It means bigger houses, or bigger gardens, either way is a win.
No, this is bonkers. Both mean eating up available space with houses that are unaffordable for most people, thus making the crisis worse. The effect would be (a) more and more people unable to buy or rent homes or (b) more and more land area built on, i.e. urban sprawl on speed. High density (with the safeguards discussed elsewhere on the thread) is essential to any successful housing strategy, whether you want more owner-occupancy, more rented accommodation or both.
It’s one of those paradoxes of composition thingies.
Everyone likes the idea of having their own big house & garden. All that lovely space! All that green space! No noisy neighbours! What’s not to like?
Well, what’s not to like is the cost of everyone doing that - low density exurban sprawl means that every single amenity gets much more expensive to deliver. Every house now has to support: longer roads, longer sewers, longer gas lines, longer drains & these aren’t longer by some small factor; we’re talking 10x the length for the same number of people when comparing an exurb with ordinary city housing. It’s not just the materials cost for these things - now just driving out to fix things takes longer, because everthing is more spread out (this is why skyscrapers are horrendously expensive + usually a net negative: getting services up & down all that height is astonishingly expensive compared with low-rise blocks of flats). No pubs, no local amenities because there aren’t enough people to support them, And on and on.
It’s a lot like the paradox of driving: Driving is great when it’s only you on the road. It’s bloody awful when everyone else is on the roads too.
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.
As soon as they get the planning permission, there is no more free market. You can't roll up and build on a development site they've already got planning permission for. Even if they're building out really slowly.
A suggested fix -
If you apply for planning permission, you put the land into the agreement. If you get your planning permission and fail to build at an agreed rate - you lose the land.
"We've been delayed by x, y, z. We couldn't have anticipated [a pandemic/archeological discoveries/delays in receipt of building materials/staff illness/new legislation to comply with/unexpected birthday party] (delete as applicable). However, we have made a meaningful start as agreed."
Once a meaningful start has been made on a site, they're free and clear. I'd guess the original intent was to give them confidence that they won't have the rug pulled out from under them when buildings were half built. These days - well, I'm still a bit unsure about what "meaningful start" is supposed to mean; I've seen at least one site where I couldn't have told anything had happened. But they'd "made a meaningful start" so they were in the clear.
Charge Council Tax as if the house has been built from a particular point after permission is granted.
If they're tardy then hope they enjoy paying ~£1500 per house per year they're delayed by.
Make it 10x the rate, and put a doubling escalator on it. £15,000 the first year, £30,000 the second, and £60,000 the third. That will fix the problem almost overnight.
I think that building and holding election winning coalitions is now more difficult for Labour than the Tories because their members and hard core supporters are much more ideologically driven. Every political and culture wars battle has the capability of fracturing Labour much more than the Tories: 1. Trans activism versus "traditional" feminism. 2. Racial identity politics versus traditional socialism and class based politics. 3. Feminism, anti-racism, gay rights versus conservative Islam. 4. Palestine as a hot button acts as gateway drug to anti-semitism and drives off many voters, WWC and non-Moslem ethnic minorities. 5. All identity politics versus diminishing but still significant working class vote.
That's not to mention other challenges like residual Remain versus Brexit and economic policy which also challenge the Tories of course. Probably the Tories will be more pragmatic even on those topics if they need to be..
The Conservative approach to principles is pretty simple - 'you don't like the main ones, we have plenty of others out back..' It has wroked pretty well for over 200 years and counting...
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.
As soon as they get the planning permission, there is no more free market. You can't roll up and build on a development site they've already got planning permission for. Even if they're building out really slowly.
That's the point though, the requirement for permission is what is distorting the market!
Currently they can get permission for thousands of homes and then that's that and nobody else gets permission (since thousands have been approved) and they're a monopoly provider.
But if there's zonal planning so that permission doesn't need to be gained thousands at a time then unless the developer buys the entire zone if they buy some of it and plan to develop it slowly, someone else can buy another bit of the zone and develop that instead.
Indeed liberate the market enough and instead of developers with thousands of homes, you can break it down to people building just one house at a time.
The whole point of properly liberalising the market properly isn't to build over everything green (nobody wants that nor is there demand for that), but to break away the anticompetitive practices that planning creates.
The zonal policy isn't to pre-issue planning permission but to set it up that planning permission will be automatically granted.
Which opens a big can of worms: what do you do when the big developer goes to the landowner and offers them cash for the entire area? And why shouldn't they do that? All the risk has gone, and now they can secure a work pipeline for literally decades. First rule of markets: Incentives matter.
Next rule of markets: what are the externalities and how do you address them?
(How do you require infrastructure to be created or supported (schools, surgeries, leisure facilities, etc)? How do you apply planning conditions? How do you enforce compliance with a whole suite of requirements that are currently thrown onto the planning system?)
It means bigger houses, or bigger gardens, either way is a win.
No, this is bonkers. Both mean eating up available space with houses that are unaffordable for most people, thus making the crisis worse. The effect would be (a) more and more people unable to buy or rent homes or (b) more and more land area built on, i.e. urban sprawl on speed. High density (with the safeguards discussed elsewhere on the thread) is essential to any successful housing strategy, whether you want more owner-occupancy, more rented accommodation or both.
It’s one of those paradoxes of composition thingies.
Everyone likes the idea of having their own big house & garden. All that lovely space! All that green space! No noisy neighbours! What’s not to like?
Well, what’s not to like is the cost of everyone doing that - low density exurban sprawl means that every single amenity gets much more expensive to deliver. Every house now has to support: longer roads, longer sewers, longer gas lines, longer drains & these aren’t longer by some small factor; we’re talking 10x the length for the same number of people when comparing an exurb with ordinary city housing. It’s not just the materials cost for these things - now just driving out to fix things takes longer, because everthing is more spread out (this is why skyscrapers are horrendously expensive + usually a net negative: getting services up & down all that height is astonishingly expensive compared with low-rise blocks of flats). No pubs, no local amenities because there aren’t enough people to support them, And on and on.
It’s a lot like the paradox of driving: Driving is great when it’s only you on the road. It’s bloody awful when everyone else is on the roads too.
...and then this leads to the idea that a house without a garden is a good idea. Or a garden barely as long as the house is wide. And sitting rooms where one sofa barely fits....
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.
Have you seen the outer suburbs of American or Australian cities? Yes, they have more land per house, which is nice for the inhabitants, but the houses are in a sea of identical houses. There are no neighbourhood centres, no pubs you can walk to, no stations, no pleasant little cafes - because the low densities mean the catchment population for these things is too low to make them viable.
And this isn't my particular hobbyhorse, but there are significant downsides to being a car dependent society.
I would rather live in a house with a modest garden and little space to my neighbours and be within walking distance of a school, a pub, a shop, a cafe, a station, a town centre - than have a massive house and a massive garden but be a drive from any of these. And if I make the former decision, that enables four or five more people to do the same.
Granted there is room in the market for both options, and I wouldn't want to say no more big new new builds in peripheral locations. Indeed, it's possible to do big new new builds in peripheral locations very well (Woodford Garden Village springs to mind). But I think the high quality high density option (18 dwellings per acre and above) in a functioning neighbourhood is more generally attractive, and the low density option has significant externalities.
I think that there are certain things out planning system can do quite well - esp. compared to most other countries, and one of those is maintaining local diversity.
That is partly through the intensive individual feedback on house by house applications which is possible (which drives many self-builders spare).
I think we often underestimate the extent to which land scarcity and intensive use impacts on planning - our property laws going back centuries are shot through with the assumption that using all the land is important. One example is the possibility of adverse possession just because no one else is using a piece of land.
That's an interesting point. It's instructive to reflect how procedurally, emotionally difficult it is to build anything in this country than in countries with much lower density population - and I think you're right, it's because we place a very high value on the land. It's finite and precious. And you're right, I think we have a tendency as a nation to consider unused land something of an affront. That's not to say it has to be obviously economically productive - it can be reserved for nature, for example. But land which is just left doing nothing but growing nettles raises the odd hackle. That's not to say valuing the land highly doesn't give us some awful outcomes of course!
I actually thought you were going to propose the other solution, which is to have a voting system whereby each interest group can have its own party without being obliterated as they would be under FPTP, unless they are geographically based.
But that has the obvious problem that governing coalitions are formed between parties, rather than within them, which is not obviously better and arguably worse.
Yes, I do support PR too, despite the drawback that you rightly identify - it provides transparency on what voters actually think and encourages positive appeals ("Vote against X" doesn't work with PR since there are more alternatives). The coalition negotiations can then build on what the real flow of opinion is.
On the other hand, everybody can see what strands the coalition is made up of. With the "coalitions within parties", as we have now, you can never be whether any particular strand of Marxists or feminists will be the dominant one.
Images from Google Street View show that the concrete was in a poor state, which might not be a surprise given it faces the sea, and storms throwing up salt are frequent.
Another failure of building inspectors (or the lack of them). More Ponte Morandi than Grenfell, I think, although of course we had a similar collapse (due to a gas explosion) in Newham in the 1960s.
Coincidentally enough, myself and the little 'un were watching a recorded documentary this morning. It featured a Cocoa Beach condominium that collapsed during construction back in 1981. Various design and construction errors led to the collapse.
The building that collapsed today was just up the coast, and was apparently built in ... 1981. It'll be interesting to see if the one that collapsed today was of concrete sab design, like the Harbor Bay. If there was a connection, then it was a ticking timebomb ...
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.
As soon as they get the planning permission, there is no more free market. You can't roll up and build on a development site they've already got planning permission for. Even if they're building out really slowly.
A suggested fix -
If you apply for planning permission, you put the land into the agreement. If you get your planning permission and fail to build at an agreed rate - you lose the land.
"We've been delayed by x, y, z. We couldn't have anticipated [a pandemic/archeological discoveries/delays in receipt of building materials/staff illness/new legislation to comply with/unexpected birthday party] (delete as applicable). However, we have made a meaningful start as agreed."
Once a meaningful start has been made on a site, they're free and clear. I'd guess the original intent was to give them confidence that they won't have the rug pulled out from under them when buildings were half built. These days - well, I'm still a bit unsure about what "meaningful start" is supposed to mean; I've seen at least one site where I couldn't have told anything had happened. But they'd "made a meaningful start" so they were in the clear.
Charge Council Tax as if the house has been built from a particular point after permission is granted.
If they're tardy then hope they enjoy paying ~£1500 per house per year they're delayed by.
Something I'm in favour of, myself. Except a transition to Land Value Tax (charged on the value of the land-plus-permissions). So the incentive created is to do something useful with the land.
Mr. Sandpit, a First Amendment would be great but given authoritarian politicians, terminally over sensitive dimwits, and religious censors, there's sod all chance of it happening.
It means bigger houses, or bigger gardens, either way is a win.
No, this is bonkers. Both mean eating up available space with houses that are unaffordable for most people, thus making the crisis worse. The effect would be (a) more and more people unable to buy or rent homes or (b) more and more land area built on, i.e. urban sprawl on speed. High density (with the safeguards discussed elsewhere on the thread) is essential to any successful housing strategy, whether you want more owner-occupancy, more rented accommodation or both.
It’s one of those paradoxes of composition thingies.
Everyone likes the idea of having their own big house & garden. All that lovely space! All that green space! No noisy neighbours! What’s not to like?
Well, what’s not to like is the cost of everyone doing that - low density exurban sprawl means that every single amenity gets much more expensive to deliver. Every house now has to support: longer roads, longer sewers, longer gas lines, longer drains & these aren’t longer by some small factor; we’re talking 10x the length for the same number of people when comparing an exurb with ordinary city housing. It’s not just the materials cost for these things - now just driving out to fix things takes longer, because everthing is more spread out (this is why skyscrapers are horrendously expensive + usually a net negative: getting services up & down all that height is astonishingly expensive compared with low-rise blocks of flats). No pubs, no local amenities because there aren’t enough people to support them, And on and on.
It’s a lot like the paradox of driving: Driving is great when it’s only you on the road. It’s bloody awful when everyone else is on the roads too.
...and then this leads to the idea that a house without a garden is a good idea. Or a garden barely as long as the house is wide. And sitting rooms where one sofa barely fits....
It’s perfectly possible to build relatively high density housing with decent sized rooms. The fact that housebuilders in the UK build cheap-arsed shitboxes with tiny rooms is because they can get away with it due to the structure of our housing market, not because anyone is forcing them to do so.
& I’ve stayed in glorious flats on the continent with huge rooms & high ceilings & massive shared gardens that were nevertheless far higher density than the average UK new-build estate. But we seem to have an aversion to this kind of building in the UK.
It means bigger houses, or bigger gardens, either way is a win.
No, this is bonkers. Both mean eating up available space with houses that are unaffordable for most people, thus making the crisis worse. The effect would be (a) more and more people unable to buy or rent homes or (b) more and more land area built on, i.e. urban sprawl on speed. High density (with the safeguards discussed elsewhere on the thread) is essential to any successful housing strategy, whether you want more owner-occupancy, more rented accommodation or both.
It’s one of those paradoxes of composition thingies.
Everyone likes the idea of having their own big house & garden. All that lovely space! All that green space! No noisy neighbours! What’s not to like?
Well, what’s not to like is the cost of everyone doing that - low density exurban sprawl means that every single amenity gets much more expensive to deliver. Every house now has to support: longer roads, longer sewers, longer gas lines, longer drains & these aren’t longer by some small factor; we’re talking 10x the length for the same number of people when comparing an exurb with ordinary city housing. It’s not just the materials cost for these things - now just driving out to fix things takes longer, because everthing is more spread out (this is why skyscrapers are horrendously expensive + usually a net negative: getting services up & down all that height is astonishingly expensive compared with low-rise blocks of flats). No pubs, no local amenities because there aren’t enough people to support them, And on and on.
It’s a lot like the paradox of driving: Driving is great when it’s only you on the road. It’s bloody awful when everyone else is on the roads too.
...and then this leads to the idea that a house without a garden is a good idea. Or a garden barely as long as the house is wide. And sitting rooms where one sofa barely fits....
Judging by the number of people putting down astroturf, some people don't really want a garden to manage.
If I remeber correctly I could have sworn that people on here said Americans were turning off the NBA in droves due to the player's BLM-Wokeness-SJW madness driving them away
It means bigger houses, or bigger gardens, either way is a win.
No, this is bonkers. Both mean eating up available space with houses that are unaffordable for most people, thus making the crisis worse. The effect would be (a) more and more people unable to buy or rent homes or (b) more and more land area built on, i.e. urban sprawl on speed. High density (with the safeguards discussed elsewhere on the thread) is essential to any successful housing strategy, whether you want more owner-occupancy, more rented accommodation or both.
It’s one of those paradoxes of composition thingies.
Everyone likes the idea of having their own big house & garden. All that lovely space! All that green space! No noisy neighbours! What’s not to like?
Well, what’s not to like is the cost of everyone doing that - low density exurban sprawl means that every single amenity gets much more expensive to deliver. Every house now has to support: longer roads, longer sewers, longer gas lines, longer drains & these aren’t longer by some small factor; we’re talking 10x the length for the same number of people when comparing an exurb with ordinary city housing. It’s not just the materials cost for these things - now just driving out to fix things takes longer, because everthing is more spread out (this is why skyscrapers are horrendously expensive + usually a net negative: getting services up & down all that height is astonishingly expensive compared with low-rise blocks of flats). No pubs, no local amenities because there aren’t enough people to support them, And on and on.
It’s a lot like the paradox of driving: Driving is great when it’s only you on the road. It’s bloody awful when everyone else is on the roads too.
...and then this leads to the idea that a house without a garden is a good idea. Or a garden barely as long as the house is wide. And sitting rooms where one sofa barely fits....
It’s perfectly possible to build relatively high density housing with decent sized rooms. The fact that housebuilders in the UK build cheap-arsed shitboxes with tiny rooms is because they can get away with it due to the structure of our housing market, not because anyone is forcing them to do so.
& I’ve stayed in glorious flats on the continent with huge rooms & high ceilings & massive shared gardens that were nevertheless far higher density than the average UK new-build estate. But we seem to have an aversion to this kind of building in the UK.
Th planners push for more density. In fact, they demand it.
Just because it suits the house builders as well, doesn't absolve the planners of responsibility.
If the planners only granted permission for houses with decent sized rooms....
It means bigger houses, or bigger gardens, either way is a win.
No, this is bonkers. Both mean eating up available space with houses that are unaffordable for most people, thus making the crisis worse. The effect would be (a) more and more people unable to buy or rent homes or (b) more and more land area built on, i.e. urban sprawl on speed. High density (with the safeguards discussed elsewhere on the thread) is essential to any successful housing strategy, whether you want more owner-occupancy, more rented accommodation or both.
It’s one of those paradoxes of composition thingies.
Everyone likes the idea of having their own big house & garden. All that lovely space! All that green space! No noisy neighbours! What’s not to like?
Well, what’s not to like is the cost of everyone doing that - low density exurban sprawl means that every single amenity gets much more expensive to deliver. Every house now has to support: longer roads, longer sewers, longer gas lines, longer drains & these aren’t longer by some small factor; we’re talking 10x the length for the same number of people when comparing an exurb with ordinary city housing. It’s not just the materials cost for these things - now just driving out to fix things takes longer, because everthing is more spread out (this is why skyscrapers are horrendously expensive + usually a net negative: getting services up & down all that height is astonishingly expensive compared with low-rise blocks of flats). No pubs, no local amenities because there aren’t enough people to support them, And on and on.
It’s a lot like the paradox of driving: Driving is great when it’s only you on the road. It’s bloody awful when everyone else is on the roads too.
...and then this leads to the idea that a house without a garden is a good idea. Or a garden barely as long as the house is wide. And sitting rooms where one sofa barely fits....
Judging by the number of people putting down astroturf, some people don't really want a garden to manage.
A mix would be better, though.
Often astroturf is put down because the garden is so small, that sustaining turf is impossible.
Being in the bottom half of the draw seems a big advantage to me. That gives me Wijnaldum and Forsberg. I'm already on Wijnaldum up to my nads having backed him pre-tournament at 150 on the spreads and at 80/1 e/w with a bookie.
So that leave Forsberg (Sweden). He takes their penalties (big plus in this market - see Ronaldo), and Sweden is in the bottom half of the draw, playing Ukraine next. Top price with trad bookies is 66/1 but I just got 130 with BF.
Edit: worth pointing out that with the spreads this is a top goalscorer market not a Golden Boot market. Dead heat rules apply. None of this assist bollocks.
It means bigger houses, or bigger gardens, either way is a win.
No, this is bonkers. Both mean eating up available space with houses that are unaffordable for most people, thus making the crisis worse. The effect would be (a) more and more people unable to buy or rent homes or (b) more and more land area built on, i.e. urban sprawl on speed. High density (with the safeguards discussed elsewhere on the thread) is essential to any successful housing strategy, whether you want more owner-occupancy, more rented accommodation or both.
Most people in this country don't want to live in very high density housing. (I don't mind it personally).
Images from Google Street View show that the concrete was in a poor state, which might not be a surprise given it faces the sea, and storms throwing up salt are frequent.
Another failure of building inspectors (or the lack of them). More Ponte Morandi than Grenfell, I think, although of course we had a similar collapse (due to a gas explosion) in Newham in the 1960s.
Coincidentally enough, myself and the little 'un were watching a recorded documentary this morning. It featured a Cocoa Beach condominium that collapsed during construction back in 1981. Various design and construction errors led to the collapse.
The building that collapsed today was just up the coast, and was apparently built in ... 1981. It'll be interesting to see if the one that collapsed today was of concrete sab design, like the Harbor Bay. If there was a connection, then it was a ticking timebomb ...
Good lord, welcome back JJ. Looks like my Starship vs SLS bet with you could be scuppered by enviromental enforcement on Musk
Ms Cherry has accepted instructions through Beltrami and Company to defend Ms Millar, who has been charged by police with offences under s.127 of the Communications Act 2003 over her social media activity in 2019.
Ms Millar, an accountant, had retweeted an image of a bow of ribbons in the Suffragette colours of green, white and purple that was tied around a tree outside of the Glasgow studio in which a BBC soap opera was being filmed.
The police received a complaint about the image on the basis the ribbons represented a noose. The nature of other complaints made against Ms Millar is unknown.
It looks horribly like she’s been charged because of who she is, rather than what she did. How is retweeting a photo of some ribbons a criminal offence, if the original post isn’t, and neither is putting the ribbons there in the first place?
UK a really needs a First Amendment.
If those are the tweets she’s being charged for then it seems completely insane (and I’m someone that almost completely disagrees with her position on this issue).
The police seem completely at sea with social media and hate speech. Either they completely ignore obvious threats “because it’s on the internet so it doesn’t matter” or they go wildly over the top and charge people for mentioning that they don’t like someone.
Complete waste of police time + I have no idea why the CPS is pursuing this. Maybe there really is something more that meets the eye & in fact she was guiltly of more direct harrassment which is being left out of this version of events? Otherwise this seems completely overboard.
SKS adds GG to his list of pathetic excuses for being Labours worst EVER loser.
When Labour loses B&S it will be largely because the post-Corbyn Labour Party is not deemed sufficiently anti-semitic by a section of the muslim voters in the constituency.
If I remeber correctly I could have sworn that people on here said Americans were turning off the NBA in droves due to the player's BLM-Wokeness-SJW madness driving them away
Well, yes they stopped all the stuff they were doing last year that pissed off a lot of people e.g. sticking BLM slogans on the back of their shirts rather than their name.
Like the NFL, they realised perhaps a more subtle and nuanced approach might be better and less alienating.
Its like perhaps rather than the footballers taking the knee which is divisive and no matter how much they say not BLM, in many fans minds it still is, they come up with a better a slightly different approach e.g. NFL inspire change.
I notice Sky have now moved to displaying "Kick it Out" logos, rather than BLM.
What is the limit of Galloway's potential in the constituency at this time:
He won 35% in Bethnal Green & Bow at the 2005 GE at the height of Iraq anger and in a even more favourable constituency than Batley & Spen.
He won 55% at Bradford West, also corralling the WWC vote.
He has had various small shares since.
He shed large portions of those votes at subsequent elections, but that is perhaps by-the-by.
I think both of the above were free hits, despite only one being a by-election. I also don't think he can carry that much of the WWC vote - many will generally know enough that he goes on incessantly about the Middle East in an era when Corbyn has made that toxic, why not just plump for the Tory if you want to kick Starmer.
So, I think his core vote this time will heavily tend to a section of the Muslim community and in B&S there is an upper limit to that, even if he does capture the imagination. I think his absolute ceiling if his campaign catches fire again is about 20%, but realistically hitting the 10-15% range would be a good result for him.
It would sink Labour, for sure, in fact I increasingly think Labour are sunk in B&S already and it'll be around a 4-5% Tory majority. That's from neck and neck a week ago. But Galloway in second - still probably not.
Batley & Spen has around 40% of the Muslim population that Bradford West has where Galloway polled 56%, so on that basis he ought to be able to get around 22%. If he could increase that to 30% with more support from white working-class areas he could win if the votes for the other parties are evenly divided. Unlikely but not impossible.
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.
As soon as they get the planning permission, there is no more free market. You can't roll up and build on a development site they've already got planning permission for. Even if they're building out really slowly.
A suggested fix -
If you apply for planning permission, you put the land into the agreement. If you get your planning permission and fail to build at an agreed rate - you lose the land.
"We've been delayed by x, y, z. We couldn't have anticipated [a pandemic/archeological discoveries/delays in receipt of building materials/staff illness/new legislation to comply with/unexpected birthday party] (delete as applicable). However, we have made a meaningful start as agreed."
Once a meaningful start has been made on a site, they're free and clear. I'd guess the original intent was to give them confidence that they won't have the rug pulled out from under them when buildings were half built. These days - well, I'm still a bit unsure about what "meaningful start" is supposed to mean; I've seen at least one site where I couldn't have told anything had happened. But they'd "made a meaningful start" so they were in the clear.
Charge Council Tax as if the house has been built from a particular point after permission is granted.
If they're tardy then hope they enjoy paying ~£1500 per house per year they're delayed by.
The problem with this idea is that this would be a tax without any services being provided in response. Politicians have been hesitant to go down this road, although it certainly happens in other countries where plots are sold, eg after 3 years you have to pay municipal tax irrespective of whether you have built anything.
The developers say that they need a reserve of shovel ready land to build out to meet demand (there is only so much demand for new build, it goes up and down). This explanation is generally accepted, the best way to increase delivery is for the state to take a more active role in housebuilding, for instance through building council housing on plots it has acquired.
On topic, I don't have a clue what's going on in Batley & Spen. But I do know that the Labour Party should be engaging in a full-blown, no-holds barred character assassination of Galloway. Some good material in Nick Palmer's earlier post, and there's lots more out there. They need to take the gloves off and distribute an abundance of material to raise serious doubts about Galloway's character and commitment to the constituency in voters' minds. It shouldn't be that hard.
Agreed but Galloway is making inroads into the Labour vote in B&S through a combination of anti-semitism and homophobia. The Labour Party needs to be equally vociferous in telling muslim voters with those attitudes that they are not welcome in the party. They have pussy-footed around those attitudes with the muslim community for too long and the chickens are coming home to roost .
Ms Cherry has accepted instructions through Beltrami and Company to defend Ms Millar, who has been charged by police with offences under s.127 of the Communications Act 2003 over her social media activity in 2019.
Ms Millar, an accountant, had retweeted an image of a bow of ribbons in the Suffragette colours of green, white and purple that was tied around a tree outside of the Glasgow studio in which a BBC soap opera was being filmed.
The police received a complaint about the image on the basis the ribbons represented a noose. The nature of other complaints made against Ms Millar is unknown.
It looks horribly like she’s been charged because of who she is, rather than what she did. How is retweeting a photo of some ribbons a criminal offence, if the original post isn’t, and neither is putting the ribbons there in the first place?
UK a really needs a First Amendment.
I have no idea why the CPS is pursuing this.
It's Scotland so it's the Procurator Fiscal.
Amazing how a "colony" has kept its own legal system for 300+ years, eh?
What is the limit of Galloway's potential in the constituency at this time:
He won 35% in Bethnal Green & Bow at the 2005 GE at the height of Iraq anger and in a even more favourable constituency than Batley & Spen.
He won 55% at Bradford West, also corralling the WWC vote.
He has had various small shares since.
He shed large portions of those votes at subsequent elections, but that is perhaps by-the-by.
I think both of the above were free hits, despite only one being a by-election. I also don't think he can carry that much of the WWC vote - many will generally know enough that he goes on incessantly about the Middle East in an era when Corbyn has made that toxic, why not just plump for the Tory if you want to kick Starmer.
So, I think his core vote this time will heavily tend to a section of the Muslim community and in B&S there is an upper limit to that, even if he does capture the imagination. I think his absolute ceiling if his campaign catches fire again is about 20%, but realistically hitting the 10-15% range would be a good result for him.
It would sink Labour, for sure, in fact I increasingly think Labour are sunk in B&S already and it'll be around a 4-5% Tory majority. That's from neck and neck a week ago. But Galloway in second - still probably not.
Batley & Spen has around 40% of the Muslim population that Bradford West has where Galloway polled 56%, so on that basis he ought to be able to get around 22%. If he could increase that to 30% with more support from white working-class areas he could win if the votes for the other parties are evenly divided. Unlikely but not impossible.
As someone pointed out to me the other day when I made the same point, differential turnout is GG's friend. If his ceiling is the Muslim vote - c. 20% of the electorate - and he gets most of them - but the nominal Lab and Con vote doesn't bother - a highly plausible outcome - GG is already up in 30%+ of the vote territory or even higher. Which in a world where Lab and Con are evenly split could allow him in.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that GG is value at anything better than about 6/1.
Ms Cherry has accepted instructions through Beltrami and Company to defend Ms Millar, who has been charged by police with offences under s.127 of the Communications Act 2003 over her social media activity in 2019.
Ms Millar, an accountant, had retweeted an image of a bow of ribbons in the Suffragette colours of green, white and purple that was tied around a tree outside of the Glasgow studio in which a BBC soap opera was being filmed.
The police received a complaint about the image on the basis the ribbons represented a noose. The nature of other complaints made against Ms Millar is unknown.
On topic, I don't have a clue what's going on in Batley & Spen. But I do know that the Labour Party should be engaging in a full-blown, no-holds barred character assassination of Galloway. Some good material in Nick Palmer's earlier post, and there's lots more out there. They need to take the gloves off and distribute an abundance of material to raise serious doubts about Galloway's character and commitment to the constituency in voters' minds. It shouldn't be that hard.
Agreed but Galloway is making inroads into the Labour vote in B&S through a combination of anti-semitism and homophobia. The Labour Party needs to be equally vociferous in telling muslim voters with those attitudes that they are not welcome in the party. They have pussy-footed around those attitudes with the muslim community for too long and the chickens are coming home to roost .
A party of competing factions falling in on itself.
SKS adds GG to his list of pathetic excuses for being Labours worst EVER loser.
When Labour loses B&S it will be largely because the post-Corbyn Labour Party is not deemed sufficiently anti-semitic by a section of the muslim voters in the constituency.
Pretty alarming when Religion really matters in our elections.
I think it's very important that it doesn't matter. I think very well of the various communities that now live in the UK, and I think very poorly of them should they wish to muddle politics and religion.
It means bigger houses, or bigger gardens, either way is a win.
No, this is bonkers. Both mean eating up available space with houses that are unaffordable for most people, thus making the crisis worse. The effect would be (a) more and more people unable to buy or rent homes or (b) more and more land area built on, i.e. urban sprawl on speed. High density (with the safeguards discussed elsewhere on the thread) is essential to any successful housing strategy, whether you want more owner-occupancy, more rented accommodation or both.
It’s one of those paradoxes of composition thingies.
Everyone likes the idea of having their own big house & garden. All that lovely space! All that green space! No noisy neighbours! What’s not to like?
Well, what’s not to like is the cost of everyone doing that - low density exurban sprawl means that every single amenity gets much more expensive to deliver. Every house now has to support: longer roads, longer sewers, longer gas lines, longer drains & these aren’t longer by some small factor; we’re talking 10x the length for the same number of people when comparing an exurb with ordinary city housing. It’s not just the materials cost for these things - now just driving out to fix things takes longer, because everthing is more spread out (this is why skyscrapers are horrendously expensive + usually a net negative: getting services up & down all that height is astonishingly expensive compared with low-rise blocks of flats). No pubs, no local amenities because there aren’t enough people to support them, And on and on.
It’s a lot like the paradox of driving: Driving is great when it’s only you on the road. It’s bloody awful when everyone else is on the roads too.
...and then this leads to the idea that a house without a garden is a good idea. Or a garden barely as long as the house is wide. And sitting rooms where one sofa barely fits....
It’s perfectly possible to build relatively high density housing with decent sized rooms. The fact that housebuilders in the UK build cheap-arsed shitboxes with tiny rooms is because they can get away with it due to the structure of our housing market, not because anyone is forcing them to do so.
& I’ve stayed in glorious flats on the continent with huge rooms & high ceilings & massive shared gardens that were nevertheless far higher density than the average UK new-build estate. But we seem to have an aversion to this kind of building in the UK.
It's bizarre because the old buildings that were built like that in the UK, in Edinburgh's New Town, say, are still very popular.
It seems like everyone wants buildings like those, except the people who might build them.
Following Welsh positives trebling from seven days ago, Scottish positives are well over double last Thursday's. We're at nearly 3,500 just from S+W. Looks like another bumper day. Which looked at positively is another giant step down the road to herd immunity.
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.
As soon as they get the planning permission, there is no more free market. You can't roll up and build on a development site they've already got planning permission for. Even if they're building out really slowly.
A suggested fix -
If you apply for planning permission, you put the land into the agreement. If you get your planning permission and fail to build at an agreed rate - you lose the land.
"We've been delayed by x, y, z. We couldn't have anticipated [a pandemic/archeological discoveries/delays in receipt of building materials/staff illness/new legislation to comply with/unexpected birthday party] (delete as applicable). However, we have made a meaningful start as agreed."
Once a meaningful start has been made on a site, they're free and clear. I'd guess the original intent was to give them confidence that they won't have the rug pulled out from under them when buildings were half built. These days - well, I'm still a bit unsure about what "meaningful start" is supposed to mean; I've seen at least one site where I couldn't have told anything had happened. But they'd "made a meaningful start" so they were in the clear.
Charge Council Tax as if the house has been built from a particular point after permission is granted.
If they're tardy then hope they enjoy paying ~£1500 per house per year they're delayed by.
But eg a requirement for archaeological investigation is a Council / Legal Requirement which could not be anticipated, and therefore that increased Council Tax could be subject eg to legal action.
Ms Cherry has accepted instructions through Beltrami and Company to defend Ms Millar, who has been charged by police with offences under s.127 of the Communications Act 2003 over her social media activity in 2019.
Ms Millar, an accountant, had retweeted an image of a bow of ribbons in the Suffragette colours of green, white and purple that was tied around a tree outside of the Glasgow studio in which a BBC soap opera was being filmed.
The police received a complaint about the image on the basis the ribbons represented a noose. The nature of other complaints made against Ms Millar is unknown.
We are hearing a lot about Galloway causing mischief and Labour are sending a load of big hitters, but nothing about the Tories? Are they even trying? Or just relying on the fact the left / left of centre vote will split?
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.
As soon as they get the planning permission, there is no more free market. You can't roll up and build on a development site they've already got planning permission for. Even if they're building out really slowly.
That's the point though, the requirement for permission is what is distorting the market!
Currently they can get permission for thousands of homes and then that's that and nobody else gets permission (since thousands have been approved) and they're a monopoly provider.
But if there's zonal planning so that permission doesn't need to be gained thousands at a time then unless the developer buys the entire zone if they buy some of it and plan to develop it slowly, someone else can buy another bit of the zone and develop that instead.
Indeed liberate the market enough and instead of developers with thousands of homes, you can break it down to people building just one house at a time.
The whole point of properly liberalising the market properly isn't to build over everything green (nobody wants that nor is there demand for that), but to break away the anticompetitive practices that planning creates.
The zonal policy isn't to pre-issue planning permission but to set it up that planning permission will be automatically granted.
Which opens a big can of worms: what do you do when the big developer goes to the landowner and offers them cash for the entire area? And why shouldn't they do that? All the risk has gone, and now they can secure a work pipeline for literally decades. First rule of markets: Incentives matter.
Next rule of markets: what are the externalities and how do you address them?
(How do you require infrastructure to be created or supported (schools, surgeries, leisure facilities, etc)? How do you apply planning conditions? How do you enforce compliance with a whole suite of requirements that are currently thrown onto the planning system?)
There's also the small matter as to whether it is just / fair to impose this cost on 1st Time Buyers rather than the Nimbies who tried to stop these young families with toddlers having a house to live in.
ie Should some of these costs be on Council Tax?
(Yes we can argue about whether this would actually be on Developers, but it is probably a mix)
(It is normal to impose capital cost plus maintenance for a generation - 25 years - for eg children's play areas or lamp posts onto the development itself.)
We are hearing a lot about Galloway causing mischief and Labour are sending a load of big hitters, but nothing about the Tories? Are they even trying? Or just relying on the fact the left / left of centre vote will split?
That has been my sense. BJ was up there last week but there has been little noise. I suspect, as with Hartlepool, that BJ turning up the weekend before the election suggests the Tories are confident.
One of mates girlfriends had the jab in March and says she has felt rough ever since. She isn’t going to have her second one and he blew his out yesterday too. I have to say I am tempted to swerve the second jab - I’m not going abroad this year even if I could, work from home anyway, not on the vulnerable list etc etc
Images from Google Street View show that the concrete was in a poor state, which might not be a surprise given it faces the sea, and storms throwing up salt are frequent.
Another failure of building inspectors (or the lack of them). More Ponte Morandi than Grenfell, I think, although of course we had a similar collapse (due to a gas explosion) in Newham in the 1960s.
Coincidentally enough, myself and the little 'un were watching a recorded documentary this morning. It featured a Cocoa Beach condominium that collapsed during construction back in 1981. Various design and construction errors led to the collapse.
The building that collapsed today was just up the coast, and was apparently built in ... 1981. It'll be interesting to see if the one that collapsed today was of concrete sab design, like the Harbor Bay. If there was a connection, then it was a ticking timebomb ...
Thanks for that, I'll have a read through later. A glance does suggest similarities but it isn't really possible to know all the small details.
Old reinforced concrete is always a ticking timebomb!
One of mates girlfriends had the jab in March and says she has felt rough ever since. She isn’t going to have her second one and he blew his out yesterday too. I have to say I am tempted to swerve the second jab - I’m not going abroad this year even if I could, work from home anyway, not on the vulnerable list etc etc
How protected am I after one AZ?
Not as much as you will be after 2. It is a no brainer, seriously.
One of mates girlfriends had the jab in March and says she has felt rough ever since. She isn’t going to have her second one and he blew his out yesterday too. I have to say I am tempted to swerve the second jab - I’m not going abroad this year even if I could, work from home anyway, not on the vulnerable list etc etc
How protected am I after one AZ?
The current stats are it is only about 30% effective against catching the Indian variant with just one dose.....where as two doses you are still talking 60-70% with AZN, and just as importantly protection against serious illness is really really high after two.
Basically one dose against Indian variant, you really aren't that well protected. But two doses, little difference vs original variant i.e. very effective (in fact probably due to statistical noise, the numbers say you are marginally better than against original variant after two doses).
I have felt rubbish for the past few days after the second dose, but IMO, you would be silly not to. The difference in protection levels are too large when weighed against a 5 min jab and at worst a couple of days of feeling like a bad hangover.
I first came across Galloway when he was a councilor in Dundee pushing for Dundee to be twinned with Nablus, which it subsequently was. He was friends of a group of Palestinian activists in Dundee who shared a flat with a friend of mine. MI5 was not uninterested in some of this group and Galloway seemed to regard this as a badge of honour.
He seems to me very similar to the Corbyn mode of thinking. The point of these "freedom" groups around the world was not so much the morality of their cause but the fact that they hated the west, a contempt that both Corbyn and Galloway seemed to share. His support for that murdering thug Saddam Hussein seemed to come from the same source. If he opposed the west that was good enough for George (even if he had been our willing tool against Iran).
I find it a little odd that @NickPalmer can think so highly of Corbyn and yet so little of Galloway. They are cut from the same cloth. They both start off from the premise that everything we do is wrong, everything is done in our self interest, that we are hypocritical about it and that our establishment is beneath contempt. There have clearly been times when this assessment was not that wide of the mark but personally as a default I find it comes pretty close to treason. I find it dismaying that he finds such a ready audience in a significant minority in this country. It suggests a degree of alienation that can only lead to trouble.
He, of course, will seek to exploit it rather than try to smooth the troubled waters. Where he is clearly even more morally reprehensible than Corbyn is that he has been very content to make money out of doing so. In fairness, not even Corbyn sought to do that.
The biggest difference is that Galloway has decided to be anti-Woke and anti-identity politics.
It means bigger houses, or bigger gardens, either way is a win.
No, this is bonkers. Both mean eating up available space with houses that are unaffordable for most people, thus making the crisis worse. The effect would be (a) more and more people unable to buy or rent homes or (b) more and more land area built on, i.e. urban sprawl on speed. High density (with the safeguards discussed elsewhere on the thread) is essential to any successful housing strategy, whether you want more owner-occupancy, more rented accommodation or both.
It’s one of those paradoxes of composition thingies.
Everyone likes the idea of having their own big house & garden. All that lovely space! All that green space! No noisy neighbours! What’s not to like?
Well, what’s not to like is the cost of everyone doing that - low density exurban sprawl means that every single amenity gets much more expensive to deliver. Every house now has to support: longer roads, longer sewers, longer gas lines, longer drains & these aren’t longer by some small factor; we’re talking 10x the length for the same number of people when comparing an exurb with ordinary city housing. It’s not just the materials cost for these things - now just driving out to fix things takes longer, because everthing is more spread out (this is why skyscrapers are horrendously expensive + usually a net negative: getting services up & down all that height is astonishingly expensive compared with low-rise blocks of flats). No pubs, no local amenities because there aren’t enough people to support them, And on and on.
It’s a lot like the paradox of driving: Driving is great when it’s only you on the road. It’s bloody awful when everyone else is on the roads too.
...and then this leads to the idea that a house without a garden is a good idea. Or a garden barely as long as the house is wide. And sitting rooms where one sofa barely fits....
It’s perfectly possible to build relatively high density housing with decent sized rooms. The fact that housebuilders in the UK build cheap-arsed shitboxes with tiny rooms is because they can get away with it due to the structure of our housing market, not because anyone is forcing them to do so.
& I’ve stayed in glorious flats on the continent with huge rooms & high ceilings & massive shared gardens that were nevertheless far higher density than the average UK new-build estate. But we seem to have an aversion to this kind of building in the UK.
It's bizarre because the old buildings that were built like that in the UK, in Edinburgh's New Town, say, are still very popular.
It seems like everyone wants buildings like those, except the people who might build them.
Some years ago, a chap I knew through a friend inherited a site in south London. During WWII the Herman Goering redevelopment boys had taken out three houses out of a terrace. After the war it had been used for various things. It was a mess when he inherited the land.
His idea was to build 3 houses, reconnect the terrace, faced in the same brick (reclaimed).
Apparently this was completely unacceptable... spent ages in the planning. They kept wanting him to build a block of flats. Despite there being blocks of new built flats in the area by the ton. quite a few of them unsold....
The last thing the Tories want is a by-election in Wales. Drakeford's determined to keep everyone in their homes till at least 2025 and it's wildly popular there.
What is the limit of Galloway's potential in the constituency at this time:
He won 35% in Bethnal Green & Bow at the 2005 GE at the height of Iraq anger and in a even more favourable constituency than Batley & Spen.
He won 55% at Bradford West, also corralling the WWC vote.
He has had various small shares since.
He shed large portions of those votes at subsequent elections, but that is perhaps by-the-by.
I think both of the above were free hits, despite only one being a by-election. I also don't think he can carry that much of the WWC vote - many will generally know enough that he goes on incessantly about the Middle East in an era when Corbyn has made that toxic, why not just plump for the Tory if you want to kick Starmer.
So, I think his core vote this time will heavily tend to a section of the Muslim community and in B&S there is an upper limit to that, even if he does capture the imagination. I think his absolute ceiling if his campaign catches fire again is about 20%, but realistically hitting the 10-15% range would be a good result for him.
It would sink Labour, for sure, in fact I increasingly think Labour are sunk in B&S already and it'll be around a 4-5% Tory majority. That's from neck and neck a week ago. But Galloway in second - still probably not.
Batley & Spen has around 40% of the Muslim population that Bradford West has where Galloway polled 56%, so on that basis he ought to be able to get around 22%. If he could increase that to 30% with more support from white working-class areas he could win if the votes for the other parties are evenly divided. Unlikely but not impossible.
As someone pointed out to me the other day when I made the same point, differential turnout is GG's friend. If his ceiling is the Muslim vote - c. 20% of the electorate - and he gets most of them - but the nominal Lab and Con vote doesn't bother - a highly plausible outcome - GG is already up in 30%+ of the vote territory or even higher. Which in a world where Lab and Con are evenly split could allow him in.
I'm increasingly of the opinion that GG is value at anything better than about 6/1.
Yes, I have had exactly the same thinking. Nick’s reports have stopped me betting on this but, as Francis said, the Tories don’t seem to be very proactive and there is no Ben Houchen figure to boost their support. Part of me wonders whether they would be happy to see Galloway win in order to cause further fallout in Labour.
It means bigger houses, or bigger gardens, either way is a win.
No, this is bonkers. Both mean eating up available space with houses that are unaffordable for most people, thus making the crisis worse. The effect would be (a) more and more people unable to buy or rent homes or (b) more and more land area built on, i.e. urban sprawl on speed. High density (with the safeguards discussed elsewhere on the thread) is essential to any successful housing strategy, whether you want more owner-occupancy, more rented accommodation or both.
It’s one of those paradoxes of composition thingies.
Everyone likes the idea of having their own big house & garden. All that lovely space! All that green space! No noisy neighbours! What’s not to like?
Well, what’s not to like is the cost of everyone doing that - low density exurban sprawl means that every single amenity gets much more expensive to deliver. Every house now has to support: longer roads, longer sewers, longer gas lines, longer drains & these aren’t longer by some small factor; we’re talking 10x the length for the same number of people when comparing an exurb with ordinary city housing. It’s not just the materials cost for these things - now just driving out to fix things takes longer, because everthing is more spread out (this is why skyscrapers are horrendously expensive + usually a net negative: getting services up & down all that height is astonishingly expensive compared with low-rise blocks of flats). No pubs, no local amenities because there aren’t enough people to support them, And on and on.
It’s a lot like the paradox of driving: Driving is great when it’s only you on the road. It’s bloody awful when everyone else is on the roads too.
...and then this leads to the idea that a house without a garden is a good idea. Or a garden barely as long as the house is wide. And sitting rooms where one sofa barely fits....
Judging by the number of people putting down astroturf, some people don't really want a garden to manage.
A mix would be better, though.
Often astroturf is put down because the garden is so small, that sustaining turf is impossible.
It isn't impossible, but it is true that there's not much point in keeping a lawnmower for a 2m x 2m bit of grass.
Some I've seen are a lot bigger than that, though.
One of mates girlfriends had the jab in March and says she has felt rough ever since. She isn’t going to have her second one and he blew his out yesterday too. I have to say I am tempted to swerve the second jab - I’m not going abroad this year even if I could, work from home anyway, not on the vulnerable list etc etc
How protected am I after one AZ?
Would strongly advise you get it with your other half being pregnant (And her waiting till post partum to get hers) tbh.
I first came across Galloway when he was a councilor in Dundee pushing for Dundee to be twinned with Nablus, which it subsequently was. He was friends of a group of Palestinian activists in Dundee who shared a flat with a friend of mine. MI5 was not uninterested in some of this group and Galloway seemed to regard this as a badge of honour.
He seems to me very similar to the Corbyn mode of thinking. The point of these "freedom" groups around the world was not so much the morality of their cause but the fact that they hated the west, a contempt that both Corbyn and Galloway seemed to share. His support for that murdering thug Saddam Hussein seemed to come from the same source. If he opposed the west that was good enough for George (even if he had been our willing tool against Iran).
I find it a little odd that @NickPalmer can think so highly of Corbyn and yet so little of Galloway. They are cut from the same cloth. They both start off from the premise that everything we do is wrong, everything is done in our self interest, that we are hypocritical about it and that our establishment is beneath contempt. There have clearly been times when this assessment was not that wide of the mark but personally as a default I find it comes pretty close to treason. I find it dismaying that he finds such a ready audience in a significant minority in this country. It suggests a degree of alienation that can only lead to trouble.
He, of course, will seek to exploit it rather than try to smooth the troubled waters. Where he is clearly even more morally reprehensible than Corbyn is that he has been very content to make money out of doing so. In fairness, not even Corbyn sought to do that.
The biggest difference is that Galloway has taken the decision to be anti-Woke and anti-identity politics.
I think Nick’s other point was that Corbyn is genuinely sincere in his beliefs and behaviour while Galloway is a chancer.
The anti-LGBTQ thing is a way for Galloway to connect (in his mind) the Muslim and WWC votes. May work in a few seats.
We are hearing a lot about Galloway causing mischief and Labour are sending a load of big hitters, but nothing about the Tories? Are they even trying? Or just relying on the fact the left / left of centre vote will split?
I read somewhere that they have some confidence in retaining their voters.
One of mates girlfriends had the jab in March and says she has felt rough ever since. She isn’t going to have her second one and he blew his out yesterday too. I have to say I am tempted to swerve the second jab - I’m not going abroad this year even if I could, work from home anyway, not on the vulnerable list etc etc
How protected am I after one AZ?
According to data on here a few days ago around 70%* but unclear for how long. I think it is a huge mistake to miss the 2nd jab both for your own safety and for that of others.
EDIT: * Against serious illness. Much less effective against actually catching the delta variant.
From a betting perspective if Labour lose heavily in B&S it'll be great fun.
A mild loss won't matter.
My guess is Burgeon will try. Lammy will take soundings (and to be fair to him they'll have improved). Beyond that I don't have a clue.
In seriousness, the worst thing Labour did was get rid of Corbyn.
He was the one figure who actually could have United the various parts of Labour. WWC saw him as instinctively pro-Brexit and committed to them, Muslims see him as a friend, the Greenie urban professional types looked at him on a bike and thought “he’s one of us” and the students loved the Magic Grandpa stuff. Plus people genuinely like a bit of unpolish in their politicians.
And before you mention 2019, the chief reason Labour did so badly in the Red Wall was because they were seen to be frustrating Brexit. Corbyn was attuned to that hence why he was open to a deal with May that would have got her version through. The person to blame for this? Starmer
On the latest Tim Spector update from ZOE data, he had a nice chart that showed the rising cases, and then split for unvaccinated, 1st dose, 2nd dose. Obviously big rise in unvaccinated, a decent rise among those with only one dose, but very little rise among those who had 2nd dose.
And that should still be set against the fact that there are people in the "2nd dose" category are included because they tested positive 10 days after 2nd dose, but that means there are some in those low numbers who will have caught it in the 10 day window when the 2nd dose hasn't kicked in.
From that data it shows the level of protection is very good after two doses and that is before you even get to thinking about yes you got it, but are the symptoms less severe. Again, Tim Spector says yes, different and milder symptoms being reported even against one dose. One dose again Indian variant much closer range of symptoms to the unvaccinated.
It means bigger houses, or bigger gardens, either way is a win.
No, this is bonkers. Both mean eating up available space with houses that are unaffordable for most people, thus making the crisis worse. The effect would be (a) more and more people unable to buy or rent homes or (b) more and more land area built on, i.e. urban sprawl on speed. High density (with the safeguards discussed elsewhere on the thread) is essential to any successful housing strategy, whether you want more owner-occupancy, more rented accommodation or both.
It’s one of those paradoxes of composition thingies.
Everyone likes the idea of having their own big house & garden. All that lovely space! All that green space! No noisy neighbours! What’s not to like?
Well, what’s not to like is the cost of everyone doing that - low density exurban sprawl means that every single amenity gets much more expensive to deliver. Every house now has to support: longer roads, longer sewers, longer gas lines, longer drains & these aren’t longer by some small factor; we’re talking 10x the length for the same number of people when comparing an exurb with ordinary city housing. It’s not just the materials cost for these things - now just driving out to fix things takes longer, because everthing is more spread out (this is why skyscrapers are horrendously expensive + usually a net negative: getting services up & down all that height is astonishingly expensive compared with low-rise blocks of flats). No pubs, no local amenities because there aren’t enough people to support them, And on and on.
It’s a lot like the paradox of driving: Driving is great when it’s only you on the road. It’s bloody awful when everyone else is on the roads too.
...and then this leads to the idea that a house without a garden is a good idea. Or a garden barely as long as the house is wide. And sitting rooms where one sofa barely fits....
Judging by the number of people putting down astroturf, some people don't really want a garden to manage.
A mix would be better, though.
Often astroturf is put down because the garden is so small, that sustaining turf is impossible.
It isn't impossible, but it is true that there's not much point in keeping a lawnmower for a 2m x 2m bit of grass.
Some I've seen are a lot bigger than that, though.
If you much usage - especially small children - it gets churned up very rapidly.
From a betting perspective if Labour lose heavily in B&S it'll be great fun.
A mild loss won't matter.
My guess is Burgeon will try. Lammy will take soundings (and to be fair to him they'll have improved). Beyond that I don't have a clue.
In seriousness, the worst thing Labour did was get rid of Corbyn.
He was the one figure who actually could have United the various parts of Labour. WWC saw him as instinctively pro-Brexit and committed to them, Muslims see him as a friend, the Greenie urban professional types looked at him on a bike and thought “he’s one of us” and the students loved the Magic Grandpa stuff. Plus people genuinely like a bit of unpolish in their politicians.
And before you mention 2019, the chief reason Labour did so badly in the Red Wall was because they were seen to be frustrating Brexit. Corbyn was attuned to that hence why he was open to a deal with May that would have got her version through. The person to blame for this? Starmer
We are hearing a lot about Galloway causing mischief and Labour are sending a load of big hitters, but nothing about the Tories? Are they even trying? Or just relying on the fact the left / left of centre vote will split?
I think Boris was there a few days ago, understand a big proportion of CCHQ are focused on it.
Answer to Mike's question on the header is " I hope so." Anyone who is a presenter on RT is a spokesman for Putin. Anyone who allows themselves to be a mouthpiece for Russia or China is scum and should be shunned by any right thinking people.
It includes politicians across the spectrum, but the most high profile scumbags/useful idiots are Galloway, Corbyn and of course, Malc's idol, the little toad who was referred to by his MP as "a bully and sex pest", aka Alex Salmond, one time leader of the Scottish Nasty Party and mentor to the Scottish First minister. I wonder if MI5 are taking an interest?
James Forsyth @JGForsyth · 3h The July 7th election for the chair of the 1922 Committee will give us a sense of the mood of the Tory backbenches. Will they go for former minister and loyalist Heather Wheeler or the more independent minded incumbent, Graham Brady?
Images from Google Street View show that the concrete was in a poor state, which might not be a surprise given it faces the sea, and storms throwing up salt are frequent.
Another failure of building inspectors (or the lack of them). More Ponte Morandi than Grenfell, I think, although of course we had a similar collapse (due to a gas explosion) in Newham in the 1960s.
Coincidentally enough, myself and the little 'un were watching a recorded documentary this morning. It featured a Cocoa Beach condominium that collapsed during construction back in 1981. Various design and construction errors led to the collapse.
The building that collapsed today was just up the coast, and was apparently built in ... 1981. It'll be interesting to see if the one that collapsed today was of concrete sab design, like the Harbor Bay. If there was a connection, then it was a ticking timebomb ...
Thanks for that, I'll have a read through later. A glance does suggest similarities but it isn't really possible to know all the small details.
Old reinforced concrete is always a ticking timebomb!
I've just been skimming that report. Some amazing warning signs were ignored: for instance they found four to five inch cracks in a slab only seven inches deep. Also, deflections of well over an inch, and water pooling on the top of a slab. To fix this, they just levelled it off with more concrete - only for water to pool there again. (pages 31/2).
Like the FIU Footbridge Collapse, warning signs of an imminent failure were ignored...
I've had a quick look online to see if I can find design outlines of the building that collapsed today, but didn't find much.
Those goals are: Inflate perceptions of Russian dominance in the Black Sea, inflate perceptions in NATO nations that the cost to operate in totally normal ways in the Black Sea is too high/dangerous, inflate perceptions in Ukraine & Georgia that NATO ain’t coming to save you. /6....
In reality, a NATO ally did something very bold today — and Russia couldn’t stop it. NATO (or at least, the UK) stood up for Ukraine, and it stood up to Russia. It did it without firing shots. The significance of this is important. /7
I'm watching a lot more YouTube since lockdown began. You can just nerd out on any subject you want. To be fair to the BBC, ITN, etc, they just don't have the time to go into this level of detail, and it is detail that would probably see a lot of people switching off pretty quickly.
But we are very lucky to have YouTube.
And may I also give an honourable mention to these guys, going from strength to strength: https://www.historyhit.com/
One of mates girlfriends had the jab in March and says she has felt rough ever since. She isn’t going to have her second one and he blew his out yesterday too. I have to say I am tempted to swerve the second jab - I’m not going abroad this year even if I could, work from home anyway, not on the vulnerable list etc etc
How protected am I after one AZ?
Protection against symptomatic disease: 33% after 1 dose, rising to 80% after 2. Protection against hospitalisation: 75% after 1 dose, rising to around 95% after 2.
So the chance of, say, a 30-year-old male being hospitalised from covid would be 2.7% unvaccinated versus original covid (so anywhere between 3-5% against Delta).
Down to about 1 to 1.5% if single-dosed, and down to about 0.15%-0.25% if double-dosed.
Totally up to you (although anecdotally, the second dose of AZ is usually far less likely to cause adverse effects; we found that in my family (both Mrs C and my Mum were really rough after their first doses, but fine after their second doses)
Comments
They should be strong favourites to reach the Semi Final at least.
Everyone likes the idea of having their own big house & garden. All that lovely space! All that green space! No noisy neighbours! What’s not to like?
Well, what’s not to like is the cost of everyone doing that - low density exurban sprawl means that every single amenity gets much more expensive to deliver. Every house now has to support: longer roads, longer sewers, longer gas lines, longer drains & these aren’t longer by some small factor; we’re talking 10x the length for the same number of people when comparing an exurb with ordinary city housing. It’s not just the materials cost for these things - now just driving out to fix things takes longer, because everthing is more spread out (this is why skyscrapers are horrendously expensive + usually a net negative: getting services up & down all that height is astonishingly expensive compared with low-rise blocks of flats). No pubs, no local amenities because there aren’t enough people to support them, And on and on.
It’s a lot like the paradox of driving: Driving is great when it’s only you on the road. It’s bloody awful when everyone else is on the roads too.
Which opens a big can of worms: what do you do when the big developer goes to the landowner and offers them cash for the entire area? And why shouldn't they do that? All the risk has gone, and now they can secure a work pipeline for literally decades. First rule of markets: Incentives matter.
Next rule of markets: what are the externalities and how do you address them?
(How do you require infrastructure to be created or supported (schools, surgeries, leisure facilities, etc)? How do you apply planning conditions? How do you enforce compliance with a whole suite of requirements that are currently thrown onto the planning system?)
That's not to say valuing the land highly doesn't give us some awful outcomes of course!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harbor_Cay_Condominium_collapse
https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/GOVPUB-C13-c3d64fd6d7663600a6e3a147919af0a1/pdf/GOVPUB-C13-c3d64fd6d7663600a6e3a147919af0a1.pdf
The building that collapsed today was just up the coast, and was apparently built in ... 1981. It'll be interesting to see if the one that collapsed today was of concrete sab design, like the Harbor Bay. If there was a connection, then it was a ticking timebomb ...
& I’ve stayed in glorious flats on the continent with huge rooms & high ceilings & massive shared gardens that were nevertheless far higher density than the average UK new-build estate. But we seem to have an aversion to this kind of building in the UK.
A mix would be better, though.
https://twitter.com/FOS/status/1407712800080744459
The NBA's TV market share has hit an all-time high Television
The viewership share for the 2021 NBA Playoffs is at its highest since 2002, when the league started tracking it.
(h/t @YahooSports)
Weird.
Just because it suits the house builders as well, doesn't absolve the planners of responsibility.
If the planners only granted permission for houses with decent sized rooms....
The police seem completely at sea with social media and hate speech. Either they completely ignore obvious threats “because it’s on the internet so it doesn’t matter” or they go wildly over the top and charge people for mentioning that they don’t like someone.
Complete waste of police time + I have no idea why the CPS is pursuing this. Maybe there really is something more that meets the eye & in fact she was guiltly of more direct harrassment which is being left out of this version of events? Otherwise this seems completely overboard.
Like the NFL, they realised perhaps a more subtle and nuanced approach might be better and less alienating.
Its like perhaps rather than the footballers taking the knee which is divisive and no matter how much they say not BLM, in many fans minds it still is, they come up with a better a slightly different approach e.g. NFL inspire change.
I notice Sky have now moved to displaying "Kick it Out" logos, rather than BLM.
The developers say that they need a reserve of shovel ready land to build out to meet demand (there is only so much demand for new build, it goes up and down). This explanation is generally accepted, the best way to increase delivery is for the state to take a more active role in housebuilding, for instance through building council housing on plots it has acquired.
For breaking an EU taboo
Sit on journos and judges
And nobody budges
But don’t touch the LGBTQ
https://twitter.com/mseltzermayr/status/1408052039767179265?s=20
Where is Jadon Sancho? from Tifo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9q1RUIxgOpE
Just a different level of analysis and insight.
Amazing how a "colony" has kept its own legal system for 300+ years, eh?
I'm increasingly of the opinion that GG is value at anything better than about 6/1.
https://order-order.com/2021/06/24/retrospective-rule-changes-to-force-rob-roberts-by-election-very-unlikely/
I think it's very important that it doesn't matter. I think very well of the various communities that now live in the UK, and I think very poorly of them should they wish to muddle politics and religion.
It seems like everyone wants buildings like those, except the people who might build them.
Which looked at positively is another giant step down the road to herd immunity.
It happened at the Brexit Lorry Park in Kent, when they discovered a Saxon Wall.
https://www.kentonline.co.uk/ashford/news/saxons-hold-up-brexit-lorry-park-232935/
Mind you, some of the fruitarians among them were probably armed with some really, really sharp kiwi fruit.
Meanwhile the "Alan's Snackbar" types were publicly declaiming about the necessity of murdering people. And using increasing violence.
ie Should some of these costs be on Council Tax?
(Yes we can argue about whether this would actually be on Developers, but it is probably a mix)
(It is normal to impose capital cost plus maintenance for a generation - 25 years - for eg children's play areas or lamp posts onto the development itself.)
Anyone thinking of betting should be aware that some people will have an inside track on where the votes are going.
How protected am I after one AZ?
Old reinforced concrete is always a ticking timebomb!
Basically one dose against Indian variant, you really aren't that well protected. But two doses, little difference vs original variant i.e. very effective (in fact probably due to statistical noise, the numbers say you are marginally better than against original variant after two doses).
I have felt rubbish for the past few days after the second dose, but IMO, you would be silly not to. The difference in protection levels are too large when weighed against a 5 min jab and at worst a couple of days of feeling like a bad hangover.
His idea was to build 3 houses, reconnect the terrace, faced in the same brick (reclaimed).
Apparently this was completely unacceptable... spent ages in the planning. They kept wanting him to build a block of flats. Despite there being blocks of new built flats in the area by the ton. quite a few of them unsold....
In the end, he built the houses.....
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/poverty-shouldnt-part-anybody-social-24313790?
Why do we allow this kind of shite advertising?
Buying lottery tickets creates poverty.
Some I've seen are a lot bigger than that, though.
The anti-LGBTQ thing is a way for Galloway to connect (in his mind) the Muslim and WWC votes. May work in a few seats.
A mild loss won't matter.
My guess is Burgon will try. Lammy will take soundings (and to be fair to him they'll have improved). Beyond that I don't have a clue.
EDIT: * Against serious illness. Much less effective against actually catching the delta variant.
He was the one figure who actually could have United the various parts of Labour. WWC saw him as instinctively pro-Brexit and committed to them, Muslims see him as a friend, the Greenie urban professional types looked at him on a bike and thought “he’s one of us” and the students loved the Magic Grandpa stuff. Plus people genuinely like a bit of unpolish in their politicians.
And before you mention 2019, the chief reason Labour did so badly in the Red Wall was because they were seen to be frustrating Brexit. Corbyn was attuned to that hence why he was open to a deal with May that would have got her version through. The person to blame for this? Starmer
And that should still be set against the fact that there are people in the "2nd dose" category are included because they tested positive 10 days after 2nd dose, but that means there are some in those low numbers who will have caught it in the 10 day window when the 2nd dose hasn't kicked in.
From that data it shows the level of protection is very good after two doses and that is before you even get to thinking about yes you got it, but are the symptoms less severe. Again, Tim Spector says yes, different and milder symptoms being reported even against one dose. One dose again Indian variant much closer range of symptoms to the unvaccinated.
It includes politicians across the spectrum, but the most high profile scumbags/useful idiots are Galloway, Corbyn and of course, Malc's idol, the little toad who was referred to by his MP as "a bully and sex pest", aka Alex Salmond, one time leader of the Scottish Nasty Party and mentor to the Scottish First minister. I wonder if MI5 are taking an interest?
@AmIRightSir
14 years ago today, Tony Blair left office as Leader of the Labour Party and was succeeded by Gordon Brown
@JGForsyth
·
3h
The July 7th election for the chair of the 1922 Committee will give us a sense of the mood of the Tory backbenches. Will they go for former minister and loyalist Heather Wheeler or the more independent minded incumbent, Graham Brady?
Like the FIU Footbridge Collapse, warning signs of an imminent failure were ignored...
I've had a quick look online to see if I can find design outlines of the building that collapsed today, but didn't find much.
Those goals are: Inflate perceptions of Russian dominance in the Black Sea, inflate perceptions in NATO nations that the cost to operate in totally normal ways in the Black Sea is too high/dangerous, inflate perceptions in Ukraine & Georgia that NATO ain’t coming to save you. /6....
In reality, a NATO ally did something very bold today — and Russia couldn’t stop it. NATO (or at least, the UK) stood up for Ukraine, and it stood up to Russia. It did it without firing shots. The significance of this is important. /7
https://twitter.com/MollyMcKew/status/1407833322970042372?s=20
But we are very lucky to have YouTube.
And may I also give an honourable mention to these guys, going from strength to strength: https://www.historyhit.com/
Protection against hospitalisation: 75% after 1 dose, rising to around 95% after 2.
So the chance of, say, a 30-year-old male being hospitalised from covid would be 2.7% unvaccinated versus original covid (so anywhere between 3-5% against Delta).
Down to about 1 to 1.5% if single-dosed, and down to about 0.15%-0.25% if double-dosed.
Totally up to you (although anecdotally, the second dose of AZ is usually far less likely to cause adverse effects; we found that in my family (both Mrs C and my Mum were really rough after their first doses, but fine after their second doses)