I'm quite a traditionalist when it comes to county geography. But I can completely see the reason for this: Rutland is far too tiny a population for the services a county is expected to provide.
What I think is needed is one of two things - either: - a way of disassociating county identity from administrative geography - this really shouldn't be that hard to do: a few signs in the right places, institutional continuity, etc - so I could say 'I live in Cheshire' while having my bins collected by Trafford Council. This isn't the snobbery it's often perceived as; it's just a desire for continuity and local identity. I want to be able to aske a question like 'how many league football clubs have ever played home games in Cheshire' without a long footnote explaining what I mean by 'Cheshire'. I want to be able to answer 'where is Kirkby Lonsdale' with the same answer I would have given 20 or 50 or 100 years ago. Or: - a complete year zero where we abandon the old and have completely new administrative units for the half-a-million-to-three-million population units of territory. I could draw you up dozens of these right now. But we'd then have to agree to stick with them completely a la American states for the next 500 years at least and stop fucking tinkering.
Point 2: a complete year zero where we abandon the old and have completely new administrative units We did that in 1973/4, introducing concepts like Avon and Humberside. It was not popular and was reverted in 1997.
Becoming unpopular is what has always happened to Prime Ministers.
Becoming very unpopular very quickly is what tends to happen to Prime Ministers these days. Partly because it's a difficult country to run, partly because the modern media environment means that your opponents become your sworn enemies.
I'm reminded of that long-run American polling on how well voters think the economy is doing, and how the partisan split flips on a dime whenever there's a change of presidency. It's too rapid to be policy, so it must be vibes. Fortunately for us, this isn't the USA, but some of those vibe issues have made it across the Atlantic.
Starmer (not really a politician) was broken by that. Burnham is a politician, and has craved this job forever. Surely that will make him more resilient against the headwinds, but it won't make them go away.
Good luck, sir. You are going to need it.
Agree. While all political lives end in failure, the very top ability make their own luck, at least for a reasonable length of time. The current media climate and national mood make that hard of course, but not, IMO, quite impossible.
The last PM with both the relevant qualities and the good luck being PM at a time when it was possible to do it for long was Cameron, who blew it away by the fatal flaw of being unprepared for 50% of the possible outcomes of his key policy.
Since then we have had:
May - not PM material Boris - morally not the right material Truss - no good Rishi - circumstances rendered the job impossible because his party was busted Starmer - golden opportunity but his personality made it impossible. + a series of elementary errors.
I think Burnham has the best combination of personal qualities and situation since Cameron. Reform are on the run and exposed as morally flawed and tawdry; Tory recovery is way off. No-one but Labour is ready to govern.
Tentative prediction: Burnham to survive, see off Reform, lead the government (majority or deal with LDs) after the next election in 28/29 and to be good for about 5 or 6 years.
I don't think Theresa May would have ever made a brilliant PM - but I think she could have made an ok one. She actually looked reasonably good for the few months in which she had a majority. Trying to get Brexit through, without a majority, and with a signiifcant minority of her own parliamentary party opposed to it, would have taxed even the greatest statesman. And yes, her lack of majority is partly her own fault. She was a terrible campaigner. But if she lost the election on the dementia tax she was at least trying to do the right thing having spotted the opportunity of an apparently unloseable election. She deserves some credit at least here.
Becoming unpopular is what has always happened to Prime Ministers.
Becoming very unpopular very quickly is what tends to happen to Prime Ministers these days. Partly because it's a difficult country to run, partly because the modern media environment means that your opponents become your sworn enemies.
I'm reminded of that long-run American polling on how well voters think the economy is doing, and how the partisan split flips on a dime whenever there's a change of presidency. It's too rapid to be policy, so it must be vibes. Fortunately for us, this isn't the USA, but some of those vibe issues have made it across the Atlantic.
Starmer (not really a politician) was broken by that. Burnham is a politician, and has craved this job forever. Surely that will make him more resilient against the headwinds, but it won't make them go away.
Good luck, sir. You are going to need it.
Agree. While all political lives end in failure, the very top ability make their own luck, at least for a reasonable length of time. The current media climate and national mood make that hard of course, but not, IMO, quite impossible.
The last PM with both the relevant qualities and the good luck being PM at a time when it was possible to do it for long was Cameron, who blew it away by the fatal flaw of being unprepared for 50% of the possible outcomes of his key policy.
Since then we have had:
May - not PM material Boris - morally not the right material Truss - no good Rishi - circumstances rendered the job impossible because his party was busted Starmer - golden opportunity but his personality made it impossible. + a series of elementary errors.
I think Burnham has the best combination of personal qualities and situation since Cameron. Reform are on the run and exposed as morally flawed and tawdry; Tory recovery is way off. No-one but Labour is ready to govern.
Tentative prediction: Burnham to survive, see off Reform, lead the government (majority or deal with LDs) after the next election in 28/29 and to be good for about 5 or 6 years.
I don't think Theresa May would have ever made a brilliant PM - but I think she could have made an ok one. She actually looked reasonably good for the few months in which she had a majority. Trying to get Brexit through, without a majority, and with a signiifcant minority of her own parliamentary party opposed to it, would have taxed even the greatest statesman. And yes, her lack of majority is partly her own fault. She was a terrible campaigner. But if she lost the election on the dementia tax she was at least trying to do the right thing having spotted the opportunity of an apparently unloseable election. She deserves some credit at least here.
I think she was like SKS. Devoid of people and political skills.
Her approach was to sit saying nothing in silence for months, and then act as a dictator when she'd decided.
May like Starmer was more suited to being a senior civil servant, both lacked the charisma and people skills to be top rank politicians and election campaigners
But Starmer was less popular than Corbyn - well the Labour Party got fewer votes. it was just that our electoral system catapulted them into such a big majority.
Yes, as he alienated swing voters less
Labour got fewer votes, but got them in the right place, and the Conservative vote was split by Reform.
'US President Donald Trump has delivered a primetime address in which he accused China of interfering in the 2020 election and alleged "shocking vulnerabilities" in American voting systems.
Trump, who spoke from the White House on Thursday, has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and foreign meddling in the 2020 election which he lost to Joe Biden.
In the half-hour speech, delivered three months before the midterm elections, he said he had declassified hundreds of intelligence files which supported his claims that Beijing had tried to sway the election in Biden's favour.
The US intelligence community has previously concluded China did not interfere in the 2020 election.'
Despite the endless lies, the Iran debacle, the insulting of former allies, the threats to Greenland and Canada, sucking up to Putin, the tariffs fiasco and the industrial scale corruption and grifting ........ 40% of Americans approve of the job he is doing!
That tells you everything you need to know about the state America is in and why we can never ever trust the USA again.
By all means cooperate with a sane successor but insulate ourselves from the US as best we can because as sure as night follows day the US will elect another lunatic within the next decade. Trump is just a symptom of what the USA has become.
Mind you with the Le Pen, Farage, Hanson, the AfD etc all leading some polls in their nations the idea the US alone is prone to significant support to hardline nationalism and anti immigration rhetoric is for the birds
Agreed, but none of them have actually won an election yet and, with the exception of Farage, none would be as spectacularly corrupt and mendacious as Trump. Meloni was also in that camp but has not turned out to be anything like as "bad" as predicted.
Just to note that at this minute we are in an unusual situation where Labour leadership is not leaking, and it is clear that no-one outside a closed circle knows anything worth knowing. It will be interesting to see if this can last as it is not a natural state of affairs in modern politics. The top guns in the 24 hour news cycle are, I think, hating every minute of it.
A very good start. Maybe we can get back to announcements only made in Parliament. The Speaker will approve.
I'm quite a traditionalist when it comes to county geography. But I can completely see the reason for this: Rutland is far too tiny a population for the services a county is expected to provide.
What I think is needed is one of two things - either: - a way of disassociating county identity from administrative geography - this really shouldn't be that hard to do: a few signs in the right places, institutional continuity, etc - so I could say 'I live in Cheshire' while having my bins collected by Trafford Council. This isn't the snobbery it's often perceived as; it's just a desire for continuity and local identity. I want to be able to aske a question like 'how many league football clubs have ever played home games in Cheshire' without a long footnote explaining what I mean by 'Cheshire'. I want to be able to answer 'where is Kirkby Lonsdale' with the same answer I would have given 20 or 50 or 100 years ago. Or: - a complete year zero where we abandon the old and have completely new administrative units for the half-a-million-to-three-million population units of territory. I could draw you up dozens of these right now. But we'd then have to agree to stick with them completely a la American states for the next 500 years at least and stop fucking tinkering.
Won't happen. Too many people are too attached to the counties. Along with the parishes they have existed pretty much since Saxon times and people like the tradition - the sense of belonging. As soon as someone with a better sense of heritage gets back into power they wil be back in place.
Clackmannanshire waves hello. I think one-tier is fine but there should be some recognition of history and geography. US state boundaries are just silly.
What is strange about the US system is that counties can move state. If you don't like the policies of the state you are in then you can apply to move to an adjacent state. It is not easy because it needs the approval of both State legislatures as well as Congress but it is possible. 12 counties in Oregon are currently applying to join Idaho.
Another mistake that probably doomed Keir's premiership was the extraordinarily thin manifesto Labour ran on. It kept the Labour Party together and didn't frighten the horses before the last election, but it meant that the electorate had no clear idea what it was voting for, other than getting the Conservatives out, that Labour couldn't claim a mandate for whatever it did in office; and that Labour's turbulent backbenchers could all claim that whatever they wanted was "real Labour" and that everyone else was just a traitor.
Blair did the same in 1997, and got away with it, but was blessed with a fawning media that would make the North Koreans blush, a dream economic legacy from the Conservatives, and once-in-a-generation political skills.
Starmer had none of those. And, once people realised what he was going to do, his support collapsed pretty quickly.
So now we move on to Burnham, who’s even more of a blank sheet of paper than Starmer was.
He’s done no campaigning, no serious interviews, we have no real idea what he believes in or what his plans are for the country.
He also didn’t stand under that thin 2024 manifesto, so will he feel bound by it, or will he go to the country next year to receive a mandate for more significant policy change, so that he doesn’t feel bound by left-wing backbenchers blocking everything with which they disagree?
Surely the shift to Burnham is one for even more tax and spend and more appeasing of leftwing backbenchers
If it is then this government won't see September through
Not necessarily, while the right is split between the Tories and Reform Burnham could easily get a small poll lead just mainly from squeezing the Greens
I'm quite a traditionalist when it comes to county geography. But I can completely see the reason for this: Rutland is far too tiny a population for the services a county is expected to provide.
What I think is needed is one of two things - either: - a way of disassociating county identity from administrative geography - this really shouldn't be that hard to do: a few signs in the right places, institutional continuity, etc - so I could say 'I live in Cheshire' while having my bins collected by Trafford Council. This isn't the snobbery it's often perceived as; it's just a desire for continuity and local identity. I want to be able to aske a question like 'how many league football clubs have ever played home games in Cheshire' without a long footnote explaining what I mean by 'Cheshire'. I want to be able to answer 'where is Kirkby Lonsdale' with the same answer I would have given 20 or 50 or 100 years ago. Or: - a complete year zero where we abandon the old and have completely new administrative units for the half-a-million-to-three-million population units of territory. I could draw you up dozens of these right now. But we'd then have to agree to stick with them completely a la American states for the next 500 years at least and stop fucking tinkering.
Point 2: a complete year zero where we abandon the old and have completely new administrative units We did that in 1973/4, introducing concepts like Avon and Humberside. It was not popular and was reverted in 1997.
As Marquee Mark of this parish will tell you, for the purposes of recording moths and butterflies (as well as other biological and scientific observations) there is a system of vice-counties, started in 1852 and based on the old county system with each vice county having its own official Recorder. I am in VC53 - South Lincolnshire
I'm quite a traditionalist when it comes to county geography. But I can completely see the reason for this: Rutland is far too tiny a population for the services a county is expected to provide.
What I think is needed is one of two things - either: - a way of disassociating county identity from administrative geography - this really shouldn't be that hard to do: a few signs in the right places, institutional continuity, etc - so I could say 'I live in Cheshire' while having my bins collected by Trafford Council. This isn't the snobbery it's often perceived as; it's just a desire for continuity and local identity. I want to be able to aske a question like 'how many league football clubs have ever played home games in Cheshire' without a long footnote explaining what I mean by 'Cheshire'. I want to be able to answer 'where is Kirkby Lonsdale' with the same answer I would have given 20 or 50 or 100 years ago. Or: - a complete year zero where we abandon the old and have completely new administrative units for the half-a-million-to-three-million population units of territory. I could draw you up dozens of these right now. But we'd then have to agree to stick with them completely a la American states for the next 500 years at least and stop fucking tinkering.
Won't happen. Too many people are too attached to the counties. Along with the parishes they have existed pretty much since Saxon times and people like the tradition - the sense of belonging. As soon as someone with a better sense of heritage gets back into power they wil be back in place.
Clackmannanshire waves hello. I think one-tier is fine but there should be some recognition of history and geography. US state boundaries are just silly.
What is strange about the US system is that counties can move state. If you don't like the policies of the state you are in then you can apply to move to an adjacent state. It is not easy because it needs the approval of both State legislatures as well as Congress but it is possible. 12 counties in Oregon are currently applying to join Idaho.
Alternatively, just do it on watersheds. That would annoy everyone equally but be quite neat and tidy (and you can see some ancient boundaries there already). The US in particular looks much more sensible on that basis.
I’ve also been doing some work on a new allocation across the UK on public spending, assuming per capita weighting with double for remote rural and bottom 20% deprivation. London gets a cut of 15% (obvs), Scotland down 3%, NI down 10%, Yorkshire and Humber up 10% - but NE of England only up 5%.
'US President Donald Trump has delivered a primetime address in which he accused China of interfering in the 2020 election and alleged "shocking vulnerabilities" in American voting systems.
Trump, who spoke from the White House on Thursday, has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and foreign meddling in the 2020 election which he lost to Joe Biden.
In the half-hour speech, delivered three months before the midterm elections, he said he had declassified hundreds of intelligence files which supported his claims that Beijing had tried to sway the election in Biden's favour.
The US intelligence community has previously concluded China did not interfere in the 2020 election.'
That is bad news for the Forest and Stroud, possibly Gloucester itself, as the county council will be dominated by rich Fukkers from Tewkesbury and the Cotswolds who will be totally unscrupulous about redirecting all the money to where it will benefit their voters rather than where it's actually needed.
The whole plan for the country is a f##king shambles. Pointless and costly reorganisations which will do nothing to improve local democracy or performance. Indeed I expect services to be far worse and cost far more as a result.
I’d be fascinated by the thought processes behind these re-organisations.
Sadly I do suspect a lot of gerrymandering.
And of course the changes will ensure that rural areas are dominated by the adjacent urban areas so making things like new building developments easier.
They will do almost nothing to save costs. There will be a few very senior managerial jobs that will go but because of the TUPE rules they cannot use the reorganisation as an excuse for layoffs, nor can they change pay and conditions. And given that they will still need to use existing district and county council offices because they still need to do all the jobs that are currently being done and need the office spce for that, there will be little or no real-estate savings.
This is all being driven entirely by political considerations and is a centralising rather than decentralising move. A real retrograde step.
Given we desperately need developments and that you (rightly) welcome migration which means we need even more developments, then why are you saying it will make new developments easier as if it is a bad thing?
Because what it actually means is people living in one area deciding that all those developments should be in another area - preferably some distance away from them. The urban areas have large swathes of brownfield sites which should be redeveloped. But that is more expensive both for the developers and the local authorities. So now they will have nice large areas of green field they can build on instead. It is simply supercharged NIMBYism.
Where are these mythical large swathes of brownfield sites that have not been redeveloped in the past quarter of a century where our population has grown by about 20%?
Any brownfield sites that can be developed should be and largely are, but we need green too. And will do as long as our population rises and until we clear the backlog of missing developments we need.
1.5 million homes. Half of it with some form of planning permission in place. But developers don't like building on brownfield sites because of the additional costs.
Allegedly, claimed by a group the CPRE with a very vested-interest and based on a series of flawed assumptions.
Yes if every single brownfield site were capable of being transformed to housing, at high density, and nothing else then those houses could be built.
However that is never going to happen and can't happen. Some land is unsuitable due to contamination or other reasons. And some will inevitably get used for other purposes, such as industry or retail or anything else. Indeed, build homes and other services are needed so its never all going to go to housing.
So yes, brownfield can be a part of the mix - and is, but green is needed too.
Find some counter evidence and you might be worth listening to on this. But vague claims which are not backed up by any actual evidence, whilst occasionally a PB standard, does not win arguments.
Our analysis clearly highlights the planning systems as very significant drivers of negative overall outcomes in the housing market. Across GB as a whole, and England in particular, the planning systems are not delivering sufficient planning permissions to deliver new housing up to government targets and other assessments of need.
... We have also seen evidence that problems in planning systems may be having a disproportionate impact on SME housebuilders ...
.. We have found that barriers to entry and expansion are likely to be restricting the role of SMEs in the market. Of these barriers, the most significant is negotiating the planning system, the burdens of which fall most heavily on smaller builders, followed by access to land ...
The CMA does not argue that the solution is simply 'build on brownfield'; it identifies a systemic shortage of permissions and land supply. The fact that planning constraints exist applies regardless of whether the land is brownfield or greenfield.
Around 54% of new homes are already being built on brownfield land. So brownfield is not being ignored, it is already the majority of new housing.
The disagreement is not whether brownfield should be used. It should. The question is whether theoretical brownfield capacity means greenfield development is unnecessary. The evidence does not support that conclusion. Brownfield sites have competing uses, viability constraints and are not always located where housing demand is highest. Therefore brownfield is part of the solution, but not the entire solution.
One thing I do support the gov't in is the move to entirely single tier local authorities. I have no idea of the materiality, rights, wrongs or anything else involved in this court case:
Aligate = hypocrite Southport = tone deaf WFA = policy
No different to the 'others', but worse as moralising hypocrite. Handles safety concerns badly. Introduces deeply unpopular policy not in the manifesto.
First impressions count and this is what he offered. Was never recovering from that. He then carried on in that vein.
One thing I do support the gov't in is the move to entirely single tier local authorities. I have no idea of the materiality, rights, wrongs or anything else involved in this court case:
But obviously this can't happen if there is a single tier local authority
My experience in the private sector and (as seen from outside) government is that sweeping organisational changes result in confusion and initially a worse service because what stays and goes from merged units depends almost entirely on politics and favouritism rather than on merit – note I said what, not who. Savings are often illusory: in the short term they are swamped by one-off costs; long-term by departing customers.
'US President Donald Trump has delivered a primetime address in which he accused China of interfering in the 2020 election and alleged "shocking vulnerabilities" in American voting systems.
Trump, who spoke from the White House on Thursday, has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and foreign meddling in the 2020 election which he lost to Joe Biden.
In the half-hour speech, delivered three months before the midterm elections, he said he had declassified hundreds of intelligence files which supported his claims that Beijing had tried to sway the election in Biden's favour.
The US intelligence community has previously concluded China did not interfere in the 2020 election.'
So, back in 2016, he's certain foreigners didn't interfere... but they're doing it now.
Thomas Massie, who unlike most of his colleagues shows occasional signs of clear thinking. Of course they're pre-emptively complaing cos they're facing an ass-whipping in the mid terms.
Aaron Rupar @atrupar · 20h Massie: "I don't think the problem is that our elections aren't secure because we control the House, Senate, White House, and to some degree we control the Supreme Court. So I ask my Republican colleagues, why are you complaining about election fraud? We won all the damn elections!"
That is bad news for the Forest and Stroud, possibly Gloucester itself, as the county council will be dominated by rich Fukkers from Tewkesbury and the Cotswolds who will be totally unscrupulous about redirecting all the money to where it will benefit their voters rather than where it's actually needed.
The whole plan for the country is a f##king shambles. Pointless and costly reorganisations which will do nothing to improve local democracy or performance. Indeed I expect services to be far worse and cost far more as a result.
I’d be fascinated by the thought processes behind these re-organisations.
Sadly I do suspect a lot of gerrymandering.
And of course the changes will ensure that rural areas are dominated by the adjacent urban areas so making things like new building developments easier.
They will do almost nothing to save costs. There will be a few very senior managerial jobs that will go but because of the TUPE rules they cannot use the reorganisation as an excuse for layoffs, nor can they change pay and conditions. And given that they will still need to use existing district and county council offices because they still need to do all the jobs that are currently being done and need the office spce for that, there will be little or no real-estate savings.
This is all being driven entirely by political considerations and is a centralising rather than decentralising move. A real retrograde step.
Given we desperately need developments and that you (rightly) welcome migration which means we need even more developments, then why are you saying it will make new developments easier as if it is a bad thing?
Because what it actually means is people living in one area deciding that all those developments should be in another area - preferably some distance away from them. The urban areas have large swathes of brownfield sites which should be redeveloped. But that is more expensive both for the developers and the local authorities. So now they will have nice large areas of green field they can build on instead. It is simply supercharged NIMBYism.
Where are these mythical large swathes of brownfield sites that have not been redeveloped in the past quarter of a century where our population has grown by about 20%?
Any brownfield sites that can be developed should be and largely are, but we need green too. And will do as long as our population rises and until we clear the backlog of missing developments we need.
1.5 million homes. Half of it with some form of planning permission in place. But developers don't like building on brownfield sites because of the additional costs.
Allegedly, claimed by a group the CPRE with a very vested-interest and based on a series of flawed assumptions.
Yes if every single brownfield site were capable of being transformed to housing, at high density, and nothing else then those houses could be built.
However that is never going to happen and can't happen. Some land is unsuitable due to contamination or other reasons. And some will inevitably get used for other purposes, such as industry or retail or anything else. Indeed, build homes and other services are needed so its never all going to go to housing.
So yes, brownfield can be a part of the mix - and is, but green is needed too.
Find some counter evidence and you might be worth listening to on this. But vague claims which are not backed up by any actual evidence, whilst occasionally a PB standard, does not win arguments.
Our analysis clearly highlights the planning systems as very significant drivers of negative overall outcomes in the housing market. Across GB as a whole, and England in particular, the planning systems are not delivering sufficient planning permissions to deliver new housing up to government targets and other assessments of need.
... We have also seen evidence that problems in planning systems may be having a disproportionate impact on SME housebuilders ...
.. We have found that barriers to entry and expansion are likely to be restricting the role of SMEs in the market. Of these barriers, the most significant is negotiating the planning system, the burdens of which fall most heavily on smaller builders, followed by access to land ...
The CMA does not argue that the solution is simply 'build on brownfield'; it identifies a systemic shortage of permissions and land supply. The fact that planning constraints exist applies regardless of whether the land is brownfield or greenfield.
Around 54% of new homes are already being built on brownfield land. So brownfield is not being ignored, it is already the majority of new housing.
The disagreement is not whether brownfield should be used. It should. The question is whether theoretical brownfield capacity means greenfield development is unnecessary. The evidence does not support that conclusion. Brownfield sites have competing uses, viability constraints and are not always located where housing demand is highest. Therefore brownfield is part of the solution, but not the entire solution.
So no actual evidence to counter the argument that there are brownfield sites capable of supporting 1.5 million additional homes then? Just some completely different argument about your old idiocy about the the planning system.
'US President Donald Trump has delivered a primetime address in which he accused China of interfering in the 2020 election and alleged "shocking vulnerabilities" in American voting systems.
Trump, who spoke from the White House on Thursday, has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and foreign meddling in the 2020 election which he lost to Joe Biden.
In the half-hour speech, delivered three months before the midterm elections, he said he had declassified hundreds of intelligence files which supported his claims that Beijing had tried to sway the election in Biden's favour.
The US intelligence community has previously concluded China did not interfere in the 2020 election.'
Despite the endless lies, the Iran debacle, the insulting of former allies, the threats to Greenland and Canada, sucking up to Putin, the tariffs fiasco and the industrial scale corruption and grifting ........ 40% of Americans approve of the job he is doing!
That tells you everything you need to know about the state America is in and why we can never ever trust the USA again.
By all means cooperate with a sane successor but insulate ourselves from the US as best we can because as sure as night follows day the US will elect another lunatic within the next decade. Trump is just a symptom of what the USA has become.
tbf we have people on here asserting that taking a few items of clothing or concert tickets and declaring them is much worse than taking 5 million pounds from an overseas billionaire and unsuccessfully trying to conceal it.
That is bad news for the Forest and Stroud, possibly Gloucester itself, as the county council will be dominated by rich Fukkers from Tewkesbury and the Cotswolds who will be totally unscrupulous about redirecting all the money to where it will benefit their voters rather than where it's actually needed.
The whole plan for the country is a f##king shambles. Pointless and costly reorganisations which will do nothing to improve local democracy or performance. Indeed I expect services to be far worse and cost far more as a result.
I’d be fascinated by the thought processes behind these re-organisations.
Sadly I do suspect a lot of gerrymandering.
And of course the changes will ensure that rural areas are dominated by the adjacent urban areas so making things like new building developments easier.
They will do almost nothing to save costs. There will be a few very senior managerial jobs that will go but because of the TUPE rules they cannot use the reorganisation as an excuse for layoffs, nor can they change pay and conditions. And given that they will still need to use existing district and county council offices because they still need to do all the jobs that are currently being done and need the office spce for that, there will be little or no real-estate savings.
This is all being driven entirely by political considerations and is a centralising rather than decentralising move. A real retrograde step.
Given we desperately need developments and that you (rightly) welcome migration which means we need even more developments, then why are you saying it will make new developments easier as if it is a bad thing?
Because what it actually means is people living in one area deciding that all those developments should be in another area - preferably some distance away from them. The urban areas have large swathes of brownfield sites which should be redeveloped. But that is more expensive both for the developers and the local authorities. So now they will have nice large areas of green field they can build on instead. It is simply supercharged NIMBYism.
Where are these mythical large swathes of brownfield sites that have not been redeveloped in the past quarter of a century where our population has grown by about 20%?
Any brownfield sites that can be developed should be and largely are, but we need green too. And will do as long as our population rises and until we clear the backlog of missing developments we need.
1.5 million homes. Half of it with some form of planning permission in place. But developers don't like building on brownfield sites because of the additional costs.
Allegedly, claimed by a group the CPRE with a very vested-interest and based on a series of flawed assumptions.
Yes if every single brownfield site were capable of being transformed to housing, at high density, and nothing else then those houses could be built.
However that is never going to happen and can't happen. Some land is unsuitable due to contamination or other reasons. And some will inevitably get used for other purposes, such as industry or retail or anything else. Indeed, build homes and other services are needed so its never all going to go to housing.
So yes, brownfield can be a part of the mix - and is, but green is needed too.
Find some counter evidence and you might be worth listening to on this. But vague claims which are not backed up by any actual evidence, whilst occasionally a PB standard, does not win arguments.
Our analysis clearly highlights the planning systems as very significant drivers of negative overall outcomes in the housing market. Across GB as a whole, and England in particular, the planning systems are not delivering sufficient planning permissions to deliver new housing up to government targets and other assessments of need.
... We have also seen evidence that problems in planning systems may be having a disproportionate impact on SME housebuilders ...
.. We have found that barriers to entry and expansion are likely to be restricting the role of SMEs in the market. Of these barriers, the most significant is negotiating the planning system, the burdens of which fall most heavily on smaller builders, followed by access to land ...
The CMA does not argue that the solution is simply 'build on brownfield'; it identifies a systemic shortage of permissions and land supply. The fact that planning constraints exist applies regardless of whether the land is brownfield or greenfield.
Around 54% of new homes are already being built on brownfield land. So brownfield is not being ignored, it is already the majority of new housing.
The disagreement is not whether brownfield should be used. It should. The question is whether theoretical brownfield capacity means greenfield development is unnecessary. The evidence does not support that conclusion. Brownfield sites have competing uses, viability constraints and are not always located where housing demand is highest. Therefore brownfield is part of the solution, but not the entire solution.
So no actual evidence to counter the argument that there are brownfield sites capable of supporting 1.5 million additional homes then? Just some completely different argument about your old idiocy about the the planning system.
Did you miss the CMA saying there is a shortage of land there?
Yes the CMA acknowledged planning as the biggest problem, which it is, but it also said access to land was one too which I quoted.
And yes, brownfield is capable of supporting those homes if every hectare of that brownfield is used for homes and nothing else, as I acknowledged all along. However we need industry and retail and a plethora of other uses for brownfield too. Potentially housing does not equate to will be housing as there are competing demands for land.
Do you think we can do without industry? Or anything else?
That is bad news for the Forest and Stroud, possibly Gloucester itself, as the county council will be dominated by rich Fukkers from Tewkesbury and the Cotswolds who will be totally unscrupulous about redirecting all the money to where it will benefit their voters rather than where it's actually needed.
The whole plan for the country is a f##king shambles. Pointless and costly reorganisations which will do nothing to improve local democracy or performance. Indeed I expect services to be far worse and cost far more as a result.
I’d be fascinated by the thought processes behind these re-organisations.
Sadly I do suspect a lot of gerrymandering.
And of course the changes will ensure that rural areas are dominated by the adjacent urban areas so making things like new building developments easier.
They will do almost nothing to save costs. There will be a few very senior managerial jobs that will go but because of the TUPE rules they cannot use the reorganisation as an excuse for layoffs, nor can they change pay and conditions. And given that they will still need to use existing district and county council offices because they still need to do all the jobs that are currently being done and need the office spce for that, there will be little or no real-estate savings.
This is all being driven entirely by political considerations and is a centralising rather than decentralising move. A real retrograde step.
Given we desperately need developments and that you (rightly) welcome migration which means we need even more developments, then why are you saying it will make new developments easier as if it is a bad thing?
Because what it actually means is people living in one area deciding that all those developments should be in another area - preferably some distance away from them. The urban areas have large swathes of brownfield sites which should be redeveloped. But that is more expensive both for the developers and the local authorities. So now they will have nice large areas of green field they can build on instead. It is simply supercharged NIMBYism.
Where are these mythical large swathes of brownfield sites that have not been redeveloped in the past quarter of a century where our population has grown by about 20%?
Any brownfield sites that can be developed should be and largely are, but we need green too. And will do as long as our population rises and until we clear the backlog of missing developments we need.
1.5 million homes. Half of it with some form of planning permission in place. But developers don't like building on brownfield sites because of the additional costs.
Allegedly, claimed by a group the CPRE with a very vested-interest and based on a series of flawed assumptions.
Yes if every single brownfield site were capable of being transformed to housing, at high density, and nothing else then those houses could be built.
However that is never going to happen and can't happen. Some land is unsuitable due to contamination or other reasons. And some will inevitably get used for other purposes, such as industry or retail or anything else. Indeed, build homes and other services are needed so its never all going to go to housing.
So yes, brownfield can be a part of the mix - and is, but green is needed too.
Find some counter evidence and you might be worth listening to on this. But vague claims which are not backed up by any actual evidence, whilst occasionally a PB standard, does not win arguments.
Our analysis clearly highlights the planning systems as very significant drivers of negative overall outcomes in the housing market. Across GB as a whole, and England in particular, the planning systems are not delivering sufficient planning permissions to deliver new housing up to government targets and other assessments of need.
... We have also seen evidence that problems in planning systems may be having a disproportionate impact on SME housebuilders ...
.. We have found that barriers to entry and expansion are likely to be restricting the role of SMEs in the market. Of these barriers, the most significant is negotiating the planning system, the burdens of which fall most heavily on smaller builders, followed by access to land ...
The CMA does not argue that the solution is simply 'build on brownfield'; it identifies a systemic shortage of permissions and land supply. The fact that planning constraints exist applies regardless of whether the land is brownfield or greenfield.
Around 54% of new homes are already being built on brownfield land. So brownfield is not being ignored, it is already the majority of new housing.
The disagreement is not whether brownfield should be used. It should. The question is whether theoretical brownfield capacity means greenfield development is unnecessary. The evidence does not support that conclusion. Brownfield sites have competing uses, viability constraints and are not always located where housing demand is highest. Therefore brownfield is part of the solution, but not the entire solution.
So no actual evidence to counter the argument that there are brownfield sites capable of supporting 1.5 million additional homes then? Just some completely different argument about your old idiocy about the the planning system.
If 54% of new properties are being built on brownfield - 170K new properties were built in the UK in 2025, when this report was written
so 90K were on brownfield, apparently.
That doesn't sound as if brownfield is being ignored.
It would be interesting to see how this breaks down. In London, they were building on everything - until chunks of the market collapsed
That is bad news for the Forest and Stroud, possibly Gloucester itself, as the county council will be dominated by rich Fukkers from Tewkesbury and the Cotswolds who will be totally unscrupulous about redirecting all the money to where it will benefit their voters rather than where it's actually needed.
The whole plan for the country is a f##king shambles. Pointless and costly reorganisations which will do nothing to improve local democracy or performance. Indeed I expect services to be far worse and cost far more as a result.
I’d be fascinated by the thought processes behind these re-organisations.
Sadly I do suspect a lot of gerrymandering.
And of course the changes will ensure that rural areas are dominated by the adjacent urban areas so making things like new building developments easier.
They will do almost nothing to save costs. There will be a few very senior managerial jobs that will go but because of the TUPE rules they cannot use the reorganisation as an excuse for layoffs, nor can they change pay and conditions. And given that they will still need to use existing district and county council offices because they still need to do all the jobs that are currently being done and need the office spce for that, there will be little or no real-estate savings.
This is all being driven entirely by political considerations and is a centralising rather than decentralising move. A real retrograde step.
Given we desperately need developments and that you (rightly) welcome migration which means we need even more developments, then why are you saying it will make new developments easier as if it is a bad thing?
Because what it actually means is people living in one area deciding that all those developments should be in another area - preferably some distance away from them. The urban areas have large swathes of brownfield sites which should be redeveloped. But that is more expensive both for the developers and the local authorities. So now they will have nice large areas of green field they can build on instead. It is simply supercharged NIMBYism.
Where are these mythical large swathes of brownfield sites that have not been redeveloped in the past quarter of a century where our population has grown by about 20%?
Any brownfield sites that can be developed should be and largely are, but we need green too. And will do as long as our population rises and until we clear the backlog of missing developments we need.
1.5 million homes. Half of it with some form of planning permission in place. But developers don't like building on brownfield sites because of the additional costs.
Allegedly, claimed by a group the CPRE with a very vested-interest and based on a series of flawed assumptions.
Yes if every single brownfield site were capable of being transformed to housing, at high density, and nothing else then those houses could be built.
However that is never going to happen and can't happen. Some land is unsuitable due to contamination or other reasons. And some will inevitably get used for other purposes, such as industry or retail or anything else. Indeed, build homes and other services are needed so its never all going to go to housing.
So yes, brownfield can be a part of the mix - and is, but green is needed too.
Find some counter evidence and you might be worth listening to on this. But vague claims which are not backed up by any actual evidence, whilst occasionally a PB standard, does not win arguments.
Our analysis clearly highlights the planning systems as very significant drivers of negative overall outcomes in the housing market. Across GB as a whole, and England in particular, the planning systems are not delivering sufficient planning permissions to deliver new housing up to government targets and other assessments of need.
... We have also seen evidence that problems in planning systems may be having a disproportionate impact on SME housebuilders ...
.. We have found that barriers to entry and expansion are likely to be restricting the role of SMEs in the market. Of these barriers, the most significant is negotiating the planning system, the burdens of which fall most heavily on smaller builders, followed by access to land ...
The CMA does not argue that the solution is simply 'build on brownfield'; it identifies a systemic shortage of permissions and land supply. The fact that planning constraints exist applies regardless of whether the land is brownfield or greenfield.
Around 54% of new homes are already being built on brownfield land. So brownfield is not being ignored, it is already the majority of new housing.
The disagreement is not whether brownfield should be used. It should. The question is whether theoretical brownfield capacity means greenfield development is unnecessary. The evidence does not support that conclusion. Brownfield sites have competing uses, viability constraints and are not always located where housing demand is highest. Therefore brownfield is part of the solution, but not the entire solution.
So no actual evidence to counter the argument that there are brownfield sites capable of supporting 1.5 million additional homes then? Just some completely different argument about your old idiocy about the the planning system.
Did you miss the CMA saying there is a shortage of land there?
Yes the CMA acknowledged planning as the biggest problem, which it is, but it also said access to land was one too which I quoted.
And yes, brownfield is capable of supporting those homes if every hectare of that brownfield is used for homes and nothing else, as I acknowledged all along. However we need industry and retail and a plethora of other uses for brownfield too. Potentially housing does not equate to will be housing as there are competing demands for land.
Do you think we can do without industry? Or anything else?
1.5 million is about 20% of the extra properties we need, incidentally.
That is bad news for the Forest and Stroud, possibly Gloucester itself, as the county council will be dominated by rich Fukkers from Tewkesbury and the Cotswolds who will be totally unscrupulous about redirecting all the money to where it will benefit their voters rather than where it's actually needed.
The whole plan for the country is a f##king shambles. Pointless and costly reorganisations which will do nothing to improve local democracy or performance. Indeed I expect services to be far worse and cost far more as a result.
I’d be fascinated by the thought processes behind these re-organisations.
Sadly I do suspect a lot of gerrymandering.
And of course the changes will ensure that rural areas are dominated by the adjacent urban areas so making things like new building developments easier.
They will do almost nothing to save costs. There will be a few very senior managerial jobs that will go but because of the TUPE rules they cannot use the reorganisation as an excuse for layoffs, nor can they change pay and conditions. And given that they will still need to use existing district and county council offices because they still need to do all the jobs that are currently being done and need the office spce for that, there will be little or no real-estate savings.
This is all being driven entirely by political considerations and is a centralising rather than decentralising move. A real retrograde step.
Given we desperately need developments and that you (rightly) welcome migration which means we need even more developments, then why are you saying it will make new developments easier as if it is a bad thing?
Because what it actually means is people living in one area deciding that all those developments should be in another area - preferably some distance away from them. The urban areas have large swathes of brownfield sites which should be redeveloped. But that is more expensive both for the developers and the local authorities. So now they will have nice large areas of green field they can build on instead. It is simply supercharged NIMBYism.
Where are these mythical large swathes of brownfield sites that have not been redeveloped in the past quarter of a century where our population has grown by about 20%?
Any brownfield sites that can be developed should be and largely are, but we need green too. And will do as long as our population rises and until we clear the backlog of missing developments we need.
1.5 million homes. Half of it with some form of planning permission in place. But developers don't like building on brownfield sites because of the additional costs.
Allegedly, claimed by a group the CPRE with a very vested-interest and based on a series of flawed assumptions.
Yes if every single brownfield site were capable of being transformed to housing, at high density, and nothing else then those houses could be built.
However that is never going to happen and can't happen. Some land is unsuitable due to contamination or other reasons. And some will inevitably get used for other purposes, such as industry or retail or anything else. Indeed, build homes and other services are needed so its never all going to go to housing.
So yes, brownfield can be a part of the mix - and is, but green is needed too.
Find some counter evidence and you might be worth listening to on this. But vague claims which are not backed up by any actual evidence, whilst occasionally a PB standard, does not win arguments.
Our analysis clearly highlights the planning systems as very significant drivers of negative overall outcomes in the housing market. Across GB as a whole, and England in particular, the planning systems are not delivering sufficient planning permissions to deliver new housing up to government targets and other assessments of need.
... We have also seen evidence that problems in planning systems may be having a disproportionate impact on SME housebuilders ...
.. We have found that barriers to entry and expansion are likely to be restricting the role of SMEs in the market. Of these barriers, the most significant is negotiating the planning system, the burdens of which fall most heavily on smaller builders, followed by access to land ...
The CMA does not argue that the solution is simply 'build on brownfield'; it identifies a systemic shortage of permissions and land supply. The fact that planning constraints exist applies regardless of whether the land is brownfield or greenfield.
Around 54% of new homes are already being built on brownfield land. So brownfield is not being ignored, it is already the majority of new housing.
The disagreement is not whether brownfield should be used. It should. The question is whether theoretical brownfield capacity means greenfield development is unnecessary. The evidence does not support that conclusion. Brownfield sites have competing uses, viability constraints and are not always located where housing demand is highest. Therefore brownfield is part of the solution, but not the entire solution.
So no actual evidence to counter the argument that there are brownfield sites capable of supporting 1.5 million additional homes then? Just some completely different argument about your old idiocy about the the planning system.
Check out the vacant land for Scotland map. There’s space for hundreds of thousands of homes within a 15 minute cycle of Glasgow Central.
It all boils down to severely unequal economic demand across the UK and profit maximising behaviour from developers (which they are perfectly entitled to do). If we agree that building more housing is good thing for the country, then we should have a hard think about why that is the case and make interventions to deliver those benefits.
As an aside, I note that private rents as a proportion of income have been roughly flat for the last 20 years, and mortgages are the lowest since 2002 (excluding principal, 30% lower). It’s purely the value of the asset and shifts in tenure that are causing issues here.
That is bad news for the Forest and Stroud, possibly Gloucester itself, as the county council will be dominated by rich Fukkers from Tewkesbury and the Cotswolds who will be totally unscrupulous about redirecting all the money to where it will benefit their voters rather than where it's actually needed.
The whole plan for the country is a f##king shambles. Pointless and costly reorganisations which will do nothing to improve local democracy or performance. Indeed I expect services to be far worse and cost far more as a result.
I’d be fascinated by the thought processes behind these re-organisations.
Sadly I do suspect a lot of gerrymandering.
And of course the changes will ensure that rural areas are dominated by the adjacent urban areas so making things like new building developments easier.
They will do almost nothing to save costs. There will be a few very senior managerial jobs that will go but because of the TUPE rules they cannot use the reorganisation as an excuse for layoffs, nor can they change pay and conditions. And given that they will still need to use existing district and county council offices because they still need to do all the jobs that are currently being done and need the office spce for that, there will be little or no real-estate savings.
This is all being driven entirely by political considerations and is a centralising rather than decentralising move. A real retrograde step.
Given we desperately need developments and that you (rightly) welcome migration which means we need even more developments, then why are you saying it will make new developments easier as if it is a bad thing?
Because what it actually means is people living in one area deciding that all those developments should be in another area - preferably some distance away from them. The urban areas have large swathes of brownfield sites which should be redeveloped. But that is more expensive both for the developers and the local authorities. So now they will have nice large areas of green field they can build on instead. It is simply supercharged NIMBYism.
Where are these mythical large swathes of brownfield sites that have not been redeveloped in the past quarter of a century where our population has grown by about 20%?
Any brownfield sites that can be developed should be and largely are, but we need green too. And will do as long as our population rises and until we clear the backlog of missing developments we need.
1.5 million homes. Half of it with some form of planning permission in place. But developers don't like building on brownfield sites because of the additional costs.
Allegedly, claimed by a group the CPRE with a very vested-interest and based on a series of flawed assumptions.
Yes if every single brownfield site were capable of being transformed to housing, at high density, and nothing else then those houses could be built.
However that is never going to happen and can't happen. Some land is unsuitable due to contamination or other reasons. And some will inevitably get used for other purposes, such as industry or retail or anything else. Indeed, build homes and other services are needed so its never all going to go to housing.
So yes, brownfield can be a part of the mix - and is, but green is needed too.
Find some counter evidence and you might be worth listening to on this. But vague claims which are not backed up by any actual evidence, whilst occasionally a PB standard, does not win arguments.
Our analysis clearly highlights the planning systems as very significant drivers of negative overall outcomes in the housing market. Across GB as a whole, and England in particular, the planning systems are not delivering sufficient planning permissions to deliver new housing up to government targets and other assessments of need.
... We have also seen evidence that problems in planning systems may be having a disproportionate impact on SME housebuilders ...
.. We have found that barriers to entry and expansion are likely to be restricting the role of SMEs in the market. Of these barriers, the most significant is negotiating the planning system, the burdens of which fall most heavily on smaller builders, followed by access to land ...
The CMA does not argue that the solution is simply 'build on brownfield'; it identifies a systemic shortage of permissions and land supply. The fact that planning constraints exist applies regardless of whether the land is brownfield or greenfield.
Around 54% of new homes are already being built on brownfield land. So brownfield is not being ignored, it is already the majority of new housing.
The disagreement is not whether brownfield should be used. It should. The question is whether theoretical brownfield capacity means greenfield development is unnecessary. The evidence does not support that conclusion. Brownfield sites have competing uses, viability constraints and are not always located where housing demand is highest. Therefore brownfield is part of the solution, but not the entire solution.
So no actual evidence to counter the argument that there are brownfield sites capable of supporting 1.5 million additional homes then? Just some completely different argument about your old idiocy about the the planning system.
If 54% of new properties are being built on brownfield - 170K new properties were built in the UK in 2025, when this report was written
so 90K were on brownfield, apparently.
That doesn't sound as if brownfield is being ignored.
It would be interesting to see how this breaks down. In London, they were building on everything - until chunks of the market collapsed
I suspect a different story in rural Sussex, say.
There's a huge amount of building on greenfield near us (Brightwell, south of Oxford) - basically just a field kept preserved between villages and towns to preserve their distinctive identity. That said, Oxfordshire remains overwhelmingly green and I can't get worked up about building on fields (unlike my wife who moved here 12 years ago and views it with dislike).
He simply wasn't up to the job. He had a laissez faire management style and abominable communications.
He relied on unreliable political operatives like Reeves, but his biggest crime was sacking Robbins. He could have been truthful over Mandelson and told us it was a risk worth taking in the event of Trump which fell over badly, but instead he shot the messenger.
The U turns were bad politics.
He was far too Trump and Netanyahu centric.
The Telegraph and others ( with assistance from the Kremlin) armed with all this failure still found time to make up utter lies about the man. And on here, hands up if you were taken in by the rent boy story. I can't think of another so comprehensive a hatchet job in my lifetime.
He was a poor leader, but the narrative went that he was lazy, incompetent ( partially true) corrupt (ironic when compared even to Johnson and Farage) and he was a traitor (ironic when compared to Putin fanboi, Farage).
He was the master of his own destiny and he failed, but the hatchet job done on him by GBNews, the Mail, the Telegraph and the Express was remarkable. The BBC weren't far behind, but Murdoch wasn't even at the races.
One thing I do support the gov't in is the move to entirely single tier local authorities. I have no idea of the materiality, rights, wrongs or anything else involved in this court case:
But obviously this can't happen if there is a single tier local authority
My experience in the private sector and (as seen from outside) government is that sweeping organisational changes result in confusion and initially a worse service because what stays and goes from merged units depends almost entirely on politics and favouritism rather than on merit – note I said what, not who. Savings are often illusory: in the short term they are swamped by one-off costs; long-term by departing customers.
It would be great if they were being done to bring about streamlining and efficiency. Unfortunately, as you say, in my area they are being proposed entirely on political divides so that Labour and Lib Dem can keep control of specific areas where their support is highest. Huntingdonshire is set to be split in half if reports are to be believed. The backlash will be immense.
That is bad news for the Forest and Stroud, possibly Gloucester itself, as the county council will be dominated by rich Fukkers from Tewkesbury and the Cotswolds who will be totally unscrupulous about redirecting all the money to where it will benefit their voters rather than where it's actually needed.
The whole plan for the country is a f##king shambles. Pointless and costly reorganisations which will do nothing to improve local democracy or performance. Indeed I expect services to be far worse and cost far more as a result.
I’d be fascinated by the thought processes behind these re-organisations.
Sadly I do suspect a lot of gerrymandering.
And of course the changes will ensure that rural areas are dominated by the adjacent urban areas so making things like new building developments easier.
They will do almost nothing to save costs. There will be a few very senior managerial jobs that will go but because of the TUPE rules they cannot use the reorganisation as an excuse for layoffs, nor can they change pay and conditions. And given that they will still need to use existing district and county council offices because they still need to do all the jobs that are currently being done and need the office spce for that, there will be little or no real-estate savings.
This is all being driven entirely by political considerations and is a centralising rather than decentralising move. A real retrograde step.
Given we desperately need developments and that you (rightly) welcome migration which means we need even more developments, then why are you saying it will make new developments easier as if it is a bad thing?
Because what it actually means is people living in one area deciding that all those developments should be in another area - preferably some distance away from them. The urban areas have large swathes of brownfield sites which should be redeveloped. But that is more expensive both for the developers and the local authorities. So now they will have nice large areas of green field they can build on instead. It is simply supercharged NIMBYism.
Where are these mythical large swathes of brownfield sites that have not been redeveloped in the past quarter of a century where our population has grown by about 20%?
Any brownfield sites that can be developed should be and largely are, but we need green too. And will do as long as our population rises and until we clear the backlog of missing developments we need.
1.5 million homes. Half of it with some form of planning permission in place. But developers don't like building on brownfield sites because of the additional costs.
Allegedly, claimed by a group the CPRE with a very vested-interest and based on a series of flawed assumptions.
Yes if every single brownfield site were capable of being transformed to housing, at high density, and nothing else then those houses could be built.
However that is never going to happen and can't happen. Some land is unsuitable due to contamination or other reasons. And some will inevitably get used for other purposes, such as industry or retail or anything else. Indeed, build homes and other services are needed so its never all going to go to housing.
So yes, brownfield can be a part of the mix - and is, but green is needed too.
Find some counter evidence and you might be worth listening to on this. But vague claims which are not backed up by any actual evidence, whilst occasionally a PB standard, does not win arguments.
Our analysis clearly highlights the planning systems as very significant drivers of negative overall outcomes in the housing market. Across GB as a whole, and England in particular, the planning systems are not delivering sufficient planning permissions to deliver new housing up to government targets and other assessments of need.
... We have also seen evidence that problems in planning systems may be having a disproportionate impact on SME housebuilders ...
.. We have found that barriers to entry and expansion are likely to be restricting the role of SMEs in the market. Of these barriers, the most significant is negotiating the planning system, the burdens of which fall most heavily on smaller builders, followed by access to land ...
The CMA does not argue that the solution is simply 'build on brownfield'; it identifies a systemic shortage of permissions and land supply. The fact that planning constraints exist applies regardless of whether the land is brownfield or greenfield.
Around 54% of new homes are already being built on brownfield land. So brownfield is not being ignored, it is already the majority of new housing.
The disagreement is not whether brownfield should be used. It should. The question is whether theoretical brownfield capacity means greenfield development is unnecessary. The evidence does not support that conclusion. Brownfield sites have competing uses, viability constraints and are not always located where housing demand is highest. Therefore brownfield is part of the solution, but not the entire solution.
So no actual evidence to counter the argument that there are brownfield sites capable of supporting 1.5 million additional homes then? Just some completely different argument about your old idiocy about the the planning system.
If 54% of new properties are being built on brownfield - 170K new properties were built in the UK in 2025, when this report was written
so 90K were on brownfield, apparently.
That doesn't sound as if brownfield is being ignored.
It would be interesting to see how this breaks down. In London, they were building on everything - until chunks of the market collapsed
I suspect a different story in rural Sussex, say.
There's a huge amount of building on greenfield near us (Brightwell, south of Oxford) - basically just a field kept preserved between villages and towns to preserve their distinctive identity. That said, Oxfordshire remains overwhelmingly green and I can't get worked up about building on fields (unlike my wife who moved here 12 years ago and views it with dislike).
I don't doubt there will be a lot more "infill" in the area. South side of Wallingford, the area from Cholsey to the Reading road (and along from the old Fairmile hospital) looks inevitable for building. There won't be any more corncrake or quail heard in those fields...
'US President Donald Trump has delivered a primetime address in which he accused China of interfering in the 2020 election and alleged "shocking vulnerabilities" in American voting systems.
Trump, who spoke from the White House on Thursday, has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and foreign meddling in the 2020 election which he lost to Joe Biden.
In the half-hour speech, delivered three months before the midterm elections, he said he had declassified hundreds of intelligence files which supported his claims that Beijing had tried to sway the election in Biden's favour.
The US intelligence community has previously concluded China did not interfere in the 2020 election.'
Despite the endless lies, the Iran debacle, the insulting of former allies, the threats to Greenland and Canada, sucking up to Putin, the tariffs fiasco and the industrial scale corruption and grifting ........ 40% of Americans approve of the job he is doing!
That tells you everything you need to know about the state America is in and why we can never ever trust the USA again.
By all means cooperate with a sane successor but insulate ourselves from the US as best we can because as sure as night follows day the US will elect another lunatic within the next decade. Trump is just a symptom of what the USA has become.
tbf we have people on here asserting that taking a few items of clothing or concert tickets and declaring them is much worse than taking 5 million pounds from an overseas billionaire and unsuccessfully trying to conceal it.
The difference is that we all know Farage is a grifter, and he’s under investigation for such.
Starmer, Rayner et al spent the last five years attacking Conservatives constantly over such grift, only to enthusiastically embrace the gifts and trips the minute they got to power themselves. It’s the hypocracy that was the problem, they sold themselves as whiter-than-white, but turned out to be no better than the rest of them.
One thing I do support the gov't in is the move to entirely single tier local authorities. I have no idea of the materiality, rights, wrongs or anything else involved in this court case:
But obviously this can't happen if there is a single tier local authority
My experience in the private sector and (as seen from outside) government is that sweeping organisational changes result in confusion and initially a worse service because what stays and goes from merged units depends almost entirely on politics and favouritism rather than on merit – note I said what, not who. Savings are often illusory: in the short term they are swamped by one-off costs; long-term by departing customers.
It would be great if they were being done to bring about streamlining and efficiency. Unfortunately, as you say, in my area they are being proposed entirely on political divides so that Labour and Lib Dem can keep control of specific areas where their support is highest. Huntingdonshire is set to be split in half if reports are to be believed. The backlash will be immense.
Refuse to accept it. It took 22 years for Humberside to be finally euthanised* after the population refused to accept it but it eventually was.
*And it lingers on in the name of the police and fire services…
That is bad news for the Forest and Stroud, possibly Gloucester itself, as the county council will be dominated by rich Fukkers from Tewkesbury and the Cotswolds who will be totally unscrupulous about redirecting all the money to where it will benefit their voters rather than where it's actually needed.
The whole plan for the country is a f##king shambles. Pointless and costly reorganisations which will do nothing to improve local democracy or performance. Indeed I expect services to be far worse and cost far more as a result.
I’d be fascinated by the thought processes behind these re-organisations.
Sadly I do suspect a lot of gerrymandering.
And of course the changes will ensure that rural areas are dominated by the adjacent urban areas so making things like new building developments easier.
They will do almost nothing to save costs. There will be a few very senior managerial jobs that will go but because of the TUPE rules they cannot use the reorganisation as an excuse for layoffs, nor can they change pay and conditions. And given that they will still need to use existing district and county council offices because they still need to do all the jobs that are currently being done and need the office spce for that, there will be little or no real-estate savings.
This is all being driven entirely by political considerations and is a centralising rather than decentralising move. A real retrograde step.
Given we desperately need developments and that you (rightly) welcome migration which means we need even more developments, then why are you saying it will make new developments easier as if it is a bad thing?
Because what it actually means is people living in one area deciding that all those developments should be in another area - preferably some distance away from them. The urban areas have large swathes of brownfield sites which should be redeveloped. But that is more expensive both for the developers and the local authorities. So now they will have nice large areas of green field they can build on instead. It is simply supercharged NIMBYism.
Where are these mythical large swathes of brownfield sites that have not been redeveloped in the past quarter of a century where our population has grown by about 20%?
Any brownfield sites that can be developed should be and largely are, but we need green too. And will do as long as our population rises and until we clear the backlog of missing developments we need.
1.5 million homes. Half of it with some form of planning permission in place. But developers don't like building on brownfield sites because of the additional costs.
Allegedly, claimed by a group the CPRE with a very vested-interest and based on a series of flawed assumptions.
Yes if every single brownfield site were capable of being transformed to housing, at high density, and nothing else then those houses could be built.
However that is never going to happen and can't happen. Some land is unsuitable due to contamination or other reasons. And some will inevitably get used for other purposes, such as industry or retail or anything else. Indeed, build homes and other services are needed so its never all going to go to housing.
So yes, brownfield can be a part of the mix - and is, but green is needed too.
Find some counter evidence and you might be worth listening to on this. But vague claims which are not backed up by any actual evidence, whilst occasionally a PB standard, does not win arguments.
Our analysis clearly highlights the planning systems as very significant drivers of negative overall outcomes in the housing market. Across GB as a whole, and England in particular, the planning systems are not delivering sufficient planning permissions to deliver new housing up to government targets and other assessments of need.
... We have also seen evidence that problems in planning systems may be having a disproportionate impact on SME housebuilders ...
.. We have found that barriers to entry and expansion are likely to be restricting the role of SMEs in the market. Of these barriers, the most significant is negotiating the planning system, the burdens of which fall most heavily on smaller builders, followed by access to land ...
The CMA does not argue that the solution is simply 'build on brownfield'; it identifies a systemic shortage of permissions and land supply. The fact that planning constraints exist applies regardless of whether the land is brownfield or greenfield.
Around 54% of new homes are already being built on brownfield land. So brownfield is not being ignored, it is already the majority of new housing.
The disagreement is not whether brownfield should be used. It should. The question is whether theoretical brownfield capacity means greenfield development is unnecessary. The evidence does not support that conclusion. Brownfield sites have competing uses, viability constraints and are not always located where housing demand is highest. Therefore brownfield is part of the solution, but not the entire solution.
So no actual evidence to counter the argument that there are brownfield sites capable of supporting 1.5 million additional homes then? Just some completely different argument about your old idiocy about the the planning system.
Did you miss the CMA saying there is a shortage of land there?
Yes the CMA acknowledged planning as the biggest problem, which it is, but it also said access to land was one too which I quoted.
And yes, brownfield is capable of supporting those homes if every hectare of that brownfield is used for homes and nothing else, as I acknowledged all along. However we need industry and retail and a plethora of other uses for brownfield too. Potentially housing does not equate to will be housing as there are competing demands for land.
Do you think we can do without industry? Or anything else?
It never ceases to amaze me how people living in sparsely populated rural areas consider that people in cities have absolutely no need for green space and that as more and more people are crammed into existing urban settlements all the existing brownfield land should be used for housing as opposed to creating green space for recreational use and to boost urban wildlife. What a selfish bunch.
Green space in urban areas is the most valuable in the country and we should be looking to add to it. Existing "brownfield sites" are often quite ecologically rich simply by virtue of nature having reclaimed them.
New housing should be developed primarily as planned settlement on the misnamed "green belt", which apart from the brownfield parts which can rightly be recategorised as "grey belt" also includes vaste swathes of ecologically denuded land put over to high intensity agri business with monolithic crops and high use of insecticides etc. Such as huge fields of hedgerow-less oil seed rape for example, very common around here. Green deserts if you prefer.
That's just one stage so isn't a full picture, but the pattern of England being a top second tier nation rather than the very top table, those teams who win more than they exit at semi finals is what we need to bridge.
That's just one stage so isn't a full picture, but the pattern of England being a top second tier nation rather than the very top table, those teams who win more than they exit at semi finals is what we need to bridge.
Ha, reminds me a little of Charles Leclerc poles versus wins (27 to 9, for those wondering).
That is bad news for the Forest and Stroud, possibly Gloucester itself, as the county council will be dominated by rich Fukkers from Tewkesbury and the Cotswolds who will be totally unscrupulous about redirecting all the money to where it will benefit their voters rather than where it's actually needed.
The whole plan for the country is a f##king shambles. Pointless and costly reorganisations which will do nothing to improve local democracy or performance. Indeed I expect services to be far worse and cost far more as a result.
I’d be fascinated by the thought processes behind these re-organisations.
Sadly I do suspect a lot of gerrymandering.
And of course the changes will ensure that rural areas are dominated by the adjacent urban areas so making things like new building developments easier.
They will do almost nothing to save costs. There will be a few very senior managerial jobs that will go but because of the TUPE rules they cannot use the reorganisation as an excuse for layoffs, nor can they change pay and conditions. And given that they will still need to use existing district and county council offices because they still need to do all the jobs that are currently being done and need the office spce for that, there will be little or no real-estate savings.
This is all being driven entirely by political considerations and is a centralising rather than decentralising move. A real retrograde step.
Given we desperately need developments and that you (rightly) welcome migration which means we need even more developments, then why are you saying it will make new developments easier as if it is a bad thing?
Because what it actually means is people living in one area deciding that all those developments should be in another area - preferably some distance away from them. The urban areas have large swathes of brownfield sites which should be redeveloped. But that is more expensive both for the developers and the local authorities. So now they will have nice large areas of green field they can build on instead. It is simply supercharged NIMBYism.
Where are these mythical large swathes of brownfield sites that have not been redeveloped in the past quarter of a century where our population has grown by about 20%?
Any brownfield sites that can be developed should be and largely are, but we need green too. And will do as long as our population rises and until we clear the backlog of missing developments we need.
1.5 million homes. Half of it with some form of planning permission in place. But developers don't like building on brownfield sites because of the additional costs.
Allegedly, claimed by a group the CPRE with a very vested-interest and based on a series of flawed assumptions.
Yes if every single brownfield site were capable of being transformed to housing, at high density, and nothing else then those houses could be built.
However that is never going to happen and can't happen. Some land is unsuitable due to contamination or other reasons. And some will inevitably get used for other purposes, such as industry or retail or anything else. Indeed, build homes and other services are needed so its never all going to go to housing.
So yes, brownfield can be a part of the mix - and is, but green is needed too.
Find some counter evidence and you might be worth listening to on this. But vague claims which are not backed up by any actual evidence, whilst occasionally a PB standard, does not win arguments.
Our analysis clearly highlights the planning systems as very significant drivers of negative overall outcomes in the housing market. Across GB as a whole, and England in particular, the planning systems are not delivering sufficient planning permissions to deliver new housing up to government targets and other assessments of need.
... We have also seen evidence that problems in planning systems may be having a disproportionate impact on SME housebuilders ...
.. We have found that barriers to entry and expansion are likely to be restricting the role of SMEs in the market. Of these barriers, the most significant is negotiating the planning system, the burdens of which fall most heavily on smaller builders, followed by access to land ...
The CMA does not argue that the solution is simply 'build on brownfield'; it identifies a systemic shortage of permissions and land supply. The fact that planning constraints exist applies regardless of whether the land is brownfield or greenfield.
Around 54% of new homes are already being built on brownfield land. So brownfield is not being ignored, it is already the majority of new housing.
The disagreement is not whether brownfield should be used. It should. The question is whether theoretical brownfield capacity means greenfield development is unnecessary. The evidence does not support that conclusion. Brownfield sites have competing uses, viability constraints and are not always located where housing demand is highest. Therefore brownfield is part of the solution, but not the entire solution.
So no actual evidence to counter the argument that there are brownfield sites capable of supporting 1.5 million additional homes then? Just some completely different argument about your old idiocy about the the planning system.
If 54% of new properties are being built on brownfield - 170K new properties were built in the UK in 2025, when this report was written
so 90K were on brownfield, apparently.
That doesn't sound as if brownfield is being ignored.
It would be interesting to see how this breaks down. In London, they were building on everything - until chunks of the market collapsed
I suspect a different story in rural Sussex, say.
There's a huge amount of building on greenfield near us (Brightwell, south of Oxford) - basically just a field kept preserved between villages and towns to preserve their distinctive identity. That said, Oxfordshire remains overwhelmingly green and I can't get worked up about building on fields (unlike my wife who moved here 12 years ago and views it with dislike).
I don't doubt there will be a lot more "infill" in the area. South side of Wallingford, the area from Cholsey to the Reading road (and along from the old Fairmile hospital) looks inevitable for building. There won't be any more corncrake or quail heard in those fields...
That will cheer my daughter up She lives in Moulsford In all the time shes been there we've never heard a corncrake. Lots of red kites though.
'US President Donald Trump has delivered a primetime address in which he accused China of interfering in the 2020 election and alleged "shocking vulnerabilities" in American voting systems.
Trump, who spoke from the White House on Thursday, has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and foreign meddling in the 2020 election which he lost to Joe Biden.
In the half-hour speech, delivered three months before the midterm elections, he said he had declassified hundreds of intelligence files which supported his claims that Beijing had tried to sway the election in Biden's favour.
The US intelligence community has previously concluded China did not interfere in the 2020 election.'
Despite the endless lies, the Iran debacle, the insulting of former allies, the threats to Greenland and Canada, sucking up to Putin, the tariffs fiasco and the industrial scale corruption and grifting ........ 40% of Americans approve of the job he is doing!
That tells you everything you need to know about the state America is in and why we can never ever trust the USA again.
By all means cooperate with a sane successor but insulate ourselves from the US as best we can because as sure as night follows day the US will elect another lunatic within the next decade. Trump is just a symptom of what the USA has become.
tbf we have people on here asserting that taking a few items of clothing or concert tickets and declaring them is much worse than taking 5 million pounds from an overseas billionaire and unsuccessfully trying to conceal it.
The difference is that we all know Farage is a grifter, and he’s under investigation for such.
Starmer, Rayner et al spent the last five years attacking Conservatives constantly over such grift, only to enthusiastically embrace the gifts and trips the minute they got to power themselves. It’s the hypocracy that was the problem, they sold themselves as whiter-than-white, but turned out to be no better than the rest of them.
no, we don't all know that, and you pushing this false equivalence is blatently dishonest.
That's just one stage so isn't a full picture, but the pattern of England being a top second tier nation rather than the very top table, those teams who win more than they exit at semi finals is what we need to bridge.
The 20 minutes after we scored was unbelievably poor, just awful. The high press had been working well and we almost pinched a goal but for a quick and slightly lucky bit of work by Argentina's centre-back. Was fitness an issue why we suddenly dropped off ? Tuchel didn't help with his nonsense changes (We were not down to 10 men defending at altitude) but the rot set in before that.
'US President Donald Trump has delivered a primetime address in which he accused China of interfering in the 2020 election and alleged "shocking vulnerabilities" in American voting systems.
Trump, who spoke from the White House on Thursday, has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and foreign meddling in the 2020 election which he lost to Joe Biden.
In the half-hour speech, delivered three months before the midterm elections, he said he had declassified hundreds of intelligence files which supported his claims that Beijing had tried to sway the election in Biden's favour.
The US intelligence community has previously concluded China did not interfere in the 2020 election.'
Among the documents published are ones showing China attempted to interfere against Biden. I don't think they even bothered to read them, and they don't expect anyone else to either.
'US President Donald Trump has delivered a primetime address in which he accused China of interfering in the 2020 election and alleged "shocking vulnerabilities" in American voting systems.
Trump, who spoke from the White House on Thursday, has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and foreign meddling in the 2020 election which he lost to Joe Biden.
In the half-hour speech, delivered three months before the midterm elections, he said he had declassified hundreds of intelligence files which supported his claims that Beijing had tried to sway the election in Biden's favour.
The US intelligence community has previously concluded China did not interfere in the 2020 election.'
Despite the endless lies, the Iran debacle, the insulting of former allies, the threats to Greenland and Canada, sucking up to Putin, the tariffs fiasco and the industrial scale corruption and grifting ........ 40% of Americans approve of the job he is doing!
That tells you everything you need to know about the state America is in and why we can never ever trust the USA again.
By all means cooperate with a sane successor but insulate ourselves from the US as best we can because as sure as night follows day the US will elect another lunatic within the next decade. Trump is just a symptom of what the USA has become.
tbf we have people on here asserting that taking a few items of clothing or concert tickets and declaring them is much worse than taking 5 million pounds from an overseas billionaire and unsuccessfully trying to conceal it.
The difference is that we all know Farage is a grifter, and he’s under investigation for such.
Starmer, Rayner et al spent the last five years attacking Conservatives constantly over such grift, only to enthusiastically embrace the gifts and trips the minute they got to power themselves. It’s the hypocracy that was the problem, they sold themselves as whiter-than-white, but turned out to be no better than the rest of them.
no, we don't all know that, and you pushing this false equivalence is blatently dishonest.
I’m not making equivalence between the two at all, they’re totally different circumstances.
Farage could be suspended or kicked out of Parliament for failing to declare a substantial gift just before he became an MP. Good, that’s how the system is supposed to work.
The problem with Labour isn’t the behaviour in itself, it’s the hypocracy and their presenting themselves as somehow better than other parties, which unraveled almost immediately once they were in power.
'US President Donald Trump has delivered a primetime address in which he accused China of interfering in the 2020 election and alleged "shocking vulnerabilities" in American voting systems.
Trump, who spoke from the White House on Thursday, has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and foreign meddling in the 2020 election which he lost to Joe Biden.
In the half-hour speech, delivered three months before the midterm elections, he said he had declassified hundreds of intelligence files which supported his claims that Beijing had tried to sway the election in Biden's favour.
The US intelligence community has previously concluded China did not interfere in the 2020 election.'
Despite the endless lies, the Iran debacle, the insulting of former allies, the threats to Greenland and Canada, sucking up to Putin, the tariffs fiasco and the industrial scale corruption and grifting ........ 40% of Americans approve of the job he is doing!
That tells you everything you need to know about the state America is in and why we can never ever trust the USA again.
By all means cooperate with a sane successor but insulate ourselves from the US as best we can because as sure as night follows day the US will elect another lunatic within the next decade. Trump is just a symptom of what the USA has become.
tbf we have people on here asserting that taking a few items of clothing or concert tickets and declaring them is much worse than taking 5 million pounds from an overseas billionaire and unsuccessfully trying to conceal it.
The difference is that we all know Farage is a grifter, and he’s under investigation for such.
Starmer, Rayner et al spent the last five years attacking Conservatives constantly over such grift, only to enthusiastically embrace the gifts and trips the minute they got to power themselves. It’s the hypocracy that was the problem, they sold themselves as whiter-than-white, but turned out to be no better than the rest of them.
Mrs Starmer's lingerie were unwise gifts from a political ally and Angela Rayner's run in with HMRC was worthy of a resignation but trying to equate it to (off the top of my head) the PPE scandal, Nahawi's tax issues whilst CoE ( is far more serious than Rayner) Farage's 5 million and (£13m for the party) is disingenuous.
Perhaps Mrs Starmer's clothes and Starmer's glasses could be compared to Johnson's Lulu Lytle wallpaper and Carole Bamford's Daylesford food parcels to Johnson. None of which worried you all too much.
'US President Donald Trump has delivered a primetime address in which he accused China of interfering in the 2020 election and alleged "shocking vulnerabilities" in American voting systems.
Trump, who spoke from the White House on Thursday, has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and foreign meddling in the 2020 election which he lost to Joe Biden.
In the half-hour speech, delivered three months before the midterm elections, he said he had declassified hundreds of intelligence files which supported his claims that Beijing had tried to sway the election in Biden's favour.
The US intelligence community has previously concluded China did not interfere in the 2020 election.'
Despite the endless lies, the Iran debacle, the insulting of former allies, the threats to Greenland and Canada, sucking up to Putin, the tariffs fiasco and the industrial scale corruption and grifting ........ 40% of Americans approve of the job he is doing!
That tells you everything you need to know about the state America is in and why we can never ever trust the USA again.
By all means cooperate with a sane successor but insulate ourselves from the US as best we can because as sure as night follows day the US will elect another lunatic within the next decade. Trump is just a symptom of what the USA has become.
tbf we have people on here asserting that taking a few items of clothing or concert tickets and declaring them is much worse than taking 5 million pounds from an overseas billionaire and unsuccessfully trying to conceal it.
The difference is that we all know Farage is a grifter, and he’s under investigation for such.
Starmer, Rayner et al spent the last five years attacking Conservatives constantly over such grift, only to enthusiastically embrace the gifts and trips the minute they got to power themselves. It’s the hypocracy that was the problem, they sold themselves as whiter-than-white, but turned out to be no better than the rest of them.
no, we don't all know that, and you pushing this false equivalence is blatently dishonest.
I’m not making equivalence between the two at all, they’re totally different circumstances.
Farage could be suspended or kicked out of Parliament for failing to declare a substantial gift just before he became an MP. Good, that’s how the system is supposed to work.
The problem with Labour isn’t the behaviour in itself, it’s the hypocracy and their presenting themselves as somehow better than other parties, which unraveled almost immediately once they were in power.
it funny how those accusing other of hypocrisy never notice it in their own actions
'US President Donald Trump has delivered a primetime address in which he accused China of interfering in the 2020 election and alleged "shocking vulnerabilities" in American voting systems.
Trump, who spoke from the White House on Thursday, has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and foreign meddling in the 2020 election which he lost to Joe Biden.
In the half-hour speech, delivered three months before the midterm elections, he said he had declassified hundreds of intelligence files which supported his claims that Beijing had tried to sway the election in Biden's favour.
The US intelligence community has previously concluded China did not interfere in the 2020 election.'
Despite the endless lies, the Iran debacle, the insulting of former allies, the threats to Greenland and Canada, sucking up to Putin, the tariffs fiasco and the industrial scale corruption and grifting ........ 40% of Americans approve of the job he is doing!
That tells you everything you need to know about the state America is in and why we can never ever trust the USA again.
By all means cooperate with a sane successor but insulate ourselves from the US as best we can because as sure as night follows day the US will elect another lunatic within the next decade. Trump is just a symptom of what the USA has become.
tbf we have people on here asserting that taking a few items of clothing or concert tickets and declaring them is much worse than taking 5 million pounds from an overseas billionaire and unsuccessfully trying to conceal it.
The difference is that we all know Farage is a grifter, and he’s under investigation for such.
Starmer, Rayner et al spent the last five years attacking Conservatives constantly over such grift, only to enthusiastically embrace the gifts and trips the minute they got to power themselves. It’s the hypocracy that was the problem, they sold themselves as whiter-than-white, but turned out to be no better than the rest of them.
no, we don't all know that, and you pushing this false equivalence is blatently dishonest.
I’m not making equivalence between the two at all, they’re totally different circumstances.
Farage could be suspended or kicked out of Parliament for failing to declare a substantial gift just before he became an MP. Good, that’s how the system is supposed to work.
The problem with Labour isn’t the behaviour in itself, it’s the hypocracy and their presenting themselves as somehow better than other parties, which unraveled almost immediately once they were in power.
You’re quite right. The hypocrisy was quite breathtaking by Rayner, SKS et al.
In opposition they paraded their virtue. In power it was ‘meet the new boss. Same as the old boss’
'US President Donald Trump has delivered a primetime address in which he accused China of interfering in the 2020 election and alleged "shocking vulnerabilities" in American voting systems.
Trump, who spoke from the White House on Thursday, has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and foreign meddling in the 2020 election which he lost to Joe Biden.
In the half-hour speech, delivered three months before the midterm elections, he said he had declassified hundreds of intelligence files which supported his claims that Beijing had tried to sway the election in Biden's favour.
The US intelligence community has previously concluded China did not interfere in the 2020 election.'
Despite the endless lies, the Iran debacle, the insulting of former allies, the threats to Greenland and Canada, sucking up to Putin, the tariffs fiasco and the industrial scale corruption and grifting ........ 40% of Americans approve of the job he is doing!
That tells you everything you need to know about the state America is in and why we can never ever trust the USA again.
By all means cooperate with a sane successor but insulate ourselves from the US as best we can because as sure as night follows day the US will elect another lunatic within the next decade. Trump is just a symptom of what the USA has become.
tbf we have people on here asserting that taking a few items of clothing or concert tickets and declaring them is much worse than taking 5 million pounds from an overseas billionaire and unsuccessfully trying to conceal it.
The difference is that we all know Farage is a grifter, and he’s under investigation for such.
Starmer, Rayner et al spent the last five years attacking Conservatives constantly over such grift, only to enthusiastically embrace the gifts and trips the minute they got to power themselves. It’s the hypocracy that was the problem, they sold themselves as whiter-than-white, but turned out to be no better than the rest of them.
no, we don't all know that, and you pushing this false equivalence is blatently dishonest.
I’m not making equivalence between the two at all, they’re totally different circumstances.
Farage could be suspended or kicked out of Parliament for failing to declare a substantial gift just before he became an MP. Good, that’s how the system is supposed to work.
The problem with Labour isn’t the behaviour in itself, it’s the hypocracy and their presenting themselves as somehow better than other parties, which unraveled almost immediately once they were in power.
You’re quite right. The hypocrisy was quite breathtaking by Rayner, SKS et al.
In opposition they paraded their virtue. In power it was ‘meet the new boss. Same as the old boss’
oh here's the other hypocrisy specialist right on cue
It was SKS total and chronic lack of political skills that did for him, not the policies.
A leader like Tony Blair or David Cameron, carefully preparing the ground, could easily have cut back on WFA, although they'd still have experienced the screams and howls of utterly self-entitled pensioners, they could have weathered them.
Yes, they could (e) have and should have.
But I no longer think it's only pensioners who disapproved of the WFA cuts. I noted recently that although working age people do tend to view pensioners as taking more than their fair share, they are still very supportive of measures that reduce death by natural causes for the elderly.
That's the line that's often peddled.
In reality, WFA was used, for example, by OGH to top up his Betfair account.
'China has hit out at the nationalisation of British Steel, saying it "firmly opposes and is strongly dissatisfied with the British government's decision".
On Thursday, the UK government said that taking the loss-making firm into public hands would protect jobs and safeguard a "vital national capability".
China should be thanking Ed Miliband for making every other heavy industry shut down, not complaining about the last remaining steel works in the country being nationalised for national security reasons because they couldn’t afford the powere bill.
To be honest, it's one nationalisation I approve of even though I expect it will be spectacularly inefficient and perhaps not even of great quality.
We must have one virgin steel making plant in British hands, for national security.
That is bad news for the Forest and Stroud, possibly Gloucester itself, as the county council will be dominated by rich Fukkers from Tewkesbury and the Cotswolds who will be totally unscrupulous about redirecting all the money to where it will benefit their voters rather than where it's actually needed.
The whole plan for the country is a f##king shambles. Pointless and costly reorganisations which will do nothing to improve local democracy or performance. Indeed I expect services to be far worse and cost far more as a result.
I’d be fascinated by the thought processes behind these re-organisations.
Sadly I do suspect a lot of gerrymandering.
And of course the changes will ensure that rural areas are dominated by the adjacent urban areas so making things like new building developments easier.
They will do almost nothing to save costs. There will be a few very senior managerial jobs that will go but because of the TUPE rules they cannot use the reorganisation as an excuse for layoffs, nor can they change pay and conditions. And given that they will still need to use existing district and county council offices because they still need to do all the jobs that are currently being done and need the office spce for that, there will be little or no real-estate savings.
This is all being driven entirely by political considerations and is a centralising rather than decentralising move. A real retrograde step.
Given we desperately need developments and that you (rightly) welcome migration which means we need even more developments, then why are you saying it will make new developments easier as if it is a bad thing?
Because what it actually means is people living in one area deciding that all those developments should be in another area - preferably some distance away from them. The urban areas have large swathes of brownfield sites which should be redeveloped. But that is more expensive both for the developers and the local authorities. So now they will have nice large areas of green field they can build on instead. It is simply supercharged NIMBYism.
Where are these mythical large swathes of brownfield sites that have not been redeveloped in the past quarter of a century where our population has grown by about 20%?
Any brownfield sites that can be developed should be and largely are, but we need green too. And will do as long as our population rises and until we clear the backlog of missing developments we need.
1.5 million homes. Half of it with some form of planning permission in place. But developers don't like building on brownfield sites because of the additional costs.
Allegedly, claimed by a group the CPRE with a very vested-interest and based on a series of flawed assumptions.
Yes if every single brownfield site were capable of being transformed to housing, at high density, and nothing else then those houses could be built.
However that is never going to happen and can't happen. Some land is unsuitable due to contamination or other reasons. And some will inevitably get used for other purposes, such as industry or retail or anything else. Indeed, build homes and other services are needed so its never all going to go to housing.
So yes, brownfield can be a part of the mix - and is, but green is needed too.
Find some counter evidence and you might be worth listening to on this. But vague claims which are not backed up by any actual evidence, whilst occasionally a PB standard, does not win arguments.
Our analysis clearly highlights the planning systems as very significant drivers of negative overall outcomes in the housing market. Across GB as a whole, and England in particular, the planning systems are not delivering sufficient planning permissions to deliver new housing up to government targets and other assessments of need.
... We have also seen evidence that problems in planning systems may be having a disproportionate impact on SME housebuilders ...
.. We have found that barriers to entry and expansion are likely to be restricting the role of SMEs in the market. Of these barriers, the most significant is negotiating the planning system, the burdens of which fall most heavily on smaller builders, followed by access to land ...
The CMA does not argue that the solution is simply 'build on brownfield'; it identifies a systemic shortage of permissions and land supply. The fact that planning constraints exist applies regardless of whether the land is brownfield or greenfield.
Around 54% of new homes are already being built on brownfield land. So brownfield is not being ignored, it is already the majority of new housing.
The disagreement is not whether brownfield should be used. It should. The question is whether theoretical brownfield capacity means greenfield development is unnecessary. The evidence does not support that conclusion. Brownfield sites have competing uses, viability constraints and are not always located where housing demand is highest. Therefore brownfield is part of the solution, but not the entire solution.
So no actual evidence to counter the argument that there are brownfield sites capable of supporting 1.5 million additional homes then? Just some completely different argument about your old idiocy about the the planning system.
Did you miss the CMA saying there is a shortage of land there?
Yes the CMA acknowledged planning as the biggest problem, which it is, but it also said access to land was one too which I quoted.
And yes, brownfield is capable of supporting those homes if every hectare of that brownfield is used for homes and nothing else, as I acknowledged all along. However we need industry and retail and a plethora of other uses for brownfield too. Potentially housing does not equate to will be housing as there are competing demands for land.
Do you think we can do without industry? Or anything else?
It never ceases to amaze me how people living in sparsely populated rural areas consider that people in cities have absolutely no need for green space and that as more and more people are crammed into existing urban settlements all the existing brownfield land should be used for housing as opposed to creating green space for recreational use and to boost urban wildlife. What a selfish bunch.
Green space in urban areas is the most valuable in the country and we should be looking to add to it. Existing "brownfield sites" are often quite ecologically rich simply by virtue of nature having reclaimed them.
New housing should be developed primarily as planned settlement on the misnamed "green belt", which apart from the brownfield parts which can rightly be recategorised as "grey belt" also includes vaste swathes of ecologically denuded land put over to high intensity agri business with monolithic crops and high use of insecticides etc. Such as huge fields of hedgerow-less oil seed rape for example, very common around here. Green deserts if you prefer.
Not to mention the importance of parks and trees in combating pollution and warming. London is planting more trees for these reasons.
It’s interesting that the FON poll was a lot more Green first round friendly/Ref unfriendly than this YouGov given their last national polls were about the same.
That is bad news for the Forest and Stroud, possibly Gloucester itself, as the county council will be dominated by rich Fukkers from Tewkesbury and the Cotswolds who will be totally unscrupulous about redirecting all the money to where it will benefit their voters rather than where it's actually needed.
The whole plan for the country is a f##king shambles. Pointless and costly reorganisations which will do nothing to improve local democracy or performance. Indeed I expect services to be far worse and cost far more as a result.
I’d be fascinated by the thought processes behind these re-organisations.
Sadly I do suspect a lot of gerrymandering.
And of course the changes will ensure that rural areas are dominated by the adjacent urban areas so making things like new building developments easier.
They will do almost nothing to save costs. There will be a few very senior managerial jobs that will go but because of the TUPE rules they cannot use the reorganisation as an excuse for layoffs, nor can they change pay and conditions. And given that they will still need to use existing district and county council offices because they still need to do all the jobs that are currently being done and need the office spce for that, there will be little or no real-estate savings.
This is all being driven entirely by political considerations and is a centralising rather than decentralising move. A real retrograde step.
Given we desperately need developments and that you (rightly) welcome migration which means we need even more developments, then why are you saying it will make new developments easier as if it is a bad thing?
Because what it actually means is people living in one area deciding that all those developments should be in another area - preferably some distance away from them. The urban areas have large swathes of brownfield sites which should be redeveloped. But that is more expensive both for the developers and the local authorities. So now they will have nice large areas of green field they can build on instead. It is simply supercharged NIMBYism.
Where are these mythical large swathes of brownfield sites that have not been redeveloped in the past quarter of a century where our population has grown by about 20%?
Any brownfield sites that can be developed should be and largely are, but we need green too. And will do as long as our population rises and until we clear the backlog of missing developments we need.
1.5 million homes. Half of it with some form of planning permission in place. But developers don't like building on brownfield sites because of the additional costs.
Allegedly, claimed by a group the CPRE with a very vested-interest and based on a series of flawed assumptions.
Yes if every single brownfield site were capable of being transformed to housing, at high density, and nothing else then those houses could be built.
However that is never going to happen and can't happen. Some land is unsuitable due to contamination or other reasons. And some will inevitably get used for other purposes, such as industry or retail or anything else. Indeed, build homes and other services are needed so its never all going to go to housing.
So yes, brownfield can be a part of the mix - and is, but green is needed too.
Find some counter evidence and you might be worth listening to on this. But vague claims which are not backed up by any actual evidence, whilst occasionally a PB standard, does not win arguments.
Our analysis clearly highlights the planning systems as very significant drivers of negative overall outcomes in the housing market. Across GB as a whole, and England in particular, the planning systems are not delivering sufficient planning permissions to deliver new housing up to government targets and other assessments of need.
... We have also seen evidence that problems in planning systems may be having a disproportionate impact on SME housebuilders ...
.. We have found that barriers to entry and expansion are likely to be restricting the role of SMEs in the market. Of these barriers, the most significant is negotiating the planning system, the burdens of which fall most heavily on smaller builders, followed by access to land ...
The CMA does not argue that the solution is simply 'build on brownfield'; it identifies a systemic shortage of permissions and land supply. The fact that planning constraints exist applies regardless of whether the land is brownfield or greenfield.
Around 54% of new homes are already being built on brownfield land. So brownfield is not being ignored, it is already the majority of new housing.
The disagreement is not whether brownfield should be used. It should. The question is whether theoretical brownfield capacity means greenfield development is unnecessary. The evidence does not support that conclusion. Brownfield sites have competing uses, viability constraints and are not always located where housing demand is highest. Therefore brownfield is part of the solution, but not the entire solution.
So no actual evidence to counter the argument that there are brownfield sites capable of supporting 1.5 million additional homes then? Just some completely different argument about your old idiocy about the the planning system.
Did you miss the CMA saying there is a shortage of land there?
Yes the CMA acknowledged planning as the biggest problem, which it is, but it also said access to land was one too which I quoted.
And yes, brownfield is capable of supporting those homes if every hectare of that brownfield is used for homes and nothing else, as I acknowledged all along. However we need industry and retail and a plethora of other uses for brownfield too. Potentially housing does not equate to will be housing as there are competing demands for land.
Do you think we can do without industry? Or anything else?
It never ceases to amaze me how people living in sparsely populated rural areas consider that people in cities have absolutely no need for green space and that as more and more people are crammed into existing urban settlements all the existing brownfield land should be used for housing as opposed to creating green space for recreational use and to boost urban wildlife. What a selfish bunch.
Green space in urban areas is the most valuable in the country and we should be looking to add to it. Existing "brownfield sites" are often quite ecologically rich simply by virtue of nature having reclaimed them.
New housing should be developed primarily as planned settlement on the misnamed "green belt", which apart from the brownfield parts which can rightly be recategorised as "grey belt" also includes vaste swathes of ecologically denuded land put over to high intensity agri business with monolithic crops and high use of insecticides etc. Such as huge fields of hedgerow-less oil seed rape for example, very common around here. Green deserts if you prefer.
Almost no brownfield is converted to green space. It would be great if it were. Much of it is left for decades without being either developed or converted.
And it never ceases to amaze me that poeple living in urban areas think that there is nothing more to the countryside than famers fields. We can afford to lose farmers fields which is why I have long advocated on here for building new towns in East Anglia and Lincolnshire. What we have lost has been the high nature value marginal land. This is why since WW2 we have lost 97% of our water meadows and hay meadows, 50% of our ancient woodland, 80% of our lowland heath and 85% of our freshwater wetlands. This is why England is considered to be critically nature depleted and ranks 189th out of 240 countries for biodiversity and last amongst the G7 countries. We have seen an 80% decline in priority species since the 1970s.
That's just one stage so isn't a full picture, but the pattern of England being a top second tier nation rather than the very top table, those teams who win more than they exit at semi finals is what we need to bridge.
The 20 minutes after we scored was unbelievably poor, just awful. The high press had been working well and we almost pinched a goal but for a quick and slightly lucky bit of work by Argentina's centre-back. Was fitness an issue why we suddenly dropped off ? Tuchel didn't help with his nonsense changes (We were not down to 10 men defending at altitude) but the rot set in before that.
It was like watching Tim Henman at Wimbledon in the 90s.
'US President Donald Trump has delivered a primetime address in which he accused China of interfering in the 2020 election and alleged "shocking vulnerabilities" in American voting systems.
Trump, who spoke from the White House on Thursday, has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and foreign meddling in the 2020 election which he lost to Joe Biden.
In the half-hour speech, delivered three months before the midterm elections, he said he had declassified hundreds of intelligence files which supported his claims that Beijing had tried to sway the election in Biden's favour.
The US intelligence community has previously concluded China did not interfere in the 2020 election.'
Despite the endless lies, the Iran debacle, the insulting of former allies, the threats to Greenland and Canada, sucking up to Putin, the tariffs fiasco and the industrial scale corruption and grifting ........ 40% of Americans approve of the job he is doing!
That tells you everything you need to know about the state America is in and why we can never ever trust the USA again.
By all means cooperate with a sane successor but insulate ourselves from the US as best we can because as sure as night follows day the US will elect another lunatic within the next decade. Trump is just a symptom of what the USA has become.
tbf we have people on here asserting that taking a few items of clothing or concert tickets and declaring them is much worse than taking 5 million pounds from an overseas billionaire and unsuccessfully trying to conceal it.
The difference is that we all know Farage is a grifter, and he’s under investigation for such.
Starmer, Rayner et al spent the last five years attacking Conservatives constantly over such grift, only to enthusiastically embrace the gifts and trips the minute they got to power themselves. It’s the hypocracy that was the problem, they sold themselves as whiter-than-white, but turned out to be no better than the rest of them.
no, we don't all know that, and you pushing this false equivalence is blatently dishonest.
I’m not making equivalence between the two at all, they’re totally different circumstances.
Farage could be suspended or kicked out of Parliament for failing to declare a substantial gift just before he became an MP. Good, that’s how the system is supposed to work.
The problem with Labour isn’t the behaviour in itself, it’s the hypocracy and their presenting themselves as somehow better than other parties, which unraveled almost immediately once they were in power.
Surely all parties, quite reasonably, present themselves to their target audience as being better than the other parties? In the case of Reform, their message is that they are the non-establishment party who intend to root out the corruption and waste that has been endemic under the other parties, so if their leader is himself guilty of grift, it makes them even more hypocritical.
'US President Donald Trump has delivered a primetime address in which he accused China of interfering in the 2020 election and alleged "shocking vulnerabilities" in American voting systems.
Trump, who spoke from the White House on Thursday, has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and foreign meddling in the 2020 election which he lost to Joe Biden.
In the half-hour speech, delivered three months before the midterm elections, he said he had declassified hundreds of intelligence files which supported his claims that Beijing had tried to sway the election in Biden's favour.
The US intelligence community has previously concluded China did not interfere in the 2020 election.'
Despite the endless lies, the Iran debacle, the insulting of former allies, the threats to Greenland and Canada, sucking up to Putin, the tariffs fiasco and the industrial scale corruption and grifting ........ 40% of Americans approve of the job he is doing!
That tells you everything you need to know about the state America is in and why we can never ever trust the USA again.
By all means cooperate with a sane successor but insulate ourselves from the US as best we can because as sure as night follows day the US will elect another lunatic within the next decade. Trump is just a symptom of what the USA has become.
tbf we have people on here asserting that taking a few items of clothing or concert tickets and declaring them is much worse than taking 5 million pounds from an overseas billionaire and unsuccessfully trying to conceal it.
The difference is that we all know Farage is a grifter, and he’s under investigation for such.
Starmer, Rayner et al spent the last five years attacking Conservatives constantly over such grift, only to enthusiastically embrace the gifts and trips the minute they got to power themselves. It’s the hypocracy that was the problem, they sold themselves as whiter-than-white, but turned out to be no better than the rest of them.
no, we don't all know that, and you pushing this false equivalence is blatently dishonest.
I’m not making equivalence between the two at all, they’re totally different circumstances.
Farage could be suspended or kicked out of Parliament for failing to declare a substantial gift just before he became an MP. Good, that’s how the system is supposed to work.
The problem with Labour isn’t the behaviour in itself, it’s the hypocracy and their presenting themselves as somehow better than other parties, which unraveled almost immediately once they were in power.
You’re quite right. The hypocrisy was quite breathtaking by Rayner, SKS et al.
In opposition they paraded their virtue. In power it was ‘meet the new boss. Same as the old boss’
oh here's the other hypocrisy specialist right on cue
'China has hit out at the nationalisation of British Steel, saying it "firmly opposes and is strongly dissatisfied with the British government's decision".
On Thursday, the UK government said that taking the loss-making firm into public hands would protect jobs and safeguard a "vital national capability".
China should be thanking Ed Miliband for making every other heavy industry shut down, not complaining about the last remaining steel works in the country being nationalised for national security reasons because they couldn’t afford the powere bill.
To be honest, it's one nationalisation I approve of even though I expect it will be spectacularly inefficient and perhaps not even of great quality.
We must have one virgin steel making plant in British hands, for national security.
Yes absolutely. Normally you and I would be dead against nationalisation of anything, but there simply has to be a local steel plant able to supply military and nuclear needs even if it’s not economically viable.
That is bad news for the Forest and Stroud, possibly Gloucester itself, as the county council will be dominated by rich Fukkers from Tewkesbury and the Cotswolds who will be totally unscrupulous about redirecting all the money to where it will benefit their voters rather than where it's actually needed.
The whole plan for the country is a f##king shambles. Pointless and costly reorganisations which will do nothing to improve local democracy or performance. Indeed I expect services to be far worse and cost far more as a result.
I’d be fascinated by the thought processes behind these re-organisations.
Sadly I do suspect a lot of gerrymandering.
And of course the changes will ensure that rural areas are dominated by the adjacent urban areas so making things like new building developments easier.
They will do almost nothing to save costs. There will be a few very senior managerial jobs that will go but because of the TUPE rules they cannot use the reorganisation as an excuse for layoffs, nor can they change pay and conditions. And given that they will still need to use existing district and county council offices because they still need to do all the jobs that are currently being done and need the office spce for that, there will be little or no real-estate savings.
This is all being driven entirely by political considerations and is a centralising rather than decentralising move. A real retrograde step.
Given we desperately need developments and that you (rightly) welcome migration which means we need even more developments, then why are you saying it will make new developments easier as if it is a bad thing?
Because what it actually means is people living in one area deciding that all those developments should be in another area - preferably some distance away from them. The urban areas have large swathes of brownfield sites which should be redeveloped. But that is more expensive both for the developers and the local authorities. So now they will have nice large areas of green field they can build on instead. It is simply supercharged NIMBYism.
Where are these mythical large swathes of brownfield sites that have not been redeveloped in the past quarter of a century where our population has grown by about 20%?
Any brownfield sites that can be developed should be and largely are, but we need green too. And will do as long as our population rises and until we clear the backlog of missing developments we need.
1.5 million homes. Half of it with some form of planning permission in place. But developers don't like building on brownfield sites because of the additional costs.
Allegedly, claimed by a group the CPRE with a very vested-interest and based on a series of flawed assumptions.
Yes if every single brownfield site were capable of being transformed to housing, at high density, and nothing else then those houses could be built.
However that is never going to happen and can't happen. Some land is unsuitable due to contamination or other reasons. And some will inevitably get used for other purposes, such as industry or retail or anything else. Indeed, build homes and other services are needed so its never all going to go to housing.
So yes, brownfield can be a part of the mix - and is, but green is needed too.
Find some counter evidence and you might be worth listening to on this. But vague claims which are not backed up by any actual evidence, whilst occasionally a PB standard, does not win arguments.
Our analysis clearly highlights the planning systems as very significant drivers of negative overall outcomes in the housing market. Across GB as a whole, and England in particular, the planning systems are not delivering sufficient planning permissions to deliver new housing up to government targets and other assessments of need.
... We have also seen evidence that problems in planning systems may be having a disproportionate impact on SME housebuilders ...
.. We have found that barriers to entry and expansion are likely to be restricting the role of SMEs in the market. Of these barriers, the most significant is negotiating the planning system, the burdens of which fall most heavily on smaller builders, followed by access to land ...
The CMA does not argue that the solution is simply 'build on brownfield'; it identifies a systemic shortage of permissions and land supply. The fact that planning constraints exist applies regardless of whether the land is brownfield or greenfield.
Around 54% of new homes are already being built on brownfield land. So brownfield is not being ignored, it is already the majority of new housing.
The disagreement is not whether brownfield should be used. It should. The question is whether theoretical brownfield capacity means greenfield development is unnecessary. The evidence does not support that conclusion. Brownfield sites have competing uses, viability constraints and are not always located where housing demand is highest. Therefore brownfield is part of the solution, but not the entire solution.
So no actual evidence to counter the argument that there are brownfield sites capable of supporting 1.5 million additional homes then? Just some completely different argument about your old idiocy about the the planning system.
Did you miss the CMA saying there is a shortage of land there?
Yes the CMA acknowledged planning as the biggest problem, which it is, but it also said access to land was one too which I quoted.
And yes, brownfield is capable of supporting those homes if every hectare of that brownfield is used for homes and nothing else, as I acknowledged all along. However we need industry and retail and a plethora of other uses for brownfield too. Potentially housing does not equate to will be housing as there are competing demands for land.
Do you think we can do without industry? Or anything else?
It never ceases to amaze me how people living in sparsely populated rural areas consider that people in cities have absolutely no need for green space and that as more and more people are crammed into existing urban settlements all the existing brownfield land should be used for housing as opposed to creating green space for recreational use and to boost urban wildlife. What a selfish bunch.
Green space in urban areas is the most valuable in the country and we should be looking to add to it. Existing "brownfield sites" are often quite ecologically rich simply by virtue of nature having reclaimed them.
New housing should be developed primarily as planned settlement on the misnamed "green belt", which apart from the brownfield parts which can rightly be recategorised as "grey belt" also includes vaste swathes of ecologically denuded land put over to high intensity agri business with monolithic crops and high use of insecticides etc. Such as huge fields of hedgerow-less oil seed rape for example, very common around here. Green deserts if you prefer.
Almost no brownfield is converted to green space. It would be great if it were. Much of it is left for decades without being either developed or converted.
And it never ceases to amaze me that poeple living in urban areas think that there is nothing more to the countryside than famers fields. We can afford to lose farmers fields which is why I have long advocated on here for building new towns in East Anglia and Lincolnshire. What we have lost has been the high nature value marginal land. This is why since WW2 we have lost 97% of our water meadows and hay meadows, 50% of our ancient woodland, 80% of our lowland heath and 85% of our freshwater wetlands. This is why England is considered to be critically nature depleted and ranks 189th out of 240 countries for biodiversity and last amongst the G7 countries. We have seen an 80% decline in priority species since the 1970s.
Its been lost to agriculture, not to housing.
The planning system and green belt were in place the entire time that it was lost. Neither worked to save what should have been protected.
I used to work for Safety Kleen, which at the time was American owner. The CEO Don Brinckman had been Fortune 500 Businessman of the decade in the 1980s so they were doing a lot right. After 5 years service one was given an SK 9CT gold ring which was very similarly ostentatious. I left a month before the 5 years was up. I could have stayed on to get the 5 year service anniversary, but thought better of it. Each year they had an event in Hawaii called the Advisory Council. Attendance was by performance to target. I came close on a couple of years but no cigar. Attendance at the Advisory Council resulted in diamonds being added to the gold ring.
In retrospect I could have hung on, taken the ring, left and had it melted down for something appropriate for the wife. That's what I would do to that World Cup shite.
'US President Donald Trump has delivered a primetime address in which he accused China of interfering in the 2020 election and alleged "shocking vulnerabilities" in American voting systems.
Trump, who spoke from the White House on Thursday, has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and foreign meddling in the 2020 election which he lost to Joe Biden.
In the half-hour speech, delivered three months before the midterm elections, he said he had declassified hundreds of intelligence files which supported his claims that Beijing had tried to sway the election in Biden's favour.
The US intelligence community has previously concluded China did not interfere in the 2020 election.'
Despite the endless lies, the Iran debacle, the insulting of former allies, the threats to Greenland and Canada, sucking up to Putin, the tariffs fiasco and the industrial scale corruption and grifting ........ 40% of Americans approve of the job he is doing!
That tells you everything you need to know about the state America is in and why we can never ever trust the USA again.
By all means cooperate with a sane successor but insulate ourselves from the US as best we can because as sure as night follows day the US will elect another lunatic within the next decade. Trump is just a symptom of what the USA has become.
tbf we have people on here asserting that taking a few items of clothing or concert tickets and declaring them is much worse than taking 5 million pounds from an overseas billionaire and unsuccessfully trying to conceal it.
It's a sign of a low trust society I think. A wholly bad thing. If people think "they're all at it" you lose all sense of proportion.
And as we're seeing on this board, the more blatant you are in your corruption and doing it on an industrial scale, somehow makes you less "hypocritical" and makes it OK ?
I'm quite a traditionalist when it comes to county geography. But I can completely see the reason for this: Rutland is far too tiny a population for the services a county is expected to provide.
What I think is needed is one of two things - either: - a way of disassociating county identity from administrative geography - this really shouldn't be that hard to do: a few signs in the right places, institutional continuity, etc - so I could say 'I live in Cheshire' while having my bins collected by Trafford Council. This isn't the snobbery it's often perceived as; it's just a desire for continuity and local identity. I want to be able to aske a question like 'how many league football clubs have ever played home games in Cheshire' without a long footnote explaining what I mean by 'Cheshire'. I want to be able to answer 'where is Kirkby Lonsdale' with the same answer I would have given 20 or 50 or 100 years ago. Or: - a complete year zero where we abandon the old and have completely new administrative units for the half-a-million-to-three-million population units of territory. I could draw you up dozens of these right now. But we'd then have to agree to stick with them completely a la American states for the next 500 years at least and stop fucking tinkering.
Point 2: a complete year zero where we abandon the old and have completely new administrative units We did that in 1973/4, introducing concepts like Avon and Humberside. It was not popular and was reverted in 1997.
1) Ceremonial counties - but they are half-arsed in their presence, trampled over by the administrative units and don't even match the traditional counties
2) It would have worked as a year zero only if it was completely different to what went before. Calling something 'Lancashire' but it just referring to the rump in the middle was a worst-of-all-worlds scenario. It was dressed up as continuity but it really wasn't - geographically, I think only Cornwall, Shropshire and Wolverhampton were untouched. But it wasn't sufficiently new that new identities could be formed even over years and years. A reflection: we were slightly obsessed back then (and indeed remain so) with separating the rural from the urban. In terms of forming an area with an identity, I think this is unhelpful.
That is bad news for the Forest and Stroud, possibly Gloucester itself, as the county council will be dominated by rich Fukkers from Tewkesbury and the Cotswolds who will be totally unscrupulous about redirecting all the money to where it will benefit their voters rather than where it's actually needed.
The whole plan for the country is a f##king shambles. Pointless and costly reorganisations which will do nothing to improve local democracy or performance. Indeed I expect services to be far worse and cost far more as a result.
I’d be fascinated by the thought processes behind these re-organisations.
Sadly I do suspect a lot of gerrymandering.
And of course the changes will ensure that rural areas are dominated by the adjacent urban areas so making things like new building developments easier.
They will do almost nothing to save costs. There will be a few very senior managerial jobs that will go but because of the TUPE rules they cannot use the reorganisation as an excuse for layoffs, nor can they change pay and conditions. And given that they will still need to use existing district and county council offices because they still need to do all the jobs that are currently being done and need the office spce for that, there will be little or no real-estate savings.
This is all being driven entirely by political considerations and is a centralising rather than decentralising move. A real retrograde step.
Given we desperately need developments and that you (rightly) welcome migration which means we need even more developments, then why are you saying it will make new developments easier as if it is a bad thing?
Because what it actually means is people living in one area deciding that all those developments should be in another area - preferably some distance away from them. The urban areas have large swathes of brownfield sites which should be redeveloped. But that is more expensive both for the developers and the local authorities. So now they will have nice large areas of green field they can build on instead. It is simply supercharged NIMBYism.
Where are these mythical large swathes of brownfield sites that have not been redeveloped in the past quarter of a century where our population has grown by about 20%?
Any brownfield sites that can be developed should be and largely are, but we need green too. And will do as long as our population rises and until we clear the backlog of missing developments we need.
1.5 million homes. Half of it with some form of planning permission in place. But developers don't like building on brownfield sites because of the additional costs.
Allegedly, claimed by a group the CPRE with a very vested-interest and based on a series of flawed assumptions.
Yes if every single brownfield site were capable of being transformed to housing, at high density, and nothing else then those houses could be built.
However that is never going to happen and can't happen. Some land is unsuitable due to contamination or other reasons. And some will inevitably get used for other purposes, such as industry or retail or anything else. Indeed, build homes and other services are needed so its never all going to go to housing.
So yes, brownfield can be a part of the mix - and is, but green is needed too.
Find some counter evidence and you might be worth listening to on this. But vague claims which are not backed up by any actual evidence, whilst occasionally a PB standard, does not win arguments.
Our analysis clearly highlights the planning systems as very significant drivers of negative overall outcomes in the housing market. Across GB as a whole, and England in particular, the planning systems are not delivering sufficient planning permissions to deliver new housing up to government targets and other assessments of need.
... We have also seen evidence that problems in planning systems may be having a disproportionate impact on SME housebuilders ...
.. We have found that barriers to entry and expansion are likely to be restricting the role of SMEs in the market. Of these barriers, the most significant is negotiating the planning system, the burdens of which fall most heavily on smaller builders, followed by access to land ...
The CMA does not argue that the solution is simply 'build on brownfield'; it identifies a systemic shortage of permissions and land supply. The fact that planning constraints exist applies regardless of whether the land is brownfield or greenfield.
Around 54% of new homes are already being built on brownfield land. So brownfield is not being ignored, it is already the majority of new housing.
The disagreement is not whether brownfield should be used. It should. The question is whether theoretical brownfield capacity means greenfield development is unnecessary. The evidence does not support that conclusion. Brownfield sites have competing uses, viability constraints and are not always located where housing demand is highest. Therefore brownfield is part of the solution, but not the entire solution.
So no actual evidence to counter the argument that there are brownfield sites capable of supporting 1.5 million additional homes then? Just some completely different argument about your old idiocy about the the planning system.
Did you miss the CMA saying there is a shortage of land there?
Yes the CMA acknowledged planning as the biggest problem, which it is, but it also said access to land was one too which I quoted.
And yes, brownfield is capable of supporting those homes if every hectare of that brownfield is used for homes and nothing else, as I acknowledged all along. However we need industry and retail and a plethora of other uses for brownfield too. Potentially housing does not equate to will be housing as there are competing demands for land.
Do you think we can do without industry? Or anything else?
It never ceases to amaze me how people living in sparsely populated rural areas consider that people in cities have absolutely no need for green space and that as more and more people are crammed into existing urban settlements all the existing brownfield land should be used for housing as opposed to creating green space for recreational use and to boost urban wildlife. What a selfish bunch.
Green space in urban areas is the most valuable in the country and we should be looking to add to it. Existing "brownfield sites" are often quite ecologically rich simply by virtue of nature having reclaimed them.
New housing should be developed primarily as planned settlement on the misnamed "green belt", which apart from the brownfield parts which can rightly be recategorised as "grey belt" also includes vaste swathes of ecologically denuded land put over to high intensity agri business with monolithic crops and high use of insecticides etc. Such as huge fields of hedgerow-less oil seed rape for example, very common around here. Green deserts if you prefer.
Almost no brownfield is converted to green space. It would be great if it were. Much of it is left for decades without being either developed or converted.
And it never ceases to amaze me that poeple living in urban areas think that there is nothing more to the countryside than famers fields. We can afford to lose farmers fields which is why I have long advocated on here for building new towns in East Anglia and Lincolnshire. What we have lost has been the high nature value marginal land. This is why since WW2 we have lost 97% of our water meadows and hay meadows, 50% of our ancient woodland, 80% of our lowland heath and 85% of our freshwater wetlands. This is why England is considered to be critically nature depleted and ranks 189th out of 240 countries for biodiversity and last amongst the G7 countries. We have seen an 80% decline in priority species since the 1970s.
I've always thought we should build a new city in Lincolnshire.
The problem is that people don't especially want to live on the east side of the country. Arguably, the housing shortage reflects desires for people to live in high-demand areas.
That is bad news for the Forest and Stroud, possibly Gloucester itself, as the county council will be dominated by rich Fukkers from Tewkesbury and the Cotswolds who will be totally unscrupulous about redirecting all the money to where it will benefit their voters rather than where it's actually needed.
The whole plan for the country is a f##king shambles. Pointless and costly reorganisations which will do nothing to improve local democracy or performance. Indeed I expect services to be far worse and cost far more as a result.
I’d be fascinated by the thought processes behind these re-organisations.
Sadly I do suspect a lot of gerrymandering.
And of course the changes will ensure that rural areas are dominated by the adjacent urban areas so making things like new building developments easier.
They will do almost nothing to save costs. There will be a few very senior managerial jobs that will go but because of the TUPE rules they cannot use the reorganisation as an excuse for layoffs, nor can they change pay and conditions. And given that they will still need to use existing district and county council offices because they still need to do all the jobs that are currently being done and need the office spce for that, there will be little or no real-estate savings.
This is all being driven entirely by political considerations and is a centralising rather than decentralising move. A real retrograde step.
Given we desperately need developments and that you (rightly) welcome migration which means we need even more developments, then why are you saying it will make new developments easier as if it is a bad thing?
Because what it actually means is people living in one area deciding that all those developments should be in another area - preferably some distance away from them. The urban areas have large swathes of brownfield sites which should be redeveloped. But that is more expensive both for the developers and the local authorities. So now they will have nice large areas of green field they can build on instead. It is simply supercharged NIMBYism.
Where are these mythical large swathes of brownfield sites that have not been redeveloped in the past quarter of a century where our population has grown by about 20%?
Any brownfield sites that can be developed should be and largely are, but we need green too. And will do as long as our population rises and until we clear the backlog of missing developments we need.
1.5 million homes. Half of it with some form of planning permission in place. But developers don't like building on brownfield sites because of the additional costs.
Allegedly, claimed by a group the CPRE with a very vested-interest and based on a series of flawed assumptions.
Yes if every single brownfield site were capable of being transformed to housing, at high density, and nothing else then those houses could be built.
However that is never going to happen and can't happen. Some land is unsuitable due to contamination or other reasons. And some will inevitably get used for other purposes, such as industry or retail or anything else. Indeed, build homes and other services are needed so its never all going to go to housing.
So yes, brownfield can be a part of the mix - and is, but green is needed too.
Find some counter evidence and you might be worth listening to on this. But vague claims which are not backed up by any actual evidence, whilst occasionally a PB standard, does not win arguments.
Our analysis clearly highlights the planning systems as very significant drivers of negative overall outcomes in the housing market. Across GB as a whole, and England in particular, the planning systems are not delivering sufficient planning permissions to deliver new housing up to government targets and other assessments of need.
... We have also seen evidence that problems in planning systems may be having a disproportionate impact on SME housebuilders ...
.. We have found that barriers to entry and expansion are likely to be restricting the role of SMEs in the market. Of these barriers, the most significant is negotiating the planning system, the burdens of which fall most heavily on smaller builders, followed by access to land ...
The CMA does not argue that the solution is simply 'build on brownfield'; it identifies a systemic shortage of permissions and land supply. The fact that planning constraints exist applies regardless of whether the land is brownfield or greenfield.
Around 54% of new homes are already being built on brownfield land. So brownfield is not being ignored, it is already the majority of new housing.
The disagreement is not whether brownfield should be used. It should. The question is whether theoretical brownfield capacity means greenfield development is unnecessary. The evidence does not support that conclusion. Brownfield sites have competing uses, viability constraints and are not always located where housing demand is highest. Therefore brownfield is part of the solution, but not the entire solution.
So no actual evidence to counter the argument that there are brownfield sites capable of supporting 1.5 million additional homes then? Just some completely different argument about your old idiocy about the the planning system.
Did you miss the CMA saying there is a shortage of land there?
Yes the CMA acknowledged planning as the biggest problem, which it is, but it also said access to land was one too which I quoted.
And yes, brownfield is capable of supporting those homes if every hectare of that brownfield is used for homes and nothing else, as I acknowledged all along. However we need industry and retail and a plethora of other uses for brownfield too. Potentially housing does not equate to will be housing as there are competing demands for land.
Do you think we can do without industry? Or anything else?
It never ceases to amaze me how people living in sparsely populated rural areas consider that people in cities have absolutely no need for green space and that as more and more people are crammed into existing urban settlements all the existing brownfield land should be used for housing as opposed to creating green space for recreational use and to boost urban wildlife. What a selfish bunch.
Green space in urban areas is the most valuable in the country and we should be looking to add to it. Existing "brownfield sites" are often quite ecologically rich simply by virtue of nature having reclaimed them.
New housing should be developed primarily as planned settlement on the misnamed "green belt", which apart from the brownfield parts which can rightly be recategorised as "grey belt" also includes vaste swathes of ecologically denuded land put over to high intensity agri business with monolithic crops and high use of insecticides etc. Such as huge fields of hedgerow-less oil seed rape for example, very common around here. Green deserts if you prefer.
Almost no brownfield is converted to green space. It would be great if it were. Much of it is left for decades without being either developed or converted.
And it never ceases to amaze me that poeple living in urban areas think that there is nothing more to the countryside than famers fields. We can afford to lose farmers fields which is why I have long advocated on here for building new towns in East Anglia and Lincolnshire. What we have lost has been the high nature value marginal land. This is why since WW2 we have lost 97% of our water meadows and hay meadows, 50% of our ancient woodland, 80% of our lowland heath and 85% of our freshwater wetlands. This is why England is considered to be critically nature depleted and ranks 89th out of 240 countries for biodiversity and last amongst the G7 countries. We have seen an 80% decline in priority species since the 1970s.
Agree in principle - agricultural monoculture should we right at the bottom of the list of things we should seek to preserve from an environmental perspective. There is a consideration for autarky-style food security in somewhere like Lincolnshire however, it’s where the vast majority of our domestic calories come from.
An example of brownfield converted into a wetland is Saltholme in Teesside - it’s great, amazing steampunk vibes. And HS2 is/was going to be surrounded by extensive wetland and meadows, cycle infrastructure etc at marginal additional cost. It’s that kind of mitigation that made a lot more sense.
just watching the open coverage - amazed it apparently takes 50 minutes to drive from centre of Liverpool to the course about 15 miles north of the city . the north feels like another world sometimes
'US President Donald Trump has delivered a primetime address in which he accused China of interfering in the 2020 election and alleged "shocking vulnerabilities" in American voting systems.
Trump, who spoke from the White House on Thursday, has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and foreign meddling in the 2020 election which he lost to Joe Biden.
In the half-hour speech, delivered three months before the midterm elections, he said he had declassified hundreds of intelligence files which supported his claims that Beijing had tried to sway the election in Biden's favour.
The US intelligence community has previously concluded China did not interfere in the 2020 election.'
Despite the endless lies, the Iran debacle, the insulting of former allies, the threats to Greenland and Canada, sucking up to Putin, the tariffs fiasco and the industrial scale corruption and grifting ........ 40% of Americans approve of the job he is doing!
That tells you everything you need to know about the state America is in and why we can never ever trust the USA again.
By all means cooperate with a sane successor but insulate ourselves from the US as best we can because as sure as night follows day the US will elect another lunatic within the next decade. Trump is just a symptom of what the USA has become.
tbf we have people on here asserting that taking a few items of clothing or concert tickets and declaring them is much worse than taking 5 million pounds from an overseas billionaire and unsuccessfully trying to conceal it.
The difference is that we all know Farage is a grifter, and he’s under investigation for such.
Starmer, Rayner et al spent the last five years attacking Conservatives constantly over such grift, only to enthusiastically embrace the gifts and trips the minute they got to power themselves. It’s the hypocracy that was the problem, they sold themselves as whiter-than-white, but turned out to be no better than the rest of them.
no, we don't all know that, and you pushing this false equivalence is blatently dishonest.
I’m not making equivalence between the two at all, they’re totally different circumstances.
Farage could be suspended or kicked out of Parliament for failing to declare a substantial gift just before he became an MP. Good, that’s how the system is supposed to work.
The problem with Labour isn’t the behaviour in itself, it’s the hypocracy and their presenting themselves as somehow better than other parties, which unraveled almost immediately once they were in power.
You’re quite right. The hypocrisy was quite breathtaking by Rayner, SKS et al.
In opposition they paraded their virtue. In power it was ‘meet the new boss. Same as the old boss’
oh here's the other hypocrisy specialist right on cue
Well done. You must be so proud
. .
you're really owning those 80s era ableist insults. it's like your calling card.
'US President Donald Trump has delivered a primetime address in which he accused China of interfering in the 2020 election and alleged "shocking vulnerabilities" in American voting systems.
Trump, who spoke from the White House on Thursday, has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and foreign meddling in the 2020 election which he lost to Joe Biden.
In the half-hour speech, delivered three months before the midterm elections, he said he had declassified hundreds of intelligence files which supported his claims that Beijing had tried to sway the election in Biden's favour.
The US intelligence community has previously concluded China did not interfere in the 2020 election.'
Despite the endless lies, the Iran debacle, the insulting of former allies, the threats to Greenland and Canada, sucking up to Putin, the tariffs fiasco and the industrial scale corruption and grifting ........ 40% of Americans approve of the job he is doing!
That tells you everything you need to know about the state America is in and why we can never ever trust the USA again.
By all means cooperate with a sane successor but insulate ourselves from the US as best we can because as sure as night follows day the US will elect another lunatic within the next decade. Trump is just a symptom of what the USA has become.
tbf we have people on here asserting that taking a few items of clothing or concert tickets and declaring them is much worse than taking 5 million pounds from an overseas billionaire and unsuccessfully trying to conceal it.
The difference is that we all know Farage is a grifter, and he’s under investigation for such.
Starmer, Rayner et al spent the last five years attacking Conservatives constantly over such grift, only to enthusiastically embrace the gifts and trips the minute they got to power themselves. It’s the hypocracy that was the problem, they sold themselves as whiter-than-white, but turned out to be no better than the rest of them.
no, we don't all know that, and you pushing this false equivalence is blatently dishonest.
I’m not making equivalence between the two at all, they’re totally different circumstances.
Farage could be suspended or kicked out of Parliament for failing to declare a substantial gift just before he became an MP. Good, that’s how the system is supposed to work.
The problem with Labour isn’t the behaviour in itself, it’s the hypocracy and their presenting themselves as somehow better than other parties, which unraveled almost immediately once they were in power.
Surely all parties, quite reasonably, present themselves to their target audience as being better than the other parties? In the case of Reform, their message is that they are the non-establishment party who intend to root out the corruption and waste that has been endemic under the other parties, so if their leader is himself guilty of grift, it makes them even more hypocritical.
Abso-bloody-lutely. The problem is when the Labour supporters use ‘s behaviour to try and minimise their own hypocracy in government.
Starmer had almost no honeymoon because the stories of his wife’s dresses, concerts, and sporting events, started within weeks of him taking office. It was as if they spent that whole summer spending other people’s money.
That is bad news for the Forest and Stroud, possibly Gloucester itself, as the county council will be dominated by rich Fukkers from Tewkesbury and the Cotswolds who will be totally unscrupulous about redirecting all the money to where it will benefit their voters rather than where it's actually needed.
The whole plan for the country is a f##king shambles. Pointless and costly reorganisations which will do nothing to improve local democracy or performance. Indeed I expect services to be far worse and cost far more as a result.
I’d be fascinated by the thought processes behind these re-organisations.
Sadly I do suspect a lot of gerrymandering.
And of course the changes will ensure that rural areas are dominated by the adjacent urban areas so making things like new building developments easier.
They will do almost nothing to save costs. There will be a few very senior managerial jobs that will go but because of the TUPE rules they cannot use the reorganisation as an excuse for layoffs, nor can they change pay and conditions. And given that they will still need to use existing district and county council offices because they still need to do all the jobs that are currently being done and need the office spce for that, there will be little or no real-estate savings.
This is all being driven entirely by political considerations and is a centralising rather than decentralising move. A real retrograde step.
Given we desperately need developments and that you (rightly) welcome migration which means we need even more developments, then why are you saying it will make new developments easier as if it is a bad thing?
Because what it actually means is people living in one area deciding that all those developments should be in another area - preferably some distance away from them. The urban areas have large swathes of brownfield sites which should be redeveloped. But that is more expensive both for the developers and the local authorities. So now they will have nice large areas of green field they can build on instead. It is simply supercharged NIMBYism.
Where are these mythical large swathes of brownfield sites that have not been redeveloped in the past quarter of a century where our population has grown by about 20%?
Any brownfield sites that can be developed should be and largely are, but we need green too. And will do as long as our population rises and until we clear the backlog of missing developments we need.
1.5 million homes. Half of it with some form of planning permission in place. But developers don't like building on brownfield sites because of the additional costs.
Allegedly, claimed by a group the CPRE with a very vested-interest and based on a series of flawed assumptions.
Yes if every single brownfield site were capable of being transformed to housing, at high density, and nothing else then those houses could be built.
However that is never going to happen and can't happen. Some land is unsuitable due to contamination or other reasons. And some will inevitably get used for other purposes, such as industry or retail or anything else. Indeed, build homes and other services are needed so its never all going to go to housing.
So yes, brownfield can be a part of the mix - and is, but green is needed too.
Find some counter evidence and you might be worth listening to on this. But vague claims which are not backed up by any actual evidence, whilst occasionally a PB standard, does not win arguments.
Our analysis clearly highlights the planning systems as very significant drivers of negative overall outcomes in the housing market. Across GB as a whole, and England in particular, the planning systems are not delivering sufficient planning permissions to deliver new housing up to government targets and other assessments of need.
... We have also seen evidence that problems in planning systems may be having a disproportionate impact on SME housebuilders ...
.. We have found that barriers to entry and expansion are likely to be restricting the role of SMEs in the market. Of these barriers, the most significant is negotiating the planning system, the burdens of which fall most heavily on smaller builders, followed by access to land ...
The CMA does not argue that the solution is simply 'build on brownfield'; it identifies a systemic shortage of permissions and land supply. The fact that planning constraints exist applies regardless of whether the land is brownfield or greenfield.
Around 54% of new homes are already being built on brownfield land. So brownfield is not being ignored, it is already the majority of new housing.
The disagreement is not whether brownfield should be used. It should. The question is whether theoretical brownfield capacity means greenfield development is unnecessary. The evidence does not support that conclusion. Brownfield sites have competing uses, viability constraints and are not always located where housing demand is highest. Therefore brownfield is part of the solution, but not the entire solution.
So no actual evidence to counter the argument that there are brownfield sites capable of supporting 1.5 million additional homes then? Just some completely different argument about your old idiocy about the the planning system.
Did you miss the CMA saying there is a shortage of land there?
Yes the CMA acknowledged planning as the biggest problem, which it is, but it also said access to land was one too which I quoted.
And yes, brownfield is capable of supporting those homes if every hectare of that brownfield is used for homes and nothing else, as I acknowledged all along. However we need industry and retail and a plethora of other uses for brownfield too. Potentially housing does not equate to will be housing as there are competing demands for land.
Do you think we can do without industry? Or anything else?
It never ceases to amaze me how people living in sparsely populated rural areas consider that people in cities have absolutely no need for green space and that as more and more people are crammed into existing urban settlements all the existing brownfield land should be used for housing as opposed to creating green space for recreational use and to boost urban wildlife. What a selfish bunch.
Green space in urban areas is the most valuable in the country and we should be looking to add to it. Existing "brownfield sites" are often quite ecologically rich simply by virtue of nature having reclaimed them.
New housing should be developed primarily as planned settlement on the misnamed "green belt", which apart from the brownfield parts which can rightly be recategorised as "grey belt" also includes vaste swathes of ecologically denuded land put over to high intensity agri business with monolithic crops and high use of insecticides etc. Such as huge fields of hedgerow-less oil seed rape for example, very common around here. Green deserts if you prefer.
Almost no brownfield is converted to green space. It would be great if it were. Much of it is left for decades without being either developed or converted.
And it never ceases to amaze me that poeple living in urban areas think that there is nothing more to the countryside than famers fields. We can afford to lose farmers fields which is why I have long advocated on here for building new towns in East Anglia and Lincolnshire. What we have lost has been the high nature value marginal land. This is why since WW2 we have lost 97% of our water meadows and hay meadows, 50% of our ancient woodland, 80% of our lowland heath and 85% of our freshwater wetlands. This is why England is considered to be critically nature depleted and ranks 189th out of 240 countries for biodiversity and last amongst the G7 countries. We have seen an 80% decline in priority species since the 1970s.
I've always thought we should build a new city in Lincolnshire.
The problem is that people don't especially want to live on the east side of the country. Arguably, the housing shortage reflects desires for people to live in high-demand areas.
And yet they are building 1 million new houses in the corridor between Cambridge and Oxford. It is quicker for me to get into central London from Grantham than it is from most of the commuter belt.
'US President Donald Trump has delivered a primetime address in which he accused China of interfering in the 2020 election and alleged "shocking vulnerabilities" in American voting systems.
Trump, who spoke from the White House on Thursday, has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and foreign meddling in the 2020 election which he lost to Joe Biden.
In the half-hour speech, delivered three months before the midterm elections, he said he had declassified hundreds of intelligence files which supported his claims that Beijing had tried to sway the election in Biden's favour.
The US intelligence community has previously concluded China did not interfere in the 2020 election.'
Despite the endless lies, the Iran debacle, the insulting of former allies, the threats to Greenland and Canada, sucking up to Putin, the tariffs fiasco and the industrial scale corruption and grifting ........ 40% of Americans approve of the job he is doing!
That tells you everything you need to know about the state America is in and why we can never ever trust the USA again.
By all means cooperate with a sane successor but insulate ourselves from the US as best we can because as sure as night follows day the US will elect another lunatic within the next decade. Trump is just a symptom of what the USA has become.
tbf we have people on here asserting that taking a few items of clothing or concert tickets and declaring them is much worse than taking 5 million pounds from an overseas billionaire and unsuccessfully trying to conceal it.
The difference is that we all know Farage is a grifter, and he’s under investigation for such.
Starmer, Rayner et al spent the last five years attacking Conservatives constantly over such grift, only to enthusiastically embrace the gifts and trips the minute they got to power themselves. It’s the hypocracy that was the problem, they sold themselves as whiter-than-white, but turned out to be no better than the rest of them.
Mrs Starmer's lingerie were unwise gifts from a political ally and Angela Rayner's run in with HMRC was worthy of a resignation but trying to equate it to (off the top of my head) the PPE scandal, Nahawi's tax issues whilst CoE ( is far more serious than Rayner) Farage's 5 million and (£13m for the party) is disingenuous.
Perhaps Mrs Starmer's clothes and Starmer's glasses could be compared to Johnson's Lulu Lytle wallpaper and Carole Bamford's Daylesford food parcels to Johnson. None of which worried you all too much.
The thing is it’s all rotten and shit. Farage’s situation is very bad as it raises questions about his suitability to office and how his decision making can be swayed by money.
Boris’s wallpaper issue was dumb as it showed such disconnect from sense and reading the room and a desire (possibly not necessarily in this case) for the finest things in life at others’ expense.
The PPP situation was some grifters (and some who genuinely were in a position to help) benefiting from an emergency and unprecedented situation - if we are being honest I don’t think any party in charge could have dealt with the situation much better and there would have been connected chancers taking advantage.
Nahawi was stupid and arrogant showing probably a belief that he was above needing to follow laws and rules for the sake of a bit more money when already well off.
Rayner was stupid as she tried to minimise her liabilities and then tried to throw blameless third parties under a bus. The fact that she was a minister, for housing no less, should, if she had a brain, have led her to measure twice and cut once on a property and tax matter.
Starmer and the gifts was, in my opinion as bad as the above regardless of the value of the gifts. It was cheap, it looked unnecessarily vain for a man earning well over his career to accept glasses, clothes etc from anyone. It was during a period where a lot of the population are struggling financially and yet a multi millionaire is giving a wealthy man free designer items. If someone is happy to take those gifts them it raises the spectre of what else they could be offered and accept.
So it shouldn’t matter which party you support, all of the above were bad and stupid behaviour and all “as bad” in different ways as they undermine public trust in politicians and build on existing cynicism.
'US President Donald Trump has delivered a primetime address in which he accused China of interfering in the 2020 election and alleged "shocking vulnerabilities" in American voting systems.
Trump, who spoke from the White House on Thursday, has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and foreign meddling in the 2020 election which he lost to Joe Biden.
In the half-hour speech, delivered three months before the midterm elections, he said he had declassified hundreds of intelligence files which supported his claims that Beijing had tried to sway the election in Biden's favour.
The US intelligence community has previously concluded China did not interfere in the 2020 election.'
Despite the endless lies, the Iran debacle, the insulting of former allies, the threats to Greenland and Canada, sucking up to Putin, the tariffs fiasco and the industrial scale corruption and grifting ........ 40% of Americans approve of the job he is doing!
That tells you everything you need to know about the state America is in and why we can never ever trust the USA again.
By all means cooperate with a sane successor but insulate ourselves from the US as best we can because as sure as night follows day the US will elect another lunatic within the next decade. Trump is just a symptom of what the USA has become.
tbf we have people on here asserting that taking a few items of clothing or concert tickets and declaring them is much worse than taking 5 million pounds from an overseas billionaire and unsuccessfully trying to conceal it.
The difference is that we all know Farage is a grifter, and he’s under investigation for such.
Starmer, Rayner et al spent the last five years attacking Conservatives constantly over such grift, only to enthusiastically embrace the gifts and trips the minute they got to power themselves. It’s the hypocracy that was the problem, they sold themselves as whiter-than-white, but turned out to be no better than the rest of them.
no, we don't all know that, and you pushing this false equivalence is blatently dishonest.
I’m not making equivalence between the two at all, they’re totally different circumstances.
Farage could be suspended or kicked out of Parliament for failing to declare a substantial gift just before he became an MP. Good, that’s how the system is supposed to work.
The problem with Labour isn’t the behaviour in itself, it’s the hypocracy and their presenting themselves as somehow better than other parties, which unraveled almost immediately once they were in power.
You’re quite right. The hypocrisy was quite breathtaking by Rayner, SKS et al.
In opposition they paraded their virtue. In power it was ‘meet the new boss. Same as the old boss’
Even after he's gone, will SKS be "living rent free" in your head ?
That is bad news for the Forest and Stroud, possibly Gloucester itself, as the county council will be dominated by rich Fukkers from Tewkesbury and the Cotswolds who will be totally unscrupulous about redirecting all the money to where it will benefit their voters rather than where it's actually needed.
The whole plan for the country is a f##king shambles. Pointless and costly reorganisations which will do nothing to improve local democracy or performance. Indeed I expect services to be far worse and cost far more as a result.
I’d be fascinated by the thought processes behind these re-organisations.
Sadly I do suspect a lot of gerrymandering.
And of course the changes will ensure that rural areas are dominated by the adjacent urban areas so making things like new building developments easier.
They will do almost nothing to save costs. There will be a few very senior managerial jobs that will go but because of the TUPE rules they cannot use the reorganisation as an excuse for layoffs, nor can they change pay and conditions. And given that they will still need to use existing district and county council offices because they still need to do all the jobs that are currently being done and need the office spce for that, there will be little or no real-estate savings.
This is all being driven entirely by political considerations and is a centralising rather than decentralising move. A real retrograde step.
Given we desperately need developments and that you (rightly) welcome migration which means we need even more developments, then why are you saying it will make new developments easier as if it is a bad thing?
Because what it actually means is people living in one area deciding that all those developments should be in another area - preferably some distance away from them. The urban areas have large swathes of brownfield sites which should be redeveloped. But that is more expensive both for the developers and the local authorities. So now they will have nice large areas of green field they can build on instead. It is simply supercharged NIMBYism.
Where are these mythical large swathes of brownfield sites that have not been redeveloped in the past quarter of a century where our population has grown by about 20%?
Any brownfield sites that can be developed should be and largely are, but we need green too. And will do as long as our population rises and until we clear the backlog of missing developments we need.
1.5 million homes. Half of it with some form of planning permission in place. But developers don't like building on brownfield sites because of the additional costs.
Allegedly, claimed by a group the CPRE with a very vested-interest and based on a series of flawed assumptions.
Yes if every single brownfield site were capable of being transformed to housing, at high density, and nothing else then those houses could be built.
However that is never going to happen and can't happen. Some land is unsuitable due to contamination or other reasons. And some will inevitably get used for other purposes, such as industry or retail or anything else. Indeed, build homes and other services are needed so its never all going to go to housing.
So yes, brownfield can be a part of the mix - and is, but green is needed too.
Find some counter evidence and you might be worth listening to on this. But vague claims which are not backed up by any actual evidence, whilst occasionally a PB standard, does not win arguments.
Our analysis clearly highlights the planning systems as very significant drivers of negative overall outcomes in the housing market. Across GB as a whole, and England in particular, the planning systems are not delivering sufficient planning permissions to deliver new housing up to government targets and other assessments of need.
... We have also seen evidence that problems in planning systems may be having a disproportionate impact on SME housebuilders ...
.. We have found that barriers to entry and expansion are likely to be restricting the role of SMEs in the market. Of these barriers, the most significant is negotiating the planning system, the burdens of which fall most heavily on smaller builders, followed by access to land ...
The CMA does not argue that the solution is simply 'build on brownfield'; it identifies a systemic shortage of permissions and land supply. The fact that planning constraints exist applies regardless of whether the land is brownfield or greenfield.
Around 54% of new homes are already being built on brownfield land. So brownfield is not being ignored, it is already the majority of new housing.
The disagreement is not whether brownfield should be used. It should. The question is whether theoretical brownfield capacity means greenfield development is unnecessary. The evidence does not support that conclusion. Brownfield sites have competing uses, viability constraints and are not always located where housing demand is highest. Therefore brownfield is part of the solution, but not the entire solution.
So no actual evidence to counter the argument that there are brownfield sites capable of supporting 1.5 million additional homes then? Just some completely different argument about your old idiocy about the the planning system.
Did you miss the CMA saying there is a shortage of land there?
Yes the CMA acknowledged planning as the biggest problem, which it is, but it also said access to land was one too which I quoted.
And yes, brownfield is capable of supporting those homes if every hectare of that brownfield is used for homes and nothing else, as I acknowledged all along. However we need industry and retail and a plethora of other uses for brownfield too. Potentially housing does not equate to will be housing as there are competing demands for land.
Do you think we can do without industry? Or anything else?
It never ceases to amaze me how people living in sparsely populated rural areas consider that people in cities have absolutely no need for green space and that as more and more people are crammed into existing urban settlements all the existing brownfield land should be used for housing as opposed to creating green space for recreational use and to boost urban wildlife. What a selfish bunch.
Green space in urban areas is the most valuable in the country and we should be looking to add to it. Existing "brownfield sites" are often quite ecologically rich simply by virtue of nature having reclaimed them.
New housing should be developed primarily as planned settlement on the misnamed "green belt", which apart from the brownfield parts which can rightly be recategorised as "grey belt" also includes vaste swathes of ecologically denuded land put over to high intensity agri business with monolithic crops and high use of insecticides etc. Such as huge fields of hedgerow-less oil seed rape for example, very common around here. Green deserts if you prefer.
Almost no brownfield is converted to green space. It would be great if it were. Much of it is left for decades without being either developed or converted.
And it never ceases to amaze me that poeple living in urban areas think that there is nothing more to the countryside than famers fields. We can afford to lose farmers fields which is why I have long advocated on here for building new towns in East Anglia and Lincolnshire. What we have lost has been the high nature value marginal land. This is why since WW2 we have lost 97% of our water meadows and hay meadows, 50% of our ancient woodland, 80% of our lowland heath and 85% of our freshwater wetlands. This is why England is considered to be critically nature depleted and ranks 189th out of 240 countries for biodiversity and last amongst the G7 countries. We have seen an 80% decline in priority species since the 1970s.
Its been lost to agriculture, not to housing.
The planning system and green belt were in place the entire time that it was lost. Neither worked to save what should have been protected.
The small amounts we have left are only there because of the planning system. You would see the whole lot destroyed.
'US President Donald Trump has delivered a primetime address in which he accused China of interfering in the 2020 election and alleged "shocking vulnerabilities" in American voting systems.
Trump, who spoke from the White House on Thursday, has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and foreign meddling in the 2020 election which he lost to Joe Biden.
In the half-hour speech, delivered three months before the midterm elections, he said he had declassified hundreds of intelligence files which supported his claims that Beijing had tried to sway the election in Biden's favour.
The US intelligence community has previously concluded China did not interfere in the 2020 election.'
Despite the endless lies, the Iran debacle, the insulting of former allies, the threats to Greenland and Canada, sucking up to Putin, the tariffs fiasco and the industrial scale corruption and grifting ........ 40% of Americans approve of the job he is doing!
That tells you everything you need to know about the state America is in and why we can never ever trust the USA again.
By all means cooperate with a sane successor but insulate ourselves from the US as best we can because as sure as night follows day the US will elect another lunatic within the next decade. Trump is just a symptom of what the USA has become.
tbf we have people on here asserting that taking a few items of clothing or concert tickets and declaring them is much worse than taking 5 million pounds from an overseas billionaire and unsuccessfully trying to conceal it.
The difference is that we all know Farage is a grifter, and he’s under investigation for such.
Starmer, Rayner et al spent the last five years attacking Conservatives constantly over such grift, only to enthusiastically embrace the gifts and trips the minute they got to power themselves. It’s the hypocracy that was the problem, they sold themselves as whiter-than-white, but turned out to be no better than the rest of them.
no, we don't all know that, and you pushing this false equivalence is blatently dishonest.
I’m not making equivalence between the two at all, they’re totally different circumstances.
Farage could be suspended or kicked out of Parliament for failing to declare a substantial gift just before he became an MP. Good, that’s how the system is supposed to work.
The problem with Labour isn’t the behaviour in itself, it’s the hypocracy and their presenting themselves as somehow better than other parties, which unraveled almost immediately once they were in power.
You’re quite right. The hypocrisy was quite breathtaking by Rayner, SKS et al.
In opposition they paraded their virtue. In power it was ‘meet the new boss. Same as the old boss’
oh here's the other hypocrisy specialist right on cue
Well done. You must be so proud
. .
you're really owning those 80s era ableist insults. it's like your calling card.
It was SKS total and chronic lack of political skills that did for him, not the policies.
A leader like Tony Blair or David Cameron, carefully preparing the ground, could easily have cut back on WFA, although they'd still have experienced the screams and howls of utterly self-entitled pensioners, they could have weathered them.
Yes, they could (e) have and should have.
But I no longer think it's only pensioners who disapproved of the WFA cuts. I noted recently that although working age people do tend to view pensioners as taking more than their fair share, they are still very supportive of measures that reduce death by natural causes for the elderly.
That's the line that's often peddled.
In reality, WFA was used, for example, by OGH to top up his Betfair account.
It's an astonishingly bad use of public funds.
Poor shivering pensioners is one of those bits of our collective mental map of the country that isn't particularly true any more, but is really hard to shift.
There are others- for example, lanyard-wearers aren't the powerful ones; if anything, they're the everyman workers of the 21st century.
I'd love to think that the right politician-educator could teach the new map... but I'm not optimistic. Kemi's not trying, and the early signs from Andy aren't good.
'US President Donald Trump has delivered a primetime address in which he accused China of interfering in the 2020 election and alleged "shocking vulnerabilities" in American voting systems.
Trump, who spoke from the White House on Thursday, has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and foreign meddling in the 2020 election which he lost to Joe Biden.
In the half-hour speech, delivered three months before the midterm elections, he said he had declassified hundreds of intelligence files which supported his claims that Beijing had tried to sway the election in Biden's favour.
The US intelligence community has previously concluded China did not interfere in the 2020 election.'
Despite the endless lies, the Iran debacle, the insulting of former allies, the threats to Greenland and Canada, sucking up to Putin, the tariffs fiasco and the industrial scale corruption and grifting ........ 40% of Americans approve of the job he is doing!
That tells you everything you need to know about the state America is in and why we can never ever trust the USA again.
By all means cooperate with a sane successor but insulate ourselves from the US as best we can because as sure as night follows day the US will elect another lunatic within the next decade. Trump is just a symptom of what the USA has become.
tbf we have people on here asserting that taking a few items of clothing or concert tickets and declaring them is much worse than taking 5 million pounds from an overseas billionaire and unsuccessfully trying to conceal it.
The difference is that we all know Farage is a grifter, and he’s under investigation for such.
Starmer, Rayner et al spent the last five years attacking Conservatives constantly over such grift, only to enthusiastically embrace the gifts and trips the minute they got to power themselves. It’s the hypocracy that was the problem, they sold themselves as whiter-than-white, but turned out to be no better than the rest of them.
no, we don't all know that, and you pushing this false equivalence is blatently dishonest.
I’m not making equivalence between the two at all, they’re totally different circumstances.
Farage could be suspended or kicked out of Parliament for failing to declare a substantial gift just before he became an MP. Good, that’s how the system is supposed to work.
The problem with Labour isn’t the behaviour in itself, it’s the hypocracy and their presenting themselves as somehow better than other parties, which unraveled almost immediately once they were in power.
You’re quite right. The hypocrisy was quite breathtaking by Rayner, SKS et al.
In opposition they paraded their virtue. In power it was ‘meet the new boss. Same as the old boss’
oh here's the other hypocrisy specialist right on cue
Well done. You must be so proud
. .
you're really owning those 80s era ableist insults. it's like your calling card.
just watching the open coverage - amazed it apparently takes 50 minutes to drive from centre of Liverpool to the course about 15 miles north of the city . the north feels like another world sometimes
I know - 15 miles I'd normally expect just over half an hour but you always get some traffic in a city centre.
'US President Donald Trump has delivered a primetime address in which he accused China of interfering in the 2020 election and alleged "shocking vulnerabilities" in American voting systems.
Trump, who spoke from the White House on Thursday, has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and foreign meddling in the 2020 election which he lost to Joe Biden.
In the half-hour speech, delivered three months before the midterm elections, he said he had declassified hundreds of intelligence files which supported his claims that Beijing had tried to sway the election in Biden's favour.
The US intelligence community has previously concluded China did not interfere in the 2020 election.'
Despite the endless lies, the Iran debacle, the insulting of former allies, the threats to Greenland and Canada, sucking up to Putin, the tariffs fiasco and the industrial scale corruption and grifting ........ 40% of Americans approve of the job he is doing!
That tells you everything you need to know about the state America is in and why we can never ever trust the USA again.
By all means cooperate with a sane successor but insulate ourselves from the US as best we can because as sure as night follows day the US will elect another lunatic within the next decade. Trump is just a symptom of what the USA has become.
tbf we have people on here asserting that taking a few items of clothing or concert tickets and declaring them is much worse than taking 5 million pounds from an overseas billionaire and unsuccessfully trying to conceal it.
The difference is that we all know Farage is a grifter, and he’s under investigation for such.
Starmer, Rayner et al spent the last five years attacking Conservatives constantly over such grift, only to enthusiastically embrace the gifts and trips the minute they got to power themselves. It’s the hypocracy that was the problem, they sold themselves as whiter-than-white, but turned out to be no better than the rest of them.
no, we don't all know that, and you pushing this false equivalence is blatently dishonest.
I’m not making equivalence between the two at all, they’re totally different circumstances.
Farage could be suspended or kicked out of Parliament for failing to declare a substantial gift just before he became an MP. Good, that’s how the system is supposed to work.
The problem with Labour isn’t the behaviour in itself, it’s the hypocracy and their presenting themselves as somehow better than other parties, which unraveled almost immediately once they were in power.
You’re quite right. The hypocrisy was quite breathtaking by Rayner, SKS et al.
In opposition they paraded their virtue. In power it was ‘meet the new boss. Same as the old boss’
oh here's the other hypocrisy specialist right on cue
I think Labour have been hostages to their own narrative against Tory corruption but suggesting a parity with the PPE scandal or Farage's millions is a hypocritical crock.
Starmer should have bought his own glasses and Rayner should have sought better tax advice, but where do we start with the PPE fast lane scandal?
That is bad news for the Forest and Stroud, possibly Gloucester itself, as the county council will be dominated by rich Fukkers from Tewkesbury and the Cotswolds who will be totally unscrupulous about redirecting all the money to where it will benefit their voters rather than where it's actually needed.
The whole plan for the country is a f##king shambles. Pointless and costly reorganisations which will do nothing to improve local democracy or performance. Indeed I expect services to be far worse and cost far more as a result.
I’d be fascinated by the thought processes behind these re-organisations.
Sadly I do suspect a lot of gerrymandering.
And of course the changes will ensure that rural areas are dominated by the adjacent urban areas so making things like new building developments easier.
They will do almost nothing to save costs. There will be a few very senior managerial jobs that will go but because of the TUPE rules they cannot use the reorganisation as an excuse for layoffs, nor can they change pay and conditions. And given that they will still need to use existing district and county council offices because they still need to do all the jobs that are currently being done and need the office spce for that, there will be little or no real-estate savings.
This is all being driven entirely by political considerations and is a centralising rather than decentralising move. A real retrograde step.
Given we desperately need developments and that you (rightly) welcome migration which means we need even more developments, then why are you saying it will make new developments easier as if it is a bad thing?
Because what it actually means is people living in one area deciding that all those developments should be in another area - preferably some distance away from them. The urban areas have large swathes of brownfield sites which should be redeveloped. But that is more expensive both for the developers and the local authorities. So now they will have nice large areas of green field they can build on instead. It is simply supercharged NIMBYism.
Where are these mythical large swathes of brownfield sites that have not been redeveloped in the past quarter of a century where our population has grown by about 20%?
Any brownfield sites that can be developed should be and largely are, but we need green too. And will do as long as our population rises and until we clear the backlog of missing developments we need.
1.5 million homes. Half of it with some form of planning permission in place. But developers don't like building on brownfield sites because of the additional costs.
Allegedly, claimed by a group the CPRE with a very vested-interest and based on a series of flawed assumptions.
Yes if every single brownfield site were capable of being transformed to housing, at high density, and nothing else then those houses could be built.
However that is never going to happen and can't happen. Some land is unsuitable due to contamination or other reasons. And some will inevitably get used for other purposes, such as industry or retail or anything else. Indeed, build homes and other services are needed so its never all going to go to housing.
So yes, brownfield can be a part of the mix - and is, but green is needed too.
Find some counter evidence and you might be worth listening to on this. But vague claims which are not backed up by any actual evidence, whilst occasionally a PB standard, does not win arguments.
Our analysis clearly highlights the planning systems as very significant drivers of negative overall outcomes in the housing market. Across GB as a whole, and England in particular, the planning systems are not delivering sufficient planning permissions to deliver new housing up to government targets and other assessments of need.
... We have also seen evidence that problems in planning systems may be having a disproportionate impact on SME housebuilders ...
.. We have found that barriers to entry and expansion are likely to be restricting the role of SMEs in the market. Of these barriers, the most significant is negotiating the planning system, the burdens of which fall most heavily on smaller builders, followed by access to land ...
The CMA does not argue that the solution is simply 'build on brownfield'; it identifies a systemic shortage of permissions and land supply. The fact that planning constraints exist applies regardless of whether the land is brownfield or greenfield.
Around 54% of new homes are already being built on brownfield land. So brownfield is not being ignored, it is already the majority of new housing.
The disagreement is not whether brownfield should be used. It should. The question is whether theoretical brownfield capacity means greenfield development is unnecessary. The evidence does not support that conclusion. Brownfield sites have competing uses, viability constraints and are not always located where housing demand is highest. Therefore brownfield is part of the solution, but not the entire solution.
So no actual evidence to counter the argument that there are brownfield sites capable of supporting 1.5 million additional homes then? Just some completely different argument about your old idiocy about the the planning system.
Did you miss the CMA saying there is a shortage of land there?
Yes the CMA acknowledged planning as the biggest problem, which it is, but it also said access to land was one too which I quoted.
And yes, brownfield is capable of supporting those homes if every hectare of that brownfield is used for homes and nothing else, as I acknowledged all along. However we need industry and retail and a plethora of other uses for brownfield too. Potentially housing does not equate to will be housing as there are competing demands for land.
Do you think we can do without industry? Or anything else?
It never ceases to amaze me how people living in sparsely populated rural areas consider that people in cities have absolutely no need for green space and that as more and more people are crammed into existing urban settlements all the existing brownfield land should be used for housing as opposed to creating green space for recreational use and to boost urban wildlife. What a selfish bunch.
Green space in urban areas is the most valuable in the country and we should be looking to add to it. Existing "brownfield sites" are often quite ecologically rich simply by virtue of nature having reclaimed them.
New housing should be developed primarily as planned settlement on the misnamed "green belt", which apart from the brownfield parts which can rightly be recategorised as "grey belt" also includes vaste swathes of ecologically denuded land put over to high intensity agri business with monolithic crops and high use of insecticides etc. Such as huge fields of hedgerow-less oil seed rape for example, very common around here. Green deserts if you prefer.
Almost no brownfield is converted to green space. It would be great if it were. Much of it is left for decades without being either developed or converted.
And it never ceases to amaze me that poeple living in urban areas think that there is nothing more to the countryside than famers fields. We can afford to lose farmers fields which is why I have long advocated on here for building new towns in East Anglia and Lincolnshire. What we have lost has been the high nature value marginal land. This is why since WW2 we have lost 97% of our water meadows and hay meadows, 50% of our ancient woodland, 80% of our lowland heath and 85% of our freshwater wetlands. This is why England is considered to be critically nature depleted and ranks 189th out of 240 countries for biodiversity and last amongst the G7 countries. We have seen an 80% decline in priority species since the 1970s.
Its been lost to agriculture, not to housing.
The planning system and green belt were in place the entire time that it was lost. Neither worked to save what should have been protected.
The small amounts we have left are only there because of the planning system. You would see the whole lot destroyed.
No I would not.
I would, as I have said time and again, zone such lands as not for development.
Land that is for development, which arguably should include uniculture agricultural land but definitely should include brownfield land, should be able to be developed within the law without seeking permission first - so long as it is developed within standards.
That would enable SMEs to redevelop brownfield sites, or convert land that you don't object to being developed, while protecting the high nature value land like heaths and wetlands.
Currently we have a system of all that is not permitted is forbidden. I would revert to a more liberal, traditionally British system that existed pre-war and before this devastation that you speak of where all that is not forbidden is permitted - with the development of such limited lands being one thing that is forbidden.
just watching the open coverage - amazed it apparently takes 50 minutes to drive from centre of Liverpool to the course about 15 miles north of the city . the north feels like another world sometimes
The North's public transport is poor in comparison to London's - but low road speeds in urban areas isn't a specifically Northern issue - surely it would take 50 minutes to drive from Central London to somewhere 15 miles away too? I wouldn't say there's anything particularly challenging about the roads around Crosby/Formby/Southport.
Indeed (I'm assuming the Open is at Birkdale given the above) there are few top-level golf courses in the country better connected by public transport to their closest big city than Birkdale is to Liverpool.
That is bad news for the Forest and Stroud, possibly Gloucester itself, as the county council will be dominated by rich Fukkers from Tewkesbury and the Cotswolds who will be totally unscrupulous about redirecting all the money to where it will benefit their voters rather than where it's actually needed.
The whole plan for the country is a f##king shambles. Pointless and costly reorganisations which will do nothing to improve local democracy or performance. Indeed I expect services to be far worse and cost far more as a result.
I’d be fascinated by the thought processes behind these re-organisations.
Sadly I do suspect a lot of gerrymandering.
And of course the changes will ensure that rural areas are dominated by the adjacent urban areas so making things like new building developments easier.
They will do almost nothing to save costs. There will be a few very senior managerial jobs that will go but because of the TUPE rules they cannot use the reorganisation as an excuse for layoffs, nor can they change pay and conditions. And given that they will still need to use existing district and county council offices because they still need to do all the jobs that are currently being done and need the office spce for that, there will be little or no real-estate savings.
This is all being driven entirely by political considerations and is a centralising rather than decentralising move. A real retrograde step.
Given we desperately need developments and that you (rightly) welcome migration which means we need even more developments, then why are you saying it will make new developments easier as if it is a bad thing?
Because what it actually means is people living in one area deciding that all those developments should be in another area - preferably some distance away from them. The urban areas have large swathes of brownfield sites which should be redeveloped. But that is more expensive both for the developers and the local authorities. So now they will have nice large areas of green field they can build on instead. It is simply supercharged NIMBYism.
Where are these mythical large swathes of brownfield sites that have not been redeveloped in the past quarter of a century where our population has grown by about 20%?
Any brownfield sites that can be developed should be and largely are, but we need green too. And will do as long as our population rises and until we clear the backlog of missing developments we need.
1.5 million homes. Half of it with some form of planning permission in place. But developers don't like building on brownfield sites because of the additional costs.
Allegedly, claimed by a group the CPRE with a very vested-interest and based on a series of flawed assumptions.
Yes if every single brownfield site were capable of being transformed to housing, at high density, and nothing else then those houses could be built.
However that is never going to happen and can't happen. Some land is unsuitable due to contamination or other reasons. And some will inevitably get used for other purposes, such as industry or retail or anything else. Indeed, build homes and other services are needed so its never all going to go to housing.
So yes, brownfield can be a part of the mix - and is, but green is needed too.
Find some counter evidence and you might be worth listening to on this. But vague claims which are not backed up by any actual evidence, whilst occasionally a PB standard, does not win arguments.
Our analysis clearly highlights the planning systems as very significant drivers of negative overall outcomes in the housing market. Across GB as a whole, and England in particular, the planning systems are not delivering sufficient planning permissions to deliver new housing up to government targets and other assessments of need.
... We have also seen evidence that problems in planning systems may be having a disproportionate impact on SME housebuilders ...
.. We have found that barriers to entry and expansion are likely to be restricting the role of SMEs in the market. Of these barriers, the most significant is negotiating the planning system, the burdens of which fall most heavily on smaller builders, followed by access to land ...
The CMA does not argue that the solution is simply 'build on brownfield'; it identifies a systemic shortage of permissions and land supply. The fact that planning constraints exist applies regardless of whether the land is brownfield or greenfield.
Around 54% of new homes are already being built on brownfield land. So brownfield is not being ignored, it is already the majority of new housing.
The disagreement is not whether brownfield should be used. It should. The question is whether theoretical brownfield capacity means greenfield development is unnecessary. The evidence does not support that conclusion. Brownfield sites have competing uses, viability constraints and are not always located where housing demand is highest. Therefore brownfield is part of the solution, but not the entire solution.
So no actual evidence to counter the argument that there are brownfield sites capable of supporting 1.5 million additional homes then? Just some completely different argument about your old idiocy about the the planning system.
Did you miss the CMA saying there is a shortage of land there?
Yes the CMA acknowledged planning as the biggest problem, which it is, but it also said access to land was one too which I quoted.
And yes, brownfield is capable of supporting those homes if every hectare of that brownfield is used for homes and nothing else, as I acknowledged all along. However we need industry and retail and a plethora of other uses for brownfield too. Potentially housing does not equate to will be housing as there are competing demands for land.
Do you think we can do without industry? Or anything else?
It never ceases to amaze me how people living in sparsely populated rural areas consider that people in cities have absolutely no need for green space and that as more and more people are crammed into existing urban settlements all the existing brownfield land should be used for housing as opposed to creating green space for recreational use and to boost urban wildlife. What a selfish bunch.
Green space in urban areas is the most valuable in the country and we should be looking to add to it. Existing "brownfield sites" are often quite ecologically rich simply by virtue of nature having reclaimed them.
New housing should be developed primarily as planned settlement on the misnamed "green belt", which apart from the brownfield parts which can rightly be recategorised as "grey belt" also includes vaste swathes of ecologically denuded land put over to high intensity agri business with monolithic crops and high use of insecticides etc. Such as huge fields of hedgerow-less oil seed rape for example, very common around here. Green deserts if you prefer.
Almost no brownfield is converted to green space. It would be great if it were. Much of it is left for decades without being either developed or converted.
And it never ceases to amaze me that poeple living in urban areas think that there is nothing more to the countryside than famers fields. We can afford to lose farmers fields which is why I have long advocated on here for building new towns in East Anglia and Lincolnshire. What we have lost has been the high nature value marginal land. This is why since WW2 we have lost 97% of our water meadows and hay meadows, 50% of our ancient woodland, 80% of our lowland heath and 85% of our freshwater wetlands. This is why England is considered to be critically nature depleted and ranks 189th out of 240 countries for biodiversity and last amongst the G7 countries. We have seen an 80% decline in priority species since the 1970s.
Likely to be exacerbated by climate change, I suspect ?
The single best way to reduce our housing problems would be genuine levelling up of the regions outside London and the SE.
Easier said than done of course, but (for example) a genuine Liverpool-Hull transits corridor would make a massive difference to economic growth in the region, make a lot more development land accessible - and more importantly make it (both brown and greenfield) more economically viable to develop
just watching the open coverage - amazed it apparently takes 50 minutes to drive from centre of Liverpool to the course about 15 miles north of the city . the north feels like another world sometimes
Why? How long would it take to drive from the centre of London to 15 miles north of the city?
Travelling from the centre of any city can take a while, however a new motorway connection between Liverpool and Southport (and via a new bridge Blackpool too) is one example of the many new motorways I would build if I were in charge of the country.
That is bad news for the Forest and Stroud, possibly Gloucester itself, as the county council will be dominated by rich Fukkers from Tewkesbury and the Cotswolds who will be totally unscrupulous about redirecting all the money to where it will benefit their voters rather than where it's actually needed.
The whole plan for the country is a f##king shambles. Pointless and costly reorganisations which will do nothing to improve local democracy or performance. Indeed I expect services to be far worse and cost far more as a result.
I’d be fascinated by the thought processes behind these re-organisations.
Sadly I do suspect a lot of gerrymandering.
And of course the changes will ensure that rural areas are dominated by the adjacent urban areas so making things like new building developments easier.
They will do almost nothing to save costs. There will be a few very senior managerial jobs that will go but because of the TUPE rules they cannot use the reorganisation as an excuse for layoffs, nor can they change pay and conditions. And given that they will still need to use existing district and county council offices because they still need to do all the jobs that are currently being done and need the office spce for that, there will be little or no real-estate savings.
This is all being driven entirely by political considerations and is a centralising rather than decentralising move. A real retrograde step.
Given we desperately need developments and that you (rightly) welcome migration which means we need even more developments, then why are you saying it will make new developments easier as if it is a bad thing?
Because what it actually means is people living in one area deciding that all those developments should be in another area - preferably some distance away from them. The urban areas have large swathes of brownfield sites which should be redeveloped. But that is more expensive both for the developers and the local authorities. So now they will have nice large areas of green field they can build on instead. It is simply supercharged NIMBYism.
Where are these mythical large swathes of brownfield sites that have not been redeveloped in the past quarter of a century where our population has grown by about 20%?
Any brownfield sites that can be developed should be and largely are, but we need green too. And will do as long as our population rises and until we clear the backlog of missing developments we need.
1.5 million homes. Half of it with some form of planning permission in place. But developers don't like building on brownfield sites because of the additional costs.
Allegedly, claimed by a group the CPRE with a very vested-interest and based on a series of flawed assumptions.
Yes if every single brownfield site were capable of being transformed to housing, at high density, and nothing else then those houses could be built.
However that is never going to happen and can't happen. Some land is unsuitable due to contamination or other reasons. And some will inevitably get used for other purposes, such as industry or retail or anything else. Indeed, build homes and other services are needed so its never all going to go to housing.
So yes, brownfield can be a part of the mix - and is, but green is needed too.
Find some counter evidence and you might be worth listening to on this. But vague claims which are not backed up by any actual evidence, whilst occasionally a PB standard, does not win arguments.
Our analysis clearly highlights the planning systems as very significant drivers of negative overall outcomes in the housing market. Across GB as a whole, and England in particular, the planning systems are not delivering sufficient planning permissions to deliver new housing up to government targets and other assessments of need.
... We have also seen evidence that problems in planning systems may be having a disproportionate impact on SME housebuilders ...
.. We have found that barriers to entry and expansion are likely to be restricting the role of SMEs in the market. Of these barriers, the most significant is negotiating the planning system, the burdens of which fall most heavily on smaller builders, followed by access to land ...
The CMA does not argue that the solution is simply 'build on brownfield'; it identifies a systemic shortage of permissions and land supply. The fact that planning constraints exist applies regardless of whether the land is brownfield or greenfield.
Around 54% of new homes are already being built on brownfield land. So brownfield is not being ignored, it is already the majority of new housing.
The disagreement is not whether brownfield should be used. It should. The question is whether theoretical brownfield capacity means greenfield development is unnecessary. The evidence does not support that conclusion. Brownfield sites have competing uses, viability constraints and are not always located where housing demand is highest. Therefore brownfield is part of the solution, but not the entire solution.
So no actual evidence to counter the argument that there are brownfield sites capable of supporting 1.5 million additional homes then? Just some completely different argument about your old idiocy about the the planning system.
Did you miss the CMA saying there is a shortage of land there?
Yes the CMA acknowledged planning as the biggest problem, which it is, but it also said access to land was one too which I quoted.
And yes, brownfield is capable of supporting those homes if every hectare of that brownfield is used for homes and nothing else, as I acknowledged all along. However we need industry and retail and a plethora of other uses for brownfield too. Potentially housing does not equate to will be housing as there are competing demands for land.
Do you think we can do without industry? Or anything else?
It never ceases to amaze me how people living in sparsely populated rural areas consider that people in cities have absolutely no need for green space and that as more and more people are crammed into existing urban settlements all the existing brownfield land should be used for housing as opposed to creating green space for recreational use and to boost urban wildlife. What a selfish bunch.
Green space in urban areas is the most valuable in the country and we should be looking to add to it. Existing "brownfield sites" are often quite ecologically rich simply by virtue of nature having reclaimed them.
New housing should be developed primarily as planned settlement on the misnamed "green belt", which apart from the brownfield parts which can rightly be recategorised as "grey belt" also includes vaste swathes of ecologically denuded land put over to high intensity agri business with monolithic crops and high use of insecticides etc. Such as huge fields of hedgerow-less oil seed rape for example, very common around here. Green deserts if you prefer.
Almost no brownfield is converted to green space. It would be great if it were. Much of it is left for decades without being either developed or converted.
And it never ceases to amaze me that poeple living in urban areas think that there is nothing more to the countryside than famers fields. We can afford to lose farmers fields which is why I have long advocated on here for building new towns in East Anglia and Lincolnshire. What we have lost has been the high nature value marginal land. This is why since WW2 we have lost 97% of our water meadows and hay meadows, 50% of our ancient woodland, 80% of our lowland heath and 85% of our freshwater wetlands. This is why England is considered to be critically nature depleted and ranks 189th out of 240 countries for biodiversity and last amongst the G7 countries. We have seen an 80% decline in priority species since the 1970s.
Its been lost to agriculture, not to housing.
The planning system and green belt were in place the entire time that it was lost. Neither worked to save what should have been protected.
The small amounts we have left are only there because of the planning system. You would see the whole lot destroyed.
No I would not.
I would, as I have said time and again, zone such lands as not for development.
Land that is for development, which arguably should include uniculture agricultural land but definitely should include brownfield land, should be able to be developed within the law without seeking permission first - so long as it is developed within standards.
That would enable SMEs to redevelop brownfield sites, or convert land that you don't object to being developed, while protecting the high nature value land like heaths and wetlands.
Currently we have a system of all that is not permitted is forbidden. I would revert to a more liberal, traditionally British system that existed pre-war and before this devastation that you speak of where all that is not forbidden is permitted - with the development of such limited lands being one thing that is forbidden.
Time for a fine old Soviet joke:
In America, anything is permitted unless it is prohibited.
In West Germany, anything is prohibited, unless it is permitted.
In France, anything is permitted, even that which is prohibited.
In Russia, everything is prohibited, even when it is permitted.
I'm quite a traditionalist when it comes to county geography. But I can completely see the reason for this: Rutland is far too tiny a population for the services a county is expected to provide.
What I think is needed is one of two things - either: - a way of disassociating county identity from administrative geography - this really shouldn't be that hard to do: a few signs in the right places, institutional continuity, etc - so I could say 'I live in Cheshire' while having my bins collected by Trafford Council. This isn't the snobbery it's often perceived as; it's just a desire for continuity and local identity. I want to be able to aske a question like 'how many league football clubs have ever played home games in Cheshire' without a long footnote explaining what I mean by 'Cheshire'. I want to be able to answer 'where is Kirkby Lonsdale' with the same answer I would have given 20 or 50 or 100 years ago. Or: - a complete year zero where we abandon the old and have completely new administrative units for the half-a-million-to-three-million population units of territory. I could draw you up dozens of these right now. But we'd then have to agree to stick with them completely a la American states for the next 500 years at least and stop fucking tinkering.
Won't happen. Too many people are too attached to the counties. Along with the parishes they have existed pretty much since Saxon times and people like the tradition - the sense of belonging. As soon as someone with a better sense of heritage gets back into power they wil be back in place.
Then we go with the first option.
But I think you overestimate the extent to which people are attached. I am. But I know very few other people who understand or care. My quite-intelligent sister-in-law (I understate - she has a degree from Oxford and a masters from Cambridge and came in the 'just-about-top-of-the-year' category in both and is something terribly senior at somewhere quite large) cannot understand why Lancashire play at Old Trafford (for example).
If she chose -of her own free will- to go to Oxford, then I'd question how smart she is.
In Surrey, 538 District, Borough and County Councillors are being replaced by 162 in the two new Unitaries which start life on April 1st 2027.
That may or may not be an argument for a unitary authority in and of itself.
I know from connections in the County Council there remained, even after more than 50 years of the current structure which was set up under the Heath Government in 1974, a widespread ignorance of responsibilties among the general population - in other words, who did what and that was complicated further when some provision was provided by both County and District Councils such as Day Centres and Planning.
If you asked most people where they would go to get a fishing licence for example, most people would say "the Council" without really knowing which one. The County tended to the big ticket items - Education, Adult & Child Social Care, Highways and Libraries leaving the Districts and Boroughs with Council Tax collection, Waste collection (though that was taken to sites managed by the County Council) and the likes of Leisure Centres and Crematoria.
In truth, there was always a tension and relations between the County and Districts at times made the US-Soviet relationship in late October 1962 look positively cordial.
Will it work? Probably, in time. The staff are being transferred via TUPE to the new councils and I imagine vacancies will be deleted to show an initial saving. As with changes to rail franchises, there's the issue of signage - how doyouput new signs up at every building, bus stop and the like? How long does it take and who pays for it?
The staff have no guarantees because both East and West Surrey will, I suspect, want to review what they do and how they do it (and how much it costs) before too long.
just watching the open coverage - amazed it apparently takes 50 minutes to drive from centre of Liverpool to the course about 15 miles north of the city . the north feels like another world sometimes
Why? How long would it take to drive from the centre of London to 15 miles north of the city?
Travelling from the centre of any city can take a while, however a new motorway connection between Liverpool and Southport (and via a new bridge Blackpool too) is one example of the many new motorways I would build if I were in charge of the country.
It was SKS total and chronic lack of political skills that did for him, not the policies.
A leader like Tony Blair or David Cameron, carefully preparing the ground, could easily have cut back on WFA, although they'd still have experienced the screams and howls of utterly self-entitled pensioners, they could have weathered them.
Yes, they could (e) have and should have.
But I no longer think it's only pensioners who disapproved of the WFA cuts. I noted recently that although working age people do tend to view pensioners as taking more than their fair share, they are still very supportive of measures that reduce death by natural causes for the elderly.
That's the line that's often peddled.
In reality, WFA was used, for example, by OGH to top up his Betfair account.
It's an astonishingly bad use of public funds.
Poor shivering pensioners is one of those bits of our collective mental map of the country that isn't particularly true any more, but is really hard to shift.
There are others- for example, lanyard-wearers aren't the powerful ones; if anything, they're the everyman workers of the 21st century.
I'd love to think that the right politician-educator could teach the new map... but I'm not optimistic. Kemi's not trying, and the early signs from Andy aren't good.
Listening to Burnham's speech and finding it hard to square his tirade against factionalism and briefings against his assuming power after a palace coup. Seems a bit do as I say and not as I do
Factoid of the day - the next US President (unless Trump claims his third term) is likely to be the first one since 1865 who was not alive at the same time as Herbert Hoover.
That is bad news for the Forest and Stroud, possibly Gloucester itself, as the county council will be dominated by rich Fukkers from Tewkesbury and the Cotswolds who will be totally unscrupulous about redirecting all the money to where it will benefit their voters rather than where it's actually needed.
The whole plan for the country is a f##king shambles. Pointless and costly reorganisations which will do nothing to improve local democracy or performance. Indeed I expect services to be far worse and cost far more as a result.
I’d be fascinated by the thought processes behind these re-organisations.
Sadly I do suspect a lot of gerrymandering.
And of course the changes will ensure that rural areas are dominated by the adjacent urban areas so making things like new building developments easier.
They will do almost nothing to save costs. There will be a few very senior managerial jobs that will go but because of the TUPE rules they cannot use the reorganisation as an excuse for layoffs, nor can they change pay and conditions. And given that they will still need to use existing district and county council offices because they still need to do all the jobs that are currently being done and need the office spce for that, there will be little or no real-estate savings.
This is all being driven entirely by political considerations and is a centralising rather than decentralising move. A real retrograde step.
Given we desperately need developments and that you (rightly) welcome migration which means we need even more developments, then why are you saying it will make new developments easier as if it is a bad thing?
Because what it actually means is people living in one area deciding that all those developments should be in another area - preferably some distance away from them. The urban areas have large swathes of brownfield sites which should be redeveloped. But that is more expensive both for the developers and the local authorities. So now they will have nice large areas of green field they can build on instead. It is simply supercharged NIMBYism.
Where are these mythical large swathes of brownfield sites that have not been redeveloped in the past quarter of a century where our population has grown by about 20%?
Any brownfield sites that can be developed should be and largely are, but we need green too. And will do as long as our population rises and until we clear the backlog of missing developments we need.
1.5 million homes. Half of it with some form of planning permission in place. But developers don't like building on brownfield sites because of the additional costs.
Allegedly, claimed by a group the CPRE with a very vested-interest and based on a series of flawed assumptions.
Yes if every single brownfield site were capable of being transformed to housing, at high density, and nothing else then those houses could be built.
However that is never going to happen and can't happen. Some land is unsuitable due to contamination or other reasons. And some will inevitably get used for other purposes, such as industry or retail or anything else. Indeed, build homes and other services are needed so its never all going to go to housing.
So yes, brownfield can be a part of the mix - and is, but green is needed too.
Find some counter evidence and you might be worth listening to on this. But vague claims which are not backed up by any actual evidence, whilst occasionally a PB standard, does not win arguments.
Our analysis clearly highlights the planning systems as very significant drivers of negative overall outcomes in the housing market. Across GB as a whole, and England in particular, the planning systems are not delivering sufficient planning permissions to deliver new housing up to government targets and other assessments of need.
... We have also seen evidence that problems in planning systems may be having a disproportionate impact on SME housebuilders ...
.. We have found that barriers to entry and expansion are likely to be restricting the role of SMEs in the market. Of these barriers, the most significant is negotiating the planning system, the burdens of which fall most heavily on smaller builders, followed by access to land ...
The CMA does not argue that the solution is simply 'build on brownfield'; it identifies a systemic shortage of permissions and land supply. The fact that planning constraints exist applies regardless of whether the land is brownfield or greenfield.
Around 54% of new homes are already being built on brownfield land. So brownfield is not being ignored, it is already the majority of new housing.
The disagreement is not whether brownfield should be used. It should. The question is whether theoretical brownfield capacity means greenfield development is unnecessary. The evidence does not support that conclusion. Brownfield sites have competing uses, viability constraints and are not always located where housing demand is highest. Therefore brownfield is part of the solution, but not the entire solution.
So no actual evidence to counter the argument that there are brownfield sites capable of supporting 1.5 million additional homes then? Just some completely different argument about your old idiocy about the the planning system.
Did you miss the CMA saying there is a shortage of land there?
Yes the CMA acknowledged planning as the biggest problem, which it is, but it also said access to land was one too which I quoted.
And yes, brownfield is capable of supporting those homes if every hectare of that brownfield is used for homes and nothing else, as I acknowledged all along. However we need industry and retail and a plethora of other uses for brownfield too. Potentially housing does not equate to will be housing as there are competing demands for land.
Do you think we can do without industry? Or anything else?
It never ceases to amaze me how people living in sparsely populated rural areas consider that people in cities have absolutely no need for green space and that as more and more people are crammed into existing urban settlements all the existing brownfield land should be used for housing as opposed to creating green space for recreational use and to boost urban wildlife. What a selfish bunch.
Green space in urban areas is the most valuable in the country and we should be looking to add to it. Existing "brownfield sites" are often quite ecologically rich simply by virtue of nature having reclaimed them.
New housing should be developed primarily as planned settlement on the misnamed "green belt", which apart from the brownfield parts which can rightly be recategorised as "grey belt" also includes vaste swathes of ecologically denuded land put over to high intensity agri business with monolithic crops and high use of insecticides etc. Such as huge fields of hedgerow-less oil seed rape for example, very common around here. Green deserts if you prefer.
Almost no brownfield is converted to green space. It would be great if it were. Much of it is left for decades without being either developed or converted.
And it never ceases to amaze me that poeple living in urban areas think that there is nothing more to the countryside than famers fields. We can afford to lose farmers fields which is why I have long advocated on here for building new towns in East Anglia and Lincolnshire. What we have lost has been the high nature value marginal land. This is why since WW2 we have lost 97% of our water meadows and hay meadows, 50% of our ancient woodland, 80% of our lowland heath and 85% of our freshwater wetlands. This is why England is considered to be critically nature depleted and ranks 189th out of 240 countries for biodiversity and last amongst the G7 countries. We have seen an 80% decline in priority species since the 1970s.
Just to correct you slightly, what can happen to "brownfield" is it gets re-designated as "Metropolitan Open Land" to prevent every square inch being built on.
Here in Newham, all we have is brownfield - there is a nearby development in which I have reluctantly become involved and they are fighting hard to keep an area of land near the River Roding outside the development and are arguing it is a habitat for endangered species.
Listening to Burnham's speech and finding it hard to square his tirade against factionalism and briefings against his assuming power after a palace coup. Seems a bit do as I say and not as I do
'Factionalism' seems to be a word the left use, but the argument 'things would work better if everyone just agreed with me' is used across the political spectrum and always irritates me for its weakness. See also the word 'divisive'.
just watching the open coverage - amazed it apparently takes 50 minutes to drive from centre of Liverpool to the course about 15 miles north of the city . the north feels like another world sometimes
Why? How long would it take to drive from the centre of London to 15 miles north of the city?
Travelling from the centre of any city can take a while, however a new motorway connection between Liverpool and Southport (and via a new bridge Blackpool too) is one example of the many new motorways I would build if I were in charge of the country.
'US President Donald Trump has delivered a primetime address in which he accused China of interfering in the 2020 election and alleged "shocking vulnerabilities" in American voting systems.
Trump, who spoke from the White House on Thursday, has repeatedly made unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and foreign meddling in the 2020 election which he lost to Joe Biden.
In the half-hour speech, delivered three months before the midterm elections, he said he had declassified hundreds of intelligence files which supported his claims that Beijing had tried to sway the election in Biden's favour.
The US intelligence community has previously concluded China did not interfere in the 2020 election.'
Despite the endless lies, the Iran debacle, the insulting of former allies, the threats to Greenland and Canada, sucking up to Putin, the tariffs fiasco and the industrial scale corruption and grifting ........ 40% of Americans approve of the job he is doing!
That tells you everything you need to know about the state America is in and why we can never ever trust the USA again.
By all means cooperate with a sane successor but insulate ourselves from the US as best we can because as sure as night follows day the US will elect another lunatic within the next decade. Trump is just a symptom of what the USA has become.
tbf we have people on here asserting that taking a few items of clothing or concert tickets and declaring them is much worse than taking 5 million pounds from an overseas billionaire and unsuccessfully trying to conceal it.
The difference is that we all know Farage is a grifter, and he’s under investigation for such.
Starmer, Rayner et al spent the last five years attacking Conservatives constantly over such grift, only to enthusiastically embrace the gifts and trips the minute they got to power themselves. It’s the hypocracy that was the problem, they sold themselves as whiter-than-white, but turned out to be no better than the rest of them.
no, we don't all know that, and you pushing this false equivalence is blatently dishonest.
I’m not making equivalence between the two at all, they’re totally different circumstances.
Farage could be suspended or kicked out of Parliament for failing to declare a substantial gift just before he became an MP. Good, that’s how the system is supposed to work.
The problem with Labour isn’t the behaviour in itself, it’s the hypocracy and their presenting themselves as somehow better than other parties, which unraveled almost immediately once they were in power.
You’re quite right. The hypocrisy was quite breathtaking by Rayner, SKS et al.
In opposition they paraded their virtue. In power it was ‘meet the new boss. Same as the old boss’
oh here's the other hypocrisy specialist right on cue
I think Labour have been hostages to their own narrative against Tory corruption but suggesting a parity with the PPE scandal or Farage's millions is a hypocritical crock.
Starmer should have bought his own glasses and Rayner should have sought better tax advice, but where do we start with the PPE fast lane scandal?
We can start with ten billion pounds of public money siphoned off by crooks and shysters?
Comments
Point 1: a way of disassociating county identity from administrative geography
We have already done this, thus:
- For ceremonial purposes: there's the ceremonial counties and the lieutenancies: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ceremonial_counties_of_England and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lieutenancy_area
- For administrative purposes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counties_of_England
- For old administrative purposes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historic_counties_of_England
You may recall that the actress Penelope Keith was a Deputy Lieutenant of Surrey.Point 2: a complete year zero where we abandon the old and have completely new administrative units
We did that in 1973/4, introducing concepts like Avon and Humberside. It was not popular and was reverted in 1997.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Counties_of_England#Reforms
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:England_counties/1974
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avon_(county)
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Humberside
Outside England- Don't ask about Northern Ireland. JUST DON'T.
- Scotland also has the registration counties: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Registration_county#Scotland
- Wales has a similar ceremonial/administrative split, with https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Preserved_counties_of_Wales and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principal_areas_of_Wales
OtherI’ve also been doing some work on a new allocation across the UK on public spending, assuming per capita weighting with double for remote rural and bottom 20% deprivation. London gets a cut of 15% (obvs), Scotland down 3%, NI down 10%, Yorkshire and Humber up 10% - but NE of England only up 5%.
Our analysis clearly highlights the planning systems as very significant drivers of negative overall outcomes in the housing market. Across GB as a whole, and England in particular, the planning systems are not delivering sufficient planning permissions to deliver new housing up to government targets and other assessments of need.
... We have also seen evidence that problems in planning systems may be having a disproportionate impact on SME housebuilders ...
.. We have found that barriers to entry and expansion are likely to be restricting the role of SMEs in the market. Of these barriers, the most significant is negotiating the planning system, the burdens of which fall most heavily on smaller builders, followed by access to land ...
The CMA does not argue that the solution is simply 'build on brownfield'; it identifies a systemic shortage of permissions and land supply. The fact that planning constraints exist applies regardless of whether the land is brownfield or greenfield.
Also see the evidence here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/new-homes-fact-sheet-7-homes-and-different-land-types/fact-sheet-7-homes-and-different-land
Around 54% of new homes are already being built on brownfield land. So brownfield is not being ignored, it is already the majority of new housing.
The disagreement is not whether brownfield should be used. It should. The question is whether theoretical brownfield capacity means greenfield development is unnecessary. The evidence does not support that conclusion. Brownfield sites have competing uses, viability constraints and are not always located where housing demand is highest. Therefore brownfield is part of the solution, but not the entire solution.
https://caseboard.io/cases/02925e96-1535-451a-950d-d55f9360e85e
But obviously this can't happen if there is a single tier local authority
Southport = tone deaf
WFA = policy
No different to the 'others', but worse as moralising hypocrite. Handles safety concerns badly. Introduces deeply unpopular policy not in the manifesto.
First impressions count and this is what he offered. Was never recovering from that. He then carried on in that vein.
I replied, "no, you're great".
She's been in a good mood ever since, I should correct her grammar more often.
I’m not sure that watching the Belgian Grand Prix on Sunday was what she had in mind, but I’ll be cheering for Lewis.
Yes the CMA acknowledged planning as the biggest problem, which it is, but it also said access to land was one too which I quoted.
And yes, brownfield is capable of supporting those homes if every hectare of that brownfield is used for homes and nothing else, as I acknowledged all along. However we need industry and retail and a plethora of other uses for brownfield too. Potentially housing does not equate to will be housing as there are competing demands for land.
Do you think we can do without industry? Or anything else?
so 90K were on brownfield, apparently.
That doesn't sound as if brownfield is being ignored.
It would be interesting to see how this breaks down. In London, they were building on everything - until chunks of the market collapsed
I suspect a different story in rural Sussex, say.
It all boils down to severely unequal economic demand across the UK and profit maximising behaviour from developers (which they are perfectly entitled to do). If we agree that building more housing is good thing for the country, then we should have a hard think about why that is the case and make interventions to deliver those benefits.
As an aside, I note that private rents as a proportion of income have been roughly flat for the last 20 years, and mortgages are the lowest since 2002 (excluding principal, 30% lower). It’s purely the value of the asset and shifts in tenure that are causing issues here.
He relied on unreliable political operatives like Reeves, but his biggest crime was sacking Robbins. He could have been truthful over Mandelson and told us it was a risk worth taking in the event of Trump which fell over badly, but instead he shot the messenger.
The U turns were bad politics.
He was far too Trump and Netanyahu centric.
The Telegraph and others ( with assistance from the Kremlin) armed with all this failure still found time to make up utter lies about the man. And on here, hands up if you were taken in by the rent boy story. I can't think of another so comprehensive a hatchet job in my lifetime.
He was a poor leader, but the narrative went that he was lazy, incompetent ( partially true) corrupt (ironic when compared even to Johnson and Farage) and he was a traitor (ironic when compared to Putin fanboi, Farage).
He was the master of his own destiny and he failed, but the hatchet job done on him by GBNews, the Mail, the Telegraph and the Express was remarkable. The BBC weren't far behind, but Murdoch wasn't even at the races.
Starmer, Rayner et al spent the last five years attacking Conservatives constantly over such grift, only to enthusiastically embrace the gifts and trips the minute they got to power themselves. It’s the hypocracy that was the problem, they sold themselves as whiter-than-white, but turned out to be no better than the rest of them.
*And it lingers on in the name of the police and fire services…
Green space in urban areas is the most valuable in the country and we should be looking to add to it. Existing "brownfield sites" are often quite ecologically rich simply by virtue of nature having reclaimed them.
New housing should be developed primarily as planned settlement on the misnamed "green belt", which apart from the brownfield parts which can rightly be recategorised as "grey belt" also includes vaste swathes of ecologically denuded land put over to high intensity agri business with monolithic crops and high use of insecticides etc. Such as huge fields of hedgerow-less oil seed rape for example, very common around here. Green deserts if you prefer.
Argentina: 86% (43%)
Spain: 86% (71%) (relatively few and recent)
Liverpool: 78% (43%)
Italy: 77% (46%)
Chelsea: 68% (38%)
Man City: 67% (50%)
Man Utd: 66% (34%)
Germany: 64% (32%)
Arsenal: 60% (28%)
France: 50% (29%)
Tottenham: 44% (13%)
Newcastle: 40% (20%)
England: 38% (13%)
Netherlands: 36% (9%)
Everton: 20% (0%)
That's just one stage so isn't a full picture, but the pattern of England being a top second tier nation rather than the very top table, those teams who win more than they exit at semi finals is what we need to bridge.
She lives in Moulsford
In all the time shes been there we've never heard a corncrake. Lots of red kites though.
I don't think they even bothered to read them, and they don't expect anyone else to either.
Farage could be suspended or kicked out of Parliament for failing to declare a substantial gift just before he became an MP. Good, that’s how the system is supposed to work.
The problem with Labour isn’t the behaviour in itself, it’s the hypocracy and their presenting themselves as somehow better than other parties, which unraveled almost immediately once they were in power.
Perhaps Mrs Starmer's clothes and Starmer's glasses could be compared to Johnson's Lulu Lytle wallpaper and Carole Bamford's Daylesford food parcels to Johnson. None of which worried you all too much.
In opposition they paraded their virtue. In power it was ‘meet the new boss. Same as the old boss’
Good grief , talk about tacky .
Greater Manchester Mayoral By-Election Voting Intention:
LAB: 38% (-25)
RFM: 24% (+17)
GRN: 17% (+10)
CON: 11% (+1)
RES: 7% (New)
LDM: 3% (-1)
Ind: 1% (New)
2nd Round:
LAB: 62%
RFM: 38%
Via
@YouGov
, 8-15 Jul.
Changes w/ 2024.
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/2078045423705465160
I'm also intrigued that 1,900 will go on sale to fans. Surely this isn't the sort of thing you should just be able to buy? That's tacky too.
In reality, WFA was used, for example, by OGH to top up his Betfair account.
It's an astonishingly bad use of public funds.
We must have one virgin steel making plant in British hands, for national security.
Mayor invests £4.6 million to boost London’s green and blue spaces and build a more climate resilient city
https://www.london.gov.uk/mayor-invests-ps46-million-boost-londons-green-and-blue-spaces-and-build-more-climate-resilient-city
🌳 CON: 45.8% (-1.7)
➡️ RFM: 36.9% (New)
🌹 LAB: 17.2% (-35.3)
Conservative GAIN from Labour.
Changes w/ 2023.'
https://x.com/ElectionMapsUK/status/2078070856664650212?s=20
And it never ceases to amaze me that poeple living in urban areas think that there is nothing more to the countryside than famers fields. We can afford to lose farmers fields which is why I have long advocated on here for building new towns in East Anglia and Lincolnshire. What we have lost has been the high nature value marginal land. This is why since WW2 we have lost 97% of our water meadows and hay meadows, 50% of our ancient woodland, 80% of our lowland heath and 85% of our freshwater wetlands. This is why England is considered to be critically nature depleted and ranks 189th out of 240 countries for biodiversity and last amongst the G7 countries. We have seen an 80% decline in priority species since the 1970s.
.
.
The planning system and green belt were in place the entire time that it was lost. Neither worked to save what should have been protected.
In retrospect I could have hung on, taken the ring, left and had it melted down for something appropriate for the wife. That's what I would do to that World Cup shite.
And as we're seeing on this board, the more blatant you are in your corruption and doing it on an industrial scale, somehow makes you less "hypocritical" and makes it OK ?
1) Ceremonial counties - but they are half-arsed in their presence, trampled over by the administrative units and don't even match the traditional counties
2) It would have worked as a year zero only if it was completely different to what went before. Calling something 'Lancashire' but it just referring to the rump in the middle was a worst-of-all-worlds scenario. It was dressed up as continuity but it really wasn't - geographically, I think only Cornwall, Shropshire and Wolverhampton were untouched. But it wasn't sufficiently new that new identities could be formed even over years and years.
A reflection: we were slightly obsessed back then (and indeed remain so) with separating the rural from the urban. In terms of forming an area with an identity, I think this is unhelpful.
The problem is that people don't especially want to live on the east side of the country. Arguably, the housing shortage reflects desires for people to live in high-demand areas.
An example of brownfield converted into a wetland is Saltholme in Teesside - it’s great, amazing steampunk vibes. And HS2 is/was going to be surrounded by extensive wetland and meadows, cycle infrastructure etc at marginal additional cost. It’s that kind of mitigation that made a lot more sense.
Starmer had almost no honeymoon because the stories of his wife’s dresses, concerts, and sporting events, started within weeks of him taking office. It was as if they spent that whole summer spending other people’s money.
Boris’s wallpaper issue was dumb as it showed such disconnect from sense and reading the room and a desire (possibly not necessarily in this case) for the finest things in life at others’ expense.
The PPP situation was some grifters (and some who genuinely were in a position to help) benefiting from an emergency and unprecedented situation - if we are being honest I don’t think any party in charge could have dealt with the situation much better and there would have been connected chancers taking advantage.
Nahawi was stupid and arrogant showing probably a belief that he was above needing to follow laws and rules for the sake of a bit more money when already well off.
Rayner was stupid as she tried to minimise her liabilities and then tried to throw blameless third parties under a bus. The fact that she was a minister, for housing no less, should, if she had a brain, have led her to measure twice and cut once on a property and tax matter.
Starmer and the gifts was, in my opinion as bad as the above regardless of the value of the gifts. It was cheap, it looked unnecessarily vain for a man earning well over his career to accept glasses, clothes etc from anyone. It was during a period where a lot of the population are struggling financially and yet a multi millionaire is giving a wealthy man free designer items. If someone is happy to take those gifts them it raises the spectre of what else they could be offered and accept.
So it shouldn’t matter which party you support, all of the above were bad and stupid behaviour and all “as bad” in different ways as they undermine public trust in politicians and build on existing cynicism.
There are others- for example, lanyard-wearers aren't the powerful ones; if anything, they're the everyman workers of the 21st century.
I'd love to think that the right politician-educator could teach the new map... but I'm not optimistic. Kemi's not trying, and the early signs from Andy aren't good.
Starmer should have bought his own glasses and Rayner should have sought better tax advice, but where do we start with the PPE fast lane scandal?
I would, as I have said time and again, zone such lands as not for development.
Land that is for development, which arguably should include uniculture agricultural land but definitely should include brownfield land, should be able to be developed within the law without seeking permission first - so long as it is developed within standards.
That would enable SMEs to redevelop brownfield sites, or convert land that you don't object to being developed, while protecting the high nature value land like heaths and wetlands.
Currently we have a system of all that is not permitted is forbidden. I would revert to a more liberal, traditionally British system that existed pre-war and before this devastation that you speak of where all that is not forbidden is permitted - with the development of such limited lands being one thing that is forbidden.
That’s not funny but it is a joke.
Indeed (I'm assuming the Open is at Birkdale given the above) there are few top-level golf courses in the country better connected by public transport to their closest big city than Birkdale is to Liverpool.
The single best way to reduce our housing problems would be genuine levelling up of the regions outside London and the SE.
Easier said than done of course, but (for example) a genuine Liverpool-Hull transits corridor would make a massive difference to economic growth in the region, make a lot more development land accessible - and more importantly make it (both brown and greenfield) more economically viable to develop
Travelling from the centre of any city can take a while, however a new motorway connection between Liverpool and Southport (and via a new bridge Blackpool too) is one example of the many new motorways I would build if I were in charge of the country.
In America, anything is permitted unless it is prohibited.
In West Germany, anything is prohibited, unless it is permitted.
In France, anything is permitted, even that which is prohibited.
In Russia, everything is prohibited, even when it is permitted.
That may or may not be an argument for a unitary authority in and of itself.
I know from connections in the County Council there remained, even after more than 50 years of the current structure which was set up under the Heath Government in 1974, a widespread ignorance of responsibilties among the general population - in other words, who did what and that was complicated further when some provision was provided by both County and District Councils such as Day Centres and Planning.
If you asked most people where they would go to get a fishing licence for example, most people would say "the Council" without really knowing which one. The County tended to the big ticket items - Education, Adult & Child Social Care, Highways and Libraries leaving the Districts and Boroughs with Council Tax collection, Waste collection (though that was taken to sites managed by the County Council) and the likes of Leisure Centres and Crematoria.
In truth, there was always a tension and relations between the County and Districts at times made the US-Soviet relationship in late October 1962 look positively cordial.
Will it work? Probably, in time. The staff are being transferred via TUPE to the new councils and I imagine vacancies will be deleted to show an initial saving. As with changes to rail franchises, there's the issue of signage - how doyouput new signs up at every building, bus stop and the like? How long does it take and who pays for it?
The staff have no guarantees because both East and West Surrey will, I suspect, want to review what they do and how they do it (and how much it costs) before too long.
Big unity spiel
Like a newly qualified teacher stumbling his way through his first assembly.
Let's see some action!
Let's see some action!
Here in Newham, all we have is brownfield - there is a nearby development in which I have reluctantly become involved and they are fighting hard to keep an area of land near the River Roding outside the development and are arguing it is a habitat for endangered species.
It's a big help it's all in the flood plain.