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?
Of course it isn't.
You can't generally build new towns where existing towns already exist.
You can't generally build new houses where existing houses already exist.
Uninhabited land is the best land to develop.
There is plenty of undeveloped land available for homes there.
You clearly have plenty of space to develop at least 3500 per annum which is the minimum I would suggest per LA.
..an average expected error of 4.9%, and was in the field between August 5, 2024 and August 22, 2024 with a median field date of August 14. .. (Pennsylvania poll)
So, essentially worthless, post convention.
And how do you accurately poll Kennedy voters ? Any of them who actually engage with pollsters are pretty unlikely to be at all representative of the category. And a poll of Kennedy voters in the states that matter would be even more difficult. (for that poll, This survey was conducted August 18-22, 2024 using an online sample of 1,867 likely voters. The survey's margin of error is +/- 2.3%, ensuring a reliable snapshot of public opinion at the time of the study, so the sample of Kennedy voters would be around 95 people - for the whole country.)
@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
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....
Perhaps but in the past we've had weeks of commentary in the run-up to leadership challenges, and I doubt anyone took new vows of silence, so I'm inclined to dismiss that. Even if they had managed to keep it secret at the time, which I doubt, news would surely have leaked by now.
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).
A minimum of 10% of properties should be vacant at any one time.
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.
If you have local knowledge and know what you are doing, there is some fun to be had with looking for big properties that someone in the UK bought, dropped a fortune in and then realised the taxes and upkeep were too much.
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.
He's also behind a big academy chain, and is involved in the Church Revitalisation Trust, which relaunches Anglican churches in a very specific way;
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:
Interesting though on the politics front that Richard Tice, Farage's Deputy and now a Reform party MP and before a wealthy businessman and CEO of CLS Holdings attended the same Iwerne muscular Christian camps Welby did led by John Smyth QC, now with abuse allegations made against Smyth.
As well as funding HTB with millions, Sir Paul Marshall also has given millions to GB News and helped fund Gove's leadership bid. He was also once an Orange Book LD before defecting to the Tories due to backing Brexit
@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.
You think North Yorkshire should be required to produce 31 times more dwellings than Birmingham ?!
It's a view.
Where are you getting 31x from?
I averaged at saying they should be required to produce the same. I averaged at a minimum of 3500 per annum per LA to close the housing shortage, that's the same for Vale as it is for Birmingham.
Even though Vale has much, much, much more space to be building new homes and new towns than Birmingham, so its considerably easier for Vale to do so.
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?
Of course it isn't.
You can't generally build new towns where existing towns already exist.
You can't generally build new houses where existing houses already exist.
Uninhabited land is the best land to develop.
There is plenty of undeveloped land available for homes there.
You clearly have plenty of space to develop at least 3500 per annum which is the minimum I would suggest per LA.
Well, building out in Scotland to take London's overflow is obviously the best way forwards, then. Scotland has nearly as much land area as England.
Head. Desk.
I'm afraid we're not going to pursue policy based on numbers that appear to have simply been plucked from your arse. Notwithstanding that we don't have the ability to build on safeguarded land, that we have limits on what we can build in AONBs (and we don't have the power to change that), that we need the infrastructure to support those houses (your previous airy assertions that this isn't a problem don't actually cut any ice in the real world), and no developer in the country would willingly build that sort of rate.
Remember that 4000+ development I mentioned earlier? One thing I tried to get put on them (and failed, because there's no power to impose it, unfortunately) is for the developers to speed up their proposed rate of building them. They want to spread them over 25 years.
They refused because their market projections on prices meant it would be much less profitable for them. They aren't going to willingly build enough to bring down prices. Thus my proposed solutions earlier (which you appear to have completely ignored in favour of ranting about the lower numbers in the past (which we've trebled, in our "dismal failure") and suggesting a number with zero actual evidence provided behind it.
..an average expected error of 4.9%, and was in the field between August 5, 2024 and August 22, 2024 with a median field date of August 14. .. (Pennsylvania poll)
So, essentially worthless, post convention.
And how do you accurately poll Kennedy voters ? Any of them who actually engage with pollsters are pretty unlikely to be at all representative of the category. And a poll of Kennedy voters in the states that matter would be even more difficult. (for that poll, This survey was conducted August 18-22, 2024 using an online sample of 1,867 likely voters. The survey's margin of error is +/- 2.3%, ensuring a reliable snapshot of public opinion at the time of the study, so the sample of Kennedy voters would be around 95 people - for the whole country.)
The Outward poll was taken from Sunday to yesterday so mostly during the DNC convention
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 ?!
It's a view.
Where are you getting 31x from?
I averaged at saying they should be required to produce the same. I averaged at a minimum of 3500 per annum per LA to close the housing shortage, that's the same for Vale as it is for Birmingham.
Even though Vale has much, much, much more space to be building new homes and new towns than Birmingham, so its considerably easier for Vale to do so.
North Yorkshire has much more land available. On your logic that it should be done on land area, of which they have 31 times as much as Birmingham, they should produce 31 times as many dwellings as Birmingham.
Just doing it on "per LA" means that you have a huge variation on land area, existing housing stock, and population size. Meaning that it would be trivially easy for North Yorkshire, and incredibly difficult for the Scilly Isles (which would be building 1.5 houses every year per existing person (man, woman, and child) living there at the moment)
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?
Of course it isn't.
You can't generally build new towns where existing towns already exist.
You can't generally build new houses where existing houses already exist.
Uninhabited land is the best land to develop.
There is plenty of undeveloped land available for homes there.
You clearly have plenty of space to develop at least 3500 per annum which is the minimum I would suggest per LA.
Well, building out in Scotland to take London's overflow is obviously the best way forwards, then. Scotland has nearly as much land area as England.
Head. Desk.
I'm afraid we're not going to pursue policy based on numbers that appear to have simply been plucked from your arse. Notwithstanding that we don't have the ability to build on safeguarded land, that we have limits on what we can build in AONBs (and we don't have the power to change that), that we need the infrastructure to support those houses (your previous airy assertions that this isn't a problem don't actually cut any ice in the real world), and no developer in the country would willingly build that sort of rate.
Remember that 4000+ development I mentioned earlier? One thing I tried to get put on them (and failed, because there's no power to impose it, unfortunately) is for the developers to speed up their proposed rate of building them. They want to spread them over 25 years.
They refused because their market projections on prices meant it would be much less profitable for them. They aren't going to willingly build enough to bring down prices. Thus my proposed solutions earlier (which you appear to have completely ignored in favour of ranting about the lower numbers in the past (which we've trebled, in our "dismal failure") and suggesting a number with zero actual evidence provided behind it.
Scotland is a different country, Vale is not.
The oligopoly of housing developers can slow down construction precisely because they get permission and nobody else does. Why give a whole development to only one developer (or a couple) and expect them to do anything other than suit their own best interests?
If they have permission and nobody else does then refusing to build harms everyone else by inflating their assets.
In Japan where anyone can build a house without asking for permission first most new developments don't come hundreds or thousands at a time, they come one at a time. Somebody needs a house? They get a house. It works - and if any developer chooses not to do the development, then any other developer can instead, no questions asked, so any developer who refuses is just harming themselves not everyone else.
Tugendhat considering scrapping 2050 goal according to Telegraph. I know they are a long way behind in the polls but surely a new leader should hope to get in power by then?
"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.
Either way you slice it, its insufficient.
You think North Yorkshire should be required to produce 31 times more dwellings than Birmingham ?!
It's a view.
Where are you getting 31x from?
I averaged at saying they should be required to produce the same. I averaged at a minimum of 3500 per annum per LA to close the housing shortage, that's the same for Vale as it is for Birmingham.
Even though Vale has much, much, much more space to be building new homes and new towns than Birmingham, so its considerably easier for Vale to do so.
North Yorkshire has much more land available. On your logic that it should be done on land area, of which they have 31 times as much as Birmingham, they should produce 31 times as many dwellings as Birmingham.
Just doing it on "per LA" means that you have a huge variation on land area, existing housing stock, and population size. Meaning that it would be trivially easy for North Yorkshire, and incredibly difficult for the Scilly Isles (which would be building 1.5 houses every year per existing person (man, woman, and child) living there at the moment)
My logic was not that it should be done by area, my logic is that it can be done by area, and absolutely I have no qualms with a lot of development happening in Yorkshire. There is plenty of space for new towns in Yorkshire.
New towns are a good thing and can be built easier where towns don't exist than where they already do.
Have you any good reason why Vale can't fit one or more new towns in its 578 km^2 area?
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 ?!
It's a view.
Of course it's a view. Please don't bring that horrible PB cliche back @Pulpstar! I thought we were rid of 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.
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?
Of course it isn't.
You can't generally build new towns where existing towns already exist.
You can't generally build new houses where existing houses already exist.
Uninhabited land is the best land to develop.
There is plenty of undeveloped land available for homes there.
You clearly have plenty of space to develop at least 3500 per annum which is the minimum I would suggest per LA.
Well, building out in Scotland to take London's overflow is obviously the best way forwards, then. Scotland has nearly as much land area as England.
Head. Desk.
I'm afraid we're not going to pursue policy based on numbers that appear to have simply been plucked from your arse. Notwithstanding that we don't have the ability to build on safeguarded land, that we have limits on what we can build in AONBs (and we don't have the power to change that), that we need the infrastructure to support those houses (your previous airy assertions that this isn't a problem don't actually cut any ice in the real world), and no developer in the country would willingly build that sort of rate.
Remember that 4000+ development I mentioned earlier? One thing I tried to get put on them (and failed, because there's no power to impose it, unfortunately) is for the developers to speed up their proposed rate of building them. They want to spread them over 25 years.
They refused because their market projections on prices meant it would be much less profitable for them. They aren't going to willingly build enough to bring down prices. Thus my proposed solutions earlier (which you appear to have completely ignored in favour of ranting about the lower numbers in the past (which we've trebled, in our "dismal failure") and suggesting a number with zero actual evidence provided behind it.
The way to solve a sellers strike is to have more sellers.
I really like the idea of setting out new neighbourhoods, complete with roads, public transport, medical facilities, schools etc. Then sell the plots in blocks. Or individually.
This worked in the past - the Victorians and Edwardians managed to build suburbs at a tremendous rate using this kind of thinking.
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 ?!
It's a view.
Of course it's a view. Please don't bring that horrible PB cliche back @Pulpstar! I thought we were rid of it!!
"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.
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?
Of course it isn't.
You can't generally build new towns where existing towns already exist.
You can't generally build new houses where existing houses already exist.
Uninhabited land is the best land to develop.
There is plenty of undeveloped land available for homes there.
You clearly have plenty of space to develop at least 3500 per annum which is the minimum I would suggest per LA.
Well, building out in Scotland to take London's overflow is obviously the best way forwards, then. Scotland has nearly as much land area as England.
Head. Desk.
I'm afraid we're not going to pursue policy based on numbers that appear to have simply been plucked from your arse. Notwithstanding that we don't have the ability to build on safeguarded land, that we have limits on what we can build in AONBs (and we don't have the power to change that), that we need the infrastructure to support those houses (your previous airy assertions that this isn't a problem don't actually cut any ice in the real world), and no developer in the country would willingly build that sort of rate.
Remember that 4000+ development I mentioned earlier? One thing I tried to get put on them (and failed, because there's no power to impose it, unfortunately) is for the developers to speed up their proposed rate of building them. They want to spread them over 25 years.
They refused because their market projections on prices meant it would be much less profitable for them. They aren't going to willingly build enough to bring down prices. Thus my proposed solutions earlier (which you appear to have completely ignored in favour of ranting about the lower numbers in the past (which we've trebled, in our "dismal failure") and suggesting a number with zero actual evidence provided behind it.
The way to solve a sellers strike is to have more sellers.
I really like the idea of setting out new neighbourhoods, complete with roads, public transport, medical facilities, schools etc. Then sell the plots in blocks. Or individually.
This worked in the past - the Victorians and Edwardians managed to build suburbs at a tremendous rate using this kind of thinking.
I have no problem with that being done as well as people being able to build without that stuff already there too.
Because the problem is that otherwise its putting the cart before the horse in that people will say we don't want new neighbourhoods, so won't spend any money on the transport, facilities, schools etc, so then we won't get new construction.
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?
Of course it isn't.
You can't generally build new towns where existing towns already exist.
You can't generally build new houses where existing houses already exist.
Uninhabited land is the best land to develop.
There is plenty of undeveloped land available for homes there.
You clearly have plenty of space to develop at least 3500 per annum which is the minimum I would suggest per LA.
Well, building out in Scotland to take London's overflow is obviously the best way forwards, then. Scotland has nearly as much land area as England.
Head. Desk.
I'm afraid we're not going to pursue policy based on numbers that appear to have simply been plucked from your arse. Notwithstanding that we don't have the ability to build on safeguarded land, that we have limits on what we can build in AONBs (and we don't have the power to change that), that we need the infrastructure to support those houses (your previous airy assertions that this isn't a problem don't actually cut any ice in the real world), and no developer in the country would willingly build that sort of rate.
Remember that 4000+ development I mentioned earlier? One thing I tried to get put on them (and failed, because there's no power to impose it, unfortunately) is for the developers to speed up their proposed rate of building them. They want to spread them over 25 years.
They refused because their market projections on prices meant it would be much less profitable for them. They aren't going to willingly build enough to bring down prices. Thus my proposed solutions earlier (which you appear to have completely ignored in favour of ranting about the lower numbers in the past (which we've trebled, in our "dismal failure") and suggesting a number with zero actual evidence provided behind it.
The way to solve a sellers strike is to have more sellers.
I really like the idea of setting out new neighbourhoods, complete with roads, public transport, medical facilities, schools etc. Then sell the plots in blocks. Or individually.
This worked in the past - the Victorians and Edwardians managed to build suburbs at a tremendous rate using this kind of thinking.
The Tabard Inn is still there – it's a rather unmemorable boozer. There are many better in W4.
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?
Of course it isn't.
You can't generally build new towns where existing towns already exist.
You can't generally build new houses where existing houses already exist.
Uninhabited land is the best land to develop.
There is plenty of undeveloped land available for homes there.
You clearly have plenty of space to develop at least 3500 per annum which is the minimum I would suggest per LA.
Well, building out in Scotland to take London's overflow is obviously the best way forwards, then. Scotland has nearly as much land area as England.
Head. Desk.
I'm afraid we're not going to pursue policy based on numbers that appear to have simply been plucked from your arse. Notwithstanding that we don't have the ability to build on safeguarded land, that we have limits on what we can build in AONBs (and we don't have the power to change that), that we need the infrastructure to support those houses (your previous airy assertions that this isn't a problem don't actually cut any ice in the real world), and no developer in the country would willingly build that sort of rate.
Remember that 4000+ development I mentioned earlier? One thing I tried to get put on them (and failed, because there's no power to impose it, unfortunately) is for the developers to speed up their proposed rate of building them. They want to spread them over 25 years.
They refused because their market projections on prices meant it would be much less profitable for them. They aren't going to willingly build enough to bring down prices. Thus my proposed solutions earlier (which you appear to have completely ignored in favour of ranting about the lower numbers in the past (which we've trebled, in our "dismal failure") and suggesting a number with zero actual evidence provided behind it.
The way to solve a sellers strike is to have more sellers.
I really like the idea of setting out new neighbourhoods, complete with roads, public transport, medical facilities, schools etc. Then sell the plots in blocks. Or individually.
This worked in the past - the Victorians and Edwardians managed to build suburbs at a tremendous rate using this kind of thinking.
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 ?!
It's a view.
Where are you getting 31x from?
I averaged at saying they should be required to produce the same. I averaged at a minimum of 3500 per annum per LA to close the housing shortage, that's the same for Vale as it is for Birmingham.
Even though Vale has much, much, much more space to be building new homes and new towns than Birmingham, so its considerably easier for Vale to do so.
North Yorkshire has much more land available. On your logic that it should be done on land area, of which they have 31 times as much as Birmingham, they should produce 31 times as many dwellings as Birmingham.
Just doing it on "per LA" means that you have a huge variation on land area, existing housing stock, and population size. Meaning that it would be trivially easy for North Yorkshire, and incredibly difficult for the Scilly Isles (which would be building 1.5 houses every year per existing person (man, woman, and child) living there at the moment)
My logic was not that it should be done by area, my logic is that it can be done by area, and absolutely I have no qualms with a lot of development happening in Yorkshire. There is plenty of space for new towns in Yorkshire.
New towns are a good thing and can be built easier where towns don't exist than where they already do.
Have you any good reason why Vale can't fit one or more new towns in its 578 km^2 area?
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?
Of course it isn't.
You can't generally build new towns where existing towns already exist.
You can't generally build new houses where existing houses already exist.
Uninhabited land is the best land to develop.
There is plenty of undeveloped land available for homes there.
You clearly have plenty of space to develop at least 3500 per annum which is the minimum I would suggest per LA.
Well, building out in Scotland to take London's overflow is obviously the best way forwards, then. Scotland has nearly as much land area as England.
Head. Desk.
I'm afraid we're not going to pursue policy based on numbers that appear to have simply been plucked from your arse. Notwithstanding that we don't have the ability to build on safeguarded land, that we have limits on what we can build in AONBs (and we don't have the power to change that), that we need the infrastructure to support those houses (your previous airy assertions that this isn't a problem don't actually cut any ice in the real world), and no developer in the country would willingly build that sort of rate.
Remember that 4000+ development I mentioned earlier? One thing I tried to get put on them (and failed, because there's no power to impose it, unfortunately) is for the developers to speed up their proposed rate of building them. They want to spread them over 25 years.
They refused because their market projections on prices meant it would be much less profitable for them. They aren't going to willingly build enough to bring down prices. Thus my proposed solutions earlier (which you appear to have completely ignored in favour of ranting about the lower numbers in the past (which we've trebled, in our "dismal failure") and suggesting a number with zero actual evidence provided behind it.
The way to solve a sellers strike is to have more sellers.
I really like the idea of setting out new neighbourhoods, complete with roads, public transport, medical facilities, schools etc. Then sell the plots in blocks. Or individually.
This worked in the past - the Victorians and Edwardians managed to build suburbs at a tremendous rate using this kind of thinking.
The Tabard Inn is still there – it's a rather unmemorable boozer. There are many better in W4.
True - but it's not too bad. Seems to thrive
Their venue, upstairs, sometimes gets big name comedians doing a warm up, before heading into the West End to do their big shows on TV.
..an average expected error of 4.9%, and was in the field between August 5, 2024 and August 22, 2024 with a median field date of August 14. .. (Pennsylvania poll)
So, essentially worthless, post convention.
And how do you accurately poll Kennedy voters ? Any of them who actually engage with pollsters are pretty unlikely to be at all representative of the category. And a poll of Kennedy voters in the states that matter would be even more difficult. (for that poll, This survey was conducted August 18-22, 2024 using an online sample of 1,867 likely voters. The survey's margin of error is +/- 2.3%, ensuring a reliable snapshot of public opinion at the time of the study, so the sample of Kennedy voters would be around 95 people - for the whole country.)
The Outward poll was taken from Sunday to yesterday so mostly during the DNC convention
As I point out, national polls (which are in any event only loosely correlated with what's going on in individual states) are completely useless when it comes to telling us what Kennedy voters might do.
A national poll of maybe 95 voters is of no statistical use in predicting how a Kennedy voter (who might not vote anyway) is going to behave in a swing state.
"577 academics have now signed an open letter to Bridget Phillipson calling on the education secretary to restore the Tories’ Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023. The act strengthened impositions on universities to support free speech on their premises and would introduce a complaints scheme to resolve issues. Naturally Labour said this would “enable hate speech” and immediately scrapped it…
Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, Kathleen Stock and others have signed. The letter spells out that the act won’t be “burdensome” as Labour claims because government analysis has compliance cost at a tiny £4.7 million and that the complaints scheme would keep cases out of court. Seeing as the UK ranks so terribly on the Academic Freedom Index more protections might be a good idea…
Labour’s response is indignant: “We make no apology for pausing the Tories’ hate speech charter, which would have allowed antisemites and holocaust deniers free rein on campuses.” As far as competition goes UCL is leading on signers with 38, followed by Oxford on 36 and Cambridge on 21."
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 ?!
It's a view.
Where are you getting 31x from?
I averaged at saying they should be required to produce the same. I averaged at a minimum of 3500 per annum per LA to close the housing shortage, that's the same for Vale as it is for Birmingham.
Even though Vale has much, much, much more space to be building new homes and new towns than Birmingham, so its considerably easier for Vale to do so.
North Yorkshire has much more land available. On your logic that it should be done on land area, of which they have 31 times as much as Birmingham, they should produce 31 times as many dwellings as Birmingham.
Just doing it on "per LA" means that you have a huge variation on land area, existing housing stock, and population size. Meaning that it would be trivially easy for North Yorkshire, and incredibly difficult for the Scilly Isles (which would be building 1.5 houses every year per existing person (man, woman, and child) living there at the moment)
My logic was not that it should be done by area, my logic is that it can be done by area, and absolutely I have no qualms with a lot of development happening in Yorkshire. There is plenty of space for new towns in Yorkshire.
New towns are a good thing and can be built easier where towns don't exist than where they already do.
Have you any good reason why Vale can't fit one or more new towns in its 578 km^2 area?
Three:
Infrastructure. AONB. Safeguarded land.
Infrastructure can be built. Indeed if you're going to build a new town, its pretty much going to be coming with new infrastructure, that's rather the point!
How much area is undeveloped in land that is neither AONB nor safeguarded?
@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?
Of course it isn't.
You can't generally build new towns where existing towns already exist.
You can't generally build new houses where existing houses already exist.
Uninhabited land is the best land to develop.
There is plenty of undeveloped land available for homes there.
You clearly have plenty of space to develop at least 3500 per annum which is the minimum I would suggest per LA.
Well, building out in Scotland to take London's overflow is obviously the best way forwards, then. Scotland has nearly as much land area as England.
Head. Desk.
I'm afraid we're not going to pursue policy based on numbers that appear to have simply been plucked from your arse. Notwithstanding that we don't have the ability to build on safeguarded land, that we have limits on what we can build in AONBs (and we don't have the power to change that), that we need the infrastructure to support those houses (your previous airy assertions that this isn't a problem don't actually cut any ice in the real world), and no developer in the country would willingly build that sort of rate.
Remember that 4000+ development I mentioned earlier? One thing I tried to get put on them (and failed, because there's no power to impose it, unfortunately) is for the developers to speed up their proposed rate of building them. They want to spread them over 25 years.
They refused because their market projections on prices meant it would be much less profitable for them. They aren't going to willingly build enough to bring down prices. Thus my proposed solutions earlier (which you appear to have completely ignored in favour of ranting about the lower numbers in the past (which we've trebled, in our "dismal failure") and suggesting a number with zero actual evidence provided behind it.
The way to solve a sellers strike is to have more sellers.
I really like the idea of setting out new neighbourhoods, complete with roads, public transport, medical facilities, schools etc. Then sell the plots in blocks. Or individually.
This worked in the past - the Victorians and Edwardians managed to build suburbs at a tremendous rate using this kind of thinking.
I have no problem with that being done as well as people being able to build without that stuff already there too.
Because the problem is that otherwise its putting the cart before the horse in that people will say we don't want new neighbourhoods, so won't spend any money on the transport, facilities, schools etc, so then we won't get new construction.
I think you'd find that many developers would prefer that to the various payments for infrastructure. Especially the smaller developers.
You include the value of the infrastructure in the cost of the plot.
Buy a plot - get the gas, leecy, roads, trains, schools, GP surgeries etc already there.
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?
Of course it isn't.
You can't generally build new towns where existing towns already exist.
You can't generally build new houses where existing houses already exist.
Uninhabited land is the best land to develop.
There is plenty of undeveloped land available for homes there.
You clearly have plenty of space to develop at least 3500 per annum which is the minimum I would suggest per LA.
Well, building out in Scotland to take London's overflow is obviously the best way forwards, then. Scotland has nearly as much land area as England.
Head. Desk.
I'm afraid we're not going to pursue policy based on numbers that appear to have simply been plucked from your arse. Notwithstanding that we don't have the ability to build on safeguarded land, that we have limits on what we can build in AONBs (and we don't have the power to change that), that we need the infrastructure to support those houses (your previous airy assertions that this isn't a problem don't actually cut any ice in the real world), and no developer in the country would willingly build that sort of rate.
Remember that 4000+ development I mentioned earlier? One thing I tried to get put on them (and failed, because there's no power to impose it, unfortunately) is for the developers to speed up their proposed rate of building them. They want to spread them over 25 years.
They refused because their market projections on prices meant it would be much less profitable for them. They aren't going to willingly build enough to bring down prices. Thus my proposed solutions earlier (which you appear to have completely ignored in favour of ranting about the lower numbers in the past (which we've trebled, in our "dismal failure") and suggesting a number with zero actual evidence provided behind it.
The way to solve a sellers strike is to have more sellers.
I really like the idea of setting out new neighbourhoods, complete with roads, public transport, medical facilities, schools etc. Then sell the plots in blocks. Or individually.
This worked in the past - the Victorians and Edwardians managed to build suburbs at a tremendous rate using this kind of thinking.
I have no problem with that being done as well as people being able to build without that stuff already there too.
Because the problem is that otherwise its putting the cart before the horse in that people will say we don't want new neighbourhoods, so won't spend any money on the transport, facilities, schools etc, so then we won't get new construction.
I think you'd find that many developers would prefer that to the various payments for infrastructure. Especially the smaller developers.
You include the value of the infrastructure in the cost of the plot.
Buy a plot - get the gas, leecy, roads, trains, schools, GP surgeries etc already there.
Absolutely. And no problem with that being one option.
The problem is that our NIMBY culture and politicians mean we can't trust the politicians to let that be the only option. As they'll just build nothing like enough.
Do your solution as part of the solution - great! But only part of it..
Take the brakes off housing and let other developers build wherever and whenever they want, and the housing shortage will be eliminated.
Then just put infrastructure where it's needed to fill in the gaps. But if you're doing enough of your solution there won't be many gaps.
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 ?!
It's a view.
Where are you getting 31x from?
I averaged at saying they should be required to produce the same. I averaged at a minimum of 3500 per annum per LA to close the housing shortage, that's the same for Vale as it is for Birmingham.
Even though Vale has much, much, much more space to be building new homes and new towns than Birmingham, so its considerably easier for Vale to do so.
North Yorkshire has much more land available. On your logic that it should be done on land area, of which they have 31 times as much as Birmingham, they should produce 31 times as many dwellings as Birmingham.
Just doing it on "per LA" means that you have a huge variation on land area, existing housing stock, and population size. Meaning that it would be trivially easy for North Yorkshire, and incredibly difficult for the Scilly Isles (which would be building 1.5 houses every year per existing person (man, woman, and child) living there at the moment)
My logic was not that it should be done by area, my logic is that it can be done by area, and absolutely I have no qualms with a lot of development happening in Yorkshire. There is plenty of space for new towns in Yorkshire.
New towns are a good thing and can be built easier where towns don't exist than where they already do.
Have you any good reason why Vale can't fit one or more new towns in its 578 km^2 area?
Three:
Infrastructure. AONB. Safeguarded land.
Infrastructure can be built. Indeed if you're going to build a new town, its pretty much going to be coming with new infrastructure, that's rather the point!
How much area is undeveloped in land that is neither AONB nor safeguarded?
I've set it to AONB, Green Belt, Flood zone, Ancient Woodland, SSI as these tend to squeeze out development.
Safeguarded land isn't readily available, but off the top of my head, about two thirds of my ward by area is safeguarded by Thames Water for their megareservoir proposal, and there's safeguarded land south of Abingdon for a proposed bypass that never seems to be coming.
"577 academics have now signed an open letter to Bridget Phillipson calling on the education secretary to restore the Tories’ Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023. The act strengthened impositions on universities to support free speech on their premises and would introduce a complaints scheme to resolve issues. Naturally Labour said this would “enable hate speech” and immediately scrapped it…
Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, Kathleen Stock and others have signed. The letter spells out that the act won’t be “burdensome” as Labour claims because government analysis has compliance cost at a tiny £4.7 million and that the complaints scheme would keep cases out of court. Seeing as the UK ranks so terribly on the Academic Freedom Index more protections might be a good idea…
Labour’s response is indignant: “We make no apology for pausing the Tories’ hate speech charter, which would have allowed antisemites and holocaust deniers free rein on campuses.” As far as competition goes UCL is leading on signers with 38, followed by Oxford on 36 and Cambridge on 21."
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.
He's also behind a big academy chain, and is involved in the Church Revitalisation Trust, which relaunches Anglican churches in a very specific way;
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:
Interesting though on the politics front that Richard Tice, Farage's Deputy and now a Reform party MP and before a wealthy businessman and CEO of CLS Holdings attended the same Iwerne muscular Christian camps Welby did led by John Smyth QC, now with abuse allegations made against Smyth.
As well as funding HTB with millions, Sir Paul Marshall also has given millions to GB News and helped fund Gove's leadership bid. He was also once an Orange Book LD before defecting to the Tories due to backing Brexit
One of the things that I find interesting is how many try to use Archbishop Welby as a blank slate / straw man to use in their politics as a fake-up icon of things they oppose.
On one end Andrew Graystone who wrote that piece is trying to in a way paint him as a Muscular Evangelical something something taking over the Church of England for the HTB tendency - HTB being defined as the heart of CofE evangelicalism (it isn't, and CofE evangelicalism is far more complex).
If you look at the National Conservative types (Truss, Braverman, Rees-Mogg possibly shading into Tice, Bridgen, Carl Benjamin type rhetoric) they attempt to portray Welby as representing liberal toleration of gay marriage and 'transgenderism' being imported wholesale into the CofE. Those are themes also being deployed by the near-edge of the far tight, shading into Tommy Robinson's "Patriotic Christian" allies / useful idiots.
Both of those positions are caricatures of where Welby stands, one trying to link him to a harder edged conservative evangelical tradition that is more accurately defined by Reform (evangelical movement not political party) movement linked to Rev David Holloway / Evangelical Times or even James Anderton (the Manchester anti-gay policeman) type emphases, the other trying to make him a liberal icon.
Reality is much more subtle, as I am sure we agree.
One of my concerns is UK Natcons adopting more simplistic / dogmatic ideas from some US Evangelical traditions. Neither UK conservatives or the UK itself will swallow that except at the margins. There imo lies a wrecked future if the Conservative Party goes in that direction.
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.
I haven't witnessed any breathless ramping, but it's probably wishful thinking to say it will make no difference either way.
It's probably worth 1 or 2% to Trump with an endorsement. But I still think RFK might not do it because Trump won't give him the guarantees he wants. Plus his wife is supposedly dead against it, and does he really want to trash his reputation among those who still admire him for his supposed environmentalism?
"577 academics have now signed an open letter to Bridget Phillipson calling on the education secretary to restore the Tories’ Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023. The act strengthened impositions on universities to support free speech on their premises and would introduce a complaints scheme to resolve issues. Naturally Labour said this would “enable hate speech” and immediately scrapped it…
Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, Kathleen Stock and others have signed. The letter spells out that the act won’t be “burdensome” as Labour claims because government analysis has compliance cost at a tiny £4.7 million and that the complaints scheme would keep cases out of court. Seeing as the UK ranks so terribly on the Academic Freedom Index more protections might be a good idea…
Labour’s response is indignant: “We make no apology for pausing the Tories’ hate speech charter, which would have allowed antisemites and holocaust deniers free rein on campuses.” As far as competition goes UCL is leading on signers with 38, followed by Oxford on 36 and Cambridge on 21."
One to watch, imo - a potentially unsubtle or subtle canary in the coalmine, which will be a revealing multidimensional curve ball for this Labour Government to play.
Lord Mandelbrot would have triangulated and finessed.
"577 academics have now signed an open letter to Bridget Phillipson calling on the education secretary to restore the Tories’ Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act 2023. The act strengthened impositions on universities to support free speech on their premises and would introduce a complaints scheme to resolve issues. Naturally Labour said this would “enable hate speech” and immediately scrapped it…
Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, Kathleen Stock and others have signed. The letter spells out that the act won’t be “burdensome” as Labour claims because government analysis has compliance cost at a tiny £4.7 million and that the complaints scheme would keep cases out of court. Seeing as the UK ranks so terribly on the Academic Freedom Index more protections might be a good idea…
Labour’s response is indignant: “We make no apology for pausing the Tories’ hate speech charter, which would have allowed antisemites and holocaust deniers free rein on campuses.” As far as competition goes UCL is leading on signers with 38, followed by Oxford on 36 and Cambridge on 21."
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.
I think this would enable you to have a more efficient market for housebuilding, as, if the local authority provides the land, with services, then to a large extent toy streamline the process for a builder. They can bid on buying so many plots and their planning should be a lot simpler, and they can get straight onto building.
Private individuals could buy a single plot and engage their own architect and builders if they wished.
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).
A minimum of 10% of properties should be vacant at any one time.
Comments
The utility companies are making an astonishing amount of money today.
You can't generally build new towns where existing towns already exist.
You can't generally build new houses where existing houses already exist.
Uninhabited land is the best land to develop.
There is plenty of undeveloped land available for homes there.
You clearly have plenty of space to develop at least 3500 per annum which is the minimum I would suggest per LA.
So, essentially worthless, post convention.
And how do you accurately poll Kennedy voters ? Any of them who actually engage with pollsters are pretty unlikely to be at all representative of the category.
And a poll of Kennedy voters in the states that matter would be even more difficult.
(for that poll, This survey was conducted August 18-22, 2024 using an online sample of 1,867 likely voters. The survey's margin of error is +/- 2.3%, ensuring a reliable snapshot of public opinion at the time of the study, so the sample of Kennedy voters would be around 95 people - for the whole country.)
As well as funding HTB with millions, Sir Paul Marshall also has given millions to GB News and helped fund Gove's leadership bid.
He was also once an Orange Book LD before defecting to the Tories due to backing Brexit
https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/ideas/media/65415/the-marshall-plan-paul-marshall-gb-news
I averaged at saying they should be required to produce the same. I averaged at a minimum of 3500 per annum per LA to close the housing shortage, that's the same for Vale as it is for Birmingham.
Even though Vale has much, much, much more space to be building new homes and new towns than Birmingham, so its considerably easier for Vale to do so.
Head. Desk.
I'm afraid we're not going to pursue policy based on numbers that appear to have simply been plucked from your arse. Notwithstanding that we don't have the ability to build on safeguarded land, that we have limits on what we can build in AONBs (and we don't have the power to change that), that we need the infrastructure to support those houses (your previous airy assertions that this isn't a problem don't actually cut any ice in the real world), and no developer in the country would willingly build that sort of rate.
Remember that 4000+ development I mentioned earlier? One thing I tried to get put on them (and failed, because there's no power to impose it, unfortunately) is for the developers to speed up their proposed rate of building them. They want to spread them over 25 years.
They refused because their market projections on prices meant it would be much less profitable for them. They aren't going to willingly build enough to bring down prices. Thus my proposed solutions earlier (which you appear to have completely ignored in favour of ranting about the lower numbers in the past (which we've trebled, in our "dismal failure") and suggesting a number with zero actual evidence provided behind it.
https://www.formula1.com/en/latest/article/breaking-jack-doohan-promoted-to-f1-for-2025-as-alpine-confirm-he-will-partner.5evE7WYf8EMU8XdSeVi2lp
Just doing it on "per LA" means that you have a huge variation on land area, existing housing stock, and population size. Meaning that it would be trivially easy for North Yorkshire, and incredibly difficult for the Scilly Isles (which would be building 1.5 houses every year per existing person (man, woman, and child) living there at the moment)
The oligopoly of housing developers can slow down construction precisely because they get permission and nobody else does. Why give a whole development to only one developer (or a couple) and expect them to do anything other than suit their own best interests?
If they have permission and nobody else does then refusing to build harms everyone else by inflating their assets.
In Japan where anyone can build a house without asking for permission first most new developments don't come hundreds or thousands at a time, they come one at a time. Somebody needs a house? They get a house. It works - and if any developer chooses not to do the development, then any other developer can instead, no questions asked, so any developer who refuses is just harming themselves not everyone else.
@jeremycorbyn
·
20h
Austerity has decimated our communities & pushed millions of people into poverty.
It would be a catastrophic mistake to repeat this failed economic experiment.
The top 1% in the UK own more than 70% of the population combined. Stop cutting our services and tax the rich instead.
New towns are a good thing and can be built easier where towns don't exist than where they already do.
Have you any good reason why Vale can't fit one or more new towns in its 578 km^2 area?
I really like the idea of setting out new neighbourhoods, complete with roads, public transport, medical facilities, schools etc. Then sell the plots in blocks. Or individually.
This worked in the past - the Victorians and Edwardians managed to build suburbs at a tremendous rate using this kind of thinking.
Octopus has a good article on it here:
https://octopus.energy/blog/Energy-industry-addiction-to-short-termism-will-hike-bills-and-reduce-support-for-renewables/
Because the problem is that otherwise its putting the cart before the horse in that people will say we don't want new neighbourhoods, so won't spend any money on the transport, facilities, schools etc, so then we won't get new construction.
Infrastructure.
AONB.
Safeguarded land.
Their venue, upstairs, sometimes gets big name comedians doing a warm up, before heading into the West End to do their big shows on TV.
A national poll of maybe 95 voters is of no statistical use in predicting how a Kennedy voter (who might not vote anyway) is going to behave in a swing state.
Richard Dawkins, Niall Ferguson, Kathleen Stock and others have signed. The letter spells out that the act won’t be “burdensome” as Labour claims because government analysis has compliance cost at a tiny £4.7 million and that the complaints scheme would keep cases out of court. Seeing as the UK ranks so terribly on the Academic Freedom Index more protections might be a good idea…
Labour’s response is indignant: “We make no apology for pausing the Tories’ hate speech charter, which would have allowed antisemites and holocaust deniers free rein on campuses.” As far as competition goes UCL is leading on signers with 38, followed by Oxford on 36 and Cambridge on 21."
https://order-order.com/2024/08/23/hundreds-of-academics-accuse-labour-of-free-speech-betrayal/
How much area is undeveloped in land that is neither AONB nor safeguarded?
But it’s not illegal.
https://x.com/LeftieStats/status/1826939427068756025/photo/1
You include the value of the infrastructure in the cost of the plot.
Buy a plot - get the gas, leecy, roads, trains, schools, GP surgeries etc already there.
The problem is that our NIMBY culture and politicians mean we can't trust the politicians to let that be the only option. As they'll just build nothing like enough.
Do your solution as part of the solution - great! But only part of it..
Take the brakes off housing and let other developers build wherever and whenever they want, and the housing shortage will be eliminated.
Then just put infrastructure where it's needed to fill in the gaps. But if you're doing enough of your solution there won't be many gaps.
Wherever has the most green land can support more new homes.
The idea of scaling by population is insane, so you want to pile new homes on top of existing ones do you?
I've set it to AONB, Green Belt, Flood zone, Ancient Woodland, SSI as these tend to squeeze out development.
Safeguarded land isn't readily available, but off the top of my head, about two thirds of my ward by area is safeguarded by Thames Water for their megareservoir proposal, and there's safeguarded land south of Abingdon for a proposed bypass that never seems to be coming.
The Local Plan (which contains those safeguardings) is here: https://www.whitehorsedc.gov.uk/vale-of-white-horse-district-council/planning-and-development/local-plan-and-planning-policies/local-plan-2031/
Have fun.
NEW THREAD
One of the things that I find interesting is how many try to use Archbishop Welby as a blank slate / straw man to use in their politics as a fake-up icon of things they oppose.
On one end Andrew Graystone who wrote that piece is trying to in a way paint him as a Muscular Evangelical something something taking over the Church of England for the HTB tendency - HTB being defined as the heart of CofE evangelicalism (it isn't, and CofE evangelicalism is far more complex).
If you look at the National Conservative types (Truss, Braverman, Rees-Mogg possibly shading into Tice, Bridgen, Carl Benjamin type rhetoric) they attempt to portray Welby as representing liberal toleration of gay marriage and 'transgenderism' being imported wholesale into the CofE. Those are themes also being deployed by the near-edge of the far tight, shading into Tommy Robinson's "Patriotic Christian" allies / useful idiots.
Both of those positions are caricatures of where Welby stands, one trying to link him to a harder edged conservative evangelical tradition that is more accurately defined by Reform (evangelical movement not political party) movement linked to Rev David Holloway / Evangelical Times or even James Anderton (the Manchester anti-gay policeman) type emphases, the other trying to make him a liberal icon.
Reality is much more subtle, as I am sure we agree.
One of my concerns is UK Natcons adopting more simplistic / dogmatic ideas from some US Evangelical traditions. Neither UK conservatives or the UK itself will swallow that except at the margins. There imo lies a wrecked future if the Conservative Party goes in that direction.
It's probably worth 1 or 2% to Trump with an endorsement. But I still think RFK might not do it because Trump won't give him the guarantees he wants. Plus his wife is supposedly dead against it, and does he really want to trash his reputation among those who still admire him for his supposed environmentalism?
Lord Mandelbrot would have triangulated and finessed.
What will SKS do?
Private individuals could buy a single plot and engage their own architect and builders if they wished.