Speaking of photos here’s one. Do we have any horticulturalists on the site? Or er palm/cactusologists?
THIS is just growing, fervently, in my hotel garden, amongst the green iguanas and the Andean squirrels
What is it? All I know is that it is quite magnificent
I’m gonna see if an AI app can identify it. An interesting use-case
A yucca?
A Traveller’s Palm it seems. Not a true palm tree but very distinctive. It grows in one plane making it kind of 2D
There are 2 examples here in my hotel garden
That Advocaat extinguisher looks nasty.
I’m staying at entirely the wrong hotel. It has no pool and no aircon, and it is “feels like” 44C here in Palomino. Excruciatingly hot (hence the chilled white wine as coolant and anaesthetic)
I got carried away by the 9.3 rating on booking.com next to a reasonable price - usually a great sign. However I now realise that rating is given by all the eager young people who come here to do Buddhist chanting and endless daily yoga sessions. I’m in a kind of Woke Colombian Ashram
The girls are pretty, tanned and lithe, but oddly unsexy. All that Woke yoga. The men are hermaphrodites with good teeth
They speak Globish, fractured basic English “ok guys now breakfast”
I like the squirrels and the iguanas. I shall move on tomorrow
I quite like the voyage of discovery that is involved in nearly very nice hotels. Generally its no problem, but it can be odd. Monkeys ransacking the room in Zimbabwe, lots of small lizards lurking everywhere in Laos, a room in Naples that hadn't bothered to be rain proof, and a place in Vietnam where the rattle of cockroaches was quite bad (that one I really objected to, the rest were fine-ish)
I've not been to Colombia other than Bogata airport for a brief stop. I genuinely think that the most beautiful girl ever to exist was a stewardess on that flight though. More amazing even than Salma Hayek. I was struck dumb, obviously. (I can deal with 'quite stunning', but the categories beyond that cause me to trip over my tongue)
Colombian girls are on average rather pretty, possibly the prettiest girls I’ve seen in Latin America. There isn’t much obesity - yet - they are a huge genetic mix, all shades of black to brown to white, it seems to work. They have really good teeth, no idea why, is Colombia famed for its dentists?
lol anyhow it it quite noticeable. A pretty and mammacious girl will attend you in a shop and then flash this dazzling smile, it is most becoming, Shakira is Colombian for a reason
And they all look healthy. The food may be banal but it is healthy. Tons of fruit all the time
NB
USA (GDP per capita, $70,000), life expectancy: 77
Colombia (GDP per capita, $7,000), life expectancy: 78
From the FT. It is not just we are not building enough homes. We are not building enough where they are needed. Some places, as Rochdale mentioned with Stockton, are building a fair quantity.
The chances of a General Election on May 2nd are below 50% now, in my opinion. 🫠
If polling day were to be May 2, with dissolution on March 26, the general election would have to be announced 21 or 22. Under electoral law, Parliament has to be dissolved – in other words, come to an end – 25 working days before a general election is held. In practice, Parliament would need a few days’ notice of dissolution to allow MPs and peers to decide which – if any – remaining pieces of non-controversial legislation should be approved. It has also become a tradition for the House of Commons to hold a “valedictory debate” just before a dissolution, during which MPs who are standing down from Parliament are given time to make a farewell speech. This means that if the election were to be on May 2, dissolution must take place no later than March 26, Sunak would need to call the election several days before dissolution took place.
What an optimistic economic backdrop to fight an April general election campaign. Looking at how much better todays PMQs was for Rishi, armed with good news of inflation and interest rate falls to come, and still dining out on boat crossings down by a third - all those arguments will be removed from him in an Autumn campaign, where high mortgages high interests rates, rising inflation and energy costs and the record boat crossings are going to be used to flatten him.
If you are not choosing a date based on forecasts for mood music of your campaign, what are you choosing it on 🤷♀️
You are right. A more precise figure is, and always has been, approximately Zero%.
What makes you sure it’s always been approximately zero? Where’s your evidence?
The polls and past experience.
No PM will call an election when they are 20% behind the polls unless they run out of time.
All the other signs have made it clear May was a non starter as the Tories weren't buying billboard spaces and ads commensurate with a May general election.
no PM will call election when 20% behind? They won’t let it time out on December 17th, hold campaign over holidays, it will give them even worse result than they deserve - so they will call and hold an election before Dec 17th, even if 20% behind.
Billboards are so last century - check out how much Conservative Party has spent on social media advertising since December. 😦
They are not 20 points behind anyway, they are only 7 away. It’s only 8% they need to claw back, and that certainly feels very doable in April to me, as I explained just now.
It’s like you are living in the past, giving this bespoke 21st century situation no thought or analysis 🫣
One of us was right about a May election and one of us wrong about a May election.
@MarqueeMark it wouldn't surprise me if Totnes became a three-way marginal
Strictly speaking there isn’t going to be a Totnes constituency any more. It is being subsumed by South Devon. But Electoral Calculus agrees with you: 37% Cons, 32% Lab, 31% LibDem.
I’m in the neighbouring Newton Abbot constituency and under the boundary changes it is a lot more marginal. A quite plausible Lab GAIN. I’d be delighted to see Anne Morris get the boot.
Clearly a seat that needs a steer on tactical voting.
I don’t think the outcome of the general election is going to be determined by tactical voting. Tories lose, Labour win. More or less tactical voting may effect the majority, but polling doesn’t suggest that tactics voting is critical.
The extent of tactical voting is important only for those of us betting on LibDem seat numbers.
He was fun and interesting. Sure he was provocative and right wing and possibly pro-Putin (tho quite subtle about it) - I can see why his views might have outraged people, but then @148grss views are outrageous to me, but I don’t want him cancelled, quite the opposite
However I expect you have a solid moderators’ reason for cancelling him, and if so fair enuff
I didn't ban him, so I don't know.
I just want reassurance people aren’t being banned for provocative opinions.
You must be new here.
That reassurance doesn't exist. As @RodCrosby , @isam and @MrEd can testify, having provocative opinions is pretty much the only thing that gets you reliably banned. PB operates on pub rules: if it pisses @OGH or his helpers off you get thrown out. If you want to complain that you are being cancelled I understand that the Spectator pays complainants to complain about viscious[1] things on Twitter.
[1] Yes I know it's "vicious". But Rob Liddle is really oily and oozes dribble, so, y'know...
I could point out many seem to feel my opinions are provocative yet I am still here
Provocative but always interesting and that is coming from a LD whom I know you hate.
I don't hate lib dems I merely said it was the only party I would vote to keep out, not the same thing
@MarqueeMark it wouldn't surprise me if Totnes became a three-way marginal
Strictly speaking there isn’t going to be a Totnes constituency any more. It is being subsumed by South Devon. But Electoral Calculus agrees with you: 37% Cons, 32% Lab, 31% LibDem.
I’m in the neighbouring Newton Abbot constituency and under the boundary changes it is a lot more marginal. A quite plausible Lab GAIN. I’d be delighted to see Anne Morris get the boot.
Clearly a seat that needs a steer on tactical voting.
I don’t think the outcome of the general election is going to be determined by tactical voting. Tories lose, Labour win. More or less tactical voting may effect the majority, but polling doesn’t suggest that tactics voting is critical.
The extent of tactical voting is important only for those of us betting on LibDem seat numbers.
He was fun and interesting. Sure he was provocative and right wing and possibly pro-Putin (tho quite subtle about it) - I can see why his views might have outraged people, but then @148grss views are outrageous to me, but I don’t want him cancelled, quite the opposite
However I expect you have a solid moderators’ reason for cancelling him, and if so fair enuff
I didn't ban him, so I don't know.
I just want reassurance people aren’t being banned for provocative opinions.
You must be new here.
That reassurance doesn't exist. As @RodCrosby , @isam and @MrEd can testify, having provocative opinions is pretty much the only thing that gets you reliably banned. PB operates on pub rules: if it pisses @OGH or his helpers off you get thrown out. If you want to complain that you are being cancelled I understand that the Spectator pays complainants to complain about viscious[1] things on Twitter.
[1] Yes I know it's "vicious". But Rob Liddle is really oily and oozes dribble, so, y'know...
I could point out many seem to feel my opinions are provocative yet I am still here
Provocative but always interesting and that is coming from a LD whom I know you hate.
I don't hate lib dems I merely said it was the only party I would vote to keep out, not the same thing
Badly worded by me. I always get the impression we would get on. I know I could never convert you, but I feel I could make you less anti.
From the FT. It is not just we are not building enough homes. We are not building enough where they are needed. Some places, as Rochdale mentioned with Stockton, are building a fair quantity.
Fieldwork: 15th to 18th March 2024 · Sample: 2,072 adults in Great Britain
If there were a second referendum on British membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Re-join: 54% (+3) Stay out: 39% (-4)
(Changes from 8th to 11th March 2024)
That’s a striking shift
I don’t like it but I won’t deny it. I wonder if Starmer will be tempted. Let’s say he gets a 150 seat majority and the polls are showing 65/35 Rejoin - a sure fire win
He’s an ardent Remoaner. He will have Remoaner friends saying “We will never get this chance again, a massive majority and the polls totally in favour. Do it NOW”
He's also a lawyer. So he won't ask the question (out loud, anyway) unless/until he is certain what the answer is going to be.
If nothing else, he saw what happened to Dave.
He’s also 61. He’s an older man in a bit of a hurry
I know the feeling
His first term (which might be his only term) will be all about managerial and incremental changes, our problems are so deep they won’t be solved overnight
If he wants a definite legacy then this would be it: the guy who reversed the strategic error of Brexit (as Remoaners see it), the guy who took us back in
If he doesn’t go for Actual Rejoin then the pressure on him to at least rejoin the SM/CU will be intense
The chances of a General Election on May 2nd are below 50% now, in my opinion. 🫠
If polling day were to be May 2, with dissolution on March 26, the general election would have to be announced 21 or 22. Under electoral law, Parliament has to be dissolved – in other words, come to an end – 25 working days before a general election is held. In practice, Parliament would need a few days’ notice of dissolution to allow MPs and peers to decide which – if any – remaining pieces of non-controversial legislation should be approved. It has also become a tradition for the House of Commons to hold a “valedictory debate” just before a dissolution, during which MPs who are standing down from Parliament are given time to make a farewell speech. This means that if the election were to be on May 2, dissolution must take place no later than March 26, Sunak would need to call the election several days before dissolution took place.
What an optimistic economic backdrop to fight an April general election campaign. Looking at how much better todays PMQs was for Rishi, armed with good news of inflation and interest rate falls to come, and still dining out on boat crossings down by a third - all those arguments will be removed from him in an Autumn campaign, where high mortgages high interests rates, rising inflation and energy costs and the record boat crossings are going to be used to flatten him.
If you are not choosing a date based on forecasts for mood music of your campaign, what are you choosing it on 🤷♀️
You are right. A more precise figure is, and always has been, approximately Zero%.
What makes you sure it’s always been approximately zero? Where’s your evidence?
The polls and past experience.
No PM will call an election when they are 20% behind the polls unless they run out of time.
All the other signs have made it clear May was a non starter as the Tories weren't buying billboard spaces and ads commensurate with a May general election.
no PM will call election when 20% behind? They won’t let it time out on December 17th, hold campaign over holidays, it will give them even worse result than they deserve - so they will call and hold an election before Dec 17th, even if 20% behind.
Billboards are so last century - check out how much Conservative Party has spent on social media advertising since December. 😦
They are not 20 points behind anyway, they are only 7 away. It’s only 8% they need to claw back, and that certainly feels very doable in April to me, as I explained just now.
It’s like you are living in the past, giving this bespoke 21st century situation no thought or analysis 🫣
One of us was right about a May election and one of us wrong about a May election.
My past looking analysis was right.
🙂↔️
Only according to the decision making of Rishi Sunak are you right.
Not according to If you are not choosing a date based on forecasts for mood music of your campaign, what are you choosing it on 🤷♀️
You’re basically telling me I’m wrong, because basically they didn’t have a choice for May 2nd? And that basically boils down to being too far behind in the polls?
I am not wrong. They are not that far behind as polls you are looking at are saying. They can get the 8% they need in April.
@MarqueeMark it wouldn't surprise me if Totnes became a three-way marginal
Strictly speaking there isn’t going to be a Totnes constituency any more. It is being subsumed by South Devon. But Electoral Calculus agrees with you: 37% Cons, 32% Lab, 31% LibDem.
I’m in the neighbouring Newton Abbot constituency and under the boundary changes it is a lot more marginal. A quite plausible Lab GAIN. I’d be delighted to see Anne Morris get the boot.
Clearly a seat that needs a steer on tactical voting.
I don’t think the outcome of the general election is going to be determined by tactical voting. Tories lose, Labour win. More or less tactical voting may effect the majority, but polling doesn’t suggest that tactics voting is critical.
The extent of tactical voting is important only for those of us betting on LibDem seat numbers.
He was fun and interesting. Sure he was provocative and right wing and possibly pro-Putin (tho quite subtle about it) - I can see why his views might have outraged people, but then @148grss views are outrageous to me, but I don’t want him cancelled, quite the opposite
However I expect you have a solid moderators’ reason for cancelling him, and if so fair enuff
I didn't ban him, so I don't know.
I just want reassurance people aren’t being banned for provocative opinions.
You must be new here.
That reassurance doesn't exist. As @RodCrosby , @isam and @MrEd can testify, having provocative opinions is pretty much the only thing that gets you reliably banned. PB operates on pub rules: if it pisses @OGH or his helpers off you get thrown out. If you want to complain that you are being cancelled I understand that the Spectator pays complainants to complain about viscious[1] things on Twitter.
[1] Yes I know it's "vicious". But Rob Liddle is really oily and oozes dribble, so, y'know...
I could point out many seem to feel my opinions are provocative yet I am still here
Provocative but always interesting and that is coming from a LD whom I know you hate.
I don't hate lib dems I merely said it was the only party I would vote to keep out, not the same thing
Badly worded by me. I always get the impression we would get on. I know I could never convert you, but I feel I could make you less anti.
My problem with your party is merely one of honesty, your candidates come across as we will say what we need to get elected and then do what we want when elected. All politicians do it however your party seems completely fine with candidates giving different messages in different constituencies as long as they get voted in. At least other parties get there candidates to mostly sell a common view.
From the FT. It is not just we are not building enough homes. We are not building enough where they are needed. Some places, as Rochdale mentioned with Stockton, are building a fair quantity.
The chances of a General Election on May 2nd are below 50% now, in my opinion. 🫠
If polling day were to be May 2, with dissolution on March 26, the general election would have to be announced 21 or 22. Under electoral law, Parliament has to be dissolved – in other words, come to an end – 25 working days before a general election is held. In practice, Parliament would need a few days’ notice of dissolution to allow MPs and peers to decide which – if any – remaining pieces of non-controversial legislation should be approved. It has also become a tradition for the House of Commons to hold a “valedictory debate” just before a dissolution, during which MPs who are standing down from Parliament are given time to make a farewell speech. This means that if the election were to be on May 2, dissolution must take place no later than March 26, Sunak would need to call the election several days before dissolution took place.
What an optimistic economic backdrop to fight an April general election campaign. Looking at how much better todays PMQs was for Rishi, armed with good news of inflation and interest rate falls to come, and still dining out on boat crossings down by a third - all those arguments will be removed from him in an Autumn campaign, where high mortgages high interests rates, rising inflation and energy costs and the record boat crossings are going to be used to flatten him.
If you are not choosing a date based on forecasts for mood music of your campaign, what are you choosing it on 🤷♀️
You are right. A more precise figure is, and always has been, approximately Zero%.
What makes you sure it’s always been approximately zero? Where’s your evidence?
The polls and past experience.
No PM will call an election when they are 20% behind the polls unless they run out of time.
All the other signs have made it clear May was a non starter as the Tories weren't buying billboard spaces and ads commensurate with a May general election.
no PM will call election when 20% behind? They won’t let it time out on December 17th, hold campaign over holidays, it will give them even worse result than they deserve - so they will call and hold an election before Dec 17th, even if 20% behind.
Billboards are so last century - check out how much Conservative Party has spent on social media advertising since December. 😦
They are not 20 points behind anyway, they are only 7 away. It’s only 8% they need to claw back, and that certainly feels very doable in April to me, as I explained just now.
It’s like you are living in the past, giving this bespoke 21st century situation no thought or analysis 🫣
One of us was right about a May election and one of us wrong about a May election.
My past looking analysis was right.
🙂↔️
Only according to the decision making of Rishi Sunak are you right.
Not according to If you are not choosing a date based on forecasts for mood music of your campaign, what are you choosing it on 🤷♀️
You’re basically telling me I’m wrong, because basically they didn’t have a choice for May 2nd? And that basically boils down to being too far behind in the polls?
I am not wrong. They are not that far behind as polls you are looking at are saying. They can get the 8% they need in April.
They did have a choice.
My analysis was delicious 🤤
You probably are wrong, but when the analysis is delicious nobody's going to argue
And let's not forget our housing crisis isn't just about high prices and declining home ownership. Another big problem is our neglect of the public rental sector. Thatcher.
Really? HA homes tend to be considerably better quality than the council estates I remember from my childhood.
Now I'm not a fan of the way the state props up the bottom end of the private rented sector in a way which benefits neither tenant not taxpayer, but that's a different issue.
The chances of a General Election on May 2nd are below 50% now, in my opinion. 🫠
If polling day were to be May 2, with dissolution on March 26, the general election would have to be announced 21 or 22. Under electoral law, Parliament has to be dissolved – in other words, come to an end – 25 working days before a general election is held. In practice, Parliament would need a few days’ notice of dissolution to allow MPs and peers to decide which – if any – remaining pieces of non-controversial legislation should be approved. It has also become a tradition for the House of Commons to hold a “valedictory debate” just before a dissolution, during which MPs who are standing down from Parliament are given time to make a farewell speech. This means that if the election were to be on May 2, dissolution must take place no later than March 26, Sunak would need to call the election several days before dissolution took place.
What an optimistic economic backdrop to fight an April general election campaign. Looking at how much better todays PMQs was for Rishi, armed with good news of inflation and interest rate falls to come, and still dining out on boat crossings down by a third - all those arguments will be removed from him in an Autumn campaign, where high mortgages high interests rates, rising inflation and energy costs and the record boat crossings are going to be used to flatten him.
If you are not choosing a date based on forecasts for mood music of your campaign, what are you choosing it on 🤷♀️
You are right. A more precise figure is, and always has been, approximately Zero%.
What makes you sure it’s always been approximately zero? Where’s your evidence?
The polls and past experience.
No PM will call an election when they are 20% behind the polls unless they run out of time.
All the other signs have made it clear May was a non starter as the Tories weren't buying billboard spaces and ads commensurate with a May general election.
no PM will call election when 20% behind? They won’t let it time out on December 17th, hold campaign over holidays, it will give them even worse result than they deserve - so they will call and hold an election before Dec 17th, even if 20% behind.
Billboards are so last century - check out how much Conservative Party has spent on social media advertising since December. 😦
They are not 20 points behind anyway, they are only 7 away. It’s only 8% they need to claw back, and that certainly feels very doable in April to me, as I explained just now.
It’s like you are living in the past, giving this bespoke 21st century situation no thought or analysis 🫣
One of us was right about a May election and one of us wrong about a May election.
My past looking analysis was right.
🙂↔️
Only according to the decision making of Rishi Sunak are you right.
Not according to If you are not choosing a date based on forecasts for mood music of your campaign, what are you choosing it on 🤷♀️
You’re basically telling me I’m wrong, because basically they didn’t have a choice for May 2nd? And that basically boils down to being too far behind in the polls?
I am not wrong. They are not that far behind as polls you are looking at are saying. They can get the 8% they need in April.
They did have a choice.
My analysis was delicious 🤤
As delicious as your analysis on the Privileges Committee clearing Boris Johnson.
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Yes, it is certainly true that contributions are often insufficient, done poorly, or weaseled out of, I wouldn't deny that is an issue. But the point was about people would be less likely to object if infrastructure was ensured, and I would say it would certainly reduce the objections, but it would definitely not eliminate them, since as I stated people object for reasons of principle irrespective of infrastructure, or they object to infrastructure as well (for instance in rare occasions when government is going to provide grants to put in relief roads etc before housing is built).
A cookie-croissant that sent dessert lovers wild online is now available to buy in London.
The 'crookie' is a plain butter croissant filled with cookie dough and chocolate chips that was first invented by pâtissier Stéphane Louvard in October 2022.
From the FT. It is not just we are not building enough homes. We are not building enough where they are needed. Some places, as Rochdale mentioned with Stockton, are building a fair quantity.
Could it be that we've already developed London and the South East as much as it can be?
No. And that's not even taking a pro-expansion position really, since we're always hearing about all the available brownfield land in that region and others for a start.
We've got a bit of a perfect storm where policies are often obstructive (that is partly the point, but it's also supposed to assist in building the right way too), local decision makers are incentivised to say no politically where they can, and developers are infamous for dodging every obligation they can.
Speaking of photos here’s one. Do we have any horticulturalists on the site? Or er palm/cactusologists?
THIS is just growing, fervently, in my hotel garden, amongst the green iguanas and the Andean squirrels
What is it? All I know is that it is quite magnificent
I’m gonna see if an AI app can identify it. An interesting use-case
A yucca?
A Traveller’s Palm it seems. Not a true palm tree but very distinctive. It grows in one plane making it kind of 2D
There are 2 examples here in my hotel garden
That Advocaat extinguisher looks nasty.
I’m staying at entirely the wrong hotel. It has no pool and no aircon, and it is “feels like” 44C here in Palomino. Excruciatingly hot (hence the chilled white wine as coolant and anaesthetic)
I got carried away by the 9.3 rating on booking.com next to a reasonable price - usually a great sign. However I now realise that rating is given by all the eager young people who come here to do Buddhist chanting and endless daily yoga sessions. I’m in a kind of Woke Colombian Ashram
The girls are pretty, tanned and lithe, but oddly unsexy. All that Woke yoga. The men are hermaphrodites with good teeth
They speak Globish, fractured basic English “ok guys now breakfast”
I like the squirrels and the iguanas. I shall move on tomorrow
“Woke yoga”
This suggests the existence of unWoke Yoga.
Hmmm
Viking Yoga perhaps - “there is no fucking about when we say Corpse Pose”
Russian Window Yoga….
No, there really is unwoke yoga
My young and lovely ex wife, with her weird mix of UKIP-Buddhist TERFy anti-communism, kept trying to sell it to me, as she hates The Wokeness
I quite like the sound of that.
In a similar vein, some friends of mine* used to refer to tge yoga class they used to frequent - notable for the number of attractive young women who would attend - as a Lech'n'Stretch.
*They were lesbians, so by the rules of the 2020s I think this is still ok.
A cookie-croissant that sent dessert lovers wild online is now available to buy in London.
The 'crookie' is a plain butter croissant filled with cookie dough and chocolate chips that was first invented by pâtissier Stéphane Louvard in October 2022.
And let's not forget our housing crisis isn't just about high prices and declining home ownership. Another big problem is our neglect of the public rental sector. Thatcher.
Really? HA homes tend to be considerably better quality than the council estates I remember from my childhood.
Now I'm not a fan of the way the state props up the bottom end of the private rented sector in a way which benefits neither tenant not taxpayer, but that's a different issue.
Yes, the sector has withered away since the glory days.
Fieldwork: 15th to 18th March 2024 · Sample: 2,072 adults in Great Britain
If there were a second referendum on British membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Re-join: 54% (+3) Stay out: 39% (-4)
(Changes from 8th to 11th March 2024)
That’s a striking shift
I don’t like it but I won’t deny it. I wonder if Starmer will be tempted. Let’s say he gets a 150 seat majority and the polls are showing 65/35 Rejoin - a sure fire win
He’s an ardent Remoaner. He will have Remoaner friends saying “We will never get this chance again, a massive majority and the polls totally in favour. Do it NOW”
He's also a lawyer. So he won't ask the question (out loud, anyway) unless/until he is certain what the answer is going to be.
If nothing else, he saw what happened to Dave.
He’s also 61. He’s an older man in a bit of a hurry
I know the feeling
His first term (which might be his only term) will be all about managerial and incremental changes, our problems are so deep they won’t be solved overnight
If he wants a definite legacy then this would be it: the guy who reversed the strategic error of Brexit (as Remoaners see it), the guy who took us back in
If he doesn’t go for Actual Rejoin then the pressure on him to at least rejoin the SM/CU will be intense
Term 1 - realignment Term 2 - renegotiation Term 3 - rejoin
If things go well he can cut short term 2 and make the GE for term 3 a pseudo-referendum on rejoin.
Dig deep treasury, for the WASPI women. PHSO due to report tomorrow. WASPI women already threatening further court action if they are not happy with the outcome.
Looks like blanket ‘compensation’ won’t happen. So what has the fight been for and where does it go ?
If you want to live in an Islamic theocracy go live in Iran or Saudi
Yep. If we'd have let that go it would have been sharia law at the Old Bailey by Christmas. Except there wouldn't be a Christmas.
How far do you reckon we'd get if we suggested NR put some atheist messaging up in the name of inclusion? Yet surely atheists still outnumber Muslims.
They should put up The Life of Brian quotes.
Tricky to define the line.
There are the thoughts for the day that you get on TfL whiteboards when there aren't emergency delays. They're harmless in a "live laugh love" sort of way and add to the niceness of the nation.
The Kings Cross messaging probably did cross a line, even if it's not entirely clear where... what would make it acceptable, or is that an impossibility?
And what about the organisations that buy advertising hoardings at stations to put Bible quotes on?
If you want to live in an Islamic theocracy go live in Iran or Saudi
Yep. If we'd have let that go it would have been sharia law at the Old Bailey by Christmas. Except there wouldn't be a Christmas.
How far do you reckon we'd get if we suggested NR put some atheist messaging up in the name of inclusion? Yet surely atheists still outnumber Muslims.
They should put up The Life of Brian quotes.
Very good. "He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy." " Yes, we're all individuals (I'm not)". I wonder if there is a Python day we could use for the purposes? A quick Google only gives me tips on coding.
I find myself in the not unusual position of disagreeing not only with the header but with most of the comments on the topic which seem incredibly one dimensional.
"Housing" isn't just a question of building places to live - it is much more nuanced. What do you build? Where do you build it? Who do you build it for? There are a whole gamut of questions.
The much vilified "NIMBY" is also caricatured - very few are totally anti development. What most want is development which conforms to the agreed local plan in terms of density and type. Developers maximise applications to challenge local plans and obviously accentuate their profits. Currently, they can't sell the houses and flats they are building so either have to leave them empty or drop the prices.
Other issues include the ability of the construction industry and its constituent parts to respond to a sudden push in building plans - it's not just houses that are being built at any given time. There are local authorities looking to build specialist accommodation for vulnerable children and adults, there are doubtless major construction projects across the whole economy. Are there enough contractors, sub contractors and suppliers (especially in the specialist trades) to support a major housebuilding programme?
We've also heard about impacts on the electricity, sewage and transport infrastructures of new developments and increasing pressures on infrastructures aren't always understood.
Here, for example, is another example of incoherent public policy:
More houses for more people means more rubbish created and that has to be dealt with. There is a huge problem with fly tipping across many areas and that needs to be addressed. Hunt's response in the Budget was to stick a further 20% on the Landfill Tax which will only encourage more illegal dumping of rubbish.
If you bring more people into an area, fine, but as the Panorama programme at the weekend demonstrated, if you increase an area's population by 15%, that has impact on service provision such as in Special Needs Education. If you fund that on old data, there's not enough money. Beyond the actual financial provision, there's the thorny question of getting enough specialist teachers, education psychologists, speech & language therapists and those specialising in physical & sensory support education to deal with the growing demands.
Don't get me wrong - I want decent accommodation for all, the ideas of families in tiny B&Bs or in mold-infested rental accommodation is appalling and should be to anyone and everyone but are housebuilders generally interested in solving the housing problem or just making profits? Taking the profit motive out of house building might enable a better mix of accommodation to be built including genuine provision for those without the ability to move on to or up the property ladder.
Chihuahua killed and woman injured in attack by two XL bully-type dogs in Glasgow
Police Scotland said it received a report of the dogs attacking a 25-year-old woman and her pet chihuahua in Finnart Street on Monday afternoon. Officers are now trying to trace the owner of the two canines.
Sad but not a problem in England of course now Rishi's government has banned XL Bullys
Just been reading those reports, coincidentally. (I'll let you into a secret. Just because Mr Sunak's administration says pink is green doesn't actually make it happen.)
Dig deep treasury, for the WASPI women. PHSO due to report tomorrow. WASPI women already threatening further court action if they are not happy with the outcome.
Looks like blanket ‘compensation’ won’t happen. So what has the fight been for and where does it go ?
IIRC Alistair Meeks wrote some headers on this subject that essentially said the broader claims of the WASPI women about lack of communication were overblown, so a 'highly targeted' scheme as stated in the article would sound pretty fair.
Can the Starmer go out to bat for them? An easy political win I assume. The 2019 manifesto talked about them facing an injustice and a system of recompense, but it was pretty woolly about it, so no firm commitment.
And let's not forget our housing crisis isn't just about high prices and declining home ownership. Another big problem is our neglect of the public rental sector. Thatcher.
Really? HA homes tend to be considerably better quality than the council estates I remember from my childhood.
Now I'm not a fan of the way the state props up the bottom end of the private rented sector in a way which benefits neither tenant not taxpayer, but that's a different issue.
Yes, the sector has withered away since the glory days.
But my memory is that they weren't glory days. Council houses were of the lowest possible quality, both practically and aesthetically. You're surely harking back to a golden age that never was. Granted this is only based on my memory and you are about 15 years older than me so maybe there was a golden period?
From the FT. It is not just we are not building enough homes. We are not building enough where they are needed. Some places, as Rochdale mentioned with Stockton, are building a fair quantity.
If you want to live in an Islamic theocracy go live in Iran or Saudi
Yep. If we'd have let that go it would have been sharia law at the Old Bailey by Christmas. Except there wouldn't be a Christmas.
How far do you reckon we'd get if we suggested NR put some atheist messaging up in the name of inclusion? Yet surely atheists still outnumber Muslims.
They should put up The Life of Brian quotes.
Very good. "He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy." " Yes, we're all individuals (I'm not)". I wonder if there is a Python day we could use for the purposes? A quick Google only gives me tips on coding.
Brian: I'm not the Messiah!
Follower: I say you are, Lord, and I should know, I've followed a few!
If you want to live in an Islamic theocracy go live in Iran or Saudi
Yep. If we'd have let that go it would have been sharia law at the Old Bailey by Christmas. Except there wouldn't be a Christmas.
How far do you reckon we'd get if we suggested NR put some atheist messaging up in the name of inclusion? Yet surely atheists still outnumber Muslims.
They should put up The Life of Brian quotes.
Tricky to define the line.
There are the thoughts for the day that you get on TfL whiteboards when there aren't emergency delays. They're harmless in a "live laugh love" sort of way and add to the niceness of the nation.
The Kings Cross messaging probably did cross a line, even if it's not entirely clear where... what would make it acceptable, or is that an impossibility?
And what about the organisations that buy advertising hoardings at stations to put Bible quotes on?
Since you're apparently not allowed to urge people to get beach body ready (I forget the reason why) I'm not sure if any religious text, however inoffensive, would pass muster as not triggering someone if that is the bar, so surprised they are ok.
And let's not forget our housing crisis isn't just about high prices and declining home ownership. Another big problem is our neglect of the public rental sector. Thatcher.
Really? HA homes tend to be considerably better quality than the council estates I remember from my childhood.
Now I'm not a fan of the way the state props up the bottom end of the private rented sector in a way which benefits neither tenant not taxpayer, but that's a different issue.
Yes, the sector has withered away since the glory days.
But my memory is that they weren't glory days. Council houses were of the lowest possible quality, both practically and aesthetically. You're surely harking back to a golden age that never was. Granted this is only based on my memory and you are about 15 years older than me so maybe there was a golden period?
They varied a lot, it must be said. But I've been impressed with the 1920s-1930s and equally the current 2010 on builds in Scotland, allowing for their different times.
Fieldwork: 15th to 18th March 2024 · Sample: 2,072 adults in Great Britain
If there were a second referendum on British membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Re-join: 54% (+3) Stay out: 39% (-4)
(Changes from 8th to 11th March 2024)
Pro EU vote goes from 48% in 2016 to 54%. I am one of the switchers, though reluctant. Reasons in order:
In 2016 it was reasonable to trust that Cameron would see through what he initiated and that his government had a good plan for leaving if the referendum went that way. The betrayal of trust was immediate - the same day.
The threat of American isolationism and authoritarianism
The need for European unity in the face of the Russian threat.
OTOH someone I know well, a passionate Remainer in 2016 feels that the growth of the far right in the EU is a reason for switching the other way.
Dig deep treasury, for the WASPI women. PHSO due to report tomorrow. WASPI women already threatening further court action if they are not happy with the outcome.
Looks like blanket ‘compensation’ won’t happen. So what has the fight been for and where does it go ?
IIRC Alistair Meeks wrote some headers on this subject that essentially said the broader claims of the WASPI women about lack of communication were overblown, so a 'highly targeted' scheme as stated in the article would sound pretty fair.
Can the Starmer go out to bat for them? An easy political win I assume. The 2019 manifesto talked about them facing an injustice and a system of recompense, but it was pretty woolly about it, so no firm commitment.
The i article referred to 2019 labour pledge costing just under 60 billion.
Fieldwork: 15th to 18th March 2024 · Sample: 2,072 adults in Great Britain
If there were a second referendum on British membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Re-join: 54% (+3) Stay out: 39% (-4)
(Changes from 8th to 11th March 2024)
That’s a striking shift
I don’t like it but I won’t deny it. I wonder if Starmer will be tempted. Let’s say he gets a 150 seat majority and the polls are showing 65/35 Rejoin - a sure fire win
He’s an ardent Remoaner. He will have Remoaner friends saying “We will never get this chance again, a massive majority and the polls totally in favour. Do it NOW”
He's also a lawyer. So he won't ask the question (out loud, anyway) unless/until he is certain what the answer is going to be.
If nothing else, he saw what happened to Dave.
He’s also 61. He’s an older man in a bit of a hurry
I know the feeling
His first term (which might be his only term) will be all about managerial and incremental changes, our problems are so deep they won’t be solved overnight
If he wants a definite legacy then this would be it: the guy who reversed the strategic error of Brexit (as Remoaners see it), the guy who took us back in
If he doesn’t go for Actual Rejoin then the pressure on him to at least rejoin the SM/CU will be intense
Term 1 - realignment Term 2 - renegotiation Term 3 - rejoin
If things go well he can cut short term 2 and make the GE for term 3 a pseudo-referendum on rejoin.
Currently that 'renegotiation' idea is simply a non-runner in the EU. Not just from a bureaucrat perspective, but from the average EU citizen.
As it says in the article, we were due to be the second constituency doing it, but the process is on the edge of collapse, Labour having refused to participate (as in Devon) and the LibDems pulling out, supposedly on HQ advice, at the last minute. The alternative process referred to in the article is likely to be a rather desperate last minute online poll, based on little more than party allegiance, followed up by an email with the outcome. Whether this has any significant effect remains to be seen. But in any event with Labour refusing to participate, this revolutionary ‘new politics’ isn’t likely to be going anywhere (sadly).
So the article is "be afraid Tories, change is coming" but it isn't because it is another half baked scheme dreamed up by centrist Dad types who think progressive is anything they believe in. What a load of crap.
It is like "vote Swapping", pioneered by the Guardian a few years back, and other so called initiatives. The wet dream of political obsessives and why on earth would Labour waste their time participating. They are poised to win a landslide.
Also this statement in the article is a massive assumption too. "But cooperation among progressive parties could have averted all eight Conservative majority governments bar 2015." Why assume votes for 1 non Tory party are internchangeable with another non Tory Party. I vote Labour. I would not vote Green or Lib Dem irrespective. Not that I vote anymore. But when I did.
Vote swapping goes back a long way.
It was done in a number of local areas in the 1997 election. For example Ed Davey's supporters in Kingston & Surbiton had a deal with I think another local Constituency to swap votes with the Labour Candidate there.
Ed Davey in 1997 turned a majority of 250 or so into a majority of ~16,000 iirc. This may have been part of that. One issue was that Labour did well enough to not need LD support afterwards, so LD leverage was lost, especially (imo) as Blair moved into his authoritarian phase.
No one has ever told how effective such things were - but perhaps OGH and Mark Pack have a decent idea, which I'm not aware either of them have ever written about. Maybe Ryan Cullen (LDV founder now in the Newark area, in short trousers in 1997) may know something (!). Or Lord Bonkers.
At the time it was was partly around "Hmmm. What can we do with the internet in politics?" And partly about visceral opposition to contemporaneous Tories.
When Blair became leader, there was significant co-operation including swapping information on target seats. Later on, Neal Lawson told of a meeting in a pub in Victoria where bits of paper were swapped.
A significant part of this was that information was fed to the Mirror during the campaign. Their subsequent recommendations on tactical voting meant that we won 20 out of our 22 targets.
There was also a lot of parliamentary co-operation between the two parties on policy, the most open being the Cook Maclennan talks on constitutional reform.
There was comparison to 2019 where virtually no tactical voting took place. If Labour voters are going to vote Lib Dem an vice versa, they need to like each other’s leader and have a relatively positive view of what they are saying.
From the FT. It is not just we are not building enough homes. We are not building enough where they are needed. Some places, as Rochdale mentioned with Stockton, are building a fair quantity.
Could it be that we've already developed London and the South East as much as it can be?
This is the key issue. Berkshire, Herts and Surrey all have a population density of around 700 people per km, which is more than the Netherlands. At the other end of the scale, Northumberland, Cumbria and Herefordshire all have <100 people per km
In the whole UK, the emptiest areas are Highlands and Western Isles with only 9 people per km
So we need to find ways to boost the economy outside London and SE, so that people want to move to these more remote areas, where there is plenty of land.
If you want to live in an Islamic theocracy go live in Iran or Saudi
Yep. If we'd have let that go it would have been sharia law at the Old Bailey by Christmas. Except there wouldn't be a Christmas.
How far do you reckon we'd get if we suggested NR put some atheist messaging up in the name of inclusion? Yet surely atheists still outnumber Muslims.
They should put up The Life of Brian quotes.
Tricky to define the line.
There are the thoughts for the day that you get on TfL whiteboards when there aren't emergency delays. They're harmless in a "live laugh love" sort of way and add to the niceness of the nation.
The Kings Cross messaging probably did cross a line, even if it's not entirely clear where... what would make it acceptable, or is that an impossibility?
And what about the organisations that buy advertising hoardings at stations to put Bible quotes on?
Yes but thise organisations have paid for that space. KXgate was the public sector expressing dubious views at its own expense.
No objection to the TfL whiteboards 9f course. The inclusion of humour is the main thing. If religious texts had more of that they could get away with much more.
From the FT. It is not just we are not building enough homes. We are not building enough where they are needed. Some places, as Rochdale mentioned with Stockton, are building a fair quantity.
In the same way that Green Belt is usually presented as if it is all pristinely beautiful fields, YIMBYs sometimes suffer from figuratively wanting to build everywhere being taken as a literal desire to build on everything, as if parks and other open space are not part of sensibly planned sustainable development.
If you want to live in an Islamic theocracy go live in Iran or Saudi
Yep. If we'd have let that go it would have been sharia law at the Old Bailey by Christmas. Except there wouldn't be a Christmas.
How far do you reckon we'd get if we suggested NR put some atheist messaging up in the name of inclusion? Yet surely atheists still outnumber Muslims.
It'd be fine by me. But is there an Atheist equivalent of Ramadan?
I'm biased but just being an atheist would be sufficient Lenten fast, permanent Ramadan, winter with no Christmas and disenchantment of an enchanted world without further self inflicted obstacles.
Fieldwork: 15th to 18th March 2024 · Sample: 2,072 adults in Great Britain
If there were a second referendum on British membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Re-join: 54% (+3) Stay out: 39% (-4)
(Changes from 8th to 11th March 2024)
That’s a striking shift
I don’t like it but I won’t deny it. I wonder if Starmer will be tempted. Let’s say he gets a 150 seat majority and the polls are showing 65/35 Rejoin - a sure fire win
He’s an ardent Remoaner. He will have Remoaner friends saying “We will never get this chance again, a massive majority and the polls totally in favour. Do it NOW”
He's also a lawyer. So he won't ask the question (out loud, anyway) unless/until he is certain what the answer is going to be.
If nothing else, he saw what happened to Dave.
He’s also 61. He’s an older man in a bit of a hurry
I know the feeling
His first term (which might be his only term) will be all about managerial and incremental changes, our problems are so deep they won’t be solved overnight
If he wants a definite legacy then this would be it: the guy who reversed the strategic error of Brexit (as Remoaners see it), the guy who took us back in
If he doesn’t go for Actual Rejoin then the pressure on him to at least rejoin the SM/CU will be intense
Term 1 - realignment Term 2 - renegotiation Term 3 - rejoin
If things go well he can cut short term 2 and make the GE for term 3 a pseudo-referendum on rejoin.
Currently that 'renegotiation' idea is simply a non-runner in the EU. Not just from a bureaucrat perspective, but from the average EU citizen.
My use of renegotiation was more of a euphemism (and to keep to the 're' theme).
At one end it could be at least an attempt to negotiate terms similar ot we had before, at the other it could just be the formal process to enter accession talks, happy to take whatever the EU offers from its boilerplate options.
If I were the EU I'd not want us back until all the main parties advocated rejoining, and no minor party was having significant attention and minority support for staying out. They wouldn't want to go through all this again. I'd also insist we sign up to everything, no carve outs, including adopting the Euro, which could be a major stumbling block.
So from their perspective getting us closer aligned would be end goal enough I'd think.
From the FT. It is not just we are not building enough homes. We are not building enough where they are needed. Some places, as Rochdale mentioned with Stockton, are building a fair quantity.
In the same way that Green Belt is usually presented as if it is all pristinely beautiful fields, YIMBYs sometimes suffer from figuratively wanting to build everywhere being taken as a literal desire to build on everything, as if parks and other open space are not part of sensibly planned sustainable development.
Yes, you’re right. I recall a threat on twitter with some green belt sites that would not be developed in/around London and they were all the polar opposite of green fields but were concreted over and disused.
Fieldwork: 15th to 18th March 2024 · Sample: 2,072 adults in Great Britain
If there were a second referendum on British membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Re-join: 54% (+3) Stay out: 39% (-4)
(Changes from 8th to 11th March 2024)
That’s a striking shift
I don’t like it but I won’t deny it. I wonder if Starmer will be tempted. Let’s say he gets a 150 seat majority and the polls are showing 65/35 Rejoin - a sure fire win
He’s an ardent Remoaner. He will have Remoaner friends saying “We will never get this chance again, a massive majority and the polls totally in favour. Do it NOW”
He's also a lawyer. So he won't ask the question (out loud, anyway) unless/until he is certain what the answer is going to be.
If nothing else, he saw what happened to Dave.
He’s also 61. He’s an older man in a bit of a hurry
I know the feeling
His first term (which might be his only term) will be all about managerial and incremental changes, our problems are so deep they won’t be solved overnight
If he wants a definite legacy then this would be it: the guy who reversed the strategic error of Brexit (as Remoaners see it), the guy who took us back in
If he doesn’t go for Actual Rejoin then the pressure on him to at least rejoin the SM/CU will be intense
Term 1 - realignment Term 2 - renegotiation Term 3 - rejoin
If things go well he can cut short term 2 and make the GE for term 3 a pseudo-referendum on rejoin.
Currently that 'renegotiation' idea is simply a non-runner in the EU. Not just from a bureaucrat perspective, but from the average EU citizen.
My use of renegotiation was more of a euphemism (and to keep to the 're' theme).
At one end it could be at least an attempt to negotiate terms similar ot we had before, at the other it could just be the formal process to enter accession talks, happy to take whatever the EU offers from its boilerplate options.
If I were the EU I'd not want us back until all the main parties advocated rejoining, and no minor party was having significant attention and minority support for staying out. They wouldn't want to go through all this again. I'd also insist we sign up to everything, no carve outs, including adopting the Euro, which could be a major stumbling block.
So from their perspective getting us closer aligned would be end goal enough I'd think.
See this is the problem you cite all major parties wanting to go back in.....you dont cite most of the electorate wanting to go back in. So if lib, lab , con all say rejoin but the electorate is mostly against it. Well guess what we dont generally vote in a ge on single issue so chances are it would be lab or con and because all three agree we should go back in it will be negotiated even though most are against it
And let's not forget our housing crisis isn't just about high prices and declining home ownership. Another big problem is our neglect of the public rental sector. Thatcher.
Really? HA homes tend to be considerably better quality than the council estates I remember from my childhood.
Now I'm not a fan of the way the state props up the bottom end of the private rented sector in a way which benefits neither tenant not taxpayer, but that's a different issue.
Yes, the sector has withered away since the glory days.
But my memory is that they weren't glory days. Council houses were of the lowest possible quality, both practically and aesthetically. You're surely harking back to a golden age that never was. Granted this is only based on my memory and you are about 15 years older than me so maybe there was a golden period?
They varied a lot, it must be said. But I've been impressed with the 1920s-1930s and equally the current 2010 on builds in Scotland, allowing for their different times.
Actually, I'll row back here. Parts of Wythenshawe (Northern Moor for example): squint your eyes and you could be in Letchworth or Welwyn. And the older parts of Wythenshawe generally were quite socially broad-based, among the lowest three-fifths of society at least, rather than the ghetto of the bottom 10% it had become by my youth. It is, as it happens, on its way up now, driven by connectivity, GM's relentless growth, the unaffordability for the young middle classes of where they would previously have settled in M33, SK8 and WA15, and the fact that some of it is actually quite attractive.
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
I find myself in the not unusual position of disagreeing not only with the header but with most of the comments on the topic which seem incredibly one dimensional.
"Housing" isn't just a question of building places to live - it is much more nuanced. What do you build? Where do you build it? Who do you build it for? There are a whole gamut of questions.
The much vilified "NIMBY" is also caricatured - very few are totally anti development. What most want is development which conforms to the agreed local plan in terms of density and type. Developers maximise applications to challenge local plans and obviously accentuate their profits. Currently, they can't sell the houses and flats they are building so either have to leave them empty or drop the prices.
Other issues include the ability of the construction industry and its constituent parts to respond to a sudden push in building plans - it's not just houses that are being built at any given time. There are local authorities looking to build specialist accommodation for vulnerable children and adults, there are doubtless major construction projects across the whole economy. Are there enough contractors, sub contractors and suppliers (especially in the specialist trades) to support a major housebuilding programme?
We've also heard about impacts on the electricity, sewage and transport infrastructures of new developments and increasing pressures on infrastructures aren't always understood.
Here, for example, is another example of incoherent public policy:
More houses for more people means more rubbish created and that has to be dealt with. There is a huge problem with fly tipping across many areas and that needs to be addressed. Hunt's response in the Budget was to stick a further 20% on the Landfill Tax which will only encourage more illegal dumping of rubbish.
If you bring more people into an area, fine, but as the Panorama programme at the weekend demonstrated, if you increase an area's population by 15%, that has impact on service provision such as in Special Needs Education. If you fund that on old data, there's not enough money. Beyond the actual financial provision, there's the thorny question of getting enough specialist teachers, education psychologists, speech & language therapists and those specialising in physical & sensory support education to deal with the growing demands.
Don't get me wrong - I want decent accommodation for all, the ideas of families in tiny B&Bs or in mold-infested rental accommodation is appalling and should be to anyone and everyone but are housebuilders generally interested in solving the housing problem or just making profits? Taking the profit motive out of house building might enable a better mix of accommodation to be built including genuine provision for those without the ability to move on to or up the property ladder.
I think you are too kind on NIMBY's personally. Yes, I am definitely biased on this issue myself, but I've seen far too many pretextual arguments using the language of 'not against development, BUT..' to think the caricature is so out of scope as to be unreasonable to reference. The standard tropes get trotted out time and again, however flimsily, no evidence of need or mitigation is ever enough, no amount of engagement is ever enough.
The average crowd of objectors to a planning application do not want development which conforms to the local plan and object if it does not. Most people don't know anything about local plans, why would they? It's not unreasonable that most people do not know about such matters. But objections roll in even if something is perfectly in accordance with a local plan, as they are permitted to do.
Yes, you will generally get more of them for speculative applications, on the edge of towns but outside limits of development or on unallocated sites that kind of thing, and those also have a greater chance of being refused anyway (where the authority has sufficient housing land supply at any rate).
But the difference between NIMBYism and legitimate objection is like pornography - hard to define where it crosses the line, but you can tell it when you see it.
None of which is to say a solution is just to let housebuilders do whatever, whereever they want. They are partly responsible for things as they are now, and unchecked they won't have residents and communities to heart, there are countless terrible, isolated, poorly served developments out there.
YIMBYism is not, usually, an advocation of no rules whatsoever and literally concreting over every green space. It's a feeling that the balance has gone too far one way and looking to shift it back the other. We should be able to manage that whilst simultaneously holding developers' feet to the fire to not take us all for mugs.
And let's not forget our housing crisis isn't just about high prices and declining home ownership. Another big problem is our neglect of the public rental sector. Thatcher.
Really? HA homes tend to be considerably better quality than the council estates I remember from my childhood.
Now I'm not a fan of the way the state props up the bottom end of the private rented sector in a way which benefits neither tenant not taxpayer, but that's a different issue.
Yes, the sector has withered away since the glory days.
But my memory is that they weren't glory days. Council houses were of the lowest possible quality, both practically and aesthetically. You're surely harking back to a golden age that never was. Granted this is only based on my memory and you are about 15 years older than me so maybe there was a golden period?
They varied a lot, it must be said. But I've been impressed with the 1920s-1930s and equally the current 2010 on builds in Scotland, allowing for their different times.
I think that evaluations depends very heavily on perception and goals. We are strange in this country, and houses last 2-3 times as long as in other places, so we have to adapt them more.
Edwardian *is* more spacious, and a post-2010 (say) house will likely have half the heating bills of an unrenovated 1980s or 1990s house. Early Council houses will have things like downstairs loos and big bedrooms, because they were building to a social vision (eg "garden city", "cottage estate").
Modern HA housing will often be better than equivalent developer-estate housing because there were space standards and similar in place - down to trivia such as HAs requiring a washing line to be installed at the start.
Or, comparing a London Georgian with a London Victoria, the former will usually be crap quality compared with the latter partly because eg industrialised production of manufactured standard bricks made in factories on production were an invention of around 1800, and Georgian speculators were throw-it-up types. But rich-enough Londoners continue to buy a Georgian fairy-tale they have bought from estate agents and swallowed wholesale.
A good example is to compare 1950s built modern public developments (say Roehampton) with 1960s-1970s developments elsewhere, when the cost-engineers moved in. There are good examples of very high quality 1970s Council flat developments in Camden (some of it built under Ken Livingstone's watch in his early days) which are an excellent London Open option - I spent a day vising some in around 2005.
Plus there's long been a political bandwagon trying to trash all modern housebuilding, sometimes unfairly, for political purposes.
Dig deep treasury, for the WASPI women. PHSO due to report tomorrow. WASPI women already threatening further court action if they are not happy with the outcome.
Looks like blanket ‘compensation’ won’t happen. So what has the fight been for and where does it go ?
IIRC Alistair Meeks wrote some headers on this subject that essentially said the broader claims of the WASPI women about lack of communication were overblown, so a 'highly targeted' scheme as stated in the article would sound pretty fair.
Can the Starmer go out to bat for them? An easy political win I assume. The 2019 manifesto talked about them facing an injustice and a system of recompense, but it was pretty woolly about it, so no firm commitment.
The i article referred to 2019 labour pledge costing just under 60 billion.
They can get stuffed in that case, the incoming Labour government won't have that amount to flash about no matter how justified.
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
The average number of square metres of accommodation per person obviously impacts the consumption of resources. If everyone has their own detached house then they will burn more energy than if they live two to a room.
Fieldwork: 15th to 18th March 2024 · Sample: 2,072 adults in Great Britain
If there were a second referendum on British membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Re-join: 54% (+3) Stay out: 39% (-4)
(Changes from 8th to 11th March 2024)
That’s a striking shift
I don’t like it but I won’t deny it. I wonder if Starmer will be tempted. Let’s say he gets a 150 seat majority and the polls are showing 65/35 Rejoin - a sure fire win
He’s an ardent Remoaner. He will have Remoaner friends saying “We will never get this chance again, a massive majority and the polls totally in favour. Do it NOW”
He's also a lawyer. So he won't ask the question (out loud, anyway) unless/until he is certain what the answer is going to be.
If nothing else, he saw what happened to Dave.
He’s also 61. He’s an older man in a bit of a hurry
I know the feeling
His first term (which might be his only term) will be all about managerial and incremental changes, our problems are so deep they won’t be solved overnight
If he wants a definite legacy then this would be it: the guy who reversed the strategic error of Brexit (as Remoaners see it), the guy who took us back in
If he doesn’t go for Actual Rejoin then the pressure on him to at least rejoin the SM/CU will be intense
Term 1 - realignment Term 2 - renegotiation Term 3 - rejoin
If things go well he can cut short term 2 and make the GE for term 3 a pseudo-referendum on rejoin.
Currently that 'renegotiation' idea is simply a non-runner in the EU. Not just from a bureaucrat perspective, but from the average EU citizen.
My use of renegotiation was more of a euphemism (and to keep to the 're' theme).
At one end it could be at least an attempt to negotiate terms similar ot we had before, at the other it could just be the formal process to enter accession talks, happy to take whatever the EU offers from its boilerplate options.
If I were the EU I'd not want us back until all the main parties advocated rejoining, and no minor party was having significant attention and minority support for staying out. They wouldn't want to go through all this again. I'd also insist we sign up to everything, no carve outs, including adopting the Euro, which could be a major stumbling block.
So from their perspective getting us closer aligned would be end goal enough I'd think.
See this is the problem you cite all major parties wanting to go back in.....you dont cite most of the electorate wanting to go back in. So if lib, lab , con all say rejoin but the electorate is mostly against it. Well guess what we dont generally vote in a ge on single issue so chances are it would be lab or con and because all three agree we should go back in it will be negotiated even though most are against it
No, I covered that point by reference to no minor party getting significant attention or minority support for staying out - the EU would not want to risk us getting back in when it was obvious a New UKIP would probably emerge to counter the mainstream political consensus. That's the way they would have to assess what the electorate wanted, since they wouldn't even want to agree something for a referendum without being confident there was very limited opposition to it.
I don't think we're getting back in until the 2040s at least.
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
The average number of square metres of accommodation per person obviously impacts the consumption of resources. If everyone has their own detached house then they will burn more energy than if they live two to a room.
Which is why people can, should and do pay for their own energy.
That has bugger all to do with school demand, NHS demand etc which are all based on population not the quantity of houses.
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because the infrastructure is essential to them having valuable assets. They be fit from a positive externality so should chip in
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
The average number of square metres of accommodation per person obviously impacts the consumption of resources. If everyone has their own detached house then they will burn more energy than if they live two to a room.
Which is why people can, should and do pay for their own energy.
That has bugger all to do with school demand, NHS demand etc which are all based on population not the quantity of houses.
There's a difference between national demand and local demand. Are you proposing that all new development be ringfenced so that only locals can live there to ensure the impact on local services is neutral?
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because the infrastructure is essential to them having valuable assets. They be fit from a positive externality so should chip in
Why? Its not an externality, the infrastructure is to serve the population who are in the country whether houses are or not.
If infrastructure is personal it should be paid by the user. If its public, it should be paid by everyone.
In neither case should it fall on only new houses.
Fieldwork: 15th to 18th March 2024 · Sample: 2,072 adults in Great Britain
If there were a second referendum on British membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Re-join: 54% (+3) Stay out: 39% (-4)
(Changes from 8th to 11th March 2024)
That’s a striking shift
I don’t like it but I won’t deny it. I wonder if Starmer will be tempted. Let’s say he gets a 150 seat majority and the polls are showing 65/35 Rejoin - a sure fire win
He’s an ardent Remoaner. He will have Remoaner friends saying “We will never get this chance again, a massive majority and the polls totally in favour. Do it NOW”
He's also a lawyer. So he won't ask the question (out loud, anyway) unless/until he is certain what the answer is going to be.
If nothing else, he saw what happened to Dave.
He’s also 61. He’s an older man in a bit of a hurry
I know the feeling
His first term (which might be his only term) will be all about managerial and incremental changes, our problems are so deep they won’t be solved overnight
If he wants a definite legacy then this would be it: the guy who reversed the strategic error of Brexit (as Remoaners see it), the guy who took us back in
If he doesn’t go for Actual Rejoin then the pressure on him to at least rejoin the SM/CU will be intense
Term 1 - realignment Term 2 - renegotiation Term 3 - rejoin
If things go well he can cut short term 2 and make the GE for term 3 a pseudo-referendum on rejoin.
Currently that 'renegotiation' idea is simply a non-runner in the EU. Not just from a bureaucrat perspective, but from the average EU citizen.
My use of renegotiation was more of a euphemism (and to keep to the 're' theme).
At one end it could be at least an attempt to negotiate terms similar ot we had before, at the other it could just be the formal process to enter accession talks, happy to take whatever the EU offers from its boilerplate options.
If I were the EU I'd not want us back until all the main parties advocated rejoining, and no minor party was having significant attention and minority support for staying out. They wouldn't want to go through all this again. I'd also insist we sign up to everything, no carve outs, including adopting the Euro, which could be a major stumbling block.
So from their perspective getting us closer aligned would be end goal enough I'd think.
See this is the problem you cite all major parties wanting to go back in.....you dont cite most of the electorate wanting to go back in. So if lib, lab , con all say rejoin but the electorate is mostly against it. Well guess what we dont generally vote in a ge on single issue so chances are it would be lab or con and because all three agree we should go back in it will be negotiated even though most are against it
No, I covered that point by reference to no minor party getting significant attention or minority support for staying out - the EU would not want to risk us getting back in when it was obvious a New UKIP would probably emerge to counter the mainstream political consensus. That's the way they would have to assess what the electorate wanted, since they wouldn't even want to agree something for a referendum without being confident there was very limited opposition to it.
I don't think we're getting back in until the 2040s at least.
My fear will be all major parties want to take us back, polling shows people agree. They negotiate a deal to take us back which 60% wont agree with and dont give us a referendum on as they learnt not to. It works for politicians and there backers but not the general population who might be yes we want back but not on those terms. I cite the lisbon treaty referendum which never happened because politicians knew we would say "fuck off no"
As it says in the article, we were due to be the second constituency doing it, but the process is on the edge of collapse, Labour having refused to participate (as in Devon) and the LibDems pulling out, supposedly on HQ advice, at the last minute. The alternative process referred to in the article is likely to be a rather desperate last minute online poll, based on little more than party allegiance, followed up by an email with the outcome. Whether this has any significant effect remains to be seen. But in any event with Labour refusing to participate, this revolutionary ‘new politics’ isn’t likely to be going anywhere (sadly).
So the article is "be afraid Tories, change is coming" but it isn't because it is another half baked scheme dreamed up by centrist Dad types who think progressive is anything they believe in. What a load of crap.
It is like "vote Swapping", pioneered by the Guardian a few years back, and other so called initiatives. The wet dream of political obsessives and why on earth would Labour waste their time participating. They are poised to win a landslide.
Also this statement in the article is a massive assumption too. "But cooperation among progressive parties could have averted all eight Conservative majority governments bar 2015." Why assume votes for 1 non Tory party are internchangeable with another non Tory Party. I vote Labour. I would not vote Green or Lib Dem irrespective. Not that I vote anymore. But when I did.
Vote swapping goes back a long way.
It was done in a number of local areas in the 1997 election. For example Ed Davey's supporters in Kingston & Surbiton had a deal with I think another local Constituency to swap votes with the Labour Candidate there.
Ed Davey in 1997 turned a majority of 250 or so into a majority of ~16,000 iirc. This may have been part of that. One issue was that Labour did well enough to not need LD support afterwards, so LD leverage was lost, especially (imo) as Blair moved into his authoritarian phase.
No one has ever told how effective such things were - but perhaps OGH and Mark Pack have a decent idea, which I'm not aware either of them have ever written about. Maybe Ryan Cullen (LDV founder now in the Newark area, in short trousers in 1997) may know something (!). Or Lord Bonkers.
At the time it was was partly around "Hmmm. What can we do with the internet in politics?" And partly about visceral opposition to contemporaneous Tories.
When Blair became leader, there was significant co-operation including swapping information on target seats. Later on, Neal Lawson told of a meeting in a pub in Victoria where bits of paper were swapped.
A significant part of this was that information was fed to the Mirror during the campaign. Their subsequent recommendations on tactical voting meant that we won 20 out of our 22 targets.
There was also a lot of parliamentary co-operation between the two parties on policy, the most open being the Cook Maclennan talks on constitutional reform.
There was comparison to 2019 where virtually no tactical voting took place. If Labour voters are going to vote Lib Dem an vice versa, they need to like each other’s leader and have a relatively positive view of what they are saying.
Didn't OGH vote swap with a Labour voter in Richmond upon Thames in 2019?
And let's not forget our housing crisis isn't just about high prices and declining home ownership. Another big problem is our neglect of the public rental sector. Thatcher.
Really? HA homes tend to be considerably better quality than the council estates I remember from my childhood.
Now I'm not a fan of the way the state props up the bottom end of the private rented sector in a way which benefits neither tenant not taxpayer, but that's a different issue.
Yes, the sector has withered away since the glory days.
But my memory is that they weren't glory days. Council houses were of the lowest possible quality, both practically and aesthetically. You're surely harking back to a golden age that never was. Granted this is only based on my memory and you are about 15 years older than me so maybe there was a golden period?
In the parts of England I know best (Leeds, York, North London, Brighton, Norwich) there was a great deal of high-quality council housing built, in particular in the 1950s. Unsurprisingly, these were the first council properties to be sold off under Thatcher's right-to-buy reforms, so they've been in private hands for a long time now. Few people under 60 would recognise them as ex-council properties. In LB Camden, for example, some now change hands for over £1m.
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because the infrastructure is essential to them having valuable assets. They be fit from a positive externality so should chip in
Why? Its not an externality, the infrastructure is to serve the population who are in the country whether houses are or not.
If infrastructure is personal it should be paid by the user. If its public, it should be paid by everyone.
In neither case should it fall on only new houses.
"To serve the population who are in the country whether houses are or not"
Are you advocating a one-in, one-out immigration policy now? Otherwise how do you propose to ensure that the additional supply doesn't just suck in more people?
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
The average number of square metres of accommodation per person obviously impacts the consumption of resources. If everyone has their own detached house then they will burn more energy than if they live two to a room.
Which is why people can, should and do pay for their own energy.
That has bugger all to do with school demand, NHS demand etc which are all based on population not the quantity of houses.
There's a difference between national demand and local demand. Are you proposing that all new development be ringfenced so that only locals can live there to ensure the impact on local services is neutral?
No there is not. We have a free country, people are free to demand anywhere in the country.
I propose the taxpayer pays for school and healthcare in this countrry. The taxpayer also pays taxes to HMG.
You want polluter pays then fine - population growth is the consequence of central government policy. If new schools or healthcare is needed, due to central government policy, then central government should pay for it. Its the one that sets the migration policy and takes the taxes, it should pay for its own externality. Polluter pays.
Construction is not the cause of population growth.
Fieldwork: 15th to 18th March 2024 · Sample: 2,072 adults in Great Britain
If there were a second referendum on British membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Re-join: 54% (+3) Stay out: 39% (-4)
(Changes from 8th to 11th March 2024)
That’s a striking shift
I don’t like it but I won’t deny it. I wonder if Starmer will be tempted. Let’s say he gets a 150 seat majority and the polls are showing 65/35 Rejoin - a sure fire win
He’s an ardent Remoaner. He will have Remoaner friends saying “We will never get this chance again, a massive majority and the polls totally in favour. Do it NOW”
He's also a lawyer. So he won't ask the question (out loud, anyway) unless/until he is certain what the answer is going to be.
If nothing else, he saw what happened to Dave.
He’s also 61. He’s an older man in a bit of a hurry
I know the feeling
His first term (which might be his only term) will be all about managerial and incremental changes, our problems are so deep they won’t be solved overnight
If he wants a definite legacy then this would be it: the guy who reversed the strategic error of Brexit (as Remoaners see it), the guy who took us back in
If he doesn’t go for Actual Rejoin then the pressure on him to at least rejoin the SM/CU will be intense
Term 1 - realignment Term 2 - renegotiation Term 3 - rejoin
If things go well he can cut short term 2 and make the GE for term 3 a pseudo-referendum on rejoin.
Currently that 'renegotiation' idea is simply a non-runner in the EU. Not just from a bureaucrat perspective, but from the average EU citizen.
My use of renegotiation was more of a euphemism (and to keep to the 're' theme).
At one end it could be at least an attempt to negotiate terms similar ot we had before, at the other it could just be the formal process to enter accession talks, happy to take whatever the EU offers from its boilerplate options.
If I were the EU I'd not want us back until all the main parties advocated rejoining, and no minor party was having significant attention and minority support for staying out. They wouldn't want to go through all this again. I'd also insist we sign up to everything, no carve outs, including adopting the Euro, which could be a major stumbling block.
So from their perspective getting us closer aligned would be end goal enough I'd think.
See this is the problem you cite all major parties wanting to go back in.....you dont cite most of the electorate wanting to go back in. So if lib, lab , con all say rejoin but the electorate is mostly against it. Well guess what we dont generally vote in a ge on single issue so chances are it would be lab or con and because all three agree we should go back in it will be negotiated even though most are against it
If the current polling is to be believed (and there are lots of caveats to that, including what rejoin would look like and whether the 2016 crew can reunited for one last job) the majority of the electorate have decided they would like to be back in.
It's odd that no party is really going for this. My theory is that they don't want to rouse the Farage.
Dig deep treasury, for the WASPI women. PHSO due to report tomorrow. WASPI women already threatening further court action if they are not happy with the outcome.
Looks like blanket ‘compensation’ won’t happen. So what has the fight been for and where does it go ?
IIRC Alistair Meeks wrote some headers on this subject that essentially said the broader claims of the WASPI women about lack of communication were overblown, so a 'highly targeted' scheme as stated in the article would sound pretty fair.
Can the Starmer go out to bat for them? An easy political win I assume. The 2019 manifesto talked about them facing an injustice and a system of recompense, but it was pretty woolly about it, so no firm commitment.
The i article referred to 2019 labour pledge costing just under 60 billion.
They can get stuffed in that case, the incoming Labour government won't have that amount to flash about no matter how justified.
The equal rights person in me says stuff em as well. Why shouldn’t the ages be equal men and women? Yes they can argue that things changed during their working life, but it does to us all. I expect the pension age to keep rising, and probably be older than it is even for me, and I’m 52 this year.
A wedge of youthful Labour MPs will surely demand something is done about generation rent.
Calgie @christiancalgie · 10h Can someone explain why so many Labour candidates in winnable seats are so young? Seems to be a swathe of 20-27 year olds being selected.
Not a criticism but a different demographic to what came in in 97.
Ben Kentish @BenKentish I asked a Labour insider about this recently. Their answer? “No one with a family wants to do the job any more”. Which is, if true, a massive issue.
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
This feels like undergrad economic theory (and that isn’t intended as a compliment).
On one level you’re right. But in practice houses without adequate services are a significant part of why Britain feels so broken at the moment.
House building generates externalities. Wishing those away is not good policy.
I find myself in the not unusual position of disagreeing not only with the header but with most of the comments on the topic which seem incredibly one dimensional.
"Housing" isn't just a question of building places to live - it is much more nuanced. What do you build? Where do you build it? Who do you build it for? There are a whole gamut of questions.
The much vilified "NIMBY" is also caricatured - very few are totally anti development. What most want is development which conforms to the agreed local plan in terms of density and type. Developers maximise applications to challenge local plans and obviously accentuate their profits. Currently, they can't sell the houses and flats they are building so either have to leave them empty or drop the prices.
Other issues include the ability of the construction industry and its constituent parts to respond to a sudden push in building plans - it's not just houses that are being built at any given time. There are local authorities looking to build specialist accommodation for vulnerable children and adults, there are doubtless major construction projects across the whole economy. Are there enough contractors, sub contractors and suppliers (especially in the specialist trades) to support a major housebuilding programme?
We've also heard about impacts on the electricity, sewage and transport infrastructures of new developments and increasing pressures on infrastructures aren't always understood.
Here, for example, is another example of incoherent public policy:
More houses for more people means more rubbish created and that has to be dealt with. There is a huge problem with fly tipping across many areas and that needs to be addressed. Hunt's response in the Budget was to stick a further 20% on the Landfill Tax which will only encourage more illegal dumping of rubbish.
If you bring more people into an area, fine, but as the Panorama programme at the weekend demonstrated, if you increase an area's population by 15%, that has impact on service provision such as in Special Needs Education. If you fund that on old data, there's not enough money. Beyond the actual financial provision, there's the thorny question of getting enough specialist teachers, education psychologists, speech & language therapists and those specialising in physical & sensory support education to deal with the growing demands.
Don't get me wrong - I want decent accommodation for all, the ideas of families in tiny B&Bs or in mold-infested rental accommodation is appalling and should be to anyone and everyone but are housebuilders generally interested in solving the housing problem or just making profits? Taking the profit motive out of house building might enable a better mix of accommodation to be built including genuine provision for those without the ability to move on to or up the property ladder.
I think you are too kind on NIMBY's personally. Yes, I am definitely biased on this issue myself, but I've seen far too many pretextual arguments using the language of 'not against development, BUT..' to think the caricature is so out of scope as to be unreasonable to reference. The standard tropes get trotted out time and again, however flimsily, no evidence of need or mitigation is ever enough, no amount of engagement is ever enough.
The average crowd of objectors to a planning application do not want development which conforms to the local plan and object if it does not. Most people don't know anything about local plans, why would they? It's not unreasonable that most people do not know about such matters. But objections roll in even if something is perfectly in accordance with a local plan, as they are permitted to do.
Yes, you will generally get more of them for speculative applications, on the edge of towns but outside limits of development or on unallocated sites that kind of thing, and those also have a greater chance of being refused anyway (where the authority has sufficient housing land supply at any rate).
But the difference between NIMBYism and legitimate objection is like pornography - hard to define where it crosses the line, but you can tell it when you see it.
None of which is to say a solution is just to let housebuilders do whatever, whereever they want. They are partly responsible for things as they are now, and unchecked they won't have residents and communities to heart, there are countless terrible, isolated, poorly served developments out there.
YIMBYism is not, usually, an advocation of no rules whatsoever and literally concreting over every green space. It's a feeling that the balance has gone too far one way and looking to shift it back the other. We should be able to manage that whilst simultaneously holding developers' feet to the fire to not take us all for mugs.
There's elements of that which I certainly support - indeed, some of the strongest objections I've ever witnessed haven't been for housing developments but for changes to schools. Even a move of half a mile to a demonstrably better brand new facility has local parents (not residents) screaming abuse at the Council officials and their own elected representatives as well as the school governors (who are often themselves local residents).
In terms of more conventional developments, you will get those who object to anything and everything and they can be quite loud but the cleverer developers use third party PR companies to sound out local residents in advance of submitting an application by holding public meetings and trying to pre-empt objections. A little bit of dialogue goes a long way and the more that is seen to be happening the more the local council will take on board.
When it becomes less adversarial it can be more successful but that requires compromise on both sides.
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because the infrastructure is essential to them having valuable assets. They be fit from a positive externality so should chip in
Why? Its not an externality, the infrastructure is to serve the population who are in the country whether houses are or not.
If infrastructure is personal it should be paid by the user. If its public, it should be paid by everyone.
In neither case should it fall on only new houses.
"To serve the population who are in the country whether houses are or not"
Are you advocating a one-in, one-out immigration policy now? Otherwise how do you propose to ensure that the additional supply doesn't just suck in more people?
No, I'm not.
People come in either way. I couldn't give less of a shit how many people come into this country, we just need to ensure its met with a commensurate increase in infrastructure which should not be the responsibility of new build homeowners, it should be the responsibility of central government that sets the policy and takes the taxes.
Polluter pays.
If it doesn't want to pay for the infrastructure, it should change its policies. Taking the taxes from migrants but not paying for the infrastructure they need is not on.
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
This feels like undergrad economic theory (and that isn’t intended as a compliment).
On one level you’re right. But in practice houses without adequate services are a significant part of why Britain feels so broken at the moment.
House building generates externalities. Wishing those away is not good policy.
"This feels like undergrad economic theory", as opposed to the more advanced stuff where the 'we don't have a clue' punchline is better disguised.
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
The average number of square metres of accommodation per person obviously impacts the consumption of resources. If everyone has their own detached house then they will burn more energy than if they live two to a room.
Which is why people can, should and do pay for their own energy.
That has bugger all to do with school demand, NHS demand etc which are all based on population not the quantity of houses.
There's a difference between national demand and local demand. Are you proposing that all new development be ringfenced so that only locals can live there to ensure the impact on local services is neutral?
No there is not. We have a free country, people are free to demand anywhere in the country.
I propose the taxpayer pays for school and healthcare in this countrry. The taxpayer also pays taxes to HMG.
You want polluter pays then fine - population growth is the consequence of central government policy. If new schools or healthcare is needed, due to central government policy, then central government should pay for it. Its the one that sets the migration policy and takes the taxes, it should pay for its own externality. Polluter pays.
Construction is not the cause of population growth.
The bit in bold is precisely the point. If there's a new development of 10,000 homes next to a village in the Cotswolds, it will obviously impact demand for local services.
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
This feels like undergrad economic theory (and that isn’t intended as a compliment).
On one level you’re right. But in practice houses without adequate services are a significant part of why Britain feels so broken at the moment.
House building generates externalities. Wishing those away is not good policy.
What externalities?
Name one single externality that isn't due to population growth instead.
Children need schools whether they live in a home with their parents, or are crammed into a single room with their parents in someone else's home.
People need healthcare whether they have a home of their own, or are in a room in someone else's home.
Fieldwork: 15th to 18th March 2024 · Sample: 2,072 adults in Great Britain
If there were a second referendum on British membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Re-join: 54% (+3) Stay out: 39% (-4)
(Changes from 8th to 11th March 2024)
That’s a striking shift
I don’t like it but I won’t deny it. I wonder if Starmer will be tempted. Let’s say he gets a 150 seat majority and the polls are showing 65/35 Rejoin - a sure fire win
He’s an ardent Remoaner. He will have Remoaner friends saying “We will never get this chance again, a massive majority and the polls totally in favour. Do it NOW”
He's also a lawyer. So he won't ask the question (out loud, anyway) unless/until he is certain what the answer is going to be.
If nothing else, he saw what happened to Dave.
He’s also 61. He’s an older man in a bit of a hurry
I know the feeling
His first term (which might be his only term) will be all about managerial and incremental changes, our problems are so deep they won’t be solved overnight
If he wants a definite legacy then this would be it: the guy who reversed the strategic error of Brexit (as Remoaners see it), the guy who took us back in
If he doesn’t go for Actual Rejoin then the pressure on him to at least rejoin the SM/CU will be intense
Term 1 - realignment Term 2 - renegotiation Term 3 - rejoin
If things go well he can cut short term 2 and make the GE for term 3 a pseudo-referendum on rejoin.
Currently that 'renegotiation' idea is simply a non-runner in the EU. Not just from a bureaucrat perspective, but from the average EU citizen.
My use of renegotiation was more of a euphemism (and to keep to the 're' theme).
At one end it could be at least an attempt to negotiate terms similar ot we had before, at the other it could just be the formal process to enter accession talks, happy to take whatever the EU offers from its boilerplate options.
If I were the EU I'd not want us back until all the main parties advocated rejoining, and no minor party was having significant attention and minority support for staying out. They wouldn't want to go through all this again. I'd also insist we sign up to everything, no carve outs, including adopting the Euro, which could be a major stumbling block.
So from their perspective getting us closer aligned would be end goal enough I'd think.
See this is the problem you cite all major parties wanting to go back in.....you dont cite most of the electorate wanting to go back in. So if lib, lab , con all say rejoin but the electorate is mostly against it. Well guess what we dont generally vote in a ge on single issue so chances are it would be lab or con and because all three agree we should go back in it will be negotiated even though most are against it
If the current polling is to be believed (and there are lots of caveats to that, including what rejoin would look like and whether the 2016 crew can reunited for one last job) the majority of the electorate have decided they would like to be back in.
It's odd that no party is really going for this. My theory is that they don't want to rouse the Farage.
You missed my point I suspect. Yes current polling suggests they do. That doesn't mean they want to go back in on the deal negotiated for example I suspect polling would drop sharply if we had to take the euro. My fear is we the electorate will be excluded from saying yay or nay as we always have been in the past which is what led to brexit in the first place.
Fieldwork: 15th to 18th March 2024 · Sample: 2,072 adults in Great Britain
If there were a second referendum on British membership of the European Union, how would you vote?
Re-join: 54% (+3) Stay out: 39% (-4)
(Changes from 8th to 11th March 2024)
That’s a striking shift
I don’t like it but I won’t deny it. I wonder if Starmer will be tempted. Let’s say he gets a 150 seat majority and the polls are showing 65/35 Rejoin - a sure fire win
He’s an ardent Remoaner. He will have Remoaner friends saying “We will never get this chance again, a massive majority and the polls totally in favour. Do it NOW”
He's also a lawyer. So he won't ask the question (out loud, anyway) unless/until he is certain what the answer is going to be.
If nothing else, he saw what happened to Dave.
He’s also 61. He’s an older man in a bit of a hurry
I know the feeling
His first term (which might be his only term) will be all about managerial and incremental changes, our problems are so deep they won’t be solved overnight
If he wants a definite legacy then this would be it: the guy who reversed the strategic error of Brexit (as Remoaners see it), the guy who took us back in
If he doesn’t go for Actual Rejoin then the pressure on him to at least rejoin the SM/CU will be intense
Term 1 - realignment Term 2 - renegotiation Term 3 - rejoin
If things go well he can cut short term 2 and make the GE for term 3 a pseudo-referendum on rejoin.
Currently that 'renegotiation' idea is simply a non-runner in the EU. Not just from a bureaucrat perspective, but from the average EU citizen.
My use of renegotiation was more of a euphemism (and to keep to the 're' theme).
At one end it could be at least an attempt to negotiate terms similar ot we had before, at the other it could just be the formal process to enter accession talks, happy to take whatever the EU offers from its boilerplate options.
If I were the EU I'd not want us back until all the main parties advocated rejoining, and no minor party was having significant attention and minority support for staying out. They wouldn't want to go through all this again. I'd also insist we sign up to everything, no carve outs, including adopting the Euro, which could be a major stumbling block.
So from their perspective getting us closer aligned would be end goal enough I'd think.
See this is the problem you cite all major parties wanting to go back in.....you dont cite most of the electorate wanting to go back in. So if lib, lab , con all say rejoin but the electorate is mostly against it. Well guess what we dont generally vote in a ge on single issue so chances are it would be lab or con and because all three agree we should go back in it will be negotiated even though most are against it
No, I covered that point by reference to no minor party getting significant attention or minority support for staying out - the EU would not want to risk us getting back in when it was obvious a New UKIP would probably emerge to counter the mainstream political consensus. That's the way they would have to assess what the electorate wanted, since they wouldn't even want to agree something for a referendum without being confident there was very limited opposition to it.
I don't think we're getting back in until the 2040s at least.
My fear will be all major parties want to take us back, polling shows people agree. They negotiate a deal to take us back which 60% wont agree with and dont give us a referendum on as they learnt not to. It works for politicians and there backers but not the general population who might be yes we want back but not on those terms. I cite the lisbon treaty referendum which never happened because politicians knew we would say "fuck off no"
I agree with this. If we have learnt anything from Brexit it’s that, if we are opening up the question ever again, we had best get a pretty decisive answer, directly from the country.
Which is why I think it needs to be something like 70/30 before we reopen that can of worms.
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
The average number of square metres of accommodation per person obviously impacts the consumption of resources. If everyone has their own detached house then they will burn more energy than if they live two to a room.
Which is why people can, should and do pay for their own energy.
That has bugger all to do with school demand, NHS demand etc which are all based on population not the quantity of houses.
There's a difference between national demand and local demand. Are you proposing that all new development be ringfenced so that only locals can live there to ensure the impact on local services is neutral?
No there is not. We have a free country, people are free to demand anywhere in the country.
I propose the taxpayer pays for school and healthcare in this countrry. The taxpayer also pays taxes to HMG.
You want polluter pays then fine - population growth is the consequence of central government policy. If new schools or healthcare is needed, due to central government policy, then central government should pay for it. Its the one that sets the migration policy and takes the taxes, it should pay for its own externality. Polluter pays.
Construction is not the cause of population growth.
The bit in bold is precisely the point. If there's a new development of 10,000 homes next to a village in the Cotswolds, it will obviously impact demand for local services.
Then central government should pay for it.
Its the one that takes the taxes and lets people into the county.
I've got no problem with migration into the country, but the government that sets the policy and takes the taxes needs to account for both sides of the ledger.
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because the infrastructure is essential to them having valuable assets. They be fit from a positive externality so should chip in
Why? Its not an externality, the infrastructure is to serve the population who are in the country whether houses are or not.
If infrastructure is personal it should be paid by the user. If its public, it should be paid by everyone.
In neither case should it fall on only new houses.
"To serve the population who are in the country whether houses are or not"
Are you advocating a one-in, one-out immigration policy now? Otherwise how do you propose to ensure that the additional supply doesn't just suck in more people?
No, I'm not.
People come in either way. I couldn't give less of a shit how many people come into this country, we just need to ensure its met with a commensurate increase in infrastructure which should not be the responsibility of new build homeowners, it should be the responsibility of central government that sets the policy and takes the taxes.
Polluter pays.
If it doesn't want to pay for the infrastructure, it should change its policies. Taking the taxes from migrants but not paying for the infrastructure they need is not on.
I was quite in favour of more development until I heard your arguments for it. Now I'm opposed.
Dig deep treasury, for the WASPI women. PHSO due to report tomorrow. WASPI women already threatening further court action if they are not happy with the outcome.
Looks like blanket ‘compensation’ won’t happen. So what has the fight been for and where does it go ?
IIRC Alistair Meeks wrote some headers on this subject that essentially said the broader claims of the WASPI women about lack of communication were overblown, so a 'highly targeted' scheme as stated in the article would sound pretty fair.
Can the Starmer go out to bat for them? An easy political win I assume. The 2019 manifesto talked about them facing an injustice and a system of recompense, but it was pretty woolly about it, so no firm commitment.
The i article referred to 2019 labour pledge costing just under 60 billion.
They can get stuffed in that case, the incoming Labour government won't have that amount to flash about no matter how justified.
That was 2019. I think 2024 will be different. Sufficiently vague and woolly to offer plenty of wiggle room and if the WASPI women launch more court action it helps kick the can further down the road.
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
The average number of square metres of accommodation per person obviously impacts the consumption of resources. If everyone has their own detached house then they will burn more energy than if they live two to a room.
Which is why people can, should and do pay for their own energy.
That has bugger all to do with school demand, NHS demand etc which are all based on population not the quantity of houses.
There's a difference between national demand and local demand. Are you proposing that all new development be ringfenced so that only locals can live there to ensure the impact on local services is neutral?
No there is not. We have a free country, people are free to demand anywhere in the country.
I propose the taxpayer pays for school and healthcare in this countrry. The taxpayer also pays taxes to HMG.
You want polluter pays then fine - population growth is the consequence of central government policy. If new schools or healthcare is needed, due to central government policy, then central government should pay for it. Its the one that sets the migration policy and takes the taxes, it should pay for its own externality. Polluter pays.
Construction is not the cause of population growth.
The bit in bold is precisely the point. If there's a new development of 10,000 homes next to a village in the Cotswolds, it will obviously impact demand for local services.
Then central government should pay for it.
Its the one that takes the taxes and lets people into the county.
I've got no problem with migration into the country, but the government that sets the policy and takes the taxes needs to account for both sides of the ledger.
The point you keep missing is that it's perfectly legitimate for local people to say "not in my back yard".
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because the infrastructure is essential to them having valuable assets. They be fit from a positive externality so should chip in
Why? Its not an externality, the infrastructure is to serve the population who are in the country whether houses are or not.
If infrastructure is personal it should be paid by the user. If its public, it should be paid by everyone.
In neither case should it fall on only new houses.
"To serve the population who are in the country whether houses are or not"
Are you advocating a one-in, one-out immigration policy now? Otherwise how do you propose to ensure that the additional supply doesn't just suck in more people?
No, I'm not.
People come in either way. I couldn't give less of a shit how many people come into this country, we just need to ensure its met with a commensurate increase in infrastructure which should not be the responsibility of new build homeowners, it should be the responsibility of central government that sets the policy and takes the taxes.
Polluter pays.
If it doesn't want to pay for the infrastructure, it should change its policies. Taking the taxes from migrants but not paying for the infrastructure they need is not on.
I was quite in favour of more development until I heard your arguments for it. Now I'm opposed.
Because you want it to be an anti-immigration argument instead.
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
The average number of square metres of accommodation per person obviously impacts the consumption of resources. If everyone has their own detached house then they will burn more energy than if they live two to a room.
Which is why people can, should and do pay for their own energy.
That has bugger all to do with school demand, NHS demand etc which are all based on population not the quantity of houses.
There's a difference between national demand and local demand. Are you proposing that all new development be ringfenced so that only locals can live there to ensure the impact on local services is neutral?
No there is not. We have a free country, people are free to demand anywhere in the country.
I propose the taxpayer pays for school and healthcare in this countrry. The taxpayer also pays taxes to HMG.
You want polluter pays then fine - population growth is the consequence of central government policy. If new schools or healthcare is needed, due to central government policy, then central government should pay for it. Its the one that sets the migration policy and takes the taxes, it should pay for its own externality. Polluter pays.
Construction is not the cause of population growth.
The bit in bold is precisely the point. If there's a new development of 10,000 homes next to a village in the Cotswolds, it will obviously impact demand for local services.
Then central government should pay for it.
Its the one that takes the taxes and lets people into the county.
I've got no problem with migration into the country, but the government that sets the policy and takes the taxes needs to account for both sides of the ledger.
The point you keep missing is that it's perfectly legitimate for local people to say "not in my back yard".
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
This feels like undergrad economic theory (and that isn’t intended as a compliment).
On one level you’re right. But in practice houses without adequate services are a significant part of why Britain feels so broken at the moment.
House building generates externalities. Wishing those away is not good policy.
What externalities?
Name one single externality that isn't due to population growth instead.
Children need schools whether they live in a home with their parents, or are crammed into a single room with their parents in someone else's home.
People need healthcare whether they have a home of their own, or are in a room in someone else's home.
It’s not that it’s not due to population growth, it’s that that growth is unevenly distributed. You can’t just move a school or GP surgery because the kids crammed into existing housing move to a new build 20 miles away.
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
The average number of square metres of accommodation per person obviously impacts the consumption of resources. If everyone has their own detached house then they will burn more energy than if they live two to a room.
Which is why people can, should and do pay for their own energy.
That has bugger all to do with school demand, NHS demand etc which are all based on population not the quantity of houses.
There's a difference between national demand and local demand. Are you proposing that all new development be ringfenced so that only locals can live there to ensure the impact on local services is neutral?
No there is not. We have a free country, people are free to demand anywhere in the country.
I propose the taxpayer pays for school and healthcare in this countrry. The taxpayer also pays taxes to HMG.
You want polluter pays then fine - population growth is the consequence of central government policy. If new schools or healthcare is needed, due to central government policy, then central government should pay for it. Its the one that sets the migration policy and takes the taxes, it should pay for its own externality. Polluter pays.
Construction is not the cause of population growth.
The bit in bold is precisely the point. If there's a new development of 10,000 homes next to a village in the Cotswolds, it will obviously impact demand for local services.
Then central government should pay for it.
Its the one that takes the taxes and lets people into the county.
I've got no problem with migration into the country, but the government that sets the policy and takes the taxes needs to account for both sides of the ledger.
The point you keep missing is that it's perfectly legitimate for local people to say "not in my back yard".
A wedge of youthful Labour MPs will surely demand something is done about generation rent.
Calgie @christiancalgie · 10h Can someone explain why so many Labour candidates in winnable seats are so young? Seems to be a swathe of 20-27 year olds being selected.
Not a criticism but a different demographic to what came in in 97.
Ben Kentish @BenKentish I asked a Labour insider about this recently. Their answer? “No one with a family wants to do the job any more”. Which is, if true, a massive issue.
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because the infrastructure is essential to them having valuable assets. They be fit from a positive externality so should chip in
Why? Its not an externality, the infrastructure is to serve the population who are in the country whether houses are or not.
If infrastructure is personal it should be paid by the user. If its public, it should be paid by everyone.
In neither case should it fall on only new houses.
"To serve the population who are in the country whether houses are or not"
Are you advocating a one-in, one-out immigration policy now? Otherwise how do you propose to ensure that the additional supply doesn't just suck in more people?
No, I'm not.
People come in either way. I couldn't give less of a shit how many people come into this country, we just need to ensure its met with a commensurate increase in infrastructure which should not be the responsibility of new build homeowners, it should be the responsibility of central government that sets the policy and takes the taxes.
Polluter pays.
If it doesn't want to pay for the infrastructure, it should change its policies. Taking the taxes from migrants but not paying for the infrastructure they need is not on.
I was quite in favour of more development until I heard your arguments for it. Now I'm opposed.
Because you want it to be an anti-immigration argument instead.
You're as transparent as glass.
Come, come @williamglenn has always been my favourite PB Euro Federalist. Free movement rocks!
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
This feels like undergrad economic theory (and that isn’t intended as a compliment).
On one level you’re right. But in practice houses without adequate services are a significant part of why Britain feels so broken at the moment.
House building generates externalities. Wishing those away is not good policy.
What externalities?
Name one single externality that isn't due to population growth instead.
Children need schools whether they live in a home with their parents, or are crammed into a single room with their parents in someone else's home.
People need healthcare whether they have a home of their own, or are in a room in someone else's home.
It’s not that it’s not due to population growth, it’s that that growth is unevenly distributed. You can’t just move a school or GP surgery because the kids crammed into existing housing move to a new build 20 miles away.
So why shouldn't central government which is taking the taxes from migrants (and everyone else) for that matter pay for the new schools and GP surgeries?
Central government issues the visas that cause population growth. Central government takes their income tax. Central government takes their national insurance. Central government takes the VAT. Central government takes duties.
Why should it not use its funds to pay for the externalities of its choices?
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
This feels like undergrad economic theory (and that isn’t intended as a compliment).
On one level you’re right. But in practice houses without adequate services are a significant part of why Britain feels so broken at the moment.
House building generates externalities. Wishing those away is not good policy.
What externalities?
Name one single externality that isn't due to population growth instead.
Children need schools whether they live in a home with their parents, or are crammed into a single room with their parents in someone else's home.
People need healthcare whether they have a home of their own, or are in a room in someone else's home.
It’s not that it’s not due to population growth, it’s that that growth is unevenly distributed. You can’t just move a school or GP surgery because the kids crammed into existing housing move to a new build 20 miles away.
So why shouldn't central government which is taking the taxes from migrants (and everyone else) for that matter pay for the new schools and GP surgeries?
Central government issues the visas that cause population growth. Central government takes their income tax. Central government takes their national insurance. Central government takes the VAT. Central government takes duties.
Why should it not use its funds to pay for the externalities of its choices?
You can't have it both ways. Either new housing in a given area is irrelevant to local demand for services or it isn't.
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
This feels like undergrad economic theory (and that isn’t intended as a compliment).
On one level you’re right. But in practice houses without adequate services are a significant part of why Britain feels so broken at the moment.
House building generates externalities. Wishing those away is not good policy.
What externalities?
Name one single externality that isn't due to population growth instead.
Children need schools whether they live in a home with their parents, or are crammed into a single room with their parents in someone else's home.
People need healthcare whether they have a home of their own, or are in a room in someone else's home.
However, if you create a new place, where negligible numbers of people lived before, it creates a need for services in that place that didn't exist before. Crudely, the revenue costs are the same wherever people are, but there are capital costs as well.
Now, you could avoid those, I suppose, by not building a new school, surgery, park, bus stop etc in that new place. Just have everyone drive to the nearest existing town to use the facilities there. But many people find that a dismal way to live and it builds in inefficiencies to people's lives.
So these things ought to be built alongside new homes. (One thing I'd love to see tried is to get services built and opened much earlier in the development cycle, even if it means temporary subsidies.) And Theresa decent case for getting the state to stump up the cash for this.
Trouble is that the signals from voters at every bloody election in my adulthood is that the voters don't want to pay for capital investment. They want spending now or tax cuts or both. With the consequences we see around us.
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
The average number of square metres of accommodation per person obviously impacts the consumption of resources. If everyone has their own detached house then they will burn more energy than if they live two to a room.
Which is why people can, should and do pay for their own energy.
That has bugger all to do with school demand, NHS demand etc which are all based on population not the quantity of houses.
There's a difference between national demand and local demand. Are you proposing that all new development be ringfenced so that only locals can live there to ensure the impact on local services is neutral?
No there is not. We have a free country, people are free to demand anywhere in the country.
I propose the taxpayer pays for school and healthcare in this countrry. The taxpayer also pays taxes to HMG.
You want polluter pays then fine - population growth is the consequence of central government policy. If new schools or healthcare is needed, due to central government policy, then central government should pay for it. Its the one that sets the migration policy and takes the taxes, it should pay for its own externality. Polluter pays.
Construction is not the cause of population growth.
The bit in bold is precisely the point. If there's a new development of 10,000 homes next to a village in the Cotswolds, it will obviously impact demand for local services.
Then central government should pay for it.
Its the one that takes the taxes and lets people into the county.
I've got no problem with migration into the country, but the government that sets the policy and takes the taxes needs to account for both sides of the ledger.
The point you keep missing is that it's perfectly legitimate for local people to say "not in my back yard".
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
The average number of square metres of accommodation per person obviously impacts the consumption of resources. If everyone has their own detached house then they will burn more energy than if they live two to a room.
Which is why people can, should and do pay for their own energy.
That has bugger all to do with school demand, NHS demand etc which are all based on population not the quantity of houses.
There's a difference between national demand and local demand. Are you proposing that all new development be ringfenced so that only locals can live there to ensure the impact on local services is neutral?
No there is not. We have a free country, people are free to demand anywhere in the country.
I propose the taxpayer pays for school and healthcare in this countrry. The taxpayer also pays taxes to HMG.
You want polluter pays then fine - population growth is the consequence of central government policy. If new schools or healthcare is needed, due to central government policy, then central government should pay for it. Its the one that sets the migration policy and takes the taxes, it should pay for its own externality. Polluter pays.
Construction is not the cause of population growth.
The bit in bold is precisely the point. If there's a new development of 10,000 homes next to a village in the Cotswolds, it will obviously impact demand for local services.
Then central government should pay for it.
Its the one that takes the taxes and lets people into the county.
I've got no problem with migration into the country, but the government that sets the policy and takes the taxes needs to account for both sides of the ledger.
The point you keep missing is that it's perfectly legitimate for local people to say "not in my back yard".
Why is it?
QED
That's not an argument.
If its literally their backyard, they own it, they can veto people building on land they own.
If its not, its none of their bloody business.
In Japan NIMBYs have no more input whether their neighbours can build a home than they do whether their neighbours go to McDonalds, or the cinema, or buy a candlestick or anything else.
Because, again, its none of their bloody business.
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
The average number of square metres of accommodation per person obviously impacts the consumption of resources. If everyone has their own detached house then they will burn more energy than if they live two to a room.
Which is why people can, should and do pay for their own energy.
That has bugger all to do with school demand, NHS demand etc which are all based on population not the quantity of houses.
There's a difference between national demand and local demand. Are you proposing that all new development be ringfenced so that only locals can live there to ensure the impact on local services is neutral?
No there is not. We have a free country, people are free to demand anywhere in the country.
I propose the taxpayer pays for school and healthcare in this countrry. The taxpayer also pays taxes to HMG.
You want polluter pays then fine - population growth is the consequence of central government policy. If new schools or healthcare is needed, due to central government policy, then central government should pay for it. Its the one that sets the migration policy and takes the taxes, it should pay for its own externality. Polluter pays.
Construction is not the cause of population growth.
The bit in bold is precisely the point. If there's a new development of 10,000 homes next to a village in the Cotswolds, it will obviously impact demand for local services.
Then central government should pay for it.
Its the one that takes the taxes and lets people into the county.
I've got no problem with migration into the country, but the government that sets the policy and takes the taxes needs to account for both sides of the ledger.
The point you keep missing is that it's perfectly legitimate for local people to say "not in my back yard".
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
The average number of square metres of accommodation per person obviously impacts the consumption of resources. If everyone has their own detached house then they will burn more energy than if they live two to a room.
Which is why people can, should and do pay for their own energy.
That has bugger all to do with school demand, NHS demand etc which are all based on population not the quantity of houses.
There's a difference between national demand and local demand. Are you proposing that all new development be ringfenced so that only locals can live there to ensure the impact on local services is neutral?
No there is not. We have a free country, people are free to demand anywhere in the country.
I propose the taxpayer pays for school and healthcare in this countrry. The taxpayer also pays taxes to HMG.
You want polluter pays then fine - population growth is the consequence of central government policy. If new schools or healthcare is needed, due to central government policy, then central government should pay for it. Its the one that sets the migration policy and takes the taxes, it should pay for its own externality. Polluter pays.
Construction is not the cause of population growth.
The bit in bold is precisely the point. If there's a new development of 10,000 homes next to a village in the Cotswolds, it will obviously impact demand for local services.
Then central government should pay for it.
Its the one that takes the taxes and lets people into the county.
I've got no problem with migration into the country, but the government that sets the policy and takes the taxes needs to account for both sides of the ledger.
The point you keep missing is that it's perfectly legitimate for local people to say "not in my back yard".
Why is it?
QED
That's not an argument.
If its literally their backyard, they own it, they can veto people building on land they own.
If its not, its none of their bloody business.
In Japan NIMBYs have no more input whether their neighbours can build a home than they do whether their neighbours go to McDonalds, or the cinema, or buy a candlestick or anything else.
Because, again, its none of their bloody business.
In a democracy it is their business. That's why we hold elections and let representatives decide laws. We also don't treat the country as an undifferentiated mass but have various forms of local government.
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
This feels like undergrad economic theory (and that isn’t intended as a compliment).
On one level you’re right. But in practice houses without adequate services are a significant part of why Britain feels so broken at the moment.
House building generates externalities. Wishing those away is not good policy.
What externalities?
Name one single externality that isn't due to population growth instead.
Children need schools whether they live in a home with their parents, or are crammed into a single room with their parents in someone else's home.
People need healthcare whether they have a home of their own, or are in a room in someone else's home.
However, if you create a new place, where negligible numbers of people lived before, it creates a need for services in that place that didn't exist before. Crudely, the revenue costs are the same wherever people are, but there are capital costs as well.
Now, you could avoid those, I suppose, by not building a new school, surgery, park, bus stop etc in that new place. Just have everyone drive to the nearest existing town to use the facilities there. But many people find that a dismal way to live and it builds in inefficiencies to people's lives.
So these things ought to be built alongside new homes. (One thing I'd love to see tried is to get services built and opened much earlier in the development cycle, even if it means temporary subsidies.) And Theresa decent case for getting the state to stump up the cash for this.
Trouble is that the signals from voters at every bloody election in my adulthood is that the voters don't want to pay for capital investment. They want spending now or tax cuts or both. With the consequences we see around us.
Central government issues the visas. Central government sets policy. Central government takes the taxes.
Yes there's a capital cost. The Treasury should pay it.
If the Treasury doesn't want to pay for the consequences of its choices, then it needs to make other choices.
Either the Treasury needs to pay for infrastructure for population growth, or it needs to not have population growth. It should decide either way and follow through, but new home owners are not responsible for population growth.
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
The average number of square metres of accommodation per person obviously impacts the consumption of resources. If everyone has their own detached house then they will burn more energy than if they live two to a room.
Which is why people can, should and do pay for their own energy.
That has bugger all to do with school demand, NHS demand etc which are all based on population not the quantity of houses.
There's a difference between national demand and local demand. Are you proposing that all new development be ringfenced so that only locals can live there to ensure the impact on local services is neutral?
No there is not. We have a free country, people are free to demand anywhere in the country.
I propose the taxpayer pays for school and healthcare in this countrry. The taxpayer also pays taxes to HMG.
You want polluter pays then fine - population growth is the consequence of central government policy. If new schools or healthcare is needed, due to central government policy, then central government should pay for it. Its the one that sets the migration policy and takes the taxes, it should pay for its own externality. Polluter pays.
Construction is not the cause of population growth.
The bit in bold is precisely the point. If there's a new development of 10,000 homes next to a village in the Cotswolds, it will obviously impact demand for local services.
Then central government should pay for it.
Its the one that takes the taxes and lets people into the county.
I've got no problem with migration into the country, but the government that sets the policy and takes the taxes needs to account for both sides of the ledger.
The point you keep missing is that it's perfectly legitimate for local people to say "not in my back yard".
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
The average number of square metres of accommodation per person obviously impacts the consumption of resources. If everyone has their own detached house then they will burn more energy than if they live two to a room.
Which is why people can, should and do pay for their own energy.
That has bugger all to do with school demand, NHS demand etc which are all based on population not the quantity of houses.
There's a difference between national demand and local demand. Are you proposing that all new development be ringfenced so that only locals can live there to ensure the impact on local services is neutral?
No there is not. We have a free country, people are free to demand anywhere in the country.
I propose the taxpayer pays for school and healthcare in this countrry. The taxpayer also pays taxes to HMG.
You want polluter pays then fine - population growth is the consequence of central government policy. If new schools or healthcare is needed, due to central government policy, then central government should pay for it. Its the one that sets the migration policy and takes the taxes, it should pay for its own externality. Polluter pays.
Construction is not the cause of population growth.
The bit in bold is precisely the point. If there's a new development of 10,000 homes next to a village in the Cotswolds, it will obviously impact demand for local services.
Then central government should pay for it.
Its the one that takes the taxes and lets people into the county.
I've got no problem with migration into the country, but the government that sets the policy and takes the taxes needs to account for both sides of the ledger.
The point you keep missing is that it's perfectly legitimate for local people to say "not in my back yard".
Why is it?
QED
That's not an argument.
If its literally their backyard, they own it, they can veto people building on land they own.
If its not, its none of their bloody business.
In Japan NIMBYs have no more input whether their neighbours can build a home than they do whether their neighbours go to McDonalds, or the cinema, or buy a candlestick or anything else.
Because, again, its none of their bloody business.
In a democracy it is their business. That's why we hold elections and let representatives decide laws. We also don't treat the country as an undifferentiated mass but have various forms of local government.
In a liberal democracy its none of their business.
Agree about the NIMBYS but we also need to deal with one of the biggest obstacles to housebuilding - the building firms.
How can it be acceptable that last year, when prices stopped rising as sharply as they had been, the big developers cut back on their building programmes specificaly citing the platauing of house prices?
Housebuilders are sitting on hundredas of thousands of plots with planning permission and are refusing to build on them.
That, and the regulation of new builds is almost non-existent. If you're lucky you get a structurally sound ludicrously expensive rabbit hutch out of your typical volume housebuilder. If you're unlucky the thing is full of serious faults that they don't want to spend money putting right and, as many horrified buyers have quickly discovered, they don't want to do the work and you can do nothing more than beg to get them to do it. The NHBC certificate is worthless.
Personally, I wouldn't buy a new build under any circumstances. Not good value, not worth the risk.
We bought new build Barrett in 2005 and we got a good one. Garden full of rubble with major drainage issues. Wall cavities not full of insulation as supposed to be. Cracks in wall and ceiling plaster as the building settled.
Then we had a hole open up in the downstairs ceiling right above the front door. Just as it was on sale with people coming for viewings. And - having had conversations with various neighbours - we appear to have got a good one!
Never again.
Standards have clearly deteriorated over time. My flat was built about 20 years ago and, apart from a little bit of plaster cracking and the windows being a little on the cheap side, it's fine.
Nowadays you can barely move for tales of wonky walls and collapsed ceilings. There was even a case in Cambridge recently where the shysters built houses that started falling down before they'd finished building them. Those got torn down, but you bet if they could've disguised the problems with plaster and paint they would've flogged them off.
What's insane is that standards have gotten worse, as costs and regulation have risen.
Many objections to new housing would disappear is they weren’t so horrendously ugly. Vile redbrick warts all over our fair land
Build nice Georgian terraces or Victorian semis with proper windows and build them with gentle density - four or five storeys
Make them handsome and make sure there is infrastructure and community - pubs and shops that are walkable - not soulless Barratt bart-burbs based on the car
It would help, but given the types of objection many raise which have nothing to do with appearance and character, and more to do with principle or separate material matters, it wouldn't make that much difference.
The infrastructure point would remove many more - some objections are because people genuinely don't know that contributions from the development may well address those concerns - but given that people also object to infrastructure and amenity changes, I wouldn't bet a non-existent house on it.
Except contributions from development notoriously don't address those concerns. One of the big problems with Barts loony plans for getting rid of planning is that part of that planning is making developers make contibutions towards servcies. It is a failing system which needs reform but not abolition. Indeed we need more power to force developers to properly fund services - particularly GPs and schools.
Bart's issue with planning is he fundementally misunderstands what it is and what it does. He wrongly sees it as the main impediment to building (it isn't) and thinks that by sweeping it away things will magically get better and we will get more houses built (we won't).
The idea that freeing up more land for building will get more houses built is a fallacy. As I have pointed out before available land with planning permission far outstrips the number of houses being built and the gap has widened every year for the last decade or more.
Why should housebuilders, any more than candlestick makers, be required to fund schools and bits of the NHS? This is a tax payer liability; housebuilders provide a service, the growing population they serve is a direct result of government migration policy, and the consequences are a state liability.
Because ever since Thatcher we have worked on the principle of 'polluter pays'. Local councils cannot control how many houses are built in their area - this is assigned from central government. But central Government is not willing to pay for all the costs of the services associated with all the new building. So if they will not pay and the local councils cannot pay then it is down to the company actually making the profit to pay.
But it's not pollution.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
This feels like undergrad economic theory (and that isn’t intended as a compliment).
On one level you’re right. But in practice houses without adequate services are a significant part of why Britain feels so broken at the moment.
House building generates externalities. Wishing those away is not good policy.
What externalities?
Name one single externality that isn't due to population growth instead.
Children need schools whether they live in a home with their parents, or are crammed into a single room with their parents in someone else's home.
People need healthcare whether they have a home of their own, or are in a room in someone else's home.
It’s not that it’s not due to population growth, it’s that that growth is unevenly distributed. You can’t just move a school or GP surgery because the kids crammed into existing housing move to a new build 20 miles away.
So why shouldn't central government which is taking the taxes from migrants (and everyone else) for that matter pay for the new schools and GP surgeries?
Central government issues the visas that cause population growth. Central government takes their income tax. Central government takes their national insurance. Central government takes the VAT. Central government takes duties.
Why should it not use its funds to pay for the externalities of its choices?
You can't have it both ways. Either new housing in a given area is irrelevant to local demand for services or it isn't.
No, new housing in a given area is irrelevant to national demand for services.
The Treasury should pay for the National Health Service. The Department for Education should pay for schools.
The chances of a General Election on May 2nd are below 50% now, in my opinion. 🫠
If polling day were to be May 2, with dissolution on March 26, the general election would have to be announced 21 or 22. Under electoral law, Parliament has to be dissolved – in other words, come to an end – 25 working days before a general election is held. In practice, Parliament would need a few days’ notice of dissolution to allow MPs and peers to decide which – if any – remaining pieces of non-controversial legislation should be approved. It has also become a tradition for the House of Commons to hold a “valedictory debate” just before a dissolution, during which MPs who are standing down from Parliament are given time to make a farewell speech. This means that if the election were to be on May 2, dissolution must take place no later than March 26, Sunak would need to call the election several days before dissolution took place.
What an optimistic economic backdrop to fight an April general election campaign. Looking at how much better todays PMQs was for Rishi, armed with good news of inflation and interest rate falls to come, and still dining out on boat crossings down by a third - all those arguments will be removed from him in an Autumn campaign, where high mortgages high interests rates, rising inflation and energy costs and the record boat crossings are going to be used to flatten him.
If you are not choosing a date based on forecasts for mood music of your campaign, what are you choosing it on 🤷♀️
You are right. A more precise figure is, and always has been, approximately Zero%.
What makes you sure it’s always been approximately zero? Where’s your evidence?
The polls and past experience.
No PM will call an election when they are 20% behind the polls unless they run out of time.
All the other signs have made it clear May was a non starter as the Tories weren't buying billboard spaces and ads commensurate with a May general election.
no PM will call election when 20% behind? They won’t let it time out on December 17th, hold campaign over holidays, it will give them even worse result than they deserve - so they will call and hold an election before Dec 17th, even if 20% behind.
Billboards are so last century - check out how much Conservative Party has spent on social media advertising since December. 😦
They are not 20 points behind anyway, they are only 7 away. It’s only 8% they need to claw back, and that certainly feels very doable in April to me, as I explained just now.
It’s like you are living in the past, giving this bespoke 21st century situation no thought or analysis 🫣
One of us was right about a May election and one of us wrong about a May election.
My past looking analysis was right.
🙂↔️
Only according to the decision making of Rishi Sunak are you right.
Not according to If you are not choosing a date based on forecasts for mood music of your campaign, what are you choosing it on 🤷♀️
You’re basically telling me I’m wrong, because basically they didn’t have a choice for May 2nd? And that basically boils down to being too far behind in the polls?
I am not wrong. They are not that far behind as polls you are looking at are saying. They can get the 8% they need in April.
They did have a choice.
My analysis was delicious 🤤
As delicious as your analysis on the Privileges Committee clearing Boris Johnson.
The privileges committee thing again, I was only quoting the headline on the front of the Daily Telegraph, it wasn’t even me predicting.
Listen to what Hunt is saying, and know he CAN’T SAY ANY OF THIS upbeat news in an autumn campaign you are predicting, with inflation going upwards, probably doubled since June, with energy costs going higher, and after high rents and mortgages has been number one economic news story throughout the summer.
Not only that but today in interviews, Tory politicians are already coming under pressure for the rise in “boat crossings” being called liars for still repeating it’s down.
Let me run this passed you for your analysis - in the second week of May, in nearly successive days, inflation under new energy prices will hit 2% or even less, the country will come out of recession, and the BoE will announce an interest rate cut. Is that moment of reaching its peak, from which the governments case can only deteriorate the moment for the podium outside No.10, May/June campaign - June election?
What percentage chance are you giving a suggestion of a June election?
Because the answer to the question “If you are not choosing a date based on forecasts for helpful mood music of your campaign, what are you choosing it on?” It cannot be Autumn. They cannot turn down the sunshine and optimism of May & June, and campaign in a gloomy storm of failure in October. That makes no sense to my understanding of politics. I can’t be alone thinking this. 🤷♀️
Comments
lol anyhow it it quite noticeable. A pretty and mammacious girl will attend you in a shop and then flash this dazzling smile, it is most becoming, Shakira is Colombian for a reason
And they all look healthy. The food may be banal but it is healthy. Tons of fruit all the time
NB
USA (GDP per capita, $70,000), life expectancy: 77
Colombia (GDP per capita, $7,000), life expectancy: 78
My past looking analysis was right.
I know the feeling
His first term (which might be his only term) will be all about managerial and incremental changes, our problems are so deep they won’t be solved overnight
If he wants a definite legacy then this would be it: the guy who reversed the strategic error of Brexit (as Remoaners see it), the guy who took us back in
If he doesn’t go for Actual Rejoin then the pressure on him to at least rejoin the SM/CU will be intense
Only according to the decision making of Rishi Sunak are you right.
Not according to If you are not choosing a date based on forecasts for mood music of your campaign, what are you choosing it on 🤷♀️
You’re basically telling me I’m wrong, because basically they didn’t have a choice for May 2nd? And that basically boils down to being too far behind in the polls?
I am not wrong. They are not that far behind as polls you are looking at are saying. They can get the 8% they need in April.
They did have a choice.
My analysis was delicious 🤤
Now I'm not a fan of the way the state props up the bottom end of the private rented sector in a way which benefits neither tenant not taxpayer, but that's a different issue.
A cookie-croissant that sent dessert lovers wild online is now available to buy in London.
The 'crookie' is a plain butter croissant filled with cookie dough and chocolate chips that was first invented by pâtissier Stéphane Louvard in October 2022.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/food/article-13215963/Viral-crookie-available-buy-London.html
We've got a bit of a perfect storm where policies are often obstructive (that is partly the point, but it's also supposed to assist in building the right way too), local decision makers are incentivised to say no politically where they can, and developers are infamous for dodging every obligation they can.
In a similar vein, some friends of mine* used to refer to tge yoga class they used to frequent - notable for the number of attractive young women who would attend - as a Lech'n'Stretch.
*They were lesbians, so by the rules of the 2020s I think this is still ok.
Term 2 - renegotiation
Term 3 - rejoin
If things go well he can cut short term 2 and make the GE for term 3 a pseudo-referendum on rejoin.
Looks like blanket ‘compensation’ won’t happen. So what has the fight been for and where does it go ?
https://inews.co.uk/news/waspi-women-miss-out-compensation-payouts-report-2966328
There are the thoughts for the day that you get on TfL whiteboards when there aren't emergency delays. They're harmless in a "live laugh love" sort of way and add to the niceness of the nation.
The Kings Cross messaging probably did cross a line, even if it's not entirely clear where... what would make it acceptable, or is that an impossibility?
And what about the organisations that buy advertising hoardings at stations to put Bible quotes on?
I find myself in the not unusual position of disagreeing not only with the header but with most of the comments on the topic which seem incredibly one dimensional.
"Housing" isn't just a question of building places to live - it is much more nuanced. What do you build? Where do you build it? Who do you build it for? There are a whole gamut of questions.
The much vilified "NIMBY" is also caricatured - very few are totally anti development. What most want is development which conforms to the agreed local plan in terms of density and type. Developers maximise applications to challenge local plans and obviously accentuate their profits. Currently, they can't sell the houses and flats they are building so either have to leave them empty or drop the prices.
Other issues include the ability of the construction industry and its constituent parts to respond to a sudden push in building plans - it's not just houses that are being built at any given time. There are local authorities looking to build specialist accommodation for vulnerable children and adults, there are doubtless major construction projects across the whole economy. Are there enough contractors, sub contractors and suppliers (especially in the specialist trades) to support a major housebuilding programme?
We've also heard about impacts on the electricity, sewage and transport infrastructures of new developments and increasing pressures on infrastructures aren't always understood.
Here, for example, is another example of incoherent public policy:
https://www.localis.org.uk/news/landfill-tax-reform-reduce-waste-crime-pollution-localis-study-argues/
More houses for more people means more rubbish created and that has to be dealt with. There is a huge problem with fly tipping across many areas and that needs to be addressed. Hunt's response in the Budget was to stick a further 20% on the Landfill Tax which will only encourage more illegal dumping of rubbish.
If you bring more people into an area, fine, but as the Panorama programme at the weekend demonstrated, if you increase an area's population by 15%, that has impact on service provision such as in Special Needs Education. If you fund that on old data, there's not enough money. Beyond the actual financial provision, there's the thorny question of getting enough specialist teachers, education psychologists, speech & language therapists and those specialising in physical & sensory support education to deal with the growing demands.
Don't get me wrong - I want decent accommodation for all, the ideas of families in tiny B&Bs or in mold-infested rental accommodation is appalling and should be to anyone and everyone but are housebuilders generally interested in solving the housing problem or just making profits? Taking the profit motive out of house building might enable a better mix of accommodation to be built including genuine provision for those without the ability to move on to or up the property ladder.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2024/feb/01/thousands-xl-bullies-unregistered-ban-england-wales-begins
https://news.sky.com/story/xl-bully-shot-and-killed-by-police-after-injuring-four-people-in-battersea-13098084
Can the Starmer go out to bat for them? An easy political win I assume. The 2019 manifesto talked about them facing an injustice and a system of recompense, but it was pretty woolly about it, so no firm commitment.
https://x.com/ben_a_hopkinson/status/1770077717360201875?s=61
Follower: I say you are, Lord, and I should know, I've followed a few!
In 2016 it was reasonable to trust that Cameron would see through what he initiated and that his government had a good plan for leaving if the referendum went that way. The betrayal of trust was immediate - the same day.
The threat of American isolationism and authoritarianism
The need for European unity in the face of the Russian threat.
OTOH someone I know well, a passionate Remainer in 2016 feels that the growth of the far right in the EU is a reason for switching the other way.
Dethreaded 3 hours later. Lesson to self: do not leave comments box open and get major-distracted. Vote swapping goes back a long way.
It was done in a number of local areas in the 1997 election. For example Ed Davey's supporters in Kingston & Surbiton had a deal with I think another local Constituency to swap votes with the Labour Candidate there.
Ed Davey in 1997 turned a majority of 250 or so into a majority of ~16,000 iirc. This may have been part of that. One issue was that Labour did well enough to not need LD support afterwards, so LD leverage was lost, especially (imo) as Blair moved into his authoritarian phase.
No one has ever told how effective such things were - but perhaps OGH and Mark Pack have a decent idea, which I'm not aware either of them have ever written about. Maybe Ryan Cullen (LDV founder now in the Newark area, in short trousers in 1997) may know something (!). Or Lord Bonkers.
At the time it was was partly around "Hmmm. What can we do with the internet in politics?" And partly about visceral opposition to contemporaneous Tories.
There is a summary Lib Dem Voice and Compass podcast from 2022 by Caron Lindsay here, with some interesting comments from people involved:
https://www.libdemvoice.org/lessons-from-97-lib-demlabour-cooperation-compassslf-podcast-69760.html
Compass "It's bloody complicated" Podcasts are here, but the interface to find anything is diabolical. We are after early 2022.
https://www.compassonline.org.uk/podcast/listen/
When Blair became leader, there was significant co-operation including swapping information on target seats. Later on, Neal Lawson told of a meeting in a pub in Victoria where bits of paper were swapped.
A significant part of this was that information was fed to the Mirror during the campaign. Their subsequent recommendations on tactical voting meant that we won 20 out of our 22 targets.
There was also a lot of parliamentary co-operation between the two parties on policy, the most open being the Cook Maclennan talks on constitutional reform.
There was comparison to 2019 where virtually no tactical voting took place. If Labour voters are going to vote Lib Dem an vice versa, they need to like each other’s leader and have a relatively positive view of what they are saying.
In the whole UK, the emptiest areas are Highlands and Western Isles with only 9 people per km
So we need to find ways to boost the economy outside London and SE, so that people want to move to these more remote areas, where there is plenty of land.
No objection to the TfL whiteboards 9f course. The inclusion of humour is the main thing. If religious texts had more of that they could get away with much more.
At one end it could be at least an attempt to negotiate terms similar ot we had before, at the other it could just be the formal process to enter accession talks, happy to take whatever the EU offers from its boilerplate options.
If I were the EU I'd not want us back until all the main parties advocated rejoining, and no minor party was having significant attention and minority support for staying out. They wouldn't want to go through all this again. I'd also insist we sign up to everything, no carve outs, including adopting the Euro, which could be a major stumbling block.
So from their perspective getting us closer aligned would be end goal enough I'd think.
And the older parts of Wythenshawe generally were quite socially broad-based, among the lowest three-fifths of society at least, rather than the ghetto of the bottom 10% it had become by my youth.
It is, as it happens, on its way up now, driven by connectivity, GM's relentless growth, the unaffordability for the young middle classes of where they would previously have settled in M33, SK8 and WA15, and the fact that some of it is actually quite attractive.
Population growth is not due to construction. Healthcare demand, school demand, none of it comes from construction. Fail to build sufficient houses (as we have) and demand is still there.
Demand comes from population growth, not housing growth. You want to tax the "polluter" then fine, but construction is not it. It's a response to population growth, not it's cause.
The average crowd of objectors to a planning application do not want development which conforms to the local plan and object if it does not. Most people don't know anything about local plans, why would they? It's not unreasonable that most people do not know about such matters. But objections roll in even if something is perfectly in accordance with a local plan, as they are permitted to do.
Yes, you will generally get more of them for speculative applications, on the edge of towns but outside limits of development or on unallocated sites that kind of thing, and those also have a greater chance of being refused anyway (where the authority has sufficient housing land supply at any rate).
But the difference between NIMBYism and legitimate objection is like pornography - hard to define where it crosses the line, but you can tell it when you see it.
None of which is to say a solution is just to let housebuilders do whatever, whereever they want. They are partly responsible for things as they are now, and unchecked they won't have residents and communities to heart, there are countless terrible, isolated, poorly served developments out there.
YIMBYism is not, usually, an advocation of no rules whatsoever and literally concreting over every green space. It's a feeling that the balance has gone too far one way and looking to shift it back the other. We should be able to manage that whilst simultaneously holding developers' feet to the fire to not take us all for mugs.
Edwardian *is* more spacious, and a post-2010 (say) house will likely have half the heating bills of an unrenovated 1980s or 1990s house. Early Council houses will have things like downstairs loos and big bedrooms, because they were building to a social vision (eg "garden city", "cottage estate").
Modern HA housing will often be better than equivalent developer-estate housing because there were space standards and similar in place - down to trivia such as HAs requiring a washing line to be installed at the start.
Or, comparing a London Georgian with a London Victoria, the former will usually be crap quality compared with the latter partly because eg industrialised production of manufactured standard bricks made in factories on production were an invention of around 1800, and Georgian speculators were throw-it-up types. But rich-enough Londoners continue to buy a Georgian fairy-tale they have bought from estate agents and swallowed wholesale.
A good example is to compare 1950s built modern public developments (say Roehampton) with 1960s-1970s developments elsewhere, when the cost-engineers moved in. There are good examples of very high quality 1970s Council flat developments in Camden (some of it built under Ken Livingstone's watch in his early days) which are an excellent London Open option - I spent a day vising some in around 2005.
Plus there's long been a political bandwagon trying to trash all modern housebuilding, sometimes unfairly, for political purposes.
A complicated subject.
I don't think we're getting back in until the 2040s at least.
That has bugger all to do with school demand, NHS demand etc which are all based on population not the quantity of houses.
If infrastructure is personal it should be paid by the user.
If its public, it should be paid by everyone.
In neither case should it fall on only new houses.
Are you advocating a one-in, one-out immigration policy now? Otherwise how do you propose to ensure that the additional supply doesn't just suck in more people?
I propose the taxpayer pays for school and healthcare in this countrry. The taxpayer also pays taxes to HMG.
You want polluter pays then fine - population growth is the consequence of central government policy. If new schools or healthcare is needed, due to central government policy, then central government should pay for it. Its the one that sets the migration policy and takes the taxes, it should pay for its own externality. Polluter pays.
Construction is not the cause of population growth.
It's odd that no party is really going for this. My theory is that they don't want to rouse the Farage.
A wedge of youthful Labour MPs will surely demand something is done about generation rent.
Calgie
@christiancalgie
·
10h
Can someone explain why so many Labour candidates in winnable seats are so young? Seems to be a swathe of 20-27 year olds being selected.
Not a criticism but a different demographic to what came in in 97.
Ben Kentish
@BenKentish
I asked a Labour insider about this recently. Their answer? “No one with a family wants to do the job any more”. Which is, if true, a massive issue.
https://twitter.com/BenKentish/status/1770430018914537585
On one level you’re right. But in practice houses without adequate services are a significant part of why Britain feels so broken at the moment.
House building generates externalities. Wishing those away is not good policy.
In terms of more conventional developments, you will get those who object to anything and everything and they can be quite loud but the cleverer developers use third party PR companies to sound out local residents in advance of submitting an application by holding public meetings and trying to pre-empt objections. A little bit of dialogue goes a long way and the more that is seen to be happening the more the local council will take on board.
When it becomes less adversarial it can be more successful but that requires compromise on both sides.
People come in either way. I couldn't give less of a shit how many people come into this country, we just need to ensure its met with a commensurate increase in infrastructure which should not be the responsibility of new build homeowners, it should be the responsibility of central government that sets the policy and takes the taxes.
Polluter pays.
If it doesn't want to pay for the infrastructure, it should change its policies. Taking the taxes from migrants but not paying for the infrastructure they need is not on.
Name one single externality that isn't due to population growth instead.
Children need schools whether they live in a home with their parents, or are crammed into a single room with their parents in someone else's home.
People need healthcare whether they have a home of their own, or are in a room in someone else's home.
Which is why I think it needs to be something like 70/30 before we reopen that can of worms.
Its the one that takes the taxes and lets people into the county.
I've got no problem with migration into the country, but the government that sets the policy and takes the taxes needs to account for both sides of the ledger.
You're as transparent as glass.
Central government issues the visas that cause population growth.
Central government takes their income tax.
Central government takes their national insurance.
Central government takes the VAT.
Central government takes duties.
Why should it not use its funds to pay for the externalities of its choices?
Now, you could avoid those, I suppose, by not building a new school, surgery, park, bus stop etc in that new place. Just have everyone drive to the nearest existing town to use the facilities there. But many people find that a dismal way to live and it builds in inefficiencies to people's lives.
So these things ought to be built alongside new homes. (One thing I'd love to see tried is to get services built and opened much earlier in the development cycle, even if it means temporary subsidies.) And Theresa decent case for getting the state to stump up the cash for this.
Trouble is that the signals from voters at every bloody election in my adulthood is that the voters don't want to pay for capital investment. They want spending now or tax cuts or both. With the consequences we see around us.
If its literally their backyard, they own it, they can veto people building on land they own.
If its not, its none of their bloody business.
In Japan NIMBYs have no more input whether their neighbours can build a home than they do whether their neighbours go to McDonalds, or the cinema, or buy a candlestick or anything else.
Because, again, its none of their bloody business.
Central government sets policy.
Central government takes the taxes.
Yes there's a capital cost. The Treasury should pay it.
If the Treasury doesn't want to pay for the consequences of its choices, then it needs to make other choices.
Either the Treasury needs to pay for infrastructure for population growth, or it needs to not have population growth. It should decide either way and follow through, but new home owners are not responsible for population growth.
The Treasury should pay for the National Health Service.
The Department for Education should pay for schools.
Anyway.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=llhp9Q0XOIg
Listen to what Hunt is saying, and know he CAN’T SAY ANY OF THIS upbeat news in an autumn campaign you are predicting, with inflation going upwards, probably doubled since June, with energy costs going higher, and after high rents and mortgages has been number one economic news story throughout the summer.
Not only that but today in interviews, Tory politicians are already coming under pressure for the rise in “boat crossings” being called liars for still repeating it’s down.
Let me run this passed you for your analysis - in the second week of May, in nearly successive days, inflation under new energy prices will hit 2% or even less, the country will come out of recession, and the BoE will announce an interest rate cut. Is that moment of reaching its peak, from which the governments case can only deteriorate the moment for the podium outside No.10, May/June campaign - June election?
What percentage chance are you giving a suggestion of a June election?
Because the answer to the question “If you are not choosing a date based on forecasts for helpful mood music of your campaign, what are you choosing it on?” It cannot be Autumn. They cannot turn down the sunshine and optimism of May & June, and campaign in a gloomy storm of failure in October. That makes no sense to my understanding of politics. I can’t be alone thinking this. 🤷♀️