empty. We have an affordability crisis, which again doesn't make sense if supply isn't an issue. So who owns those 250,000 homes? Landlords, second home owners, "investors" etc. If you build more homes, do you stop the same kind of people snapping them up? No.
Out of university I worked for a few years at a housing association and then in local government on regeneration - essentially replacing old stock with new stock. And every time developers would promise x amount of affordable housing, then once the first shovel hit the ground and everything had been approved, they would turn around, say that the profits they projected had gone down due to factors outside their control, and the affordable housing had to be reduced to allow for more houses that could make them money.
You see this everywhere. Every local council will have a housing needs assessment document somewhere, which will almost always say the same thing - we need more affordable homes, one and two bedroom homes for single people and old people, and we don't really need more large family homes. Developers, on the other hand, want to build 3 or 4 bedroom homes because they can be sold to wealthy families or landlords who will rent out the rooms individually and pay of their mortgage for them, as well as make a profit. And successive governments since the coalition years have protected developers over the needs of average people.
So what, if the developer says that the profits they projected had gone down due to factors outside their control? That’s the risk they took, the problem is councils bending over to a small number of large developers.
Better to have a larger number of smaller developers.
Their profit margin was protected by legislation, so if they projected less profit, they were allowed to change the plans.
Ooh, go on…
I mean, there is little more to say. I think it was the Cameron years that brought in that legislation, but essentially if a developer thinks they'll make less money, that's unacceptable, so they can change the original spec of housing stock (say 15% affordable v 85% market changes to 5% affordable v 95% market) and the local council can't really do anything about it. So councils giving planning permission and working with developers essentially just became rubber stamps for whatever developers really wanted to build.
I was involved in a big redevelopment of a pre existing council estate where the plan was to move everyone out, build everyone who currently lived there a new home, and then create new private stock on the same land for a mixed use estate of about 30% market to 70% social housing. Once development started, that percentage changed closer to 50/50, and lots of people who were moved out and promised a new home were permanently displaced from that estate. Because the developer said they needed more market homes to make up the new projected loss. This was around 2016?
That sounds like a mess and not the kind of situation I was thinking of in my original reply to you. Perhaps the council should have made it 100% social housing instead of trying to subsidise it by acting like property developers.
It's what they have to do. Councils were no longer allowed to develop themselves, so had to turn to private developers, and infrastructure spending was linked to development - you weren't allowed to build new GPs or schools or whatever until you had approved development. So, when councils commissioned new projects, they would have to go to private developers who would essentially bid on projects because the local council couldn't do it themselves, but once they had done that the council essentially became in hock to the developer and not the other way around. I remember having officers in regeneration bending backwards to accommodate the changes the developers proposed because otherwise they would lose money needed for infrastructure. And, of course, when parts of council services are also hived off to private companies (like Capita), if you have Capita running the council and Capita also bidding on development... then the incentive is not for quick and good development...
I don't see anything wrong with developers bidding to build on behalf councils, but the council should then be the customer to whom the developer is directly accountable.
Most of these problems come about from structuring things in a way that's too clever by half, so you end up with armies of people on all sides whose sole job is understanding how to play the system.
There are two moving targets: SNP losses and Lib Dem gains. Both are now the central case.
The question is how many seats change hands in each category.
If the SNP lose net 15 seats, they are down to 30. If the Lib Dems gain 16, they are up to 30.
Even leaving aside the "Blue Wall" in the Home Counties, there are quite a few ex Lib Dem seats in Devon and Somerset, plus places like Cheltenham, that look nailed on for the Lib Dems next time. Equally, there are at least 15 seats that look like Labour gains from the SNP, especially in the the greater Glasgow area, and I see no SNP surge against the Tories in the North East and the Borders, so no likely SNP gains.
If counties like Surrey also swing Lib Dem, then Ed Davey will outdo Paddy Ashdown for gains.
I think the odds favour the Lib Dems over the SNP at this point.
In a change from 1997, it looks likely the LDs will win more MPs in Surrey, Oxfordshire and Hertfordshire than Cornwall, Devon and Somerset. The Brexit effect
Which seats do you think are likely to fall to the Lib Dems in each group, young HY?
Guildford, Esher and Walton, Surrey SW, Woking and Mole Valley in Surrey. Wantage and Henley in Oxfordshire and in Hertfordshire the LDs could gain Hitchen and Harpenden to add to their gain of St Albans in 2019
Excellent list (I would say that because it aligns with mine as far as Surrey is concerned).Surrey SW will now be 2 seats so another one as both would be targeted. As an outside shot Surrey Heath. LDs appear very well organised and did spectacularly well in the locals
Surrey Heath is Camberley, Gove’s seat? That must be pretty safe.
Surrey SW is Hunt’s seat - Farnham, Godalming and a lot of expensive countyside. What will it look like after the boundary changes? @NickPalmer ?
I was heavily involved in both seats in the past. I can't give more details without giving my identity. Yes SHeath is Gove's seat. I remember it being 100% Tory council. It was slaughter in the locals. 3 more seats will be added to the LD total on 15/5. It is now 21/6 LD/Tory. It will be 24/6 on 15/5. I don't expect the LDs to win it in the GE but it is possible.
Nick will be more upto date than me on SW Surrey. I understand that both seats will be targets for the LDs. I was significantly involved when we missed SW Surrey by 800 odd votes. After that the local party went into infighting. I had to oversee the expulsion of several members. Sigh. Not something I joined to get involved in.
PS correction 15/6.
Surrey Heath is only 58th on the LD target list and voted Leave (and Gove is a relative Nimby unlike ex Tory councillors in his patch). I expect him to hang on.
Surrey SW is 19th on the LD target list and voted Remain. Hunt is much more at risk whichever of the 2 seats it splits into he ends up in
Slightly to my surprise, Hunt chose Godalming and Ash, where he has a much better-known LibDem opponent (Paul Follows, leader of the local councils). Godalming now only has one Conservative town councillor (even Labour has two), and the "get the Brexit madmen out!" mood is pretty strong. Ash is an unknown quantity to me, though. I agree with HYUFD that Hunt is at risk. He's quite a diligent constituency MP and generally liked, though without exciting strong passions either way. I'd think the swing, whatever it is, will conform to the regional average.
Farnham and Borden now has no likely candidate from any party who stood last time. The Farnham Residents continue to dominate local politics and don't stand in General Elections. Labour did quite well there in the locals, coming a good 2nd where we made an effort, far ahead of the Tories; the LibDems didn't stand in most Farnham wards. I suspect that Labour will be hard to persuade there to fight a low-key campaign.
There are two moving targets: SNP losses and Lib Dem gains. Both are now the central case.
The question is how many seats change hands in each category.
If the SNP lose net 15 seats, they are down to 30. If the Lib Dems gain 16, they are up to 30.
Even leaving aside the "Blue Wall" in the Home Counties, there are quite a few ex Lib Dem seats in Devon and Somerset, plus places like Cheltenham, that look nailed on for the Lib Dems next time. Equally, there are at least 15 seats that look like Labour gains from the SNP, especially in the the greater Glasgow area, and I see no SNP surge against the Tories in the North East and the Borders, so no likely SNP gains.
If counties like Surrey also swing Lib Dem, then Ed Davey will outdo Paddy Ashdown for gains.
I think the odds favour the Lib Dems over the SNP at this point.
In a change from 1997, it looks likely the LDs will win more MPs in Surrey, Oxfordshire and Hertfordshire than Cornwall, Devon and Somerset. The Brexit effect
Which seats do you think are likely to fall to the Lib Dems in each group, young HY?
Guildford, Esher and Walton, Surrey SW, Woking and Mole Valley in Surrey. Wantage and Henley in Oxfordshire and in Hertfordshire the LDs could gain Hitchen and Harpenden to add to their gain of St Albans in 2019
Excellent list (I would say that because it aligns with mine as far as Surrey is concerned).Surrey SW will now be 2 seats so another one as both would be targeted. As an outside shot Surrey Heath. LDs appear very well organised and did spectacularly well in the locals
Surrey Heath is Camberley, Gove’s seat? That must be pretty safe.
Surrey SW is Hunt’s seat - Farnham, Godalming and a lot of expensive countyside. What will it look like after the boundary changes? @NickPalmer ?
I was heavily involved in both seats in the past. I can't give more details without giving my identity. Yes SHeath is Gove's seat. I remember it being 100% Tory council. It was slaughter in the locals. 3 more seats will be added to the LD total on 15/5. It is now 21/6 LD/Tory. It will be 24/6 on 15/5. I don't expect the LDs to win it in the GE but it is possible.
Nick will be more upto date than me on SW Surrey. I understand that both seats will be targets for the LDs. I was significantly involved when we missed SW Surrey by 800 odd votes. After that the local party went into infighting. I had to oversee the expulsion of several members. Sigh. Not something I joined to get involved in.
PS correction 15/6.
Virginia Bottomley was the MP who almost lost in 2001.
The reason she didn't was because the Tories were better organised and she was a better MP than the Tories in Guildford. The LDs ran a joint campaign for SWSurrey and Guildford. SWSurrey was the target. Guildford was the backup. With about a week to go they switched, although both were worked very hard. The Tories in Guildford were useless. In SWSurrey they were good. Sadly they have learnt their lesson. It is often easier to win by taking your opponent by surprise. The SWSurrey Tories knew all about us.
I'm going to repeat my prescription for planning reform (from the point of view of someone who has actually sat on a planning committee and for whom the planning legislation is a constant pain), but this time with explanations:
- Infrastructure must (just) precede housing. [This reduces NIMBYism to a staggering degree. The true NIMBYs use the (real) issue of infrastructure to support their stance and it makes anyone with any reluctance very susceptible]
- Considerably greater enforcement powers should be given to Local Authorities when developers fail to provide promised infrastructure or damage a site in any way. [This further removes a perennial complaint and reduces NIMBYism. You do have to bring people with you, and these two measures do that]
- Local Authorities should present housing plans and the areas nominated be given central funding to carry out “pre-approval” to the level of an LDO (or better): Countryside Officer, Archeaological Search, Drainage (and need for balancing ponds or not), SuDS and any sewerage upgrades, transport implications (and any upgrades needed), Environmental Protection issues, contaminated land searches, air quality surveys etc are carried out at this time and remain valid. Many of the main issues would then be then pre-resolved… and small developers can find it MUCH easier. [The key issues with "zoning" are that a whole bunch of the above aren't actually resolved. And most of them are real issues. Get them out of the way, and new sites are far easier to bring on, and small developers and self-builders find it MUCH more easy. You also get diversity of provision in existing sites]
- Supported self-build made available on these sites. [We are way behind other countries on self-build. This removes 95% of the obstacles]
- Developments to occur in the places laid out by the Local Plans and not speculative developments outside of them. [The last issue to reduce NIMBYism down to its irreducible core, which is far smaller. I was sceptical that many of these were just "excuses," but in my patch and around, I've found very little resistance to proposals that comply with the NDP, are enforced, and with infrastructure available]
- Funding for LAs to build social housing. [They're all too broke to fund it themselves. Housing Benefit gets poured into private rental accommodation and pushes up the price. It bypasses the rational economic motive of drip-feeding development to keep the price up]
- When planning applications are approved, a monthly Land Value Tax to be levied until the housing is built. [Make land-banking cost. LVT is the only known tax with a negative tax wedge (ie it drives more growth than it costs)]
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning.
Build. More. Houses.
Not really.
The main swing to Labour since 2019 is from 40-65 year olds who own their own home with a mortgage after the cost of living rise and Truss and Kwarteng budget disaster. Most under 40 renters voted Labour in 2019 even when the Tories won a landslide nationally.
Yes it might be nice to get more 30 to 40 year olds on the housing ladder and win a few more Tory voters from younger age groups at general elections but as 2019 proved the Tories can win without them. Building more homes in the greenbelt also sees more over 50s vote LD or Independent locally, as the local elections this month proved when the Tories lost control of most of their southern and home counties councils in a NIMBY revolt over Tory councils local plans to allow more homes to be built on green fields near them
The calculation of voting at a GE is different to that a local elections though.
Unless one thinks that the price of the LDs going into coalition with Labour, will be to bend over to the NIMBYs, the LDs having learned their lesson when they bent over on tuition fees last time out?
IMHO, as someone generally preferring of a Conservative government, there’s plenty of evidence that today’s 30 somethings are not getting more conservative as they grow older, because they aren’t buying houses and not having children.
As life expectancy rises, so people don’t inherit until their 50s and 60s, there’s at least as many pensioners worried about their children not being able to buy a house, as there are worried about their children’s inheritance. Which leads to the explosion in reverse mortgages, the next massive mis-selling scandal, and something I’ve just had to talk my own parents out of doing.
Most still own a property by 39 at least with a mortgage, hence 39s and over voted Tory in 2019.
The LDs certainly would block Starmer building on the greenbelt if they were Kingmakers in a hung parliament, they learnt from the tuition fees debacle yes they cannot offend their core vote
I'm in my early 30s and cannot see how I would possibly get a mortgage by 39. And my generation are getting less Tory with age, not moreso.
No they aren't and certainly not less Tory with age, each decade of age the Tory voteshare rose in 2019 exactly as it almost always does.
I'm going to repeat my prescription for planning reform (from the point of view of someone who has actually sat on a planning committee and for whom the planning legislation is a constant pain), but this time with explanations:
- Infrastructure must (just) precede housing. [This reduces NIMBYism to a staggering degree. The true NIMBYs use the (real) issue of infrastructure to support their stance and it makes anyone with any reluctance very susceptible]
- Considerably greater enforcement powers should be given to Local Authorities when developers fail to provide promised infrastructure or damage a site in any way. [This further removes a perennial complaint and reduces NIMBYism. You do have to bring people with you, and these two measures do that]
- Local Authorities should present housing plans and the areas nominated be given central funding to carry out “pre-approval” to the level of an LDO (or better): Countryside Officer, Archeaological Search, Drainage (and need for balancing ponds or not), SuDS and any sewerage upgrades, transport implications (and any upgrades needed), Environmental Protection issues, contaminated land searches, air quality surveys etc are carried out at this time and remain valid. Many of the main issues would then be then pre-resolved… and small developers can find it MUCH easier. [The key issues with "zoning" are that a whole bunch of the above aren't actually resolved. And most of them are real issues. Get them out of the way, and new sites are far easier to bring on, and small developers and self-builders find it MUCH more easy. You also get diversity of provision in existing sites]
- Supported self-build made available on these sites. [We are way behind other countries on self-build. This removes 95% of the obstacles]
- Developments to occur in the places laid out by the Local Plans and not speculative developments outside of them. [The last issue to reduce NIMBYism down to its irreducible core, which is far smaller. I was sceptical that many of these were just "excuses," but in my patch and around, I've found very little resistance to proposals that comply with the NDP, are enforced, and with infrastructure available]
- Funding for LAs to build social housing. [They're all too broke to fund it themselves. Housing Benefit gets poured into private rental accommodation and pushes up the price. It bypasses the rational economic motive of drip-feeding development to keep the price up]
- When planning applications are approved, a monthly Land Value Tax to be levied until the housing is built. [Make land-banking cost. LVT is the only known tax with a negative tax wedge (ie it drives more growth than it costs)]
I'm surprised no-one has mentioned this today. Sunak has a potential path, albeit it's a very narrow one.
He has rather good favourability ratings with 25-40 year olds, particularly those in their 30s, who favour their taxes being lowered over redistribution. If he can solidify the 50-64 year old group and win a chunk of the older Millennials (big ask) then there's possibly a game still on:
The answer for Mr Sunak is obvious, and Labour are making the running on it this morning. Face down the NIMBYs.
Build. More. Houses.
Building more houses isn't really the answer. There are 1/4 million long term empty homes in the UK (figure from Nov 2022). The issue is the housing market is broken and more supply won't help. Housing in this country is broken by hugely inflated prices, an excess of landlordism and a refusal from the government to really deal with that. Along with the fact that wages have not risen with inflation, it means that people of my generation (I was born in '91) have no real chance of getting on the housing ladder unless we have rich parents.
The house my parents moved into in their 20s was £55k; in my 20s it was worth £360k. It is an ex council house. Allowing more private developers (whose profits are protected in legislation) to build more high price houses (which is what they always do) and flog them off to landlords or people who use them as "investments" (see money laundering) will not help my generation.
Taking back unused houses from landlords and investors, bringing back affordable housing as a domain of the state and not housing associations, and defining affordable housing as something people can actually afford (instead of 80% of local market prices) is what is really needed.
Because there are maybe a dozen or so significant causes of our housing problems, people often assume it is only a subset of them. All the things you listed are broken and significant. As is the shortage of new homes being built.
What issues does building new houses solve? It increases supply, but we obviously don't have a real supply issue if over 1/4 million homes are empty. We have an affordability crisis, which again doesn't make sense if supply isn't an issue. So who owns those 250,000 homes? Landlords, second home owners, "investors" etc. If you build more homes, do you stop the same kind of people snapping them up? No.
Out of university I worked for a few years at a housing association and then in local government on regeneration - essentially replacing old stock with new stock. And every time developers would promise x amount of affordable housing, then once the first shovel hit the ground and everything had been approved, they would turn around, say that the profits they projected had gone down due to factors outside their control, and the affordable housing had to be reduced to allow for more houses that could make them money.
You see this everywhere. Every local council will have a housing needs assessment document somewhere, which will almost always say the same thing - we need more affordable homes, one and two bedroom homes for single people and old people, and we don't really need more large family homes. Developers, on the other hand, want to build 3 or 4 bedroom homes because they can be sold to wealthy families or landlords who will rent out the rooms individually and pay of their mortgage for them, as well as make a profit. And successive governments since the coalition years have protected developers over the needs of average people.
Your second sentence is making an incorrect assumption based on 1/4 million being a big number. The rest I broadly concur with.
Across Europe the average empty home rate is about 10%. That's much healthier. We should aspire to 2.5 million empty homes to get to that rate and if we did both rent and property prices would be much, much lower. And rental conditions would be much better, as people wouldn't be required to let neglected properties anymore.
England only having 1% of properties empty is part of the problem. More supply would fix that problem.
In Operational Research, a system running at 99% is generally considered to be bad sign. Unless you have insanely stable demand, it is about to fail at any moment.
Oh, another thing that needs fixing: the rule of "making a meaningful start."
As it stands, you get planning permission issued and it will expire in 12 months/24 months/whatever unless you get building.
Sounds great.
Except all you have to do is either dig a small trench or knock down a building on the site and you have "made a meaningful start." That locks in planning permission for what appears to be forever.
Many developers will scratch a trench and then stop and landbank it or tout it around for years.
There are two moving targets: SNP losses and Lib Dem gains. Both are now the central case.
The question is how many seats change hands in each category.
If the SNP lose net 15 seats, they are down to 30. If the Lib Dems gain 16, they are up to 30.
Even leaving aside the "Blue Wall" in the Home Counties, there are quite a few ex Lib Dem seats in Devon and Somerset, plus places like Cheltenham, that look nailed on for the Lib Dems next time. Equally, there are at least 15 seats that look like Labour gains from the SNP, especially in the the greater Glasgow area, and I see no SNP surge against the Tories in the North East and the Borders, so no likely SNP gains.
If counties like Surrey also swing Lib Dem, then Ed Davey will outdo Paddy Ashdown for gains.
I think the odds favour the Lib Dems over the SNP at this point.
In a change from 1997, it looks likely the LDs will win more MPs in Surrey, Oxfordshire and Hertfordshire than Cornwall, Devon and Somerset. The Brexit effect
Which seats do you think are likely to fall to the Lib Dems in each group, young HY?
Guildford, Esher and Walton, Surrey SW, Woking and Mole Valley in Surrey. Wantage and Henley in Oxfordshire and in Hertfordshire the LDs could gain Hitchen and Harpenden to add to their gain of St Albans in 2019
Excellent list (I would say that because it aligns with mine as far as Surrey is concerned).Surrey SW will now be 2 seats so another one as both would be targeted. As an outside shot Surrey Heath. LDs appear very well organised and did spectacularly well in the locals
Surrey Heath is Camberley, Gove’s seat? That must be pretty safe.
Surrey SW is Hunt’s seat - Farnham, Godalming and a lot of expensive countyside. What will it look like after the boundary changes? @NickPalmer ?
I was heavily involved in both seats in the past. I can't give more details without giving my identity. Yes SHeath is Gove's seat. I remember it being 100% Tory council. It was slaughter in the locals. 3 more seats will be added to the LD total on 15/5. It is now 21/6 LD/Tory. It will be 24/6 on 15/5. I don't expect the LDs to win it in the GE but it is possible.
Nick will be more upto date than me on SW Surrey. I understand that both seats will be targets for the LDs. I was significantly involved when we missed SW Surrey by 800 odd votes. After that the local party went into infighting. I had to oversee the expulsion of several members. Sigh. Not something I joined to get involved in.
PS correction 15/6.
Surrey Heath is only 58th on the LD target list and voted Leave (and Gove is a relative Nimby unlike ex Tory councillors in his patch). I expect him to hang on.
Surrey SW is 19th on the LD target list and voted Remain. Hunt is much more at risk whichever of the 2 seats it splits into he ends up in
Slightly to my surprise, Hunt chose Godalming and Ash, where he has a much better-known LibDem opponent (Paul Follows, leader of the local councils). Godalming now only has one Conservative town councillor (even Labour has two), and the "get the Brexit madmen out!" mood is pretty strong. Ash is an unknown quantity to me, though. I agree with HYUFD that Hunt is at risk. He's quite a diligent constituency MP and generally liked, though without exciting strong passions either way. I'd think the swing, whatever it is, will conform to the regional average.
Farnham and Borden now has no likely candidate from any party who stood last time. The Farnham Residents continue to dominate local politics and don't stand in General Elections. Labour did quite well there in the locals, coming a good 2nd where we made an effort, far ahead of the Tories; the LibDems didn't stand in most Farnham wards. I suspect that Labour will be hard to persuade there to fight a low-key campaign.
Ash used to be one of those neglected areas for campaigning being in Surrey Heath constituency but Guildford borough before the boundary changes. A classic problem. So it regularly returned Tories as the LDs did not put up effective enough campaigns. The Tories lost all 6 of their councillors in these elections, 5 to LDs and 1 indy, so I expect it to be worked well by the LDs in the GE.
Farnham was rock solid LD before the infighting that led to several setting up the residents group. I have no idea if they are the same people now as it is a decade plus on.
I think it's an example of something I said a while back- to get big changes to happen, you can either excite the public by emphasising the bigness, or soothe them by making them sound boring and technical.
This sounds dull, but is probably dead important. After all, the money that goes to owners of arbitrarily rationed developable land is one of the big reasons we can't afford nice things.
It sounds like a very large transfer of power to councils - which is (depending on the details) probably a very good thing.
And possibly makes them more significant players in the housing market than they have been since Thatcher.
Definitely not boring.
All building is good at this point, but how many people aspire to be allocated a council house?
Would this change allow Councils to purchase land cheaply and then sell off the houses under a right to buy? Could be a powerful money spinner for the Council.
I'm quite pleased by this policy announcement.
All serious policies have winners and losers, of course, and governing is just about balancing them appropriately. But non-homeowners have been getting the shitty end of the stick pretty much ever since I can remember.
My view is that we need more housing of all tenures. If all this does is build big council estates, it's still a positive. But (with apologies for rehashing a hobbyhorse of mine) what I'd really like to see if the public sector as private developer - or, rather, as developer of mixed neighbourhoods. One problem with the current model of delivery is that all building impacts the existing population: visual impact, environmental impact, severance, increased traffic, and so on - but developers - quite reasonably - have an interest only in what they sell to their customers; they need planning permission, but that is pretty binary. If councils were able to develop themselves, they could not only provide the housing stock (of all tenures) that they require but also improve the lot of the existing population. And also, as noted above, recycle revenues back into the public purse.
As with any potentially good policy, there are risks and there are downsides: the risk is that the public sector hasn't got the best of records for developing lovely neighbourhoods. But I think we have moved on sufficiently since the 60s that that risk can at least be managed. And the downside is that less profit will go to landowners. I'm trying to think of a way of phrasing this which doesn't sound like 'hooray, the baddies lose out' because that is not what I mean; it's genuinely to be regretted, because profit provides incentive to do things, and also because landowners [sorry - f key has packed in] oten aren't top-hatted baddies but are broadly owned companies in which many pension unds have shares. It's just that in my view loss o proit to devlopers is to be regretted less than a serious shortage o housing.
It's not clear from the reports I've seen, but the council estate redevelopments around here are mixed for sale/for rent/social rent. And in theory, new private developments are meant to have a social housing element to them. Council house monoculture was definitely a mistake made in the 1950s/60s, and Right to Buy did a good thing in mixing things up a bit.
The recent developments that have worked- Poundbury and the like- have had a single mind controlling the masterplan, the mix of what gets built where and growing the community facilities as you go along. They've also not had to worry too much about the price of the land. It would be good to extend that model beyond benevolent aristrocracy.
And the landowners? I'm sure they will still make a tidy sum from converting undeveloped land into developed. Without these changes in the rules, they might not be allowed to build anything. It's just the profits will be less huge but more certain.
More Poundburys is probably the answer.
But one Poundbury is only 2,000 houses, so we need at least 300 new Poundburys every year.
Looking into Poundbury (which I'd only vaguely been aware of prior) is interesting, and I've had a good chuckle reading about how much a good chunk of the architectural profession hated it, while it's been enthusiastically embraced by the people who actually live there.
Is there a profession more out of touch with its end-users, I wonder? Or more egomaniacal?
There are two moving targets: SNP losses and Lib Dem gains. Both are now the central case.
The question is how many seats change hands in each category.
If the SNP lose net 15 seats, they are down to 30. If the Lib Dems gain 16, they are up to 30.
Even leaving aside the "Blue Wall" in the Home Counties, there are quite a few ex Lib Dem seats in Devon and Somerset, plus places like Cheltenham, that look nailed on for the Lib Dems next time. Equally, there are at least 15 seats that look like Labour gains from the SNP, especially in the the greater Glasgow area, and I see no SNP surge against the Tories in the North East and the Borders, so no likely SNP gains.
If counties like Surrey also swing Lib Dem, then Ed Davey will outdo Paddy Ashdown for gains.
I think the odds favour the Lib Dems over the SNP at this point.
In a change from 1997, it looks likely the LDs will win more MPs in Surrey, Oxfordshire and Hertfordshire than Cornwall, Devon and Somerset. The Brexit effect
Which seats do you think are likely to fall to the Lib Dems in each group, young HY?
Guildford, Esher and Walton, Surrey SW, Woking and Mole Valley in Surrey. Wantage and Henley in Oxfordshire and in Hertfordshire the LDs could gain Hitchen and Harpenden to add to their gain of St Albans in 2019
Excellent list (I would say that because it aligns with mine as far as Surrey is concerned).Surrey SW will now be 2 seats so another one as both would be targeted. As an outside shot Surrey Heath. LDs appear very well organised and did spectacularly well in the locals
Surrey Heath is Camberley, Gove’s seat? That must be pretty safe.
Surrey SW is Hunt’s seat - Farnham, Godalming and a lot of expensive countyside. What will it look like after the boundary changes? @NickPalmer ?
I was heavily involved in both seats in the past. I can't give more details without giving my identity. Yes SHeath is Gove's seat. I remember it being 100% Tory council. It was slaughter in the locals. 3 more seats will be added to the LD total on 15/5. It is now 21/6 LD/Tory. It will be 24/6 on 15/5. I don't expect the LDs to win it in the GE but it is possible.
Nick will be more upto date than me on SW Surrey. I understand that both seats will be targets for the LDs. I was significantly involved when we missed SW Surrey by 800 odd votes. After that the local party went into infighting. I had to oversee the expulsion of several members. Sigh. Not something I joined to get involved in.
PS correction 15/6.
Surrey Heath is only 58th on the LD target list and voted Leave (and Gove is a relative Nimby unlike ex Tory councillors in his patch). I expect him to hang on.
Surrey SW is 19th on the LD target list and voted Remain. Hunt is much more at risk whichever of the 2 seats it splits into he ends up in
Slightly to my surprise, Hunt chose Godalming and Ash, where he has a much better-known LibDem opponent (Paul Follows, leader of the local councils). Godalming now only has one Conservative town councillor (even Labour has two), and the "get the Brexit madmen out!" mood is pretty strong. Ash is an unknown quantity to me, though. I agree with HYUFD that Hunt is at risk. He's quite a diligent constituency MP and generally liked, though without exciting strong passions either way. I'd think the swing, whatever it is, will conform to the regional average.
Farnham and Borden now has no likely candidate from any party who stood last time. The Farnham Residents continue to dominate local politics and don't stand in General Elections. Labour did quite well there in the locals, coming a good 2nd where we made an effort, far ahead of the Tories; the LibDems didn't stand in most Farnham wards. I suspect that Labour will be hard to persuade there to fight a low-key campaign.
Ash used to be one of those neglected areas for campaigning being in Surrey Heath constituency but Guildford borough before the boundary changes. A classic problem. So it regularly returned Tories as the LDs did not put up effective enough campaigns. The Tories lost all 6 of their councillors in these elections, 5 to LDs and 1 indy, so I expect it to be worked well by the LDs in the GE.
Farnham was rock solid LD before the infighting that led to several setting up the residents group. I have no idea if they are the same people now as it is a decade plus on.
Also Bordon is up and coming with a lot of new houses and young families. Would expect to be trending Lib Dem
There are two moving targets: SNP losses and Lib Dem gains. Both are now the central case.
The question is how many seats change hands in each category.
If the SNP lose net 15 seats, they are down to 30. If the Lib Dems gain 16, they are up to 30.
Even leaving aside the "Blue Wall" in the Home Counties, there are quite a few ex Lib Dem seats in Devon and Somerset, plus places like Cheltenham, that look nailed on for the Lib Dems next time. Equally, there are at least 15 seats that look like Labour gains from the SNP, especially in the the greater Glasgow area, and I see no SNP surge against the Tories in the North East and the Borders, so no likely SNP gains.
If counties like Surrey also swing Lib Dem, then Ed Davey will outdo Paddy Ashdown for gains.
I think the odds favour the Lib Dems over the SNP at this point.
In a change from 1997, it looks likely the LDs will win more MPs in Surrey, Oxfordshire and Hertfordshire than Cornwall, Devon and Somerset. The Brexit effect
Which seats do you think are likely to fall to the Lib Dems in each group, young HY?
Guildford, Esher and Walton, Surrey SW, Woking and Mole Valley in Surrey. Wantage and Henley in Oxfordshire and in Hertfordshire the LDs could gain Hitchen and Harpenden to add to their gain of St Albans in 2019
Thanks for the reply, young HY. But that answers only half of my question...
How about Devon, Cornwall, Somerset? Only Devon had local elections this year, but the Lib Dems did very well there. Presumably they are also working hard in Cornwall and Somerset.
So as yet, I do not see why you think the Surry-Oxford area would be more fruitful territory for them.
I only see St Ives in Cornwall and Wells in Somerset (plus Taunton Deane if they have a very good night) as possible LD gains there. I don't think the LDs will gain any seats in Devon, it wasn't that great for them in the locals there, the Tories gained Torbay council for instance. Yet in 1997 Torbay went LD
I think you are being a bit pessimistic there, young HY. The Lib Dems have taken control of four of the district councils in Devon. The other rural councils are a bit complicated by the presence of Independents. But in these four councils, the Lib Dem - Conservative balance is
North Devon 22 - 7 Mid Devon 33 - 5 Teignbridge 26 - 9 South Hams 19 - 7
I can see no reason, when Tiverton & Honiton is split, the Lib Dems should not pick up five of the Devon Parliamentary contituencies.
Comments
Bold.
The recent developments that have worked- Poundbury and the like- have had a single mind controlling the masterplan, the mix of what gets built where and growing the community facilities as you go along. They've also not had to worry too much about the price of the land. It would be good to extend that model beyond benevolent aristrocracy.
And the landowners? I'm sure they will still make a tidy sum from converting undeveloped land into developed. Without these changes in the rules, they might not be allowed to build anything. It's just the profits will be less huge but more certain.
Surrey SW is Hunt’s seat - Farnham, Godalming and a lot of expensive countyside. What will it look like after the boundary changes? @NickPalmer ?
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum-36618907
If there is a zoning area for development then anywhere in that zone ought to be able to be developed easily and thus getting consent in that area should not artificially inflate the value of the land with a huge windfall.
But one Poundbury is only 2,000 houses, so we need at least 300 new Poundburys every year.
Is the enormous differential in land price between land with and without planning permission really news to anyone?
How about Devon, Cornwall, Somerset? Only Devon had local elections this year, but the Lib Dems did very well there. Presumably they are also working hard in Cornwall and Somerset.
So as yet, I do not see why you think the Surrey-Oxford area would be more fruitful territory for them.
The RFU looks like it will get its 10 team Premiership, with London Irish facing a 5 pm deadline.
Not sure 3 teams going bust in a season was their preferred route, but hey ho.
Rumours abound about Newcastle too.
"Failure on an epic scale."
Out of university I worked for a few years at a housing association and then in local government on regeneration - essentially replacing old stock with new stock. And every time developers would promise x amount of affordable housing, then once the first shovel hit the ground and everything had been approved, they would turn around, say that the profits they projected had gone down due to factors outside their control, and the affordable housing had to be reduced to allow for more houses that could make them money.
You see this everywhere. Every local council will have a housing needs assessment document somewhere, which will almost always say the same thing - we need more affordable homes, one and two bedroom homes for single people and old people, and we don't really need more large family homes. Developers, on the other hand, want to build 3 or 4 bedroom homes because they can be sold to wealthy families or landlords who will rent out the rooms individually and pay of their mortgage for them, as well as make a profit. And successive governments since the coalition years have protected developers over the needs of average people.
Start with Jeremy Clarkson, and work down to the several million people that watched his farm show.
The LDs certainly would block Starmer building on the greenbelt if they were Kingmakers in a hung parliament, they learnt from the tuition fees debacle yes they cannot offend their core vote
A limited supply of homes means that slum BTL landlords can neglect their property, not pay their own mortgage out of their own money, and still expect to get a healthy income and their mortgage paid by their tenants because there's nowhere else for people to go.
It means people selling houses can demand a high price, because there's nowhere else to go.
More empty homes are needed so anyone asking too much, or offering too little, is told by purchasers/tenants "not interested" and has to shoulder the costs themselves.
A couple of decades ago, that figure was closer to 2/3 of people. That’s the massive gap in 30-something Tory voters right there.
SKS has played a very slow, boring and steady game.
Unless you search every car and person carrying a bag, how do you stop the following - guy brings drone in a bag. Gets a hotel room (say). Unfolds the drone, opens the window. Leaves the do not disturb sign on the door. Leaves, takes a plane out of the country.
X hours later, the drone powers up on a timer, flies out the window on a pre-programmed mission.
Fancier version - shipping container of drones sent to destination X. When a GPS sensor verified the location of the container, hatch ok top pops open, drones launch through it.
This is why drone panic became a thing - Heathrow etc.
This is the current reality, not because of the lack of empty housing, but because of the artificial strength of property ownership versus renters. Homes aren't empty because people don't want to move into them; they are empty because the owner either makes enough money to not need or want to rent it out, isn't using it to rent but rather as an investment, or because the way landlords price rent is insane.
We would have been tempted if there had been a suitable job available! (The lack of such presumably explaining the price)
England only having 1% of properties empty is part of the problem. More supply would fix that problem.
You are under a misapprehension that 1% of properties being empty is a problem. Only 1% of properties being empty is the problem, it means that people who need somewhere to live are short of choice.
We need much, much, much more empty homes, not fewer: https://www.centreforcities.org/blog/why-we-need-more-empty-homes-to-end-the-housing-crisis/
Nick will be more upto date than me on SW Surrey. I understand that both seats will be targets for the LDs. I was significantly involved when we missed SW Surrey by 800 odd votes. After that the local party went into infighting. I had to oversee the expulsion of several members. Sigh. Not something I joined to get involved in.
PS correction 15/6.
What I referred to is housing, which your party isn't interested in building for me. Why not?
And it's the type of house too. I have a quite high-flying friend who works in London and has just bought his first house at the age of 39. He's saved like a bastard and mortgaged himself to the hilt. It's quite depressingly low quality compared to the irst house I bought at the age of 30 on a much more modest income. That means the non-high-flyers are buying even sketchier houses or not buying at all.
In fact, there’s already quite a bit of evidence for this, as retail landlords are now exiting the market at record pace. Unfortunately, that means there’s now a shortage of private rental accommodation, which means that rents are going up.
In an ideal world, house prices start to fall in money terms by about 5% pa, such that individual investment goes elsewhere, replaced by corporate investment, and there’s little negative equity, which can screw up labour markets.
We need to start going the other way. Houses viewed primarily as places to live, more of them built, and a rebalancing towards the social sector; long term, secure, modestly priced rentals for people who can't afford to buy or don't wish to. I think this is where Labour are heading and as well as being the right thing to do it has a chance of being popular (an unusual combination).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/St_Albans_(UK_Parliament_constituency)#Elections_in_the_1990s
At the moment the problem that a would-be buyer of affordable housing faces is more that the type of properties that would normally be affordable - 2-up, 2-down terraces, doer-uppers, etc - are bid up by people who would not normally be interested in that part of the market because there isn't enough supply of more desirable properties.
Remote island living like that is hard work though, everything else costs a fortune to supply.
Surrey SW is 19th on the LD target list and voted Remain. Hunt is much more at risk whichever of the 2 seats it splits into he ends up in
We should still aspire to have almost everyone having their own home, so keep RTB, but having a social sector as a safety net is not a bad thing.
It seems to me the logical solution is to keep RTB but to mandate that Councils reinvest the proceeds of RTB back into new houses on a 1:1 basis.
If a social tenant wants to own their home they should be able to do so. And the Council ensures a new home is built with the proceeds so the supply doesn't change and the aggregate supply of houses increases.
When it was first introduced, the green belt worked well in partnership with planned development of self-sufficient new towns, which ensured that there would continue to be an adequate supply of land for housebuilding. It's the new town element that was been lost.
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-2019-election
https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/how-britain-voted-1997
https://newsyou.info/en/2023/05/zyavilisya-pershi-znimki-ukrainskogo-drone-kamikadze-bober-photo
Which are around $100k.
Better to have a larger number of smaller developers.
Building shitty homes to be "affordable" just means more shit homes. That's not a good thing in the long run.
Though the tide does seem to have changed somewhat. Increasing numbers of affordable homes seem to be not by building crap homes, but by building the same quality home but funding it differently eg shared-equity.
On my new estate you couldn't visually tell looking at them which houses are the 'affordable' ones and which ones aren't as they've all been built to the same spec. The only difference is the affordable ones are shared equity, but the brick work and specs aren't any lower. That is a much better solution than building slummy flats.
The Tories won't win any future election if nobody under the age of 50 now votes for you. Do you not care?
He wants those who are already well off to vote for him and screw anyone else.
Its a losing strategy and it deserves to lose.
The Tories at their best are the party of aspiration. People who have done well vote for them and people who want to do well. The party forgets that, it deserves to lose.
“Susie Green, the former chief executive of Mermaids, who stood down “unexpectedly” last year, has been hiding in plain sight for so long that I sincerely hope we can see her clearly now. How this woman was ever allowed to have so much influence over vulnerable children, never mind medical professionals, is frankly disturbing. She is a former IT consultant with no medical training – unless you count the fact that she won 2016’s Sparkle Diversity Champion of the Year as a specialised qualification. I certainly don’t. The story of how much power she came to have remains shocking.
“The organisation she ran was once not controversial; it was a support group for children and parents of kids with gender issues until she got her hands on it. It became an activist and lobby group receiving hundreds of thousands of pounds in lottery funding and grants and was hired by the Department for Education to provide training on “gender identity” in schools. As with Stonewall, it had huge reach into key institutions and the usual gormless celebrity support.
“We now find that Green herself had direct influence on policy at the gender identity development service (GIDS) at the Tavistock. After being told that the Tavistock did not have any records of meeting with Green, when threatened by court action, miraculously it found 300 pages of them.
“They reveal that Green spoke directly to the director Dr Polly Carmichael, had advisory roles on two studies and – most scandalous of all – could refer children for treatment at the clinic even when their own GPs had repeatedly advised against it. The Cass Review, remember, effectively shut down GIDS as it was not fit for purpose. ”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/columnists/2023/05/30/the-cult-of-gender-ideology-finally-crumbling/
I was involved in a big redevelopment of a pre existing council estate where the plan was to move everyone out, build everyone who currently lived there a new home, and then create new private stock on the same land for a mixed use estate of about 30% market to 70% social housing. Once development started, that percentage changed closer to 50/50, and lots of people who were moved out and promised a new home were permanently displaced from that estate. Because the developer said they needed more market homes to make up the new projected loss. This was around 2016?
*average speed, based on transporting a boatload of hard drives as required once per week
“Eighty Albanian migrants have been sentenced to 130 years in jail in the first four months of this year alone, as the scale of the crime wave from the surge in Channel crossings can be revealed for the first time.
They have been convicted of murder, manslaughter, rape, violent disorder, firearms offences, kidnap, causing death by dangerous driving, burglary and producing cannabis in gang-run farms in houses and disused industrial sites.”
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/05/29/channel-migrants-albania-crime-wave-numbers-jailed/
“Albanians are one in six, 16 per cent, of all jail inmates despite representing fewer than 0.05 per cent of the UK population.”
*replace as appropriate with political persuasion of choice...
And the Cass review said GIDS was not fit for purpose not because it referred too many young people to treatment, but because it was too slow and centralised, hence why the new model is looking at regional hubs rather than treatment centralised in London. Indeed, the current interim report says that children suffering "gender incongruence or dysphoria must receive the same standards of clinical care, assessment and treatment as every other child or young person accessing health services" including "timely and appropriate care for children and young people needing support around their gender identity." Considering current waiting lists for trans children, and trans adults, currently outstrip cis waiting lists, that can only be read to me as needing to speed up healthcare, not slow it down.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=auP1nbrZ4Mo
Most of these problems come about from structuring things in a way that's too clever by half, so you end up with armies of people on all sides whose sole job is understanding how to play the system.
Farnham and Borden now has no likely candidate from any party who stood last time. The Farnham Residents continue to dominate local politics and don't stand in General Elections. Labour did quite well there in the locals, coming a good 2nd where we made an effort, far ahead of the Tories; the LibDems didn't stand in most Farnham wards. I suspect that Labour will be hard to persuade there to fight a low-key campaign.
- Infrastructure must (just) precede housing. [This reduces NIMBYism to a staggering degree. The true NIMBYs use the (real) issue of infrastructure to support their stance and it makes anyone with any reluctance very susceptible]
- Considerably greater enforcement powers should be given to Local Authorities when developers fail to provide promised infrastructure or damage a site in any way. [This further removes a perennial complaint and reduces NIMBYism. You do have to bring people with you, and these two measures do that]
- Local Authorities should present housing plans and the areas nominated be given central funding to carry out “pre-approval” to the level of an LDO (or better): Countryside Officer, Archeaological Search, Drainage (and need for balancing ponds or not), SuDS and any sewerage upgrades, transport implications (and any upgrades needed), Environmental Protection issues, contaminated land searches, air quality surveys etc are carried out at this time and remain valid. Many of the main issues would then be then pre-resolved… and small developers can find it MUCH easier. [The key issues with "zoning" are that a whole bunch of the above aren't actually resolved. And most of them are real issues. Get them out of the way, and new sites are far easier to bring on, and small developers and self-builders find it MUCH more easy. You also get diversity of provision in existing sites]
- Supported self-build made available on these sites. [We are way behind other countries on self-build. This removes 95% of the obstacles]
- Developments to occur in the places laid out by the Local Plans and not speculative developments outside of them. [The last issue to reduce NIMBYism down to its irreducible core, which is far smaller. I was sceptical that many of these were just "excuses," but in my patch and around, I've found very little resistance to proposals that comply with the NDP, are enforced, and with infrastructure available]
- Funding for LAs to build social housing. [They're all too broke to fund it themselves. Housing Benefit gets poured into private rental accommodation and pushes up the price. It bypasses the rational economic motive of drip-feeding development to keep the price up]
- When planning applications are approved, a monthly Land Value Tax to be levied until the housing is built. [Make land-banking cost. LVT is the only known tax with a negative tax wedge (ie it drives more growth than it costs)]
And as his later tweet shows (https://twitter.com/jburnmurdoch/status/1608759025084297216?s=20), millennial homeowners are still significantly more left-leaning than their X/Boomer/Silent counterparts at the same age.
As it stands, you get planning permission issued and it will expire in 12 months/24 months/whatever unless you get building.
Sounds great.
Except all you have to do is either dig a small trench or knock down a building on the site and you have "made a meaningful start." That locks in planning permission for what appears to be forever.
Many developers will scratch a trench and then stop and landbank it or tout it around for years.
Even most under 50s oppose allowing more building on the greenbelt.
https://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/survey-results/daily/2023/05/17/d5ba5/1
Technically the Tories could win most seats, albeit not a majority even if they lose most voters under 50 as the median voter is now aged 50
Farnham was rock solid LD before the infighting that led to several setting up the residents group. I have no idea if they are the same people now as it is a decade plus on.
Is there a profession more out of touch with its end-users, I wonder? Or more egomaniacal?
North Devon 22 - 7
Mid Devon 33 - 5
Teignbridge 26 - 9
South Hams 19 - 7
I can see no reason, when Tiverton & Honiton is split, the Lib Dems should not pick up five of the Devon Parliamentary contituencies.