Wasn't JD Vance claiming that children are going hungry something that led to outrage among Dem supporters ?
From last year:
David Cameron was famously asked the price of bread a decade ago and struggled to answer, saying instead he used an electric breadmaker. The answer was around 47p.
Then, the Tories were struggling to deal with a cost of living crisis and were accused of being out of touch. Now, here we are again a decade later, with the prime minister Rishi Sunak and his chancellor Jeremy Hunt being accused of having no clue. Only now an average white loaf is £1.37 – and this time it’s not just politicians that are under pressure to do something about it.
Which suggests that the Guardian is as confused as any politician as to what the price of bread is.
On the Tesco loaf, given it was "first baked 1872" I'd expect it to be pretty cheap. That is crazy cheap by today's prices.
I reckon my tastes in bread to be a bit daringly top-end - and I'd blanche at paying much more than £1.20. I'm somewhat sceptical of the £1.37 figure. Perhaps that's the average of all loaves - because there are some expensive options out there - but I can't believe it's the average of all loaves bought.
Checking, I think I pay around £1.00-£1.10 for those 800g sliced loaves I do have from Aldi, which are for things that are more awkward with bread machine bread - such as dipping sticks for a boiled hegg.
That will not be a shredded loo roll white, but more like a brown / wholemeal with seeds.
Maybe the Guardian one is an Islington-average, or they got confused because it a number bigger than three.
Or perhaps they use the ONS official figures.
They clearly don’t since the 47p from a decade ago is nonsense. A decade ago the price of bread was about the same as it is now….
The 47p came from Nick Ferrari, Tory fanboy at LBC, the Guardian repeated it.
So not using ONS figures then.
The 47p Cameron quote is about the price of a value loaf of bread from LBC, using a price comparison site. The 137p Guardian quote people are quibbling about is from the ONS, average white sliced loaf 800g.
A fair criticism would be apples and oranges (not their prices) rather than source of statistics.
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
If prices are going up then you’re not building enough houses. Build more houses until prices fall.
Wasn't JD Vance claiming that children are going hungry something that led to outrage among Dem supporters ?
From last year:
David Cameron was famously asked the price of bread a decade ago and struggled to answer, saying instead he used an electric breadmaker. The answer was around 47p.
Then, the Tories were struggling to deal with a cost of living crisis and were accused of being out of touch. Now, here we are again a decade later, with the prime minister Rishi Sunak and his chancellor Jeremy Hunt being accused of having no clue. Only now an average white loaf is £1.37 – and this time it’s not just politicians that are under pressure to do something about it.
Which suggests that the Guardian is as confused as any politician as to what the price of bread is.
On the Tesco loaf, given it was "first baked 1872" I'd expect it to be pretty cheap. That is crazy cheap by today's prices.
I reckon my tastes in bread to be a bit daringly top-end - and I'd blanche at paying much more than £1.20. I'm somewhat sceptical of the £1.37 figure. Perhaps that's the average of all loaves - because there are some expensive options out there - but I can't believe it's the average of all loaves bought.
Checking, I think I pay around £1.00-£1.10 for those 800g sliced loaves I do have from Aldi, which are for things that are more awkward with bread machine bread - such as dipping sticks for a boiled hegg.
That will not be a shredded loo roll white, but more like a brown / wholemeal with seeds.
Maybe the Guardian one is an Islington-average, or they got confused because it a number bigger than three.
Or perhaps they use the ONS official figures.
They clearly don’t since the 47p from a decade ago is nonsense. A decade ago the price of bread was about the same as it is now….
The 47p came from Nick Ferrari, Tory fanboy at LBC, the Guardian repeated it.
So not using ONS figures then.
The 47p Cameron quote is about the price of a value loaf of bread from LBC, using a price comparison site. The 137p Guardian quote people are quibbling about is from the ONS.
I’ve been quibbling about the 47p from the start. It was the value they were comparing the 137p too as a demonstration of the cost of living crisis. It’s shoddy journalism to compare the two when one looks to be completely made up.
“It reads, ‘I’m With Her,’” Trump intoned. “I choose to recite a different pledge. My pledge reads: ‘I’m with you.’”
It was an unusually deft rhetorical turn that mocked Clinton’s self-hyping campaign and encouraged many voters’ suspicions that she was not truly focused on them.
Fast forward eight years and Kamala Harris delivered the counter-argument that Clinton and Joe Biden never really managed to land.
Narrating her career as a lawyer, Harris told the Democratic convention in Chicago that she has “only had one client: the people.” In Trump’s career in business and politics, she went on, he has represented “the only client he has ever had: himself.”
It extends a theme we’ve heard throughout the Democratic convention: that Trump is a narcissist who’s not really interested in governing, leading or helping people. It is an ironic turn that among the most effective versions of that message came from Bill Clinton, when he urged voters listening to Trump: “Don’t count the lies, count the I’d.”..
The Dems have the considerable advantage of most of their attack lines being palpably true. None more so than this one.
Not quite. From your link, RLB says that excluding affordable homes will not address the shortage of affordable homes.
In a letter to Salford City Council, Ms Long-Bailey called for the plans to be refused for not ensuring 20% of the planned homes were "affordable" housing, a requirement in the area’s local plan. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgd429gdpno
Which is totally innumerate bullshit. If the supply of houses in the local area increases by over 3000 (not a typo) then the price of all homes in the area comes down versus if the homes aren't built. Which makes housing more affordable.
Building poor quality "affordable" homes isn't the only way to get home prices down, increasing supply faster than demand does that too.
What did you expect from her, something other than totally innumerate bullsh…?
Just to play devil's advocate, it is possible that new developments stimulate higher house prices, particularly if they are of a high enough quality, have good transport connections and are within commute distance of a city centre.
There are less salubrious parts of Edinburgh that are experiencing very high levels of development, largely in the old port areas like Leith, Granton, Newhaven, Seafield. This is leading to a large influx of young working people which carries a snowball effect - they are rapidly gentrifying with yoga, board game and plant pot shops. This means the values of existing flats is increasing as these working class areas suddenly get flooded with young professionals.
In fact, I was at a viewing yesterday of older flat in one of these areas, and the agent estimated about 75% of people interested are BTL landlords, thereby further squeezing the number of homes available to people who want to own their own place.
As we find time and again, the housing market is a complex beast and pointing at a supply and demand graph is simply not enough. There are plenty of examples of this kinda thing once you pass Economics 1A.
Gentrification is a different issue, specific to large cities, but every new dwelling built still works towards the overall housing problem.
The biggest current problem is massive pent-up demand for housing - there’s loads of twentysomethings and even thirtysomethings living with their parents or sharing with friends, who aspire to have a place of their own.
This means that prices won’t appreciably start falling until we are a couple of million units in to new construction, minus the units sold as second homes or to foreign residents.
Yes, it’s a horribly complex economic situation, with a load of moving parts such as taxation, interest rates, availability of finance, laws on foreign investment etc, rather than simply supply and demand for houses.
I dunno. The French have 8 million more homes than use, similar house prices and more overcrowding.
The problem is that 20 and 30 somethings all want to live close to where their peers and their jobs are, which is increasingly just a few major cities. People go to Uni and never return to towns or villages.
(and I don't think gentrification is an issue at all - it's just people whining about somewhere not being a shithole anymore. But being nice comes with a price).
Build more houses, it’s that simple.
Then build even more houses.
Starmer's 1.5 million houses in 5 years is just nonsense. We're already building about 1.1 million so an extra 400k is hardly going to have an impact. We need to be building another 1.5 million on top off the 1.1 million to have any effect.
Mr. JohnL, being a technically deficient fellow, always happy to receive advice but you say 'buy one' without saying what the one is...
What do you think they sell at UPS shops? UPS = uninterruptible power supply which gives your PC time to shut down tidily in the event of a mains outage. That said, some Windows updates can still take too long!
Ex-Tory chairman launches blistering tirade at 'complete idiocy' of Rishi Sunak Sir Jake Berry said Rishi Sunak's decision to call a General Election early was 'absolute idiocy' and said the former PM 'must have taken leave of his senses... if he ever had them' https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/ex-tory-chairman-lauches-blistering-33524186
Though looking at the issues that were in the governmental in-tray... The public sector pay recommendations, the energy price rises... Any reason to think that Sunak would have done better by staying in government until the autumn?
He handled pay better, didnt kick off a public sector free for all and did all of that without riots.
And he didnt have a wanker like Miliband screwing up energy.
Wasn't JD Vance claiming that children are going hungry something that led to outrage among Dem supporters ?
From last year:
David Cameron was famously asked the price of bread a decade ago and struggled to answer, saying instead he used an electric breadmaker. The answer was around 47p.
Then, the Tories were struggling to deal with a cost of living crisis and were accused of being out of touch. Now, here we are again a decade later, with the prime minister Rishi Sunak and his chancellor Jeremy Hunt being accused of having no clue. Only now an average white loaf is £1.37 – and this time it’s not just politicians that are under pressure to do something about it.
Which suggests that the Guardian is as confused as any politician as to what the price of bread is.
On the Tesco loaf, given it was "first baked 1872" I'd expect it to be pretty cheap. That is crazy cheap by today's prices.
I reckon my tastes in bread to be a bit daringly top-end - and I'd blanche at paying much more than £1.20. I'm somewhat sceptical of the £1.37 figure. Perhaps that's the average of all loaves - because there are some expensive options out there - but I can't believe it's the average of all loaves bought.
Checking, I think I pay around £1.00-£1.10 for those 800g sliced loaves I do have from Aldi, which are for things that are more awkward with bread machine bread - such as dipping sticks for a boiled hegg.
That will not be a shredded loo roll white, but more like a brown / wholemeal with seeds.
Maybe the Guardian one is an Islington-average, or they got confused because it a number bigger than three.
Or perhaps they use the ONS official figures.
They clearly don’t since the 47p from a decade ago is nonsense. A decade ago the price of bread was about the same as it is now….
The 47p came from Nick Ferrari, Tory fanboy at LBC, the Guardian repeated it.
So not using ONS figures then.
The 47p Cameron quote is about the price of a value loaf of bread from LBC, using a price comparison site. The 137p Guardian quote people are quibbling about is from the ONS.
I’ve been quibbling about the 47p from the start. It was the value they were comparing the 137p too as a demonstration of the cost of living crisis. It’s shoddy journalism to compare the two when one looks to be completely made up.
Neither are made up. One is the price of a value loaf in 2013. The other is the average price of white sliced loaf 800g in 2023. It has been spun to tell the story and is misleading but not made up. If only Nick Ferrari had used the ONS statistics in the first place, like the Guardian has, I wouldn't have wasted 15 minutes of my morning.
Off topic but after a summer of reading I wanted to thank @StillWaters for the recommendation of Barr's A Line in the Sand to understand more about the conflict in Gaza. Despite what felt at times like a bit of an anti - French bias it was a great read and I feel much better informed about the political history. Thanks.
Also to @148grss for the recommendation of Federici's Caliban and the Witch. It's rare to read a book that offers a completely new perspective on something but this did so on the early history of capitalism. I felt it played into my own prejudices at times and when I forced myself to be skeptical I felt she sometimes drew out fairly tendentious causal chains for things, but the scholarship is deep and wide and it's an impressive read, thanks.
The first I'm familiar with; not the second. It looks an interesting, if somewhat speculative thesis; I might order a copy.
The other really interesting, but under-explored period for the status of women in Britain, is the first few decades of the nineteenth century.
Wasn't JD Vance claiming that children are going hungry something that led to outrage among Dem supporters ?
From last year:
David Cameron was famously asked the price of bread a decade ago and struggled to answer, saying instead he used an electric breadmaker. The answer was around 47p.
Then, the Tories were struggling to deal with a cost of living crisis and were accused of being out of touch. Now, here we are again a decade later, with the prime minister Rishi Sunak and his chancellor Jeremy Hunt being accused of having no clue. Only now an average white loaf is £1.37 – and this time it’s not just politicians that are under pressure to do something about it.
Which suggests that the Guardian is as confused as any politician as to what the price of bread is.
That'll be the difference between "the average white loaf" and "the absolute cheapest economy loaf available", I expect.
With the latter being the relevant one in any reference to a 'cost of living crisis'.
Now you can pay £1 extra to get a branded bread or £3 extra to get a fancy hand baked sourdough bread.
But you don't have to, you don't need to, you do so by choice.
Good quality bread, like good quality coffee or olive oil is a very affordable luxury.
Very few Britons have calorie deficient malnutrition, but loads have obesity from excess refined carbohydrate in their diet.
Indeed, eliminating carbohydrates entirely from my diet has done wonders for my health.
Its also been cheaper too, as while meat is expensive per calorie, when its all you're eating you can afford to pay for it and not buy the rest of the stuff that goes with it.
Still buy fruits and vegetables and bread etc for my wife and kids even though I don't eat it myself, but doing the weekly shop is proving cheaper by eliminating my portion of those and eliminating snacks etc even while considerably increasing the amount of meat purchased.
Though I get my meat cheaper by going to by buying joints and cutting them into steaks (which Morrisons butcher will do for you when buying a joint) rather than buying pre-packaged steaks.
How do you think you'll go on that long term? Not a criticism, just genuinely interested. Are you fully carnivore, no fruit, nuts, seeds, grains at all? Do you take supplements? I'm fully 180° the other way, no animal products at all. I'm in the best shape I've ever been in in the round, but that's also because of a complete overhaul of lifestyle, better sleep, no booze, a lot more exercise and fresh air, even a bit of meditation 😀
I'm coming up towards a year now of full carnivore. Don't take any supplements, don't need them you get all the nutrition you need from beef.
I do drink booze, also getting more exercise.
I am not a doctor but I don't think it's advisable to live just on beef.
Patrick Fox @RealCynicalFox · 14h I mentioned this a month or so ago, now it has cropped up again. Pres. Trump has repeatedly indicated a preference for a massive senior leadership turnover at the Pentagon, should he win in November.
i.e. He wants generals who will not resist the use of the military to support him remaining in power beyond the four years and being used on the streets to control protest. He'll be asking them to swear loyalty to him and not the constitution.
Wasn't JD Vance claiming that children are going hungry something that led to outrage among Dem supporters ?
From last year:
David Cameron was famously asked the price of bread a decade ago and struggled to answer, saying instead he used an electric breadmaker. The answer was around 47p.
Then, the Tories were struggling to deal with a cost of living crisis and were accused of being out of touch. Now, here we are again a decade later, with the prime minister Rishi Sunak and his chancellor Jeremy Hunt being accused of having no clue. Only now an average white loaf is £1.37 – and this time it’s not just politicians that are under pressure to do something about it.
Which suggests that the Guardian is as confused as any politician as to what the price of bread is.
On the Tesco loaf, given it was "first baked 1872" I'd expect it to be pretty cheap. That is crazy cheap by today's prices.
I reckon my tastes in bread to be a bit daringly top-end - and I'd blanche at paying much more than £1.20. I'm somewhat sceptical of the £1.37 figure. Perhaps that's the average of all loaves - because there are some expensive options out there - but I can't believe it's the average of all loaves bought.
Checking, I think I pay around £1.00-£1.10 for those 800g sliced loaves I do have from Aldi, which are for things that are more awkward with bread machine bread - such as dipping sticks for a boiled hegg.
That will not be a shredded loo roll white, but more like a brown / wholemeal with seeds.
Maybe the Guardian one is an Islington-average, or they got confused because it a number bigger than three.
Or perhaps they use the ONS official figures.
They clearly don’t since the 47p from a decade ago is nonsense. A decade ago the price of bread was about the same as it is now….
The 47p came from Nick Ferrari, Tory fanboy at LBC, the Guardian repeated it.
So not using ONS figures then.
The 47p Cameron quote is about the price of a value loaf of bread from LBC, using a price comparison site. The 137p Guardian quote people are quibbling about is from the ONS.
I’ve been quibbling about the 47p from the start. It was the value they were comparing the 137p too as a demonstration of the cost of living crisis. It’s shoddy journalism to compare the two when one looks to be completely made up.
Neither are made up. One is the price of a value loaf in 2013. The other is the average price of white sliced loaf 800g in 2023. It has been spun to tell the story and is misleading but not made up. If only Nick Ferrari had used the ONS statistics in the first place, like the Guardian has, I wouldn't have wasted 15 minutes of my morning.
Not quite. From your link, RLB says that excluding affordable homes will not address the shortage of affordable homes.
In a letter to Salford City Council, Ms Long-Bailey called for the plans to be refused for not ensuring 20% of the planned homes were "affordable" housing, a requirement in the area’s local plan. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgd429gdpno
Which is totally innumerate bullshit. If the supply of houses in the local area increases by over 3000 (not a typo) then the price of all homes in the area comes down versus if the homes aren't built. Which makes housing more affordable.
Building poor quality "affordable" homes isn't the only way to get home prices down, increasing supply faster than demand does that too.
What did you expect from her, something other than totally innumerate bullsh…?
Just to play devil's advocate, it is possible that new developments stimulate higher house prices, particularly if they are of a high enough quality, have good transport connections and are within commute distance of a city centre.
There are less salubrious parts of Edinburgh that are experiencing very high levels of development, largely in the old port areas like Leith, Granton, Newhaven, Seafield. This is leading to a large influx of young working people which carries a snowball effect - they are rapidly gentrifying with yoga, board game and plant pot shops. This means the values of existing flats is increasing as these working class areas suddenly get flooded with young professionals.
In fact, I was at a viewing yesterday of older flat in one of these areas, and the agent estimated about 75% of people interested are BTL landlords, thereby further squeezing the number of homes available to people who want to own their own place.
As we find time and again, the housing market is a complex beast and pointing at a supply and demand graph is simply not enough. There are plenty of examples of this kinda thing once you pass Economics 1A.
Gentrification is a different issue, specific to large cities, but every new dwelling built still works towards the overall housing problem.
The biggest current problem is massive pent-up demand for housing - there’s loads of twentysomethings and even thirtysomethings living with their parents or sharing with friends, who aspire to have a place of their own.
This means that prices won’t appreciably start falling until we are a couple of million units in to new construction, minus the units sold as second homes or to foreign residents.
Yes, it’s a horribly complex economic situation, with a load of moving parts such as taxation, interest rates, availability of finance, laws on foreign investment etc, rather than simply supply and demand for houses.
I dunno. The French have 8 million more homes than use, similar house prices and more overcrowding.
The problem is that 20 and 30 somethings all want to live close to where their peers and their jobs are, which is increasingly just a few major cities. People go to Uni and never return to towns or villages.
(and I don't think gentrification is an issue at all - it's just people whining about somewhere not being a shithole anymore. But being nice comes with a price).
'Gentrification' is used as a euphemism for other complaints.
My biggest objection to "Gentrification" protestors, is that they won't do the obvious.
Burglary, sell some crack, get the neighbourhood back to how it was....
Used to live in a 'gentrified' street in N. London. Drug dealing at one end, prostitution at the other and burglary conveniently in the middle (five times in nine years). They are not mutually exclusive.
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
If prices are going up then you’re not building enough houses. Build more houses until prices fall.
That assumes that you have a downwards sloping demand curve. Andy has just described a scenario where that "law" is violated.
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
Summary of solution elements:
1 - Provide infrastructure in ADVANCE of development. Otherwise your best case is chronic overload (because by the time you've constructed it to catch up with the housing level (say) five years earlier, you've had five years more building houses and your new infrastructure is insufficient. Worse case, developers don't provide it or the Treasury fails to do so and instead of chronic overload, you've got acute (and chronic) overload. This is unsurprisingly an unpopular state for residents to experience, especially when it's seemingly eternal.
2 - Give real enforcement powers to LAs. At the moment, developers can get away with so much as long as they just provide a promise and sketchy plan to do something about it and oops we didn't do it yet but we will sometime, honest. In one development, they've been waiting for over a decade for the promised sports pitches because the developer just buried all the rubble in the central green area, raising the levels six feet (so you could stand there and see into upstairs windows) and making it unusable.
3 - Give Neighbourhood Development Plans real teeth. We had a window a decade or so ago when people locally were content with large numbers of houses to come, as they had apparent influence over where these would be and over what infrastructure would come along with them. Since then, they've seen houses spring up all over the place with nothing that was promised accompanying them. Shockingly, they now oppose these new developments.
4 - Use Local Development Orders to streamline planning. In effect, you pick an area for a type of development and provide a big chunk of the compulsory planning reports up front and give what's effectively preapproval to developments within certain constraints.
5 - Fund LAs to buy up areas for the above (at before planning uplift prices) and carry out LDO preplanning approval AND provide power, sewerage, and road/path infrastructure to the development to then sell off plots to multiple smaller developers for a single site. From the profits, they fund schools and surgeries and a chunk of hiring developers to provide social housing there for them to administrate going forwards.
There's more than that, but that would be a basic start.
Not quite. From your link, RLB says that excluding affordable homes will not address the shortage of affordable homes.
In a letter to Salford City Council, Ms Long-Bailey called for the plans to be refused for not ensuring 20% of the planned homes were "affordable" housing, a requirement in the area’s local plan. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgd429gdpno
Which is totally innumerate bullshit. If the supply of houses in the local area increases by over 3000 (not a typo) then the price of all homes in the area comes down versus if the homes aren't built. Which makes housing more affordable.
Building poor quality "affordable" homes isn't the only way to get home prices down, increasing supply faster than demand does that too.
What did you expect from her, something other than totally innumerate bullsh…?
Just to play devil's advocate, it is possible that new developments stimulate higher house prices, particularly if they are of a high enough quality, have good transport connections and are within commute distance of a city centre.
There are less salubrious parts of Edinburgh that are experiencing very high levels of development, largely in the old port areas like Leith, Granton, Newhaven, Seafield. This is leading to a large influx of young working people which carries a snowball effect - they are rapidly gentrifying with yoga, board game and plant pot shops. This means the values of existing flats is increasing as these working class areas suddenly get flooded with young professionals.
In fact, I was at a viewing yesterday of older flat in one of these areas, and the agent estimated about 75% of people interested are BTL landlords, thereby further squeezing the number of homes available to people who want to own their own place.
As we find time and again, the housing market is a complex beast and pointing at a supply and demand graph is simply not enough. There are plenty of examples of this kinda thing once you pass Economics 1A.
Gentrification is a different issue, specific to large cities, but every new dwelling built still works towards the overall housing problem.
The biggest current problem is massive pent-up demand for housing - there’s loads of twentysomethings and even thirtysomethings living with their parents or sharing with friends, who aspire to have a place of their own.
This means that prices won’t appreciably start falling until we are a couple of million units in to new construction, minus the units sold as second homes or to foreign residents.
Yes, it’s a horribly complex economic situation, with a load of moving parts such as taxation, interest rates, availability of finance, laws on foreign investment etc, rather than simply supply and demand for houses.
I dunno. The French have 8 million more homes than use, similar house prices and more overcrowding.
The problem is that 20 and 30 somethings all want to live close to where their peers and their jobs are, which is increasingly just a few major cities. People go to Uni and never return to towns or villages.
(and I don't think gentrification is an issue at all - it's just people whining about somewhere not being a shithole anymore. But being nice comes with a price).
'Gentrification' is used as a euphemism for other complaints.
My biggest objection to "Gentrification" protestors, is that they won't do the obvious.
Burglary, sell some crack, get the neighbourhood back to how it was....
Used to live in a 'gentrified' street in N. London. Drug dealing at one end, prostitution at the other and burglary conveniently in the middle (five times in nine years). They are not mutually exclusive.
The problem is that eventually, the drug dealers, prostitutes and burglars can't afford the rising rents. And public transport is expensive....
Before you know it, you are up to your nuts in crusty jugglers.
Wasn't JD Vance claiming that children are going hungry something that led to outrage among Dem supporters ?
From last year:
David Cameron was famously asked the price of bread a decade ago and struggled to answer, saying instead he used an electric breadmaker. The answer was around 47p.
Then, the Tories were struggling to deal with a cost of living crisis and were accused of being out of touch. Now, here we are again a decade later, with the prime minister Rishi Sunak and his chancellor Jeremy Hunt being accused of having no clue. Only now an average white loaf is £1.37 – and this time it’s not just politicians that are under pressure to do something about it.
Which suggests that the Guardian is as confused as any politician as to what the price of bread is.
On the Tesco loaf, given it was "first baked 1872" I'd expect it to be pretty cheap. That is crazy cheap by today's prices.
I reckon my tastes in bread to be a bit daringly top-end - and I'd blanche at paying much more than £1.20. I'm somewhat sceptical of the £1.37 figure. Perhaps that's the average of all loaves - because there are some expensive options out there - but I can't believe it's the average of all loaves bought.
Checking, I think I pay around £1.00-£1.10 for those 800g sliced loaves I do have from Aldi, which are for things that are more awkward with bread machine bread - such as dipping sticks for a boiled hegg.
That will not be a shredded loo roll white, but more like a brown / wholemeal with seeds.
Maybe the Guardian one is an Islington-average, or they got confused because it a number bigger than three.
Or perhaps they use the ONS official figures.
They clearly don’t since the 47p from a decade ago is nonsense. A decade ago the price of bread was about the same as it is now….
The 47p came from Nick Ferrari, Tory fanboy at LBC, the Guardian repeated it.
So not using ONS figures then.
The 47p Cameron quote is about the price of a value loaf of bread from LBC, using a price comparison site. The 137p Guardian quote people are quibbling about is from the ONS.
I’ve been quibbling about the 47p from the start. It was the value they were comparing the 137p too as a demonstration of the cost of living crisis. It’s shoddy journalism to compare the two when one looks to be completely made up.
Neither are made up. One is the price of a value loaf in 2013. The other is the average price of white sliced loaf 800g in 2023. It has been spun to tell the story and is misleading but not made up. If only Nick Ferrari had used the ONS statistics in the first place, like the Guardian has, I wouldn't have wasted 15 minutes of my morning.
They didn’t use that qualifier though, nor did they quote anyone, they just said a loaf cost 47p. It’s clear they are connecting the two to suggest a huge increase in the price over the last decade “and now an average loaf costs…”.
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
If prices are going up then you’re not building enough houses. Build more houses until prices fall.
That assumes that you have a downwards sloping demand curve. Andy has just described a scenario where that "law" is violated.
When you get to the point that street person has two houses....
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
If prices are going up then you’re not building enough houses. Build more houses until prices fall.
How many will that be in the Vale, then? After all, as Heinlein said, "If there are no numbers, it's not science but opinion." People understandably would like to know how many is enough. After all, at the rate we've been building, if every other LA had been building at our rate, we'd have seen 600,000+ new houses per year nationwide for 10-15 years.
Mr. JohnL, ah, I'd never heard of that before. Is it worthwhile, given the desktop actually seems fine even given a power failure during an update?
The problem is that a badly-timed outage while a patch is being applied can render your pc unbootable. Depending how reliable your electricity company is, you might choose to mitigate that risk with a UPS. Or you can take other steps to reduce the risk, like applying patches during the day when you are less likely to have power companies doing routine maintenance. And a proper backup strategy means you don't need to care very much about having to reinstall Windows.
That recording of Jan 6th is indeed brutal. But it is not new. How can anyone support Trump after that, let alone nearly 45% of Americans?
I genuinely find it bewildering. How can any elected official of any part of the party think this is ok?
Many Americans see a very different picture of events, they’re fed a stream of propaganda on Fox News etc. They see a different reality, they’re told lies. They’re in a Facebook bubble where they believe that Harris slept her way to the top, lies about her ethnicity and her family, and is a communist. They’ve absorbed a message that the country is in a crisis because of immigrants and anyone who isn’t white.
These beliefs don’t spontaneously emerge. They are rehearsed, over and over again, by traditional and social media on the right.
It's why we should close down GB News.
Prevention is better than cure.
What calumnies are you alleging GBNews have been guilty of?
Spreading antivax bollocks for starters such as
GB News broke Ofcom rules with presenter’s Covid vaccine claims
Regulator says Mark Steyn’s use of data to draw misleading conclusions breached content guidelines
GB News is an entertainment channel for right wing morons and Farage supporters masquerading as a bona fide news channel.
On GB News, I don't understand how Gloria de Piero is still there. I'm surprised she hasn't jumped ship for somewhere like Times Radio.
Unlike Lee Anderson, she hasn't gone loopy, and still does interesting work.
Her twitter feed is civilised and interesting, as opposed to Anderson's constant dog whistles. https://x.com/GloriaDePiero
On GBNews itself, it is owned by Sir Paul Marshall and investment firm Legatum. Paul Marshall also owns Unherd, and is in the running to buy the Spectator and the Telegraph.
The article I linked talks about that, and about how he attends HTB, but it is by a Political Correspondent - and imo has little clue about that church, or Church of England evangelicalism. Some accurate stuff in there, but no real knowledge.
All of these need to be taken with our own pinch of salt.
I have yet to get a handle on how I understand Paul Marshall; I think his motivations and expressed objectives are OK, but I question his judgement, and I do wonder whether he has been put out of balance by exposure to something like the ideology of Nat Con.
Mr. JohnL, ah, I'd never heard of that before. Is it worthwhile, given the desktop actually seems fine even given a power failure during an update?
The problem is that a badly-timed outage while a patch is being applied can render your pc unbootable. Depending how reliable your electricity company is, you might choose to mitigate that risk with a UPS. Or you can take other steps to reduce the risk, like applying patches during the day when you are less likely to have power companies doing routine maintenance. And a proper backup strategy means you don't need to care very much about having to reinstall Windows.
So is a UPS worth it? That is for you to decide.
Anotther advantage is that a UPS *can* (depends on spec) against surges.
Wasn't JD Vance claiming that children are going hungry something that led to outrage among Dem supporters ?
From last year:
David Cameron was famously asked the price of bread a decade ago and struggled to answer, saying instead he used an electric breadmaker. The answer was around 47p.
Then, the Tories were struggling to deal with a cost of living crisis and were accused of being out of touch. Now, here we are again a decade later, with the prime minister Rishi Sunak and his chancellor Jeremy Hunt being accused of having no clue. Only now an average white loaf is £1.37 – and this time it’s not just politicians that are under pressure to do something about it.
Which suggests that the Guardian is as confused as any politician as to what the price of bread is.
That'll be the difference between "the average white loaf" and "the absolute cheapest economy loaf available", I expect.
With the latter being the relevant one in any reference to a 'cost of living crisis'.
Now you can pay £1 extra to get a branded bread or £3 extra to get a fancy hand baked sourdough bread.
But you don't have to, you don't need to, you do so by choice.
Good quality bread, like good quality coffee or olive oil is a very affordable luxury.
Very few Britons have calorie deficient malnutrition, but loads have obesity from excess refined carbohydrate in their diet.
Indeed, eliminating carbohydrates entirely from my diet has done wonders for my health.
Its also been cheaper too, as while meat is expensive per calorie, when its all you're eating you can afford to pay for it and not buy the rest of the stuff that goes with it.
Still buy fruits and vegetables and bread etc for my wife and kids even though I don't eat it myself, but doing the weekly shop is proving cheaper by eliminating my portion of those and eliminating snacks etc even while considerably increasing the amount of meat purchased.
Though I get my meat cheaper by going to by buying joints and cutting them into steaks (which Morrisons butcher will do for you when buying a joint) rather than buying pre-packaged steaks.
How do you think you'll go on that long term? Not a criticism, just genuinely interested. Are you fully carnivore, no fruit, nuts, seeds, grains at all? Do you take supplements? I'm fully 180° the other way, no animal products at all. I'm in the best shape I've ever been in in the round, but that's also because of a complete overhaul of lifestyle, better sleep, no booze, a lot more exercise and fresh air, even a bit of meditation 😀
I'm coming up towards a year now of full carnivore. Don't take any supplements, don't need them you get all the nutrition you need from beef.
I do drink booze, also getting more exercise.
I am not a doctor but I don't think it's advisable to live just on beef.
Of course not. Has to be some venison for balance.
Not quite. From your link, RLB says that excluding affordable homes will not address the shortage of affordable homes.
In a letter to Salford City Council, Ms Long-Bailey called for the plans to be refused for not ensuring 20% of the planned homes were "affordable" housing, a requirement in the area’s local plan. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgd429gdpno
Which is totally innumerate bullshit. If the supply of houses in the local area increases by over 3000 (not a typo) then the price of all homes in the area comes down versus if the homes aren't built. Which makes housing more affordable.
Building poor quality "affordable" homes isn't the only way to get home prices down, increasing supply faster than demand does that too.
What did you expect from her, something other than totally innumerate bullsh…?
Just to play devil's advocate, it is possible that new developments stimulate higher house prices, particularly if they are of a high enough quality, have good transport connections and are within commute distance of a city centre.
There are less salubrious parts of Edinburgh that are experiencing very high levels of development, largely in the old port areas like Leith, Granton, Newhaven, Seafield. This is leading to a large influx of young working people which carries a snowball effect - they are rapidly gentrifying with yoga, board game and plant pot shops. This means the values of existing flats is increasing as these working class areas suddenly get flooded with young professionals.
In fact, I was at a viewing yesterday of older flat in one of these areas, and the agent estimated about 75% of people interested are BTL landlords, thereby further squeezing the number of homes available to people who want to own their own place.
As we find time and again, the housing market is a complex beast and pointing at a supply and demand graph is simply not enough. There are plenty of examples of this kinda thing once you pass Economics 1A.
Gentrification is a different issue, specific to large cities, but every new dwelling built still works towards the overall housing problem.
The biggest current problem is massive pent-up demand for housing - there’s loads of twentysomethings and even thirtysomethings living with their parents or sharing with friends, who aspire to have a place of their own.
This means that prices won’t appreciably start falling until we are a couple of million units in to new construction, minus the units sold as second homes or to foreign residents.
Yes, it’s a horribly complex economic situation, with a load of moving parts such as taxation, interest rates, availability of finance, laws on foreign investment etc, rather than simply supply and demand for houses.
I dunno. The French have 8 million more homes than use, similar house prices and more overcrowding.
The problem is that 20 and 30 somethings all want to live close to where their peers and their jobs are, which is increasingly just a few major cities. People go to Uni and never return to towns or villages.
(and I don't think gentrification is an issue at all - it's just people whining about somewhere not being a shithole anymore. But being nice comes with a price).
'Gentrification' is used as a euphemism for other complaints.
My biggest objection to "Gentrification" protestors, is that they won't do the obvious.
Burglary, sell some crack, get the neighbourhood back to how it was....
Used to live in a 'gentrified' street in N. London. Drug dealing at one end, prostitution at the other and burglary conveniently in the middle (five times in nine years). They are not mutually exclusive.
The problem is that eventually, the drug dealers, prostitutes and burglars can't afford the rising rents. And public transport is expensive....
Before you know it, you are up to your nuts in crusty jugglers.
Crusty jugglers?
Soda rye bread enthusiasts? Edinburgh Fringe nuisances?
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
There isn't an LA in the country that is building sufficient houses, as per Pulpstar's data.
Building not enough, but being less bad than elsewhere, is simply failing less badly not succeeding.
Wasn't JD Vance claiming that children are going hungry something that led to outrage among Dem supporters ?
From last year:
David Cameron was famously asked the price of bread a decade ago and struggled to answer, saying instead he used an electric breadmaker. The answer was around 47p.
Then, the Tories were struggling to deal with a cost of living crisis and were accused of being out of touch. Now, here we are again a decade later, with the prime minister Rishi Sunak and his chancellor Jeremy Hunt being accused of having no clue. Only now an average white loaf is £1.37 – and this time it’s not just politicians that are under pressure to do something about it.
Which suggests that the Guardian is as confused as any politician as to what the price of bread is.
That'll be the difference between "the average white loaf" and "the absolute cheapest economy loaf available", I expect.
With the latter being the relevant one in any reference to a 'cost of living crisis'.
Now you can pay £1 extra to get a branded bread or £3 extra to get a fancy hand baked sourdough bread.
But you don't have to, you don't need to, you do so by choice.
Good quality bread, like good quality coffee or olive oil is a very affordable luxury.
Very few Britons have calorie deficient malnutrition, but loads have obesity from excess refined carbohydrate in their diet.
Indeed, eliminating carbohydrates entirely from my diet has done wonders for my health.
Its also been cheaper too, as while meat is expensive per calorie, when its all you're eating you can afford to pay for it and not buy the rest of the stuff that goes with it.
Still buy fruits and vegetables and bread etc for my wife and kids even though I don't eat it myself, but doing the weekly shop is proving cheaper by eliminating my portion of those and eliminating snacks etc even while considerably increasing the amount of meat purchased.
Though I get my meat cheaper by going to by buying joints and cutting them into steaks (which Morrisons butcher will do for you when buying a joint) rather than buying pre-packaged steaks.
How do you think you'll go on that long term? Not a criticism, just genuinely interested. Are you fully carnivore, no fruit, nuts, seeds, grains at all? Do you take supplements? I'm fully 180° the other way, no animal products at all. I'm in the best shape I've ever been in in the round, but that's also because of a complete overhaul of lifestyle, better sleep, no booze, a lot more exercise and fresh air, even a bit of meditation 😀
I am not quite so full on, more flexitarian, with a predominantly "Mediterranean" diet heavy on salads, vegetables, pulses, wholegrain and some fish and meat. I avoid cured meats because of the nitrites and salt, and restrict drinking alcohol to weekends and holidays.
It's a much more varied and sustainable diet, both in terms of enjoyment and for the planet, but I am not doctrinaire and eat what I am given if a guest somewhere.
Not quite. From your link, RLB says that excluding affordable homes will not address the shortage of affordable homes.
In a letter to Salford City Council, Ms Long-Bailey called for the plans to be refused for not ensuring 20% of the planned homes were "affordable" housing, a requirement in the area’s local plan. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgd429gdpno
Which is totally innumerate bullshit. If the supply of houses in the local area increases by over 3000 (not a typo) then the price of all homes in the area comes down versus if the homes aren't built. Which makes housing more affordable.
Building poor quality "affordable" homes isn't the only way to get home prices down, increasing supply faster than demand does that too.
What did you expect from her, something other than totally innumerate bullsh…?
Just to play devil's advocate, it is possible that new developments stimulate higher house prices, particularly if they are of a high enough quality, have good transport connections and are within commute distance of a city centre.
There are less salubrious parts of Edinburgh that are experiencing very high levels of development, largely in the old port areas like Leith, Granton, Newhaven, Seafield. This is leading to a large influx of young working people which carries a snowball effect - they are rapidly gentrifying with yoga, board game and plant pot shops. This means the values of existing flats is increasing as these working class areas suddenly get flooded with young professionals.
In fact, I was at a viewing yesterday of older flat in one of these areas, and the agent estimated about 75% of people interested are BTL landlords, thereby further squeezing the number of homes available to people who want to own their own place.
As we find time and again, the housing market is a complex beast and pointing at a supply and demand graph is simply not enough. There are plenty of examples of this kinda thing once you pass Economics 1A.
Gentrification is a different issue, specific to large cities, but every new dwelling built still works towards the overall housing problem.
The biggest current problem is massive pent-up demand for housing - there’s loads of twentysomethings and even thirtysomethings living with their parents or sharing with friends, who aspire to have a place of their own.
This means that prices won’t appreciably start falling until we are a couple of million units in to new construction, minus the units sold as second homes or to foreign residents.
Yes, it’s a horribly complex economic situation, with a load of moving parts such as taxation, interest rates, availability of finance, laws on foreign investment etc, rather than simply supply and demand for houses.
I dunno. The French have 8 million more homes than use, similar house prices and more overcrowding.
The problem is that 20 and 30 somethings all want to live close to where their peers and their jobs are, which is increasingly just a few major cities. People go to Uni and never return to towns or villages.
(and I don't think gentrification is an issue at all - it's just people whining about somewhere not being a shithole anymore. But being nice comes with a price).
'Gentrification' is used as a euphemism for other complaints.
My biggest objection to "Gentrification" protestors, is that they won't do the obvious.
Burglary, sell some crack, get the neighbourhood back to how it was....
Used to live in a 'gentrified' street in N. London. Drug dealing at one end, prostitution at the other and burglary conveniently in the middle (five times in nine years). They are not mutually exclusive.
The problem is that eventually, the drug dealers, prostitutes and burglars can't afford the rising rents. And public transport is expensive....
Before you know it, you are up to your nuts in crusty jugglers.
Crusty jugglers?
Soda rye bread enthusiasts? Edinburgh Fringe nuisances?
Not quite. From your link, RLB says that excluding affordable homes will not address the shortage of affordable homes.
In a letter to Salford City Council, Ms Long-Bailey called for the plans to be refused for not ensuring 20% of the planned homes were "affordable" housing, a requirement in the area’s local plan. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgd429gdpno
Which is totally innumerate bullshit. If the supply of houses in the local area increases by over 3000 (not a typo) then the price of all homes in the area comes down versus if the homes aren't built. Which makes housing more affordable.
Building poor quality "affordable" homes isn't the only way to get home prices down, increasing supply faster than demand does that too.
What did you expect from her, something other than totally innumerate bullsh…?
Just to play devil's advocate, it is possible that new developments stimulate higher house prices, particularly if they are of a high enough quality, have good transport connections and are within commute distance of a city centre.
There are less salubrious parts of Edinburgh that are experiencing very high levels of development, largely in the old port areas like Leith, Granton, Newhaven, Seafield. This is leading to a large influx of young working people which carries a snowball effect - they are rapidly gentrifying with yoga, board game and plant pot shops. This means the values of existing flats is increasing as these working class areas suddenly get flooded with young professionals.
In fact, I was at a viewing yesterday of older flat in one of these areas, and the agent estimated about 75% of people interested are BTL landlords, thereby further squeezing the number of homes available to people who want to own their own place.
As we find time and again, the housing market is a complex beast and pointing at a supply and demand graph is simply not enough. There are plenty of examples of this kinda thing once you pass Economics 1A.
Gentrification is a different issue, specific to large cities, but every new dwelling built still works towards the overall housing problem.
The biggest current problem is massive pent-up demand for housing - there’s loads of twentysomethings and even thirtysomethings living with their parents or sharing with friends, who aspire to have a place of their own.
This means that prices won’t appreciably start falling until we are a couple of million units in to new construction, minus the units sold as second homes or to foreign residents.
Yes, it’s a horribly complex economic situation, with a load of moving parts such as taxation, interest rates, availability of finance, laws on foreign investment etc, rather than simply supply and demand for houses.
I dunno. The French have 8 million more homes than use, similar house prices and more overcrowding.
The problem is that 20 and 30 somethings all want to live close to where their peers and their jobs are, which is increasingly just a few major cities. People go to Uni and never return to towns or villages.
(and I don't think gentrification is an issue at all - it's just people whining about somewhere not being a shithole anymore. But being nice comes with a price).
Build more houses, it’s that simple.
Then build even more houses.
Starmer's 1.5 million houses in 5 years is just nonsense. We're already building about 1.1 million so an extra 400k is hardly going to have an impact. We need to be building another 1.5 million on top off the 1.1 million to have any effect.
Not quite. From your link, RLB says that excluding affordable homes will not address the shortage of affordable homes.
In a letter to Salford City Council, Ms Long-Bailey called for the plans to be refused for not ensuring 20% of the planned homes were "affordable" housing, a requirement in the area’s local plan. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgd429gdpno
Which is totally innumerate bullshit. If the supply of houses in the local area increases by over 3000 (not a typo) then the price of all homes in the area comes down versus if the homes aren't built. Which makes housing more affordable.
Building poor quality "affordable" homes isn't the only way to get home prices down, increasing supply faster than demand does that too.
What did you expect from her, something other than totally innumerate bullsh…?
Just to play devil's advocate, it is possible that new developments stimulate higher house prices, particularly if they are of a high enough quality, have good transport connections and are within commute distance of a city centre.
There are less salubrious parts of Edinburgh that are experiencing very high levels of development, largely in the old port areas like Leith, Granton, Newhaven, Seafield. This is leading to a large influx of young working people which carries a snowball effect - they are rapidly gentrifying with yoga, board game and plant pot shops. This means the values of existing flats is increasing as these working class areas suddenly get flooded with young professionals.
In fact, I was at a viewing yesterday of older flat in one of these areas, and the agent estimated about 75% of people interested are BTL landlords, thereby further squeezing the number of homes available to people who want to own their own place.
As we find time and again, the housing market is a complex beast and pointing at a supply and demand graph is simply not enough. There are plenty of examples of this kinda thing once you pass Economics 1A.
Gentrification is a different issue, specific to large cities, but every new dwelling built still works towards the overall housing problem.
The biggest current problem is massive pent-up demand for housing - there’s loads of twentysomethings and even thirtysomethings living with their parents or sharing with friends, who aspire to have a place of their own.
This means that prices won’t appreciably start falling until we are a couple of million units in to new construction, minus the units sold as second homes or to foreign residents.
Yes, it’s a horribly complex economic situation, with a load of moving parts such as taxation, interest rates, availability of finance, laws on foreign investment etc, rather than simply supply and demand for houses.
I dunno. The French have 8 million more homes than use, similar house prices and more overcrowding.
The problem is that 20 and 30 somethings all want to live close to where their peers and their jobs are, which is increasingly just a few major cities. People go to Uni and never return to towns or villages.
(and I don't think gentrification is an issue at all - it's just people whining about somewhere not being a shithole anymore. But being nice comes with a price).
Build more houses, it’s that simple.
Then build even more houses.
Starmer's 1.5 million houses in 5 years is just nonsense. We're already building about 1.1 million so an extra 400k is hardly going to have an impact. We need to be building another 1.5 million on top off the 1.1 million to have any effect.
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
If prices are going up then you’re not building enough houses. Build more houses until prices fall.
How many will that be in the Vale, then? After all, as Heinlein said, "If there are no numbers, it's not science but opinion." People understandably would like to know how many is enough. After all, at the rate we've been building, if every other LA had been building at our rate, we'd have seen 600,000+ new houses per year nationwide for 10-15 years.
We have a shortage of over 10 million houses.
And that's on today's figures. Given ongoing population growth and demographic changes, we'd need even more.
Mr. JohnL, thanks for that answer, I appreciate the guidance. At the moment, I'll think about it. I do backup things onto both flashdrives and other devices fairly often. If I'd been aware there was a weather warning I might've delayed the restart. Hmm.
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
Summary of solution elements:
1 - Provide infrastructure in ADVANCE of development. Otherwise your best case is chronic overload (because by the time you've constructed it to catch up with the housing level (say) five years earlier, you've had five years more building houses and your new infrastructure is insufficient. Worse case, developers don't provide it or the Treasury fails to do so and instead of chronic overload, you've got acute (and chronic) overload. This is unsurprisingly an unpopular state for residents to experience, especially when it's seemingly eternal.
2 - Give real enforcement powers to LAs. At the moment, developers can get away with so much as long as they just provide a promise and sketchy plan to do something about it and oops we didn't do it yet but we will sometime, honest. In one development, they've been waiting for over a decade for the promised sports pitches because the developer just buried all the rubble in the central green area, raising the levels six feet (so you could stand there and see into upstairs windows) and making it unusable.
3 - Give Neighbourhood Development Plans real teeth. We had a window a decade or so ago when people locally were content with large numbers of houses to come, as they had apparent influence over where these would be and over what infrastructure would come along with them. Since then, they've seen houses spring up all over the place with nothing that was promised accompanying them. Shockingly, they now oppose these new developments.
4 - Use Local Development Orders to streamline planning. In effect, you pick an area for a type of development and provide a big chunk of the compulsory planning reports up front and give what's effectively preapproval to developments within certain constraints.
5 - Fund LAs to buy up areas for the above (at before planning uplift prices) and carry out LDO preplanning approval AND provide power, sewerage, and road/path infrastructure to the development to then sell off plots to multiple smaller developers for a single site. From the profits, they fund schools and surgeries and a chunk of hiring developers to provide social housing there for them to administrate going forwards.
There's more than that, but that would be a basic start.
One of the things that speaks of is more projects such as Graven Hill in Bicester - self-build with ready-to-build plots, as was much done in the 1970s. GravenHill is 2000 dwellings, with elements of social and housing association.
Five Graven Hills per county would be a start - 200-250k self-builds over a decade.
But Graven Hill has had no navigate a total MAZE of rules and bureaucracy, partly to skirt around VAT, and has ended up mainly accessible for people with half a million to hand, or the capacity to borrow that much or more.
So RR needs to pick up things like the local aspiring self-builder registers kept by Councile and integrate them into an orderly process.
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
There isn't an LA in the country that is building sufficient houses, as per Pulpstar's data.
Building not enough, but being less bad than elsewhere, is simply failing less badly not succeeding.
Nope.
Pulpstar's data showed us increasing our housing stock by more than 10% over the past five years. At that rate, that's five million new houses per decade. If everyone else had done what we'd done over the past five years, we'd be half way to being out of the housing crisis already.
A single LA can't provide all the housing you need for the entire country.
As we don't have North Korea-style borders about the district, it simply means we absorb a tiny fraction of the issues from elsewhere. It's literally impossible for us to build enough houses to satisfy your simplistic cry: we'd have to build the five million or so houses ourselves (on top of the 50,000 with which we started a decade ago).
Meanwhile our residents are suffering all the infrastructure issues I described (and you ignore).
So - how many houses should the Vale of White Horse be building?
Not quite. From your link, RLB says that excluding affordable homes will not address the shortage of affordable homes.
In a letter to Salford City Council, Ms Long-Bailey called for the plans to be refused for not ensuring 20% of the planned homes were "affordable" housing, a requirement in the area’s local plan. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgd429gdpno
Which is totally innumerate bullshit. If the supply of houses in the local area increases by over 3000 (not a typo) then the price of all homes in the area comes down versus if the homes aren't built. Which makes housing more affordable.
Building poor quality "affordable" homes isn't the only way to get home prices down, increasing supply faster than demand does that too.
What did you expect from her, something other than totally innumerate bullsh…?
Just to play devil's advocate, it is possible that new developments stimulate higher house prices, particularly if they are of a high enough quality, have good transport connections and are within commute distance of a city centre.
There are less salubrious parts of Edinburgh that are experiencing very high levels of development, largely in the old port areas like Leith, Granton, Newhaven, Seafield. This is leading to a large influx of young working people which carries a snowball effect - they are rapidly gentrifying with yoga, board game and plant pot shops. This means the values of existing flats is increasing as these working class areas suddenly get flooded with young professionals.
In fact, I was at a viewing yesterday of older flat in one of these areas, and the agent estimated about 75% of people interested are BTL landlords, thereby further squeezing the number of homes available to people who want to own their own place.
As we find time and again, the housing market is a complex beast and pointing at a supply and demand graph is simply not enough. There are plenty of examples of this kinda thing once you pass Economics 1A.
Gentrification is a different issue, specific to large cities, but every new dwelling built still works towards the overall housing problem.
The biggest current problem is massive pent-up demand for housing - there’s loads of twentysomethings and even thirtysomethings living with their parents or sharing with friends, who aspire to have a place of their own.
This means that prices won’t appreciably start falling until we are a couple of million units in to new construction, minus the units sold as second homes or to foreign residents.
Yes, it’s a horribly complex economic situation, with a load of moving parts such as taxation, interest rates, availability of finance, laws on foreign investment etc, rather than simply supply and demand for houses.
I dunno. The French have 8 million more homes than use, similar house prices and more overcrowding.
The problem is that 20 and 30 somethings all want to live close to where their peers and their jobs are, which is increasingly just a few major cities. People go to Uni and never return to towns or villages.
(and I don't think gentrification is an issue at all - it's just people whining about somewhere not being a shithole anymore. But being nice comes with a price).
'Gentrification' is used as a euphemism for other complaints.
My biggest objection to "Gentrification" protestors, is that they won't do the obvious.
Burglary, sell some crack, get the neighbourhood back to how it was....
Used to live in a 'gentrified' street in N. London. Drug dealing at one end, prostitution at the other and burglary conveniently in the middle (five times in nine years). They are not mutually exclusive.
The problem is that eventually, the drug dealers, prostitutes and burglars can't afford the rising rents. And public transport is expensive....
Before you know it, you are up to your nuts in crusty jugglers.
Crusty jugglers?
Soda rye bread enthusiasts? Edinburgh Fringe nuisances?
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
Summary of solution elements:
1 - Provide infrastructure in ADVANCE of development. Otherwise your best case is chronic overload (because by the time you've constructed it to catch up with the housing level (say) five years earlier, you've had five years more building houses and your new infrastructure is insufficient. Worse case, developers don't provide it or the Treasury fails to do so and instead of chronic overload, you've got acute (and chronic) overload. This is unsurprisingly an unpopular state for residents to experience, especially when it's seemingly eternal.
2 - Give real enforcement powers to LAs. At the moment, developers can get away with so much as long as they just provide a promise and sketchy plan to do something about it and oops we didn't do it yet but we will sometime, honest. In one development, they've been waiting for over a decade for the promised sports pitches because the developer just buried all the rubble in the central green area, raising the levels six feet (so you could stand there and see into upstairs windows) and making it unusable.
3 - Give Neighbourhood Development Plans real teeth. We had a window a decade or so ago when people locally were content with large numbers of houses to come, as they had apparent influence over where these would be and over what infrastructure would come along with them. Since then, they've seen houses spring up all over the place with nothing that was promised accompanying them. Shockingly, they now oppose these new developments.
4 - Use Local Development Orders to streamline planning. In effect, you pick an area for a type of development and provide a big chunk of the compulsory planning reports up front and give what's effectively preapproval to developments within certain constraints.
5 - Fund LAs to buy up areas for the above (at before planning uplift prices) and carry out LDO preplanning approval AND provide power, sewerage, and road/path infrastructure to the development to then sell off plots to multiple smaller developers for a single site. From the profits, they fund schools and surgeries and a chunk of hiring developers to provide social housing there for them to administrate going forwards.
There's more than that, but that would be a basic start.
One of the things that speaks of is more projects such as Graven Hill in Bicester - self-build with ready-to-build plots, as was much done in the 1970s. GravenHill is 2000 dwellings, with elements of social and housing association.
Three or four Graven Hills per county would be a start - 200-250k self-builds over a decade.
But Graven Hill has had no navigate a total MAZE of rules and bureaucracy, partly top skirt around VAT, and has ended up mainly accessible for people with half a million to hand, or the capacity to borrow that much or more.
We've been trying something very similar (partly because it's so close) and it's a bloody nightmare. There's a site in my ward to do this and a project very dear to my heart and we've been pushing it since I got elected for the first time more than five years ago and it's like running through treacle.
Ex-Tory chairman launches blistering tirade at 'complete idiocy' of Rishi Sunak Sir Jake Berry said Rishi Sunak's decision to call a General Election early was 'absolute idiocy' and said the former PM 'must have taken leave of his senses... if he ever had them' https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/ex-tory-chairman-lauches-blistering-33524186
Though looking at the issues that were in the governmental in-tray... The public sector pay recommendations, the energy price rises... Any reason to think that Sunak would have done better by staying in government until the autumn?
He handled pay better, didnt kick off a public sector free for all and did all of that without riots.
And he didnt have a wanker like Miliband screwing up energy.
Sunak handled public sector pay by hiding the review body reports in a basement behind a sign saying "beware of the leopard". He just about got away with that until early July, but it wasn't a long-term answer.
Once those reports were published, he could either pay up or trigger a load more strikes.
Wasn't JD Vance claiming that children are going hungry something that led to outrage among Dem supporters ?
From last year:
David Cameron was famously asked the price of bread a decade ago and struggled to answer, saying instead he used an electric breadmaker. The answer was around 47p.
Then, the Tories were struggling to deal with a cost of living crisis and were accused of being out of touch. Now, here we are again a decade later, with the prime minister Rishi Sunak and his chancellor Jeremy Hunt being accused of having no clue. Only now an average white loaf is £1.37 – and this time it’s not just politicians that are under pressure to do something about it.
Which suggests that the Guardian is as confused as any politician as to what the price of bread is.
That'll be the difference between "the average white loaf" and "the absolute cheapest economy loaf available", I expect.
With the latter being the relevant one in any reference to a 'cost of living crisis'.
Now you can pay £1 extra to get a branded bread or £3 extra to get a fancy hand baked sourdough bread.
But you don't have to, you don't need to, you do so by choice.
Good quality bread, like good quality coffee or olive oil is a very affordable luxury.
Very few Britons have calorie deficient malnutrition, but loads have obesity from excess refined carbohydrate in their diet.
Indeed, eliminating carbohydrates entirely from my diet has done wonders for my health.
Its also been cheaper too, as while meat is expensive per calorie, when its all you're eating you can afford to pay for it and not buy the rest of the stuff that goes with it.
Still buy fruits and vegetables and bread etc for my wife and kids even though I don't eat it myself, but doing the weekly shop is proving cheaper by eliminating my portion of those and eliminating snacks etc even while considerably increasing the amount of meat purchased.
Though I get my meat cheaper by going to by buying joints and cutting them into steaks (which Morrisons butcher will do for you when buying a joint) rather than buying pre-packaged steaks.
How do you think you'll go on that long term? Not a criticism, just genuinely interested. Are you fully carnivore, no fruit, nuts, seeds, grains at all? Do you take supplements? I'm fully 180° the other way, no animal products at all. I'm in the best shape I've ever been in in the round, but that's also because of a complete overhaul of lifestyle, better sleep, no booze, a lot more exercise and fresh air, even a bit of meditation 😀
I'm coming up towards a year now of full carnivore. Don't take any supplements, don't need them you get all the nutrition you need from beef.
I do drink booze, also getting more exercise.
I am not a doctor but I don't think it's advisable to live just on beef.
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
If prices are going up then you’re not building enough houses. Build more houses until prices fall.
How many will that be in the Vale, then? After all, as Heinlein said, "If there are no numbers, it's not science but opinion." People understandably would like to know how many is enough. After all, at the rate we've been building, if every other LA had been building at our rate, we'd have seen 600,000+ new houses per year nationwide for 10-15 years.
We have a shortage of over 10 million houses.
And that's on today's figures. Given ongoing population growth and demographic changes, we'd need even more.
It fascinates me how people don't realise this.
My current bugbear is NIMBYs who are also hugely pro immigration. And then moan about the house prices their children are having to pay.
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
If prices are going up then you’re not building enough houses. Build more houses until prices fall.
How many will that be in the Vale, then? After all, as Heinlein said, "If there are no numbers, it's not science but opinion." People understandably would like to know how many is enough. After all, at the rate we've been building, if every other LA had been building at our rate, we'd have seen 600,000+ new houses per year nationwide for 10-15 years.
We have a shortage of over 10 million houses.
And that's on today's figures. Given ongoing population growth and demographic changes, we'd need even more.
I'm sorry, but I really don't think we could even fit ten million more houses in the Vale of White Horse.
Ex-Tory chairman launches blistering tirade at 'complete idiocy' of Rishi Sunak Sir Jake Berry said Rishi Sunak's decision to call a General Election early was 'absolute idiocy' and said the former PM 'must have taken leave of his senses... if he ever had them' https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/ex-tory-chairman-lauches-blistering-33524186
Though looking at the issues that were in the governmental in-tray... The public sector pay recommendations, the energy price rises... Any reason to think that Sunak would have done better by staying in government until the autumn?
He handled pay better, didnt kick off a public sector free for all and did all of that without riots.
And he didnt have a wanker like Miliband screwing up energy.
Sunak handled public sector pay by hiding the review body reports in a basement behind a sign saying "beware of the leopard". He just about got away with that until early July, but it wasn't a long-term answer.
Once those reports were published, he could either pay up or trigger a load more strikes.
Sunak could have paid them or kicked them into the long grass for the short term at least. No, something must have happened to spook Rishi's inner circle because if he was going to call an early election, May made more sense to combine with the locals; or go long until December or even January and enjoy an extra six months in office. July gave the worst of all worlds.
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
There isn't an LA in the country that is building sufficient houses, as per Pulpstar's data.
Building not enough, but being less bad than elsewhere, is simply failing less badly not succeeding.
Nope.
Pulpstar's data showed us increasing our housing stock by more than 10% over the past five years. At that rate, that's five million new houses per decade. If everyone else had done what we'd done over the past five years, we'd be half way to being out of the housing crisis already.
A single LA can't provide all the housing you need for the entire country.
As we don't have North Korea-style borders about the district, it simply means we absorb a tiny fraction of the issues from elsewhere. It's literally impossible for us to build enough houses to satisfy your simplistic cry: we'd have to build the five million or so houses ourselves (on top of the 50,000 with which we started a decade ago).
Meanwhile our residents are suffering all the infrastructure issues I described (and you ignore).
So - how many houses should the Vale of White Horse be building?
How does five million over a decade remotely address a ten million shortage?
You're right it doesn't all have to come from one LA, but no LA is doing remotely enough.
I'd suggest a minimum of 3,500 completions per annum per authority as a starting point - more could of course be better but that should be the bare minimum per annum.
Looking at it, Vale of White Horse had just over 2000 completions in a seven year period, unless I'm misreading the data, so they've not even hit the minimum we need per year over a seven year period.
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
If prices are going up then you’re not building enough houses. Build more houses until prices fall.
How many will that be in the Vale, then? After all, as Heinlein said, "If there are no numbers, it's not science but opinion." People understandably would like to know how many is enough. After all, at the rate we've been building, if every other LA had been building at our rate, we'd have seen 600,000+ new houses per year nationwide for 10-15 years.
We have a shortage of over 10 million houses.
And that's on today's figures. Given ongoing population growth and demographic changes, we'd need even more.
I'm sorry, but I really don't think we could even fit ten million more houses in the Vale of White Horse.
Certainly not with that attitude. Have you seen Hong Kong?
Wasn't JD Vance claiming that children are going hungry something that led to outrage among Dem supporters ?
From last year:
David Cameron was famously asked the price of bread a decade ago and struggled to answer, saying instead he used an electric breadmaker. The answer was around 47p.
Then, the Tories were struggling to deal with a cost of living crisis and were accused of being out of touch. Now, here we are again a decade later, with the prime minister Rishi Sunak and his chancellor Jeremy Hunt being accused of having no clue. Only now an average white loaf is £1.37 – and this time it’s not just politicians that are under pressure to do something about it.
Which suggests that the Guardian is as confused as any politician as to what the price of bread is.
That'll be the difference between "the average white loaf" and "the absolute cheapest economy loaf available", I expect.
With the latter being the relevant one in any reference to a 'cost of living crisis'.
Now you can pay £1 extra to get a branded bread or £3 extra to get a fancy hand baked sourdough bread.
But you don't have to, you don't need to, you do so by choice.
Good quality bread, like good quality coffee or olive oil is a very affordable luxury.
Very few Britons have calorie deficient malnutrition, but loads have obesity from excess refined carbohydrate in their diet.
Indeed, eliminating carbohydrates entirely from my diet has done wonders for my health.
Its also been cheaper too, as while meat is expensive per calorie, when its all you're eating you can afford to pay for it and not buy the rest of the stuff that goes with it.
Still buy fruits and vegetables and bread etc for my wife and kids even though I don't eat it myself, but doing the weekly shop is proving cheaper by eliminating my portion of those and eliminating snacks etc even while considerably increasing the amount of meat purchased.
Though I get my meat cheaper by going to by buying joints and cutting them into steaks (which Morrisons butcher will do for you when buying a joint) rather than buying pre-packaged steaks.
How do you think you'll go on that long term? Not a criticism, just genuinely interested. Are you fully carnivore, no fruit, nuts, seeds, grains at all? Do you take supplements? I'm fully 180° the other way, no animal products at all. I'm in the best shape I've ever been in in the round, but that's also because of a complete overhaul of lifestyle, better sleep, no booze, a lot more exercise and fresh air, even a bit of meditation 😀
I'm coming up towards a year now of full carnivore. Don't take any supplements, don't need them you get all the nutrition you need from beef.
I do drink booze, also getting more exercise.
I am not a doctor but I don't think it's advisable to live just on beef.
I don't live just on beef.
I eat a varied diet.
Beef, bacon, chicken, sausages, eggs and cheese.
Quite similar to my diet when I’m in france, with the addition of gratin dauphinoise, pâté and vast amounts of baguette.
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
There isn't an LA in the country that is building sufficient houses, as per Pulpstar's data.
Building not enough, but being less bad than elsewhere, is simply failing less badly not succeeding.
Nope.
Pulpstar's data showed us increasing our housing stock by more than 10% over the past five years. At that rate, that's five million new houses per decade. If everyone else had done what we'd done over the past five years, we'd be half way to being out of the housing crisis already.
A single LA can't provide all the housing you need for the entire country.
As we don't have North Korea-style borders about the district, it simply means we absorb a tiny fraction of the issues from elsewhere. It's literally impossible for us to build enough houses to satisfy your simplistic cry: we'd have to build the five million or so houses ourselves (on top of the 50,000 with which we started a decade ago).
Meanwhile our residents are suffering all the infrastructure issues I described (and you ignore).
So - how many houses should the Vale of White Horse be building?
How does five million over a decade remotely address a ten million shortage?
You're right it doesn't all have to come from one LA, but no LA is doing remotely enough.
I'd suggest a minimum of 3,500 completions per annum per authority as a starting point - more could of course be better but that should be the bare minimum per annum.
Looking at it, Vale of White Horse had just over 2000 completions in a seven year period, unless I'm misreading the data, so they've not even hit the minimum we need per year over a seven year period.
Dismal failure.
Ummm... It's not one person per house. Five million homes makes a decent dent.
Wasn't JD Vance claiming that children are going hungry something that led to outrage among Dem supporters ?
From last year:
David Cameron was famously asked the price of bread a decade ago and struggled to answer, saying instead he used an electric breadmaker. The answer was around 47p.
Then, the Tories were struggling to deal with a cost of living crisis and were accused of being out of touch. Now, here we are again a decade later, with the prime minister Rishi Sunak and his chancellor Jeremy Hunt being accused of having no clue. Only now an average white loaf is £1.37 – and this time it’s not just politicians that are under pressure to do something about it.
Which suggests that the Guardian is as confused as any politician as to what the price of bread is.
That'll be the difference between "the average white loaf" and "the absolute cheapest economy loaf available", I expect.
With the latter being the relevant one in any reference to a 'cost of living crisis'.
Now you can pay £1 extra to get a branded bread or £3 extra to get a fancy hand baked sourdough bread.
But you don't have to, you don't need to, you do so by choice.
Good quality bread, like good quality coffee or olive oil is a very affordable luxury.
Very few Britons have calorie deficient malnutrition, but loads have obesity from excess refined carbohydrate in their diet.
Indeed, eliminating carbohydrates entirely from my diet has done wonders for my health.
Its also been cheaper too, as while meat is expensive per calorie, when its all you're eating you can afford to pay for it and not buy the rest of the stuff that goes with it.
Still buy fruits and vegetables and bread etc for my wife and kids even though I don't eat it myself, but doing the weekly shop is proving cheaper by eliminating my portion of those and eliminating snacks etc even while considerably increasing the amount of meat purchased.
Though I get my meat cheaper by going to by buying joints and cutting them into steaks (which Morrisons butcher will do for you when buying a joint) rather than buying pre-packaged steaks.
How do you think you'll go on that long term? Not a criticism, just genuinely interested. Are you fully carnivore, no fruit, nuts, seeds, grains at all? Do you take supplements? I'm fully 180° the other way, no animal products at all. I'm in the best shape I've ever been in in the round, but that's also because of a complete overhaul of lifestyle, better sleep, no booze, a lot more exercise and fresh air, even a bit of meditation 😀
I'm coming up towards a year now of full carnivore. Don't take any supplements, don't need them you get all the nutrition you need from beef.
I do drink booze, also getting more exercise.
I am not a doctor but I don't think it's advisable to live just on beef.
I don't live just on beef.
I eat a varied diet.
Beef, bacon, chicken, sausages, eggs and cheese.
How then are you a full carnivore if you eat dairy?
Ex-Tory chairman launches blistering tirade at 'complete idiocy' of Rishi Sunak Sir Jake Berry said Rishi Sunak's decision to call a General Election early was 'absolute idiocy' and said the former PM 'must have taken leave of his senses... if he ever had them' https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/ex-tory-chairman-lauches-blistering-33524186
Though looking at the issues that were in the governmental in-tray... The public sector pay recommendations, the energy price rises... Any reason to think that Sunak would have done better by staying in government until the autumn?
He handled pay better, didnt kick off a public sector free for all and did all of that without riots.
And he didnt have a wanker like Miliband screwing up energy.
Sunak handled public sector pay by hiding the review body reports in a basement behind a sign saying "beware of the leopard". He just about got away with that until early July, but it wasn't a long-term answer.
Once those reports were published, he could either pay up or trigger a load more strikes.
Sunak could have paid them or kicked them into the long grass for the short term at least. No, something must have happened to spook Rishi's inner circle because if he was going to call an early election, May made more sense to combine with the locals; or go long until December or even January and enjoy an extra six months in office. July gave the worst of all worlds.
The only thing that makes sense, is that Graham Brady’s postbox was looking awfully full.
Wasn't JD Vance claiming that children are going hungry something that led to outrage among Dem supporters ?
From last year:
David Cameron was famously asked the price of bread a decade ago and struggled to answer, saying instead he used an electric breadmaker. The answer was around 47p.
Then, the Tories were struggling to deal with a cost of living crisis and were accused of being out of touch. Now, here we are again a decade later, with the prime minister Rishi Sunak and his chancellor Jeremy Hunt being accused of having no clue. Only now an average white loaf is £1.37 – and this time it’s not just politicians that are under pressure to do something about it.
Which suggests that the Guardian is as confused as any politician as to what the price of bread is.
That'll be the difference between "the average white loaf" and "the absolute cheapest economy loaf available", I expect.
With the latter being the relevant one in any reference to a 'cost of living crisis'.
Now you can pay £1 extra to get a branded bread or £3 extra to get a fancy hand baked sourdough bread.
But you don't have to, you don't need to, you do so by choice.
Good quality bread, like good quality coffee or olive oil is a very affordable luxury.
Very few Britons have calorie deficient malnutrition, but loads have obesity from excess refined carbohydrate in their diet.
Indeed, eliminating carbohydrates entirely from my diet has done wonders for my health.
Its also been cheaper too, as while meat is expensive per calorie, when its all you're eating you can afford to pay for it and not buy the rest of the stuff that goes with it.
Still buy fruits and vegetables and bread etc for my wife and kids even though I don't eat it myself, but doing the weekly shop is proving cheaper by eliminating my portion of those and eliminating snacks etc even while considerably increasing the amount of meat purchased.
Though I get my meat cheaper by going to by buying joints and cutting them into steaks (which Morrisons butcher will do for you when buying a joint) rather than buying pre-packaged steaks.
How do you think you'll go on that long term? Not a criticism, just genuinely interested. Are you fully carnivore, no fruit, nuts, seeds, grains at all? Do you take supplements? I'm fully 180° the other way, no animal products at all. I'm in the best shape I've ever been in in the round, but that's also because of a complete overhaul of lifestyle, better sleep, no booze, a lot more exercise and fresh air, even a bit of meditation 😀
I'm coming up towards a year now of full carnivore. Don't take any supplements, don't need them you get all the nutrition you need from beef.
I do drink booze, also getting more exercise.
I am not a doctor but I don't think it's advisable to live just on beef.
I don't live just on beef.
I eat a varied diet.
Beef, bacon, chicken, sausages, eggs and cheese.
How then are you a full carnivore if you eat dairy?
Dairy is an animal based product, that's acceptable on a carnivore diet in moderation.
Not quite. From your link, RLB says that excluding affordable homes will not address the shortage of affordable homes.
In a letter to Salford City Council, Ms Long-Bailey called for the plans to be refused for not ensuring 20% of the planned homes were "affordable" housing, a requirement in the area’s local plan. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgd429gdpno
Which is totally innumerate bullshit. If the supply of houses in the local area increases by over 3000 (not a typo) then the price of all homes in the area comes down versus if the homes aren't built. Which makes housing more affordable.
Building poor quality "affordable" homes isn't the only way to get home prices down, increasing supply faster than demand does that too.
What did you expect from her, something other than totally innumerate bullsh…?
Just to play devil's advocate, it is possible that new developments stimulate higher house prices, particularly if they are of a high enough quality, have good transport connections and are within commute distance of a city centre.
There are less salubrious parts of Edinburgh that are experiencing very high levels of development, largely in the old port areas like Leith, Granton, Newhaven, Seafield. This is leading to a large influx of young working people which carries a snowball effect - they are rapidly gentrifying with yoga, board game and plant pot shops. This means the values of existing flats is increasing as these working class areas suddenly get flooded with young professionals.
In fact, I was at a viewing yesterday of older flat in one of these areas, and the agent estimated about 75% of people interested are BTL landlords, thereby further squeezing the number of homes available to people who want to own their own place.
As we find time and again, the housing market is a complex beast and pointing at a supply and demand graph is simply not enough. There are plenty of examples of this kinda thing once you pass Economics 1A.
Gentrification is a different issue, specific to large cities, but every new dwelling built still works towards the overall housing problem.
The biggest current problem is massive pent-up demand for housing - there’s loads of twentysomethings and even thirtysomethings living with their parents or sharing with friends, who aspire to have a place of their own.
This means that prices won’t appreciably start falling until we are a couple of million units in to new construction, minus the units sold as second homes or to foreign residents.
Yes, it’s a horribly complex economic situation, with a load of moving parts such as taxation, interest rates, availability of finance, laws on foreign investment etc, rather than simply supply and demand for houses.
I dunno. The French have 8 million more homes than use, similar house prices and more overcrowding.
The problem is that 20 and 30 somethings all want to live close to where their peers and their jobs are, which is increasingly just a few major cities. People go to Uni and never return to towns or villages.
(and I don't think gentrification is an issue at all - it's just people whining about somewhere not being a shithole anymore. But being nice comes with a price).
'Gentrification' is used as a euphemism for other complaints.
My biggest objection to "Gentrification" protestors, is that they won't do the obvious.
Burglary, sell some crack, get the neighbourhood back to how it was....
Used to live in a 'gentrified' street in N. London. Drug dealing at one end, prostitution at the other and burglary conveniently in the middle (five times in nine years). They are not mutually exclusive.
The problem is that eventually, the drug dealers, prostitutes and burglars can't afford the rising rents. And public transport is expensive....
Before you know it, you are up to your nuts in crusty jugglers.
Crusty jugglers?
Soda rye bread enthusiasts? Edinburgh Fringe nuisances?
There's probably a large archive of them saying uncomplimentary things about each other that the Democrats are sitting on. I don't think the RFK thing ends up being of any benefit at all to Trump.
I suspect it will make sod all difference either way despite some of the breathless Trumpian ramping we have witnessed on here since it was floated.
France has similar population and 8 million fewer properties.
And before the rubbish stats come out, people renting a property by the room, as an unregistered HMO, is not a household. Except in the minds of idiots.
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
There isn't an LA in the country that is building sufficient houses, as per Pulpstar's data.
Building not enough, but being less bad than elsewhere, is simply failing less badly not succeeding.
Nope.
Pulpstar's data showed us increasing our housing stock by more than 10% over the past five years. At that rate, that's five million new houses per decade. If everyone else had done what we'd done over the past five years, we'd be half way to being out of the housing crisis already.
A single LA can't provide all the housing you need for the entire country.
As we don't have North Korea-style borders about the district, it simply means we absorb a tiny fraction of the issues from elsewhere. It's literally impossible for us to build enough houses to satisfy your simplistic cry: we'd have to build the five million or so houses ourselves (on top of the 50,000 with which we started a decade ago).
Meanwhile our residents are suffering all the infrastructure issues I described (and you ignore).
So - how many houses should the Vale of White Horse be building?
How does five million over a decade remotely address a ten million shortage?
You're right it doesn't all have to come from one LA, but no LA is doing remotely enough.
I'd suggest a minimum of 3,500 completions per annum per authority as a starting point - more could of course be better but that should be the bare minimum per annum.
Looking at it, Vale of White Horse had just over 2000 completions in a seven year period, unless I'm misreading the data, so they've not even hit the minimum we need per year over a seven year period.
Dismal failure.
Why ten million? To have the same ratio of houses per population as France, we'd need 3.9 million more houses than we currently have. (we're at 434 per thousand; they're at 590 per thousand).
And yes, you're massively misreading the data. We had over a thousand completions last year alone. 7,330 over the past seven years (from Pulpstar's table). Bear in mind that a decade ago, we had just over 50,000 to start with.
For someone who purports to dislike NIMBYs, you seem to aim to go out of your way to create more of them. I'm literally very active in trying to sort this problem out, we're one of the leading LAs in the country, and you're calling our rate and attempts "dismal failures" - partly because you can't even read a spreadsheet.
God, the keyboard warriors who just complain, spout simplistic crap, and do nothing to actively help. Meanwhile, I've been active in promoting a 4000+ development that crosses into my ward, working hard to get a Graven Hill style development in my ward, pushing policies to streamline development, helped with an LDO for technical building development in my ward, and done my damndest to get enforcement on developers to mitigate the inevitable backlash against further development.
Not quite. From your link, RLB says that excluding affordable homes will not address the shortage of affordable homes.
In a letter to Salford City Council, Ms Long-Bailey called for the plans to be refused for not ensuring 20% of the planned homes were "affordable" housing, a requirement in the area’s local plan. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgd429gdpno
Which is totally innumerate bullshit. If the supply of houses in the local area increases by over 3000 (not a typo) then the price of all homes in the area comes down versus if the homes aren't built. Which makes housing more affordable.
Building poor quality "affordable" homes isn't the only way to get home prices down, increasing supply faster than demand does that too.
What did you expect from her, something other than totally innumerate bullsh…?
Just to play devil's advocate, it is possible that new developments stimulate higher house prices, particularly if they are of a high enough quality, have good transport connections and are within commute distance of a city centre.
There are less salubrious parts of Edinburgh that are experiencing very high levels of development, largely in the old port areas like Leith, Granton, Newhaven, Seafield. This is leading to a large influx of young working people which carries a snowball effect - they are rapidly gentrifying with yoga, board game and plant pot shops. This means the values of existing flats is increasing as these working class areas suddenly get flooded with young professionals.
In fact, I was at a viewing yesterday of older flat in one of these areas, and the agent estimated about 75% of people interested are BTL landlords, thereby further squeezing the number of homes available to people who want to own their own place.
As we find time and again, the housing market is a complex beast and pointing at a supply and demand graph is simply not enough. There are plenty of examples of this kinda thing once you pass Economics 1A.
Gentrification is a different issue, specific to large cities, but every new dwelling built still works towards the overall housing problem.
The biggest current problem is massive pent-up demand for housing - there’s loads of twentysomethings and even thirtysomethings living with their parents or sharing with friends, who aspire to have a place of their own.
This means that prices won’t appreciably start falling until we are a couple of million units in to new construction, minus the units sold as second homes or to foreign residents.
Yes, it’s a horribly complex economic situation, with a load of moving parts such as taxation, interest rates, availability of finance, laws on foreign investment etc, rather than simply supply and demand for houses.
I dunno. The French have 8 million more homes than use, similar house prices and more overcrowding.
The problem is that 20 and 30 somethings all want to live close to where their peers and their jobs are, which is increasingly just a few major cities. People go to Uni and never return to towns or villages.
(and I don't think gentrification is an issue at all - it's just people whining about somewhere not being a shithole anymore. But being nice comes with a price).
'Gentrification' is used as a euphemism for other complaints.
My biggest objection to "Gentrification" protestors, is that they won't do the obvious.
Burglary, sell some crack, get the neighbourhood back to how it was....
Used to live in a 'gentrified' street in N. London. Drug dealing at one end, prostitution at the other and burglary conveniently in the middle (five times in nine years). They are not mutually exclusive.
The problem is that eventually, the drug dealers, prostitutes and burglars can't afford the rising rents. And public transport is expensive....
Before you know it, you are up to your nuts in crusty jugglers.
Crusty jugglers?
Soda rye bread enthusiasts? Edinburgh Fringe nuisances?
Private developers are always going to try to do less on the necessary additional infrastructure. It eats into profits. They also won't coordinate their developments well with each other.
If govt did it directly we ought to be able to get more joined up development alongside additional infrastructure.
Rachel Reeves must know that borrowing to build houses is fine, we will get that money back and then some, even without the wider economic benefits.
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
There isn't an LA in the country that is building sufficient houses, as per Pulpstar's data.
Building not enough, but being less bad than elsewhere, is simply failing less badly not succeeding.
Nope.
Pulpstar's data showed us increasing our housing stock by more than 10% over the past five years. At that rate, that's five million new houses per decade. If everyone else had done what we'd done over the past five years, we'd be half way to being out of the housing crisis already.
A single LA can't provide all the housing you need for the entire country.
As we don't have North Korea-style borders about the district, it simply means we absorb a tiny fraction of the issues from elsewhere. It's literally impossible for us to build enough houses to satisfy your simplistic cry: we'd have to build the five million or so houses ourselves (on top of the 50,000 with which we started a decade ago).
Meanwhile our residents are suffering all the infrastructure issues I described (and you ignore).
So - how many houses should the Vale of White Horse be building?
How does five million over a decade remotely address a ten million shortage?
You're right it doesn't all have to come from one LA, but no LA is doing remotely enough.
I'd suggest a minimum of 3,500 completions per annum per authority as a starting point - more could of course be better but that should be the bare minimum per annum.
Looking at it, Vale of White Horse had just over 2000 completions in a seven year period, unless I'm misreading the data, so they've not even hit the minimum we need per year over a seven year period.
Dismal failure.
Ummm... It's not one person per house. Five million homes makes a decent dent.
It would make a dent, but it would not be sufficient.
Though I'm curious where the data for five million is coming from. The data I'm seeing is 2338 completions in a 7 year period, or a pitiful 334 completions per year.
334 completions per year per authority would be a pathetically low 105k completions per annum. Not even enough to keep up with population growth and demographic changes let alone make a dent in the shortage we have.
So no Andy, it's not enough. Nowhere close to enough.
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
If prices are going up then you’re not building enough houses. Build more houses until prices fall.
How many will that be in the Vale, then? After all, as Heinlein said, "If there are no numbers, it's not science but opinion." People understandably would like to know how many is enough. After all, at the rate we've been building, if every other LA had been building at our rate, we'd have seen 600,000+ new houses per year nationwide for 10-15 years.
We have a shortage of over 10 million houses.
And that's on today's figures. Given ongoing population growth and demographic changes, we'd need even more.
I'm sorry, but I really don't think we could even fit ten million more houses in the Vale of White Horse.
Certainly not with that attitude. Have you seen Hong Kong?
If you go dense, you can fit extraordinary numbers of people in small amounts of space. Those tower blocks on Kowloon can easily house 4,000 people. And you could easily put 100 of them up in a space like (say) Regent's Park.
You could probably fit the entire population of Europe in the space of Greater London, if you built to Kowloon density levels. Of course, dealing with sewage would be an interesting challenge.
France has similar population and 8 million fewer properties.
And before the rubbish stats come out, people renting a property by the room, as an unregistered HMO, is not a household. Except in the minds of idiots.
I think you mean 8 million more?
You guys have got into the unhappy habit of dismissing any statistics that don't support your view as "rubbish". France does have 8 million more homes - but also higher overcrowding and not dissimilar housing costs to us.
Ex-Tory chairman launches blistering tirade at 'complete idiocy' of Rishi Sunak Sir Jake Berry said Rishi Sunak's decision to call a General Election early was 'absolute idiocy' and said the former PM 'must have taken leave of his senses... if he ever had them' https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/ex-tory-chairman-lauches-blistering-33524186
Though looking at the issues that were in the governmental in-tray... The public sector pay recommendations, the energy price rises... Any reason to think that Sunak would have done better by staying in government until the autumn?
He handled pay better, didnt kick off a public sector free for all and did all of that without riots.
And he didnt have a wanker like Miliband screwing up energy.
Sunak handled public sector pay by hiding the review body reports in a basement behind a sign saying "beware of the leopard". He just about got away with that until early July, but it wasn't a long-term answer.
Once those reports were published, he could either pay up or trigger a load more strikes.
Sunak could have paid them or kicked them into the long grass for the short term at least. No, something must have happened to spook Rishi's inner circle because if he was going to call an early election, May made more sense to combine with the locals; or go long until December or even January and enjoy an extra six months in office. July gave the worst of all worlds.
Still think it was the number of letters with Sir Graham's postman....
That recording of Jan 6th is indeed brutal. But it is not new. How can anyone support Trump after that, let alone nearly 45% of Americans?
I genuinely find it bewildering. How can any elected official of any part of the party think this is ok?
Many Americans see a very different picture of events, they’re fed a stream of propaganda on Fox News etc. They see a different reality, they’re told lies. They’re in a Facebook bubble where they believe that Harris slept her way to the top, lies about her ethnicity and her family, and is a communist. They’ve absorbed a message that the country is in a crisis because of immigrants and anyone who isn’t white.
These beliefs don’t spontaneously emerge. They are rehearsed, over and over again, by traditional and social media on the right.
It's why we should close down GB News.
Prevention is better than cure.
What calumnies are you alleging GBNews have been guilty of?
Spreading antivax bollocks for starters such as
GB News broke Ofcom rules with presenter’s Covid vaccine claims
Regulator says Mark Steyn’s use of data to draw misleading conclusions breached content guidelines
GB News is an entertainment channel for right wing morons and Farage supporters masquerading as a bona fide news channel.
On GB News, I don't understand how Gloria de Piero is still there. I'm surprised she hasn't jumped ship for somewhere like Times Radio.
Unlike Lee Anderson, she hasn't gone loopy, and still does interesting work.
Her twitter feed is civilised and interesting, as opposed to Anderson's constant dog whistles. https://x.com/GloriaDePiero
On GBNews itself, it is owned by Sir Paul Marshall and investment firm Legatum. Paul Marshall also owns Unherd, and is in the running to buy the Spectator and the Telegraph.
The article I linked talks about that, and about how he attends HTB, but it is by a Political Correspondent - and imo has little clue about that church, or Church of England evangelicalism. Some accurate stuff in there, but no real knowledge.
All of these need to be taken with our own pinch of salt.
I have yet to get a handle on how I understand Paul Marshall; I think his motivations and expressed objectives are OK, but I question his judgement, and I do wonder whether he has been put out of balance by exposure to something like the ideology of Nat Con.
HTB one of the wealthiest and largest C of E churches in the nation and also where Welby was brought to faith and very much linked to the evangelical block he as Archbishop has championed. 'Holy Trinity (universally known as HTB) is no ordinary church. It has a budget of around £10m a year and a staff of 118, making it larger than several Church of England dioceses. Most parishes in the Church of England struggle to afford a curate. HTB has 28. In addition, there are no fewer than 14 ordinands—people in training to be priests or ministers. Together with four ministers, that totals 46 in leadership or training roles for one parish.
HTB is the home of the evangelistic Alpha course, and a centre of the charismatic church movement. Charismatic Christians believe that God intervenes personally in their lives through direct encounters with the Holy Spirit, sometimes in the form of ecstatic experiences. They may believe that God’s approval is expressed in their increasing numbers, wealth and influence. Over recent decades, HTB’s impact has extended into every corner of the Church of England. It is the engine room that now drives the Church—much to the resentment of many faithful clergy in poorer, more doctrinally diverse and less influential churches. HTB is the only parish church with its own caucus on the General Synod, the Church of England’s lawmaking body. The view from Brompton Road is that the Church is divided between those who champion the true faith and those who do not, and that God is blessing the faithful.
HTB is also the church that formed Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury. He was baptised there, married there and attended consistently until his mid-thirties...'
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
Summary of solution elements:
1 - Provide infrastructure in ADVANCE of development. Otherwise your best case is chronic overload (because by the time you've constructed it to catch up with the housing level (say) five years earlier, you've had five years more building houses and your new infrastructure is insufficient. Worse case, developers don't provide it or the Treasury fails to do so and instead of chronic overload, you've got acute (and chronic) overload. This is unsurprisingly an unpopular state for residents to experience, especially when it's seemingly eternal.
2 - Give real enforcement powers to LAs. At the moment, developers can get away with so much as long as they just provide a promise and sketchy plan to do something about it and oops we didn't do it yet but we will sometime, honest. In one development, they've been waiting for over a decade for the promised sports pitches because the developer just buried all the rubble in the central green area, raising the levels six feet (so you could stand there and see into upstairs windows) and making it unusable.
3 - Give Neighbourhood Development Plans real teeth. We had a window a decade or so ago when people locally were content with large numbers of houses to come, as they had apparent influence over where these would be and over what infrastructure would come along with them. Since then, they've seen houses spring up all over the place with nothing that was promised accompanying them. Shockingly, they now oppose these new developments.
4 - Use Local Development Orders to streamline planning. In effect, you pick an area for a type of development and provide a big chunk of the compulsory planning reports up front and give what's effectively preapproval to developments within certain constraints.
5 - Fund LAs to buy up areas for the above (at before planning uplift prices) and carry out LDO preplanning approval AND provide power, sewerage, and road/path infrastructure to the development to then sell off plots to multiple smaller developers for a single site. From the profits, they fund schools and surgeries and a chunk of hiring developers to provide social housing there for them to administrate going forwards.
There's more than that, but that would be a basic start.
One of the things that speaks of is more projects such as Graven Hill in Bicester - self-build with ready-to-build plots, as was much done in the 1970s. GravenHill is 2000 dwellings, with elements of social and housing association.
Three or four Graven Hills per county would be a start - 200-250k self-builds over a decade.
But Graven Hill has had no navigate a total MAZE of rules and bureaucracy, partly top skirt around VAT, and has ended up mainly accessible for people with half a million to hand, or the capacity to borrow that much or more.
We've been trying something very similar (partly because it's so close) and it's a bloody nightmare. There's a site in my ward to do this and a project very dear to my heart and we've been pushing it since I got elected for the first time more than five years ago and it's like running through treacle.
Yep - I won't go into detail on Graven Hill as that is covered everywhere, and the attempted Golden Brick circum-navigation has been a horriblyexpensive, complex setup.
RR needs to address and build bridges over / round / through barriers in the process, which all contradict each other and require extreme skill or a lot of luck to navigate. It's about planning reform addressing the right blockages, and making sure that those imposing them are very clear that there are hard limits to what they can impose. IMO some of these are:
1 - Landowner self-interest. 2 - Developer self-interest, especially around disputes on planning obligations, viability etc. 3 - NIMBY culture, and local politics pandering to it. 4 - Local council capacity to manage / regulate / enforce. 5 - Predictability of process.
At the other end of that we could develop problems around corruption /conflict of interest in Local Authorities beyond petty corruption ("new driveway surface for the Councillor") which is everywhere anyway. I think the role of the Planning Inspectorate is important here.
@BartholomewRoberts ideas about taking all the restrictions off and let freedom roll are interesting, but won't ever work as we don't want that as a society.
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
There isn't an LA in the country that is building sufficient houses, as per Pulpstar's data.
Building not enough, but being less bad than elsewhere, is simply failing less badly not succeeding.
Nope.
Pulpstar's data showed us increasing our housing stock by more than 10% over the past five years. At that rate, that's five million new houses per decade. If everyone else had done what we'd done over the past five years, we'd be half way to being out of the housing crisis already.
A single LA can't provide all the housing you need for the entire country.
As we don't have North Korea-style borders about the district, it simply means we absorb a tiny fraction of the issues from elsewhere. It's literally impossible for us to build enough houses to satisfy your simplistic cry: we'd have to build the five million or so houses ourselves (on top of the 50,000 with which we started a decade ago).
Meanwhile our residents are suffering all the infrastructure issues I described (and you ignore).
So - how many houses should the Vale of White Horse be building?
How does five million over a decade remotely address a ten million shortage?
You're right it doesn't all have to come from one LA, but no LA is doing remotely enough.
I'd suggest a minimum of 3,500 completions per annum per authority as a starting point - more could of course be better but that should be the bare minimum per annum.
Looking at it, Vale of White Horse had just over 2000 completions in a seven year period, unless I'm misreading the data, so they've not even hit the minimum we need per year over a seven year period.
Dismal failure.
Ummm... It's not one person per house. Five million homes makes a decent dent.
It would make a dent, but it would not be sufficient.
Though I'm curious where the data for five million is coming from. The data I'm seeing is 2338 completions in a 7 year period, or a pitiful 334 completions per year.
334 completions per year per authority would be a pathetically low 105k completions per annum. Not even enough to keep up with population growth and demographic changes let alone make a dent in the shortage we have.
So no Andy, it's not enough. Nowhere close to enough.
I'm not talking about what has been achieved, I'm talking about whether 5 million incremental homes a decade would make a big difference, and it clearly would.
Now you can argue that 7 million would be a better number, but I personally think an incremental 5 million, which is enough to house 15 million people, or more than 20% of the population, would make a massive difference.
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
There isn't an LA in the country that is building sufficient houses, as per Pulpstar's data.
Building not enough, but being less bad than elsewhere, is simply failing less badly not succeeding.
Nope.
Pulpstar's data showed us increasing our housing stock by more than 10% over the past five years. At that rate, that's five million new houses per decade. If everyone else had done what we'd done over the past five years, we'd be half way to being out of the housing crisis already.
A single LA can't provide all the housing you need for the entire country.
As we don't have North Korea-style borders about the district, it simply means we absorb a tiny fraction of the issues from elsewhere. It's literally impossible for us to build enough houses to satisfy your simplistic cry: we'd have to build the five million or so houses ourselves (on top of the 50,000 with which we started a decade ago).
Meanwhile our residents are suffering all the infrastructure issues I described (and you ignore).
So - how many houses should the Vale of White Horse be building?
France has similar population and 8 million fewer properties.
And before the rubbish stats come out, people renting a property by the room, as an unregistered HMO, is not a household. Except in the minds of idiots.
I think you mean 8 million more?
You guys have got into the unhappy habit of dismissing any statistics that don't support your view as "rubbish". France does have 8 million more homes - but also higher overcrowding and not dissimilar housing costs to us.
Outside Paris, housing costs are low. Not sure where you are finding overcrowding. Some of the older blocks of flats are… very 50s and 60s. But they are getting rarer.
Remember a certain person being astonished that a posh hotel could cost £60 a night, out in the sticks, in France?
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
There isn't an LA in the country that is building sufficient houses, as per Pulpstar's data.
Building not enough, but being less bad than elsewhere, is simply failing less badly not succeeding.
Nope.
Pulpstar's data showed us increasing our housing stock by more than 10% over the past five years. At that rate, that's five million new houses per decade. If everyone else had done what we'd done over the past five years, we'd be half way to being out of the housing crisis already.
A single LA can't provide all the housing you need for the entire country.
As we don't have North Korea-style borders about the district, it simply means we absorb a tiny fraction of the issues from elsewhere. It's literally impossible for us to build enough houses to satisfy your simplistic cry: we'd have to build the five million or so houses ourselves (on top of the 50,000 with which we started a decade ago).
Meanwhile our residents are suffering all the infrastructure issues I described (and you ignore).
So - how many houses should the Vale of White Horse be building?
How does five million over a decade remotely address a ten million shortage?
You're right it doesn't all have to come from one LA, but no LA is doing remotely enough.
I'd suggest a minimum of 3,500 completions per annum per authority as a starting point - more could of course be better but that should be the bare minimum per annum.
Looking at it, Vale of White Horse had just over 2000 completions in a seven year period, unless I'm misreading the data, so they've not even hit the minimum we need per year over a seven year period.
Dismal failure.
Ummm... It's not one person per house. Five million homes makes a decent dent.
It would make a dent, but it would not be sufficient.
Though I'm curious where the data for five million is coming from. The data I'm seeing is 2338 completions in a 7 year period, or a pitiful 334 completions per year.
334 completions per year per authority would be a pathetically low 105k completions per annum. Not even enough to keep up with population growth and demographic changes let alone make a dent in the shortage we have.
So no Andy, it's not enough. Nowhere close to enough.
I'm not talking about what has been achieved, I'm talking about whether 5 million incremental homes a decade would make a big difference, and it clearly would.
Now you can argue that 7 million would be a better number, but I personally think an incremental 5 million, which is enough to house 15 million people, or more than 20% of the population, would make a massive difference.
It would make a difference, but we'd still have a housing shortage, it'd just be less bad than it is currently.
And it'd be enough to house 10 million people. Houses have an average of 2 occupants not 3.
Wasn't JD Vance claiming that children are going hungry something that led to outrage among Dem supporters ?
From last year:
David Cameron was famously asked the price of bread a decade ago and struggled to answer, saying instead he used an electric breadmaker. The answer was around 47p.
Then, the Tories were struggling to deal with a cost of living crisis and were accused of being out of touch. Now, here we are again a decade later, with the prime minister Rishi Sunak and his chancellor Jeremy Hunt being accused of having no clue. Only now an average white loaf is £1.37 – and this time it’s not just politicians that are under pressure to do something about it.
Which suggests that the Guardian is as confused as any politician as to what the price of bread is.
That'll be the difference between "the average white loaf" and "the absolute cheapest economy loaf available", I expect.
With the latter being the relevant one in any reference to a 'cost of living crisis'.
Now you can pay £1 extra to get a branded bread or £3 extra to get a fancy hand baked sourdough bread.
But you don't have to, you don't need to, you do so by choice.
Good quality bread, like good quality coffee or olive oil is a very affordable luxury.
Very few Britons have calorie deficient malnutrition, but loads have obesity from excess refined carbohydrate in their diet.
Indeed, eliminating carbohydrates entirely from my diet has done wonders for my health.
Its also been cheaper too, as while meat is expensive per calorie, when its all you're eating you can afford to pay for it and not buy the rest of the stuff that goes with it.
Still buy fruits and vegetables and bread etc for my wife and kids even though I don't eat it myself, but doing the weekly shop is proving cheaper by eliminating my portion of those and eliminating snacks etc even while considerably increasing the amount of meat purchased.
Though I get my meat cheaper by going to by buying joints and cutting them into steaks (which Morrisons butcher will do for you when buying a joint) rather than buying pre-packaged steaks.
How do you think you'll go on that long term? Not a criticism, just genuinely interested. Are you fully carnivore, no fruit, nuts, seeds, grains at all? Do you take supplements? I'm fully 180° the other way, no animal products at all. I'm in the best shape I've ever been in in the round, but that's also because of a complete overhaul of lifestyle, better sleep, no booze, a lot more exercise and fresh air, even a bit of meditation 😀
I'm coming up towards a year now of full carnivore. Don't take any supplements, don't need them you get all the nutrition you need from beef.
I do drink booze, also getting more exercise.
I am not a doctor but I don't think it's advisable to live just on beef.
I don't live just on beef.
I eat a varied diet.
Beef, bacon, chicken, sausages, eggs and cheese.
Are you not worried about the unknown (unknowable?) long term risks of such a restricted diet? The short term, measurable/subjective benefit is one thing, but is it still worth it if following the diet, long term, results in having a heart attack on average 5 years earlier?
Obviously I've just picked a random hypothetical, but plausible risk and applied an arbitrary number, to illustrate the point.
Basically I'd want to see a peer reviewed randomised control trial, with a decent number of participants and long term follow up before radically departing from conventional medical wisdom.
Anecdata just don't cut the mustard.
tldr; I wanna know the odds. I don't know the odds. I don't think you, or anyone else does, either.
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
There isn't an LA in the country that is building sufficient houses, as per Pulpstar's data.
Building not enough, but being less bad than elsewhere, is simply failing less badly not succeeding.
Nope.
Pulpstar's data showed us increasing our housing stock by more than 10% over the past five years. At that rate, that's five million new houses per decade. If everyone else had done what we'd done over the past five years, we'd be half way to being out of the housing crisis already.
A single LA can't provide all the housing you need for the entire country.
As we don't have North Korea-style borders about the district, it simply means we absorb a tiny fraction of the issues from elsewhere. It's literally impossible for us to build enough houses to satisfy your simplistic cry: we'd have to build the five million or so houses ourselves (on top of the 50,000 with which we started a decade ago).
Meanwhile our residents are suffering all the infrastructure issues I described (and you ignore).
So - how many houses should the Vale of White Horse be building?
Political parties need to stop obsessing over the inevitable contradictory desires of voters and focus on the big picture. Deliver a strong economy, housing, security, health, opportunity and fairness and they will be popular.
France has similar population and 8 million fewer properties.
And before the rubbish stats come out, people renting a property by the room, as an unregistered HMO, is not a household. Except in the minds of idiots.
I think you mean 8 million more?
You guys have got into the unhappy habit of dismissing any statistics that don't support your view as "rubbish". France does have 8 million more homes - but also higher overcrowding and not dissimilar housing costs to us.
How much of that is the French habit of having a flat in town and a place in the country for the summer?
That's not, by itself, a bad thing. There's no fundamental reason why we should be restricted to one home each. But it does imply that, while Just Build More Damn Houses is a necessary part of the solving the "too many people not having one adequate home" problem, it's not sufficient by itself.
Not quite. From your link, RLB says that excluding affordable homes will not address the shortage of affordable homes.
In a letter to Salford City Council, Ms Long-Bailey called for the plans to be refused for not ensuring 20% of the planned homes were "affordable" housing, a requirement in the area’s local plan. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgd429gdpno
Which is totally innumerate bullshit. If the supply of houses in the local area increases by over 3000 (not a typo) then the price of all homes in the area comes down versus if the homes aren't built. Which makes housing more affordable.
Building poor quality "affordable" homes isn't the only way to get home prices down, increasing supply faster than demand does that too.
What did you expect from her, something other than totally innumerate bullsh…?
Just to play devil's advocate, it is possible that new developments stimulate higher house prices, particularly if they are of a high enough quality, have good transport connections and are within commute distance of a city centre.
There are less salubrious parts of Edinburgh that are experiencing very high levels of development, largely in the old port areas like Leith, Granton, Newhaven, Seafield. This is leading to a large influx of young working people which carries a snowball effect - they are rapidly gentrifying with yoga, board game and plant pot shops. This means the values of existing flats is increasing as these working class areas suddenly get flooded with young professionals.
In fact, I was at a viewing yesterday of older flat in one of these areas, and the agent estimated about 75% of people interested are BTL landlords, thereby further squeezing the number of homes available to people who want to own their own place.
As we find time and again, the housing market is a complex beast and pointing at a supply and demand graph is simply not enough. There are plenty of examples of this kinda thing once you pass Economics 1A.
Gentrification is a different issue, specific to large cities, but every new dwelling built still works towards the overall housing problem.
The biggest current problem is massive pent-up demand for housing - there’s loads of twentysomethings and even thirtysomethings living with their parents or sharing with friends, who aspire to have a place of their own.
This means that prices won’t appreciably start falling until we are a couple of million units in to new construction, minus the units sold as second homes or to foreign residents.
Yes, it’s a horribly complex economic situation, with a load of moving parts such as taxation, interest rates, availability of finance, laws on foreign investment etc, rather than simply supply and demand for houses.
I dunno. The French have 8 million more homes than use, similar house prices and more overcrowding.
The problem is that 20 and 30 somethings all want to live close to where their peers and their jobs are, which is increasingly just a few major cities. People go to Uni and never return to towns or villages.
(and I don't think gentrification is an issue at all - it's just people whining about somewhere not being a shithole anymore. But being nice comes with a price).
Build more houses, it’s that simple.
Then build even more houses.
Starmer's 1.5 million houses in 5 years is just nonsense. We're already building about 1.1 million so an extra 400k is hardly going to have an impact. We need to be building another 1.5 million on top off the 1.1 million to have any effect.
A couple of points on this. Housing starts, which is the reasonable measure for this was about 800 000 in England in the five years to 2023, the latest data were have. The Labour target is double the previous outturn. And of course it depends on what they actually achieve. It's unlikely to be exactly 1.5 million. We'll have to see whether it's more or less than this.
Wasn't JD Vance claiming that children are going hungry something that led to outrage among Dem supporters ?
From last year:
David Cameron was famously asked the price of bread a decade ago and struggled to answer, saying instead he used an electric breadmaker. The answer was around 47p.
Then, the Tories were struggling to deal with a cost of living crisis and were accused of being out of touch. Now, here we are again a decade later, with the prime minister Rishi Sunak and his chancellor Jeremy Hunt being accused of having no clue. Only now an average white loaf is £1.37 – and this time it’s not just politicians that are under pressure to do something about it.
Which suggests that the Guardian is as confused as any politician as to what the price of bread is.
That'll be the difference between "the average white loaf" and "the absolute cheapest economy loaf available", I expect.
With the latter being the relevant one in any reference to a 'cost of living crisis'.
Now you can pay £1 extra to get a branded bread or £3 extra to get a fancy hand baked sourdough bread.
But you don't have to, you don't need to, you do so by choice.
Good quality bread, like good quality coffee or olive oil is a very affordable luxury.
Very few Britons have calorie deficient malnutrition, but loads have obesity from excess refined carbohydrate in their diet.
Indeed, eliminating carbohydrates entirely from my diet has done wonders for my health.
Its also been cheaper too, as while meat is expensive per calorie, when its all you're eating you can afford to pay for it and not buy the rest of the stuff that goes with it.
Still buy fruits and vegetables and bread etc for my wife and kids even though I don't eat it myself, but doing the weekly shop is proving cheaper by eliminating my portion of those and eliminating snacks etc even while considerably increasing the amount of meat purchased.
Though I get my meat cheaper by going to by buying joints and cutting them into steaks (which Morrisons butcher will do for you when buying a joint) rather than buying pre-packaged steaks.
How do you think you'll go on that long term? Not a criticism, just genuinely interested. Are you fully carnivore, no fruit, nuts, seeds, grains at all? Do you take supplements? I'm fully 180° the other way, no animal products at all. I'm in the best shape I've ever been in in the round, but that's also because of a complete overhaul of lifestyle, better sleep, no booze, a lot more exercise and fresh air, even a bit of meditation 😀
I'm coming up towards a year now of full carnivore. Don't take any supplements, don't need them you get all the nutrition you need from beef.
I do drink booze, also getting more exercise.
I am not a doctor but I don't think it's advisable to live just on beef.
I don't live just on beef.
I eat a varied diet.
Beef, bacon, chicken, sausages, eggs and cheese.
Quite similar to my diet when I’m in france, with the addition of gratin dauphinoise, pâté and vast amounts of baguette.
PATE !
That brings back the one I mentioned yesterday - the Hammer House of Horror where this year's guests go into next year's special pie.
It's a pate not a pie. And checking, it is a 1982 BBC Playhouse episode called "The Guest" where holidaymakers in France are served a special pate. Bsaed on a short story by Gerald Durrell.
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
There isn't an LA in the country that is building sufficient houses, as per Pulpstar's data.
Building not enough, but being less bad than elsewhere, is simply failing less badly not succeeding.
Nope.
Pulpstar's data showed us increasing our housing stock by more than 10% over the past five years. At that rate, that's five million new houses per decade. If everyone else had done what we'd done over the past five years, we'd be half way to being out of the housing crisis already.
A single LA can't provide all the housing you need for the entire country.
As we don't have North Korea-style borders about the district, it simply means we absorb a tiny fraction of the issues from elsewhere. It's literally impossible for us to build enough houses to satisfy your simplistic cry: we'd have to build the five million or so houses ourselves (on top of the 50,000 with which we started a decade ago).
Meanwhile our residents are suffering all the infrastructure issues I described (and you ignore).
So - how many houses should the Vale of White Horse be building?
How does five million over a decade remotely address a ten million shortage?
You're right it doesn't all have to come from one LA, but no LA is doing remotely enough.
I'd suggest a minimum of 3,500 completions per annum per authority as a starting point - more could of course be better but that should be the bare minimum per annum.
Looking at it, Vale of White Horse had just over 2000 completions in a seven year period, unless I'm misreading the data, so they've not even hit the minimum we need per year over a seven year period.
Dismal failure.
Ummm... It's not one person per house. Five million homes makes a decent dent.
It would make a dent, but it would not be sufficient.
Though I'm curious where the data for five million is coming from. The data I'm seeing is 2338 completions in a 7 year period, or a pitiful 334 completions per year.
334 completions per year per authority would be a pathetically low 105k completions per annum. Not even enough to keep up with population growth and demographic changes let alone make a dent in the shortage we have.
So no Andy, it's not enough. Nowhere close to enough.
I'm not talking about what has been achieved, I'm talking about whether 5 million incremental homes a decade would make a big difference, and it clearly would.
Now you can argue that 7 million would be a better number, but I personally think an incremental 5 million, which is enough to house 15 million people, or more than 20% of the population, would make a massive difference.
It would make a difference, but we'd still have a housing shortage, it'd just be less bad than it is currently.
And it'd be enough to house 10 million people. Houses have an average of 2 occupants not 3.
That's not true.
There are 70 million people in the UK, and 29 million houses and flats, so overall occupancy is around 2.4 today. But that is split between apartments/flats at around 2, and houses at closer to 3.
You specifically mentioned houses. And in houses, there are far more families with more than two people in them (i.e. kids) than there are single occupancy.
Ex-Tory chairman launches blistering tirade at 'complete idiocy' of Rishi Sunak Sir Jake Berry said Rishi Sunak's decision to call a General Election early was 'absolute idiocy' and said the former PM 'must have taken leave of his senses... if he ever had them' https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/ex-tory-chairman-lauches-blistering-33524186
Though looking at the issues that were in the governmental in-tray... The public sector pay recommendations, the energy price rises... Any reason to think that Sunak would have done better by staying in government until the autumn?
He handled pay better, didnt kick off a public sector free for all and did all of that without riots.
And he didnt have a wanker like Miliband screwing up energy.
Sunak handled public sector pay by hiding the review body reports in a basement behind a sign saying "beware of the leopard". He just about got away with that until early July, but it wasn't a long-term answer.
Once those reports were published, he could either pay up or trigger a load more strikes.
Sunak could have paid them or kicked them into the long grass for the short term at least. No, something must have happened to spook Rishi's inner circle because if he was going to call an early election, May made more sense to combine with the locals; or go long until December or even January and enjoy an extra six months in office. July gave the worst of all worlds.
The only thing that makes sense, is that Graham Brady’s postbox was looking awfully full.
I'd go with cockup and cowardice, not conspiracy. A timeline something like this...
Start of 2024: realise there are two options; May or late Autumn.
March: Now is the time to push the button for a May election. But the Conservatives are massively behind in the polls. So don't go now. Ignore the predictable bad news incoming for the second half of the year.
late May: Oh #*&?, the incoming bad news is even worse than we thought. There is no money left, we've burnt though the contingency funds already. And we've run out of excuses to not send flights to Rwanda which will reveal what a joke the policy is. We're not going to survive into the autumn. Anyone got the music for "Nearer, my God to Thee"?
TLDR: They had the information to tell them that going long wasn't going to work (I expected December 19th, after all). But wishful groupthink stopped them processing it until it was too late.
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
There isn't an LA in the country that is building sufficient houses, as per Pulpstar's data.
Building not enough, but being less bad than elsewhere, is simply failing less badly not succeeding.
Nope.
Pulpstar's data showed us increasing our housing stock by more than 10% over the past five years. At that rate, that's five million new houses per decade. If everyone else had done what we'd done over the past five years, we'd be half way to being out of the housing crisis already.
A single LA can't provide all the housing you need for the entire country.
As we don't have North Korea-style borders about the district, it simply means we absorb a tiny fraction of the issues from elsewhere. It's literally impossible for us to build enough houses to satisfy your simplistic cry: we'd have to build the five million or so houses ourselves (on top of the 50,000 with which we started a decade ago).
Meanwhile our residents are suffering all the infrastructure issues I described (and you ignore).
So - how many houses should the Vale of White Horse be building?
How does five million over a decade remotely address a ten million shortage?
You're right it doesn't all have to come from one LA, but no LA is doing remotely enough.
I'd suggest a minimum of 3,500 completions per annum per authority as a starting point - more could of course be better but that should be the bare minimum per annum.
Looking at it, Vale of White Horse had just over 2000 completions in a seven year period, unless I'm misreading the data, so they've not even hit the minimum we need per year over a seven year period.
Dismal failure.
Why ten million? To have the same ratio of houses per population as France, we'd need 3.9 million more houses than we currently have. (we're at 434 per thousand; they're at 590 per thousand).
And yes, you're massively misreading the data. We had over a thousand completions last year alone. 7,330 over the past seven years (from Pulpstar's table). Bear in mind that a decade ago, we had just over 50,000 to start with.
For someone who purports to dislike NIMBYs, you seem to aim to go out of your way to create more of them. I'm literally very active in trying to sort this problem out, we're one of the leading LAs in the country, and you're calling our rate and attempts "dismal failures" - partly because you can't even read a spreadsheet.
God, the keyboard warriors who just complain, spout simplistic crap, and do nothing to actively help. Meanwhile, I've been active in promoting a 4000+ development that crosses into my ward, working hard to get a Graven Hill style development in my ward, pushing policies to streamline development, helped with an LDO for technical building development in my ward, and done my damndest to get enforcement on developers to mitigate the inevitable backlash against further development.
What have you done?
Getting to the same as France is insufficient. It would be an improvement, but France has a housing shortage and expensive housing too. 4 million would make us less bad than we are today, but not good enough.
Plus we have ongoing population growth and demographic changes.
As for the Vale of White Horse data, I got it from the Vale of White Horse website, based on what came up from Google: Vale of White Horse District Council https://www.whitehorsedc.gov.ukPDF Housing Summary
Page 7 put the figure on completions as 2338 in a 7 year period.
Now if you've got a better figure I'd be interested but either way it's not enough. There are 317 authorities so just 1000 per authority would not get us anywhere near the millions needed.
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
There isn't an LA in the country that is building sufficient houses, as per Pulpstar's data.
Building not enough, but being less bad than elsewhere, is simply failing less badly not succeeding.
Nope.
Pulpstar's data showed us increasing our housing stock by more than 10% over the past five years. At that rate, that's five million new houses per decade. If everyone else had done what we'd done over the past five years, we'd be half way to being out of the housing crisis already.
A single LA can't provide all the housing you need for the entire country.
As we don't have North Korea-style borders about the district, it simply means we absorb a tiny fraction of the issues from elsewhere. It's literally impossible for us to build enough houses to satisfy your simplistic cry: we'd have to build the five million or so houses ourselves (on top of the 50,000 with which we started a decade ago).
Meanwhile our residents are suffering all the infrastructure issues I described (and you ignore).
So - how many houses should the Vale of White Horse be building?
How does five million over a decade remotely address a ten million shortage?
You're right it doesn't all have to come from one LA, but no LA is doing remotely enough.
I'd suggest a minimum of 3,500 completions per annum per authority as a starting point - more could of course be better but that should be the bare minimum per annum.
Looking at it, Vale of White Horse had just over 2000 completions in a seven year period, unless I'm misreading the data, so they've not even hit the minimum we need per year over a seven year period.
Dismal failure.
Ummm... It's not one person per house. Five million homes makes a decent dent.
It would make a dent, but it would not be sufficient.
Though I'm curious where the data for five million is coming from. The data I'm seeing is 2338 completions in a 7 year period, or a pitiful 334 completions per year.
334 completions per year per authority would be a pathetically low 105k completions per annum. Not even enough to keep up with population growth and demographic changes let alone make a dent in the shortage we have.
So no Andy, it's not enough. Nowhere close to enough.
I'm not talking about what has been achieved, I'm talking about whether 5 million incremental homes a decade would make a big difference, and it clearly would.
Now you can argue that 7 million would be a better number, but I personally think an incremental 5 million, which is enough to house 15 million people, or more than 20% of the population, would make a massive difference.
Agree. Labour aiming to double the total amount of house building is not a modest target. Maybe it's not enough, and maybe they won't achieve their target, but more has to be better than less when we're short of supply.
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
There isn't an LA in the country that is building sufficient houses, as per Pulpstar's data.
Building not enough, but being less bad than elsewhere, is simply failing less badly not succeeding.
Nope.
Pulpstar's data showed us increasing our housing stock by more than 10% over the past five years. At that rate, that's five million new houses per decade. If everyone else had done what we'd done over the past five years, we'd be half way to being out of the housing crisis already.
A single LA can't provide all the housing you need for the entire country.
As we don't have North Korea-style borders about the district, it simply means we absorb a tiny fraction of the issues from elsewhere. It's literally impossible for us to build enough houses to satisfy your simplistic cry: we'd have to build the five million or so houses ourselves (on top of the 50,000 with which we started a decade ago).
Meanwhile our residents are suffering all the infrastructure issues I described (and you ignore).
So - how many houses should the Vale of White Horse be building?
How does five million over a decade remotely address a ten million shortage?
You're right it doesn't all have to come from one LA, but no LA is doing remotely enough.
I'd suggest a minimum of 3,500 completions per annum per authority as a starting point - more could of course be better but that should be the bare minimum per annum.
Looking at it, Vale of White Horse had just over 2000 completions in a seven year period, unless I'm misreading the data, so they've not even hit the minimum we need per year over a seven year period.
Dismal failure.
Ummm... It's not one person per house. Five million homes makes a decent dent.
It would make a dent, but it would not be sufficient.
Though I'm curious where the data for five million is coming from. The data I'm seeing is 2338 completions in a 7 year period, or a pitiful 334 completions per year.
334 completions per year per authority would be a pathetically low 105k completions per annum. Not even enough to keep up with population growth and demographic changes let alone make a dent in the shortage we have.
So no Andy, it's not enough. Nowhere close to enough.
I'm not talking about what has been achieved, I'm talking about whether 5 million incremental homes a decade would make a big difference, and it clearly would.
Now you can argue that 7 million would be a better number, but I personally think an incremental 5 million, which is enough to house 15 million people, or more than 20% of the population, would make a massive difference.
It would make a difference, but we'd still have a housing shortage, it'd just be less bad than it is currently.
And it'd be enough to house 10 million people. Houses have an average of 2 occupants not 3.
That's not true.
There are 70 million people in the UK, and 29 million houses and flats, so overall occupancy is around 2.4 today. But that is split between apartments/flats at around 2, and houses at closer to 3.
You specifically mentioned houses. And in houses, there are far more families with more than two people in them (i.e. kids) than there are single occupancy.
Actually houses have large numbers with just 1 person in them, or just 2 people in them.
Many young families with kids live in flats. Not many pensioners do.
Two of my surviving grandparents live in a house by themselves. Their spouse has died and their great grandchildren live in their grandchildren's homes. That's not that atypical.
Do you have any actual data to show the average is 3 in houses?
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
There isn't an LA in the country that is building sufficient houses, as per Pulpstar's data.
Building not enough, but being less bad than elsewhere, is simply failing less badly not succeeding.
Nope.
Pulpstar's data showed us increasing our housing stock by more than 10% over the past five years. At that rate, that's five million new houses per decade. If everyone else had done what we'd done over the past five years, we'd be half way to being out of the housing crisis already.
A single LA can't provide all the housing you need for the entire country.
As we don't have North Korea-style borders about the district, it simply means we absorb a tiny fraction of the issues from elsewhere. It's literally impossible for us to build enough houses to satisfy your simplistic cry: we'd have to build the five million or so houses ourselves (on top of the 50,000 with which we started a decade ago).
Meanwhile our residents are suffering all the infrastructure issues I described (and you ignore).
So - how many houses should the Vale of White Horse be building?
How does five million over a decade remotely address a ten million shortage?
You're right it doesn't all have to come from one LA, but no LA is doing remotely enough.
I'd suggest a minimum of 3,500 completions per annum per authority as a starting point - more could of course be better but that should be the bare minimum per annum.
Looking at it, Vale of White Horse had just over 2000 completions in a seven year period, unless I'm misreading the data, so they've not even hit the minimum we need per year over a seven year period.
Dismal failure.
Why ten million? To have the same ratio of houses per population as France, we'd need 3.9 million more houses than we currently have. (we're at 434 per thousand; they're at 590 per thousand).
And yes, you're massively misreading the data. We had over a thousand completions last year alone. 7,330 over the past seven years (from Pulpstar's table). Bear in mind that a decade ago, we had just over 50,000 to start with.
For someone who purports to dislike NIMBYs, you seem to aim to go out of your way to create more of them. I'm literally very active in trying to sort this problem out, we're one of the leading LAs in the country, and you're calling our rate and attempts "dismal failures" - partly because you can't even read a spreadsheet.
God, the keyboard warriors who just complain, spout simplistic crap, and do nothing to actively help. Meanwhile, I've been active in promoting a 4000+ development that crosses into my ward, working hard to get a Graven Hill style development in my ward, pushing policies to streamline development, helped with an LDO for technical building development in my ward, and done my damndest to get enforcement on developers to mitigate the inevitable backlash against further development.
What have you done?
Getting to the same as France is insufficient. It would be an improvement, but France has a housing shortage and expensive housing too. 4 million would make us less bad than we are today, but not good enough.
Plus we have ongoing population growth and demographic changes.
As for the Vale of White Horse data, I got it from the Vale of White Horse website, based on what came up from Google: Vale of White Horse District Council https://www.whitehorsedc.gov.ukPDF Housing Summary
Page 7 put the figure on completions as 2338 in a 7 year period.
Now if you've got a better figure I'd be interested but either way it's not enough. There are 317 authorities so just 1000 per authority would not get us anywhere near the millions needed.
Wasn't JD Vance claiming that children are going hungry something that led to outrage among Dem supporters ?
From last year:
David Cameron was famously asked the price of bread a decade ago and struggled to answer, saying instead he used an electric breadmaker. The answer was around 47p.
Then, the Tories were struggling to deal with a cost of living crisis and were accused of being out of touch. Now, here we are again a decade later, with the prime minister Rishi Sunak and his chancellor Jeremy Hunt being accused of having no clue. Only now an average white loaf is £1.37 – and this time it’s not just politicians that are under pressure to do something about it.
Which suggests that the Guardian is as confused as any politician as to what the price of bread is.
That'll be the difference between "the average white loaf" and "the absolute cheapest economy loaf available", I expect.
With the latter being the relevant one in any reference to a 'cost of living crisis'.
Now you can pay £1 extra to get a branded bread or £3 extra to get a fancy hand baked sourdough bread.
But you don't have to, you don't need to, you do so by choice.
Good quality bread, like good quality coffee or olive oil is a very affordable luxury.
Very few Britons have calorie deficient malnutrition, but loads have obesity from excess refined carbohydrate in their diet.
Indeed, eliminating carbohydrates entirely from my diet has done wonders for my health.
Its also been cheaper too, as while meat is expensive per calorie, when its all you're eating you can afford to pay for it and not buy the rest of the stuff that goes with it.
Still buy fruits and vegetables and bread etc for my wife and kids even though I don't eat it myself, but doing the weekly shop is proving cheaper by eliminating my portion of those and eliminating snacks etc even while considerably increasing the amount of meat purchased.
Though I get my meat cheaper by going to by buying joints and cutting them into steaks (which Morrisons butcher will do for you when buying a joint) rather than buying pre-packaged steaks.
How do you think you'll go on that long term? Not a criticism, just genuinely interested. Are you fully carnivore, no fruit, nuts, seeds, grains at all? Do you take supplements? I'm fully 180° the other way, no animal products at all. I'm in the best shape I've ever been in in the round, but that's also because of a complete overhaul of lifestyle, better sleep, no booze, a lot more exercise and fresh air, even a bit of meditation 😀
I'm coming up towards a year now of full carnivore. Don't take any supplements, don't need them you get all the nutrition you need from beef.
I do drink booze, also getting more exercise.
I am not a doctor but I don't think it's advisable to live just on beef.
There’s a conspiracy theorist who promotes a beef-only diet and goes on about Big Salad lying to us. A friend of a friend went on it.
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
There isn't an LA in the country that is building sufficient houses, as per Pulpstar's data.
Building not enough, but being less bad than elsewhere, is simply failing less badly not succeeding.
Nope.
Pulpstar's data showed us increasing our housing stock by more than 10% over the past five years. At that rate, that's five million new houses per decade. If everyone else had done what we'd done over the past five years, we'd be half way to being out of the housing crisis already.
A single LA can't provide all the housing you need for the entire country.
As we don't have North Korea-style borders about the district, it simply means we absorb a tiny fraction of the issues from elsewhere. It's literally impossible for us to build enough houses to satisfy your simplistic cry: we'd have to build the five million or so houses ourselves (on top of the 50,000 with which we started a decade ago).
Meanwhile our residents are suffering all the infrastructure issues I described (and you ignore).
So - how many houses should the Vale of White Horse be building?
How does five million over a decade remotely address a ten million shortage?
You're right it doesn't all have to come from one LA, but no LA is doing remotely enough.
I'd suggest a minimum of 3,500 completions per annum per authority as a starting point - more could of course be better but that should be the bare minimum per annum.
Looking at it, Vale of White Horse had just over 2000 completions in a seven year period, unless I'm misreading the data, so they've not even hit the minimum we need per year over a seven year period.
Dismal failure.
Why ten million? To have the same ratio of houses per population as France, we'd need 3.9 million more houses than we currently have. (we're at 434 per thousand; they're at 590 per thousand).
And yes, you're massively misreading the data. We had over a thousand completions last year alone. 7,330 over the past seven years (from Pulpstar's table). Bear in mind that a decade ago, we had just over 50,000 to start with.
For someone who purports to dislike NIMBYs, you seem to aim to go out of your way to create more of them. I'm literally very active in trying to sort this problem out, we're one of the leading LAs in the country, and you're calling our rate and attempts "dismal failures" - partly because you can't even read a spreadsheet.
God, the keyboard warriors who just complain, spout simplistic crap, and do nothing to actively help. Meanwhile, I've been active in promoting a 4000+ development that crosses into my ward, working hard to get a Graven Hill style development in my ward, pushing policies to streamline development, helped with an LDO for technical building development in my ward, and done my damndest to get enforcement on developers to mitigate the inevitable backlash against further development.
What have you done?
Getting to the same as France is insufficient. It would be an improvement, but France has a housing shortage and expensive housing too. 4 million would make us less bad than we are today, but not good enough.
Plus we have ongoing population growth and demographic changes.
As for the Vale of White Horse data, I got it from the Vale of White Horse website, based on what came up from Google: Vale of White Horse District Council https://www.whitehorsedc.gov.ukPDF Housing Summary
Page 7 put the figure on completions as 2338 in a 7 year period.
Now if you've got a better figure I'd be interested but either way it's not enough. There are 317 authorities so just 1000 per authority would not get us anywhere near the millions needed.
This is what came up on Google. It is to be fair for 2011-2018, but is what came up so went with that data.
7330 completions in 7 years is barely over a thousand completions per annum, which is better than most authorities but is completely insufficient to address the millions of homes shortage we have. That would average at ~332k homes per annum if replicated across the country in every LA. 7338 / 7 * 317 (number of LAs) to get to that figure.
Wasn't JD Vance claiming that children are going hungry something that led to outrage among Dem supporters ?
From last year:
David Cameron was famously asked the price of bread a decade ago and struggled to answer, saying instead he used an electric breadmaker. The answer was around 47p.
Then, the Tories were struggling to deal with a cost of living crisis and were accused of being out of touch. Now, here we are again a decade later, with the prime minister Rishi Sunak and his chancellor Jeremy Hunt being accused of having no clue. Only now an average white loaf is £1.37 – and this time it’s not just politicians that are under pressure to do something about it.
Which suggests that the Guardian is as confused as any politician as to what the price of bread is.
That'll be the difference between "the average white loaf" and "the absolute cheapest economy loaf available", I expect.
With the latter being the relevant one in any reference to a 'cost of living crisis'.
Now you can pay £1 extra to get a branded bread or £3 extra to get a fancy hand baked sourdough bread.
But you don't have to, you don't need to, you do so by choice.
Good quality bread, like good quality coffee or olive oil is a very affordable luxury.
Very few Britons have calorie deficient malnutrition, but loads have obesity from excess refined carbohydrate in their diet.
Indeed, eliminating carbohydrates entirely from my diet has done wonders for my health.
Its also been cheaper too, as while meat is expensive per calorie, when its all you're eating you can afford to pay for it and not buy the rest of the stuff that goes with it.
Still buy fruits and vegetables and bread etc for my wife and kids even though I don't eat it myself, but doing the weekly shop is proving cheaper by eliminating my portion of those and eliminating snacks etc even while considerably increasing the amount of meat purchased.
Though I get my meat cheaper by going to by buying joints and cutting them into steaks (which Morrisons butcher will do for you when buying a joint) rather than buying pre-packaged steaks.
How do you think you'll go on that long term? Not a criticism, just genuinely interested. Are you fully carnivore, no fruit, nuts, seeds, grains at all? Do you take supplements? I'm fully 180° the other way, no animal products at all. I'm in the best shape I've ever been in in the round, but that's also because of a complete overhaul of lifestyle, better sleep, no booze, a lot more exercise and fresh air, even a bit of meditation 😀
I'm coming up towards a year now of full carnivore. Don't take any supplements, don't need them you get all the nutrition you need from beef.
I do drink booze, also getting more exercise.
I am not a doctor but I don't think it's advisable to live just on beef.
There’s a conspiracy theorist who promotes a beef-only diet and goes on about Big Salad lying to us. A friend of a friend went on it.
Yeah there are weirdos out there, I'm not into any conspiracy theory nonsense, I just think it works.
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
There isn't an LA in the country that is building sufficient houses, as per Pulpstar's data.
Building not enough, but being less bad than elsewhere, is simply failing less badly not succeeding.
Nope.
Pulpstar's data showed us increasing our housing stock by more than 10% over the past five years. At that rate, that's five million new houses per decade. If everyone else had done what we'd done over the past five years, we'd be half way to being out of the housing crisis already.
A single LA can't provide all the housing you need for the entire country.
As we don't have North Korea-style borders about the district, it simply means we absorb a tiny fraction of the issues from elsewhere. It's literally impossible for us to build enough houses to satisfy your simplistic cry: we'd have to build the five million or so houses ourselves (on top of the 50,000 with which we started a decade ago).
Meanwhile our residents are suffering all the infrastructure issues I described (and you ignore).
So - how many houses should the Vale of White Horse be building?
How does five million over a decade remotely address a ten million shortage?
You're right it doesn't all have to come from one LA, but no LA is doing remotely enough.
I'd suggest a minimum of 3,500 completions per annum per authority as a starting point - more could of course be better but that should be the bare minimum per annum.
Looking at it, Vale of White Horse had just over 2000 completions in a seven year period, unless I'm misreading the data, so they've not even hit the minimum we need per year over a seven year period.
Dismal failure.
Why ten million? To have the same ratio of houses per population as France, we'd need 3.9 million more houses than we currently have. (we're at 434 per thousand; they're at 590 per thousand).
And yes, you're massively misreading the data. We had over a thousand completions last year alone. 7,330 over the past seven years (from Pulpstar's table). Bear in mind that a decade ago, we had just over 50,000 to start with.
For someone who purports to dislike NIMBYs, you seem to aim to go out of your way to create more of them. I'm literally very active in trying to sort this problem out, we're one of the leading LAs in the country, and you're calling our rate and attempts "dismal failures" - partly because you can't even read a spreadsheet.
God, the keyboard warriors who just complain, spout simplistic crap, and do nothing to actively help. Meanwhile, I've been active in promoting a 4000+ development that crosses into my ward, working hard to get a Graven Hill style development in my ward, pushing policies to streamline development, helped with an LDO for technical building development in my ward, and done my damndest to get enforcement on developers to mitigate the inevitable backlash against further development.
What have you done?
Getting to the same as France is insufficient. It would be an improvement, but France has a housing shortage and expensive housing too. 4 million would make us less bad than we are today, but not good enough.
Plus we have ongoing population growth and demographic changes.
As for the Vale of White Horse data, I got it from the Vale of White Horse website, based on what came up from Google: Vale of White Horse District Council https://www.whitehorsedc.gov.ukPDF Housing Summary
Page 7 put the figure on completions as 2338 in a 7 year period.
Now if you've got a better figure I'd be interested but either way it's not enough. There are 317 authorities so just 1000 per authority would not get us anywhere near the millions needed.
This is what came up on Google. It is to be fair for 2011-2018, but is what came up so went with that data.
7330 completions in 7 years is barely over a thousand completions per annum, which is better than most authorities but is completely insufficient to address the millions of homes shortage we have. That would average at ~332k homes per annum if replicated across the country in every LA. 7338 / 7 * 317 (number of LAs) to get to that figure.
You're aware local authorities are of differing size ?
Birmingham is a single local authority and so are the Isles of Scilly.
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
There isn't an LA in the country that is building sufficient houses, as per Pulpstar's data.
Building not enough, but being less bad than elsewhere, is simply failing less badly not succeeding.
Nope.
Pulpstar's data showed us increasing our housing stock by more than 10% over the past five years. At that rate, that's five million new houses per decade. If everyone else had done what we'd done over the past five years, we'd be half way to being out of the housing crisis already.
A single LA can't provide all the housing you need for the entire country.
As we don't have North Korea-style borders about the district, it simply means we absorb a tiny fraction of the issues from elsewhere. It's literally impossible for us to build enough houses to satisfy your simplistic cry: we'd have to build the five million or so houses ourselves (on top of the 50,000 with which we started a decade ago).
Meanwhile our residents are suffering all the infrastructure issues I described (and you ignore).
So - how many houses should the Vale of White Horse be building?
How does five million over a decade remotely address a ten million shortage?
You're right it doesn't all have to come from one LA, but no LA is doing remotely enough.
I'd suggest a minimum of 3,500 completions per annum per authority as a starting point - more could of course be better but that should be the bare minimum per annum.
Looking at it, Vale of White Horse had just over 2000 completions in a seven year period, unless I'm misreading the data, so they've not even hit the minimum we need per year over a seven year period.
Dismal failure.
Ummm... It's not one person per house. Five million homes makes a decent dent.
It would make a dent, but it would not be sufficient.
Though I'm curious where the data for five million is coming from. The data I'm seeing is 2338 completions in a 7 year period, or a pitiful 334 completions per year.
334 completions per year per authority would be a pathetically low 105k completions per annum. Not even enough to keep up with population growth and demographic changes let alone make a dent in the shortage we have.
So no Andy, it's not enough. Nowhere close to enough.
I'm not talking about what has been achieved, I'm talking about whether 5 million incremental homes a decade would make a big difference, and it clearly would.
Now you can argue that 7 million would be a better number, but I personally think an incremental 5 million, which is enough to house 15 million people, or more than 20% of the population, would make a massive difference.
Agree. Labour aiming to double the total amount of house building is not a modest target. Maybe it's not enough, and maybe they won't achieve their target, but more has to be better than less when we're short of supply.
Meanwhile in France average city apartment prices are down around 8% year on year. Down nearly 11% in Lyon. 7.9% in Paris
In the countryside it’s less volatile but still a tale of decline. I saw the notaire yesterday to talk about a property related bit of paperwork. We bought in 2007. She says prices round here are pretty similar to then, if a bit lower. That’s in headline terms. In real terms way way cheaper.
"Our goal should be to become the grammar school of the Western world, attracting top [migration] talent – those that contribute more in taxes and skills, than they take out in services. It won’t be plain sailing but we must do it."
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
There isn't an LA in the country that is building sufficient houses, as per Pulpstar's data.
Building not enough, but being less bad than elsewhere, is simply failing less badly not succeeding.
Nope.
Pulpstar's data showed us increasing our housing stock by more than 10% over the past five years. At that rate, that's five million new houses per decade. If everyone else had done what we'd done over the past five years, we'd be half way to being out of the housing crisis already.
A single LA can't provide all the housing you need for the entire country.
As we don't have North Korea-style borders about the district, it simply means we absorb a tiny fraction of the issues from elsewhere. It's literally impossible for us to build enough houses to satisfy your simplistic cry: we'd have to build the five million or so houses ourselves (on top of the 50,000 with which we started a decade ago).
Meanwhile our residents are suffering all the infrastructure issues I described (and you ignore).
So - how many houses should the Vale of White Horse be building?
How does five million over a decade remotely address a ten million shortage?
You're right it doesn't all have to come from one LA, but no LA is doing remotely enough.
I'd suggest a minimum of 3,500 completions per annum per authority as a starting point - more could of course be better but that should be the bare minimum per annum.
Looking at it, Vale of White Horse had just over 2000 completions in a seven year period, unless I'm misreading the data, so they've not even hit the minimum we need per year over a seven year period.
Dismal failure.
Why ten million? To have the same ratio of houses per population as France, we'd need 3.9 million more houses than we currently have. (we're at 434 per thousand; they're at 590 per thousand).
And yes, you're massively misreading the data. We had over a thousand completions last year alone. 7,330 over the past seven years (from Pulpstar's table). Bear in mind that a decade ago, we had just over 50,000 to start with.
For someone who purports to dislike NIMBYs, you seem to aim to go out of your way to create more of them. I'm literally very active in trying to sort this problem out, we're one of the leading LAs in the country, and you're calling our rate and attempts "dismal failures" - partly because you can't even read a spreadsheet.
God, the keyboard warriors who just complain, spout simplistic crap, and do nothing to actively help. Meanwhile, I've been active in promoting a 4000+ development that crosses into my ward, working hard to get a Graven Hill style development in my ward, pushing policies to streamline development, helped with an LDO for technical building development in my ward, and done my damndest to get enforcement on developers to mitigate the inevitable backlash against further development.
What have you done?
Getting to the same as France is insufficient. It would be an improvement, but France has a housing shortage and expensive housing too. 4 million would make us less bad than we are today, but not good enough.
Plus we have ongoing population growth and demographic changes.
As for the Vale of White Horse data, I got it from the Vale of White Horse website, based on what came up from Google: Vale of White Horse District Council https://www.whitehorsedc.gov.ukPDF Housing Summary
Page 7 put the figure on completions as 2338 in a 7 year period.
Now if you've got a better figure I'd be interested but either way it's not enough. There are 317 authorities so just 1000 per authority would not get us anywhere near the millions needed.
This is what came up on Google. It is to be fair for 2011-2018, but is what came up so went with that data.
7330 completions in 7 years is barely over a thousand completions per annum, which is better than most authorities but is completely insufficient to address the millions of homes shortage we have. That would average at ~332k homes per annum if replicated across the country in every LA. 7338 / 7 * 317 (number of LAs) to get to that figure.
You're aware local authorities are of differing size ?
Birmingham is a single local authority and so are the Isles of Scilly.
Of course they are.
Vale of White Horse according to Google has an area of 578.6 km^2 while Birmingham has an area of 267.8 km^2.
So Vale of White Horse should if we are averaging it by area be doing roughly double the completions of Birmingham.
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
There isn't an LA in the country that is building sufficient houses, as per Pulpstar's data.
Building not enough, but being less bad than elsewhere, is simply failing less badly not succeeding.
Nope.
Pulpstar's data showed us increasing our housing stock by more than 10% over the past five years. At that rate, that's five million new houses per decade. If everyone else had done what we'd done over the past five years, we'd be half way to being out of the housing crisis already.
A single LA can't provide all the housing you need for the entire country.
As we don't have North Korea-style borders about the district, it simply means we absorb a tiny fraction of the issues from elsewhere. It's literally impossible for us to build enough houses to satisfy your simplistic cry: we'd have to build the five million or so houses ourselves (on top of the 50,000 with which we started a decade ago).
Meanwhile our residents are suffering all the infrastructure issues I described (and you ignore).
So - how many houses should the Vale of White Horse be building?
How does five million over a decade remotely address a ten million shortage?
You're right it doesn't all have to come from one LA, but no LA is doing remotely enough.
I'd suggest a minimum of 3,500 completions per annum per authority as a starting point - more could of course be better but that should be the bare minimum per annum.
Looking at it, Vale of White Horse had just over 2000 completions in a seven year period, unless I'm misreading the data, so they've not even hit the minimum we need per year over a seven year period.
Dismal failure.
Why ten million? To have the same ratio of houses per population as France, we'd need 3.9 million more houses than we currently have. (we're at 434 per thousand; they're at 590 per thousand).
And yes, you're massively misreading the data. We had over a thousand completions last year alone. 7,330 over the past seven years (from Pulpstar's table). Bear in mind that a decade ago, we had just over 50,000 to start with.
For someone who purports to dislike NIMBYs, you seem to aim to go out of your way to create more of them. I'm literally very active in trying to sort this problem out, we're one of the leading LAs in the country, and you're calling our rate and attempts "dismal failures" - partly because you can't even read a spreadsheet.
God, the keyboard warriors who just complain, spout simplistic crap, and do nothing to actively help. Meanwhile, I've been active in promoting a 4000+ development that crosses into my ward, working hard to get a Graven Hill style development in my ward, pushing policies to streamline development, helped with an LDO for technical building development in my ward, and done my damndest to get enforcement on developers to mitigate the inevitable backlash against further development.
What have you done?
Getting to the same as France is insufficient. It would be an improvement, but France has a housing shortage and expensive housing too. 4 million would make us less bad than we are today, but not good enough.
Plus we have ongoing population growth and demographic changes.
As for the Vale of White Horse data, I got it from the Vale of White Horse website, based on what came up from Google: Vale of White Horse District Council https://www.whitehorsedc.gov.ukPDF Housing Summary
Page 7 put the figure on completions as 2338 in a 7 year period.
Now if you've got a better figure I'd be interested but either way it's not enough. There are 317 authorities so just 1000 per authority would not get us anywhere near the millions needed.
This is what came up on Google. It is to be fair for 2011-2018, but is what came up so went with that data.
7330 completions in 7 years is barely over a thousand completions per annum, which is better than most authorities but is completely insufficient to address the millions of homes shortage we have. That would average at ~332k homes per annum if replicated across the country in every LA. 7338 / 7 * 317 (number of LAs) to get to that figure.
You're aware local authorities are of differing size ?
Birmingham is a single local authority and so are the Isles of Scilly.
Of course they are.
Vale of White Horse according to Google has an area of 578.6 km^2 while Birmingham has an area of 267.8 km^2.
So Vale of White Horse should if we are averaging it by area be doing roughly double the completions of Birmingham.
Either way you slice it, its insufficient.
You think North Yorkshire should be required to produce 31 times more dwellings than Birmingham ?!
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
There isn't an LA in the country that is building sufficient houses, as per Pulpstar's data.
Building not enough, but being less bad than elsewhere, is simply failing less badly not succeeding.
Nope.
Pulpstar's data showed us increasing our housing stock by more than 10% over the past five years. At that rate, that's five million new houses per decade. If everyone else had done what we'd done over the past five years, we'd be half way to being out of the housing crisis already.
A single LA can't provide all the housing you need for the entire country.
As we don't have North Korea-style borders about the district, it simply means we absorb a tiny fraction of the issues from elsewhere. It's literally impossible for us to build enough houses to satisfy your simplistic cry: we'd have to build the five million or so houses ourselves (on top of the 50,000 with which we started a decade ago).
Meanwhile our residents are suffering all the infrastructure issues I described (and you ignore).
So - how many houses should the Vale of White Horse be building?
How does five million over a decade remotely address a ten million shortage?
You're right it doesn't all have to come from one LA, but no LA is doing remotely enough.
I'd suggest a minimum of 3,500 completions per annum per authority as a starting point - more could of course be better but that should be the bare minimum per annum.
Looking at it, Vale of White Horse had just over 2000 completions in a seven year period, unless I'm misreading the data, so they've not even hit the minimum we need per year over a seven year period.
Dismal failure.
Ummm... It's not one person per house. Five million homes makes a decent dent.
It would make a dent, but it would not be sufficient.
Though I'm curious where the data for five million is coming from. The data I'm seeing is 2338 completions in a 7 year period, or a pitiful 334 completions per year.
334 completions per year per authority would be a pathetically low 105k completions per annum. Not even enough to keep up with population growth and demographic changes let alone make a dent in the shortage we have.
So no Andy, it's not enough. Nowhere close to enough.
@Fraser_Knight NEW: Seven police officers - including Rishi Sunak's close protection officer as PM - will not be charged with misconduct in a public office over bets they placed on the general election date.
The Met has passed all of its investigations to the Gambling Commission to look into allegations of cheating, under the Gambling Act.
Warning this is "not an all clear" for those investigated by police, as there's still a possibility of other charges from the Commission.
Scotland Yard's internal professional standards team is still looking into its officer's actions @LBC
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
There isn't an LA in the country that is building sufficient houses, as per Pulpstar's data.
Building not enough, but being less bad than elsewhere, is simply failing less badly not succeeding.
Nope.
Pulpstar's data showed us increasing our housing stock by more than 10% over the past five years. At that rate, that's five million new houses per decade. If everyone else had done what we'd done over the past five years, we'd be half way to being out of the housing crisis already.
A single LA can't provide all the housing you need for the entire country.
As we don't have North Korea-style borders about the district, it simply means we absorb a tiny fraction of the issues from elsewhere. It's literally impossible for us to build enough houses to satisfy your simplistic cry: we'd have to build the five million or so houses ourselves (on top of the 50,000 with which we started a decade ago).
Meanwhile our residents are suffering all the infrastructure issues I described (and you ignore).
So - how many houses should the Vale of White Horse be building?
How does five million over a decade remotely address a ten million shortage?
You're right it doesn't all have to come from one LA, but no LA is doing remotely enough.
I'd suggest a minimum of 3,500 completions per annum per authority as a starting point - more could of course be better but that should be the bare minimum per annum.
Looking at it, Vale of White Horse had just over 2000 completions in a seven year period, unless I'm misreading the data, so they've not even hit the minimum we need per year over a seven year period.
Dismal failure.
Why ten million? To have the same ratio of houses per population as France, we'd need 3.9 million more houses than we currently have. (we're at 434 per thousand; they're at 590 per thousand).
And yes, you're massively misreading the data. We had over a thousand completions last year alone. 7,330 over the past seven years (from Pulpstar's table). Bear in mind that a decade ago, we had just over 50,000 to start with.
For someone who purports to dislike NIMBYs, you seem to aim to go out of your way to create more of them. I'm literally very active in trying to sort this problem out, we're one of the leading LAs in the country, and you're calling our rate and attempts "dismal failures" - partly because you can't even read a spreadsheet.
God, the keyboard warriors who just complain, spout simplistic crap, and do nothing to actively help. Meanwhile, I've been active in promoting a 4000+ development that crosses into my ward, working hard to get a Graven Hill style development in my ward, pushing policies to streamline development, helped with an LDO for technical building development in my ward, and done my damndest to get enforcement on developers to mitigate the inevitable backlash against further development.
What have you done?
Getting to the same as France is insufficient. It would be an improvement, but France has a housing shortage and expensive housing too. 4 million would make us less bad than we are today, but not good enough.
Plus we have ongoing population growth and demographic changes.
As for the Vale of White Horse data, I got it from the Vale of White Horse website, based on what came up from Google: Vale of White Horse District Council https://www.whitehorsedc.gov.ukPDF Housing Summary
Page 7 put the figure on completions as 2338 in a 7 year period.
Now if you've got a better figure I'd be interested but either way it's not enough. There are 317 authorities so just 1000 per authority would not get us anywhere near the millions needed.
This is what came up on Google. It is to be fair for 2011-2018, but is what came up so went with that data.
7330 completions in 7 years is barely over a thousand completions per annum, which is better than most authorities but is completely insufficient to address the millions of homes shortage we have. That would average at ~332k homes per annum if replicated across the country in every LA. 7338 / 7 * 317 (number of LAs) to get to that figure.
You're aware local authorities are of differing size ?
Birmingham is a single local authority and so are the Isles of Scilly.
Of course they are.
Vale of White Horse according to Google has an area of 578.6 km^2 while Birmingham has an area of 267.8 km^2.
So Vale of White Horse should if we are averaging it by area be doing roughly double the completions of Birmingham.
Either way you slice it, its insufficient.
Area? Why in God's name would you go by area? But that logic, London boroughs have the lowest need for new housing and you'd expect London to have the lowest house prices!
In 2014, we had 52,000 houses in the Vale. That's obviously increased past 60,000 now.
Latest population estimate is 142,000 people. That's about 2.1% of the population of the UK. Do you not think that scaling by population might be a slightly better principle than by area?
That recording of Jan 6th is indeed brutal. But it is not new. How can anyone support Trump after that, let alone nearly 45% of Americans?
I genuinely find it bewildering. How can any elected official of any part of the party think this is ok?
Many Americans see a very different picture of events, they’re fed a stream of propaganda on Fox News etc. They see a different reality, they’re told lies. They’re in a Facebook bubble where they believe that Harris slept her way to the top, lies about her ethnicity and her family, and is a communist. They’ve absorbed a message that the country is in a crisis because of immigrants and anyone who isn’t white.
These beliefs don’t spontaneously emerge. They are rehearsed, over and over again, by traditional and social media on the right.
It's why we should close down GB News.
Prevention is better than cure.
What calumnies are you alleging GBNews have been guilty of?
Spreading antivax bollocks for starters such as
GB News broke Ofcom rules with presenter’s Covid vaccine claims
Regulator says Mark Steyn’s use of data to draw misleading conclusions breached content guidelines
GB News is an entertainment channel for right wing morons and Farage supporters masquerading as a bona fide news channel.
On GB News, I don't understand how Gloria de Piero is still there. I'm surprised she hasn't jumped ship for somewhere like Times Radio.
Unlike Lee Anderson, she hasn't gone loopy, and still does interesting work.
Her twitter feed is civilised and interesting, as opposed to Anderson's constant dog whistles. https://x.com/GloriaDePiero
On GBNews itself, it is owned by Sir Paul Marshall and investment firm Legatum. Paul Marshall also owns Unherd, and is in the running to buy the Spectator and the Telegraph.
The article I linked talks about that, and about how he attends HTB, but it is by a Political Correspondent - and imo has little clue about that church, or Church of England evangelicalism. Some accurate stuff in there, but no real knowledge.
All of these need to be taken with our own pinch of salt.
I have yet to get a handle on how I understand Paul Marshall; I think his motivations and expressed objectives are OK, but I question his judgement, and I do wonder whether he has been put out of balance by exposure to something like the ideology of Nat Con.
HTB one of the wealthiest and largest C of E churches in the nation and also where Welby was brought to faith and very much linked to the evangelical block he as Archbishop has championed. 'Holy Trinity (universally known as HTB) is no ordinary church. It has a budget of around £10m a year and a staff of 118, making it larger than several Church of England dioceses. Most parishes in the Church of England struggle to afford a curate. HTB has 28. In addition, there are no fewer than 14 ordinands—people in training to be priests or ministers. Together with four ministers, that totals 46 in leadership or training roles for one parish.
HTB is the home of the evangelistic Alpha course, and a centre of the charismatic church movement. Charismatic Christians believe that God intervenes personally in their lives through direct encounters with the Holy Spirit, sometimes in the form of ecstatic experiences. They may believe that God’s approval is expressed in their increasing numbers, wealth and influence. Over recent decades, HTB’s impact has extended into every corner of the Church of England. It is the engine room that now drives the Church—much to the resentment of many faithful clergy in poorer, more doctrinally diverse and less influential churches. HTB is the only parish church with its own caucus on the General Synod, the Church of England’s lawmaking body. The view from Brompton Road is that the Church is divided between those who champion the true faith and those who do not, and that God is blessing the faithful.
HTB is also the church that formed Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury. He was baptised there, married there and attended consistently until his mid-thirties...'
Even in that quote there's quite a lot that is exaggerated, mischaracterised or shorn of context - which is why I added the link I did.
I don't think we want to do the detailed history of HTB, or the Diocese of London's approach to mission / diversity developed under Bishop Richard Chartres, in the comments at PB !
If anyone really wants to read into the recent (ie since 1980) history of HTB and linked movements the place I would recommend to start is the blog of Rev Richard Moy, who wrote a thesis about HTB Network, and has gems such as an account of an interview with Rev John Collins, who laid many foundations as the Vicar of HTB before Sandy Millar - a seminal figure:
I've always thought Badenoch was the most likely candidate to win, with Jenrick and Cleverly next. This poll is putting Tugendhat a bit higher,
If it was just down to members then yes Badenoch likely wins.
However I am not sure Tory MPs will put her in the last 2. I think Jenrick will be in the last 2 and one of Tugendhat, Cleverly or Badenoch his opponent
The housing crisis is indeed really complicated. In addition, as we live in a democracy, whatever gets done has to bring enough of the people along with it. The cry of frustration of, "Sod 'em, impose this and be done with it," simply can't work - at least not for more than one or two election cycles at best, and solving the issue won't be done in that timescale.
The simplistic "build more and prices come down" approach runs into the problem that whilst it may be true to an extent nationwide, it's not true locally (and that's cantering past the fact that actually it's "Build more and price rises won't be as great as otherwise but won't necessarily go into reverse"). Induced demand is a thing - build a load of expensive four and five bedroom houses and people will come into the area from more expensive areas outside of it. As long as other aspects of the area are sufficiently attractive. You can build loads of new houses - as we have done in the Vale - continually in the top five LAs in the country for rate (as per Pulpstar), but house prices have continued to climb. Because our population has climbed to match the housing, as we've pulled people into these new houses from elsewhere.
This makes it hard to sell to the local population. We've used the argument that housebuilding means lower house prices than otherwise, and they naturally point to the fact that houses are more unaffordable than ever, leaving us to have to argue "Yes, but they'd be even MORE unaffordable if we hadn't, honest."
Meanwhile schools get more and more oversubscribed, no-one can get into a GP surgery locally, roads jam up, the sewerage system is utterly unfit for purpose and people literally end up wading through shit (in one ward, during the storms over winter, we had the unedifying spectacle of seeing a literal shower of shit), developers continually fail to provide what was promised, Neighbourhood Development Plans get ignored as unenforceable, previously loved green spaces get concreted over... and your children STILL can't get anywhere near affording a house.
Telling people they're being unreasonable and NIMBYs just doesn't cut the mustard at that point.
There are solutions, but because they're not ultra-simple, and can involve compromises and costs, they're difficult to sell and not quick to explain.
There isn't an LA in the country that is building sufficient houses, as per Pulpstar's data.
Building not enough, but being less bad than elsewhere, is simply failing less badly not succeeding.
Nope.
Pulpstar's data showed us increasing our housing stock by more than 10% over the past five years. At that rate, that's five million new houses per decade. If everyone else had done what we'd done over the past five years, we'd be half way to being out of the housing crisis already.
A single LA can't provide all the housing you need for the entire country.
As we don't have North Korea-style borders about the district, it simply means we absorb a tiny fraction of the issues from elsewhere. It's literally impossible for us to build enough houses to satisfy your simplistic cry: we'd have to build the five million or so houses ourselves (on top of the 50,000 with which we started a decade ago).
Meanwhile our residents are suffering all the infrastructure issues I described (and you ignore).
So - how many houses should the Vale of White Horse be building?
How does five million over a decade remotely address a ten million shortage?
You're right it doesn't all have to come from one LA, but no LA is doing remotely enough.
I'd suggest a minimum of 3,500 completions per annum per authority as a starting point - more could of course be better but that should be the bare minimum per annum.
Looking at it, Vale of White Horse had just over 2000 completions in a seven year period, unless I'm misreading the data, so they've not even hit the minimum we need per year over a seven year period.
Dismal failure.
Ummm... It's not one person per house. Five million homes makes a decent dent.
It would make a dent, but it would not be sufficient.
Though I'm curious where the data for five million is coming from. The data I'm seeing is 2338 completions in a 7 year period, or a pitiful 334 completions per year.
334 completions per year per authority would be a pathetically low 105k completions per annum. Not even enough to keep up with population growth and demographic changes let alone make a dent in the shortage we have.
So no Andy, it's not enough. Nowhere close to enough.
I'm not talking about what has been achieved, I'm talking about whether 5 million incremental homes a decade would make a big difference, and it clearly would.
Now you can argue that 7 million would be a better number, but I personally think an incremental 5 million, which is enough to house 15 million people, or more than 20% of the population, would make a massive difference.
It would make a difference, but we'd still have a housing shortage, it'd just be less bad than it is currently.
And it'd be enough to house 10 million people. Houses have an average of 2 occupants not 3.
England's current population is 57 million and the number of houses is 25 million. To get to 2 people per house, we'd only need 3.5 million more houses.
Of that 57 million, about 45 million are adults. If you got your 10 million more houses, we'd have an average of 1.29 adults per house (and 0.34 children per house).
@Fraser_Knight NEW: Seven police officers - including Rishi Sunak's close protection officer as PM - will not be charged with misconduct in a public office over bets they placed on the general election date.
The Met has passed all of its investigations to the Gambling Commission to look into allegations of cheating, under the Gambling Act.
Warning this is "not an all clear" for those investigated by police, as there's still a possibility of other charges from the Commission.
Scotland Yard's internal professional standards team is still looking into its officer's actions @LBC
Comments
The 137p Guardian quote people are quibbling about is from the ONS, average white sliced loaf 800g.
A fair criticism would be apples and oranges (not their prices) rather than source of statistics.
And he didnt have a wanker like Miliband screwing up energy.
It looks an interesting, if somewhat speculative thesis; I might order a copy.
The other really interesting, but under-explored period for the status of women in Britain, is the first few decades of the nineteenth century.
@RealCynicalFox
·
14h
I mentioned this a month or so ago, now it has cropped up again. Pres. Trump has repeatedly indicated a preference for a massive senior leadership turnover at the Pentagon, should he win in November.
I think there’s a good chance he means it.
https://x.com/RealCynicalFox/status/1826701743499214885
i.e. He wants generals who will not resist the use of the military to support him remaining in power beyond the four years and being used on the streets to control protest. He'll be asking them to swear loyalty to him and not the constitution.
1 - Provide infrastructure in ADVANCE of development. Otherwise your best case is chronic overload (because by the time you've constructed it to catch up with the housing level (say) five years earlier, you've had five years more building houses and your new infrastructure is insufficient. Worse case, developers don't provide it or the Treasury fails to do so and instead of chronic overload, you've got acute (and chronic) overload. This is unsurprisingly an unpopular state for residents to experience, especially when it's seemingly eternal.
2 - Give real enforcement powers to LAs. At the moment, developers can get away with so much as long as they just provide a promise and sketchy plan to do something about it and oops we didn't do it yet but we will sometime, honest. In one development, they've been waiting for over a decade for the promised sports pitches because the developer just buried all the rubble in the central green area, raising the levels six feet (so you could stand there and see into upstairs windows) and making it unusable.
3 - Give Neighbourhood Development Plans real teeth. We had a window a decade or so ago when people locally were content with large numbers of houses to come, as they had apparent influence over where these would be and over what infrastructure would come along with them. Since then, they've seen houses spring up all over the place with nothing that was promised accompanying them. Shockingly, they now oppose these new developments.
4 - Use Local Development Orders to streamline planning. In effect, you pick an area for a type of development and provide a big chunk of the compulsory planning reports up front and give what's effectively preapproval to developments within certain constraints.
5 - Fund LAs to buy up areas for the above (at before planning uplift prices) and carry out LDO preplanning approval AND provide power, sewerage, and road/path infrastructure to the development to then sell off plots to multiple smaller developers for a single site. From the profits, they fund schools and surgeries and a chunk of hiring developers to provide social housing there for them to administrate going forwards.
There's more than that, but that would be a basic start.
Before you know it, you are up to your nuts in crusty jugglers.
After all, as Heinlein said, "If there are no numbers, it's not science but opinion."
People understandably would like to know how many is enough.
After all, at the rate we've been building, if every other LA had been building at our rate, we'd have seen 600,000+ new houses per year nationwide for 10-15 years.
So is a UPS worth it? That is for you to decide.
Your linked piece by Andrew Graystone is better in it's reporting, but he is in my view far too conspiratorial in his analysis. This review of Graystone's book by Dr Ian Paul is a good foil to that article:
https://www.psephizo.com/life-ministry/does-bleeding-for-jesus-help-resolve-abuse-issues/
All of these need to be taken with our own pinch of salt.
I have yet to get a handle on how I understand Paul Marshall; I think his motivations and expressed objectives are OK, but I question his judgement, and I do wonder whether he has been put out of balance by exposure to something like the ideology of Nat Con.
Soda rye bread enthusiasts? Edinburgh Fringe nuisances?
Building not enough, but being less bad than elsewhere, is simply failing less badly not succeeding.
It's a much more varied and sustainable diet, both in terms of enjoyment and for the planet, but I am not doctrinaire and eat what I am given if a guest somewhere.
But Starmers offering is the least bad.
Build 20 million.
And that's on today's figures. Given ongoing population growth and demographic changes, we'd need even more.
Five Graven Hills per county would be a start - 200-250k self-builds over a decade.
But Graven Hill has had no navigate a total MAZE of rules and bureaucracy, partly to skirt around VAT, and has ended up mainly accessible for people with half a million to hand, or the capacity to borrow that much or more.
So RR needs to pick up things like the local aspiring self-builder registers kept by Councile and integrate them into an orderly process.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bicester
Pulpstar's data showed us increasing our housing stock by more than 10% over the past five years. At that rate, that's five million new houses per decade. If everyone else had done what we'd done over the past five years, we'd be half way to being out of the housing crisis already.
A single LA can't provide all the housing you need for the entire country.
As we don't have North Korea-style borders about the district, it simply means we absorb a tiny fraction of the issues from elsewhere. It's literally impossible for us to build enough houses to satisfy your simplistic cry: we'd have to build the five million or so houses ourselves (on top of the 50,000 with which we started a decade ago).
Meanwhile our residents are suffering all the infrastructure issues I described (and you ignore).
So - how many houses should the Vale of White Horse be building?
Once those reports were published, he could either pay up or trigger a load more strikes.
I eat a varied diet.
Beef, bacon, chicken, sausages, eggs and cheese.
My current bugbear is NIMBYs who are also hugely pro immigration. And then moan about the house prices their children are having to pay.
You're right it doesn't all have to come from one LA, but no LA is doing remotely enough.
I'd suggest a minimum of 3,500 completions per annum per authority as a starting point - more could of course be better but that should be the bare minimum per annum.
Looking at it, Vale of White Horse had just over 2000 completions in a seven year period, unless I'm misreading the data, so they've not even hit the minimum we need per year over a seven year period.
Dismal failure.
https://www.centreforcities.org/publication/the-housebuilding-crisis/
https://www.diabetes.co.uk/diet/carnivore-diet.html
Basically my diet is the inverse of a vegan diet.
And before the rubbish stats come out, people renting a property by the room, as an unregistered HMO, is not a household. Except in the minds of idiots.
To have the same ratio of houses per population as France, we'd need 3.9 million more houses than we currently have.
(we're at 434 per thousand; they're at 590 per thousand).
And yes, you're massively misreading the data. We had over a thousand completions last year alone.
7,330 over the past seven years (from Pulpstar's table).
Bear in mind that a decade ago, we had just over 50,000 to start with.
For someone who purports to dislike NIMBYs, you seem to aim to go out of your way to create more of them.
I'm literally very active in trying to sort this problem out, we're one of the leading LAs in the country, and you're calling our rate and attempts "dismal failures" - partly because you can't even read a spreadsheet.
God, the keyboard warriors who just complain, spout simplistic crap, and do nothing to actively help. Meanwhile, I've been active in promoting a 4000+ development that crosses into my ward, working hard to get a Graven Hill style development in my ward, pushing policies to streamline development, helped with an LDO for technical building development in my ward, and done my damndest to get enforcement on developers to mitigate the inevitable backlash against further development.
What have you done?
This a fine piece, from the always-excellent Sean Trende.
It points to a Democratic vote share of 48-49%, on the day.
If govt did it directly we ought to be able to get more joined up development alongside additional infrastructure.
Rachel Reeves must know that borrowing to build houses is fine, we will get that money back and then some, even without the wider economic benefits.
Though I'm curious where the data for five million is coming from. The data I'm seeing is 2338 completions in a 7 year period, or a pitiful 334 completions per year.
334 completions per year per authority would be a pathetically low 105k completions per annum. Not even enough to keep up with population growth and demographic changes let alone make a dent in the shortage we have.
So no Andy, it's not enough. Nowhere close to enough.
You could probably fit the entire population of Europe in the space of Greater London, if you built to Kowloon density levels. Of course, dealing with sewage would be an interesting challenge.
You guys have got into the unhappy habit of dismissing any statistics that don't support your view as "rubbish". France does have 8 million more homes - but also higher overcrowding and not dissimilar housing costs to us.
HTB is the home of the evangelistic Alpha course, and a centre of the charismatic church movement. Charismatic Christians believe that God intervenes personally in their lives through direct encounters with the Holy Spirit, sometimes in the form of ecstatic experiences. They may believe that God’s approval is expressed in their increasing numbers, wealth and influence. Over recent decades, HTB’s impact has extended into every corner of the Church of England. It is the engine room that now drives the Church—much to the resentment of many faithful clergy in poorer, more doctrinally diverse and less influential churches. HTB is the only parish church with its own caucus on the General Synod, the Church of England’s lawmaking body. The view from Brompton Road is that the Church is divided between those who champion the true faith and those who do not, and that God is blessing the faithful.
HTB is also the church that formed Justin Welby, the archbishop of Canterbury. He was baptised there, married there and attended consistently until his mid-thirties...'
RR needs to address and build bridges over / round / through barriers in the process, which all contradict each other and require extreme skill or a lot of luck to navigate. It's about planning reform addressing the right blockages, and making sure that those imposing them are very clear that there are hard limits to what they can impose. IMO some of these are:
1 - Landowner self-interest.
2 - Developer self-interest, especially around disputes on planning obligations, viability etc.
3 - NIMBY culture, and local politics pandering to it.
4 - Local council capacity to manage / regulate / enforce.
5 - Predictability of process.
At the other end of that we could develop problems around corruption /conflict of interest in Local Authorities beyond petty corruption ("new driveway surface for the Councillor") which is everywhere anyway. I think the role of the Planning Inspectorate is important here.
@BartholomewRoberts ideas about taking all the restrictions off and let freedom roll are interesting, but won't ever work as we don't want that as a society.
Now you can argue that 7 million would be a better number, but I personally think an incremental 5 million, which is enough to house 15 million people, or more than 20% of the population, would make a massive difference.
https://yougov.co.uk/politics/articles/50006-what-do-the-public-make-of-labours-proposed-planning-reforms
Remember a certain person being astonished that a posh hotel could cost £60 a night, out in the sticks, in France?
And it'd be enough to house 10 million people. Houses have an average of 2 occupants not 3.
Obviously I've just picked a random hypothetical, but plausible risk and applied an arbitrary number, to illustrate the point.
Basically I'd want to see a peer reviewed randomised control trial, with a decent number of participants and long term follow up before radically departing from conventional medical wisdom.
Anecdata just don't cut the mustard.
tldr; I wanna know the odds. I don't know the odds. I don't think you, or anyone else does, either.
That's not, by itself, a bad thing. There's no fundamental reason why we should be restricted to one home each. But it does imply that, while Just Build More Damn Houses is a necessary part of the solving the "too many people not having one adequate home" problem, it's not sufficient by itself.
That brings back the one I mentioned yesterday - the Hammer House of Horror where this year's guests go into next year's special pie.
It's a pate not a pie. And checking, it is a 1982 BBC Playhouse episode called "The Guest" where holidaymakers in France are served a special pate. Bsaed on a short story by Gerald Durrell.
Here is the synopsis:
https://genome.ch.bbc.co.uk/adabbf738ca14bd6b8d5391b5be69fb9
There are 70 million people in the UK, and 29 million houses and flats, so overall occupancy is around 2.4 today. But that is split between apartments/flats at around 2, and houses at closer to 3.
You specifically mentioned houses. And in houses, there are far more families with more than two people in them (i.e. kids) than there are single occupancy.
Start of 2024: realise there are two options; May or late Autumn.
March: Now is the time to push the button for a May election. But the Conservatives are massively behind in the polls. So don't go now. Ignore the predictable bad news incoming for the second half of the year.
late May: Oh #*&?, the incoming bad news is even worse than we thought. There is no money left, we've burnt though the contingency funds already. And we've run out of excuses to not send flights to Rwanda which will reveal what a joke the policy is. We're not going to survive into the autumn. Anyone got the music for "Nearer, my God to Thee"?
TLDR: They had the information to tell them that going long wasn't going to work (I expected December 19th, after all). But wishful groupthink stopped them processing it until it was too late.
Plus we have ongoing population growth and demographic changes.
As for the Vale of White Horse data, I got it from the Vale of White Horse website, based on what came up from Google: Vale of White Horse District Council
https://www.whitehorsedc.gov.ukPDF
Housing Summary
Page 7 put the figure on completions as 2338 in a 7 year period.
Now if you've got a better figure I'd be interested but either way it's not enough. There are 317 authorities so just 1000 per authority would not get us anywhere near the millions needed.
Many young families with kids live in flats. Not many pensioners do.
Two of my surviving grandparents live in a house by themselves. Their spouse has died and their great grandchildren live in their grandchildren's homes. That's not that atypical.
Do you have any actual data to show the average is 3 in houses?
Vale of White Horse has had 7330 completions in the previous 7 years (I've checked and I've correctly copied the ONS data from https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/housing/datasets/housebuildingukpermanentdwellingsstartedandcompletedbylocalauthority , and is clearly pulling it's weight so far as housing is concerned. Where are you getting this 2338 figure from ?
7330 completions in 7 years is barely over a thousand completions per annum, which is better than most authorities but is completely insufficient to address the millions of homes shortage we have. That would average at ~332k homes per annum if replicated across the country in every LA. 7338 / 7 * 317 (number of LAs) to get to that figure.
Birmingham is a single local authority and so are the Isles of Scilly.
In the countryside it’s less volatile but still a tale of decline. I saw the notaire yesterday to talk about a property related bit of paperwork. We bought in 2007. She says prices round here are pretty similar to then, if a bit lower. That’s in headline terms. In real terms way way cheaper.
Kennedy voters go 59% for Trump and 41% for Harris if he exits
https://www.outwardintelligence.com/pulse/presidential-race-remains-stable
Activote Pennsylvania
Harris 51.1% Trump 48.9%
https://www.activote.net/harris-has-narrow-lead-in-keystone-swing-state-pennsylvania/
Activote Ohio
Trump 56% Harris 44%
https://www.activote.net/trump-has-double-digit-lead-in-ohio/
Activote Missouri
Trump 59% Harris 41%
https://www.activote.net/trump-leads-with-expected-margin-in-missouri/
"Our goal should be to become the grammar school of the Western world, attracting top [migration] talent – those that contribute more in taxes and skills, than they take out in services. It won’t be plain sailing but we must do it."
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2024/08/22/we-must-be-a-party-that-rejects-mass-migration/
Vale of White Horse according to Google has an area of 578.6 km^2 while Birmingham has an area of 267.8 km^2.
So Vale of White Horse should if we are averaging it by area be doing roughly double the completions of Birmingham.
Either way you slice it, its insufficient.
It's a view.
Pulpstar provided the figures here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1bBO7Yc_KIk9--T38_TmoQgjuog82r-KkVa2ccKRQC-A/edit?gid=0#gid=0
Line 282 is Vale of White Horse
Most recent seven years:
740 - 1,200 - 1,080 - 1,120 - 920 - 960 - 1,310
% saying is their preferred candidate…
Kemi Badenoch: 24%
Tom Tugendhat: 16%
James Cleverly: 14%
Robert Jenrick: 12%
Priti Patel: 11%
Mel Stride: 2%
Don’t know: 19%
https://x.com/YouGov/status/1826890094986359206
When polled against other candidates head to head, Kemi Badenoch leads in every contest
vs Cleverly: 47% - 38%
vs Jenrick: 48% - 33%
vs Tugendhat: 49% - 31%
vs Patel: 55% - 26%
vs Stride: 61% - 14%
https://x.com/YouGov/status/1826890097662328944
NEW: Seven police officers - including Rishi Sunak's close protection officer as PM - will not be charged with misconduct in a public office over bets they placed on the general election date.
The Met has passed all of its investigations to the Gambling Commission to look into allegations of cheating, under the Gambling Act.
Warning this is "not an all clear" for those investigated by police, as there's still a possibility of other charges from the Commission.
Scotland Yard's internal professional standards team is still looking into its officer's actions
@LBC
https://x.com/Fraser_Knight/status/1826950007867548154
Why in God's name would you go by area? But that logic, London boroughs have the lowest need for new housing and you'd expect London to have the lowest house prices!
In 2014, we had 52,000 houses in the Vale.
That's obviously increased past 60,000 now.
Latest population estimate is 142,000 people. That's about 2.1% of the population of the UK.
Do you not think that scaling by population might be a slightly better principle than by area?
I don't think we want to do the detailed history of HTB, or the Diocese of London's approach to mission / diversity developed under Bishop Richard Chartres, in the comments at PB !
If anyone really wants to read into the recent (ie since 1980) history of HTB and linked movements the place I would recommend to start is the blog of Rev Richard Moy, who wrote a thesis about HTB Network, and has gems such as an account of an interview with Rev John Collins, who laid many foundations as the Vicar of HTB before Sandy Millar - a seminal figure:
https://yournameislikehoney.com/2021/09/13/part-1-what-am-i-writing-and-why/
(There may be a couple of typos in my post here.)
However I am not sure Tory MPs will put her in the last 2. I think Jenrick will be in the last 2 and one of Tugendhat, Cleverly or Badenoch his opponent
To get to 2 people per house, we'd only need 3.5 million more houses.
Of that 57 million, about 45 million are adults.
If you got your 10 million more houses, we'd have an average of 1.29 adults per house (and 0.34 children per house).
https://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk
People bet with inside information all the time.