"Al Barrett Blue heart @hodgehillvicar One more time for those who might have missed it: #DismantlingWhiteness has nothing to do with hating white people (or white people hating ourselves). And everything to do with dismantling harmful ways of being in & seeing the world that centre some and marginalise others."
Fuck this shit
Let the Left die. They seem determined to hurl themselves off an ideological cliff, I fail to see why we should prevent this
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
If you want more internal space and more space in-between houses then open up more green belt land, otherwise its a bit rich claiming that you want more space but don't want people building on greenfield land.
Are there people clamouring to buy those homes? Yes, that's why they're being sold. If they weren't then the developers wouldn't building them because they wouldn't be able to sell them. The only reason the developers build homes is in order to sell them.
1) Schools that spend their money on buldings/teachers and demand children bring their own devices in for internet work as a result;
2) Schools that spend money on tech and therefore forbid children to use their mobiles during the day.
If they are willing to fund laptops/tablets for all children - and that is what this policy requires in today’s world - this policy is a good policy.
If it isn’t, the only reason it isn’t the stupidest policy ever is because masks in classrooms are a much stupider idea.
My children rate the quality of IT kit provided by schools according to the amount of messaging and game playing they can do on it.
One of their schools provided a customised Chromebook which is locked down quite sensibly. And provides a very detailed report of what they have used it for during the school day. The daughter in question 'hates it" and finds it "stupid" - but it seems to be able to do all the actual work stuff.
But that is funded by schools - not the DfE. If they buy those, and I agree that’s the best solution, they have to make cuts elsewhere to pay or charge parents.
Yes, a private school leading the way. All homework provided on it. Quite a few textbooks as well.
It's the inevitable next thing. Much as the end of chalk boards was in schools...
But how are they paid for?
That is the key question.
Personally, I think there is a good case for the government providing every child over the age of nine with a laptop like the one your children have for free. All textbooks available online. All resources from teachers. And they then use it to become not only tech savvy but to do their work on. Including exams. Set work via GoogleClassroom. Or Teams. Or Showbie. And take it in and Mark it the same way.
But I doubt if the government will provide the money for it.
In which case Williamson’s policy is BS.
It wasn't free to me!
Quite a few schools are already finding a way - the local Free school is using them. Part of the problem, apparently, is that up to now, all talk of laptops-per-child were based around laptop prices that would make Alienware look cheap.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
There is an issue with the wrong sort. One and two bed flats are attractive to BTL investors and developers will prefer them to family homes even in areas, like my old patch in east london, where there is a critical shortage of properties suitable for larger families. By making more units out of the piece of land I expect they are more profitable, yet fall short of meeting local housing need in the round.
If there were no demand for flats then presumably nobody would let them and BTL investors would lose their shirts buying them.
Also its worth noting that the share of BTL ownership in the country peaked a few years ago and is not going up anymore, so presumably the vast majority of developments are primarily not going to BTL investors.
Assuming markets work, perhaps. But the area between Vauxhall and Battersea has been covered in developers’ new build flats, and anecdotal reports suggest that they are struggling to shift them. And that many which have been sold have gone to absentee Chinese and Russian buyers who leave them empty. Hardly helping with housing need.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
There is an issue with the wrong sort. One and two bed flats are attractive to BTL investors and developers will prefer them to family homes even in areas, like my old patch in east london, where there is a critical shortage of properties suitable for larger families. By making more units out of the piece of land I expect they are more profitable, yet fall short of meeting local housing need in the round.
If there were no demand for flats then presumably nobody would let them and BTL investors would lose their shirts buying them.
Also its worth noting that the share of BTL ownership in the country peaked a few years ago and is not going up anymore, so presumably the vast majority of developments are primarily not going to BTL investors.
There is also immense pressure on developers to increase density - both from the cost of the land and form the planners.
There's a lot to be said for densification of households rather than houses.
In the mid-1980s the average (mean) household size was 2.6. It is now between 2.3 and 2.4.
The extra requirement (ignoring population growth) of that single change is 2.5 million extra houses.
I'm doing my bit...
And a close friend of mine and his girlfriend live with his parents.
But I don't think it's a healthy state of affairs, tbh.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
Yes. We're building too many houses. Of the wrong sort. In the wrong places. People aren't going to reward the Tories for the endless new houses swamping their towns. With the NPPF the only way to stop developers building houses is to let developers build houses...
If these houses are of the wrong sort and in the wrong places, why are people moving into them?
I have no idea. Drove past quite a few developments on the long trip north on Friday where the £400k asking price gets you a cramped site on the edge of town with literally a view of the M5/M6 going past outside your front door. People generally say they don't want such things when asked.
Thing is, so many of these estates are available as rental. Philip may well be right about the total number of BTL properties. But I suspect they are increasingly concentrated onto these new build estates which seem to be entirely reliant upon (and plagued by) BTL.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
There is an issue with the wrong sort. One and two bed flats are attractive to BTL investors and developers will prefer them to family homes even in areas, like my old patch in east london, where there is a critical shortage of properties suitable for larger families. By making more units out of the piece of land I expect they are more profitable, yet fall short of meeting local housing need in the round.
If there were no demand for flats then presumably nobody would let them and BTL investors would lose their shirts buying them.
Also its worth noting that the share of BTL ownership in the country peaked a few years ago and is not going up anymore, so presumably the vast majority of developments are primarily not going to BTL investors.
There is also immense pressure on developers to increase density - both from the cost of the land and form the planners.
There's a lot to be said for densification of households rather than houses.
In the mid-1980s the average (mean) household size was 2.6. It is now between 2.3 and 2.4.
The extra requirement (ignoring population growth) of that single change is 2.5 million extra houses.
That's no reason to shrink the size of every room to a phone box. And a "garden" which isn't big enough to run a BBQ in without setting fire to the fence.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
There is an issue with the wrong sort. One and two bed flats are attractive to BTL investors and developers will prefer them to family homes even in areas, like my old patch in east london, where there is a critical shortage of properties suitable for larger families. By making more units out of the piece of land I expect they are more profitable, yet fall short of meeting local housing need in the round.
If there were no demand for flats then presumably nobody would let them and BTL investors would lose their shirts buying them.
Also its worth noting that the share of BTL ownership in the country peaked a few years ago and is not going up anymore, so presumably the vast majority of developments are primarily not going to BTL investors.
We're not going to agree on this. All I am saying is that the people back in Stockton most outraged by planning appeals won by developers are all Tories. When these homes get thrown up in places that often the locals the council and the MP object to, how does this translate to electoral gain for the Tories as suggested? They used to be the people leading the objections to endless development and for sensible electoral reasons.
Because NIMBYs will bitch and moan about housing being built but they have their own home either way.
The primary determinant of whether people vote left or right is not whether planning was given to somebody else's home, its whether they are able to own their own home.
Ignore the NIMBY squeaky wheels who aren't interested in buying from the developments and concentrate on the real people actually buying the homes, the real people the developers are actually selling to, who become home owners as a result - they are the ones now on the property ladder which they wouldn't be if it wasn't for their new home.
There's a lot to be said for densification of households rather than houses.
In the mid-1980s the average (mean) household size was 2.6. It is now between 2.3 and 2.4.
The extra requirement (ignoring population growth) of that single change is 2.5 million extra houses.
That's no reason to shrink the size of every room to a phone box. And a "garden" which isn't big enough to run a BBQ in without setting fire to the fence.
Thing is that if you are on a budget - and we all are at one time or another - you get what you can afford. Housing is so preposterously expensive in much of the country that the only properties in scope either buying or private renting are don't-swing-your-cat-you'll-brain-it small. Affordable housing never used to be that small.
Happily we're back to discussing something sensible (the crap state of housing policy) as opposed to something truly terrifying (the idea of Gavin Williamson as PM).
In my part of London, estates of flats are taking shape at Fresh Wharf in Barking and on the site of a former retail park nearby.
It's far too simplistic to describe them as either being for BTL investment or for home ownership because they are both and neither. There is a recognition in this part of the world of the need for a healthy rental sector so the developers are going into the rental game and setting up blocks of flats for rent rather than to buy.
We are also seeing attempts to create "riverside communities" and one of the developers sponsored and ran a local food market at one of the new developments at lunchtime today which was a mixture of street food and hard sell.
There is a growing recognition communities rather than just flats are the answer and what people want.
Are these new estates getting business? Hard to tell at this stage but we all know there's demand out there but whether the cultural and socio-economic impact of the past year means the kind of lifestyle these flats perpetuated and represented is as desired and desirable as it was, remains to be seen.
They remain, however, for all too many people the only realistic housing option.
On the topic of the last thread, it seems almost anything can be explained by the demographics.
The Tories have captured the elderly vote by protecting their income, delivering them Brexit, and inflating their assets.
There have never been more old people; *and* they are more likely to vote. You can’t win England without them. The blue wall is even more, proportionally, full of old people than the South East.
That policies (like Brexit) designed for elderly, no-longer-productive voters will end up bankrupting the country and immiserating the young is of course infuriating - but electoral success is impossible without a willingness to feather-bed this selfish generation.
Time to trot out my go-to piece of research on this topic again:
In 2017, our analysis of the BES data suggests that turnout among over 55s was 83.35%, compared to 58.15% of those under 55. Likewise, turnout was 84.34% vs. 63.06% for over and under 65s respectively. Combining these BES estimates of turnout with LFS estimates of nationality and ONS population estimates, we arrive at the following figures: the over 55s constituted 48.35% of the voting public in 2017, and the over 65s, 30.27%. If we assume that both turnout and the proportion of those disenfranchised due to their nationality remain constant, over 55s will constitute over half of the voting public by 2020 as a result of projected demographic change.
Allowing for turnout, pensioners are about a third of the electorate and the over 55s an entire half, and the proportions get greater with every passing year. We are a gerontocracy, and will be for some decades to come.
And, I’ll warrant, because non-elderly votes are efficiently concentrated in London, inner cities, and university towns, the elderly vote is even *more* decisive than your stats suggest.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
Yes. We're building too many houses. Of the wrong sort. In the wrong places. People aren't going to reward the Tories for the endless new houses swamping their towns. With the NPPF the only way to stop developers building houses is to let developers build houses...
If these houses are of the wrong sort and in the wrong places, why are people moving into them?
They are in the wrong places because they are built as commuter dormitory estates for jobs that are many miles away. Rather than forcing developers to redevelop brown field sites they are letting them build hundreds of thousands of houses on green field sites and then expecting people to commute long distances to work in cities. It hollows out the urban landscape whilst carpeting the rural landscape in new housing.
Changing the planning laws to make it easier for developers to force through greenfield development whilst ignoring large areas of brownfield redevelopment is idiocy.
Nor is this helped by the fact that developers are sitting on over 1 million plots with full (600,000) or outline (480,000) planning permission.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
There is an issue with the wrong sort. One and two bed flats are attractive to BTL investors and developers will prefer them to family homes even in areas, like my old patch in east london, where there is a critical shortage of properties suitable for larger families. By making more units out of the piece of land I expect they are more profitable, yet fall short of meeting local housing need in the round.
If there were no demand for flats then presumably nobody would let them and BTL investors would lose their shirts buying them.
Also its worth noting that the share of BTL ownership in the country peaked a few years ago and is not going up anymore, so presumably the vast majority of developments are primarily not going to BTL investors.
Assuming markets work, perhaps. But the area between Vauxhall and Battersea has been covered in developers’ new build flats, and anecdotal reports suggest that they are struggling to shift them. And that many which have been sold have gone to absentee Chinese and Russian buyers who leave them empty. Hardly helping with housing need.
Could the struggle to sell Vauxhall/Battersea flats have anything to do with the fact that they seem to comprise the ugliest new housing stock in the entire country?
It’s like someone looked at Dubai and asked themselves whether they could make a cheaper and nastier version.
Happily we're back to discussing something sensible (the crap state of housing policy) as opposed to something truly terrifying (the idea of Gavin Williamson as PM).
While there are differences opinion over whether Johnson is a useless shit, or a useful shit, there is universal agreement that the rest of the cabinet are shit, particularly Williamson
Happily we're back to discussing something sensible (the crap state of housing policy) as opposed to something truly terrifying (the idea of Gavin Williamson as PM).
Could we combine the two threads? Anybody who buys a new build should get free mobile phones for all the family thrown in as an incentive, but on condition that the kids don't take theirs to school.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
Yes. We're building too many houses. Of the wrong sort. In the wrong places. People aren't going to reward the Tories for the endless new houses swamping their towns. With the NPPF the only way to stop developers building houses is to let developers build houses...
If these houses are of the wrong sort and in the wrong places, why are people moving into them?
They are in the wrong places because they are built as commuter dormitory estates for jobs that are many miles away. Rather than forcing developers to redevelop brown field sites they are letting them build hundreds of thousands of houses on green field sites and then expecting people to commute long distances to work in cities. It hollows out the urban landscape whilst carpeting the rural landscape in new housing.
Changing the planning laws to make it easier for developers to force through greenfield development whilst ignoring large areas of brownfield redevelopment is idiocy.
Nor is this helped by the fact that developers are sitting on over 1 million plots with full (600,000) or outline (480,000) planning permission.
Where are these brownfield sites that no-one is building on?
Someone close to me who is in a position to know, is convinced that “timber framed” new builds will be quite the scandal before too long. “Timber framed” actually being little more than compressed saw dust and unlikely to live much longer than the original mortgage term, if that.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
There is an issue with the wrong sort. One and two bed flats are attractive to BTL investors and developers will prefer them to family homes even in areas, like my old patch in east london, where there is a critical shortage of properties suitable for larger families. By making more units out of the piece of land I expect they are more profitable, yet fall short of meeting local housing need in the round.
If there were no demand for flats then presumably nobody would let them and BTL investors would lose their shirts buying them.
Also its worth noting that the share of BTL ownership in the country peaked a few years ago and is not going up anymore, so presumably the vast majority of developments are primarily not going to BTL investors.
Assuming markets work, perhaps. But the area between Vauxhall and Battersea has been covered in developers’ new build flats, and anecdotal reports suggest that they are struggling to shift them. And that many which have been sold have gone to absentee Chinese and Russian buyers who leave them empty. Hardly helping with housing need.
Could the struggle to sell Vauxhall/Battersea flats have anything to do with the fact that they seem to comprise the ugliest new housing stock in the entire country?
It’s like someone looked at Dubai and asked themselves whether they could make a cheaper and nastier version.
(See also, Stratford).
That’s a failure of planning (and of design).
I think it might also be something to do with the prices. See Nine Elms (Battersea), for example:
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
Yes. We're building too many houses. Of the wrong sort. In the wrong places. People aren't going to reward the Tories for the endless new houses swamping their towns. With the NPPF the only way to stop developers building houses is to let developers build houses...
If these houses are of the wrong sort and in the wrong places, why are people moving into them?
They are in the wrong places because they are built as commuter dormitory estates for jobs that are many miles away. Rather than forcing developers to redevelop brown field sites they are letting them build hundreds of thousands of houses on green field sites and then expecting people to commute long distances to work in cities. It hollows out the urban landscape whilst carpeting the rural landscape in new housing.
Changing the planning laws to make it easier for developers to force through greenfield development whilst ignoring large areas of brownfield redevelopment is idiocy.
Nor is this helped by the fact that developers are sitting on over 1 million plots with full (600,000) or outline (480,000) planning permission.
Where are these brownfield sites that no-one is building on?
I maintain there is still loads of brownfield sites in post-industrial East London, roughly the stretch from Newham through to Southend on the Essex bank and the same on the Kentish one.
To some extent this is already being developed (see the note upthread about Barking)
But, likely requires public subsidy to bring land in volume into habitable and developable use.
There's a lot to be said for densification of households rather than houses.
In the mid-1980s the average (mean) household size was 2.6. It is now between 2.3 and 2.4.
The extra requirement (ignoring population growth) of that single change is 2.5 million extra houses.
That's no reason to shrink the size of every room to a phone box. And a "garden" which isn't big enough to run a BBQ in without setting fire to the fence.
Thing is that if you are on a budget - and we all are at one time or another - you get what you can afford. Housing is so preposterously expensive in much of the country that the only properties in scope either buying or private renting are don't-swing-your-cat-you'll-brain-it small. Affordable housing never used to be that small.
Most developments would be immeasurably improved by reducing the number of houses by 10-15% to allow breathing room in the gardens. Oftentimes, this extra density is only injected after the formal planning approval has been granted, in some shady back room with no input at all from locals. The game is a fucking scam.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
There is an issue with the wrong sort. One and two bed flats are attractive to BTL investors and developers will prefer them to family homes even in areas, like my old patch in east london, where there is a critical shortage of properties suitable for larger families. By making more units out of the piece of land I expect they are more profitable, yet fall short of meeting local housing need in the round.
If there were no demand for flats then presumably nobody would let them and BTL investors would lose their shirts buying them.
Also its worth noting that the share of BTL ownership in the country peaked a few years ago and is not going up anymore, so presumably the vast majority of developments are primarily not going to BTL investors.
Assuming markets work, perhaps. But the area between Vauxhall and Battersea has been covered in developers’ new build flats, and anecdotal reports suggest that they are struggling to shift them. And that many which have been sold have gone to absentee Chinese and Russian buyers who leave them empty. Hardly helping with housing need.
Could the struggle to sell Vauxhall/Battersea flats have anything to do with the fact that they seem to comprise the ugliest new housing stock in the entire country?
It’s like someone looked at Dubai and asked themselves whether they could make a cheaper and nastier version.
(See also, Stratford).
That’s a failure of planning (and of design).
I think it might also be something to do with the prices. See Nine Elms (Battersea), for example:
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
If you want more internal space and more space in-between houses then open up more green belt land, otherwise its a bit rich claiming that you want more space but don't want people building on greenfield land.
Are there people clamouring to buy those homes? Yes, that's why they're being sold. If they weren't then the developers wouldn't building them because they wouldn't be able to sell them. The only reason the developers build homes is in order to sell them.
New build homes really are crap though. My little flat was put up in the early 2000s and is not exactly generous for space, but is liveable. Out of interest, I keep an eye on what's available around here (we occasionally entertain the possibility of trading up to a house but it never seems to be quite the right time.) Anyway, just before the Plague broke out I was idly leafing through properties, and discovered new build flats for sale which cost half as much again as I paid in 2014 and were fully one-third smaller. It really is true: new properties are rapidly shrinking *and* getting more expensive at the same time.
Factor in the all-too-frequent reports of shoddy workmanship that buyers end up having to spend years trying to pester cowboy housebuilders to put right, and you have to wonder why anyone would purchase a new build at all. Older homes might suffer from deficient insulation, for example, but surely that is more than compensated for by having stood up for an appreciable length of time without starting to fall down again, to say nothing of having rooms which you can fill with a decent amount of furniture without having to climb over it to get in and out of them?
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
Yes. We're building too many houses. Of the wrong sort. In the wrong places. People aren't going to reward the Tories for the endless new houses swamping their towns. With the NPPF the only way to stop developers building houses is to let developers build houses...
If these houses are of the wrong sort and in the wrong places, why are people moving into them?
They are in the wrong places because they are built as commuter dormitory estates for jobs that are many miles away. Rather than forcing developers to redevelop brown field sites they are letting them build hundreds of thousands of houses on green field sites and then expecting people to commute long distances to work in cities. It hollows out the urban landscape whilst carpeting the rural landscape in new housing.
Changing the planning laws to make it easier for developers to force through greenfield development whilst ignoring large areas of brownfield redevelopment is idiocy.
Nor is this helped by the fact that developers are sitting on over 1 million plots with full (600,000) or outline (480,000) planning permission.
Where are these brownfield sites that no-one is building on?
Look at any city or large town and you will see them. Nottingham has plenty of them. Even a smaller town like Newark has developments with planning permission for over 300 houses that have not been started more than a decade after planning permission was given. Meanwhile they are building 3,500 new houses on greenfield sites outside the town. And those people certainly won't be working in Newark. It is primarily for commuting into London or Nottingham.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
There is an issue with the wrong sort. One and two bed flats are attractive to BTL investors and developers will prefer them to family homes even in areas, like my old patch in east london, where there is a critical shortage of properties suitable for larger families. By making more units out of the piece of land I expect they are more profitable, yet fall short of meeting local housing need in the round.
If there were no demand for flats then presumably nobody would let them and BTL investors would lose their shirts buying them.
Also its worth noting that the share of BTL ownership in the country peaked a few years ago and is not going up anymore, so presumably the vast majority of developments are primarily not going to BTL investors.
Assuming markets work, perhaps. But the area between Vauxhall and Battersea has been covered in developers’ new build flats, and anecdotal reports suggest that they are struggling to shift them. And that many which have been sold have gone to absentee Chinese and Russian buyers who leave them empty. Hardly helping with housing need.
Could the struggle to sell Vauxhall/Battersea flats have anything to do with the fact that they seem to comprise the ugliest new housing stock in the entire country?
It’s like someone looked at Dubai and asked themselves whether they could make a cheaper and nastier version.
(See also, Stratford).
That’s a failure of planning (and of design).
I think it might also be something to do with the prices. See Nine Elms (Battersea), for example:
"Al Barrett Blue heart @hodgehillvicar One more time for those who might have missed it: #DismantlingWhiteness has nothing to do with hating white people (or white people hating ourselves). And everything to do with dismantling harmful ways of being in & seeing the world that centre some and marginalise others."
Fuck this shit
Let the Left die. They seem determined to hurl themselves off an ideological cliff, I fail to see why we should prevent this
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
Yes. We're building too many houses. Of the wrong sort. In the wrong places. People aren't going to reward the Tories for the endless new houses swamping their towns. With the NPPF the only way to stop developers building houses is to let developers build houses...
If these houses are of the wrong sort and in the wrong places, why are people moving into them?
They are in the wrong places because they are built as commuter dormitory estates for jobs that are many miles away. Rather than forcing developers to redevelop brown field sites they are letting them build hundreds of thousands of houses on green field sites and then expecting people to commute long distances to work in cities. It hollows out the urban landscape whilst carpeting the rural landscape in new housing.
Changing the planning laws to make it easier for developers to force through greenfield development whilst ignoring large areas of brownfield redevelopment is idiocy.
Nor is this helped by the fact that developers are sitting on over 1 million plots with full (600,000) or outline (480,000) planning permission.
Where are these brownfield sites that no-one is building on?
The onerous and unpredictable application of environmental certification means it’s very risky to take on a lot of brownfield sites. A case in point is the huge number (and about to exponentially increase) petrol stations. No one wants to go through the equity gamble of maybe in 1-2 years getting certification, without which leverage is impossible. And the oil companies have somehow managed to get away with shuttering the sites without first proving environmental reclamation has been completed.
To build on open countryside is just lazy corrupt politics.
Time for my weekly chance to speculate on whether someone can sing or not. Based on how they hold the microphone, their clothing, and the learned opinion of Amanda Holden and Jimmy Carr. Thanks City for not forcing extra time.
The other issue, which I’m sure is well-rehearsed, is that volume builders dominate new development in a way unheard of in most countries.
The result is shite, bad-quality, cookie-cutter “exec” homes using a pattern which has barely changed since about 1982, except that the rooms have got smaller.
Would be interesting to see a study on how these appreciate (or rather, depreciate).
"Al Barrett Blue heart @hodgehillvicar One more time for those who might have missed it: #DismantlingWhiteness has nothing to do with hating white people (or white people hating ourselves). And everything to do with dismantling harmful ways of being in & seeing the world that centre some and marginalise others."
Fuck this shit
Let the Left die. They seem determined to hurl themselves off an ideological cliff, I fail to see why we should prevent this
Topic is phones in schools.
Typical of the left - Try to shut down debate on topics you don't like.
The other issue, which I’m sure is well-rehearsed, is that volume builders dominate new development in a way unheard of in most countries.
The result is shite, bad-quality, cookie-cutter “exec” homes using a pattern which has barely changed since about 1982, except that the rooms have got smaller.
Would be interesting to see a study on how these appreciate (or rather, depreciate).
I agree, but one of the other issues is that UK houses are priced per bedroom rather than per square metre. I would much prefer them being so.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
If you want more internal space and more space in-between houses then open up more green belt land, otherwise its a bit rich claiming that you want more space but don't want people building on greenfield land.
Are there people clamouring to buy those homes? Yes, that's why they're being sold. If they weren't then the developers wouldn't building them because they wouldn't be able to sell them. The only reason the developers build homes is in order to sell them.
New build homes really are crap though. My little flat was put up in the early 2000s and is not exactly generous for space, but is liveable. Out of interest, I keep an eye on what's available around here (we occasionally entertain the possibility of trading up to a house but it never seems to be quite the right time.) Anyway, just before the Plague broke out I was idly leafing through properties, and discovered new build flats for sale which cost half as much again as I paid in 2014 and were fully one-third smaller. It really is true: new properties are rapidly shrinking *and* getting more expensive at the same time.
Factor in the all-too-frequent reports of shoddy workmanship that buyers end up having to spend years trying to pester cowboy housebuilders to put right, and you have to wonder why anyone would purchase a new build at all. Older homes might suffer from deficient insulation, for example, but surely that is more than compensated for by having stood up for an appreciable length of time without starting to fall down again, to say nothing of having rooms which you can fill with a decent amount of furniture without having to climb over it to get in and out of them?
The market failure is that many aspects of a property that would make it a better long term prospect for both the owner’s quality of life and the local community don’t command sufficient price premium at the time of new build to make it worth developers’ while. As and when the capital inflows from foreign investors dries up, we’ll be awash in unwanted starter home flats while those living in them have nowhere affordable to move on to.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
Yes. We're building too many houses. Of the wrong sort. In the wrong places. People aren't going to reward the Tories for the endless new houses swamping their towns. With the NPPF the only way to stop developers building houses is to let developers build houses...
If these houses are of the wrong sort and in the wrong places, why are people moving into them?
They are in the wrong places because they are built as commuter dormitory estates for jobs that are many miles away. Rather than forcing developers to redevelop brown field sites they are letting them build hundreds of thousands of houses on green field sites and then expecting people to commute long distances to work in cities. It hollows out the urban landscape whilst carpeting the rural landscape in new housing.
Changing the planning laws to make it easier for developers to force through greenfield development whilst ignoring large areas of brownfield redevelopment is idiocy.
Nor is this helped by the fact that developers are sitting on over 1 million plots with full (600,000) or outline (480,000) planning permission.
Where are these brownfield sites that no-one is building on?
The onerous and unpredictable application of environmental certification means it’s very risky to take on a lot of brownfield sites. A case in point is the huge number (and about to exponentially increase) petrol stations. No one wants to go through the equity gamble of maybe in 1-2 years getting certification, without which leverage is impossible. And the oil companies have somehow managed to get away with shuttering the sites without first proving environmental reclamation has been completed.
To build on open countryside is just lazy corrupt politics.
At least in London, I could find you people who will dig up and remove old tanks for a quite a reasonable price. A fun fact - back in the day, lots of small factory operations used to have underground tanks. When they closed down, a common tactic was to pour bitumen into the tank to mix with whatever other crap was down there. The expansion of London has meant that many of these parcels of joy have been rediscovered.
"Al Barrett Blue heart @hodgehillvicar One more time for those who might have missed it: #DismantlingWhiteness has nothing to do with hating white people (or white people hating ourselves). And everything to do with dismantling harmful ways of being in & seeing the world that centre some and marginalise others."
Fuck this shit
Let the Left die. They seem determined to hurl themselves off an ideological cliff, I fail to see why we should prevent this
Topic is phones in schools.
There are multiple topics running on any thread.
Nevertheless ‘look how much I’ve had to drink already’ so early on a Saturday night is a topic we could usefully skip.
How many schools currently allow mobile phones in the classroom? Sounds like yet another solution for a problem which doesn't exist.
In my limited experience almost all of them these days.
Most schools have done away with lockers which means there is no where to store phones and most parents insist their kids are able to carry phones too and from school for safety reasons. The upshot is that most schools have no alternative but to allow phones in classrooms although many do stop them being used.
It’s a shame the school can’t just install one of those Israeli gadgets that blocks all the signals
I was just thinking along exactly the same lines but without realising the Israelis had one.
I suppose we could make sure all school classrooms are refitted as Faraday cages.
I thought they had considered it for schools and prisons but found the current technology also managed to block the signal to neighbouring properties?
Which is why I think Faraday cages is the answer. To be honest I would have though most prisons were Faraday cages in practice anyway.
On the topic of the last thread, it seems almost anything can be explained by the demographics.
The Tories have captured the elderly vote by protecting their income, delivering them Brexit, and inflating their assets.
There have never been more old people; *and* they are more likely to vote. You can’t win England without them. The blue wall is even more, proportionally, full of old people than the South East.
That policies (like Brexit) designed for elderly, no-longer-productive voters will end up bankrupting the country and immiserating the young is of course infuriating - but electoral success is impossible without a willingness to feather-bed this selfish generation.
Time to trot out my go-to piece of research on this topic again:
In 2017, our analysis of the BES data suggests that turnout among over 55s was 83.35%, compared to 58.15% of those under 55. Likewise, turnout was 84.34% vs. 63.06% for over and under 65s respectively. Combining these BES estimates of turnout with LFS estimates of nationality and ONS population estimates, we arrive at the following figures: the over 55s constituted 48.35% of the voting public in 2017, and the over 65s, 30.27%. If we assume that both turnout and the proportion of those disenfranchised due to their nationality remain constant, over 55s will constitute over half of the voting public by 2020 as a result of projected demographic change.
Allowing for turnout, pensioners are about a third of the electorate and the over 55s an entire half, and the proportions get greater with every passing year. We are a gerontocracy, and will be for some decades to come.
And, I’ll warrant, because non-elderly votes are efficiently concentrated in London, inner cities, and university towns, the elderly vote is even *more* decisive than your stats suggest.
What is the real turnout of disaffected Labour voters ? 30%
On the topic of the last thread, it seems almost anything can be explained by the demographics.
The Tories have captured the elderly vote by protecting their income, delivering them Brexit, and inflating their assets.
There have never been more old people; *and* they are more likely to vote. You can’t win England without them. The blue wall is even more, proportionally, full of old people than the South East.
That policies (like Brexit) designed for elderly, no-longer-productive voters will end up bankrupting the country and immiserating the young is of course infuriating - but electoral success is impossible without a willingness to feather-bed this selfish generation.
Time to trot out my go-to piece of research on this topic again:
In 2017, our analysis of the BES data suggests that turnout among over 55s was 83.35%, compared to 58.15% of those under 55. Likewise, turnout was 84.34% vs. 63.06% for over and under 65s respectively. Combining these BES estimates of turnout with LFS estimates of nationality and ONS population estimates, we arrive at the following figures: the over 55s constituted 48.35% of the voting public in 2017, and the over 65s, 30.27%. If we assume that both turnout and the proportion of those disenfranchised due to their nationality remain constant, over 55s will constitute over half of the voting public by 2020 as a result of projected demographic change.
Allowing for turnout, pensioners are about a third of the electorate and the over 55s an entire half, and the proportions get greater with every passing year. We are a gerontocracy, and will be for some decades to come.
And, I’ll warrant, because non-elderly votes are efficiently concentrated in London, inner cities, and university towns, the elderly vote is even *more* decisive than your stats suggest.
The same piece of research indicates that the median age of the adult population in Labour-held constituencies is 5.5 years lower than that for Conservative ones, and I'm almost surprised that the gap isn't bigger.
If one were presented with a list of Parliamentary seats in England, all labelled by code numbers rather than names so that one had no idea who they were currently held by, then you could probably make quite accurate predictions as to the incumbent party in each one given three pieces of information: age profile, ethnic profile and median earnings - but age would be the single most important indicator.
"Al Barrett Blue heart @hodgehillvicar One more time for those who might have missed it: #DismantlingWhiteness has nothing to do with hating white people (or white people hating ourselves). And everything to do with dismantling harmful ways of being in & seeing the world that centre some and marginalise others."
Fuck this shit
Let the Left die. They seem determined to hurl themselves off an ideological cliff, I fail to see why we should prevent this
Topic is phones in schools.
Typical of the left - Try to shut down debate on topics you don't like.
It's an interesting topic though. Pity to get sidetracked.
On the topic of the last thread, it seems almost anything can be explained by the demographics.
The Tories have captured the elderly vote by protecting their income, delivering them Brexit, and inflating their assets.
There have never been more old people; *and* they are more likely to vote. You can’t win England without them. The blue wall is even more, proportionally, full of old people than the South East.
That policies (like Brexit) designed for elderly, no-longer-productive voters will end up bankrupting the country and immiserating the young is of course infuriating - but electoral success is impossible without a willingness to feather-bed this selfish generation.
Time to trot out my go-to piece of research on this topic again:
In 2017, our analysis of the BES data suggests that turnout among over 55s was 83.35%, compared to 58.15% of those under 55. Likewise, turnout was 84.34% vs. 63.06% for over and under 65s respectively. Combining these BES estimates of turnout with LFS estimates of nationality and ONS population estimates, we arrive at the following figures: the over 55s constituted 48.35% of the voting public in 2017, and the over 65s, 30.27%. If we assume that both turnout and the proportion of those disenfranchised due to their nationality remain constant, over 55s will constitute over half of the voting public by 2020 as a result of projected demographic change.
Allowing for turnout, pensioners are about a third of the electorate and the over 55s an entire half, and the proportions get greater with every passing year. We are a gerontocracy, and will be for some decades to come.
And, I’ll warrant, because non-elderly votes are efficiently concentrated in London, inner cities, and university towns, the elderly vote is even *more* decisive than your stats suggest.
The same piece of research indicates that the median age of the adult population in Labour-held constituencies is 5.5 years lower than that for Conservative ones, and I'm almost surprised that the gap isn't bigger.
If one were presented with a list of Parliamentary seats in England, all labelled by code numbers rather than names so that one had no idea who they were currently held by, then you could probably make quite accurate predictions as to the incumbent party in each one given three pieces of information: age profile, ethnic profile and median earnings - but age would be the single most important indicator.
I would swap median earnings with home ownership percentage.
"Al Barrett Blue heart @hodgehillvicar One more time for those who might have missed it: #DismantlingWhiteness has nothing to do with hating white people (or white people hating ourselves). And everything to do with dismantling harmful ways of being in & seeing the world that centre some and marginalise others."
Fuck this shit
Let the Left die. They seem determined to hurl themselves off an ideological cliff, I fail to see why we should prevent this
Topic is phones in schools.
There are multiple topics running on any thread.
Nevertheless ‘look how much I’ve had to drink already’ so early on a Saturday night is a topic we could usefully skip.
In the cross topic theme..... was the ending of the sale of White Lightning Cider -
a) Dismantling Whiteness b) Enforcing Whiteness c) Other
"Al Barrett Blue heart @hodgehillvicar One more time for those who might have missed it: #DismantlingWhiteness has nothing to do with hating white people (or white people hating ourselves). And everything to do with dismantling harmful ways of being in & seeing the world that centre some and marginalise others."
Fuck this shit
Let the Left die. They seem determined to hurl themselves off an ideological cliff, I fail to see why we should prevent this
Topic is phones in schools.
There are multiple topics running on any thread.
Yes but I think this one benefits from a lazer focus.
The opposition to this policy surprises me. There seems to an idea that it is not possible to learn certain skills without a mobile phone, which is laughable.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that. Rather that mobiles are used as an indispensable tool (especially by the young). If they are primarily an object of distraction and pissing about, then where is the push to forbid them in the workplace?
“School” does not equal “workplace”. And again, the idea that mobiles are an indispensable tool for educative purposes is ludicrous.
People spend an average of about 2-4 hours a day on their phones. Why would we not structure some learning around this as we do with other parts of life?
Some people spend 2 to 4 hours on their phone you can recognise them as they are the ones walking into traffic or lamp posts because they are staring at a phone screen. I use a phone for work, work issued mobile....I spend maybe 3 hours a week on it. My own mobile I spend about 20 minutes a week on or so.
On the subject of hospital admissions, here is the UK wide R derived from the hospitalisation numbers -
interesting, isn't it?
Indeed it is. What's the lag between infection and hospitalisation - something like a fortnight, isn't it? In which case, what happened in around the third week of March that would've caused a temporary blip in hospital admissions at Easter?
On the topic of the last thread, it seems almost anything can be explained by the demographics.
The Tories have captured the elderly vote by protecting their income, delivering them Brexit, and inflating their assets.
There have never been more old people; *and* they are more likely to vote. You can’t win England without them. The blue wall is even more, proportionally, full of old people than the South East.
That policies (like Brexit) designed for elderly, no-longer-productive voters will end up bankrupting the country and immiserating the young is of course infuriating - but electoral success is impossible without a willingness to feather-bed this selfish generation.
Time to trot out my go-to piece of research on this topic again:
In 2017, our analysis of the BES data suggests that turnout among over 55s was 83.35%, compared to 58.15% of those under 55. Likewise, turnout was 84.34% vs. 63.06% for over and under 65s respectively. Combining these BES estimates of turnout with LFS estimates of nationality and ONS population estimates, we arrive at the following figures: the over 55s constituted 48.35% of the voting public in 2017, and the over 65s, 30.27%. If we assume that both turnout and the proportion of those disenfranchised due to their nationality remain constant, over 55s will constitute over half of the voting public by 2020 as a result of projected demographic change.
Allowing for turnout, pensioners are about a third of the electorate and the over 55s an entire half, and the proportions get greater with every passing year. We are a gerontocracy, and will be for some decades to come.
And, I’ll warrant, because non-elderly votes are efficiently concentrated in London, inner cities, and university towns, the elderly vote is even *more* decisive than your stats suggest.
That is an interesting point that had not occurred to me.
Given the ongoing catastrophe in Scotland -- where ~ 20 per cent of the vote gets them one seat -- it does seems as though FPTP is not going to work for Labour for the forseeable future.
On the topic of the last thread, it seems almost anything can be explained by the demographics.
The Tories have captured the elderly vote by protecting their income, delivering them Brexit, and inflating their assets.
There have never been more old people; *and* they are more likely to vote. You can’t win England without them. The blue wall is even more, proportionally, full of old people than the South East.
That policies (like Brexit) designed for elderly, no-longer-productive voters will end up bankrupting the country and immiserating the young is of course infuriating - but electoral success is impossible without a willingness to feather-bed this selfish generation.
Time to trot out my go-to piece of research on this topic again:
In 2017, our analysis of the BES data suggests that turnout among over 55s was 83.35%, compared to 58.15% of those under 55. Likewise, turnout was 84.34% vs. 63.06% for over and under 65s respectively. Combining these BES estimates of turnout with LFS estimates of nationality and ONS population estimates, we arrive at the following figures: the over 55s constituted 48.35% of the voting public in 2017, and the over 65s, 30.27%. If we assume that both turnout and the proportion of those disenfranchised due to their nationality remain constant, over 55s will constitute over half of the voting public by 2020 as a result of projected demographic change.
Allowing for turnout, pensioners are about a third of the electorate and the over 55s an entire half, and the proportions get greater with every passing year. We are a gerontocracy, and will be for some decades to come.
And, I’ll warrant, because non-elderly votes are efficiently concentrated in London, inner cities, and university towns, the elderly vote is even *more* decisive than your stats suggest.
That is an interesting point that had not occurred to me.
Given the ongoing catastrophe in Scotland -- where ~ 20 per cent of the vote gets them one seat -- it does seems as though FPTP is not going to work for Labour for the forseeable future.
Mmmmm .....
The average age in cities has been coming down as older middle aged (and mostly white) people move away and settle all over the provinces, their homes either retained and rented out or sold on to someone else who rents them out. Given the strengthening of age-based voting patterns it isn’t surprising that Labour’s London majorities are increasing while new Tory voters appear all over the countryside.
In my part of London, estates of flats are taking shape at Fresh Wharf in Barking and on the site of a former retail park nearby.
It's far too simplistic to describe them as either being for BTL investment or for home ownership because they are both and neither. There is a recognition in this part of the world of the need for a healthy rental sector so the developers are going into the rental game and setting up blocks of flats for rent rather than to buy.
We are also seeing attempts to create "riverside communities" and one of the developers sponsored and ran a local food market at one of the new developments at lunchtime today which was a mixture of street food and hard sell.
There is a growing recognition communities rather than just flats are the answer and what people want.
Are these new estates getting business? Hard to tell at this stage but we all know there's demand out there but whether the cultural and socio-economic impact of the past year means the kind of lifestyle these flats perpetuated and represented is as desired and desirable as it was, remains to be seen.
They remain, however, for all too many people the only realistic housing option.
It's not Legal and General, is it - they are the Build To Let leader?
One thing that needs watching with corporate Build to Let developers is that typically target only the top 10-20% of the market, with lots of value added services, and have rents about 30% above the local norm for a similar modern flat outside the development.
(That's based on comparisons I ran across several L&G developments around the country vs local equivalents and affordability indices.
Which may work in clearing a way up the rental ladder, but may not give what you want - especially it won't give a like for like if something drives smaller LLs out. They may not usually be accessible for people on average or average-ish salaries.
On the topic of the last thread, it seems almost anything can be explained by the demographics.
The Tories have captured the elderly vote by protecting their income, delivering them Brexit, and inflating their assets.
There have never been more old people; *and* they are more likely to vote. You can’t win England without them. The blue wall is even more, proportionally, full of old people than the South East.
That policies (like Brexit) designed for elderly, no-longer-productive voters will end up bankrupting the country and immiserating the young is of course infuriating - but electoral success is impossible without a willingness to feather-bed this selfish generation.
Time to trot out my go-to piece of research on this topic again:
In 2017, our analysis of the BES data suggests that turnout among over 55s was 83.35%, compared to 58.15% of those under 55. Likewise, turnout was 84.34% vs. 63.06% for over and under 65s respectively. Combining these BES estimates of turnout with LFS estimates of nationality and ONS population estimates, we arrive at the following figures: the over 55s constituted 48.35% of the voting public in 2017, and the over 65s, 30.27%. If we assume that both turnout and the proportion of those disenfranchised due to their nationality remain constant, over 55s will constitute over half of the voting public by 2020 as a result of projected demographic change.
Allowing for turnout, pensioners are about a third of the electorate and the over 55s an entire half, and the proportions get greater with every passing year. We are a gerontocracy, and will be for some decades to come.
And, I’ll warrant, because non-elderly votes are efficiently concentrated in London, inner cities, and university towns, the elderly vote is even *more* decisive than your stats suggest.
The same piece of research indicates that the median age of the adult population in Labour-held constituencies is 5.5 years lower than that for Conservative ones, and I'm almost surprised that the gap isn't bigger.
If one were presented with a list of Parliamentary seats in England, all labelled by code numbers rather than names so that one had no idea who they were currently held by, then you could probably make quite accurate predictions as to the incumbent party in each one given three pieces of information: age profile, ethnic profile and median earnings - but age would be the single most important indicator.
I would swap median earnings with home ownership percentage.
A good idea - and it would appear that the House of Commons Library publishes reasonably recent constituency level estimates for age profile, ethnicity and housing tenure. I would give this ideal a go if I had the requisite skills in data manipulation. But I don't, alas.
"Al Barrett Blue heart @hodgehillvicar One more time for those who might have missed it: #DismantlingWhiteness has nothing to do with hating white people (or white people hating ourselves). And everything to do with dismantling harmful ways of being in & seeing the world that centre some and marginalise others."
Fuck this shit
Let the Left die. They seem determined to hurl themselves off an ideological cliff, I fail to see why we should prevent this
Topic is phones in schools.
There are multiple topics running on any thread.
Yes but I think this one benefits from a lazer focus.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
Yes. We're building too many houses. Of the wrong sort. In the wrong places. People aren't going to reward the Tories for the endless new houses swamping their towns. With the NPPF the only way to stop developers building houses is to let developers build houses...
If these houses are of the wrong sort and in the wrong places, why are people moving into them?
They are in the wrong places because they are built as commuter dormitory estates for jobs that are many miles away. Rather than forcing developers to redevelop brown field sites they are letting them build hundreds of thousands of houses on green field sites and then expecting people to commute long distances to work in cities. It hollows out the urban landscape whilst carpeting the rural landscape in new housing.
Changing the planning laws to make it easier for developers to force through greenfield development whilst ignoring large areas of brownfield redevelopment is idiocy.
Nor is this helped by the fact that developers are sitting on over 1 million plots with full (600,000) or outline (480,000) planning permission.
Where are these brownfield sites that no-one is building on?
Look at any city or large town and you will see them. Nottingham has plenty of them. Even a smaller town like Newark has developments with planning permission for over 300 houses that have not been started more than a decade after planning permission was given. Meanwhile they are building 3,500 new houses on greenfield sites outside the town. And those people certainly won't be working in Newark. It is primarily for commuting into London or Nottingham.
The land bank sat on by developers is a real issue under the NPPF. It isn't the number of planning permissions given they go off, its the number of homes actually built. So the developers get permission for the expensive harder to do brownfield stuff, refuses to proceed, then forces through permission on easy greenfield sites because the council have "failed" to build enough homes. Kerching!
On the topic of the last thread, it seems almost anything can be explained by the demographics.
The Tories have captured the elderly vote by protecting their income, delivering them Brexit, and inflating their assets.
There have never been more old people; *and* they are more likely to vote. You can’t win England without them. The blue wall is even more, proportionally, full of old people than the South East.
That policies (like Brexit) designed for elderly, no-longer-productive voters will end up bankrupting the country and immiserating the young is of course infuriating - but electoral success is impossible without a willingness to feather-bed this selfish generation.
Time to trot out my go-to piece of research on this topic again:
In 2017, our analysis of the BES data suggests that turnout among over 55s was 83.35%, compared to 58.15% of those under 55. Likewise, turnout was 84.34% vs. 63.06% for over and under 65s respectively. Combining these BES estimates of turnout with LFS estimates of nationality and ONS population estimates, we arrive at the following figures: the over 55s constituted 48.35% of the voting public in 2017, and the over 65s, 30.27%. If we assume that both turnout and the proportion of those disenfranchised due to their nationality remain constant, over 55s will constitute over half of the voting public by 2020 as a result of projected demographic change.
Allowing for turnout, pensioners are about a third of the electorate and the over 55s an entire half, and the proportions get greater with every passing year. We are a gerontocracy, and will be for some decades to come.
And, I’ll warrant, because non-elderly votes are efficiently concentrated in London, inner cities, and university towns, the elderly vote is even *more* decisive than your stats suggest.
That is an interesting point that had not occurred to me.
Given the ongoing catastrophe in Scotland -- where ~ 20 per cent of the vote gets them one seat -- it does seems as though FPTP is not going to work for Labour for the forseeable future.
Mmmmm .....
Interesting thought have having been thinking about cohorts for vaccinations, we are now all more familiar with how many people are in each group.
On the subject of hospital admissions, here is the UK wide R derived from the hospitalisation numbers -
interesting, isn't it?
Indeed it is. What's the lag between infection and hospitalisation - something like a fortnight, isn't it? In which case, what happened in around the third week of March that would've caused a temporary blip in hospital admissions at Easter?
And some longer range data to help your pondering...
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
The other issue, which I’m sure is well-rehearsed, is that volume builders dominate new development in a way unheard of in most countries.
The result is shite, bad-quality, cookie-cutter “exec” homes using a pattern which has barely changed since about 1982, except that the rooms have got smaller.
Would be interesting to see a study on how these appreciate (or rather, depreciate).
I agree, but one of the other issues is that UK houses are priced per bedroom rather than per square metre. I would much prefer them being so.
Yes although it would be more appropriate these Brexit days to have price per square foot. I've been looking at houses recently and I make a point of calculating the price per square foot of each property. It can be truly revealing.
One of my favourite statistics is the number of square feet in an average new build residence:
US - 2200 Germany - 1600 Belgium - 1300 Holland - 1300 UK - 800.
Before World War 2, the UK was 1600. We need to get it up there again.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
The problem with housing is that we’re building too many houses?
Or the wrong sort?
Or in the wrong places?
I don’t get the point of your post...?
Yes. We're building too many houses. Of the wrong sort. In the wrong places. People aren't going to reward the Tories for the endless new houses swamping their towns. With the NPPF the only way to stop developers building houses is to let developers build houses...
If these houses are of the wrong sort and in the wrong places, why are people moving into them?
They are in the wrong places because they are built as commuter dormitory estates for jobs that are many miles away. Rather than forcing developers to redevelop brown field sites they are letting them build hundreds of thousands of houses on green field sites and then expecting people to commute long distances to work in cities. It hollows out the urban landscape whilst carpeting the rural landscape in new housing.
Changing the planning laws to make it easier for developers to force through greenfield development whilst ignoring large areas of brownfield redevelopment is idiocy.
Nor is this helped by the fact that developers are sitting on over 1 million plots with full (600,000) or outline (480,000) planning permission.
Where are these brownfield sites that no-one is building on?
Look at any city or large town and you will see them. Nottingham has plenty of them. Even a smaller town like Newark has developments with planning permission for over 300 houses that have not been started more than a decade after planning permission was given. Meanwhile they are building 3,500 new houses on greenfield sites outside the town. And those people certainly won't be working in Newark. It is primarily for commuting into London or Nottingham.
Many of the estates built around the edge of towns in Notts and Yorks were on land which wasn't particularly green or particularly fields but rather formerly owned by the NCB or BR or low grade abandoned farms.
On the topic of the last thread, it seems almost anything can be explained by the demographics.
The Tories have captured the elderly vote by protecting their income, delivering them Brexit, and inflating their assets.
There have never been more old people; *and* they are more likely to vote. You can’t win England without them. The blue wall is even more, proportionally, full of old people than the South East.
That policies (like Brexit) designed for elderly, no-longer-productive voters will end up bankrupting the country and immiserating the young is of course infuriating - but electoral success is impossible without a willingness to feather-bed this selfish generation.
Time to trot out my go-to piece of research on this topic again:
In 2017, our analysis of the BES data suggests that turnout among over 55s was 83.35%, compared to 58.15% of those under 55. Likewise, turnout was 84.34% vs. 63.06% for over and under 65s respectively. Combining these BES estimates of turnout with LFS estimates of nationality and ONS population estimates, we arrive at the following figures: the over 55s constituted 48.35% of the voting public in 2017, and the over 65s, 30.27%. If we assume that both turnout and the proportion of those disenfranchised due to their nationality remain constant, over 55s will constitute over half of the voting public by 2020 as a result of projected demographic change.
Allowing for turnout, pensioners are about a third of the electorate and the over 55s an entire half, and the proportions get greater with every passing year. We are a gerontocracy, and will be for some decades to come.
And, I’ll warrant, because non-elderly votes are efficiently concentrated in London, inner cities, and university towns, the elderly vote is even *more* decisive than your stats suggest.
That is an interesting point that had not occurred to me.
Given the ongoing catastrophe in Scotland -- where ~ 20 per cent of the vote gets them one seat -- it does seems as though FPTP is not going to work for Labour for the forseeable future.
Mmmmm .....
I'm not even sure that PR could rescue Labour at this stage though. As recently as 2015, Ukip won 13% of the popular vote in a general election, in a system which meant that virtually all the votes were wasted. Bring in something strongly proportional and the risk is that you end up with the orthodox centre-right (property price inflating, pensioner bribing, traditional conservatives) as the single largest party, with the populist right (flog criminals, raise the drawbridge, anti-woke) as the third largest party, propping them up.
Labour conveys the impression of being a minority, sectional interest, party, fixated on social justice issues with a side-serving of "citizen of nowhere" internationalism and a distaste for the views of many of its traditional voters. Both it and the Tories would lose a lot of voters in a system other than FPTP, which forces those who are strongly anti one of those parties to vote for the other to get rid of it in the bulk of constituencies, but I suspect that Labour would have much further to fall.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
The other issue, which I’m sure is well-rehearsed, is that volume builders dominate new development in a way unheard of in most countries.
The result is shite, bad-quality, cookie-cutter “exec” homes using a pattern which has barely changed since about 1982, except that the rooms have got smaller.
Would be interesting to see a study on how these appreciate (or rather, depreciate).
I agree, but one of the other issues is that UK houses are priced per bedroom rather than per square metre. I would much prefer them being so.
Yes although it would be more appropriate these Brexit days to have price per square foot. I've been looking at houses recently and I make a point of calculating the price per square foot of each property. It can be truly revealing.
One of my favourite statistics is the number of square feet in an average new build residence:
US - 2200 Germany - 1600 Belgium - 1300 Holland - 1300 UK - 800.
Before World War 2, the UK was 1600. We need to get it up there again.
How many people lived in a 1930s new build compared with a 2020s new build ?
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Yes I agree. Make Poundbury aesthetic standards mandatory nationwide for planning permission. Then at least some of the NIMBYism would disappear.
Yes. Just fucking do it
Trump, in his odd, mad, uncanny way, sensed this, with his demand that all Federal buildings be "beautiful". He meant neo-classical or maybe Gothic at a push
Thing is, he's right, despite being insane. Architects, for all their ingenuity, have not bettered the Georgian terrace, and/or the higgeldy-piggledy English market town (or French, or Dutch, or German, or Italian, etc etc etc) for furthering human happiness via building style. People with kids want their own front door, on ground level, in a solid building, and a short WALK to the shops and schools. That's it
In a few inner city areas old and young or mad sexy people might be delighted with skyscrapers, and good luck to them. But families need a small defensible space with a garden
Do that, and you have a successful development, and it might even end up handsome and desirable. And you can do it quite densely, as Prince Chuck has done in Poundbury
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
The other issue, which I’m sure is well-rehearsed, is that volume builders dominate new development in a way unheard of in most countries.
The result is shite, bad-quality, cookie-cutter “exec” homes using a pattern which has barely changed since about 1982, except that the rooms have got smaller.
Would be interesting to see a study on how these appreciate (or rather, depreciate).
I agree, but one of the other issues is that UK houses are priced per bedroom rather than per square metre. I would much prefer them being so.
Yes although it would be more appropriate these Brexit days to have price per square foot. I've been looking at houses recently and I make a point of calculating the price per square foot of each property. It can be truly revealing.
One of my favourite statistics is the number of square feet in an average new build residence:
US - 2200 Germany - 1600 Belgium - 1300 Holland - 1300 UK - 800.
Before World War 2, the UK was 1600. We need to get it up there again.
How many people lived in a 1930s new build compared with a 2020s new build ?
Average household size was about 4 compared to 2.4. But people these days have much higher standards and more stuff. The desire for space hasn't declined - it's the availability of land that has, as shown by the huge increase in the prices of land cleared for building. In 1938, land was 2% of the price of the average new build, now it's 70%. The big winners from the current system are well-connected or lucky landowners.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Yes I agree. Make Poundbury aesthetic standards mandatory nationwide for planning permission. Then at least some of the NIMBYism would disappear.
Yes. Just fucking do it
Trump, in his odd, mad, uncanny way, sensed this, with his demand that all Federal buildings be "beautiful". He meant neo-classical or maybe Gothic at a push
Thing is, he's right, despite being insane. Architects, for all their ingenuity, have not bettered the Georgian terrace, and/or the higgeldy-piggledy English market town (or French, or Dutch, or German, or Italian, etc etc etc) for furthering human happiness via building style. People with kids want their own front door, on ground level, in a solid building, and a short WALK to the shops and schools. That's it
In a few inner city areas old and young or mad sexy people might be delighted with skyscrapers, and good luck to them. But families need a small defensible space with a garden
Do that, and you have a successful development, and it might even end up handsome and desirable. And you can do it quite densely, as Prince Chuck has done in Poundbury
The thing is, skyscrapers CAN work for families. I’ve lived it. If they’re spacious inside, have a good sized balcony, good common facilities that breed a sense of community. Ample parking. Security at the complex entrance. Etc... It works all over the world but has barely been attempted in the UK, because it’s been more profitable to build commercial property or 1000ft high piggy banks for foreign money launderers.
Complement this with the market town development type you advocate. And then increase every reasonably sized village by 10%. And you’re sorted.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
The other issue, which I’m sure is well-rehearsed, is that volume builders dominate new development in a way unheard of in most countries.
The result is shite, bad-quality, cookie-cutter “exec” homes using a pattern which has barely changed since about 1982, except that the rooms have got smaller.
Would be interesting to see a study on how these appreciate (or rather, depreciate).
I agree, but one of the other issues is that UK houses are priced per bedroom rather than per square metre. I would much prefer them being so.
Yes although it would be more appropriate these Brexit days to have price per square foot. I've been looking at houses recently and I make a point of calculating the price per square foot of each property. It can be truly revealing.
One of my favourite statistics is the number of square feet in an average new build residence:
US - 2200 Germany - 1600 Belgium - 1300 Holland - 1300 UK - 800.
Before World War 2, the UK was 1600. We need to get it up there again.
How many people lived in a 1930s new build compared with a 2020s new build ?
Average household size was about 4 compared to 2.4. But people these days have much higher standards and more stuff. The desire for space hasn't declined - it's the availability of land that has, as shown by the huge increase in the prices of land cleared for building. In 1938, land was 2% of the price of the average new build, now it's 70%. The big winners from the current system are well-connected or lucky landowners.
It’s far less than 70%. Even in central London, max 50%.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
Prince Philip had a very fine and fitting send off. Pleased he wanted O Valiant Hearts to be played, the most moving of the remembrance hymns, but latterly considered by some as inappropriately "glorifying war".
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
Professor Spector certainly seems very optimistic that we're almost there, the numbers look very encouraging, and he's opposing the Prime Minister's opinion and crediting the vaccines for most of the fall in case numbers.
Essentially, once the vaccination project gets down to the young folks then this should be all over bar the shouting, though whether the Government and its advisors will be willing to accept this and let go of pretty well all of the domestic restrictions is another matter entirely... Of course, the one restriction that would be more useful than any other - heavy curbs on incoming travellers, to guard against variant importation - is the one area in which the Government has acted in a half-hearted, pathetic fashion.
AIUI the threat of total vaccine escape is low, but the consequences of such a variant entering the country and gaining a foothold would be so catastrophic that they more than merit choking off the flow of incoming air passengers as a precaution for the time being. It seems foolish and reckless that this isn't being done.
On the topic of the last thread, it seems almost anything can be explained by the demographics.
The Tories have captured the elderly vote by protecting their income, delivering them Brexit, and inflating their assets.
There have never been more old people; *and* they are more likely to vote. You can’t win England without them. The blue wall is even more, proportionally, full of old people than the South East.
That policies (like Brexit) designed for elderly, no-longer-productive voters will end up bankrupting the country and immiserating the young is of course infuriating - but electoral success is impossible without a willingness to feather-bed this selfish generation.
Time to trot out my go-to piece of research on this topic again:
In 2017, our analysis of the BES data suggests that turnout among over 55s was 83.35%, compared to 58.15% of those under 55. Likewise, turnout was 84.34% vs. 63.06% for over and under 65s respectively. Combining these BES estimates of turnout with LFS estimates of nationality and ONS population estimates, we arrive at the following figures: the over 55s constituted 48.35% of the voting public in 2017, and the over 65s, 30.27%. If we assume that both turnout and the proportion of those disenfranchised due to their nationality remain constant, over 55s will constitute over half of the voting public by 2020 as a result of projected demographic change.
Allowing for turnout, pensioners are about a third of the electorate and the over 55s an entire half, and the proportions get greater with every passing year. We are a gerontocracy, and will be for some decades to come.
And, I’ll warrant, because non-elderly votes are efficiently concentrated in London, inner cities, and university towns, the elderly vote is even *more* decisive than your stats suggest.
That is an interesting point that had not occurred to me.
Given the ongoing catastrophe in Scotland -- where ~ 20 per cent of the vote gets them one seat -- it does seems as though FPTP is not going to work for Labour for the forseeable future.
Mmmmm .....
I'm not even sure that PR could rescue Labour at this stage though. As recently as 2015, Ukip won 13% of the popular vote in a general election, in a system which meant that virtually all the votes were wasted. Bring in something strongly proportional and the risk is that you end up with the orthodox centre-right (property price inflating, pensioner bribing, traditional conservatives) as the single largest party, with the populist right (flog criminals, raise the drawbridge, anti-woke) as the third largest party, propping them up.
Labour conveys the impression of being a minority, sectional interest, party, fixated on social justice issues with a side-serving of "citizen of nowhere" internationalism and a distaste for the views of many of its traditional voters. Both it and the Tories would lose a lot of voters in a system other than FPTP, which forces those who are strongly anti one of those parties to vote for the other to get rid of it in the bulk of constituencies, but I suspect that Labour would have much further to fall.
I agree that PR changes the rules of the game dramatically, and neither the current Labour party or Tory party would survive in their present form. (I am not too worried about that myself they have long since outlived their usefulness).
To pull the trigger, a party would have to be really desperate. They would have to realise they can never win under FPTP again.
Are Labour desperate enough ? Maybe not. Politicians are always hopeful they can turn it around.
But, I really can't see how Labour win under FPTP again without Scotland.
"Al Barrett Blue heart @hodgehillvicar One more time for those who might have missed it: #DismantlingWhiteness has nothing to do with hating white people (or white people hating ourselves). And everything to do with dismantling harmful ways of being in & seeing the world that centre some and marginalise others."
Fuck this shit
Let the Left die. They seem determined to hurl themselves off an ideological cliff, I fail to see why we should prevent this
Topic is phones in schools.
There are multiple topics running on any thread.
Yes but I think this one benefits from a lazer focus.
I myself will be commenting on it soon.
Grammar police. I myself .. tut tut...
The grammar police seem to be as clueless as Plod.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Yes I agree. Make Poundbury aesthetic standards mandatory nationwide for planning permission. Then at least some of the NIMBYism would disappear.
Yes. Just fucking do it
Trump, in his odd, mad, uncanny way, sensed this, with his demand that all Federal buildings be "beautiful". He meant neo-classical or maybe Gothic at a push
Thing is, he's right, despite being insane. Architects, for all their ingenuity, have not bettered the Georgian terrace, and/or the higgeldy-piggledy English market town (or French, or Dutch, or German, or Italian, etc etc etc) for furthering human happiness via building style. People with kids want their own front door, on ground level, in a solid building, and a short WALK to the shops and schools. That's it
In a few inner city areas old and young or mad sexy people might be delighted with skyscrapers, and good luck to them. But families need a small defensible space with a garden
Do that, and you have a successful development, and it might even end up handsome and desirable. And you can do it quite densely, as Prince Chuck has done in Poundbury
The thing is, skyscrapers CAN work for families. I’ve lived it. If they’re spacious inside, have a good sized balcony, good common facilities that breed a sense of community. Ample parking. Security at the complex entrance. Etc... It works all over the world but has barely been attempted in the UK, because it’s been more profitable to build commercial property or 1000ft high piggy banks for foreign money launderers.
Complement this with the market town development type you advocate. And then increase every reasonably sized village by 10. And you’re sorted.
My older daughter and her mum have just moved to a quirky bit of north London. It is not fashionable, it is safe and pleasant, it is highly intriguing, because it is a traffic-less road - virtually no cars at all - with every Victorian-built household having a door directly on to the street (two households per house: upstairs and downstairs, explicitly designed this way). Every household has a useful garden. You can walk to all shops and schools
Result? It's incredible. Kids play together on the car-less street unsupervised like it is the 1950s. Football and hopscotch. Because the kids interact so much the neighbours do too. People leave apple pies for each other, like idyllic America in the movies.
It is remarkable. Just get the housing right and people will behave as they want to behave, which is pro-social and neighbourly, nearly everyone likes to feel safe, and surrounded by people they can identify and trust. That's it. It's not subatomic physics
The other issue, which I’m sure is well-rehearsed, is that volume builders dominate new development in a way unheard of in most countries.
The result is shite, bad-quality, cookie-cutter “exec” homes using a pattern which has barely changed since about 1982, except that the rooms have got smaller.
Would be interesting to see a study on how these appreciate (or rather, depreciate).
I agree, but one of the other issues is that UK houses are priced per bedroom rather than per square metre. I would much prefer them being so.
Yes although it would be more appropriate these Brexit days to have price per square foot. I've been looking at houses recently and I make a point of calculating the price per square foot of each property. It can be truly revealing.
One of my favourite statistics is the number of square feet in an average new build residence:
US - 2200 Germany - 1600 Belgium - 1300 Holland - 1300 UK - 800.
Before World War 2, the UK was 1600. We need to get it up there again.
How many people lived in a 1930s new build compared with a 2020s new build ?
Average household size was about 4 compared to 2.4. But people these days have much higher standards and more stuff. The desire for space hasn't declined - it's the availability of land that has, as shown by the huge increase in the prices of land cleared for building. In 1938, land was 2% of the price of the average new build, now it's 70%. The big winners from the current system are well-connected or lucky landowners.
It’s far less than 70%. Even in central London, max 50%.
Normally more like 33-40%
I've seen the 70% figure for new builds somewhere, but can't find the reference.
But it's consistent with property values as a whole according to the ONS - the average property value in 2015 was £192k, of which the structure accounted for £63k, giving a residual land value of 67%.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Though new estates are already much more varied architecturally than they were in the days of Bob and Thelma Ferris.
They are still ugly. Everyone overlooks everyone else and you have a max 70ft garden boarded by panel fencing... YUK.
Perhaps you'd prefer if everyone had a detached house with an acre of land.
It would have some benefits but would be somewhat low density living.
It’s neither healthy nor sensible for all the new build to focus on one segment of the market.
Indeed.
Different housing suits different people.
And all the 'build Georgian terraces' snobbishness against new build estates doesn't alter the fact that there is a lot of demand for new build estates which is why new build estates continue to be built.
The other issue, which I’m sure is well-rehearsed, is that volume builders dominate new development in a way unheard of in most countries.
The result is shite, bad-quality, cookie-cutter “exec” homes using a pattern which has barely changed since about 1982, except that the rooms have got smaller.
Would be interesting to see a study on how these appreciate (or rather, depreciate).
I agree, but one of the other issues is that UK houses are priced per bedroom rather than per square metre. I would much prefer them being so.
Yes although it would be more appropriate these Brexit days to have price per square foot. I've been looking at houses recently and I make a point of calculating the price per square foot of each property. It can be truly revealing.
One of my favourite statistics is the number of square feet in an average new build residence:
US - 2200 Germany - 1600 Belgium - 1300 Holland - 1300 UK - 800.
Before World War 2, the UK was 1600. We need to get it up there again.
How many people lived in a 1930s new build compared with a 2020s new build ?
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Yes I agree. Make Poundbury aesthetic standards mandatory nationwide for planning permission. Then at least some of the NIMBYism would disappear.
Yes. Just fucking do it
Trump, in his odd, mad, uncanny way, sensed this, with his demand that all Federal buildings be "beautiful". He meant neo-classical or maybe Gothic at a push
Thing is, he's right, despite being insane. Architects, for all their ingenuity, have not bettered the Georgian terrace, and/or the higgeldy-piggledy English market town (or French, or Dutch, or German, or Italian, etc etc etc) for furthering human happiness via building style. People with kids want their own front door, on ground level, in a solid building, and a short WALK to the shops and schools. That's it
In a few inner city areas old and young or mad sexy people might be delighted with skyscrapers, and good luck to them. But families need a small defensible space with a garden
Do that, and you have a successful development, and it might even end up handsome and desirable. And you can do it quite densely, as Prince Chuck has done in Poundbury
The thing is, skyscrapers CAN work for families. I’ve lived it. If they’re spacious inside, have a good sized balcony, good common facilities that breed a sense of community. Ample parking. Security at the complex entrance. Etc... It works all over the world but has barely been attempted in the UK, because it’s been more profitable to build commercial property or 1000ft high piggy banks for foreign money launderers.
Complement this with the market town development type you advocate. And then increase every reasonably sized village by 10. And you’re sorted.
My older daughter and her mum have just moved to a quirky bit of north London. It is not fashionable, it is safe and pleasant, it is highly intriguing, because it is a traffic-less road - virtually no cars at all - with every Victorian-built household having a door directly on to the street (two households per house: upstairs and downstairs, explicitly designed this way). Every household has a useful garden. You can walk to all shops and schools
Result? It's incredible. Kids play together on the car-less street unsupervised like it is the 1950s. Football and hopscotch. Because the kids interact so much the neighbours do too. People leave apple pies for each other, like idyllic America in the movies.
It is remarkable. Just get the housing right and people will behave as they want to behave, which is pro-social and neighbourly, nearly everyone likes to feel safe, and surrounded by people they can identify and trust. That's it. It's not subatomic physics
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Yes I agree. Make Poundbury aesthetic standards mandatory nationwide for planning permission. Then at least some of the NIMBYism would disappear.
Yes. Just fucking do it
Trump, in his odd, mad, uncanny way, sensed this, with his demand that all Federal buildings be "beautiful". He meant neo-classical or maybe Gothic at a push
Thing is, he's right, despite being insane. Architects, for all their ingenuity, have not bettered the Georgian terrace, and/or the higgeldy-piggledy English market town (or French, or Dutch, or German, or Italian, etc etc etc) for furthering human happiness via building style. People with kids want their own front door, on ground level, in a solid building, and a short WALK to the shops and schools. That's it
In a few inner city areas old and young or mad sexy people might be delighted with skyscrapers, and good luck to them. But families need a small defensible space with a garden
Do that, and you have a successful development, and it might even end up handsome and desirable. And you can do it quite densely, as Prince Chuck has done in Poundbury
The thing is, skyscrapers CAN work for families. I’ve lived it. If they’re spacious inside, have a good sized balcony, good common facilities that breed a sense of community. Ample parking. Security at the complex entrance. Etc... It works all over the world but has barely been attempted in the UK, because it’s been more profitable to build commercial property or 1000ft high piggy banks for foreign money launderers.
Complement this with the market town development type you advocate. And then increase every reasonably sized village by 10. And you’re sorted.
My older daughter and her mum have just moved to a quirky bit of north London. It is not fashionable, it is safe and pleasant, it is highly intriguing, because it is a traffic-less road - virtually no cars at all - with every Victorian-built household having a door directly on to the street (two households per house: upstairs and downstairs, explicitly designed this way). Every household has a useful garden. You can walk to all shops and schools
Result? It's incredible. Kids play together on the car-less street unsupervised like it is the 1950s. Football and hopscotch. Because the kids interact so much the neighbours do too. People leave apple pies for each other, like idyllic America in the movies.
It is remarkable. Just get the housing right and people will behave as they want to behave, which is pro-social and neighbourly, nearly everyone likes to feel safe, and surrounded by people they can identify and trust. That's it. It's not subatomic physics
Sounds like Temple Fortune (except for being victorian)
On the topic of the last thread, it seems almost anything can be explained by the demographics.
The Tories have captured the elderly vote by protecting their income, delivering them Brexit, and inflating their assets.
There have never been more old people; *and* they are more likely to vote. You can’t win England without them. The blue wall is even more, proportionally, full of old people than the South East.
That policies (like Brexit) designed for elderly, no-longer-productive voters will end up bankrupting the country and immiserating the young is of course infuriating - but electoral success is impossible without a willingness to feather-bed this selfish generation.
Time to trot out my go-to piece of research on this topic again:
In 2017, our analysis of the BES data suggests that turnout among over 55s was 83.35%, compared to 58.15% of those under 55. Likewise, turnout was 84.34% vs. 63.06% for over and under 65s respectively. Combining these BES estimates of turnout with LFS estimates of nationality and ONS population estimates, we arrive at the following figures: the over 55s constituted 48.35% of the voting public in 2017, and the over 65s, 30.27%. If we assume that both turnout and the proportion of those disenfranchised due to their nationality remain constant, over 55s will constitute over half of the voting public by 2020 as a result of projected demographic change.
Allowing for turnout, pensioners are about a third of the electorate and the over 55s an entire half, and the proportions get greater with every passing year. We are a gerontocracy, and will be for some decades to come.
And, I’ll warrant, because non-elderly votes are efficiently concentrated in London, inner cities, and university towns, the elderly vote is even *more* decisive than your stats suggest.
That is an interesting point that had not occurred to me.
Given the ongoing catastrophe in Scotland -- where ~ 20 per cent of the vote gets them one seat -- it does seems as though FPTP is not going to work for Labour for the forseeable future.
Mmmmm .....
I'm not even sure that PR could rescue Labour at this stage though. As recently as 2015, Ukip won 13% of the popular vote in a general election, in a system which meant that virtually all the votes were wasted. Bring in something strongly proportional and the risk is that you end up with the orthodox centre-right (property price inflating, pensioner bribing, traditional conservatives) as the single largest party, with the populist right (flog criminals, raise the drawbridge, anti-woke) as the third largest party, propping them up.
Labour conveys the impression of being a minority, sectional interest, party, fixated on social justice issues with a side-serving of "citizen of nowhere" internationalism and a distaste for the views of many of its traditional voters. Both it and the Tories would lose a lot of voters in a system other than FPTP, which forces those who are strongly anti one of those parties to vote for the other to get rid of it in the bulk of constituencies, but I suspect that Labour would have much further to fall.
I agree that PR changes the rules of the game dramatically, and neither the current Labour party or Tory party would survive in their present form. (I am not too worried about that myself they have long since outlived their usefulness).
To pull the trigger, a party would have to be really desperate. They would have to realise they can never win under FPTP again.
Are Labour desperate enough ? Maybe not. Politicians are always hopeful they can turn it around.
But, I really can't see how Labour win under FPTP again without Scotland.
If Johnson f*cks up badly enough, and if they choose a political genius like Blair as a leader, Labour will win again, even under FPTP.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
BREAKING. Czechia expels 18 (!) diplomats after discovering that GRU's unit 29155 - same guys we proved were behind the Skripal and Gebrev poisonings - were behind the explosions at Czech ammunition factories in 2014.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Yes I agree. Make Poundbury aesthetic standards mandatory nationwide for planning permission. Then at least some of the NIMBYism would disappear.
Yes. Just fucking do it
Trump, in his odd, mad, uncanny way, sensed this, with his demand that all Federal buildings be "beautiful". He meant neo-classical or maybe Gothic at a push
Thing is, he's right, despite being insane. Architects, for all their ingenuity, have not bettered the Georgian terrace, and/or the higgeldy-piggledy English market town (or French, or Dutch, or German, or Italian, etc etc etc) for furthering human happiness via building style. People with kids want their own front door, on ground level, in a solid building, and a short WALK to the shops and schools. That's it
In a few inner city areas old and young or mad sexy people might be delighted with skyscrapers, and good luck to them. But families need a small defensible space with a garden
Do that, and you have a successful development, and it might even end up handsome and desirable. And you can do it quite densely, as Prince Chuck has done in Poundbury
The thing is, skyscrapers CAN work for families. I’ve lived it. If they’re spacious inside, have a good sized balcony, good common facilities that breed a sense of community. Ample parking. Security at the complex entrance. Etc... It works all over the world but has barely been attempted in the UK, because it’s been more profitable to build commercial property or 1000ft high piggy banks for foreign money launderers.
Complement this with the market town development type you advocate. And then increase every reasonably sized village by 10. And you’re sorted.
My older daughter and her mum have just moved to a quirky bit of north London. It is not fashionable, it is safe and pleasant, it is highly intriguing, because it is a traffic-less road - virtually no cars at all - with every Victorian-built household having a door directly on to the street (two households per house: upstairs and downstairs, explicitly designed this way). Every household has a useful garden. You can walk to all shops and schools
Result? It's incredible. Kids play together on the car-less street unsupervised like it is the 1950s. Football and hopscotch. Because the kids interact so much the neighbours do too. People leave apple pies for each other, like idyllic America in the movies.
It is remarkable. Just get the housing right and people will behave as they want to behave, which is pro-social and neighbourly, nearly everyone likes to feel safe, and surrounded by people they can identify and trust. That's it. It's not subatomic physics
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Yes I agree. Make Poundbury aesthetic standards mandatory nationwide for planning permission. Then at least some of the NIMBYism would disappear.
Yes. Just fucking do it
Trump, in his odd, mad, uncanny way, sensed this, with his demand that all Federal buildings be "beautiful". He meant neo-classical or maybe Gothic at a push
Thing is, he's right, despite being insane. Architects, for all their ingenuity, have not bettered the Georgian terrace, and/or the higgeldy-piggledy English market town (or French, or Dutch, or German, or Italian, etc etc etc) for furthering human happiness via building style. People with kids want their own front door, on ground level, in a solid building, and a short WALK to the shops and schools. That's it
In a few inner city areas old and young or mad sexy people might be delighted with skyscrapers, and good luck to them. But families need a small defensible space with a garden
Do that, and you have a successful development, and it might even end up handsome and desirable. And you can do it quite densely, as Prince Chuck has done in Poundbury
The thing is, skyscrapers CAN work for families. I’ve lived it. If they’re spacious inside, have a good sized balcony, good common facilities that breed a sense of community. Ample parking. Security at the complex entrance. Etc... It works all over the world but has barely been attempted in the UK, because it’s been more profitable to build commercial property or 1000ft high piggy banks for foreign money launderers.
Complement this with the market town development type you advocate. And then increase every reasonably sized village by 10. And you’re sorted.
My older daughter and her mum have just moved to a quirky bit of north London. It is not fashionable, it is safe and pleasant, it is highly intriguing, because it is a traffic-less road - virtually no cars at all - with every Victorian-built household having a door directly on to the street (two households per house: upstairs and downstairs, explicitly designed this way). Every household has a useful garden. You can walk to all shops and schools
Result? It's incredible. Kids play together on the car-less street unsupervised like it is the 1950s. Football and hopscotch. Because the kids interact so much the neighbours do too. People leave apple pies for each other, like idyllic America in the movies.
It is remarkable. Just get the housing right and people will behave as they want to behave, which is pro-social and neighbourly, nearly everyone likes to feel safe, and surrounded by people they can identify and trust. That's it. It's not subatomic physics
Sounds like Temple Fortune
Pretty close. It's about a mile away and less expected. I agree Hampstead Garden Suburb is quite a good model, tho I think you can go considerably denser than that and still provide a lifestyle many would desire
The other issue, which I’m sure is well-rehearsed, is that volume builders dominate new development in a way unheard of in most countries.
The result is shite, bad-quality, cookie-cutter “exec” homes using a pattern which has barely changed since about 1982, except that the rooms have got smaller.
Would be interesting to see a study on how these appreciate (or rather, depreciate).
I agree, but one of the other issues is that UK houses are priced per bedroom rather than per square metre. I would much prefer them being so.
Yes although it would be more appropriate these Brexit days to have price per square foot. I've been looking at houses recently and I make a point of calculating the price per square foot of each property. It can be truly revealing.
One of my favourite statistics is the number of square feet in an average new build residence:
US - 2200 Germany - 1600 Belgium - 1300 Holland - 1300 UK - 800.
Before World War 2, the UK was 1600. We need to get it up there again.
How many people lived in a 1930s new build compared with a 2020s new build ?
Yeah but fewer than Belgium or the Netherlands?
No idea.
Of course there was some references to the average Swedish person now living alone re covid last year - don't know if that was correct.
There's a cost / space equation for house buyers to decide on and there's a house size / housing density equation for the planners to decide on.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Though new estates are already much more varied architecturally than they were in the days of Bob and Thelma Ferris.
They are still ugly. Everyone overlooks everyone else and you have a max 70ft garden boarded by panel fencing... YUK.
Sometimes they do get it right. But yes, we need more Poundburys. I don't understand why architects refuse to revisit old but successful styles. Crying 'pastiche' isn't an argument. Also agree skyscrapers can work - actually there's plenty of examples in Manchester of skyscrapers going up which would work for families. The problem, though it pains me to admit it, is that central Manchester isn't a particularly family friendly place to live. Perhaps there's a chicken and egg thing going on here - if more families live there, maybe it will become more family friendly.
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
Prince Philip had a very fine and fitting send off. Pleased he wanted O Valiant Hearts to be played, the most moving of the remembrance hymns, but latterly considered by some as inappropriately "glorifying war".
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain.
For all the focus on Labour, the reality is that it is the government's record that will be on trial. Sensible oppositions "never interrupt their opponents when they're making a mistake".
The hardest thing for the government to navigate in the next three years is going to be housing. If they get it right, lots of new people will be property owners and will have positive equity in their homes.
If they get it wrong, then either house prices are materially lower (and lots of previously Conservative voters are angry) or the age of first home purchase continues to rise, resulting in ever more disenfranchised voters.
Right now, we care about Covid and Brexit (where, after a rocky start, the government has done a good, perhaps excellent, job). But that will be old news in three years time.
The problem with housing is simple. Under the Tories planning framework, councils have to build endless new homes to hit the quota. If they do, it means granting developers permission to build endless rabbit hutch homes (all they seem to want to build). If they don't developers always win on appeal in their plan to build endless rabbit hutch homes.
I know that NIMBYism gets a lot of bad press. But in somewhere like Stockton-on-Tees I totally understand it. Endless new housing developments have been done across the borough for years. And yet the government says not enough are going up, so developers have won every appeal and keep building in places that understandably locals are hacked off about.
How the Tories gain electoral credit for concreting over England I don't know.
Not something I expected to hear from you.
So you don't think people need somewhere to live?
Should people live in tents instead?
Or should we deport people so we have fewer households?
Its the Tory equivalent of Douglas Adams' Shoe Event Horizon. In many towns all we seem to be doing is building more and more and more houses. Where we need to replace old housing stock then that makes sense. But most are 3/4 bed "executive" style homes with minimal internal space and even less space in-between houses, often with a fabulous view of a major road.
Are there really people clamouring to buy these homes? That desperately want a large mortgage on a small house on estates that quickly descend into sink status thanks to every other house having a rotating cast of impossible to police BTL tenants?
The solution is planning. Build houses that people need. Which is precisely what the NPPF overrules in favour of the developers.
Topically, Prince Charles has shown the way. Build Poundbury. It is enormously successful, even though Guardianista architects loathe it (because they are unable to "express themselves",. and this is "pastiche")
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
Poundbury is a bit shit. But it is orders of magnitude less shit than the shit box estates the shit developers shit all over the countryside.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
When I lived in Australia and NZ property for development were always sold in 1/4 acre sections, and people would commission their own houses. It seemed to work OK.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Australia has, without question, the most hideous suburban housing on earth. And I have travelled widely in north America
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
Nah. Despite the metropolitan elite disdain, people prefer suburban sprawl and houses with gardens etc as places to live, and for families to grow up. Modern estates, are actually quite good places to live.
You're a rich doctor in the shires
A lot of families cannot afford the house you describe, nor the lifestyle. They can afford a 2-3 bed flat with a garden in quite dense styling, two households per building, their own doorway and bins.
Your answer is flippant, ill-informed, jejune, silly, effeminate, gauche, weird, creepy, sad, perverse and embarrassing. Other than that I liked it, quite a lot. Do more of the same
Comments
Are there people clamouring to buy those homes? Yes, that's why they're being sold. If they weren't then the developers wouldn't building them because they wouldn't be able to sell them. The only reason the developers build homes is in order to sell them.
Quite a few schools are already finding a way - the local Free school is using them. Part of the problem, apparently, is that up to now, all talk of laptops-per-child were based around laptop prices that would make Alienware look cheap.
And a close friend of mine and his girlfriend live with his parents.
But I don't think it's a healthy state of affairs, tbh.
Thing is, so many of these estates are available as rental. Philip may well be right about the total number of BTL properties. But I suspect they are increasingly concentrated onto these new build estates which seem to be entirely reliant upon (and plagued by) BTL.
The primary determinant of whether people vote left or right is not whether planning was given to somebody else's home, its whether they are able to own their own home.
Ignore the NIMBY squeaky wheels who aren't interested in buying from the developments and concentrate on the real people actually buying the homes, the real people the developers are actually selling to, who become home owners as a result - they are the ones now on the property ladder which they wouldn't be if it wasn't for their new home.
This is something I've been saying for years but The Economist realised it recently and put up a good explainer: https://www.economist.com/britain/2021/04/03/the-truth-behind-the-tories-northern-strongholds
In my part of London, estates of flats are taking shape at Fresh Wharf in Barking and on the site of a former retail park nearby.
It's far too simplistic to describe them as either being for BTL investment or for home ownership because they are both and neither. There is a recognition in this part of the world of the need for a healthy rental sector so the developers are going into the rental game and setting up blocks of flats for rent rather than to buy.
We are also seeing attempts to create "riverside communities" and one of the developers sponsored and ran a local food market at one of the new developments at lunchtime today which was a mixture of street food and hard sell.
There is a growing recognition communities rather than just flats are the answer and what people want.
Are these new estates getting business? Hard to tell at this stage but we all know there's demand out there but whether the cultural and socio-economic impact of the past year means the kind of lifestyle these flats perpetuated and represented is as desired and desirable as it was, remains to be seen.
They remain, however, for all too many people the only realistic housing option.
Changing the planning laws to make it easier for developers to force through greenfield development whilst ignoring large areas of brownfield redevelopment is idiocy.
Nor is this helped by the fact that developers are sitting on over 1 million plots with full (600,000) or outline (480,000) planning permission.
It’s like someone looked at Dubai and asked themselves whether they could make a cheaper and nastier version.
(See also, Stratford).
That’s a failure of planning (and of design).
https://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/Nine-Elms.html
A mere £15 million for the second one on the list.
To some extent this is already being developed (see the note upthread about Barking)
But, likely requires public subsidy to bring land in volume into habitable and developable use.
Factor in the all-too-frequent reports of shoddy workmanship that buyers end up having to spend years trying to pester cowboy housebuilders to put right, and you have to wonder why anyone would purchase a new build at all. Older homes might suffer from deficient insulation, for example, but surely that is more than compensated for by having stood up for an appreciable length of time without starting to fall down again, to say nothing of having rooms which you can fill with a decent amount of furniture without having to climb over it to get in and out of them?
To build on open countryside is just lazy corrupt politics.
Thanks City for not forcing extra time.
The result is shite, bad-quality, cookie-cutter “exec” homes using a pattern which has barely changed since about 1982, except that the rooms have got smaller.
Would be interesting to see a study on how these appreciate (or rather, depreciate).
interesting, isn't it?
If one were presented with a list of Parliamentary seats in England, all labelled by code numbers rather than names so that one had no idea who they were currently held by, then you could probably make quite accurate predictions as to the incumbent party in each one given three pieces of information: age profile, ethnic profile and median earnings - but age would be the single most important indicator.
a) Dismantling Whiteness
b) Enforcing Whiteness
c) Other
I myself will be commenting on it soon.
Given the ongoing catastrophe in Scotland -- where ~ 20 per cent of the vote gets them one seat -- it does seems as though FPTP is not going to work for Labour for the forseeable future.
Mmmmm .....
One thing that needs watching with corporate Build to Let developers is that typically target only the top 10-20% of the market, with lots of value added services, and have rents about 30% above the local norm for a similar modern flat outside the development.
(That's based on comparisons I ran across several L&G developments around the country vs local equivalents and affordability indices.
Which may work in clearing a way up the rental ladder, but may not give what you want - especially it won't give a like for like if something drives smaller LLs out. They may not usually be accessible for people on average or average-ish salaries.
Tax it.
Solves many many problems.
But maybe there’s a rainy day coming.
Can any PBer recommend a simple “for dummies” that will do the trick?
(Ie estimate or rank net propensity to vote Tory given three variables)?
Build 100 Poundburys. The nation will look better, and be happier, and you can do it quite densely
https://www.visit-dorset.com/explore/poundbury-p1124333
It just needs wanky architects to admit that maybe our Georgian ancestors mastered the urban housing form, and it can't get any better
One of my favourite statistics is the number of square feet in an average new build residence:
US - 2200
Germany - 1600
Belgium - 1300
Holland - 1300
UK - 800.
Before World War 2, the UK was 1600. We need to get it up there again.
An idea - layout a new suburb or whatever. Each house plot is marked out. You can build 1 house on each plot. No more, no less.
Plots for flats - for flats only.
Put in the roads, and the utilities.
Sell the plots. Maybe each side of each street to a different developer.... with quite a few individual ones thrown in.
So any developer will be paying the full cost of loans with panning permission up front. They won't be holding that for 10 years....
https://covid.joinzoe.com/data
is correct then herd immunity is being reached.
Labour conveys the impression of being a minority, sectional interest, party, fixated on social justice issues with a side-serving of "citizen of nowhere" internationalism and a distaste for the views of many of its traditional voters. Both it and the Tories would lose a lot of voters in a system other than FPTP, which forces those who are strongly anti one of those parties to vote for the other to get rid of it in the bulk of constituencies, but I suspect that Labour would have much further to fall.
Trump, in his odd, mad, uncanny way, sensed this, with his demand that all Federal buildings be "beautiful". He meant neo-classical or maybe Gothic at a push
Thing is, he's right, despite being insane. Architects, for all their ingenuity, have not bettered the Georgian terrace, and/or the higgeldy-piggledy English market town (or French, or Dutch, or German, or Italian, etc etc etc) for furthering human happiness via building style. People with kids want their own front door, on ground level, in a solid building, and a short WALK to the shops and schools. That's it
In a few inner city areas old and young or mad sexy people might be delighted with skyscrapers, and good luck to them. But families need a small defensible space with a garden
Do that, and you have a successful development, and it might even end up handsome and desirable. And you can do it quite densely, as Prince Chuck has done in Poundbury
Complement this with the market town development type you advocate. And then increase every reasonably sized village by 10%. And you’re sorted.
Normally more like 33-40%
It would have some benefits but would be somewhat low density living.
This is a proposed new build in Düsseldorf:
Pleased he wanted O Valiant Hearts to be played, the most moving of the remembrance hymns, but latterly considered by some as inappropriately "glorifying war".
Essentially, once the vaccination project gets down to the young folks then this should be all over bar the shouting, though whether the Government and its advisors will be willing to accept this and let go of pretty well all of the domestic restrictions is another matter entirely... Of course, the one restriction that would be more useful than any other - heavy curbs on incoming travellers, to guard against variant importation - is the one area in which the Government has acted in a half-hearted, pathetic fashion.
AIUI the threat of total vaccine escape is low, but the consequences of such a variant entering the country and gaining a foothold would be so catastrophic that they more than merit choking off the flow of incoming air passengers as a precaution for the time being. It seems foolish and reckless that this isn't being done.
To pull the trigger, a party would have to be really desperate. They would have to realise they can never win under FPTP again.
Are Labour desperate enough ? Maybe not. Politicians are always hopeful they can turn it around.
But, I really can't see how Labour win under FPTP again without Scotland.
Result? It's incredible. Kids play together on the car-less street unsupervised like it is the 1950s. Football and hopscotch. Because the kids interact so much the neighbours do too. People leave apple pies for each other, like idyllic America in the movies.
It is remarkable. Just get the housing right and people will behave as they want to behave, which is pro-social and neighbourly, nearly everyone likes to feel safe, and surrounded by people they can identify and trust. That's it. It's not subatomic physics
But it's consistent with property values as a whole according to the ONS - the average property value in 2015 was £192k, of which the structure accounted for £63k, giving a residual land value of 67%.
On the other hand both countries seem to have crazy property bubbles now.
Different housing suits different people.
And all the 'build Georgian terraces' snobbishness against new build estates doesn't alter the fact that there is a lot of demand for new build estates which is why new build estates continue to be built.
Two big asks, however.
It is a rich, lucky country, but I fear they are storing up troubles with their urban planning. Huge sprawl, no walkable socialising, atomised "families". It is already happening in the western suburbs of Sydney. Bigtime drugs and gangs
Humans need to live quite densely. We generally like it. As long as we can close the door and be safe in our castle
BREAKING. Czechia expels 18 (!) diplomats after discovering that GRU's unit 29155 - same guys we proved were behind the Skripal and Gebrev poisonings - were behind the explosions at Czech ammunition factories in 2014.
Of course there was some references to the average Swedish person now living alone re covid last year - don't know if that was correct.
There's a cost / space equation for house buyers to decide on and there's a house size / housing density equation for the planners to decide on.
But yes, we need more Poundburys. I don't understand why architects refuse to revisit old but successful styles. Crying 'pastiche' isn't an argument.
Also agree skyscrapers can work - actually there's plenty of examples in Manchester of skyscrapers going up which would work for families. The problem, though it pains me to admit it, is that central Manchester isn't a particularly family friendly place to live. Perhaps there's a chicken and egg thing going on here - if more families live there, maybe it will become more family friendly.
https://twitter.com/plasmatron/status/1383426067520577540?s=21
A lot of families cannot afford the house you describe, nor the lifestyle. They can afford a 2-3 bed flat with a garden in quite dense styling, two households per building, their own doorway and bins.
Your answer is flippant, ill-informed, jejune, silly, effeminate, gauche, weird, creepy, sad, perverse and embarrassing. Other than that I liked it, quite a lot. Do more of the same