So what's with these domestic events, then? They are supposed to be for "research" ie how/does the virus transmit at such places (although no one who has the virus is supposed to be there).
But what's the point of them? Of the "research"? If restrictions end on Jul 19th and we have a quarantine system for incoming travellers and we are not looking to reimpose lockdown...what's the point?
The theory is that they are monitored and tested experiments in the effects of having mass gatherings. Not so much tests of how the virus transmits, but tests on the efficacy of the various measures in preventing such mass meetings being seeding events.
Yes - two things.
Everyone is supposed to have tested negative before they go; and so what if we're about to move to "no restrictions"?
Because the more knowledge we have the better we can deal with this, if we need to deal with it, either in the future if this goes wrong - or potentially for a future pandemic.
To be forewarned is to be forearmed.
Why would you not want to have more knowledge? What is lost by gaining knowledge, even if its not required?
Yep let's get as much knowledge as possible. Doesn't sound hugely like we're ending all restrictions on 19th July, though.
There's so much rubbish and self-contradiction, from the "expert" on Radio 4 this morning using the word "immunisation" to mean "two-times vaccination against Covid-19" to the idea that it's advisable and may even be obligatory for British residents to be double-vaccinated if they want to go on holiday to certain countries and not be quarantined on their return but fine if they take unvaccinated children with them who similarly won't be quarantined. I am not a zerocovidian but I do baulk at being encouraged by the authorities to "hold two completely contradictory thoughts simultaneously while believing both of them to be true".
Yes the children thing has always been the wormhole. Inconvenient and makes it impossible to hold a coherent line. Whether that is for good or evil who knows.
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
UK house prices £366 ($511) per sq ft US house prices $155 (£111) per sq ft
Hence part of the problem. The two electorally triumphant PMs of my lifetime are Thatcher and Blair. They each presided over a rough doubling of real-terms house prices; https://www.allagents.co.uk/house-prices-adjusted/
One one hand everyone knows, deep down, that those huge profits have come from somewhere. The absurd house prices in the UK distort the economy and create massive unfairness between the generations. But rising house prices wins elections.
The Unherd article linked to earlier is worth reading and had some good ideas. But it also misses the point in quite a revealing way. One of the solutions is to pass a law stopping speculators buying houses. That skims over the awkward reality that, if we have a mortgage we are the speculators. There have been too many years where I have made more by having a mortgage than being really good at my job.
And deflating that is going to need technical genius and a willingness to be unpopular.
No, I can't see it happening.
It's exactly this. Our housing market has turned a large portion of the population into investors. We react to any move to change this in the same way the markets respond to federal reserve threats to taper QE or raise interest rates. I am one of them - once you have your long term family home, it is 100% in your interest for house prices to rise for the rest of your life. So most people over, say, 35-40 have a vested interest for the remaining 40 years of their lives.
The only plausible solution to this if you're committed to do something about supply, is wage and general goods inflation, probably coupled with currency devaluation. Enables younger people to get on to the ladder, brings UK property more in line internationally, but continues to give house owners headline price rises and erosion of the real value of their mortgages while real terms housing values decline.
The issue isn’t rising house prices, it’s rising house prices as a multiple of average wages. That’s largely a factor of low interest rates and an inability of the government to use their commercial weight in housing benefit to push down rents
Will probably cost the S Korean president his chances of reelection.
Home prices in Seoul double under Moon administration https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/biz/2021/06/488_310947.html ...The average price of a 99-square-meter apartment in Seoul rose to 1.19 billion won ($1.04 million) from 620 million won from May 2017 to May 2021.
The rise in apartment prices was found to be 192 times the rise in net income, which grew by an average of 2.98 million won during the same period.
The civic group said it would take a person or a household with an annual income of 48 million won 25 years to buy a 99-square-meter apartment in Seoul, assuming that all the disposable income is saved. It took 14 years four years ago....
Note nearly 20% of the country's population lives in Seoul. (And nearly half in the Seoul Capital Area.)
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
UK house prices £366 ($511) per sq ft US house prices $155 (£111) per sq ft
Hence part of the problem. The two electorally triumphant PMs of my lifetime are Thatcher and Blair. They each presided over a rough doubling of real-terms house prices; https://www.allagents.co.uk/house-prices-adjusted/
One one hand everyone knows, deep down, that those huge profits have come from somewhere. The absurd house prices in the UK distort the economy and create massive unfairness between the generations. But rising house prices wins elections.
The Unherd article linked to earlier is worth reading and had some good ideas. But it also misses the point in quite a revealing way. One of the solutions is to pass a law stopping speculators buying houses. That skims over the awkward reality that, if we have a mortgage we are the speculators. There have been too many years where I have made more by having a mortgage than being really good at my job.
And deflating that is going to need technical genius and a willingness to be unpopular.
No, I can't see it happening.
It's exactly this. Our housing market has turned a large portion of the population into investors. We react to any move to change this in the same way the markets respond to federal reserve threats to taper QE or raise interest rates. I am one of them - once you have your long term family home, it is 100% in your interest for house prices to rise for the rest of your life. So most people over, say, 35-40 have a vested interest for the remaining 40 years of their lives.
The only plausible solution to this if you're committed to do something about supply, is wage and general goods inflation, probably coupled with currency devaluation. Enables younger people to get on to the ladder, brings UK property more in line internationally, but continues to give house owners headline price rises and erosion of the real value of their mortgages while real terms housing values decline.
The issue isn’t rising house prices, it’s rising house prices as a multiple of average wages. That’s largely a factor of low interest rates and an inability of the government to use their commercial weight in housing benefit to push down rents
Its got absolutely nothing to do with low interest rates and is entirely to do with massive demand outstripping supply.
Increase supply and constrain demand and price ratios will fall down naturally. Though probably without a price collapse, since it will be gradual.
Banks are hugely focused on ability to repay. This is dependent on prevailing interest rates. If interest rates rise, affordability decreases, lending falls and prices fall.
Typically supply/demand results in a 10% swing around the base price.
But house price multiples which is what we're talking about peaked in 2007 when base rates were close to 6% not 0%.
Between 1997 and 2007 demand surged but construction didn't so house price ratios surged, despite interest rates being much higher then.
Between 2007 and 2019 interest rates collapsed to zero, demand continued to surge but construction increased and as a result house price ratios have basically remained roughly flat as demand and supply have kept in tandem.
If interest rates were the key factor, then house price ratios should have been much, much higher in 2019 than 2007. Especially considering our population increased a lot between 2007 and 2019 too, but construction eased the pressure so price ratios remained consistent, except especially in the one region were demand rose the most and supply rose the least.
Supply and demand works to explain the issues. Interest rates don't.
How big an issue is Palestine really in Batley and Spen? Obviously it matters to some people but it needs quantifying.
Galloway knows what makes the muslim vote tick.
Is George Galloway a Muslim himself?
Looks it up. Why he is so funny about not just saying if has converted or not? Its like Jezza and his unwillingness to just say if he has been vaccinated.
IIRC he was married to a Palestinian woman at one time. Not sure whether that's still the case.
He's married to an Indonesian woman. Putri Gayatri Pertiwi, since 2012.
He's quite SeanT like - he likes them in their 20s.
The Prince of Wales continued to support the Duke and Duchess of Sussex with a "substantial sum" in the months after they stood down as senior royals, Clarence House has said.
Prince Harry told Oprah Winfrey his family "cut me off financially" in the first quarter of 2020.
A Clarence House spokesman said Prince Charles continued to fund the Sussexes until that summer - but they were now financially independent.
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
To govern is to choose. To win elections is to avoid choosing when all choices are sub optimal.
Governing and winning elections have never been entirely compatible occupations, something which means that some sort of authoritarianism is always an option, however slight.
The poll tax was a decent example of a car crash choice which was an unforced error - everyone knew there was lots wrong with rates but election didn't turn on it.
Boris has succeeded in everything he has had ambition to try - never lost an important election, became PM against high odds, won London, did Brexit etc.
He doesn't have a track record of a comeback after disaster on his watch - the sort of disaster reflected in consistent polling.
Planning, social care, the post furlough world, unmanageable finances are four areas where this happen, and where choices probably can't be avoided, and where there are only sub optimal (somewhere between very bad and cataclysmic) outcomes.
The playing out of this scene will be worth watching.
No truly great Prime Minister has become so by shirking the big choices.
Thatcher was a truly great Prime Minister not simply because she was right wing but because she did what she considered was right and carried the country with her, even when it wasn't superficially popular. Everyone remembers the poll tax which was a reform too far, many of the then controversial decisions made before that have stayed with the country through to today.
Blair on the other hand was a mediocre Prime Minister. He had some reforms in mind that got done in 1997 in a big burst of action but then did bugger all besides spend more money and invade Iraq after that.
Boris can choose to take on the issues that need grappling and be a great PM, or he can merely be the PM who muddled us through Covid and have Brexit as his only other legacy.
TBF getting through COVID, albeit somewhat inelegantly at times, and Brexit are two pretty big legacies for a PM
Losing the American colonies was a pretty big legacy for Lord North.
FFS....this isn't taking real action against the problem of fatties. Its performative nonsense, totally locked in the old world where the internet doesn't exist.
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
To govern is to choose. To win elections is to avoid choosing when all choices are sub optimal.
Governing and winning elections have never been entirely compatible occupations, something which means that some sort of authoritarianism is always an option, however slight.
The poll tax was a decent example of a car crash choice which was an unforced error - everyone knew there was lots wrong with rates but election didn't turn on it.
Boris has succeeded in everything he has had ambition to try - never lost an important election, became PM against high odds, won London, did Brexit etc.
He doesn't have a track record of a comeback after disaster on his watch - the sort of disaster reflected in consistent polling.
Planning, social care, the post furlough world, unmanageable finances are four areas where this happen, and where choices probably can't be avoided, and where there are only sub optimal (somewhere between very bad and cataclysmic) outcomes.
The playing out of this scene will be worth watching.
No truly great Prime Minister has become so by shirking the big choices.
Thatcher was a truly great Prime Minister not simply because she was right wing but because she did what she considered was right and carried the country with her, even when it wasn't superficially popular. Everyone remembers the poll tax which was a reform too far, many of the then controversial decisions made before that have stayed with the country through to today.
Blair on the other hand was a mediocre Prime Minister. He had some reforms in mind that got done in 1997 in a big burst of action but then did bugger all besides spend more money and invade Iraq after that.
Boris can choose to take on the issues that need grappling and be a great PM, or he can merely be the PM who muddled us through Covid and have Brexit as his only other legacy.
TBF getting through COVID, albeit somewhat inelegantly at times, and Brexit are two pretty big legacies for a PM
Losing the American colonies was a pretty big legacy for Lord North.
Yes, and no one remembers anything else he did.
Lord North was the David Cameron of his day.
Most Americans don’t even remember him and seem to think they escaped from an absolute monarchy.
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
Yep - basically once your area is designated for growth, it'd be a free for all. Driving a coach and horses through our existing planning system.
Jenrick is finished. Someone will have to take the blame when the screeching u-turn is implemented.
If Jenrick is finished and there is a screeching u-turn on doing the right thing then that will be the biggest domestic mistake since Tony Blair told Frank Field to think the unthinkable, then sacked him for thinking the unthinkable.
My favourite political joke of the modern era was William Hague's "They told him to think the unthinkable. So he thought it. And they said 'that's unthinkable!'"
Hague was much funnier than Johnson and yet the latter is known for his humour.
Johnson's humour is more a form of performance art; a fully rounded comic persona. Fewer actual jokes - his humour is more in 'saying the sorts of things Boris Johnson would say'.
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
Yep - basically once your area is designated for growth, it'd be a free for all. Driving a coach and horses through our existing planning system.
Jenrick is finished. Someone will have to take the blame when the screeching u-turn is implemented.
If Jenrick is finished and there is a screeching u-turn on doing the right thing then that will be the biggest domestic mistake since Tony Blair told Frank Field to think the unthinkable, then sacked him for thinking the unthinkable.
My favourite political joke of the modern era was William Hague's "They told him to think the unthinkable. So he thought it. And they said 'that's unthinkable!'"
Hague was much funnier than Johnson and yet the latter is known for his humour.
Johnson's humour is more a form of performance art; a fully rounded comic persona. Fewer actual jokes - his humour is more in 'saying the sorts of things Boris Johnson would say'.
Stewart Lee tells a lot cleverer jokes than Peter Kay, but Peter Kay has made 100x what Stewart Lee has out of comedy....
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
UK house prices £366 ($511) per sq ft US house prices $155 (£111) per sq ft
So de Pfeffel wants to collapse house prices. Very brave.
Do you think high house prices are a good thing?
An increase in supply won't itself lead to a collapse in house prices, I wouldn't have thought, because it will happen gradually. All other things being equal (which they won't be), an increase in supply would lead to a gradual real terms reduction in house prices. Which would be a good thing.
I think we can generally agree that high house prices are bad but that house price collapses are bad. The only solution I see to this is gradual real terms reductions.
Unless we built houses on the scale of an emergency program to build prefabs in factories, trucked to site and put up at a rate of 100s per day (think https://www.huf-haus.com/en-uk/ multiplied by the Manhattan Project), it won't be possible for supply to exceed demand.
The most you can do is slow the rate of increase in prices. With a truly heroic effort, you might get house prices to slow their increase below the rate of increase in wages....
Johnson's humour is more a form of performance art; a fully rounded comic persona. Fewer actual jokes - his humour is more in 'saying the sorts of things Boris Johnson would say'.
The Prince of Wales continued to support the Duke and Duchess of Sussex with a "substantial sum" in the months after they stood down as senior royals, Clarence House has said.
Prince Harry told Oprah Winfrey his family "cut me off financially" in the first quarter of 2020.
A Clarence House spokesman said Prince Charles continued to fund the Sussexes until that summer - but they were now financially independent.
So what's with these domestic events, then? They are supposed to be for "research" ie how/does the virus transmit at such places (although no one who has the virus is supposed to be there).
But what's the point of them? Of the "research"? If restrictions end on Jul 19th and we have a quarantine system for incoming travellers and we are not looking to reimpose lockdown...what's the point?
The theory is that they are monitored and tested experiments in the effects of having mass gatherings. Not so much tests of how the virus transmits, but tests on the efficacy of the various measures in preventing such mass meetings being seeding events.
Yes - two things.
Everyone is supposed to have tested negative before they go; and so what if we're about to move to "no restrictions"?
Because the more knowledge we have the better we can deal with this, if we need to deal with it, either in the future if this goes wrong - or potentially for a future pandemic.
To be forewarned is to be forearmed.
Why would you not want to have more knowledge? What is lost by gaining knowledge, even if its not required?
Yep let's get as much knowledge as possible. Doesn't sound hugely like we're ending all restrictions on 19th July, though.
Look, it makes a lot of sense. When Dido Harding becomes Head of the NHS and has expelled all the foreign doctors and nurses and other health professionals, the NHS will consist of a few elderly GPs looking for their glasses and trying to remember what they learnt about antibiotics decades ago. So we'll need to be locked up again to avoid catching anything.
And we'll be only let out for the mass application of leeches. So we need to know how to manage these events, OK. I'm really glad that they're doing the necessary planning now.
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
UK house prices £366 ($511) per sq ft US house prices $155 (£111) per sq ft
So de Pfeffel wants to collapse house prices. Very brave.
Do you think high house prices are a good thing?
An increase in supply won't itself lead to a collapse in house prices, I wouldn't have thought, because it will happen gradually. All other things being equal (which they won't be), an increase in supply would lead to a gradual real terms reduction in house prices. Which would be a good thing.
I think we can generally agree that high house prices are bad but that house price collapses are bad. The only solution I see to this is gradual real terms reductions.
The key issue is, as touched on in that article, the proposed changes won't do much to bring house prices down or even slow their increase by much. It'll just piss off everyone affected, while enriching a handful of big developers (who will be the ones in full control over the supply and therefore in control over house prices).
One problem is the Politician's Syllogism: "Something must be done. This is something. It therefore must be done."
The suggestion in the article: "Planning reform, therefore, is largely irrelevant. A very different plan of action is required.
Firstly, the law should be used to exclude speculators from the housing market. We plan the location of new housing for environmental reasons and we should plan the ownership of new housing for social reasons. Most new houses should be reserved for first-time buyers and movers.
Free marketers might complain that this is distributism not capitalism. But so what? For a conservative, spreading home ownership should come before the purity of the market place.
On the supply side, government needs to break the big developers’ stranglehold on the land supply. It can do this by purchasing and preparing sites itself. A time-limited right to fully develop and sell-on plots could then be auctioned-off. Builders would thus be able to obtain the sites they need for houses they actually intend to build, but they’d have no need — nor the perverse incentive — to hold on to more land than that. "
... is key. And the planning reforms proposed won't do that. If anything, they'll move us further away from that. So we end up with no bringing down of house prices, poorly built rabbit hutches, big developers controlling the supply of housing, and really pissed off locals everywhere who are being completely ignored (get them involved and the problem really does reduce) and rapidly transition from dubious through NIMBY to BANANA.
Governments in this country and air travel industry continue to ignore.
The reality is anywhere where they are using the duff Chinese vaccine or vaccination rates are low, its only a matter of time before they are going to be waves of COVID. Problem is always that poor testing means they (and the rest of the world) only know they have a problem, when they have a big problemo.
Another very good article in Foreign Affairs about China, and the motivations of Xi. I recommend reading the whole thing: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2021-06-22/xis-gamble ...Put simply, Xi has consolidated so much power and upset the status quo with such force because he sees a narrow window of ten to 15 years during which Beijing can take advantage of a set of important technological and geopolitical transformations, which will also help it overcome significant internal challenges. Xi sees the convergence of strong demographic headwinds, a structural economic slowdown, rapid advances in digital technologies, and a perceived shift in the global balance of power away from the United States as what he has called “profound changes unseen in a century,” demanding a bold set of immediate responses.
By narrowing his vision to the coming ten to 15 years, Xi has instilled a sense of focus and determination in the Chinese political system that may well enable China to overcome long-standing domestic challenges and achieve a new level of global centrality. If Xi succeeds, China will position itself as an architect of an emerging era of multipolarity, its economy will escape the so-called middle-income trap, and the technological capabilities of its manufacturing sector and military will rival those of more developed countries.
Yet ambition and execution are not the same thing..
And we'll be only let out for the mass application of leeches. So we need to know how to manage these events, OK. I'm really glad that they're doing the necessary planning now.
I see a sudden business opportunity in leech farming. If only I had a cabinet minister on speed dial to bung me the necessary start up cash...
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
UK house prices £366 ($511) per sq ft US house prices $155 (£111) per sq ft
So de Pfeffel wants to collapse house prices. Very brave.
Do you think high house prices are a good thing?
An increase in supply won't itself lead to a collapse in house prices, I wouldn't have thought, because it will happen gradually. All other things being equal (which they won't be), an increase in supply would lead to a gradual real terms reduction in house prices. Which would be a good thing.
I think we can generally agree that high house prices are bad but that house price collapses are bad. The only solution I see to this is gradual real terms reductions.
Unless we built houses on the scale of an emergency program to build prefabs in factories, trucked to site and put up at a rate of 100s per day (think https://www.huf-haus.com/en-uk/ multiplied by the Manhattan Project), it won't be possible for supply to exceed demand.
The most you can do is slow the rate of increase in prices. With a truly heroic effort, you might get house prices to slow their increase below the rate of increase in wages....
Pretty easy, I'd have thought. End buy-to-let. It would not increase the number of houses available but would reduce prices, initially by forcing a fire sale and later by ending price competition from would-be private landlords using BTL as an alternative to pensions or savings because interest rates are so low.
Governments in this country and air travel industry continue to ignore.
The reality is anywhere where they are using the duff Chinese vaccine or vaccination rates are low, its only a matter of time before they are going to be waves of COVID. Problem is always that poor testing means they (and the rest of the world) only know they have a problem, when they have a big problemo.
And lots of covid in big countries is the most likely way to new variants.
Still I'm sure we can trust Russia to discover them and warn the rest of the world if that happens.
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
UK house prices £366 ($511) per sq ft US house prices $155 (£111) per sq ft
So de Pfeffel wants to collapse house prices. Very brave.
Do you think high house prices are a good thing?
An increase in supply won't itself lead to a collapse in house prices, I wouldn't have thought, because it will happen gradually. All other things being equal (which they won't be), an increase in supply would lead to a gradual real terms reduction in house prices. Which would be a good thing.
I think we can generally agree that high house prices are bad but that house price collapses are bad. The only solution I see to this is gradual real terms reductions.
The key issue is, as touched on in that article, the proposed changes won't do much to bring house prices down or even slow their increase by much. It'll just piss off everyone affected, while enriching a handful of big developers (who will be the ones in full control over the supply and therefore in control over house prices).
One problem is the Politician's Syllogism: "Something must be done. This is something. It therefore must be done."
The suggestion in the article: "Planning reform, therefore, is largely irrelevant. A very different plan of action is required.
Firstly, the law should be used to exclude speculators from the housing market. We plan the location of new housing for environmental reasons and we should plan the ownership of new housing for social reasons. Most new houses should be reserved for first-time buyers and movers.
Free marketers might complain that this is distributism not capitalism. But so what? For a conservative, spreading home ownership should come before the purity of the market place.
On the supply side, government needs to break the big developers’ stranglehold on the land supply. It can do this by purchasing and preparing sites itself. A time-limited right to fully develop and sell-on plots could then be auctioned-off. Builders would thus be able to obtain the sites they need for houses they actually intend to build, but they’d have no need — nor the perverse incentive — to hold on to more land than that. "
... is key. And the planning reforms proposed won't do that. If anything, they'll move us further away from that. So we end up with no bringing down of house prices, poorly built rabbit hutches, big developers controlling the supply of housing, and really pissed off locals everywhere who are being completely ignored (get them involved and the problem really does reduce) and rapidly transition from dubious through NIMBY to BANANA.
The rabbit hutch problem is both profit and the "density" creed combined.
Try suggesting increasing the size of rooms, in law..... The reception you get from various parties is quite telling.
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
UK house prices £366 ($511) per sq ft US house prices $155 (£111) per sq ft
So de Pfeffel wants to collapse house prices. Very brave.
Do you think high house prices are a good thing?
An increase in supply won't itself lead to a collapse in house prices, I wouldn't have thought, because it will happen gradually. All other things being equal (which they won't be), an increase in supply would lead to a gradual real terms reduction in house prices. Which would be a good thing.
I think we can generally agree that high house prices are bad but that house price collapses are bad. The only solution I see to this is gradual real terms reductions.
Unless we built houses on the scale of an emergency program to build prefabs in factories, trucked to site and put up at a rate of 100s per day (think https://www.huf-haus.com/en-uk/ multiplied by the Manhattan Project), it won't be possible for supply to exceed demand.
The most you can do is slow the rate of increase in prices. With a truly heroic effort, you might get house prices to slow their increase below the rate of increase in wages....
Pretty easy, I'd have thought. End buy-to-let. It would not increase the number of houses available but would reduce prices, initially by forcing a fire sale and later by ending price competition from would-be private landlords using BTL as an alternative to pensions or savings because interest rates are so low.
Building lots more houses, would solve that problem all on its own.
Another very good article in Foreign Affairs about China, and the motivations of Xi. I recommend reading the whole thing: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2021-06-22/xis-gamble ...Put simply, Xi has consolidated so much power and upset the status quo with such force because he sees a narrow window of ten to 15 years during which Beijing can take advantage of a set of important technological and geopolitical transformations, which will also help it overcome significant internal challenges. Xi sees the convergence of strong demographic headwinds, a structural economic slowdown, rapid advances in digital technologies, and a perceived shift in the global balance of power away from the United States as what he has called “profound changes unseen in a century,” demanding a bold set of immediate responses.
By narrowing his vision to the coming ten to 15 years, Xi has instilled a sense of focus and determination in the Chinese political system that may well enable China to overcome long-standing domestic challenges and achieve a new level of global centrality. If Xi succeeds, China will position itself as an architect of an emerging era of multipolarity, its economy will escape the so-called middle-income trap, and the technological capabilities of its manufacturing sector and military will rival those of more developed countries.
Yet ambition and execution are not the same thing..
One huge advantage they have in the battle for world control is a massive advantage in AI / ML development. While in the west, the companes driving this internally battle with their employees over issues of diversity, bias and concerns over use of any tech by governments etc and governments / public concerns over privacy and use of our personal data, all leading to a lot of headwinds and inability to gather huge datasets, the Chinese just hover it all up from "smart cities" where every action by an individual is recorded (and steal the western data, especially when it is outsourced for labelling).
The west is trying to win this battle with one arm tied behind its back. A bit like covid, western governments are always trying to balance liberty and public wishes to continue things like travel, China they just seal off whole cities and weld people in their homes.
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
UK house prices £366 ($511) per sq ft US house prices $155 (£111) per sq ft
So de Pfeffel wants to collapse house prices. Very brave.
Do you think high house prices are a good thing?
An increase in supply won't itself lead to a collapse in house prices, I wouldn't have thought, because it will happen gradually. All other things being equal (which they won't be), an increase in supply would lead to a gradual real terms reduction in house prices. Which would be a good thing.
I think we can generally agree that high house prices are bad but that house price collapses are bad. The only solution I see to this is gradual real terms reductions.
Unless we built houses on the scale of an emergency program to build prefabs in factories, trucked to site and put up at a rate of 100s per day (think https://www.huf-haus.com/en-uk/ multiplied by the Manhattan Project), it won't be possible for supply to exceed demand.
The most you can do is slow the rate of increase in prices. With a truly heroic effort, you might get house prices to slow their increase below the rate of increase in wages....
Pretty easy, I'd have thought. End buy-to-let. It would not increase the number of houses available but would reduce prices, initially by forcing a fire sale and later by ending price competition from would-be private landlords using BTL as an alternative to pensions or savings because interest rates are so low.
Er no. All that does is contact the rental sector, moving the stock to the purchase sector. Then rents rise....
The problem is that there are not enough properties compared to the demand for them. The options are
- reduce the number of people - increase the number of properties - both
Thanks Dr F for the HurstLama reference yesterday. I'm not on Twitter; can't, TBH, be bothered.
Cracking finish to the World Test Championship yesterday. And a good result against Sri Lanka.
What on earth was our Navy doing off the coast of Crimea yesterday? That war finished 165 years ago. And, looking at the BBC last night and the headline in the Mail, how many journalists were on the ship, and why?
"Maintaining the right of innocent passage" they are saying on the news this morning.
Bollocks.
Why? Nearly every country with a navy does that. Sweden regularly does so....
The US had a much larger decrease in life expectancy between 2018 and 2020 than other high income nations, with pronounced losses among the Hispanic and non-Hispanic Black populations. A longstanding and widening US health disadvantage, high death rates in 2020, and continued inequitable effects on racial and ethnic minority groups are likely the products of longstanding policy choices and systemic racism.
Johnson's humour is more a form of performance art; a fully rounded comic persona. Fewer actual jokes - his humour is more in 'saying the sorts of things Boris Johnson would say'.
Hague has wit
BoZo has slapstick
Given the importance of that appearance on Have I Got News For You in the rise of Boris, it's worth remembering that Hague's go on the same show in 2005 was way more impressive than Bozza's. Including managing to get one over comedically on Paul Merton.
And we'll be only let out for the mass application of leeches. So we need to know how to manage these events, OK. I'm really glad that they're doing the necessary planning now.
I see a sudden business opportunity in leech farming. If only I had a cabinet minister on speed dial to bung me the necessary start up cash...
If it was a straight contest between a supporter of Palestinian rights and an uncritical supporter of Netanyahu there would be no contest. Labour are expected to sleep with the angels particularly in opposition. Something Starmer hasn't grasped. It wasn't a loathing of nasty right wing governments that lost Corbyn the election but that he was hopeless and likely to bankrupt the country.
Galloway could surprise us all next Thursday. It would be no bad thing either. it's time the beleaguered Palestinians had a voice in the UK Parliament from someone who hasn't been cowed into silence.
I know Galloway quite well, and a key fact about him as a politicians is that he has zero interest in his constituents - he's about himself. Nor is he really interested in Palestine. I was a co-founder of Labour Friends of Palestine while he was a Labour MP and he never bothered to join - not because he said he disagreed with anything we were doing, but he just didn't show any interest.
I remember when I was chair of a medical all-party group I had a letter from one of his constituents who had written asking for advice about what she could ask for under the NHS to address her rare disease. He replied: "Dear ..., Thank you for your support. I appreciate it." Many colleagues had similar experiences, and the MP in the next constituency built up a long list of his constituents who came to the neighbour in desperation as Galloway simply didn't respond meaningfully.
You know my soft spot for left-wingers. Galloway isn't one. He's just an egocentric chancer, and currently he's objectively a useful idiot for the Tories.
I think you might have broken the record for 'Likes' And that was without felix!
So what's with these domestic events, then? They are supposed to be for "research" ie how/does the virus transmit at such places (although no one who has the virus is supposed to be there).
But what's the point of them? Of the "research"? If restrictions end on Jul 19th and we have a quarantine system for incoming travellers and we are not looking to reimpose lockdown...what's the point?
The theory is that they are monitored and tested experiments in the effects of having mass gatherings. Not so much tests of how the virus transmits, but tests on the efficacy of the various measures in preventing such mass meetings being seeding events.
Yes - two things.
Everyone is supposed to have tested negative before they go; and so what if we're about to move to "no restrictions"?
Because the more knowledge we have the better we can deal with this, if we need to deal with it, either in the future if this goes wrong - or potentially for a future pandemic.
To be forewarned is to be forearmed.
Why would you not want to have more knowledge? What is lost by gaining knowledge, even if its not required?
Yep let's get as much knowledge as possible. Doesn't sound hugely like we're ending all restrictions on 19th July, though.
Look, it makes a lot of sense. When Dido Harding becomes Head of the NHS and has expelled all the foreign doctors and nurses and other health professionals, the NHS will consist of a few elderly GPs looking for their glasses and trying to remember what they learnt about antibiotics decades ago. So we'll need to be locked up again to avoid catching anything.
And we'll be only let out for the mass application of leeches. So we need to know how to manage these events, OK. I'm really glad that they're doing the necessary planning now.
At one time, in the 1990's my professional duties included leech-keeping. And supplying.
So maybe I can come out of retirement as a consultant!
The US had a much larger decrease in life expectancy between 2018 and 2020 than other high income nations, with pronounced losses among the Hispanic and non-Hispanic Black populations. A longstanding and widening US health disadvantage, high death rates in 2020, and continued inequitable effects on racial and ethnic minority groups are likely the products of longstanding policy choices and systemic racism.
I am not sure you can pin that on Trump. With health outcomes it takes many many years to see their effects. Eating poorly and being massively over weight will statistically cause much higher rates of hesrt disease, diabetes, cancer etc, but you don't see that next year or the year after, its 10-20 years down the line.
Anybody who has visited the US a lot, especially if you get outside the rich parts of cities, will see how overweight so many Americans are. Not a bit overweight, just enormously overweight. As with so much of US, tale of two extremes.
It is something I am noticing in the UK. When I go and visit my home area of Stoke, the number of seriously overweight people really stands out from where I live, where people in general are a lot wealthier and big on health / fitness.
Thanks Dr F for the HurstLama reference yesterday. I'm not on Twitter; can't, TBH, be bothered.
Cracking finish to the World Test Championship yesterday. And a good result against Sri Lanka.
What on earth was our Navy doing off the coast of Crimea yesterday? That war finished 165 years ago. And, looking at the BBC last night and the headline in the Mail, how many journalists were on the ship, and why?
"Maintaining the right of innocent passage" they are saying on the news this morning.
Bollocks.
Why? Nearly every country with a navy does that. Sweden regularly does so....
In the almost landlocked Black Sea?
Because we are essentially back in a cold war where any number of regimes - such as Putin's dictatorship - are trying to undermine international law.
I suppose we could ask Brussels to send one of the EU frigates to defend right of passage.
Oh wait - they haven't got any, and UVDL would be arguing with somebody about who got to direct it even after it had been sunk and the sailors killed by the Russians.
Another very good article in Foreign Affairs about China, and the motivations of Xi. I recommend reading the whole thing: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2021-06-22/xis-gamble ...Put simply, Xi has consolidated so much power and upset the status quo with such force because he sees a narrow window of ten to 15 years during which Beijing can take advantage of a set of important technological and geopolitical transformations, which will also help it overcome significant internal challenges. Xi sees the convergence of strong demographic headwinds, a structural economic slowdown, rapid advances in digital technologies, and a perceived shift in the global balance of power away from the United States as what he has called “profound changes unseen in a century,” demanding a bold set of immediate responses.
By narrowing his vision to the coming ten to 15 years, Xi has instilled a sense of focus and determination in the Chinese political system that may well enable China to overcome long-standing domestic challenges and achieve a new level of global centrality. If Xi succeeds, China will position itself as an architect of an emerging era of multipolarity, its economy will escape the so-called middle-income trap, and the technological capabilities of its manufacturing sector and military will rival those of more developed countries.
Yet ambition and execution are not the same thing..
One huge advantage they have in the battle for world control is a massive advantage in AI / ML development. While in the west, the companes driving this internally battle with their employees over issues of diversity, bias and concerns over use of any tech by governments etc and governments / public concerns over privacy and use of our personal data, all leading to a lot of headwinds and inability to gather huge datasets, the Chinese just hover it all up from "smart cities" where every action by an individual is recorded (and steal the western data, especially when it is outsourced for labelling).
The west is trying to win this battle with one arm tied behind its back. A bit like covid, western governments are always trying to balance liberty and public wishes to continue things like travel, China they just seal off whole cities and weld people in their homes.
There are certain downsides to their system, though, as the article points out.
What I'm most concerned about is their ability to overwhelm the market in a particular sector, as they are not constrained by return on investment in any particular timeframe. The case of solar panels - where they went from severe technological inferiority to seizing the bulk of the world market within a decade, mainly by bankrupting most of the US manufacturers - is a good example.
We're at a point of massive economic transition (the move away from fossil fuels is one example, but other equally large technological transformations are underway), and that leaves companies and entire industries operating in free market economies particularly vulnerable to such state tactics.
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
UK house prices £366 ($511) per sq ft US house prices $155 (£111) per sq ft
So de Pfeffel wants to collapse house prices. Very brave.
Do you think high house prices are a good thing?
An increase in supply won't itself lead to a collapse in house prices, I wouldn't have thought, because it will happen gradually. All other things being equal (which they won't be), an increase in supply would lead to a gradual real terms reduction in house prices. Which would be a good thing.
I think we can generally agree that high house prices are bad but that house price collapses are bad. The only solution I see to this is gradual real terms reductions.
Unless we built houses on the scale of an emergency program to build prefabs in factories, trucked to site and put up at a rate of 100s per day (think https://www.huf-haus.com/en-uk/ multiplied by the Manhattan Project), it won't be possible for supply to exceed demand.
The most you can do is slow the rate of increase in prices. With a truly heroic effort, you might get house prices to slow their increase below the rate of increase in wages....
Pretty easy, I'd have thought. End buy-to-let. It would not increase the number of houses available but would reduce prices, initially by forcing a fire sale and later by ending price competition from would-be private landlords using BTL as an alternative to pensions or savings because interest rates are so low.
That has been shown to be false long ago.
The ONS Date - English Housing Survey for one - show that rented property is occupied more densely than owner occupied, so you need more houses not fewer for the same number of people. Which would not reduce competition when there are more surplus people needing houses.
And any evidence that PRS drives up prices is very thin - LLs who pay full whack make poor margins.
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
"They cannot build to lower prices much. If you want lower house prices restrict house lending to the three times one income as it used to be. Jenrick's proposal seems to be a blatant handout for his developer donors- and will not reduce house prices one penny. But it will destroy millions of acres of countryside."
Thanks Dr F for the HurstLama reference yesterday. I'm not on Twitter; can't, TBH, be bothered.
Cracking finish to the World Test Championship yesterday. And a good result against Sri Lanka.
What on earth was our Navy doing off the coast of Crimea yesterday? That war finished 165 years ago. And, looking at the BBC last night and the headline in the Mail, how many journalists were on the ship, and why?
"Maintaining the right of innocent passage" they are saying on the news this morning.
Bollocks.
Why? Nearly every country with a navy does that. Sweden regularly does so....
As to Sweden sending ships to the Black sea specifically - I don't know. Some quite surprising countries have done the Bosphorus passage etc. to express their rights under international law.
The Swedish Navy does regular patrols etc to establish Swedish claims to various waters and the international status of other waters. Including areas contested with Russia....
Another very good article in Foreign Affairs about China, and the motivations of Xi. I recommend reading the whole thing: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2021-06-22/xis-gamble ...Put simply, Xi has consolidated so much power and upset the status quo with such force because he sees a narrow window of ten to 15 years during which Beijing can take advantage of a set of important technological and geopolitical transformations, which will also help it overcome significant internal challenges. Xi sees the convergence of strong demographic headwinds, a structural economic slowdown, rapid advances in digital technologies, and a perceived shift in the global balance of power away from the United States as what he has called “profound changes unseen in a century,” demanding a bold set of immediate responses.
By narrowing his vision to the coming ten to 15 years, Xi has instilled a sense of focus and determination in the Chinese political system that may well enable China to overcome long-standing domestic challenges and achieve a new level of global centrality. If Xi succeeds, China will position itself as an architect of an emerging era of multipolarity, its economy will escape the so-called middle-income trap, and the technological capabilities of its manufacturing sector and military will rival those of more developed countries.
Yet ambition and execution are not the same thing..
One huge advantage they have in the battle for world control is a massive advantage in AI / ML development. While in the west, the companes driving this internally battle with their employees over issues of diversity, bias and concerns over use of any tech by governments etc and governments / public concerns over privacy and use of our personal data, all leading to a lot of headwinds and inability to gather huge datasets, the Chinese just hover it all up from "smart cities" where every action by an individual is recorded (and steal the western data, especially when it is outsourced for labelling).
The west is trying to win this battle with one arm tied behind its back. A bit like covid, western governments are always trying to balance liberty and public wishes to continue things like travel, China they just seal off whole cities and weld people in their homes.
There are certain downsides to their system, though, as the article points out.
What I'm most concerned about is their ability to overwhelm the market in a particular sector, as they are not constrained by return on investment in any particular timeframe. The case of solar panels - where they went from severe technological inferiority to seizing the bulk of the world market within a decade, mainly by bankrupting most of the US manufacturers - is a good example.
We're at a point of massive economic transition (the move away from fossil fuels is one example, but other equally large technological transformations are underway), and that leaves companies and entire industries operating in free market economies particularly vulnerable to such state tactics.
Their use of currency manipulation is particularly problematic in that regard. Capitalism presumes there is a fair market, if you can operate in it where a) you don't need to make profit and b) you can undercut everybody by manipulating your currency, you can tilt the playing field so far in your favour and become a monopoly (which of course we have rules in the west to try and prevent this, because it is bad for the consumer).
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
UK house prices £366 ($511) per sq ft US house prices $155 (£111) per sq ft
So de Pfeffel wants to collapse house prices. Very brave.
Do you think high house prices are a good thing?
An increase in supply won't itself lead to a collapse in house prices, I wouldn't have thought, because it will happen gradually. All other things being equal (which they won't be), an increase in supply would lead to a gradual real terms reduction in house prices. Which would be a good thing.
I think we can generally agree that high house prices are bad but that house price collapses are bad. The only solution I see to this is gradual real terms reductions.
Unless we built houses on the scale of an emergency program to build prefabs in factories, trucked to site and put up at a rate of 100s per day (think https://www.huf-haus.com/en-uk/ multiplied by the Manhattan Project), it won't be possible for supply to exceed demand.
The most you can do is slow the rate of increase in prices. With a truly heroic effort, you might get house prices to slow their increase below the rate of increase in wages....
Pretty easy, I'd have thought. End buy-to-let. It would not increase the number of houses available but would reduce prices, initially by forcing a fire sale and later by ending price competition from would-be private landlords using BTL as an alternative to pensions or savings because interest rates are so low.
Building lots more houses, would solve that problem all on its own.
Building houses might not, if they are all taken for BTL or to be left empty. In any case, we've already established we can't do that.
There is a difference between a shortage of housing, and a shortage of housing for sale. Most of the people looking to buy houses are not currently homeless but are living in rented accommodation. In bidding for what houses are available, especially new builds, they are competing with buyers who do not want to live there but as a rental investment.
End that and prices will fall.
Of course, there are reasons why a large rental sector is desirable, such as increased labour mobility, but that is a topic for another day. If HMG wants to reduce house prices, the easiest way is to end BTL.
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
UK house prices £366 ($511) per sq ft US house prices $155 (£111) per sq ft
So de Pfeffel wants to collapse house prices. Very brave.
Do you think high house prices are a good thing?
An increase in supply won't itself lead to a collapse in house prices, I wouldn't have thought, because it will happen gradually. All other things being equal (which they won't be), an increase in supply would lead to a gradual real terms reduction in house prices. Which would be a good thing.
I think we can generally agree that high house prices are bad but that house price collapses are bad. The only solution I see to this is gradual real terms reductions.
Unless we built houses on the scale of an emergency program to build prefabs in factories, trucked to site and put up at a rate of 100s per day (think https://www.huf-haus.com/en-uk/ multiplied by the Manhattan Project), it won't be possible for supply to exceed demand.
The most you can do is slow the rate of increase in prices. With a truly heroic effort, you might get house prices to slow their increase below the rate of increase in wages....
Pretty easy, I'd have thought. End buy-to-let. It would not increase the number of houses available but would reduce prices, initially by forcing a fire sale and later by ending price competition from would-be private landlords using BTL as an alternative to pensions or savings because interest rates are so low.
Building lots more houses, would solve that problem all on its own.
Nightmare. Every acre of green which goes impoverishes the country and nature.
And we'll be only let out for the mass application of leeches. So we need to know how to manage these events, OK. I'm really glad that they're doing the necessary planning now.
I see a sudden business opportunity in leech farming. If only I had a cabinet minister on speed dial to bung me the necessary start up cash...
Very good people with whom to do business, in my experience. Once sent a box up from S.Wales to Essex by motorcycle courier in significantly under 3 hours.
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
UK house prices £366 ($511) per sq ft US house prices $155 (£111) per sq ft
So de Pfeffel wants to collapse house prices. Very brave.
Do you think high house prices are a good thing?
An increase in supply won't itself lead to a collapse in house prices, I wouldn't have thought, because it will happen gradually. All other things being equal (which they won't be), an increase in supply would lead to a gradual real terms reduction in house prices. Which would be a good thing.
I think we can generally agree that high house prices are bad but that house price collapses are bad. The only solution I see to this is gradual real terms reductions.
The key issue is, as touched on in that article, the proposed changes won't do much to bring house prices down or even slow their increase by much. It'll just piss off everyone affected, while enriching a handful of big developers (who will be the ones in full control over the supply and therefore in control over house prices).
One problem is the Politician's Syllogism: "Something must be done. This is something. It therefore must be done."
The suggestion in the article: "Planning reform, therefore, is largely irrelevant. A very different plan of action is required.
Firstly, the law should be used to exclude speculators from the housing market. We plan the location of new housing for environmental reasons and we should plan the ownership of new housing for social reasons. Most new houses should be reserved for first-time buyers and movers.
Free marketers might complain that this is distributism not capitalism. But so what? For a conservative, spreading home ownership should come before the purity of the market place.
On the supply side, government needs to break the big developers’ stranglehold on the land supply. It can do this by purchasing and preparing sites itself. A time-limited right to fully develop and sell-on plots could then be auctioned-off. Builders would thus be able to obtain the sites they need for houses they actually intend to build, but they’d have no need — nor the perverse incentive — to hold on to more land than that. "
... is key. And the planning reforms proposed won't do that. If anything, they'll move us further away from that. So we end up with no bringing down of house prices, poorly built rabbit hutches, big developers controlling the supply of housing, and really pissed off locals everywhere who are being completely ignored (get them involved and the problem really does reduce) and rapidly transition from dubious through NIMBY to BANANA.
Developers do not control the supply of land. They are usually just a convenient target who do not have votes.
That is done by local councils through the local plan development and zoning process. Landowners bring forward proposed sites (of which there are always more than needed), and teh Council rate them by their chosen criteria, make an ordered list and go down the list until their Housing Needs Assessment (which they also control) target has been met.
If the Council want more development land, they can allocate it.
The rub is that they often (as we have seen in C&A) do not want to do that, because their voters are self-serving Nimbys.
The article is weird - ill-informed, superficial, full of holes and impractical. I get the impression that he has never built anything other than with Lego.
On the proposal - why should the *Government* be the one buying plots. I thought the key objection was that the new proposal would take control AWAY from local communities. Give that power to the Local Authority, if someone must have it.
But it won't help, because it does not address the heart of the issue.
LONDON, June 24 (Reuters) - The proportion of British employees on furlough in early June fell to its lowest since the start of the pandemic at 6% of staff or about 1.5 million people, as easing COVID restrictions allowed most businesses to reopen.
Thanks Dr F for the HurstLama reference yesterday. I'm not on Twitter; can't, TBH, be bothered.
Cracking finish to the World Test Championship yesterday. And a good result against Sri Lanka.
What on earth was our Navy doing off the coast of Crimea yesterday? That war finished 165 years ago. And, looking at the BBC last night and the headline in the Mail, how many journalists were on the ship, and why?
"Maintaining the right of innocent passage" they are saying on the news this morning.
Bollocks.
Why? Nearly every country with a navy does that. Sweden regularly does so....
In the almost landlocked Black Sea?
Because we are essentially back in a cold war where any number of regimes - such as Putin's dictatorship - are trying to undermine international law.
I suppose we could ask Brussels to send one of the EU frigates to defend right of passage.
Oh wait - they haven't got any, and UVDL would be arguing with somebody about who got to direct it even after it had been sunk and the sailors killed by the Russians.
Surely the sea route to Batumi, the port in Georgia, needn't go near the Crimea?
Following the departure of both his chief and deputy head of comms – and Jenny Chapman’s shafting – Sir Keir has turned to Blairism to help get the Labour machine back on track. It was announced last night that the Labour leader had appointed ex-Blair spinner Matthew Doyle as his new interim director of communications. Matthew Doyle will be briefing against briefings made by Boris top spinner, Jack Doyle (no relation)…
Starmer’s Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney, has also been sidelined to a new role in elections and campaigning strategy. Guido hears full-time replacements will be announced shortly. Rumours of Rob Burley, former BBC politics editor, being offered one of the roles have been swirling for much of this week, though sources steered Guido away from the suggestion…
I am not sure reheated Blairism works in the current political climate. Blairism appeal was we can tweak things a bit, but nothing to revolutionary, while appearing to be a bit kinder and nicely all round than the nasty Tories.
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
UK house prices £366 ($511) per sq ft US house prices $155 (£111) per sq ft
So de Pfeffel wants to collapse house prices. Very brave.
Do you think high house prices are a good thing?
An increase in supply won't itself lead to a collapse in house prices, I wouldn't have thought, because it will happen gradually. All other things being equal (which they won't be), an increase in supply would lead to a gradual real terms reduction in house prices. Which would be a good thing.
I think we can generally agree that high house prices are bad but that house price collapses are bad. The only solution I see to this is gradual real terms reductions.
Unless we built houses on the scale of an emergency program to build prefabs in factories, trucked to site and put up at a rate of 100s per day (think https://www.huf-haus.com/en-uk/ multiplied by the Manhattan Project), it won't be possible for supply to exceed demand.
The most you can do is slow the rate of increase in prices. With a truly heroic effort, you might get house prices to slow their increase below the rate of increase in wages....
Pretty easy, I'd have thought. End buy-to-let. It would not increase the number of houses available but would reduce prices, initially by forcing a fire sale and later by ending price competition from would-be private landlords using BTL as an alternative to pensions or savings because interest rates are so low.
Building lots more houses, would solve that problem all on its own.
Nightmare. Every acre of green which goes impoverishes the country and nature.
Complete hairshirt envirofascist bollocks. An acre of green that goes won't even be noticeable to 99.9999% of the country and will provide a home to someone that needs it.
There is no alternative to increasing supply, other than expelling millions of people from the country. Anything else is just lies. You can't defeat supply and demand.
That doesn't mean concreting over the country. The UK will remain a green and pleasant land even if a few extra houses are built.
Johnson's humour is more a form of performance art; a fully rounded comic persona. Fewer actual jokes - his humour is more in 'saying the sorts of things Boris Johnson would say'.
Hague has wit
BoZo has slapstick
Given the importance of that appearance on Have I Got News For You in the rise of Boris, it's worth remembering that Hague's go on the same show in 2005 was way more impressive than Bozza's. Including managing to get one over comedically on Paul Merton.
Heck, Gyles Brandreth did a better job.
Was 'that appearance on HIGNFY' the one in which he chaired it, displaying comic ineptitude with the autocue, reading the same things several times and confusing stage directions for things to read out?
That was impressive in a different way. It was quite possibly the funniest thing I saw on television that year. I literally cried with laughter. It did not, obviously, say to me 'here is a man who should be PM'. It did however introduce the character of 'Boris' to a much wider audience. Knowing what we know about Boris, it was in all likelihood made up as he went along but pitched entirely deliberately. (It was also, I should add, an impressive performance from the supporting cast, who recognised the chaos being wrought, kept it going and made it an ensemble performance. Boris being 'Boris' would have been amusing, Boris being 'Boris' with Merton, Hislop and the other two fizzing off him was an all-round comic masterpiece. This was not the rapier wit that the show's producers intended, but no less funny for all that.) And Boris is PM, and Hague, despite his cleverness and wit, never got to be. So perhaps it was an impressive performance after all.
Edit: Just looked it up - the other two were Stephen K Amos, who delivered one of the best lines of the show, and Clive Anderson.
Just got a little tingle of nostalgia watching the opening sequence. HIGNFY used to be absolutely brilliant in its heyday.
Edit 2: As you say, though, getting one over comedically on Paul Merton is impressive. Like a decent amateur bowling out Brian Lara. Gyles Brandreth is also clever - and indeed funny - but the 'Gyles Brandreth' persona is a little bit discomfiting.
Because we are essentially back in a cold war where any number of regimes - such as Putin's dictatorship - are trying to undermine international law.
I suppose we could ask Brussels to send one of the EU frigates to defend right of passage.
Oh wait - they haven't got any, and UVDL would be arguing with somebody about who got to direct it even after it had been sunk and the sailors killed by the Russians.
HNLMS Evertsen (Dutch De Zeven Provincien class frigate) is with Defender in the Black Sea.
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
UK house prices £366 ($511) per sq ft US house prices $155 (£111) per sq ft
So de Pfeffel wants to collapse house prices. Very brave.
Do you think high house prices are a good thing?
An increase in supply won't itself lead to a collapse in house prices, I wouldn't have thought, because it will happen gradually. All other things being equal (which they won't be), an increase in supply would lead to a gradual real terms reduction in house prices. Which would be a good thing.
I think we can generally agree that high house prices are bad but that house price collapses are bad. The only solution I see to this is gradual real terms reductions.
Unless we built houses on the scale of an emergency program to build prefabs in factories, trucked to site and put up at a rate of 100s per day (think https://www.huf-haus.com/en-uk/ multiplied by the Manhattan Project), it won't be possible for supply to exceed demand.
The most you can do is slow the rate of increase in prices. With a truly heroic effort, you might get house prices to slow their increase below the rate of increase in wages....
Pretty easy, I'd have thought. End buy-to-let. It would not increase the number of houses available but would reduce prices, initially by forcing a fire sale and later by ending price competition from would-be private landlords using BTL as an alternative to pensions or savings because interest rates are so low.
Building lots more houses, would solve that problem all on its own.
Nightmare. Every acre of green which goes impoverishes the country and nature.
Complete hairshirt envirofascist bollocks. An acre of green that goes won't even be noticeable to 99.9999% of the country and will provide a home to someone that needs it.
There is no alternative to increasing supply, other than expelling millions of people from the country. Anything else is just lies. You can't defeat supply and demand.
That doesn't mean concreting over the country. The UK will remain a green and pleasant land even if a few extra houses are built.
Aha. Furious Phil is back .
Incidentally the "American style zoning" is a telltale that the author is using inflammatory language for the purpose of shit-stirring. He could just as well have said "European style zoning".
In their submission to the Select Committee, the National Trust (of all people) argued that the zoning proposal was too timid.
Also incidentally, the author is a twat - the "horrible sea of tarmac Estate in Mansfield" is nowhere near Mansfield, and is a good, sustainable development with a 2 acre park attached, one mile from Shirebrook town centre, and 2 miles from a railway station on the Robin Hood line which goes to both Nottingham.
They will sell like hot cakes, since the prices start at £110k for keyworker houses which are 30% off, and kept like that in perpetuity.
Because we are essentially back in a cold war where any number of regimes - such as Putin's dictatorship - are trying to undermine international law.
I suppose we could ask Brussels to send one of the EU frigates to defend right of passage.
Oh wait - they haven't got any, and UVDL would be arguing with somebody about who got to direct it even after it had been sunk and the sailors killed by the Russians.
HNLMS Evertsen (Dutch De Zeven Provincien class frigate) is with Defender in the Black Sea.
as a NATO member not as an EU member so not sure of your point.
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
UK house prices £366 ($511) per sq ft US house prices $155 (£111) per sq ft
So de Pfeffel wants to collapse house prices. Very brave.
Do you think high house prices are a good thing?
An increase in supply won't itself lead to a collapse in house prices, I wouldn't have thought, because it will happen gradually. All other things being equal (which they won't be), an increase in supply would lead to a gradual real terms reduction in house prices. Which would be a good thing.
I think we can generally agree that high house prices are bad but that house price collapses are bad. The only solution I see to this is gradual real terms reductions.
Unless we built houses on the scale of an emergency program to build prefabs in factories, trucked to site and put up at a rate of 100s per day (think https://www.huf-haus.com/en-uk/ multiplied by the Manhattan Project), it won't be possible for supply to exceed demand.
The most you can do is slow the rate of increase in prices. With a truly heroic effort, you might get house prices to slow their increase below the rate of increase in wages....
Pretty easy, I'd have thought. End buy-to-let. It would not increase the number of houses available but would reduce prices, initially by forcing a fire sale and later by ending price competition from would-be private landlords using BTL as an alternative to pensions or savings because interest rates are so low.
That has been shown to be false long ago.
The ONS Date - English Housing Survey for one - show that rented property is occupied more densely than owner occupied, so you need more houses not fewer for the same number of people. Which would not reduce competition when there are more surplus people needing houses.
And any evidence that PRS drives up prices is very thin - LLs who pay full whack make poor margins.
Rented accommodation is on average smaller, and probably more likely to house families. It does not necessarily follow that larger houses are needed but in any case is irrelevant to the point that ending BTL will reduce prices. I am not claiming it will increase housing stock.
ETA and separately, I do advocate new building, and especially to increase economic activity in "left behind" areas. But that is separate. If the government wants a quick fix to house prices, there is one.
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
UK house prices £366 ($511) per sq ft US house prices $155 (£111) per sq ft
So de Pfeffel wants to collapse house prices. Very brave.
Do you think high house prices are a good thing?
An increase in supply won't itself lead to a collapse in house prices, I wouldn't have thought, because it will happen gradually. All other things being equal (which they won't be), an increase in supply would lead to a gradual real terms reduction in house prices. Which would be a good thing.
I think we can generally agree that high house prices are bad but that house price collapses are bad. The only solution I see to this is gradual real terms reductions.
Unless we built houses on the scale of an emergency program to build prefabs in factories, trucked to site and put up at a rate of 100s per day (think https://www.huf-haus.com/en-uk/ multiplied by the Manhattan Project), it won't be possible for supply to exceed demand.
The most you can do is slow the rate of increase in prices. With a truly heroic effort, you might get house prices to slow their increase below the rate of increase in wages....
Pretty easy, I'd have thought. End buy-to-let. It would not increase the number of houses available but would reduce prices, initially by forcing a fire sale and later by ending price competition from would-be private landlords using BTL as an alternative to pensions or savings because interest rates are so low.
Building lots more houses, would solve that problem all on its own.
Nightmare. Every acre of green which goes impoverishes the country and nature.
Complete hairshirt envirofascist bollocks. An acre of green that goes won't even be noticeable to 99.9999% of the country and will provide a home to someone that needs it.
There is no alternative to increasing supply, other than expelling millions of people from the country. Anything else is just lies. You can't defeat supply and demand.
That doesn't mean concreting over the country. The UK will remain a green and pleasant land even if a few extra houses are built.
Aha. Furious Phil is back .
Although I was wrong.
An acre of land won't provide one home. It will provide about 18 homes at typical densities.
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
UK house prices £366 ($511) per sq ft US house prices $155 (£111) per sq ft
Hence part of the problem. The two electorally triumphant PMs of my lifetime are Thatcher and Blair. They each presided over a rough doubling of real-terms house prices; https://www.allagents.co.uk/house-prices-adjusted/
One one hand everyone knows, deep down, that those huge profits have come from somewhere. The absurd house prices in the UK distort the economy and create massive unfairness between the generations. But rising house prices wins elections.
The Unherd article linked to earlier is worth reading and had some good ideas. But it also misses the point in quite a revealing way. One of the solutions is to pass a law stopping speculators buying houses. That skims over the awkward reality that, if we have a mortgage we are the speculators. There have been too many years where I have made more by having a mortgage than being really good at my job.
And deflating that is going to need technical genius and a willingness to be unpopular.
No, I can't see it happening.
It's exactly this. Our housing market has turned a large portion of the population into investors. We react to any move to change this in the same way the markets respond to federal reserve threats to taper QE or raise interest rates. I am one of them - once you have your long term family home, it is 100% in your interest for house prices to rise for the rest of your life. So most people over, say, 35-40 have a vested interest for the remaining 40 years of their lives.
The only plausible solution to this if you're committed to do something about supply, is wage and general goods inflation, probably coupled with currency devaluation. Enables younger people to get on to the ladder, brings UK property more in line internationally, but continues to give house owners headline price rises and erosion of the real value of their mortgages while real terms housing values decline.
The issue isn’t rising house prices, it’s rising house prices as a multiple of average wages. That’s largely a factor of low interest rates and an inability of the government to use their commercial weight in housing benefit to push down rents
Its got absolutely nothing to do with low interest rates and is entirely to do with massive demand outstripping supply.
Increase supply and constrain demand and price ratios will fall down naturally. Though probably without a price collapse, since it will be gradual.
All the funny money in the last decade and a bit has done what funny money does. Led to massive inflation. For interesting and complex reasons, in the West this has (so far) exhibited itself in asset price inflation rather than in wage inflation.
In the US, where there is a very high (and increasing) penetration rate of retail activity in stocks and capital markets, (and crypto!) and a strong memory of a terrible housing crash, this has exhibited itself in inflation of financial assets.
In the UK there is a general distrust around financial markets, because of historic pensions scams. Add in the 2008 crisis being a a banking rather than house price crisis in the UK, and the more socialist mentality denigrating banks and bankers. And the long held conviction that an Englishman’s Home Is His Castle. So that’s where we have inflation. Residential property.
I could refer you to any number of friends and acquaintances who have good credit histories and mortgageable wealth. Whenever rates are cut and mortgage rules loosened, they are able to easily arrange refinancing of their mortgage debt to increase their holdings of uk residential property. All they need is a little more residential property inflation and they can refinance and do it again.
I know someone who by accident now owns three residential properties and has somehow managed to avoid paying the additional rate of stamp duty on any of them. I once met someone else while overseas who bragged to me that every year he challenges two accounting firms to come up with the lowest tax charges on his UK residential portfolio and pays the one who gives the lowest answer. And someone else again who casually showed me one morning a cgi picture of a newbuild flat he had bought near the new crossrail station in Canary Wharf, who was then puzzled when I told him Canary Wharf was north of the river and his new flat was south. “Hahaha oh well mate, I’ll sell this one on more quickly then than hold it”.
Simply put Philip, you are allowing yourself to be mugged off because you are blinded by the overly basic principles of supply and demand, and so cannot see the wood for the trees.
If we unthinkingly litter the countryside with a mass house building campaign but do not stop debasing our currency, further reform against multiple property ownership and ban foreign ownership of residential property entirely, all we will do is provide fresh collateral for a new credit cycle.
Thanks Dr F for the HurstLama reference yesterday. I'm not on Twitter; can't, TBH, be bothered.
Cracking finish to the World Test Championship yesterday. And a good result against Sri Lanka.
What on earth was our Navy doing off the coast of Crimea yesterday? That war finished 165 years ago. And, looking at the BBC last night and the headline in the Mail, how many journalists were on the ship, and why?
"Maintaining the right of innocent passage" they are saying on the news this morning.
Bollocks.
Why? Nearly every country with a navy does that. Sweden regularly does so....
In the almost landlocked Black Sea?
Because we are essentially back in a cold war where any number of regimes - such as Putin's dictatorship - are trying to undermine international law.
I suppose we could ask Brussels to send one of the EU frigates to defend right of passage.
Oh wait - they haven't got any, and UVDL would be arguing with somebody about who got to direct it even after it had been sunk and the sailors killed by the Russians.
Surely the sea route to Batumi, the port in Georgia, needn't go near the Crimea?
I think Ukraine was the previous stop, but I haven't seen that documented. Anyhoo, it's a Right of Passage (so to speak).
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
UK house prices £366 ($511) per sq ft US house prices $155 (£111) per sq ft
Hence part of the problem. The two electorally triumphant PMs of my lifetime are Thatcher and Blair. They each presided over a rough doubling of real-terms house prices; https://www.allagents.co.uk/house-prices-adjusted/
One one hand everyone knows, deep down, that those huge profits have come from somewhere. The absurd house prices in the UK distort the economy and create massive unfairness between the generations. But rising house prices wins elections.
The Unherd article linked to earlier is worth reading and had some good ideas. But it also misses the point in quite a revealing way. One of the solutions is to pass a law stopping speculators buying houses. That skims over the awkward reality that, if we have a mortgage we are the speculators. There have been too many years where I have made more by having a mortgage than being really good at my job.
And deflating that is going to need technical genius and a willingness to be unpopular.
No, I can't see it happening.
It's exactly this. Our housing market has turned a large portion of the population into investors. We react to any move to change this in the same way the markets respond to federal reserve threats to taper QE or raise interest rates. I am one of them - once you have your long term family home, it is 100% in your interest for house prices to rise for the rest of your life. So most people over, say, 35-40 have a vested interest for the remaining 40 years of their lives.
The only plausible solution to this if you're committed to do something about supply, is wage and general goods inflation, probably coupled with currency devaluation. Enables younger people to get on to the ladder, brings UK property more in line internationally, but continues to give house owners headline price rises and erosion of the real value of their mortgages while real terms housing values decline.
The issue isn’t rising house prices, it’s rising house prices as a multiple of average wages. That’s largely a factor of low interest rates and an inability of the government to use their commercial weight in housing benefit to push down rents
Its got absolutely nothing to do with low interest rates and is entirely to do with massive demand outstripping supply.
Increase supply and constrain demand and price ratios will fall down naturally. Though probably without a price collapse, since it will be gradual.
All the funny money in the last decade and a bit has done what funny money does. Led to massive inflation. For interesting and complex reasons, in the West this has (so far) exhibited itself in asset price inflation rather than in wage inflation.
In the US, where there is a very high (and increasing) penetration rate of retail activity in stocks and capital markets, (and crypto!) and a strong memory of a terrible housing crash, this has exhibited itself in inflation of financial assets.
In the UK there is a general distrust around financial markets, because of historic pensions scams. Add in the 2008 crisis being a a banking rather than house price crisis in the UK, and the more socialist mentality denigrating banks and bankers. And the long held conviction that an Englishman’s Home Is His Castle. So that’s where we have inflation. Residential property.
I could refer you to any number of friends and acquaintances who have good credit histories and mortgageable wealth. Whenever rates are cut and mortgage rules loosened, they are able to easily arrange refinancing of their mortgage debt to increase their holdings of uk residential property. All they need is a little more residential properly inflation and they can refinance and do it again.
I know someone who by accident now owns three residential properties and has somehow managed to avoid paying the additional rate of stamp duty on any of them. I once met someone else while overseas who bragged to me that every year he challenges two accounting firms to come up with the lowest tax charges on his UK residential portfolio and pays the one who gives the lowest answer. And someone else again who casually showed me one morning a cgi picture of a newbuild flat he had bought near the new crossrail station in Canary Wharf, who was then puzzled when I told him Canary Wharf was north of the river and his new flag was south. “Hahaha oh well mate, I’ll sell this one on more quickly then than hold it”.
Simply put Philip, you are allowing yourself to be mugged off because you are blinded by the overly basic principles of supply and demand, and so cannot see the wood for the trees.
If we unthinkingly litter the countryside with a mass house building campaign but do not stop debasing our currency, further reform against multiple property ownership and ban foreign ownership of residential property entirely, all we will do is provide fresh collateral for a new credit cycle.
A lot of words to say not very much.
House price ratios peaked in 2007. Before funny money, before zero interest rates.
Quite simply demand and supply have kept roughly par in the past decade as the population has risen but construction has roughly kept pace, but that's not bringing the ratio down. If your theory was right ratios would be at an all time high now, not in 2007.
To get the ratio down we need supply growing faster than demand. As Thatcher said: There Is No Alternative.
Thanks Dr F for the HurstLama reference yesterday. I'm not on Twitter; can't, TBH, be bothered.
Cracking finish to the World Test Championship yesterday. And a good result against Sri Lanka.
What on earth was our Navy doing off the coast of Crimea yesterday? That war finished 165 years ago. And, looking at the BBC last night and the headline in the Mail, how many journalists were on the ship, and why?
"Maintaining the right of innocent passage" they are saying on the news this morning.
Bollocks.
Why? Nearly every country with a navy does that. Sweden regularly does so....
As to Sweden sending ships to the Black sea specifically - I don't know. Some quite surprising countries have done the Bosphorus passage etc. to express their rights under international law.
The Swedish Navy does regular patrols etc to establish Swedish claims to various waters and the international status of other waters. Including areas contested with Russia....
Do they usually have hacks from SVT & SvD when pursuing this activity?
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
UK house prices £366 ($511) per sq ft US house prices $155 (£111) per sq ft
So de Pfeffel wants to collapse house prices. Very brave.
Do you think high house prices are a good thing?
An increase in supply won't itself lead to a collapse in house prices, I wouldn't have thought, because it will happen gradually. All other things being equal (which they won't be), an increase in supply would lead to a gradual real terms reduction in house prices. Which would be a good thing.
I think we can generally agree that high house prices are bad but that house price collapses are bad. The only solution I see to this is gradual real terms reductions.
Unless we built houses on the scale of an emergency program to build prefabs in factories, trucked to site and put up at a rate of 100s per day (think https://www.huf-haus.com/en-uk/ multiplied by the Manhattan Project), it won't be possible for supply to exceed demand.
The most you can do is slow the rate of increase in prices. With a truly heroic effort, you might get house prices to slow their increase below the rate of increase in wages....
Pretty easy, I'd have thought. End buy-to-let. It would not increase the number of houses available but would reduce prices, initially by forcing a fire sale and later by ending price competition from would-be private landlords using BTL as an alternative to pensions or savings because interest rates are so low.
That has been shown to be false long ago.
The ONS Date - English Housing Survey for one - show that rented property is occupied more densely than owner occupied, so you need more houses not fewer for the same number of people. Which would not reduce competition when there are more surplus people needing houses.
And any evidence that PRS drives up prices is very thin - LLs who pay full whack make poor margins.
Rented accommodation is on average smaller, and probably more likely to house families. It does not necessarily follow that larger houses are needed but in any case is irrelevant to the point that ending BTL will reduce prices. I am not claiming it will increase housing stock.
ETA and separately, I do advocate new building, and especially to increase economic activity in "left behind" areas. But that is separate. If the government wants a quick fix to house prices, there is one.
I don't believe there would be a significant effect on prices.
Thanks Dr F for the HurstLama reference yesterday. I'm not on Twitter; can't, TBH, be bothered.
Cracking finish to the World Test Championship yesterday. And a good result against Sri Lanka.
What on earth was our Navy doing off the coast of Crimea yesterday? That war finished 165 years ago. And, looking at the BBC last night and the headline in the Mail, how many journalists were on the ship, and why?
"Maintaining the right of innocent passage" they are saying on the news this morning.
Bollocks.
Why? Nearly every country with a navy does that. Sweden regularly does so....
As to Sweden sending ships to the Black sea specifically - I don't know. Some quite surprising countries have done the Bosphorus passage etc. to express their rights under international law.
The Swedish Navy does regular patrols etc to establish Swedish claims to various waters and the international status of other waters. Including areas contested with Russia....
Do they usually have hacks from SVT & SvD when pursuing this activity?
It is not unusual for journalists to be invited as observers on some of these "right of innocent passage" voyages. See the various recent accounts from observers in the South China sea, from various countries exercising their rights.
And we'll be only let out for the mass application of leeches. So we need to know how to manage these events, OK. I'm really glad that they're doing the necessary planning now.
I see a sudden business opportunity in leech farming. If only I had a cabinet minister on speed dial to bung me the necessary start up cash...
Very good people with whom to do business, in my experience. Once sent a box up from S.Wales to Essex by motorcycle courier in significantly under 3 hours.
I'm re-watching Michael Palin's v enjoyable New Europe on Saturday evenings. He went to a leech doctor in Estonia; western liberal softie that I am I recoiled somewhat when the 'hirudotherapist' (as I learned I must call them) dispatched the leeches in caustic soda immediately afterwards!
Thanks Dr F for the HurstLama reference yesterday. I'm not on Twitter; can't, TBH, be bothered.
Cracking finish to the World Test Championship yesterday. And a good result against Sri Lanka.
What on earth was our Navy doing off the coast of Crimea yesterday? That war finished 165 years ago. And, looking at the BBC last night and the headline in the Mail, how many journalists were on the ship, and why?
"Maintaining the right of innocent passage" they are saying on the news this morning.
Bollocks.
Why? Nearly every country with a navy does that. Sweden regularly does so....
In the almost landlocked Black Sea?
Because we are essentially back in a cold war where any number of regimes - such as Putin's dictatorship - are trying to undermine international law.
I suppose we could ask Brussels to send one of the EU frigates to defend right of passage.
Oh wait - they haven't got any, and UVDL would be arguing with somebody about who got to direct it even after it had been sunk and the sailors killed by the Russians.
Surely the sea route to Batumi, the port in Georgia, needn't go near the Crimea?
I think Ukraine was the previous stop, but I haven't seen that documented. Anyhoo, it's a Right of Passage (so to speak).
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
UK house prices £366 ($511) per sq ft US house prices $155 (£111) per sq ft
So de Pfeffel wants to collapse house prices. Very brave.
Do you think high house prices are a good thing?
An increase in supply won't itself lead to a collapse in house prices, I wouldn't have thought, because it will happen gradually. All other things being equal (which they won't be), an increase in supply would lead to a gradual real terms reduction in house prices. Which would be a good thing.
I think we can generally agree that high house prices are bad but that house price collapses are bad. The only solution I see to this is gradual real terms reductions.
Unless we built houses on the scale of an emergency program to build prefabs in factories, trucked to site and put up at a rate of 100s per day (think https://www.huf-haus.com/en-uk/ multiplied by the Manhattan Project), it won't be possible for supply to exceed demand.
The most you can do is slow the rate of increase in prices. With a truly heroic effort, you might get house prices to slow their increase below the rate of increase in wages....
Pretty easy, I'd have thought. End buy-to-let. It would not increase the number of houses available but would reduce prices, initially by forcing a fire sale and later by ending price competition from would-be private landlords using BTL as an alternative to pensions or savings because interest rates are so low.
Building lots more houses, would solve that problem all on its own.
Nightmare. Every acre of green which goes impoverishes the country and nature.
Complete hairshirt envirofascist bollocks. An acre of green that goes won't even be noticeable to 99.9999% of the country and will provide a home to someone that needs it.
There is no alternative to increasing supply, other than expelling millions of people from the country. Anything else is just lies. You can't defeat supply and demand.
That doesn't mean concreting over the country. The UK will remain a green and pleasant land even if a few extra houses are built.
Aha. Furious Phil is back .
Although I was wrong.
An acre of land won't provide one home. It will provide about 18 homes at typical densities.
Now, this is an important point - density. The risk of zoning is that we end up with housing delivered at an inefficient density. There is a tension between the sorts of densities developers typically want to develop (typically considerably lower than 18 per acre, in suburban locations - often 14 is the top end) and the sorts that councils want (who would often be very happy with 18, but typically have to settle for 14 or less). Note that this is net density, and doesn't take into account extra bits and bobs like access roads, public open space, and on bigger sites schools, shops etc.
Long story short: on a large peripheral site you're doing well to get 10 an acre, gross.
Higher densities are good for all sorts of reasons - more efficient use of land, more walkable communities, better community spirit, more access to local services, local services able to be supported... - though obviously you need to do this in such a way you're not packing people into a slum.
It can happen, and there are examples of high quality high density development in both urban and rural locations (Poundbury in Dorset is often given as an example of the latter - many architects hate this, but I think it is great and it is popular with its residents; a similar community is being developed on the edge of Newquay in Cornwall). But my worry is that a simple 'zoning' approach will lead to low quality, low density neighbourhoods.
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
UK house prices £366 ($511) per sq ft US house prices $155 (£111) per sq ft
Hence part of the problem. The two electorally triumphant PMs of my lifetime are Thatcher and Blair. They each presided over a rough doubling of real-terms house prices; https://www.allagents.co.uk/house-prices-adjusted/
One one hand everyone knows, deep down, that those huge profits have come from somewhere. The absurd house prices in the UK distort the economy and create massive unfairness between the generations. But rising house prices wins elections.
The Unherd article linked to earlier is worth reading and had some good ideas. But it also misses the point in quite a revealing way. One of the solutions is to pass a law stopping speculators buying houses. That skims over the awkward reality that, if we have a mortgage we are the speculators. There have been too many years where I have made more by having a mortgage than being really good at my job.
And deflating that is going to need technical genius and a willingness to be unpopular.
No, I can't see it happening.
It's exactly this. Our housing market has turned a large portion of the population into investors. We react to any move to change this in the same way the markets respond to federal reserve threats to taper QE or raise interest rates. I am one of them - once you have your long term family home, it is 100% in your interest for house prices to rise for the rest of your life. So most people over, say, 35-40 have a vested interest for the remaining 40 years of their lives.
The only plausible solution to this if you're committed to do something about supply, is wage and general goods inflation, probably coupled with currency devaluation. Enables younger people to get on to the ladder, brings UK property more in line internationally, but continues to give house owners headline price rises and erosion of the real value of their mortgages while real terms housing values decline.
The issue isn’t rising house prices, it’s rising house prices as a multiple of average wages. That’s largely a factor of low interest rates and an inability of the government to use their commercial weight in housing benefit to push down rents
Its got absolutely nothing to do with low interest rates and is entirely to do with massive demand outstripping supply.
Increase supply and constrain demand and price ratios will fall down naturally. Though probably without a price collapse, since it will be gradual.
All the funny money in the last decade and a bit has done what funny money does. Led to massive inflation. For interesting and complex reasons, in the West this has (so far) exhibited itself in asset price inflation rather than in wage inflation.
In the US, where there is a very high (and increasing) penetration rate of retail activity in stocks and capital markets, (and crypto!) and a strong memory of a terrible housing crash, this has exhibited itself in inflation of financial assets.
In the UK there is a general distrust around financial markets, because of historic pensions scams. Add in the 2008 crisis being a a banking rather than house price crisis in the UK, and the more socialist mentality denigrating banks and bankers. And the long held conviction that an Englishman’s Home Is His Castle. So that’s where we have inflation. Residential property.
I could refer you to any number of friends and acquaintances who have good credit histories and mortgageable wealth. Whenever rates are cut and mortgage rules loosened, they are able to easily arrange refinancing of their mortgage debt to increase their holdings of uk residential property. All they need is a little more residential properly inflation and they can refinance and do it again.
I know someone who by accident now owns three residential properties and has somehow managed to avoid paying the additional rate of stamp duty on any of them. I once met someone else while overseas who bragged to me that every year he challenges two accounting firms to come up with the lowest tax charges on his UK residential portfolio and pays the one who gives the lowest answer. And someone else again who casually showed me one morning a cgi picture of a newbuild flat he had bought near the new crossrail station in Canary Wharf, who was then puzzled when I told him Canary Wharf was north of the river and his new flag was south. “Hahaha oh well mate, I’ll sell this one on more quickly then than hold it”.
Simply put Philip, you are allowing yourself to be mugged off because you are blinded by the overly basic principles of supply and demand, and so cannot see the wood for the trees.
If we unthinkingly litter the countryside with a mass house building campaign but do not stop debasing our currency, further reform against multiple property ownership and ban foreign ownership of residential property entirely, all we will do is provide fresh collateral for a new credit cycle.
A lot of words to say not very much.
House price ratios peaked in 2007. Before funny money, before zero interest rates.
Quite simply demand and supply have kept roughly par in the past decade as the population has risen but construction has roughly kept pace, but that's not bringing the ratio down. If your theory was right ratios would be at an all time high now, not in 2007.
To get the ratio down we need supply growing faster than demand. As Thatcher said: There Is No Alternative.
I suspect are looking at the aggregate indices, not the on the ground reality.
Given there are challenges and negative consequences of increasing supply in housing (whether you wish to acknowledge them or not), I’m surprised you are so uninterested in demand.
Doing something to reduce under occupancy of housing would be an easy and effective first step. This doesn’t necessarily even need a land value tax. Just make it easier to get planning permission for annexes and bungalow. And this bit is important, make it illegal to ever convert a bungalow to multiple stories.
Finally if you really wanted to, you could throw a further bung at Tory voters by eliminating stamp duty on anything classed as a retirement suitable home, so long as an existing home is sold by the buyer.
Also prohibiting the purchase of UK residential property by non citizen foreign residents is so fucking obvious it makes me want to scream that our politicians won’t do it. Did you know that foreign lenders are happy to lend to foreign residents to buy uk property on standard mortgage terms, on criteria far easier than allowed by the PRA? People who pay next to no income tax in the uk context and have a cost of living that is often lower than that faced by uk based workers.
Good to agree with Paul Mason - a rarity. The government should not be encouraging schools to sing North Korean songs of the toe curling "Strong Boris, Brave Tories" variety, not least because schools can mostly do toe curling drivel without help from outside.
The rest of his article contains not a single word of sense.
Thanks Dr F for the HurstLama reference yesterday. I'm not on Twitter; can't, TBH, be bothered.
Cracking finish to the World Test Championship yesterday. And a good result against Sri Lanka.
What on earth was our Navy doing off the coast of Crimea yesterday? That war finished 165 years ago. And, looking at the BBC last night and the headline in the Mail, how many journalists were on the ship, and why?
"Maintaining the right of innocent passage" they are saying on the news this morning.
Bollocks.
Why? Nearly every country with a navy does that. Sweden regularly does so....
In the almost landlocked Black Sea?
Because we are essentially back in a cold war where any number of regimes - such as Putin's dictatorship - are trying to undermine international law.
I suppose we could ask Brussels to send one of the EU frigates to defend right of passage.
Oh wait - they haven't got any, and UVDL would be arguing with somebody about who got to direct it even after it had been sunk and the sailors killed by the Russians.
Surely the sea route to Batumi, the port in Georgia, needn't go near the Crimea?
I think Ukraine was the previous stop, but I haven't seen that documented. Anyhoo, it's a Right of Passage (so to speak).
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
UK house prices £366 ($511) per sq ft US house prices $155 (£111) per sq ft
So de Pfeffel wants to collapse house prices. Very brave.
Do you think high house prices are a good thing?
An increase in supply won't itself lead to a collapse in house prices, I wouldn't have thought, because it will happen gradually. All other things being equal (which they won't be), an increase in supply would lead to a gradual real terms reduction in house prices. Which would be a good thing.
I think we can generally agree that high house prices are bad but that house price collapses are bad. The only solution I see to this is gradual real terms reductions.
The key issue is, as touched on in that article, the proposed changes won't do much to bring house prices down or even slow their increase by much. It'll just piss off everyone affected, while enriching a handful of big developers (who will be the ones in full control over the supply and therefore in control over house prices).
One problem is the Politician's Syllogism: "Something must be done. This is something. It therefore must be done."
The suggestion in the article: "Planning reform, therefore, is largely irrelevant. A very different plan of action is required.
Firstly, the law should be used to exclude speculators from the housing market. We plan the location of new housing for environmental reasons and we should plan the ownership of new housing for social reasons. Most new houses should be reserved for first-time buyers and movers.
Free marketers might complain that this is distributism not capitalism. But so what? For a conservative, spreading home ownership should come before the purity of the market place.
On the supply side, government needs to break the big developers’ stranglehold on the land supply. It can do this by purchasing and preparing sites itself. A time-limited right to fully develop and sell-on plots could then be auctioned-off. Builders would thus be able to obtain the sites they need for houses they actually intend to build, but they’d have no need — nor the perverse incentive — to hold on to more land than that. "
... is key. And the planning reforms proposed won't do that. If anything, they'll move us further away from that. So we end up with no bringing down of house prices, poorly built rabbit hutches, big developers controlling the supply of housing, and really pissed off locals everywhere who are being completely ignored (get them involved and the problem really does reduce) and rapidly transition from dubious through NIMBY to BANANA.
Developers do not control the supply of land. They are usually just a convenient target who do not have votes.
That is done by local councils through the local plan development and zoning process. Landowners bring forward proposed sites (of which there are always more than needed), and teh Council rate them by their chosen criteria, make an ordered list and go down the list until their Housing Needs Assessment (which they also control) target has been met.
If the Council want more development land, they can allocate it.
The rub is that they often (as we have seen in C&A) do not want to do that, because their voters are self-serving Nimbys.
The article is weird - ill-informed, superficial, full of holes and impractical. I get the impression that he has never built anything other than with Lego.
On the proposal - why should the *Government* be the one buying plots. I thought the key objection was that the new proposal would take control AWAY from local communities. Give that power to the Local Authority, if someone must have it.
But it won't help, because it does not address the heart of the issue.
Developers do, however, have a huge interest in maintaining a tight grip on the supply of new houses in order to maximise their income. Most of the cost of a house is not in the house itself (in most parts of the coutry) but in the value of the land with planning permission underneath it.
My personal prediction is that local councils being forced to permit building will do little to nothing to promote house-building at the scale we need, because house builders don’t want to build at that rate - it lowers achievable prices whilst simultaneously driving up input costs (especially the labour cost of chippies, sparks etc etc).
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
UK house prices £366 ($511) per sq ft US house prices $155 (£111) per sq ft
So de Pfeffel wants to collapse house prices. Very brave.
Do you think high house prices are a good thing?
An increase in supply won't itself lead to a collapse in house prices, I wouldn't have thought, because it will happen gradually. All other things being equal (which they won't be), an increase in supply would lead to a gradual real terms reduction in house prices. Which would be a good thing.
I think we can generally agree that high house prices are bad but that house price collapses are bad. The only solution I see to this is gradual real terms reductions.
The key issue is, as touched on in that article, the proposed changes won't do much to bring house prices down or even slow their increase by much. It'll just piss off everyone affected, while enriching a handful of big developers (who will be the ones in full control over the supply and therefore in control over house prices).
One problem is the Politician's Syllogism: "Something must be done. This is something. It therefore must be done."
The suggestion in the article: "Planning reform, therefore, is largely irrelevant. A very different plan of action is required.
Firstly, the law should be used to exclude speculators from the housing market. We plan the location of new housing for environmental reasons and we should plan the ownership of new housing for social reasons. Most new houses should be reserved for first-time buyers and movers.
Free marketers might complain that this is distributism not capitalism. But so what? For a conservative, spreading home ownership should come before the purity of the market place.
On the supply side, government needs to break the big developers’ stranglehold on the land supply. It can do this by purchasing and preparing sites itself. A time-limited right to fully develop and sell-on plots could then be auctioned-off. Builders would thus be able to obtain the sites they need for houses they actually intend to build, but they’d have no need — nor the perverse incentive — to hold on to more land than that. "
... is key. And the planning reforms proposed won't do that. If anything, they'll move us further away from that. So we end up with no bringing down of house prices, poorly built rabbit hutches, big developers controlling the supply of housing, and really pissed off locals everywhere who are being completely ignored (get them involved and the problem really does reduce) and rapidly transition from dubious through NIMBY to BANANA.
BANANA is one of my favourite acronyms. I quite enjoyed straight-facedly using the term 'bananaism' in an essay at university.
Thanks Dr F for the HurstLama reference yesterday. I'm not on Twitter; can't, TBH, be bothered.
Cracking finish to the World Test Championship yesterday. And a good result against Sri Lanka.
What on earth was our Navy doing off the coast of Crimea yesterday? That war finished 165 years ago. And, looking at the BBC last night and the headline in the Mail, how many journalists were on the ship, and why?
"Maintaining the right of innocent passage" they are saying on the news this morning.
Bollocks.
Why? Nearly every country with a navy does that. Sweden regularly does so....
In the almost landlocked Black Sea?
Because we are essentially back in a cold war where any number of regimes - such as Putin's dictatorship - are trying to undermine international law.
I suppose we could ask Brussels to send one of the EU frigates to defend right of passage.
Oh wait - they haven't got any, and UVDL would be arguing with somebody about who got to direct it even after it had been sunk and the sailors killed by the Russians.
Surely the sea route to Batumi, the port in Georgia, needn't go near the Crimea?
I think Ukraine was the previous stop, but I haven't seen that documented. Anyhoo, it's a Right of Passage (so to speak).
Thanks Dr F for the HurstLama reference yesterday. I'm not on Twitter; can't, TBH, be bothered.
Cracking finish to the World Test Championship yesterday. And a good result against Sri Lanka.
What on earth was our Navy doing off the coast of Crimea yesterday? That war finished 165 years ago. And, looking at the BBC last night and the headline in the Mail, how many journalists were on the ship, and why?
"Maintaining the right of innocent passage" they are saying on the news this morning.
Bollocks.
Why? Nearly every country with a navy does that. Sweden regularly does so....
In the almost landlocked Black Sea?
Because we are essentially back in a cold war where any number of regimes - such as Putin's dictatorship - are trying to undermine international law.
I suppose we could ask Brussels to send one of the EU frigates to defend right of passage.
Oh wait - they haven't got any, and UVDL would be arguing with somebody about who got to direct it even after it had been sunk and the sailors killed by the Russians.
Surely the sea route to Batumi, the port in Georgia, needn't go near the Crimea?
I think Ukraine was the previous stop, but I haven't seen that documented. Anyhoo, it's a Right of Passage (so to speak).
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
UK house prices £366 ($511) per sq ft US house prices $155 (£111) per sq ft
So de Pfeffel wants to collapse house prices. Very brave.
Do you think high house prices are a good thing?
An increase in supply won't itself lead to a collapse in house prices, I wouldn't have thought, because it will happen gradually. All other things being equal (which they won't be), an increase in supply would lead to a gradual real terms reduction in house prices. Which would be a good thing.
I think we can generally agree that high house prices are bad but that house price collapses are bad. The only solution I see to this is gradual real terms reductions.
Unless we built houses on the scale of an emergency program to build prefabs in factories, trucked to site and put up at a rate of 100s per day (think https://www.huf-haus.com/en-uk/ multiplied by the Manhattan Project), it won't be possible for supply to exceed demand.
The most you can do is slow the rate of increase in prices. With a truly heroic effort, you might get house prices to slow their increase below the rate of increase in wages....
Pretty easy, I'd have thought. End buy-to-let. It would not increase the number of houses available but would reduce prices, initially by forcing a fire sale and later by ending price competition from would-be private landlords using BTL as an alternative to pensions or savings because interest rates are so low.
Building lots more houses, would solve that problem all on its own.
Nightmare. Every acre of green which goes impoverishes the country and nature.
Complete hairshirt envirofascist bollocks. An acre of green that goes won't even be noticeable to 99.9999% of the country and will provide a home to someone that needs it.
There is no alternative to increasing supply, other than expelling millions of people from the country. Anything else is just lies. You can't defeat supply and demand.
That doesn't mean concreting over the country. The UK will remain a green and pleasant land even if a few extra houses are built.
Aha. Furious Phil is back .
Although I was wrong.
An acre of land won't provide one home. It will provide about 18 homes at typical densities.
Now, this is an important point - density. The risk of zoning is that we end up with housing delivered at an inefficient density. There is a tension between the sorts of densities developers typically want to develop (typically considerably lower than 18 per acre, in suburban locations - often 14 is the top end) and the sorts that councils want (who would often be very happy with 18, but typically have to settle for 14 or less). Note that this is net density, and doesn't take into account extra bits and bobs like access roads, public open space, and on bigger sites schools, shops etc.
Long story short: on a large peripheral site you're doing well to get 10 an acre, gross.
Higher densities are good for all sorts of reasons - more efficient use of land, more walkable communities, better community spirit, more access to local services, local services able to be supported... - though obviously you need to do this in such a way you're not packing people into a slum.
It can happen, and there are examples of high quality high density development in both urban and rural locations (Poundbury in Dorset is often given as an example of the latter - many architects hate this, but I think it is great and it is popular with its residents; a similar community is being developed on the edge of Newquay in Cornwall). But my worry is that a simple 'zoning' approach will lead to low quality, low density neighbourhoods.
Lower density would be a good thing.
It means bigger houses, or bigger gardens, either way is a win.
Totally sick of seeing Gurning George Galloway in that stupid fucking hat. Seems to think he's Orson Welles or something. Well I've got news for him - he isn't.
German chancellor Angela Merkel said this morning that Europe is “on thin ice” in its battle against the coronavirus, as the highly contagious delta variant threatens to undo progress made in reducing infections.
---
But its ok we are going to let everybody intermingle across Europe like last summer, especially the young who haven't been fully vaccinated.
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
UK house prices £366 ($511) per sq ft US house prices $155 (£111) per sq ft
So de Pfeffel wants to collapse house prices. Very brave.
Do you think high house prices are a good thing?
An increase in supply won't itself lead to a collapse in house prices, I wouldn't have thought, because it will happen gradually. All other things being equal (which they won't be), an increase in supply would lead to a gradual real terms reduction in house prices. Which would be a good thing.
I think we can generally agree that high house prices are bad but that house price collapses are bad. The only solution I see to this is gradual real terms reductions.
The key issue is, as touched on in that article, the proposed changes won't do much to bring house prices down or even slow their increase by much. It'll just piss off everyone affected, while enriching a handful of big developers (who will be the ones in full control over the supply and therefore in control over house prices).
One problem is the Politician's Syllogism: "Something must be done. This is something. It therefore must be done."
The suggestion in the article: "Planning reform, therefore, is largely irrelevant. A very different plan of action is required.
Firstly, the law should be used to exclude speculators from the housing market. We plan the location of new housing for environmental reasons and we should plan the ownership of new housing for social reasons. Most new houses should be reserved for first-time buyers and movers.
Free marketers might complain that this is distributism not capitalism. But so what? For a conservative, spreading home ownership should come before the purity of the market place.
On the supply side, government needs to break the big developers’ stranglehold on the land supply. It can do this by purchasing and preparing sites itself. A time-limited right to fully develop and sell-on plots could then be auctioned-off. Builders would thus be able to obtain the sites they need for houses they actually intend to build, but they’d have no need — nor the perverse incentive — to hold on to more land than that. "
... is key. And the planning reforms proposed won't do that. If anything, they'll move us further away from that. So we end up with no bringing down of house prices, poorly built rabbit hutches, big developers controlling the supply of housing, and really pissed off locals everywhere who are being completely ignored (get them involved and the problem really does reduce) and rapidly transition from dubious through NIMBY to BANANA.
Developers do not control the supply of land. They are usually just a convenient target who do not have votes.
That is done by local councils through the local plan development and zoning process. Landowners bring forward proposed sites (of which there are always more than needed), and teh Council rate them by their chosen criteria, make an ordered list and go down the list until their Housing Needs Assessment (which they also control) target has been met.
If the Council want more development land, they can allocate it.
The rub is that they often (as we have seen in C&A) do not want to do that, because their voters are self-serving Nimbys.
The article is weird - ill-informed, superficial, full of holes and impractical. I get the impression that he has never built anything other than with Lego.
On the proposal - why should the *Government* be the one buying plots. I thought the key objection was that the new proposal would take control AWAY from local communities. Give that power to the Local Authority, if someone must have it.
But it won't help, because it does not address the heart of the issue.
Developers do, however, have a huge interest in maintaining a tight grip on the supply of new houses in order to maximise their income. Most of the cost of a house is not in the house itself (in most parts of the coutry) but in the value of the land with planning permission underneath it.
My personal prediction is that local councils being forced to permit building will do little to nothing to promote house-building at the scale we need, because house builders don’t want to build at that rate - it lowers achievable prices whilst simultaneously driving up input costs (especially the labour cost of chippies, sparks etc etc).
In a free market developers can't refuse to build because if they do someone else will do the building instead and that someone else will make the profit instead.
The only way developers can refuse to build is if they have monopolistic powers, which doesn't happen in a free market because there's relatively low entry costs to this sector. The developers being the only ones who can navigate the planning system is what gives them monopolistic powers and why that doesn't exist in other nations with zonal planning where smaller developers or even self-building can exist instead.
Thanks Dr F for the HurstLama reference yesterday. I'm not on Twitter; can't, TBH, be bothered.
Cracking finish to the World Test Championship yesterday. And a good result against Sri Lanka.
What on earth was our Navy doing off the coast of Crimea yesterday? That war finished 165 years ago. And, looking at the BBC last night and the headline in the Mail, how many journalists were on the ship, and why?
"Maintaining the right of innocent passage" they are saying on the news this morning.
Bollocks.
Why? Nearly every country with a navy does that. Sweden regularly does so....
In the almost landlocked Black Sea?
When you reflect on 3000 years of maritime history that word 'almost' is doing a lot of work. Jason and the Argonauts deserve better!
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
UK house prices £366 ($511) per sq ft US house prices $155 (£111) per sq ft
Hence part of the problem. The two electorally triumphant PMs of my lifetime are Thatcher and Blair. They each presided over a rough doubling of real-terms house prices; https://www.allagents.co.uk/house-prices-adjusted/
One one hand everyone knows, deep down, that those huge profits have come from somewhere. The absurd house prices in the UK distort the economy and create massive unfairness between the generations. But rising house prices wins elections.
The Unherd article linked to earlier is worth reading and had some good ideas. But it also misses the point in quite a revealing way. One of the solutions is to pass a law stopping speculators buying houses. That skims over the awkward reality that, if we have a mortgage we are the speculators. There have been too many years where I have made more by having a mortgage than being really good at my job.
And deflating that is going to need technical genius and a willingness to be unpopular.
No, I can't see it happening.
It's exactly this. Our housing market has turned a large portion of the population into investors. We react to any move to change this in the same way the markets respond to federal reserve threats to taper QE or raise interest rates. I am one of them - once you have your long term family home, it is 100% in your interest for house prices to rise for the rest of your life. So most people over, say, 35-40 have a vested interest for the remaining 40 years of their lives.
The only plausible solution to this if you're committed to do something about supply, is wage and general goods inflation, probably coupled with currency devaluation. Enables younger people to get on to the ladder, brings UK property more in line internationally, but continues to give house owners headline price rises and erosion of the real value of their mortgages while real terms housing values decline.
The issue isn’t rising house prices, it’s rising house prices as a multiple of average wages. That’s largely a factor of low interest rates and an inability of the government to use their commercial weight in housing benefit to push down rents
Its got absolutely nothing to do with low interest rates and is entirely to do with massive demand outstripping supply.
Increase supply and constrain demand and price ratios will fall down naturally. Though probably without a price collapse, since it will be gradual.
Banks are hugely focused on ability to repay. This is dependent on prevailing interest rates. If interest rates rise, affordability decreases, lending falls and prices fall.
Typically supply/demand results in a 10% swing around the base price.
But house price multiples which is what we're talking about peaked in 2007 when base rates were close to 6% not 0%.
Between 1997 and 2007 demand surged but construction didn't so house price ratios surged, despite interest rates being much higher then.
Between 2007 and 2019 interest rates collapsed to zero, demand continued to surge but construction increased and as a result house price ratios have basically remained roughly flat as demand and supply have kept in tandem.
If interest rates were the key factor, then house price ratios should have been much, much higher in 2019 than 2007. Especially considering our population increased a lot between 2007 and 2019 too, but construction eased the pressure so price ratios remained consistent, except especially in the one region were demand rose the most and supply rose the least.
Supply and demand works to explain the issues. Interest rates don't.
It’s about capital availability not interest rates directly. After 2008 capital was constrained, but it has since been released and multiples have returned to peak.
The rise from 1995 onwards was driven by recovery from the 89 crash and lower interest rates post ERM
Totally sick of seeing Gurning George Galloway in that stupid fucking hat. Seems to think he's Orson Welles or something. Well I've got news for him - he isn't.
I find it incredible that he moves from town to town like some old school snake oil salesman, but still in this modern era people buy into it.
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
UK house prices £366 ($511) per sq ft US house prices $155 (£111) per sq ft
So de Pfeffel wants to collapse house prices. Very brave.
Do you think high house prices are a good thing?
An increase in supply won't itself lead to a collapse in house prices, I wouldn't have thought, because it will happen gradually. All other things being equal (which they won't be), an increase in supply would lead to a gradual real terms reduction in house prices. Which would be a good thing.
I think we can generally agree that high house prices are bad but that house price collapses are bad. The only solution I see to this is gradual real terms reductions.
Unless we built houses on the scale of an emergency program to build prefabs in factories, trucked to site and put up at a rate of 100s per day (think https://www.huf-haus.com/en-uk/ multiplied by the Manhattan Project), it won't be possible for supply to exceed demand.
The most you can do is slow the rate of increase in prices. With a truly heroic effort, you might get house prices to slow their increase below the rate of increase in wages....
Pretty easy, I'd have thought. End buy-to-let. It would not increase the number of houses available but would reduce prices, initially by forcing a fire sale and later by ending price competition from would-be private landlords using BTL as an alternative to pensions or savings because interest rates are so low.
Building lots more houses, would solve that problem all on its own.
Nightmare. Every acre of green which goes impoverishes the country and nature.
Complete hairshirt envirofascist bollocks. An acre of green that goes won't even be noticeable to 99.9999% of the country and will provide a home to someone that needs it.
There is no alternative to increasing supply, other than expelling millions of people from the country. Anything else is just lies. You can't defeat supply and demand.
That doesn't mean concreting over the country. The UK will remain a green and pleasant land even if a few extra houses are built.
Aha. Furious Phil is back .
Although I was wrong.
An acre of land won't provide one home. It will provide about 18 homes at typical densities.
Now, this is an important point - density. The risk of zoning is that we end up with housing delivered at an inefficient density. There is a tension between the sorts of densities developers typically want to develop (typically considerably lower than 18 per acre, in suburban locations - often 14 is the top end) and the sorts that councils want (who would often be very happy with 18, but typically have to settle for 14 or less). Note that this is net density, and doesn't take into account extra bits and bobs like access roads, public open space, and on bigger sites schools, shops etc.
Long story short: on a large peripheral site you're doing well to get 10 an acre, gross.
Higher densities are good for all sorts of reasons - more efficient use of land, more walkable communities, better community spirit, more access to local services, local services able to be supported... - though obviously you need to do this in such a way you're not packing people into a slum.
It can happen, and there are examples of high quality high density development in both urban and rural locations (Poundbury in Dorset is often given as an example of the latter - many architects hate this, but I think it is great and it is popular with its residents; a similar community is being developed on the edge of Newquay in Cornwall). But my worry is that a simple 'zoning' approach will lead to low quality, low density neighbourhoods.
If it's Net Density, surely it does take the extras into account?
On a town edge site say within a mile or two of the centre, I think it tends to be about 30 per hectare net, which is 12 per acre.
Agree on your last comment. All the feedback to the Select Committee says that the zoning needs nuance added. They could do worse than look at Land Use categories in Local Plan documents as a starting point.
OTOH a lot of them are people with professions wanting a bigger share of the power or work.
The tension is perhaps between the Govt wanting to move very fast, and the on-behalf-of-Nimby lobby wanting to kill it, and having no real ideas.
I think what it really wants is a good House-of-Lords-ing, as it is the type of thing they could do a very worthwhile job on.
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
Yep - basically once your area is designated for growth, it'd be a free for all. Driving a coach and horses through our existing planning system.
Jenrick is finished. Someone will have to take the blame when the screeching u-turn is implemented.
If Jenrick is finished and there is a screeching u-turn on doing the right thing then that will be the biggest domestic mistake since Tony Blair told Frank Field to think the unthinkable, then sacked him for thinking the unthinkable.
My favourite political joke of the modern era was William Hague's "They told him to think the unthinkable. So he thought it. And they said 'that's unthinkable!'"
Hague was much funnier than Johnson and yet the latter is known for his humour.
Johnson's humour is more a form of performance art; a fully rounded comic persona. Fewer actual jokes - his humour is more in 'saying the sorts of things Boris Johnson would say'.
Stewart Lee tells a lot cleverer jokes than Peter Kay, but Peter Kay has made 100x what Stewart Lee has out of comedy....
When he does stand-up, Peter Kay's jokes aren't actually that funny. Quite jolly observational humour, but nothing you haven't really heard before. But there's more to being a comedian than telling jokes. There's the whole performance. You are laughing at Peter Kay before he's opened his mouth. I would argue that he is a genius. His sitcoms etc are a different kettle of fish - these genuinely are clever. But in all honesty I find his stand-up funnier.
I had no idea I had such strong opinions about comedy.
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
To govern is to choose. To win elections is to avoid choosing when all choices are sub optimal.
Governing and winning elections have never been entirely compatible occupations, something which means that some sort of authoritarianism is always an option, however slight.
The poll tax was a decent example of a car crash choice which was an unforced error - everyone knew there was lots wrong with rates but election didn't turn on it.
Boris has succeeded in everything he has had ambition to try - never lost an important election, became PM against high odds, won London, did Brexit etc.
He doesn't have a track record of a comeback after disaster on his watch - the sort of disaster reflected in consistent polling.
Planning, social care, the post furlough world, unmanageable finances are four areas where this happen, and where choices probably can't be avoided, and where there are only sub optimal (somewhere between very bad and cataclysmic) outcomes.
The playing out of this scene will be worth watching.
No truly great Prime Minister has become so by shirking the big choices.
Thatcher was a truly great Prime Minister not simply because she was right wing but because she did what she considered was right and carried the country with her, even when it wasn't superficially popular. Everyone remembers the poll tax which was a reform too far, many of the then controversial decisions made before that have stayed with the country through to today.
Blair on the other hand was a mediocre Prime Minister. He had some reforms in mind that got done in 1997 in a big burst of action but then did bugger all besides spend more money and invade Iraq after that.
Boris can choose to take on the issues that need grappling and be a great PM, or he can merely be the PM who muddled us through Covid and have Brexit as his only other legacy.
TBF getting through COVID, albeit somewhat inelegantly at times, and Brexit are two pretty big legacies for a PM
Losing the American colonies was a pretty big legacy for Lord North.
Yes, and no one remembers anything else he did.
Lord North was the David Cameron of his day.
Most Americans don’t even remember him and seem to think they escaped from an absolute monarchy.
By giving themselves the right to appoint Donald Trump as their temporary King
Thanks Dr F for the HurstLama reference yesterday. I'm not on Twitter; can't, TBH, be bothered.
Cracking finish to the World Test Championship yesterday. And a good result against Sri Lanka.
What on earth was our Navy doing off the coast of Crimea yesterday? That war finished 165 years ago. And, looking at the BBC last night and the headline in the Mail, how many journalists were on the ship, and why?
"Maintaining the right of innocent passage" they are saying on the news this morning.
Bollocks.
Why? Nearly every country with a navy does that. Sweden regularly does so....
In the almost landlocked Black Sea?
Because we are essentially back in a cold war where any number of regimes - such as Putin's dictatorship - are trying to undermine international law.
I suppose we could ask Brussels to send one of the EU frigates to defend right of passage.
Oh wait - they haven't got any, and UVDL would be arguing with somebody about who got to direct it even after it had been sunk and the sailors killed by the Russians.
Surely the sea route to Batumi, the port in Georgia, needn't go near the Crimea?
I think Ukraine was the previous stop, but I haven't seen that documented. Anyhoo, it's a Right of Passage (so to speak).
The centre piece of forthcoming [planning] bill is still very much in place. The idea is to gut the existing planning system and replace it with American-style “zoning”. Local authorities would be forced to divide up their communities between three types of zone: “protected”, “renewal” and “growth”. In the growth zones, outline planning permission would be granted automatically to qualifying developments and the rights of local people to object drastically curtailed.
It’s pure political poison. Every “growth zone” in the country would be seen as a building site in waiting — and every one of them surrounded by angry, disenfranchised residents. So all the ingredients are in place for a major backbench rebellion: dozens of anxious MPs; a choice of high profile potential leaders — including Theresa May and Jeremy Hunt; an opportunistic opposition; a pitifully weak Secretary of State (Robert Jenrick); and, worst of all, a truly terrible set of policies that deserve to be torn to shreds anyway.
William Hague has argued that planning reform could be Boris Johnson’s Poll Tax. It’s a lot worse than that. The Poll Tax was an unforced error. And once Margaret Thatcher was out of the way, it was easy to reverse ferret. On planning reform, however, Boris Johnson is in a much tighter spot.
An article that goes on to float an alternative approach:
The alternative approach being to pick on a few places and force them to become cities against their will, rather than spreading new building everywhere?
Its an interesting approach. Start with Chesham and Amersham pour encourager les autres?
I didn't realise it was based on American-style “zoning”.
Wow.
Anyone who has been to the US can tell you what a mess the outskirts of their cities are.
This is Johnson's poll tax. And so early in his administration. I guess he will just go off and make money when he is ousted as Cummings noted.
Yep - basically once your area is designated for growth, it'd be a free for all. Driving a coach and horses through our existing planning system.
Jenrick is finished. Someone will have to take the blame when the screeching u-turn is implemented.
If Jenrick is finished and there is a screeching u-turn on doing the right thing then that will be the biggest domestic mistake since Tony Blair told Frank Field to think the unthinkable, then sacked him for thinking the unthinkable.
My favourite political joke of the modern era was William Hague's "They told him to think the unthinkable. So he thought it. And they said 'that's unthinkable!'"
Hague was much funnier than Johnson and yet the latter is known for his humour.
Johnson's humour is more a form of performance art; a fully rounded comic persona. Fewer actual jokes - his humour is more in 'saying the sorts of things Boris Johnson would say'.
Stewart Lee tells a lot cleverer jokes than Peter Kay, but Peter Kay has made 100x what Stewart Lee has out of comedy....
When he does stand-up, Peter Kay's jokes aren't actually that funny. Quite jolly observational humour, but nothing you haven't really heard before. But there's more to being a comedian than telling jokes. There's the whole performance. You are laughing at Peter Kay before he's opened his mouth. I would argue that he is a genius. His sitcoms etc are a different kettle of fish - these genuinely are clever. But in all honesty I find his stand-up funnier.
I had no idea I had such strong opinions about comedy.
I would think most people have a family member or friend that can tell a Peter Kay gag and regularly tells similar funny stories down the pub, but aa you say Peter Kay has the magic x-factor.
Comments
Home prices in Seoul double under Moon administration
https://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/biz/2021/06/488_310947.html
...The average price of a 99-square-meter apartment in Seoul rose to 1.19 billion won ($1.04 million) from 620 million won from May 2017 to May 2021.
The rise in apartment prices was found to be 192 times the rise in net income, which grew by an average of 2.98 million won during the same period.
The civic group said it would take a person or a household with an annual income of 48 million won 25 years to buy a 99-square-meter apartment in Seoul, assuming that all the disposable income is saved. It took 14 years four years ago....
Note nearly 20% of the country's population lives in Seoul.
(And nearly half in the Seoul Capital Area.)
Delta variant now accounts for 15% of new covid-19 cases in Germany, now roughly doubling week-on-week (though figures subject to revision)
https://twitter.com/tom_nuttall/status/1407734182600601601?s=20
Between 1997 and 2007 demand surged but construction didn't so house price ratios surged, despite interest rates being much higher then.
Between 2007 and 2019 interest rates collapsed to zero, demand continued to surge but construction increased and as a result house price ratios have basically remained roughly flat as demand and supply have kept in tandem.
If interest rates were the key factor, then house price ratios should have been much, much higher in 2019 than 2007. Especially considering our population increased a lot between 2007 and 2019 too, but construction eased the pressure so price ratios remained consistent, except especially in the one region were demand rose the most and supply rose the least.
Supply and demand works to explain the issues. Interest rates don't.
SKS adds GG to his list of pathetic excuses for being Labours worst EVER loser.
Piers Morgan take on that interview that he got sacked for is increasing looking accurate.
The big take away from covid pandemic is we don't seem to ever learn.
BBC News - Anti-obesity drive: Junk food TV adverts to banned before 9pm
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-57593599
https://twitter.com/wornoutmumhack/status/1407966170284691456?s=20
The most you can do is slow the rate of increase in prices. With a truly heroic effort, you might get house prices to slow their increase below the rate of increase in wages....
BoZo has slapstick
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/country/russia/
Governments in this country and air travel industry continue to ignore.
And we'll be only let out for the mass application of leeches. So we need to know how to manage these events, OK. I'm really glad that they're doing the necessary planning now.
One problem is the Politician's Syllogism: "Something must be done. This is something. It therefore must be done."
The suggestion in the article:
"Planning reform, therefore, is largely irrelevant. A very different plan of action is required.
Firstly, the law should be used to exclude speculators from the housing market. We plan the location of new housing for environmental reasons and we should plan the ownership of new housing for social reasons. Most new houses should be reserved for first-time buyers and movers.
Free marketers might complain that this is distributism not capitalism. But so what? For a conservative, spreading home ownership should come before the purity of the market place.
On the supply side, government needs to break the big developers’ stranglehold on the land supply. It can do this by purchasing and preparing sites itself. A time-limited right to fully develop and sell-on plots could then be auctioned-off. Builders would thus be able to obtain the sites they need for houses they actually intend to build, but they’d have no need — nor the perverse incentive — to hold on to more land than that. "
... is key. And the planning reforms proposed won't do that. If anything, they'll move us further away from that.
So we end up with no bringing down of house prices, poorly built rabbit hutches, big developers controlling the supply of housing, and really pissed off locals everywhere who are being completely ignored (get them involved and the problem really does reduce) and rapidly transition from dubious through NIMBY to BANANA.
I recommend reading the whole thing:
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/china/2021-06-22/xis-gamble
...Put simply, Xi has consolidated so much power and upset the status quo with such force because he sees a narrow window of ten to 15 years during which Beijing can take advantage of a set of important technological and geopolitical transformations, which will also help it overcome significant internal challenges. Xi sees the convergence of strong demographic headwinds, a structural economic slowdown, rapid advances in digital technologies, and a perceived shift in the global balance of power away from the United States as what he has called “profound changes unseen in a century,” demanding a bold set of immediate responses.
By narrowing his vision to the coming ten to 15 years, Xi has instilled a sense of focus and determination in the Chinese political system that may well enable China to overcome long-standing domestic challenges and achieve a new level of global centrality. If Xi succeeds, China will position itself as an architect of an emerging era of multipolarity, its economy will escape the so-called middle-income trap, and the technological capabilities of its manufacturing sector and military will rival those of more developed countries.
Yet ambition and execution are not the same thing..
Still I'm sure we can trust Russia to discover them and warn the rest of the world if that happens.
Try suggesting increasing the size of rooms, in law..... The reception you get from various parties is quite telling.
The west is trying to win this battle with one arm tied behind its back. A bit like covid, western governments are always trying to balance liberty and public wishes to continue things like travel, China they just seal off whole cities and weld people in their homes.
The problem is that there are not enough properties compared to the demand for them. The options are
- reduce the number of people
- increase the number of properties
- both
The US had a much larger decrease in life expectancy between 2018 and 2020 than other high income nations, with pronounced losses among the Hispanic and non-Hispanic Black populations. A longstanding and widening US health disadvantage, high death rates in 2020, and continued inequitable effects on racial and ethnic minority groups are likely the products of longstanding policy choices and systemic racism.
https://www.bmj.com/content/373/bmj.n1343
Heck, Gyles Brandreth did a better job.
https://www.biopharm-leeches.com/
So maybe I can come out of retirement as a consultant!
Anybody who has visited the US a lot, especially if you get outside the rich parts of cities, will see how overweight so many Americans are. Not a bit overweight, just enormously overweight. As with so much of US, tale of two extremes.
It is something I am noticing in the UK. When I go and visit my home area of Stoke, the number of seriously overweight people really stands out from where I live, where people in general are a lot wealthier and big on health / fitness.
I suppose we could ask Brussels to send one of the EU frigates to defend right of passage.
Oh wait - they haven't got any, and UVDL would be arguing with somebody about who got to direct it even after it had been sunk and the sailors killed by the Russians.
What I'm most concerned about is their ability to overwhelm the market in a particular sector, as they are not constrained by return on investment in any particular timeframe.
The case of solar panels - where they went from severe technological inferiority to seizing the bulk of the world market within a decade, mainly by bankrupting most of the US manufacturers - is a good example.
We're at a point of massive economic transition (the move away from fossil fuels is one example, but other equally large technological transformations are underway), and that leaves companies and entire industries operating in free market economies particularly vulnerable to such state tactics.
https://twitter.com/CovidGenomicsUK/status/1407994486526025729?s=20
The ONS Date - English Housing Survey for one - show that rented property is occupied more densely than owner occupied, so you need more houses not fewer for the same number of people. Which would not reduce competition when there are more surplus people needing houses.
And any evidence that PRS drives up prices is very thin - LLs who pay full whack make poor margins.
"They cannot build to lower prices much. If you want lower house prices restrict house lending to the three times one income as it used to be. Jenrick's proposal seems to be a blatant handout for his developer donors- and will not reduce house prices one penny. But it will destroy millions of acres of countryside."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Montreux_Convention_Regarding_the_Regime_of_the_Strait
s
As to Sweden sending ships to the Black sea specifically - I don't know. Some quite surprising countries have done the Bosphorus passage etc. to express their rights under international law.
The Swedish Navy does regular patrols etc to establish Swedish claims to various waters and the international status of other waters. Including areas contested with Russia....
There is a difference between a shortage of housing, and a shortage of housing for sale. Most of the people looking to buy houses are not currently homeless but are living in rented accommodation. In bidding for what houses are available, especially new builds, they are competing with buyers who do not want to live there but as a rental investment.
End that and prices will fall.
Of course, there are reasons why a large rental sector is desirable, such as increased labour mobility, but that is a topic for another day. If HMG wants to reduce house prices, the easiest way is to end BTL.
Health boards have appealed to @scotgov for help after a rise in cases of people angrily demanding Moderna or Pfizer jabs instead.
https://twitter.com/DSanderson_85/status/1407988796591837185?s=20
That is done by local councils through the local plan development and zoning process. Landowners bring forward proposed sites (of which there are always more than needed), and teh Council rate them by their chosen criteria, make an ordered list and go down the list until their Housing Needs Assessment (which they also control) target has been met.
If the Council want more development land, they can allocate it.
The rub is that they often (as we have seen in C&A) do not want to do that, because their voters are self-serving Nimbys.
The article is weird - ill-informed, superficial, full of holes and impractical. I get the impression that he has never built anything other than with Lego.
On the proposal - why should the *Government* be the one buying plots. I thought the key objection was that the new proposal would take control AWAY from local communities. Give that power to the Local Authority, if someone must have it.
But it won't help, because it does not address the heart of the issue.
https://www.reuters.com/world/uk/uk-share-furloughed-workers-falls-record-low-2021-06-24/
Starmer’s Chief of Staff, Morgan McSweeney, has also been sidelined to a new role in elections and campaigning strategy. Guido hears full-time replacements will be announced shortly. Rumours of Rob Burley, former BBC politics editor, being offered one of the roles have been swirling for much of this week, though sources steered Guido away from the suggestion…
https://order-order.com/2021/06/24/starmers-new-blairite-spinner/
I am not sure reheated Blairism works in the current political climate. Blairism appeal was we can tweak things a bit, but nothing to revolutionary, while appearing to be a bit kinder and nicely all round than the nasty Tories.
There is no alternative to increasing supply, other than expelling millions of people from the country. Anything else is just lies. You can't defeat supply and demand.
That doesn't mean concreting over the country. The UK will remain a green and pleasant land even if a few extra houses are built.
That was impressive in a different way. It was quite possibly the funniest thing I saw on television that year. I literally cried with laughter.
It did not, obviously, say to me 'here is a man who should be PM'. It did however introduce the character of 'Boris' to a much wider audience. Knowing what we know about Boris, it was in all likelihood made up as he went along but pitched entirely deliberately.
(It was also, I should add, an impressive performance from the supporting cast, who recognised the chaos being wrought, kept it going and made it an ensemble performance. Boris being 'Boris' would have been amusing, Boris being 'Boris' with Merton, Hislop and the other two fizzing off him was an all-round comic masterpiece. This was not the rapier wit that the show's producers intended, but no less funny for all that.)
And Boris is PM, and Hague, despite his cleverness and wit, never got to be. So perhaps it was an impressive performance after all.
Edit: Just looked it up - the other two were Stephen K Amos, who delivered one of the best lines of the show, and Clive Anderson.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w53JbQ4pMjE
Just got a little tingle of nostalgia watching the opening sequence. HIGNFY used to be absolutely brilliant in its heyday.
Edit 2: As you say, though, getting one over comedically on Paul Merton is impressive. Like a decent amateur bowling out Brian Lara.
Gyles Brandreth is also clever - and indeed funny - but the 'Gyles Brandreth' persona is a little bit discomfiting.
Incidentally the "American style zoning" is a telltale that the author is using inflammatory language for the purpose of shit-stirring. He could just as well have said "European style zoning".
In their submission to the Select Committee, the National Trust (of all people) argued that the zoning proposal was too timid.
Also incidentally, the author is a twat - the "horrible sea of tarmac Estate in Mansfield" is nowhere near Mansfield, and is a good, sustainable development with a 2 acre park attached, one mile from Shirebrook town centre, and 2 miles from a railway station on the Robin Hood line which goes to both Nottingham.
They will sell like hot cakes, since the prices start at £110k for keyworker houses which are 30% off, and kept like that in perpetuity.
ETA and separately, I do advocate new building, and especially to increase economic activity in "left behind" areas. But that is separate. If the government wants a quick fix to house prices, there is one.
An acre of land won't provide one home. It will provide about 18 homes at typical densities.
In the US, where there is a very high (and increasing) penetration rate of retail activity in stocks and capital markets, (and crypto!) and a strong memory of a terrible housing crash, this has exhibited itself in inflation of financial assets.
In the UK there is a general distrust around financial markets, because of historic pensions scams. Add in the 2008 crisis being a a banking rather than house price crisis in the UK, and the more socialist mentality denigrating banks and bankers. And the long held conviction that an Englishman’s Home Is His Castle. So that’s where we have inflation. Residential property.
I could refer you to any number of friends and acquaintances who have good credit histories and mortgageable wealth. Whenever rates are cut and mortgage rules loosened, they are able to easily arrange refinancing of their mortgage debt to increase their holdings of uk residential property. All they need is a little more residential property inflation and they can refinance and do it again.
I know someone who by accident now owns three residential properties and has somehow managed to avoid paying the additional rate of stamp duty on any of them. I once met someone else while overseas who bragged to me that every year he challenges two accounting firms to come up with the lowest tax charges on his UK residential portfolio and pays the one who gives the lowest answer. And someone else again who casually showed me one morning a cgi picture of a newbuild flat he had bought near the new crossrail station in Canary Wharf, who was then puzzled when I told him Canary Wharf was north of the river and his new flat was south. “Hahaha oh well mate, I’ll sell this one on more quickly then than hold it”.
Simply put Philip, you are allowing yourself to be mugged off because you are blinded by the overly basic principles of supply and demand, and so cannot see the wood for the trees.
If we unthinkingly litter the countryside with a mass house building campaign but do not stop debasing our currency, further reform against multiple property ownership and ban foreign ownership of residential property entirely, all we will do is provide fresh collateral for a new credit cycle.
Putin: Aha ! Aircraft ! Warning shots ! Threats ! Territorial waters ! Conquered Ukraine ! Bombs ! Coastguards !
RN: Bring me a cup of tea, Midshipman.
House price ratios peaked in 2007. Before funny money, before zero interest rates.
Quite simply demand and supply have kept roughly par in the past decade as the population has risen but construction has roughly kept pace, but that's not bringing the ratio down. If your theory was right ratios would be at an all time high now, not in 2007.
To get the ratio down we need supply growing faster than demand. As Thatcher said: There Is No Alternative.
Generally depends on where it is though. In the Barbican it prov I don't believe there would be a significant effect on prices.
Three things that have vanished: $3.6bn in Bitcoin, a crypto investment biz, and the two brothers who ran it
https://www.theregister.com/2021/06/23/africrypt_bitcoin_disappearance/
https://www.palinstravels.co.uk/book-4418
The media say this and then they will smash England and before we know it they are in the semi-finals yet again.
The risk of zoning is that we end up with housing delivered at an inefficient density.
There is a tension between the sorts of densities developers typically want to develop (typically considerably lower than 18 per acre, in suburban locations - often 14 is the top end) and the sorts that councils want (who would often be very happy with 18, but typically have to settle for 14 or less).
Note that this is net density, and doesn't take into account extra bits and bobs like access roads, public open space, and on bigger sites schools, shops etc.
Long story short: on a large peripheral site you're doing well to get 10 an acre, gross.
Higher densities are good for all sorts of reasons - more efficient use of land, more walkable communities, better community spirit, more access to local services, local services able to be supported... - though obviously you need to do this in such a way you're not packing people into a slum.
It can happen, and there are examples of high quality high density development in both urban and rural locations (Poundbury in Dorset is often given as an example of the latter - many architects hate this, but I think it is great and it is popular with its residents; a similar community is being developed on the edge of Newquay in Cornwall). But my worry is that a simple 'zoning' approach will lead to low quality, low density neighbourhoods.
"If my constituents could have access to the UK internal market and the Single Market, they'd bite your hand off" twitter.com/MarinaNigrelli…
https://twitter.com/davidschneider/status/1407966701044604929?s=21
Given there are challenges and negative consequences of increasing supply in housing (whether you wish to acknowledge them or not), I’m surprised you are so uninterested in demand.
Doing something to reduce under occupancy of housing would be an easy and effective first step. This doesn’t necessarily even need a land value tax. Just make it easier to get planning permission for annexes and bungalow. And this bit is important, make it illegal to ever convert a bungalow to multiple stories.
Finally if you really wanted to, you could throw a further bung at Tory voters by eliminating stamp duty on anything classed as a retirement suitable home, so long as an existing home is sold by the buyer.
Also prohibiting the purchase of UK residential property by non citizen foreign residents is so fucking obvious it makes me want to scream that our politicians won’t do it. Did you know that foreign lenders are happy to lend to foreign residents to buy uk property on standard mortgage terms, on criteria far easier than allowed by the PRA? People who pay next to no income tax in the uk context and have a cost of living that is often lower than that faced by uk based workers.
It depends who their friends are.
The rest of his article contains not a single word of sense.
No midshipmen in the fleet since the 50s.
My personal prediction is that local councils being forced to permit building will do little to nothing to promote house-building at the scale we need, because house builders don’t want to build at that rate - it lowers achievable prices whilst simultaneously driving up input costs (especially the labour cost of chippies, sparks etc etc).
I quite enjoyed straight-facedly using the term 'bananaism' in an essay at university.
It means bigger houses, or bigger gardens, either way is a win.
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But its ok we are going to let everybody intermingle across Europe like last summer, especially the young who haven't been fully vaccinated.
The only way developers can refuse to build is if they have monopolistic powers, which doesn't happen in a free market because there's relatively low entry costs to this sector. The developers being the only ones who can navigate the planning system is what gives them monopolistic powers and why that doesn't exist in other nations with zonal planning where smaller developers or even self-building can exist instead.
The rise from 1995 onwards was driven by recovery from the 89 crash and lower interest rates post ERM
On a town edge site say within a mile or two of the centre, I think it tends to be about 30 per hectare net, which is 12 per acre.
Agree on your last comment. All the feedback to the Select Committee says that the zoning needs nuance added. They could do worse than look at Land Use categories in Local Plan documents as a starting point.
OTOH a lot of them are people with professions wanting a bigger share of the power or work.
The tension is perhaps between the Govt wanting to move very fast, and the on-behalf-of-Nimby lobby wanting to kill it, and having no real ideas.
I think what it really wants is a good House-of-Lords-ing, as it is the type of thing they could do a very worthwhile job on.
His sitcoms etc are a different kettle of fish - these genuinely are clever. But in all honesty I find his stand-up funnier.
I had no idea I had such strong opinions about comedy.
Some people are capable of anything.....