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.
There have been some redevelopments of old pit areas but that is a tiny fraction of the green field building that has been happening over the last 5 decades. The idea that most, many or even much of the new development has been on anything other than pure greenfield is completely false.
Why stop at five decades.
Make it a few centuries and you'll be able to say the proportion is even bigger.
And aren't you a supporter of freedom of movement ?
If so you can't start singing "every field is scared".
Because the main changes in land usage and the destruction of so much of our natural environment has happened since the 1960s and because the coal mines and railway sidings you were going on about weren't available for development more than 50 years ago because they were still in use. I base my arguments on actual facts. You base them on your own ill informed opinions.
So because I pointed out that there is currently a lot of house building on old mining land you start complaining about house building on farmland in the 1960s.
What do you want to do about it ?
Go back in time and tell Bob Ferris that he can't have his new suburban house because somebody might be offended in the 2020s ?
Stop squirming. You made a stupid unsupported claim and now are getting huffy you got challenged on it.
You can't have 67 million people living in this country and not be building on greenfield sites.
We have had our population increase by more than housing capacity for decades and people wonder why there's a housing crisis.
Either we need to start building many more homes on whatever land is available and that must realistically include greenfield sites, or we don't resolve the housing crisis, or we deport or kill a few million people to bring the population back down.
I don't see anyone prepared to advocate for the last one, but they scream blue murder about the first.
Hasn't the population fallen in the past year?
Let's keep the trend going, and happy days.
Make it financially attractive for folk to rent out their spare rooms, and that would soak up a big chunk of demand from single people.
Anyway. Bedtime.
Well Sandy has hit upon an important point here. We have a shortage of houses, but not of bedrooms. There are a lot of the 60+ generation living in ones and twos in three or four bedroom houses in a way that there wasn't thirty or forty years ago. If the elderly could be incentivised to downsize, it might help. But that generation is rich enough not to need 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.
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
My secretaries daughter, a twenty something single mum, an HCA, moved in 100 yards from me into a "affordable house" from a social housing group. Two bedrooms, nice yard, own driveway. Same school my boys went to and same village. Sure, you metropolitan North Londoners might turn up your noses at it, but all 3 houses went in a few days to similar youngsters.
There are lots of things combined here in the issue
- brownfield is both more difficult to develop and less efficient. If you wanted to extend your own home would you build over the virgin ground or that bit where the old oil tank is buried and might cost ££££ to sort out. - planning law provides new estates with requirements on limiting parking, density of housing leading to the propensity to see cars parked all over the place in front of three storey houses. - Housing locations are still dependent on NIMBY issues. The reason developers have banks of land is unpredictability of the planning system.
My opinion is that we should be looking to provide more planned expansion via new towns, but ensuring that services provision including schools and health services are high standard to attract residents.
The idea that developers have land banks to deal with the planning system is utter garbage. They have land banks to put pressure on councils to release more, and more favourable, land for development under the planning system.
There is a good way to deal with this of course. Tax undeveloped land which has been granted full planning permission for more than a year against its actual value - which is somewhere between £3-4 million a hectare. See how quickly the developers decide to build houses on it after that.
What about revoking planning permission after a year? Wouldn't that be even more effective?
But the point is we do need the houses built. So revoking planning permission doesn't help.
Well it would incentivise them to start within a year, surely?
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.
There have been some redevelopments of old pit areas but that is a tiny fraction of the green field building that has been happening over the last 5 decades. The idea that most, many or even much of the new development has been on anything other than pure greenfield is completely false.
And its not enough, we need more greenfield built on.
People need places to live more than we need unbuilt greenfield land.
People complain that the houses built are small but then operate under a pretence that we can build sufficient space for everyone in brownfield sites alone. There aren't enough brownfield sites to built on to be frank - and why should there be when our population has increased by roughly 20% in the past generation (not Scottish) it would be a shock if there were enough brownfield sites.
If we're going to have people living in this country, they need to be able to have a home. That means building and that means to solve the housing crisis a rapid expansion of greenfield too.
If you build on vast swathes of greenbelt across the Home Counties you are handing the LDs large numbers of new councillors on a plate, brownbelt should always be built on first.
Hopefully now we have the new points based immigration system that will help by reducing demand
Be interesting to see how popular the Tories remain in constituencies between Oxford and Cambridge if they ever do go ahead with the plans to build 1 million houses in a corridor between the two university towns - almost all of it on green field sites.
Probably be more popular. A million new homeowners would bolster the vote quite nicely.
I'm not sure about that. People don't always credit politicians the way politicians expect them to. Margaret got credit for selling council houses, but that was an obvious and visible government action. I'm not sure that private sector developers building houses and selling them on would be so visible to the home buyers.
But the NIMBYs would undoubtedly blame the Conservatives for ruining their views.
People wildly overestimate the impact of NIMBYs.
The single biggest determinant of whether people vote Conservative or not is time tested: does the voter own their own home or not?
If voters own their own homes, they don't want to see the economic system torn up. If they don't, they're more likely to vote for radical left solutions.
Hence why London has gone Red. Its absolutely unaffordable and as a result those seats have gone Labour.
I agree that, in the long term, rising home ownership benefits the Conservatives hugely. But I don't agree at all that the power of NIMBYs is overestimated in the short-medium term, especially in the south of England.
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
My secretaries daughter, a twenty something single mum, an HCA, moved in 100 yards from me into a "affordable house" from a social housing group. Two bedrooms, nice yard, own driveway. Same school my boys went to and same village. Sure, you metropolitan North Londoners might turn up your noses at it, but all 3 houses went in a few days to similar youngsters.
There are lots of things combined here in the issue
- brownfield is both more difficult to develop and less efficient. If you wanted to extend your own home would you build over the virgin ground or that bit where the old oil tank is buried and might cost ££££ to sort out. - planning law provides new estates with requirements on limiting parking, density of housing leading to the propensity to see cars parked all over the place in front of three storey houses. - Housing locations are still dependent on NIMBY issues. The reason developers have banks of land is unpredictability of the planning system.
My opinion is that we should be looking to provide more planned expansion via new towns, but ensuring that services provision including schools and health services are high standard to attract residents.
The idea that developers have land banks to deal with the planning system is utter garbage. They have land banks to put pressure on councils to release more, and more favourable, land for development under the planning system.
There is a good way to deal with this of course. Tax undeveloped land which has been granted full planning permission for more than a year against its actual value - which is somewhere between £3-4 million a hectare. See how quickly the developers decide to build houses on it after that.
Its not garbage, the planning system is the source of most of the problems.
If it was quick and easy to get planning consent then it would be absolutely unproductive to have a bank of land. Why spend acquiring a bank of land and not develop it? The only reason to do so is the foibles of the planning system.
Part of the problem is that much of the value of the land changes depending upon whether it has consent or not - which is entirely because of our consent system and not a feature in other countries remotely to the same degree.
As a result it makes sense for a company to acquire land, get consent and then potentially 'flip' the land on without bothering to build on it because merely getting consent has made the land worth more.
The system is broken.
Rubbish.
I deal with the planning system on a daily basis. It has been steadily reduced in its effectiveness over the years so as to make it now practically impossible to refuse planning permission to major developments.
Yes if you are an individual or a small company then it is a pain in the arse but if you are one of the 4 major developers then it is simply not a barrier to getting land released at all because they all know that no matter what the local councils decide they will go to appeal and get it overturned by central Government no matter how valid the objections. They have all this built into their plans and timelines and they know exactly how it all works.
Which makes the planning system not remotely fit for purpose, because the individual or small company ought to be able to simply and easily get consent too, but they can't. Meaning that again, the firms with banks can make a profit purely from getting consent even without building on it because land+consent is worth more than land without consent.
If getting consent is the most valuable part of the development process, rather than actually building the homes, then don't be surprised that companies end up going too much for "banking" consent - it is an entirely predictable side-effect of making banking consent a profitable business to be in. Without having to do the legwork of actually building the land. Companies concentrate on where they find the profit and in our twisted system getting consent is profitable, whether you actually build on it or not.
If the value of land with consent was worth essentially the same as land without it, because our planning system was fit for purpose, these banks would vanish.
The trouble is that the changes that the developers are demanding - and which they are getting - are only making it easier for big developments. They will do little or nothing to help smaller developers or private individuals beyond a bit of tinkering around the edges. Indeed by encouraging much larger developments through the Growth Point system they have made it far less likely that smaller, more sympathetic developments will occur as they favour the big, thousands of homes, size developments.
The changes to the planning system are making the situation worse not better.
Like I say., give developers a year with planning permission and if they haven't started along a planned, scheduled development timeline then start taxing them on the land value.
We have a housing crisis and at least the developers are providing a solution by actually building homes.
I'd be entirely in favour of a greater loosening making it easier for anyone and everyone to build. But short of that then easier for the developers to do so is at least progress. The problem is the arguments against the reforms come from those arguing against building at all, or building on greenfield, which is entirely unviable - not from the perspective of arguing to make it even easier still for everyone which would take more of the power out of the hands of the developers.
If anyone and everyone could build a home easily then there'd be no reason to have developers with banks. But its not the case and very few people are arguing for it to be the case.
But you are basing your argument on the myth that the lack of house building is due to the planning system - it is not. That is just garbage put out by big developers to cover their own failings.
Councils designate land for development under a local plan. They are designating sufficient land for development but it is not always where they developers want it and they don't like having to abide by all those awkward rules about housing density and doing proper archaeological investigation before building - something brought in incidentally by Thatcher who did actually know the value of a proper planning system. They find it difficult to game the planning system or cut corners so they want it scrapped. And the easiest way to do that is to generate a housing crisis by not building on the land that already has permissions and then claiming it is because of the planning process. It is bullshit and it is a shame you fall for it.
So what of the planning rules would you get rid of? Do you actually know any of the planning rules we are talking about? Do you understand the old PPG system that Thatcher introduced or the NPPF scheme that replaced it?
It is easy to talk blithely about getting rid of planning rules but then scream when you see the consequences.
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
My secretaries daughter, a twenty something single mum, an HCA, moved in 100 yards from me into a "affordable house" from a social housing group. Two bedrooms, nice yard, own driveway. Same school my boys went to and same village. Sure, you metropolitan North Londoners might turn up your noses at it, but all 3 houses went in a few days to similar youngsters.
There are lots of things combined here in the issue
- brownfield is both more difficult to develop and less efficient. If you wanted to extend your own home would you build over the virgin ground or that bit where the old oil tank is buried and might cost ££££ to sort out. - planning law provides new estates with requirements on limiting parking, density of housing leading to the propensity to see cars parked all over the place in front of three storey houses. - Housing locations are still dependent on NIMBY issues. The reason developers have banks of land is unpredictability of the planning system.
My opinion is that we should be looking to provide more planned expansion via new towns, but ensuring that services provision including schools and health services are high standard to attract residents.
The idea that developers have land banks to deal with the planning system is utter garbage. They have land banks to put pressure on councils to release more, and more favourable, land for development under the planning system.
There is a good way to deal with this of course. Tax undeveloped land which has been granted full planning permission for more than a year against its actual value - which is somewhere between £3-4 million a hectare. See how quickly the developers decide to build houses on it after that.
Its not garbage, the planning system is the source of most of the problems.
If it was quick and easy to get planning consent then it would be absolutely unproductive to have a bank of land. Why spend acquiring a bank of land and not develop it? The only reason to do so is the foibles of the planning system.
Part of the problem is that much of the value of the land changes depending upon whether it has consent or not - which is entirely because of our consent system and not a feature in other countries remotely to the same degree.
As a result it makes sense for a company to acquire land, get consent and then potentially 'flip' the land on without bothering to build on it because merely getting consent has made the land worth more.
The system is broken.
Rubbish.
I deal with the planning system on a daily basis. It has been steadily reduced in its effectiveness over the years so as to make it now practically impossible to refuse planning permission to major developments.
Yes if you are an individual or a small company then it is a pain in the arse but if you are one of the 4 major developers then it is simply not a barrier to getting land released at all because they all know that no matter what the local councils decide they will go to appeal and get it overturned by central Government no matter how valid the objections. They have all this built into their plans and timelines and they know exactly how it all works.
Which makes the planning system not remotely fit for purpose, because the individual or small company ought to be able to simply and easily get consent too, but they can't. Meaning that again, the firms with banks can make a profit purely from getting consent even without building on it because land+consent is worth more than land without consent.
If getting consent is the most valuable part of the development process, rather than actually building the homes, then don't be surprised that companies end up going too much for "banking" consent - it is an entirely predictable side-effect of making banking consent a profitable business to be in. Without having to do the legwork of actually building the land. Companies concentrate on where they find the profit and in our twisted system getting consent is profitable, whether you actually build on it or not.
If the value of land with consent was worth essentially the same as land without it, because our planning system was fit for purpose, these banks would vanish.
The trouble is that the changes that the developers are demanding - and which they are getting - are only making it easier for big developments. They will do little or nothing to help smaller developers or private individuals beyond a bit of tinkering around the edges. Indeed by encouraging much larger developments through the Growth Point system they have made it far less likely that smaller, more sympathetic developments will occur as they favour the big, thousands of homes, size developments.
The changes to the planning system are making the situation worse not better.
Like I say., give developers a year with planning permission and if they haven't started along a planned, scheduled development timeline then start taxing them on the land value.
We have a housing crisis and at least the developers are providing a solution by actually building homes.
I'd be entirely in favour of a greater loosening making it easier for anyone and everyone to build. But short of that then easier for the developers to do so is at least progress. The problem is the arguments against the reforms come from those arguing against building at all, or building on greenfield, which is entirely unviable - not from the perspective of arguing to make it even easier still for everyone which would take more of the power out of the hands of the developers.
If anyone and everyone could build a home easily then there'd be no reason to have developers with banks. But its not the case and very few people are arguing for it to be the case.
As an aside the two planning rules most commonly objected to by developers and that they are most keen to see got rid of are the requirement to provide land and financing for local amenities for new developments and the requirement for a certain proportion of affordable housing. Not sure we are going to be building better communities by getting rid of those two bits of planning law.
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.
There have been some redevelopments of old pit areas but that is a tiny fraction of the green field building that has been happening over the last 5 decades. The idea that most, many or even much of the new development has been on anything other than pure greenfield is completely false.
Why stop at five decades.
Make it a few centuries and you'll be able to say the proportion is even bigger.
And aren't you a supporter of freedom of movement ?
If so you can't start singing "every field is scared".
Because the main changes in land usage and the destruction of so much of our natural environment has happened since the 1960s and because the coal mines and railway sidings you were going on about weren't available for development more than 50 years ago because they were still in use. I base my arguments on actual facts. You base them on your own ill informed opinions.
So because I pointed out that there is currently a lot of house building on old mining land you start complaining about house building on farmland in the 1960s.
What do you want to do about it ?
Go back in time and tell Bob Ferris that he can't have his new suburban house because somebody might be offended in the 2020s ?
Stop squirming. You made a stupid unsupported claim and now are getting huffy you got challenged on it.
Bizarre frothing.
I made a small and quite correct comment about the present day.
And then you started babbling about the 1960s.
So I'll ask you again what do you want to do about it ?
Go back in time and tell Old Macdonald that he can't sell one of his pea fields to a housing developer ?
Now whether you like it or not the decisions of the past were made and whether you like or not many millions of people will continue to want to live in new suburban homes.
You can't have 67 million people living in this country and not be building on greenfield sites.
We have had our population increase by more than housing capacity for decades and people wonder why there's a housing crisis.
Either we need to start building many more homes on whatever land is available and that must realistically include greenfield sites, or we don't resolve the housing crisis, or we deport or kill a few million people to bring the population back down.
I don't see anyone prepared to advocate for the last one, but they scream blue murder about the first.
Hasn't the population fallen in the past year?
Let's keep the trend going, and happy days.
Make it financially attractive for folk to rent out their spare rooms, and that would soak up a big chunk of demand from single people.
Anyway. Bedtime.
It's already financially attractive to let out spare rooms - the issue is for those looking at moving in, living with a live in landlord is awful!
As for reducing the population, bar a global pandemic, hosting one of the world's two global capitals will always generate massive immigration. The question is how to harness it best, rather than xenophobically reject it.
To summarise various demands this evening about new housing:
1) New houses are too small and should be the same size as other countries or those built in the 1930s 2) All services need to be within a ten minute walk of new houses 3) No houses should be built on fields from now on (or since the 1960s for that matter)
Now match these demands with what houses people actually want to live in and what they can afford to pay for.
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
My secretaries daughter, a twenty something single mum, an HCA, moved in 100 yards from me into a "affordable house" from a social housing group. Two bedrooms, nice yard, own driveway. Same school my boys went to and same village. Sure, you metropolitan North Londoners might turn up your noses at it, but all 3 houses went in a few days to similar youngsters.
There are lots of things combined here in the issue
- brownfield is both more difficult to develop and less efficient. If you wanted to extend your own home would you build over the virgin ground or that bit where the old oil tank is buried and might cost ££££ to sort out. - planning law provides new estates with requirements on limiting parking, density of housing leading to the propensity to see cars parked all over the place in front of three storey houses. - Housing locations are still dependent on NIMBY issues. The reason developers have banks of land is unpredictability of the planning system.
My opinion is that we should be looking to provide more planned expansion via new towns, but ensuring that services provision including schools and health services are high standard to attract residents.
The idea that developers have land banks to deal with the planning system is utter garbage. They have land banks to put pressure on councils to release more, and more favourable, land for development under the planning system.
There is a good way to deal with this of course. Tax undeveloped land which has been granted full planning permission for more than a year against its actual value - which is somewhere between £3-4 million a hectare. See how quickly the developers decide to build houses on it after that.
Its not garbage, the planning system is the source of most of the problems.
If it was quick and easy to get planning consent then it would be absolutely unproductive to have a bank of land. Why spend acquiring a bank of land and not develop it? The only reason to do so is the foibles of the planning system.
Part of the problem is that much of the value of the land changes depending upon whether it has consent or not - which is entirely because of our consent system and not a feature in other countries remotely to the same degree.
As a result it makes sense for a company to acquire land, get consent and then potentially 'flip' the land on without bothering to build on it because merely getting consent has made the land worth more.
The system is broken.
Rubbish.
I deal with the planning system on a daily basis. It has been steadily reduced in its effectiveness over the years so as to make it now practically impossible to refuse planning permission to major developments.
Yes if you are an individual or a small company then it is a pain in the arse but if you are one of the 4 major developers then it is simply not a barrier to getting land released at all because they all know that no matter what the local councils decide they will go to appeal and get it overturned by central Government no matter how valid the objections. They have all this built into their plans and timelines and they know exactly how it all works.
Which makes the planning system not remotely fit for purpose, because the individual or small company ought to be able to simply and easily get consent too, but they can't. Meaning that again, the firms with banks can make a profit purely from getting consent even without building on it because land+consent is worth more than land without consent.
If getting consent is the most valuable part of the development process, rather than actually building the homes, then don't be surprised that companies end up going too much for "banking" consent - it is an entirely predictable side-effect of making banking consent a profitable business to be in. Without having to do the legwork of actually building the land. Companies concentrate on where they find the profit and in our twisted system getting consent is profitable, whether you actually build on it or not.
If the value of land with consent was worth essentially the same as land without it, because our planning system was fit for purpose, these banks would vanish.
The trouble is that the changes that the developers are demanding - and which they are getting - are only making it easier for big developments. They will do little or nothing to help smaller developers or private individuals beyond a bit of tinkering around the edges. Indeed by encouraging much larger developments through the Growth Point system they have made it far less likely that smaller, more sympathetic developments will occur as they favour the big, thousands of homes, size developments.
The changes to the planning system are making the situation worse not better.
Like I say., give developers a year with planning permission and if they haven't started along a planned, scheduled development timeline then start taxing them on the land value.
We have a housing crisis and at least the developers are providing a solution by actually building homes.
I'd be entirely in favour of a greater loosening making it easier for anyone and everyone to build. But short of that then easier for the developers to do so is at least progress. The problem is the arguments against the reforms come from those arguing against building at all, or building on greenfield, which is entirely unviable - not from the perspective of arguing to make it even easier still for everyone which would take more of the power out of the hands of the developers.
If anyone and everyone could build a home easily then there'd be no reason to have developers with banks. But its not the case and very few people are arguing for it to be the case.
But you are basing your argument on the myth that the lack of house building is due to the planning system - it is not. That is just garbage put out by big developers to cover their own failings.
Councils designate land for development under a local plan. They are designating sufficient land for development but it is not always where they developers want it and they don't like having to abide by all those awkward rules about housing density and doing proper archaeological investigation before building - something brought in incidentally by Thatcher who did actually know the value of a proper planning system. They find it difficult to game the planning system or cut corners so they want it scrapped. And the easiest way to do that is to generate a housing crisis by not building on the land that already has permissions and then claiming it is because of the planning process. It is bullshit and it is a shame you fall for it.
So what of the planning rules would you get rid of? Do you actually know any of the planning rules we are talking about? Do you understand the old PPG system that Thatcher introduced or the NPPF scheme that replaced it?
It is easy to talk blithely about getting rid of planning rules but then scream when you see the consequences.
Simple question: If the planning system is supposedly so fit for purpose then why don't small developers get the land developed rather than waiting for the large developers to do so? If the planning system can only be successfully navigated by the large developers with legal expertise on retainer then it isn't fit for purpose. The system would be working if a small developer wanting to get 10, 20, 40 homes built can simply purchase land and start building on it rather than waiting for approval on an estate.
As for what planning rules I'd get rid of, my personal answer is I'd keep rules on quality of structures etc - but junk almost everything else.
Have a Japanese-style zoning system and if people want to build in a zone authorised for construction, then consent would be automatic so long as it met the preset building quality standards. Whether it be for 1 home, 10 homes or a thousand.
To summarise various demands this evening about new housing:
1) New houses are too small and should be the same size as other countries or those built in the 1930s 2) All services need to be within a ten minute walk of new houses 3) No houses should be built on fields from now on (or since the 1960s for that matter)
Now match these demands with what houses people actually want to live in and what they can afford to pay for.
We don't need to reduce the population but keeping it steady for a few years would be popular with most people I think.
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
My secretaries daughter, a twenty something single mum, an HCA, moved in 100 yards from me into a "affordable house" from a social housing group. Two bedrooms, nice yard, own driveway. Same school my boys went to and same village. Sure, you metropolitan North Londoners might turn up your noses at it, but all 3 houses went in a few days to similar youngsters.
There are lots of things combined here in the issue
- brownfield is both more difficult to develop and less efficient. If you wanted to extend your own home would you build over the virgin ground or that bit where the old oil tank is buried and might cost ££££ to sort out. - planning law provides new estates with requirements on limiting parking, density of housing leading to the propensity to see cars parked all over the place in front of three storey houses. - Housing locations are still dependent on NIMBY issues. The reason developers have banks of land is unpredictability of the planning system.
My opinion is that we should be looking to provide more planned expansion via new towns, but ensuring that services provision including schools and health services are high standard to attract residents.
The idea that developers have land banks to deal with the planning system is utter garbage. They have land banks to put pressure on councils to release more, and more favourable, land for development under the planning system.
There is a good way to deal with this of course. Tax undeveloped land which has been granted full planning permission for more than a year against its actual value - which is somewhere between £3-4 million a hectare. See how quickly the developers decide to build houses on it after that.
Its not garbage, the planning system is the source of most of the problems.
If it was quick and easy to get planning consent then it would be absolutely unproductive to have a bank of land. Why spend acquiring a bank of land and not develop it? The only reason to do so is the foibles of the planning system.
Part of the problem is that much of the value of the land changes depending upon whether it has consent or not - which is entirely because of our consent system and not a feature in other countries remotely to the same degree.
As a result it makes sense for a company to acquire land, get consent and then potentially 'flip' the land on without bothering to build on it because merely getting consent has made the land worth more.
The system is broken.
Rubbish.
I deal with the planning system on a daily basis. It has been steadily reduced in its effectiveness over the years so as to make it now practically impossible to refuse planning permission to major developments.
Yes if you are an individual or a small company then it is a pain in the arse but if you are one of the 4 major developers then it is simply not a barrier to getting land released at all because they all know that no matter what the local councils decide they will go to appeal and get it overturned by central Government no matter how valid the objections. They have all this built into their plans and timelines and they know exactly how it all works.
Which makes the planning system not remotely fit for purpose, because the individual or small company ought to be able to simply and easily get consent too, but they can't. Meaning that again, the firms with banks can make a profit purely from getting consent even without building on it because land+consent is worth more than land without consent.
If getting consent is the most valuable part of the development process, rather than actually building the homes, then don't be surprised that companies end up going too much for "banking" consent - it is an entirely predictable side-effect of making banking consent a profitable business to be in. Without having to do the legwork of actually building the land. Companies concentrate on where they find the profit and in our twisted system getting consent is profitable, whether you actually build on it or not.
If the value of land with consent was worth essentially the same as land without it, because our planning system was fit for purpose, these banks would vanish.
The trouble is that the changes that the developers are demanding - and which they are getting - are only making it easier for big developments. They will do little or nothing to help smaller developers or private individuals beyond a bit of tinkering around the edges. Indeed by encouraging much larger developments through the Growth Point system they have made it far less likely that smaller, more sympathetic developments will occur as they favour the big, thousands of homes, size developments.
The changes to the planning system are making the situation worse not better.
Like I say., give developers a year with planning permission and if they haven't started along a planned, scheduled development timeline then start taxing them on the land value.
We have a housing crisis and at least the developers are providing a solution by actually building homes.
I'd be entirely in favour of a greater loosening making it easier for anyone and everyone to build. But short of that then easier for the developers to do so is at least progress. The problem is the arguments against the reforms come from those arguing against building at all, or building on greenfield, which is entirely unviable - not from the perspective of arguing to make it even easier still for everyone which would take more of the power out of the hands of the developers.
If anyone and everyone could build a home easily then there'd be no reason to have developers with banks. But its not the case and very few people are arguing for it to be the case.
As an aside the two planning rules most commonly objected to by developers and that they are most keen to see got rid of are the requirement to provide land and financing for local amenities for new developments and the requirement for a certain proportion of affordable housing. Not sure we are going to be building better communities by getting rid of those two bits of planning law.
I'm not on the side of the developers, I'm on the side of liberalising the planning system wholesale. If it was properly liberalised then the large developers would lose their competitive advantage of being the ones who can navigate our planning system.
As for "affordable" housing yes I would drop that. Really affordable good quality housing isn't achieved by insisting on flats within an estate to be "affordable", its done by ensuring there's more housing built, the more the better and the better quality the better. Keep building good quality homes and people will move up the ladder and either the new homes will be available at an affordable price or the older homes will be sold on and available at an affordable price.
Increasing supply is more important than micromanaging how "affordable" it is.
Jeremy Vine even manages to turn HRH Prince Philip’s funeral into a race issue. 🤯 I’m so tired of this divisive narrative. Identity politics has taken over and it’s insidious. I appreciate the irony of this, but can we please stop talking about race!"
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain. 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
My secretaries daughter, a twenty something single mum, an HCA, moved in 100 yards from me into a "affordable house" from a social housing group. Two bedrooms, nice yard, own driveway. Same school my boys went to and same village. Sure, you metropolitan North Londoners might turn up your noses at it, but all 3 houses went in a few days to similar youngsters.
There are lots of things combined here in the issue
- brownfield is both more difficult to develop and less efficient. If you wanted to extend your own home would you build over the virgin ground or that bit where the old oil tank is buried and might cost ££££ to sort out. - planning law provides new estates with requirements on limiting parking, density of housing leading to the propensity to see cars parked all over the place in front of three storey houses. - Housing locations are still dependent on NIMBY issues. The reason developers have banks of land is unpredictability of the planning system.
My opinion is that we should be looking to provide more planned expansion via new towns, but ensuring that services provision including schools and health services are high standard to attract residents.
The idea that developers have land banks to deal with the planning system is utter garbage. They have land banks to put pressure on councils to release more, and more favourable, land for development under the planning system.
There is a good way to deal with this of course. Tax undeveloped land which has been granted full planning permission for more than a year against its actual value - which is somewhere between £3-4 million a hectare. See how quickly the developers decide to build houses on it after that.
Its not garbage, the planning system is the source of most of the problems.
If it was quick and easy to get planning consent then it would be absolutely unproductive to have a bank of land. Why spend acquiring a bank of land and not develop it? The only reason to do so is the foibles of the planning system.
Part of the problem is that much of the value of the land changes depending upon whether it has consent or not - which is entirely because of our consent system and not a feature in other countries remotely to the same degree.
As a result it makes sense for a company to acquire land, get consent and then potentially 'flip' the land on without bothering to build on it because merely getting consent has made the land worth more.
The system is broken.
Rubbish.
I deal with the planning system on a daily basis. It has been steadily reduced in its effectiveness over the years so as to make it now practically impossible to refuse planning permission to major developments.
Yes if you are an individual or a small company then it is a pain in the arse but if you are one of the 4 major developers then it is simply not a barrier to getting land released at all because they all know that no matter what the local councils decide they will go to appeal and get it overturned by central Government no matter how valid the objections. They have all this built into their plans and timelines and they know exactly how it all works.
Which makes the planning system not remotely fit for purpose, because the individual or small company ought to be able to simply and easily get consent too, but they can't. Meaning that again, the firms with banks can make a profit purely from getting consent even without building on it because land+consent is worth more than land without consent.
If getting consent is the most valuable part of the development process, rather than actually building the homes, then don't be surprised that companies end up going too much for "banking" consent - it is an entirely predictable side-effect of making banking consent a profitable business to be in. Without having to do the legwork of actually building the land. Companies concentrate on where they find the profit and in our twisted system getting consent is profitable, whether you actually build on it or not.
If the value of land with consent was worth essentially the same as land without it, because our planning system was fit for purpose, these banks would vanish.
The trouble is that the changes that the developers are demanding - and which they are getting - are only making it easier for big developments. They will do little or nothing to help smaller developers or private individuals beyond a bit of tinkering around the edges. Indeed by encouraging much larger developments through the Growth Point system they have made it far less likely that smaller, more sympathetic developments will occur as they favour the big, thousands of homes, size developments.
The changes to the planning system are making the situation worse not better.
Like I say., give developers a year with planning permission and if they haven't started along a planned, scheduled development timeline then start taxing them on the land value.
We have a housing crisis and at least the developers are providing a solution by actually building homes.
I'd The problem is the arguments against the reforms come from ave developers with banks. But its not the case and very few people are arguing for it to be the case.
But you are basing your argument on the myth that the lack of house building is due to the planning system - it is not. That is just garbage put out by big developers to cover their own failings.
Councils designate land for development under a local plan. They are designating sufficient land for development but it is not always where they developers want it and they don't like having to abide by all those awkward rules about housing density and doing proper archaeological investigation before building - something brought in incidentally by Thatcher who did actually know the value of a proper planning system. They find it difficult to game the planning system or cut corners so they want it scrapped. And the easiest way to do that is to generate a housing crisis by not building on the land that already has permissions and then claiming it is because of the planning process. It is bullshit and it is a shame you fall for it.
So what of the planning rules would you get rid of? Do you actually know any of the planning rules we are talking about? Do you understand the old PPG system that Thatcher introduced or the NPPF scheme that replaced it?
It is easy to talk blithely about getting rid of planning rules but then scream when you see the consequences.
Simple question: If the planning system is supposedly so fit for purpose then why don't small developers get the land developed rather than waiting for the large developers to do so? If the planning system can only be successfully navigated by the large developers with legal expertise on retainer then it isn't fit for purpose. The system would be working if a small developer wanting to get 10, 20, 40 homes built can simply purchase land and start building on it rather than waiting for approval on an estate.
As for what planning rules I'd get rid of, my personal answer is I'd keep rules on quality of structures etc - but junk almost everything else.
Have a Japanese-style zoning system and if people want to build in a zone authorised for construction, then consent would be automatic so long as it met the preset building quality standards. Whether it be for 1 home, 10 homes or a thousand.
The large builders outbid the small builders for the land, or get in earlier using greater ability to research and influence the development of local plans or to sustain land "on the books" even if that's as an option.
They then use their ability to sustain higher overheads to lawyer and lobby for lower social contributions from their development.
The planning system can be as liberal as you want but it's not going to allow a small builder to construct and sell houses on land he doesn't own.
The huge backlog of sites with planning permission but no building work in prospect tells you the issue isn't mainly related to the planning system.
Jeremy Vine even manages to turn HRH Prince Philip’s funeral into a race issue. 🤯 I’m so tired of this divisive narrative. Identity politics has taken over and it’s insidious. I appreciate the irony of this, but can we please stop talking about race!"
And while I'd make the Conservatives 60-65% likely to win (i.e. outright majority) the next election it is far from certain. 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
My secretaries daughter, a twenty something single mum, an HCA, moved in 100 yards from me into a "affordable house" from a social housing group. Two bedrooms, nice yard, own driveway. Same school my boys went to and same village. Sure, you metropolitan North Londoners might turn up your noses at it, but all 3 houses went in a few days to similar youngsters.
There are lots of things combined here in the issue
- brownfield is both more difficult to develop and less efficient. If you wanted to extend your own home would you build over the virgin ground or that bit where the old oil tank is buried and might cost ££££ to sort out. - planning law provides new estates with requirements on limiting parking, density of housing leading to the propensity to see cars parked all over the place in front of three storey houses. - Housing locations are still dependent on NIMBY issues. The reason developers have banks of land is unpredictability of the planning system.
My opinion is that we should be looking to provide more planned expansion via new towns, but ensuring that services provision including schools and health services are high standard to attract residents.
The idea that developers have land banks to deal with the planning system is utter garbage. They have land banks to put pressure on councils to release more, and more favourable, land for development under the planning system.
There is a good way to deal with this of course. Tax undeveloped land which has been granted full planning permission for more than a year against its actual value - which is somewhere between £3-4 million a hectare. See how quickly the developers decide to build houses on it after that.
Its not garbage, the planning system is the source of most of the problems.
If it was quick and easy to get planning consent then it would be absolutely unproductive to have a bank of land. Why spend acquiring a bank of land and not develop it? The only reason to do so is the foibles of the planning system.
Part of the problem is that much of the value of the land changes depending upon whether it has consent or not - which is entirely because of our consent system and not a feature in other countries remotely to the same degree.
As a result it makes sense for a company to acquire land, get consent and then potentially 'flip' the land on without bothering to build on it because merely getting consent has made the land worth more.
The system is broken.
Rubbish.
I deal with the planning system on a daily basis. It has been steadily reduced in its effectiveness over the years so as to make it now practically impossible to refuse planning permission to major developments.
Yes if you are an individual or a small company then it is a pain in the arse but if you are one of the 4 major developers then it is simply not a barrier to getting land released at all because they all know that no matter what the local councils decide they will go to appeal and get it overturned by central Government no matter how valid the objections. They have all this built into their plans and timelines and they know exactly how it all works.
Which makes the planning system not remotely fit for purpose, because the individual or small company ought to be able to simply and easily get consent too, but they can't. Meaning that again, the firms with banks can make a profit purely from getting consent even without building on it because land+consent is worth more than land without consent.
If getting consent is the most valuable part of the development process, rather than actually building the homes, then don't be surprised that companies end up going too much for "banking" consent - it is an entirely predictable side-effect of making banking consent a profitable business to be in. Without having to do the legwork of actually building the land. Companies concentrate on where they find the profit and in our twisted system getting consent is profitable, whether you actually build on it or not.
If the value of land with consent was worth essentially the same as land without it, because our planning system was fit for purpose, these banks would vanish.
The trouble is that the changes that the developers are demanding - and which they are getting - are only making it easier for big developments. They will do little or nothing to help smaller developers or private individuals beyond a bit of tinkering around the edges. Indeed by encouraging much larger developments through the Growth Point system they have made it far less likely that smaller, more sympathetic developments will occur as they favour the big, thousands of homes, size developments.
The changes to the planning system are making the situation worse not better.
Like I say., give developers a year with planning permission and if they haven't started along a planned, scheduled development timeline then start taxing them on the land value.
We have a housing crisis and at least the developers are providing a solution by actually building homes.
I'd The problem is the arguments against the reforms come from ave developers with banks. But its not the case and very few people are arguing for it to be the case.
But you are basing your argument on the myth that the lack of house building is due to the planning system - it is not. That is just garbage put out by big developers to cover their own failings.
Councils designate land for development under a local plan. They are designating sufficient land for development but it is not always where they developers want it and they don't like having to abide by all those awkward rules about housing density and doing proper archaeological investigation before building - something brought in incidentally by Thatcher who did actually know the value of a proper planning system. They find it difficult to game the planning system or cut corners so they want it scrapped. And the easiest way to do that is to generate a housing crisis by not building on the land that already has permissions and then claiming it is because of the planning process. It is bullshit and it is a shame you fall for it.
So what of the planning rules would you get rid of? Do you actually know any of the planning rules we are talking about? Do you understand the old PPG system that Thatcher introduced or the NPPF scheme that replaced it?
It is easy to talk blithely about getting rid of planning rules but then scream when you see the consequences.
Simple question: If the planning system is supposedly so fit for purpose then why don't small developers get the land developed rather than waiting for the large developers to do so? If the planning system can only be successfully navigated by the large developers with legal expertise on retainer then it isn't fit for purpose. The system would be working if a small developer wanting to get 10, 20, 40 homes built can simply purchase land and start building on it rather than waiting for approval on an estate.
As for what planning rules I'd get rid of, my personal answer is I'd keep rules on quality of structures etc - but junk almost everything else.
Have a Japanese-style zoning system and if people want to build in a zone authorised for construction, then consent would be automatic so long as it met the preset building quality standards. Whether it be for 1 home, 10 homes or a thousand.
The large builders outbid the small builders for the land, or get in earlier using greater ability to research and influence the development of local plans or to sustain land "on the books" even if that's as an option.
They then use their ability to sustain higher overheads to lawyer and lobby for lower social contributions from their development.
The planning system can be as liberal as you want but it's not going to allow a small builder to construct and sell houses on land he doesn't own.
The huge backlog of sites with planning permission but no building work in prospect tells you the issue isn't mainly related to the planning system.
No it doesn't, because that's all part of the permission problems. You're using backlogs created by the system to defend the system.
If large developers are buying land up but not developing it then other developers should be able to buy other land and get permission there too and out compete them. But they can't because the quantity of land permission is being given to is being tightly constrained.
In other countries with more liberal planning systems then yes absolutely small developers can and do build on land, because it becomes more plausible to have smaller, granular developments even down to building it house-by-house if construction can begin almost immediately after purchase - and if you can't prevent others from building on other land by purchasing the only blocs made available.
Sounds pretty unprofessional. Civil servants are supposed to be neutral.
You believe the "senior Tory sources"? Even if true, how does it "destabilise the government"? From the story, it looks like the complaints centre on the Cameron lobbying row and Dominic Cummings.
Jeremy Vine even manages to turn HRH Prince Philip’s funeral into a race issue. 🤯 I’m so tired of this divisive narrative. Identity politics has taken over and it’s insidious. I appreciate the irony of this, but can we please stop talking about race!"
Sounds pretty unprofessional. Civil servants are supposed to be neutral.
You believe the "senior Tory sources"? Even if true, how does it "destabilise the government"? From the story, it looks like the complaints centre on the Cameron lobbying row and Dominic Cummings.
From the Mail: "Labour also seem to know a lot about what is being discussed inside No 10 on issues such as vaccine passports before we have announced anything."
FFS The likely need for something akin to vaccination passports was discussed months ago on PB, along with possible civil liberties implications and backdoor ID cards. We did not need leaks to foresee the bleeding obvious, what with some other countries demanding certification of vaccination and speculation about employers and hospitality venues also demanding proof.
Comments
A network of Labour Party 'spies' is operating at the heart of Whitehall, feeding secret information to Sir Keir Starmer's team to destabilise the Government, senior Tory sources claim.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9482297/Hunt-Labours-No-10-moles-Network-spies-feeding-information-Sir-Keir-Starmers-team.html
We have a shortage of houses, but not of bedrooms. There are a lot of the 60+ generation living in ones and twos in three or four bedroom houses in a way that there wasn't thirty or forty years ago.
If the elderly could be incentivised to downsize, it might help. But that generation is rich enough not to need to.
Councils designate land for development under a local plan. They are designating sufficient land for development but it is not always where they developers want it and they don't like having to abide by all those awkward rules about housing density and doing proper archaeological investigation before building - something brought in incidentally by Thatcher who did actually know the value of a proper planning system. They find it difficult to game the planning system or cut corners so they want it scrapped. And the easiest way to do that is to generate a housing crisis by not building on the land that already has permissions and then claiming it is because of the planning process. It is bullshit and it is a shame you fall for it.
So what of the planning rules would you get rid of? Do you actually know any of the planning rules we are talking about? Do you understand the old PPG system that Thatcher introduced or the NPPF scheme that replaced it?
It is easy to talk blithely about getting rid of planning rules but then scream when you see the consequences.
I made a small and quite correct comment about the present day.
And then you started babbling about the 1960s.
So I'll ask you again what do you want to do about it ?
Go back in time and tell Old Macdonald that he can't sell one of his pea fields to a housing developer ?
Now whether you like it or not the decisions of the past were made and whether you like or not many millions of people will continue to want to live in new suburban homes.
As for reducing the population, bar a global pandemic, hosting one of the world's two global capitals will always generate massive immigration. The question is how to harness it best, rather than xenophobically reject it.
1) New houses are too small and should be the same size as other countries or those built in the 1930s
2) All services need to be within a ten minute walk of new houses
3) No houses should be built on fields from now on (or since the 1960s for that matter)
Now match these demands with what houses people actually want to live in and what they can afford to pay for.
As for what planning rules I'd get rid of, my personal answer is I'd keep rules on quality of structures etc - but junk almost everything else.
Have a Japanese-style zoning system and if people want to build in a zone authorised for construction, then consent would be automatic so long as it met the preset building quality standards. Whether it be for 1 home, 10 homes or a thousand.
As for "affordable" housing yes I would drop that. Really affordable good quality housing isn't achieved by insisting on flats within an estate to be "affordable", its done by ensuring there's more housing built, the more the better and the better quality the better. Keep building good quality homes and people will move up the ladder and either the new homes will be available at an affordable price or the older homes will be sold on and available at an affordable price.
Increasing supply is more important than micromanaging how "affordable" it is.
@calvinrobinson
Jeremy Vine even manages to turn HRH Prince Philip’s funeral into a race issue. 🤯 I’m so tired of this divisive narrative. Identity politics has taken over and it’s insidious. I appreciate the irony of this, but can we please stop talking about race!"
https://twitter.com/calvinrobinson/status/1382663943022329857
They then use their ability to sustain higher overheads to lawyer and lobby for lower social contributions from their development.
The planning system can be as liberal as you want but it's not going to allow a small builder to construct and sell houses on land he doesn't own.
The huge backlog of sites with planning permission but no building work in prospect tells you the issue isn't mainly related to the planning system.
If large developers are buying land up but not developing it then other developers should be able to buy other land and get permission there too and out compete them. But they can't because the quantity of land permission is being given to is being tightly constrained.
In other countries with more liberal planning systems then yes absolutely small developers can and do build on land, because it becomes more plausible to have smaller, granular developments even down to building it house-by-house if construction can begin almost immediately after purchase - and if you can't prevent others from building on other land by purchasing the only blocs made available.
FFS The likely need for something akin to vaccination passports was discussed months ago on PB, along with possible civil liberties implications and backdoor ID cards. We did not need leaks to foresee the bleeding obvious, what with some other countries demanding certification of vaccination and speculation about employers and hospitality venues also demanding proof.