So, in part @Leon was right - University teaching is being replaced by AI. However, it's the universities that are doing it, and the students can tell because it's crap (and they aren't happy about it).
How do you get a highly-educated workforce if university education standards collapse due to the use of AI by universities?
Is this the Daily Express spinning against Labour or a genuine failure?
Absolutely damning new housing stats out this morning.
The number of net additional new dwellings during Labour's first year in office fell by 6% compared to the Tories.
The number of new builds fell by 8,000.
In total they oversaw just 190,000 new homes built in 24/25, suggesting they are seriously off course on their pledge to build 1.5m by the next election
It's so bad that the Tories managed to add 9,000 more additional homes *during the pandemic* than Angela Rayner managed during her time as Housing Secretary
The best case for Labour, which I also think is the most likely, is they have zero difference to house building and this is just natural fluctuation, which would still be a major failure.
The alternative is they have actively made it worse.
They haven’t done anything, yet, to really cut back on the accretion of regulations and laws that increase cost les for construction without really adding any benefit.
The other day I posted some stuff on how a religious belief that A/C Bad conflicts with the requirements for ventilation, a strange War On Windows, the post Grenfell requirements for simple evacuation….
These sum up to make it very difficult to build a block of flats that stay at a liveable temperature and provide easy egress in the event of a fire.
Another insane one is the equalising upwards of the cost of landfill for soil and rumble - which adds tens of thousands for building a single house.
For added comedy, an objection to a reservoir proposed near Didcot is that digging the material for the embankments will cause environmental damage. Joined up thinking - soil and rubble from….
Is this the Daily Express spinning against Labour or a genuine failure?
Absolutely damning new housing stats out this morning.
The number of net additional new dwellings during Labour's first year in office fell by 6% compared to the Tories.
The number of new builds fell by 8,000.
In total they oversaw just 190,000 new homes built in 24/25, suggesting they are seriously off course on their pledge to build 1.5m by the next election
It's so bad that the Tories managed to add 9,000 more additional homes *during the pandemic* than Angela Rayner managed during her time as Housing Secretary
I don't think there's much argument that Labour failed on housing in its first year.
They might need to build 500k homes in each of years 4 and 5 of the Parliament to meet the 1.5m target, given that there's no sign of a turnaround yet, nearly halfway through year 2. Now that would be impressive, but it's as fantastical as the Irish government's latest housing plan (they've cannily created a numerical target with a due date after the next election.)
Labour are too frightened to just build and tell communities affected to suck it up . Trying to please everyone is going to end in failure . If they want to reach their target then they’re going to have to do more , ignore local objections .
Labour are too frightened to just build and tell communities affected to suck it up . Trying to please everyone is going to end in failure . If they want to reach their target then they’re going to have to do more , ignore local objections .
Not just communities. They talk the talk then fold when lobbyists moan.
Is this the Daily Express spinning against Labour or a genuine failure?
Absolutely damning new housing stats out this morning.
The number of net additional new dwellings during Labour's first year in office fell by 6% compared to the Tories.
The number of new builds fell by 8,000.
In total they oversaw just 190,000 new homes built in 24/25, suggesting they are seriously off course on their pledge to build 1.5m by the next election
It's so bad that the Tories managed to add 9,000 more additional homes *during the pandemic* than Angela Rayner managed during her time as Housing Secretary
Calgie say "built" not "starts" or "completions", which is meaningless, and since a house takes the best part of a year to build bearing in mind ground works etc, or at least 2-4 years if the whole process is taken into account, we just can't judge how much is the last Govt or this Govt.
And I'm not sure exactly what "start" means - presumably "commencement" under planning law.
OTOH we know that many of the processes towards building in London have been made much more constipated under this Govt for various "not joined up policy" reasons, so the pipeline in London will be constricted for some time.
Starts are also,down.
One big problem I have with Labour is they talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.
This govt has not helped but it’s also worth pointing out the last shambles also bear some blame.
This guy seems to have a good grasp of the situation. The market isn't conducive to housebuilding right now because financing for all capital projects has got a lot more expensive. To put it another way, housebuilders can't profitably build houses at prices people can afford to pay. The probable only way to break through this is if the government finances housebuilding directly, but it obviously doesn't want to take on even more debt.
As a country bumpkin these days (well, living well west of Ealing Broadway which, as we all know, is the western edge of civilisation) I was intrigued to travel to London today.
Would it be the urban wasteland so decried by @Leon (late and very occasionally lamented of this parish) and his acolytes on here?
All was going well; Paddington is truly a masterpiece of Victorian engineering that I never properly noticed when going through it more regularly. But then I hit the circle line at Paddington (rookie error, obviously the H+C line was the better call).
IT'S NO LONGER A LOOP! Being a maths teacher, it was offensive enough that it was named the circle line when it actually connected up. Now? The sooner Putin nukes the whole city, the better.
What's even worse, you common-sense warriors blather on here about renaming the Suffragette line or some other wiffle waffle, but no-one ever speaks up for the poor yellow line. It's on a level with those who blather on about the little disagreement going on in Gaza right now without mentioning South Sudan or Boko Haram. Worse, probably.
If we are going to tolerate this monstrosity, we could at least rename it the spiral line.
Yours, Flabbergasted of the western wastelands.
I wonder where you were heading. Perhaps it would have been a good opportunity to take the wonderful Elizabeth Line, a marvel of modern British engineering excellence and an example of what all our infrastructure could look like if the good people at the Treasury weren't such penny pinching twats. Although just as the circle line is not a circle, you may have been disgusted to have discovered that the Elizabeth Line bears little resemblance to our late departed and much missed sovereign.
They could mould her face onto the front of all the trains? Like Thomas? It'd certainly be good for the Instas....
Well that would obviously be an excellent idea. Or you could have different ones for different kings and queens - ooh, look, here comes Henry V! - or different members of the royal family ('here comes Princess Eugenie!'). Brilliant.
And of course I am all on board with MaxH's simple and excellent suggestion of renaming the Circle Line to the Spiral Line. That's much more exciting.
Labour are too frightened to just build and tell communities affected to suck it up . Trying to please everyone is going to end in failure . If they want to reach their target then they’re going to have to do more , ignore local objections .
What was it Francis Urquhart said about wanting to be liked? A fine quality in a spaniel. Or a whore. But not a Prime Minister.
As a country bumpkin these days (well, living well west of Ealing Broadway which, as we all know, is the western edge of civilisation) I was intrigued to travel to London today.
Would it be the urban wasteland so decried by @Leon (late and very occasionally lamented of this parish) and his acolytes on here?
All was going well; Paddington is truly a masterpiece of Victorian engineering that I never properly noticed when going through it more regularly. But then I hit the circle line at Paddington (rookie error, obviously the H+C line was the better call).
IT'S NO LONGER A LOOP! Being a maths teacher, it was offensive enough that it was named the circle line when it actually connected up. Now? The sooner Putin nukes the whole city, the better.
What's even worse, you common-sense warriors blather on here about renaming the Suffragette line or some other wiffle waffle, but no-one ever speaks up for the poor yellow line. It's on a level with those who blather on about the little disagreement going on in Gaza right now without mentioning South Sudan or Boko Haram. Worse, probably.
If we are going to tolerate this monstrosity, we could at least rename it the spiral line.
Yours, Flabbergasted of the western wastelands.
I wonder where you were heading. Perhaps it would have been a good opportunity to take the wonderful Elizabeth Line, a marvel of modern British engineering excellence and an example of what all our infrastructure could look like if the good people at the Treasury weren't such penny pinching twats. Although just as the circle line is not a circle, you may have been disgusted to have discovered that the Elizabeth Line bears little resemblance to our late departed and much missed sovereign.
They could mould her face onto the front of all the trains? Like Thomas? It'd certainly be good for the Instas....
That's a great suggestion. Perhaps Andrew's face could grace the Central Line trains as they go to Grange Hill.
Apparently the surrender plan even includes a restriction on Ukrainian diplomatic flights.
A piss-take doesn't even start to do it justice.
Witkoff and his crew seem to be on commission from certain clients, but actually the US is cutting itself out of the process by trying to screw the Ukrainians and by extension the EU. Meanwhile Trump is watching his domestic support collapse as people realize that he is as someone said this week "as sexually predatory as Bill Clinton, as corrupt as Hilary Clinton, as much a warmonger as George W Bush and as gaga as Joe Biden".
The Ukrainians will not accept this "deal" and the US has very limited means to force it on Kyiv. It is not just Moscow that overestimates the power it has to force a settlement. By reducing its support to essentially nothing a few months ago, the US has reduced its ability to control the process, and Putin has failed to make any kind of significant breakthrough on the ground which was what the back channels had told Washington would happen, and all the time their military capabilities reduce, while the Ukrainians military capabilities are improving whether the US wants it or not.
A snap back in Washington is coming and I expect when this deal collapses in a couple of weeks or months Witkoff will be fired and some other commission driven figure will be brought in to try again. Russia by then will be in a full recession and the economic options will be closing as fast as the military options.
Meanwhile, the EU will do what they did after Trump's Alaska fiasco and say nothing to the US, but continue to bolster Zelensky as far as possible.
The thing is, if it was less obviously unreasonable there is scope for the US to pressure Ukraine to accept a bad deal. But by over-reaching so far, it makes it much easier to reject the surrender deal as absurd.
If for example, the Russians had offered a ceasefire on current lines, with the other terms remaining the same, that would still be a bad deal for Ukraine, but one could imagine that the pressure to accept it would be far greater.
This is like the Central Powers in 1917, demanding the cession of huge tracts of unconquered France, and the reduction of France to satellite status, in return for peace. Quite unrelated to realities on the battlefield.
Is this the Daily Express spinning against Labour or a genuine failure?
Absolutely damning new housing stats out this morning.
The number of net additional new dwellings during Labour's first year in office fell by 6% compared to the Tories.
The number of new builds fell by 8,000.
In total they oversaw just 190,000 new homes built in 24/25, suggesting they are seriously off course on their pledge to build 1.5m by the next election
It's so bad that the Tories managed to add 9,000 more additional homes *during the pandemic* than Angela Rayner managed during her time as Housing Secretary
Is this the Daily Express spinning against Labour or a genuine failure?
Absolutely damning new housing stats out this morning.
The number of net additional new dwellings during Labour's first year in office fell by 6% compared to the Tories.
The number of new builds fell by 8,000.
In total they oversaw just 190,000 new homes built in 24/25, suggesting they are seriously off course on their pledge to build 1.5m by the next election
It's so bad that the Tories managed to add 9,000 more additional homes *during the pandemic* than Angela Rayner managed during her time as Housing Secretary
The best case for Labour, which I also think is the most likely, is they have zero difference to house building and this is just natural fluctuation, which would still be a major failure.
The alternative is they have actively made it worse.
Of course they've made it worse. Repeatedly kicking the private sector in the balls is the way to devastate economy activity, not stimulate it. That goes for construction, just as for any other sector. Any economist, or even anybody of more than average intelligence with about two seconds of thought should be able to tell them this.
The more interesting question is what I call the Great Labour Divide - which members of the current government are too stupid or brainwashed by socialist garbage to realise this, and which are cynically feeding the Labour Party members and backbenchers what they want to hear for their career advantage, though they know that they are condemning the country to stagnation and decline.
I think Reeves is in the former camp and Bell, the real chancellor, in the latter, but I could be wrong.
Is this the Daily Express spinning against Labour or a genuine failure?
Absolutely damning new housing stats out this morning.
The number of net additional new dwellings during Labour's first year in office fell by 6% compared to the Tories.
The number of new builds fell by 8,000.
In total they oversaw just 190,000 new homes built in 24/25, suggesting they are seriously off course on their pledge to build 1.5m by the next election
It's so bad that the Tories managed to add 9,000 more additional homes *during the pandemic* than Angela Rayner managed during her time as Housing Secretary
Calgie say "built" not "starts" or "completions", which is meaningless, and since a house takes the best part of a year to build bearing in mind ground works etc, or at least 2-4 years if the whole process is taken into account, we just can't judge how much is the last Govt or this Govt.
And I'm not sure exactly what "start" means - presumably "commencement" under planning law.
OTOH we know that many of the processes towards building in London have been made much more constipated under this Govt for various "not joined up policy" reasons, so the pipeline in London will be constricted for some time.
Starts are also,down.
One big problem I have with Labour is they talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.
This govt has not helped but it’s also worth pointing out the last shambles also bear some blame.
This guy seems to have a good grasp of the situation. The market isn't conducive to housebuilding right now because financing for all capital projects has got a lot more expensive. To put it another way, housebuilders can't profitably build houses at prices people can afford to pay. The probable only way to break through this is if the government finances housebuilding directly, but it obviously doesn't want to take on even more debt.
I read on Twitter, and I wish I could find it, that in some parts of London even if the land was free the developer wouldn’t make money building homes. Insane if true,
Is this the Daily Express spinning against Labour or a genuine failure?
Absolutely damning new housing stats out this morning.
The number of net additional new dwellings during Labour's first year in office fell by 6% compared to the Tories.
The number of new builds fell by 8,000.
In total they oversaw just 190,000 new homes built in 24/25, suggesting they are seriously off course on their pledge to build 1.5m by the next election
It's so bad that the Tories managed to add 9,000 more additional homes *during the pandemic* than Angela Rayner managed during her time as Housing Secretary
Is this the Daily Express spinning against Labour or a genuine failure?
Absolutely damning new housing stats out this morning.
The number of net additional new dwellings during Labour's first year in office fell by 6% compared to the Tories.
The number of new builds fell by 8,000.
In total they oversaw just 190,000 new homes built in 24/25, suggesting they are seriously off course on their pledge to build 1.5m by the next election
It's so bad that the Tories managed to add 9,000 more additional homes *during the pandemic* than Angela Rayner managed during her time as Housing Secretary
I don't think there's much argument that Labour failed on housing in its first year.
They might need to build 500k homes in each of years 4 and 5 of the Parliament to meet the 1.5m target, given that there's no sign of a turnaround yet, nearly halfway through year 2. Now that would be impressive, but it's as fantastical as the Irish government's latest housing plan (they've cannily created a numerical target with a due date after the next election.)
The useless Rayner being sacked for her dealings has dodged a bullet here.
As a country bumpkin these days (well, living well west of Ealing Broadway which, as we all know, is the western edge of civilisation) I was intrigued to travel to London today.
Would it be the urban wasteland so decried by @Leon (late and very occasionally lamented of this parish) and his acolytes on here?
All was going well; Paddington is truly a masterpiece of Victorian engineering that I never properly noticed when going through it more regularly. But then I hit the circle line at Paddington (rookie error, obviously the H+C line was the better call).
IT'S NO LONGER A LOOP! Being a maths teacher, it was offensive enough that it was named the circle line when it actually connected up. Now? The sooner Putin nukes the whole city, the better.
What's even worse, you common-sense warriors blather on here about renaming the Suffragette line or some other wiffle waffle, but no-one ever speaks up for the poor yellow line. It's on a level with those who blather on about the little disagreement going on in Gaza right now without mentioning South Sudan or Boko Haram. Worse, probably.
If we are going to tolerate this monstrosity, we could at least rename it the spiral line.
Yours, Flabbergasted of the western wastelands.
Presumably no longer a circle for reasons of line capacity. It's a better use of the limited capacity to bring passengers into the circle, now a loop, than have them go right round the circle. A boring explanation really.
But can students still spend the day doing the famous pub crawl?
As long as one of the pubs is at Edgware Road YES!
As a country bumpkin these days (well, living well west of Ealing Broadway which, as we all know, is the western edge of civilisation) I was intrigued to travel to London today.
Would it be the urban wasteland so decried by @Leon (late and very occasionally lamented of this parish) and his acolytes on here?
All was going well; Paddington is truly a masterpiece of Victorian engineering that I never properly noticed when going through it more regularly. But then I hit the circle line at Paddington (rookie error, obviously the H+C line was the better call).
IT'S NO LONGER A LOOP! Being a maths teacher, it was offensive enough that it was named the circle line when it actually connected up. Now? The sooner Putin nukes the whole city, the better.
What's even worse, you common-sense warriors blather on here about renaming the Suffragette line or some other wiffle waffle, but no-one ever speaks up for the poor yellow line. It's on a level with those who blather on about the little disagreement going on in Gaza right now without mentioning South Sudan or Boko Haram. Worse, probably.
If we are going to tolerate this monstrosity, we could at least rename it the spiral line.
Yours, Flabbergasted of the western wastelands.
I wonder where you were heading. Perhaps it would have been a good opportunity to take the wonderful Elizabeth Line, a marvel of modern British engineering excellence and an example of what all our infrastructure could look like if the good people at the Treasury weren't such penny pinching twats. Although just as the circle line is not a circle, you may have been disgusted to have discovered that the Elizabeth Line bears little resemblance to our late departed and much missed sovereign.
They could mould her face onto the front of all the trains? Like Thomas? It'd certainly be good for the Instas....
That's a great suggestion. Perhaps Andrew's face could grace the Central Line trains as they go to Grange Hill.
The more I think about this, the more clearer it becomes that this is the best idea anyone has had in over 20 years of pb.com. It is the most British thing imaginable.
As a country bumpkin these days (well, living well west of Ealing Broadway which, as we all know, is the western edge of civilisation) I was intrigued to travel to London today.
Would it be the urban wasteland so decried by @Leon (late and very occasionally lamented of this parish) and his acolytes on here?
All was going well; Paddington is truly a masterpiece of Victorian engineering that I never properly noticed when going through it more regularly. But then I hit the circle line at Paddington (rookie error, obviously the H+C line was the better call).
IT'S NO LONGER A LOOP! Being a maths teacher, it was offensive enough that it was named the circle line when it actually connected up. Now? The sooner Putin nukes the whole city, the better.
What's even worse, you common-sense warriors blather on here about renaming the Suffragette line or some other wiffle waffle, but no-one ever speaks up for the poor yellow line. It's on a level with those who blather on about the little disagreement going on in Gaza right now without mentioning South Sudan or Boko Haram. Worse, probably.
If we are going to tolerate this monstrosity, we could at least rename it the spiral line.
Yours, Flabbergasted of the western wastelands.
I wonder where you were heading. Perhaps it would have been a good opportunity to take the wonderful Elizabeth Line, a marvel of modern British engineering excellence and an example of what all our infrastructure could look like if the good people at the Treasury weren't such penny pinching twats. Although just as the circle line is not a circle, you may have been disgusted to have discovered that the Elizabeth Line bears little resemblance to our late departed and much missed sovereign.
Luckily the Lioness Line is not a mobile Longleat Safari Park and so any fears of being hunted and eaten by a hungry big cat are unnecessary.
And as far as I know London branches of Gail’s also are equipped with their own facilities and so the chances of finding one of their staff squatting in the corner of a carriage on the Bakerloo line are also slim.
As a country bumpkin these days (well, living well west of Ealing Broadway which, as we all know, is the western edge of civilisation) I was intrigued to travel to London today.
Would it be the urban wasteland so decried by @Leon (late and very occasionally lamented of this parish) and his acolytes on here?
All was going well; Paddington is truly a masterpiece of Victorian engineering that I never properly noticed when going through it more regularly. But then I hit the circle line at Paddington (rookie error, obviously the H+C line was the better call).
IT'S NO LONGER A LOOP! Being a maths teacher, it was offensive enough that it was named the circle line when it actually connected up. Now? The sooner Putin nukes the whole city, the better.
What's even worse, you common-sense warriors blather on here about renaming the Suffragette line or some other wiffle waffle, but no-one ever speaks up for the poor yellow line. It's on a level with those who blather on about the little disagreement going on in Gaza right now without mentioning South Sudan or Boko Haram. Worse, probably.
If we are going to tolerate this monstrosity, we could at least rename it the spiral line.
Yours, Flabbergasted of the western wastelands.
I wonder where you were heading. Perhaps it would have been a good opportunity to take the wonderful Elizabeth Line, a marvel of modern British engineering excellence and an example of what all our infrastructure could look like if the good people at the Treasury weren't such penny pinching twats. Although just as the circle line is not a circle, you may have been disgusted to have discovered that the Elizabeth Line bears little resemblance to our late departed and much missed sovereign.
They could mould her face onto the front of all the trains? Like Thomas? It'd certainly be good for the Instas....
That's a great suggestion. Perhaps Andrew's face could grace the Central Line trains as they go to Grange Hill.
Andrew would have to be an Elizabeth line train as that's the line that passes closest to Belmarsh...
Labour are too frightened to just build and tell communities affected to suck it up . Trying to please everyone is going to end in failure . If they want to reach their target then they’re going to have to do more , ignore local objections .
This was clear when they first came into government. Their own think tanks, which helped develop what was intended to be Labour's planning reform, said precisely that.
At the first hint of pushback, Rayner et al basically folded.
They are now taking baby steps to resuscitate bits of the policy, but it's desperately slow going.
As a country bumpkin these days (well, living well west of Ealing Broadway which, as we all know, is the western edge of civilisation) I was intrigued to travel to London today.
Would it be the urban wasteland so decried by @Leon (late and very occasionally lamented of this parish) and his acolytes on here?
All was going well; Paddington is truly a masterpiece of Victorian engineering that I never properly noticed when going through it more regularly. But then I hit the circle line at Paddington (rookie error, obviously the H+C line was the better call).
IT'S NO LONGER A LOOP! Being a maths teacher, it was offensive enough that it was named the circle line when it actually connected up. Now? The sooner Putin nukes the whole city, the better.
What's even worse, you common-sense warriors blather on here about renaming the Suffragette line or some other wiffle waffle, but no-one ever speaks up for the poor yellow line. It's on a level with those who blather on about the little disagreement going on in Gaza right now without mentioning South Sudan or Boko Haram. Worse, probably.
If we are going to tolerate this monstrosity, we could at least rename it the spiral line.
Yours, Flabbergasted of the western wastelands.
The Circle line not being a circle has been true for decades now. This is in fact a plot point in an old episode of "New Tricks".
The Hammersmith and City Line stop at Paddington is in an odd location, being quite the trek about halfway up the platform on the extreme right instead of in the clusters with the others at the bottom. So you probably made the right choice.
But, but, but I had to change trains at Edgware Road. Our dearly departed travel correspondent Leon had convinced me that I would be set upon by feral hordes as soon as I stepped onto the platform.
Labour are too frightened to just build and tell communities affected to suck it up . Trying to please everyone is going to end in failure . If they want to reach their target then they’re going to have to do more , ignore local objections .
This was clear when they first came into government. Their own think tanks, which helped develop what was intended to be Labour's planning reform, said precisely that.
At the first hint of pushback, Rayner et al basically folded.
They are now taking baby steps to resuscitate bits of the policy, but it's desperately slow going.
It’s all talk and no delivery.
I had a boss from the US who said ‘performance talks, bullshit walks’ Labour are the latter currently.
Another BBC boss gone, this one resigning as the new Chair of Children in Need 11 days after appointment after receiving a suspended sentence for causing serious injury by careless driving in a collision in Chalfont St Giles.
The video is really instructive. Look at the extra hazard created by those cars parked on DYL opposite the junction, and also by the parking bays by the entrance to the one way forcing turning vehicles to cut the corner.
I think there's probably also a factor of wide A pillars in the SUV he is driving.
“…will Sir Keir Starmer ensure the candidate for the by-election is from an all women shortlist.”
Seems like there would be an obvious route for Burnham in that case.
The header from @Cyclefree would be volcanic - I’m thinking Thera, maybe Deccan Traps?
Ha ha! There would not in fact be any sort of route for Burnham, no matter how much mascara he wears, because the Labour Party changed its own rules quietly and without fuss shortly after the Supreme Court judgment in April to state that only women - real ones - (not men claiming to be women) could be in all-women shortlists or other Labour Party positions reserved for women.
Other organisations bewailing how difficult it is to understand the judgment might learn from this.
That is the good news. Party in government understands the importance of complying with the law, even if some of its own Ministers say the opposite to the courts (yes, I'm looking at you Bridget Phillipson).
The bad news is that it opens the way for twits like Lucy Powell.
Has the Labour Party updated its own policy documents to say that men in dresses are not women?
They seem to be taking their own pretty time over updating the official government guidance on the subject.
Er ..... yes they are. Because they are cowards. Or they don't want to admit that the women who challenged them were right.
At any event, the guidance is not law and cannot change it, the judgment is clear, the law is effective now and has been in fact since 2010 and on toilets for years before that (since 1992) and quite a few bodies have started complying with it including, amusingly, NHS Fife, which is also spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayers money arguing the opposite.
Don't forget the trans men who now have to go into women's toilets, some of whom look exactly like cis men. I'm sure that will cause no problems whatsoever.
Is this the Daily Express spinning against Labour or a genuine failure?
Absolutely damning new housing stats out this morning.
The number of net additional new dwellings during Labour's first year in office fell by 6% compared to the Tories.
The number of new builds fell by 8,000.
In total they oversaw just 190,000 new homes built in 24/25, suggesting they are seriously off course on their pledge to build 1.5m by the next election
It's so bad that the Tories managed to add 9,000 more additional homes *during the pandemic* than Angela Rayner managed during her time as Housing Secretary
Calgie say "built" not "starts" or "completions", which is meaningless, and since a house takes the best part of a year to build bearing in mind ground works etc, or at least 2-4 years if the whole process is taken into account, we just can't judge how much is the last Govt or this Govt.
And I'm not sure exactly what "start" means - presumably "commencement" under planning law.
OTOH we know that many of the processes towards building in London have been made much more constipated under this Govt for various "not joined up policy" reasons, so the pipeline in London will be constricted for some time.
Starts are also,down.
One big problem I have with Labour is they talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.
This govt has not helped but it’s also worth pointing out the last shambles also bear some blame.
This guy seems to have a good grasp of the situation. The market isn't conducive to housebuilding right now because financing for all capital projects has got a lot more expensive. To put it another way, housebuilders can't profitably build houses at prices people can afford to pay. The probable only way to break through this is if the government finances housebuilding directly, but it obviously doesn't want to take on even more debt.
They could if the cost of construction fell, which could easily happen by tackling the one artificially high cost that dominates . . . the cost of land.
The cost of land is artificially high because getting planning consent adds a 0 to the price of the land versus the exact same land without consent.
Revert back to our 1930s planning laws and we could lower the cost of land by roughly 90%, which would considerably lower the cost of construction, even without tackling any of the myriad of other costs that could also be tackled.
Labour are too frightened to just build and tell communities affected to suck it up . Trying to please everyone is going to end in failure . If they want to reach their target then they’re going to have to do more , ignore local objections .
This was clear when they first came into government. Their own think tanks, which helped develop what was intended to be Labour's planning reform, said precisely that.
At the first hint of pushback, Rayner et al basically folded.
They are now taking baby steps to resuscitate bits of the policy, but it's desperately slow going.
What baby steps are they even taking, I don't see anything meaningful. Sadly, as I voted for them to deliver this, and am desperately disappointed (but not surprised).
Is this the Daily Express spinning against Labour or a genuine failure?
Absolutely damning new housing stats out this morning.
The number of net additional new dwellings during Labour's first year in office fell by 6% compared to the Tories.
The number of new builds fell by 8,000.
In total they oversaw just 190,000 new homes built in 24/25, suggesting they are seriously off course on their pledge to build 1.5m by the next election
It's so bad that the Tories managed to add 9,000 more additional homes *during the pandemic* than Angela Rayner managed during her time as Housing Secretary
Calgie say "built" not "starts" or "completions", which is meaningless, and since a house takes the best part of a year to build bearing in mind ground works etc, or at least 2-4 years if the whole process is taken into account, we just can't judge how much is the last Govt or this Govt.
And I'm not sure exactly what "start" means - presumably "commencement" under planning law.
OTOH we know that many of the processes towards building in London have been made much more constipated under this Govt for various "not joined up policy" reasons, so the pipeline in London will be constricted for some time.
Starts are also,down.
One big problem I have with Labour is they talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.
This govt has not helped but it’s also worth pointing out the last shambles also bear some blame.
This guy seems to have a good grasp of the situation. The market isn't conducive to housebuilding right now because financing for all capital projects has got a lot more expensive. To put it another way, housebuilders can't profitably build houses at prices people can afford to pay. The probable only way to break through this is if the government finances housebuilding directly, but it obviously doesn't want to take on even more debt.
They could if the cost of construction fell, which could easily happen by tackling the one artificially high cost that dominates . . . the cost of land.
The cost of land is artificially high because getting planning consent adds a 0 to the price of the land versus the exact same land without consent.
Revert back to our 1930s planning laws and we could lower the cost of land by roughly 90%, which would considerably lower the cost of construction, even without tackling any of the myriad of other costs that could also be tackled.
This is London, the issue isn’t the cost of land, a lot of it is building requirements such as second staircases that shift plans from achievable to not economically viable
PSA: if any PBers are considering buying a new PC or Laptop in the near future, or getting someone one as a chrimbo prezzie, I highly recommend you DO IT NOW.
The price of memory has doubled over the last month and is likely to double again before Christmas. This is going to filter through to the cost of Laptops and pre-built PCs in the near future. AI companies are buying up such vast quantities of memory that it's causing a capacity crunch, and speculators have now become involved, hoarding memory and driving the price up still further.
A kit of 64GB DDR5 memory I bought in September for £150 is now over £400, at the present rate of increase it'll be approaching £600 by Christmas.
Wtf. I had no idea it was that expensive now. I spent a fraction of that on my latest PC build a year ago.
I'm very glad I sold off my AM4 system and built a new AM5 PC in September, just in the nick of time it seems.
The situation is likely to get much worse, the major memory manufacturers have already pre-sold their entire production capacity for 2026. It's so bad there's a rumour going around that NVidia and AMD are going to drop production of their cheaper GPUs to conserve memory for the higher end models, and those will be getting a significant price increase.
Is this the Daily Express spinning against Labour or a genuine failure?
Absolutely damning new housing stats out this morning.
The number of net additional new dwellings during Labour's first year in office fell by 6% compared to the Tories.
The number of new builds fell by 8,000.
In total they oversaw just 190,000 new homes built in 24/25, suggesting they are seriously off course on their pledge to build 1.5m by the next election
It's so bad that the Tories managed to add 9,000 more additional homes *during the pandemic* than Angela Rayner managed during her time as Housing Secretary
Calgie say "built" not "starts" or "completions", which is meaningless, and since a house takes the best part of a year to build bearing in mind ground works etc, or at least 2-4 years if the whole process is taken into account, we just can't judge how much is the last Govt or this Govt.
And I'm not sure exactly what "start" means - presumably "commencement" under planning law.
OTOH we know that many of the processes towards building in London have been made much more constipated under this Govt for various "not joined up policy" reasons, so the pipeline in London will be constricted for some time.
Starts are also,down.
One big problem I have with Labour is they talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.
This govt has not helped but it’s also worth pointing out the last shambles also bear some blame.
This guy seems to have a good grasp of the situation. The market isn't conducive to housebuilding right now because financing for all capital projects has got a lot more expensive. To put it another way, housebuilders can't profitably build houses at prices people can afford to pay. The probable only way to break through this is if the government finances housebuilding directly, but it obviously doesn't want to take on even more debt.
They could if the cost of construction fell, which could easily happen by tackling the one artificially high cost that dominates . . . the cost of land.
The cost of land is artificially high because getting planning consent adds a 0 to the price of the land versus the exact same land without consent.
Revert back to our 1930s planning laws and we could lower the cost of land by roughly 90%, which would considerably lower the cost of construction, even without tackling any of the myriad of other costs that could also be tackled.
This is London, the issue isn’t the cost of land, a lot of it is building requirements such as second staircases that shift plans from achievable to not economically viable
The cost of land is artificially high across the entire country, not just London. Price are too high across the entire country, not just London.
However the issue for London is similar, there is simply not enough land being used. Our population has grown this century by 20% and London has grown in population proportionately with that, but London's area has not risen in proportion with the growth of population.
The land assigned for London should grow by approximately 20% and all that land should be used for construction, without restrictions beyond building to code. Every year that our population rises, then cities and towns should be growing proportionately with our population growth - choking off growth might have made sense when our population was stable but it is utterly insane when we have a rising population.
Don't like it? Don't have a rising population. But we need homes for the millions already here even if population growth stopped in full, tonight.
PS liberalising construction and planning was done to a great extent in Tokyo [which has a rising population despite their nationwide declining population] which saw people building up, not just out, as with liberal planning laws they could build well (to codes still) without begging neighbours or officials for permission first. Building up, like that, is another solution for London that is also needed. It is everything that is required not either this or that alone as the problem is too severe to not throw everything at it.
As a country bumpkin these days (well, living well west of Ealing Broadway which, as we all know, is the western edge of civilisation) I was intrigued to travel to London today.
Would it be the urban wasteland so decried by @Leon (late and very occasionally lamented of this parish) and his acolytes on here?
All was going well; Paddington is truly a masterpiece of Victorian engineering that I never properly noticed when going through it more regularly. But then I hit the circle line at Paddington (rookie error, obviously the H+C line was the better call).
IT'S NO LONGER A LOOP! Being a maths teacher, it was offensive enough that it was named the circle line when it actually connected up. Now? The sooner Putin nukes the whole city, the better.
What's even worse, you common-sense warriors blather on here about renaming the Suffragette line or some other wiffle waffle, but no-one ever speaks up for the poor yellow line. It's on a level with those who blather on about the little disagreement going on in Gaza right now without mentioning South Sudan or Boko Haram. Worse, probably.
If we are going to tolerate this monstrosity, we could at least rename it the spiral line.
Yours, Flabbergasted of the western wastelands.
I wonder where you were heading. Perhaps it would have been a good opportunity to take the wonderful Elizabeth Line, a marvel of modern British engineering excellence and an example of what all our infrastructure could look like if the good people at the Treasury weren't such penny pinching twats. Although just as the circle line is not a circle, you may have been disgusted to have discovered that the Elizabeth Line bears little resemblance to our late departed and much missed sovereign.
Luckily the Lioness Line is not a mobile Longleat Safari Park and so any fears of being hunted and eaten by a hungry big cat are unnecessary.
And as far as I know London branches of Gail’s also are equipped with their own facilities and so the chances of finding one of their staff squatting in the corner of a carriage on the Bakerloo line are also slim.
All names of lines rapidly just become names of lines. That is, they just become abstract signifiers. No-one travels on the Jubilee line reminiscing on the 1977 jubilee.
Is this the Daily Express spinning against Labour or a genuine failure?
Absolutely damning new housing stats out this morning.
The number of net additional new dwellings during Labour's first year in office fell by 6% compared to the Tories.
The number of new builds fell by 8,000.
In total they oversaw just 190,000 new homes built in 24/25, suggesting they are seriously off course on their pledge to build 1.5m by the next election
It's so bad that the Tories managed to add 9,000 more additional homes *during the pandemic* than Angela Rayner managed during her time as Housing Secretary
Calgie say "built" not "starts" or "completions", which is meaningless, and since a house takes the best part of a year to build bearing in mind ground works etc, or at least 2-4 years if the whole process is taken into account, we just can't judge how much is the last Govt or this Govt.
And I'm not sure exactly what "start" means - presumably "commencement" under planning law.
OTOH we know that many of the processes towards building in London have been made much more constipated under this Govt for various "not joined up policy" reasons, so the pipeline in London will be constricted for some time.
Starts are also,down.
One big problem I have with Labour is they talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.
This govt has not helped but it’s also worth pointing out the last shambles also bear some blame.
This guy seems to have a good grasp of the situation. The market isn't conducive to housebuilding right now because financing for all capital projects has got a lot more expensive. To put it another way, housebuilders can't profitably build houses at prices people can afford to pay. The probable only way to break through this is if the government finances housebuilding directly, but it obviously doesn't want to take on even more debt.
They could if the cost of construction fell, which could easily happen by tackling the one artificially high cost that dominates . . . the cost of land.
The cost of land is artificially high because getting planning consent adds a 0 to the price of the land versus the exact same land without consent.
Revert back to our 1930s planning laws and we could lower the cost of land by roughly 90%, which would considerably lower the cost of construction, even without tackling any of the myriad of other costs that could also be tackled.
This is London, the issue isn’t the cost of land, a lot of it is building requirements such as second staircases that shift plans from achievable to not economically viable
According to the housing analyst I linked the issue fundamentally is financing costs. There are things you can do, some of which this government is doing relative to its predecessors, but these are at the margin. The only realistic way to unlock financing according to the analyst is if the government provides funding itself. Should it do so? The analyst implies, yes, but he will be seeing things from a housing perspective - the overall state of government finances isn't his concern.
As a country bumpkin these days (well, living well west of Ealing Broadway which, as we all know, is the western edge of civilisation) I was intrigued to travel to London today.
Would it be the urban wasteland so decried by @Leon (late and very occasionally lamented of this parish) and his acolytes on here?
All was going well; Paddington is truly a masterpiece of Victorian engineering that I never properly noticed when going through it more regularly. But then I hit the circle line at Paddington (rookie error, obviously the H+C line was the better call).
IT'S NO LONGER A LOOP! Being a maths teacher, it was offensive enough that it was named the circle line when it actually connected up. Now? The sooner Putin nukes the whole city, the better.
What's even worse, you common-sense warriors blather on here about renaming the Suffragette line or some other wiffle waffle, but no-one ever speaks up for the poor yellow line. It's on a level with those who blather on about the little disagreement going on in Gaza right now without mentioning South Sudan or Boko Haram. Worse, probably.
If we are going to tolerate this monstrosity, we could at least rename it the spiral line.
Yours, Flabbergasted of the western wastelands.
Presumably no longer a circle for reasons of line capacity. It's a better use of the limited capacity to bring passengers into the circle, now a loop, than have them go right round the circle. A boring explanation really.
But can students still spend the day doing the famous pub crawl?
There used to be an anarchist group who occasionally organised a circle line party. They'd take over the end carriage with a mobile sound system and (after covering over all the ads, natch) would feed wires through the last window of one carriage and into the first window of the next to gradually extend the sound system down the train as bemused commuters decided to join in.
Obviously, for legal reasons, it is important for me to state that I never participated in such an irresponsible activity, but I heard from a friend* that one year they got two loops in before the police cleared them out.
*I clearly admonished this friend for their nefarious tendencies.
Is this the Daily Express spinning against Labour or a genuine failure?
Absolutely damning new housing stats out this morning.
The number of net additional new dwellings during Labour's first year in office fell by 6% compared to the Tories.
The number of new builds fell by 8,000.
In total they oversaw just 190,000 new homes built in 24/25, suggesting they are seriously off course on their pledge to build 1.5m by the next election
It's so bad that the Tories managed to add 9,000 more additional homes *during the pandemic* than Angela Rayner managed during her time as Housing Secretary
Given how bad the construction industry statistics have been for some time I am surprised that the figures are not even worse. I guess there is some lag in housing completions and it will get worse in this year's figures.
A comparison with Ireland is interesting. There were just over 30,000 dwellings completed in Ireland in 2024 - widely seen as a large failure by the government, and way below the 40,000 they claimed would be built during the November 2024 general election campaign. Yet, with Ireland's population being about 1/13th of Britain's, it's the equivalent of building nearly 400,000 dwellings in Britain, more than twice the British figure.
I think I'd accept a government argument that it would take some time to turn this around, if there was evidence that they were taking action to turn it around. But at this stage I would be surprised if they managed to get 300,000 new homes built in any single year, let alone an average of that number for all five years of the Parliament.
I thought people were leaving the country like there was no tomorrow. Maybe there's no demand.
House prices are too high because demand exceeds supply. Supply therefore needs to rise, ie build more. But private sector operators (quite rationally) won't do this because although for us, society, the economy, prices are too high and need to fall, for them prices are too low and need to rise in order to generate a satisfactory return over the cost of construction (given the low interest rate era is over and all the inflation we've had recently). That's the essential problem. The best way forward imo other than loosening planning regulation (which is needed) is direct government investment at scale. A major build programme of council/social housing. Break the impasse, stimulate the economy, solve the housing problem, in the longer term free up private resource for things more productive than residential property. Let's do that.
I'd block any politician selling themselves in a high viz jacket from standing.
That's, er, um, as logical as banning pols in lanyards. It's impossible to visit some workplaces (ie where real people work) without wearing them.
Edit: ditto eye shields.
I think you missed the line 'selling themselves'. I object on two grounds.
1. it reminds me of Johnson
2. it reminds me of Thatcher on a tank
Maybe I should have widened it to inappropriate props
On 1, er, well, you may have a point.
On 2, I think you misremember. Like John Major (IIRC) Mrs T didn't dress up in combats - though in the modern era one does need a helmet for safety as Ms Truss exemplifies (lots of pointy sharp bits inside a tank - not sure about the flak jacket).
Is this the Daily Express spinning against Labour or a genuine failure?
Absolutely damning new housing stats out this morning.
The number of net additional new dwellings during Labour's first year in office fell by 6% compared to the Tories.
The number of new builds fell by 8,000.
In total they oversaw just 190,000 new homes built in 24/25, suggesting they are seriously off course on their pledge to build 1.5m by the next election
It's so bad that the Tories managed to add 9,000 more additional homes *during the pandemic* than Angela Rayner managed during her time as Housing Secretary
Calgie say "built" not "starts" or "completions", which is meaningless, and since a house takes the best part of a year to build bearing in mind ground works etc, or at least 2-4 years if the whole process is taken into account, we just can't judge how much is the last Govt or this Govt.
And I'm not sure exactly what "start" means - presumably "commencement" under planning law.
OTOH we know that many of the processes towards building in London have been made much more constipated under this Govt for various "not joined up policy" reasons, so the pipeline in London will be constricted for some time.
Starts are also,down.
One big problem I have with Labour is they talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.
This govt has not helped but it’s also worth pointing out the last shambles also bear some blame.
This guy seems to have a good grasp of the situation. The market isn't conducive to housebuilding right now because financing for all capital projects has got a lot more expensive. To put it another way, housebuilders can't profitably build houses at prices people can afford to pay. The probable only way to break through this is if the government finances housebuilding directly, but it obviously doesn't want to take on even more debt.
They could if the cost of construction fell, which could easily happen by tackling the one artificially high cost that dominates . . . the cost of land.
The cost of land is artificially high because getting planning consent adds a 0 to the price of the land versus the exact same land without consent.
Revert back to our 1930s planning laws and we could lower the cost of land by roughly 90%, which would considerably lower the cost of construction, even without tackling any of the myriad of other costs that could also be tackled.
This is London, the issue isn’t the cost of land, a lot of it is building requirements such as second staircases that shift plans from achievable to not economically viable
According to the housing analyst I linked the issue fundamentally is financing costs. There are things you can do, some of which this government is doing relative to its predecessors, but these are at the margin. The only realistic way to unlock financing according to the analyst is if the government provides funding itself. Should it do so? The analyst implies, yes, but he will be seeing things from a housing perspective - the overall state of government finances isn't his concern.
The cost of financing is the one thing that has changed recently, and so that will look like the issue, but historically financing costs aren't that high, unless there's a specific issue with the capital market for housing that isn't functioning as well as it used to. Houses have been built at times of higher interest rates in the past, so there must be other issues that are different compared to then which are more fundamental.
House prices are too high because demand exceeds supply. Supply therefore needs to rise, ie build more. But private sector operators (quite rationally) won't do this because although for us, society, the economy, prices are too high and need to fall, for them prices are too low and need to rise in order to generate a satisfactory return over the cost of construction (given the low interest rate era is over and all the inflation we've had recently). That's the essential problem. The best way forward imo other than loosening planning regulation (which is needed) is direct government investment at scale. A major build programme of council/social housing. Break the impasse, stimulate the economy, solve the housing problem, in the longer term free up private resource for things more productive than residential property. Let's do that.
Private sector operators won't do that if there's no competition.
Private sector operators will do that if there's competition.
If anyone can build a home and make a profit, then better to make some profit than no profit and any skilled tradesperson could venture into construction.
In most countries with liberal planning laws houses are constructed more one at a time, rapidly and individually, by small firms. Not monolithic uniform blocs being controlled by housing behemoths.
Is this the Daily Express spinning against Labour or a genuine failure?
Absolutely damning new housing stats out this morning.
The number of net additional new dwellings during Labour's first year in office fell by 6% compared to the Tories.
The number of new builds fell by 8,000.
In total they oversaw just 190,000 new homes built in 24/25, suggesting they are seriously off course on their pledge to build 1.5m by the next election
It's so bad that the Tories managed to add 9,000 more additional homes *during the pandemic* than Angela Rayner managed during her time as Housing Secretary
Calgie say "built" not "starts" or "completions", which is meaningless, and since a house takes the best part of a year to build bearing in mind ground works etc, or at least 2-4 years if the whole process is taken into account, we just can't judge how much is the last Govt or this Govt.
And I'm not sure exactly what "start" means - presumably "commencement" under planning law.
OTOH we know that many of the processes towards building in London have been made much more constipated under this Govt for various "not joined up policy" reasons, so the pipeline in London will be constricted for some time.
Starts are also,down.
One big problem I have with Labour is they talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.
This govt has not helped but it’s also worth pointing out the last shambles also bear some blame.
This guy seems to have a good grasp of the situation. The market isn't conducive to housebuilding right now because financing for all capital projects has got a lot more expensive. To put it another way, housebuilders can't profitably build houses at prices people can afford to pay. The probable only way to break through this is if the government finances housebuilding directly, but it obviously doesn't want to take on even more debt.
They could if the cost of construction fell, which could easily happen by tackling the one artificially high cost that dominates . . . the cost of land.
The cost of land is artificially high because getting planning consent adds a 0 to the price of the land versus the exact same land without consent.
Revert back to our 1930s planning laws and we could lower the cost of land by roughly 90%, which would considerably lower the cost of construction, even without tackling any of the myriad of other costs that could also be tackled.
This is London, the issue isn’t the cost of land, a lot of it is building requirements such as second staircases that shift plans from achievable to not economically viable
According to the housing analyst I linked the issue fundamentally is financing costs. There are things you can do, some of which this government is doing relative to its predecessors, but these are at the margin. The only realistic way to unlock financing according to the analyst is if the government provides funding itself. Should it do so? The analyst implies, yes, but he will be seeing things from a housing perspective - the overall state of government finances isn't his concern.
The cost of financing is the one thing that has changed recently, and so that will look like the issue, but historically financing costs aren't that high, unless there's a specific issue with the capital market for housing that isn't functioning as well as it used to. Houses have been built at times of higher interest rates in the past, so there must be other issues that are different compared to then which are more fundamental.
I don't know the answer to that but I think the periods of big housebuilding in the twentieth century coincided with investment from government.
As a country bumpkin these days (well, living well west of Ealing Broadway which, as we all know, is the western edge of civilisation) I was intrigued to travel to London today.
Would it be the urban wasteland so decried by @Leon (late and very occasionally lamented of this parish) and his acolytes on here?
All was going well; Paddington is truly a masterpiece of Victorian engineering that I never properly noticed when going through it more regularly. But then I hit the circle line at Paddington (rookie error, obviously the H+C line was the better call).
IT'S NO LONGER A LOOP! Being a maths teacher, it was offensive enough that it was named the circle line when it actually connected up. Now? The sooner Putin nukes the whole city, the better.
What's even worse, you common-sense warriors blather on here about renaming the Suffragette line or some other wiffle waffle, but no-one ever speaks up for the poor yellow line. It's on a level with those who blather on about the little disagreement going on in Gaza right now without mentioning South Sudan or Boko Haram. Worse, probably.
If we are going to tolerate this monstrosity, we could at least rename it the spiral line.
Yours, Flabbergasted of the western wastelands.
I wonder where you were heading. Perhaps it would have been a good opportunity to take the wonderful Elizabeth Line, a marvel of modern British engineering excellence and an example of what all our infrastructure could look like if the good people at the Treasury weren't such penny pinching twats. Although just as the circle line is not a circle, you may have been disgusted to have discovered that the Elizabeth Line bears little resemblance to our late departed and much missed sovereign.
Luckily the Lioness Line is not a mobile Longleat Safari Park and so any fears of being hunted and eaten by a hungry big cat are unnecessary.
And as far as I know London branches of Gail’s also are equipped with their own facilities and so the chances of finding one of their staff squatting in the corner of a carriage on the Bakerloo line are also slim.
All names of lines rapidly just become names of lines. That is, they just become abstract signifiers. No-one travels on the Jubilee line reminiscing on the 1977 jubilee.
What I like about the Bakerloo line is that it’s a testament to a great British tradition of journalism coming up with amusing neologisms (see also “pingdemic”). The newspapers invented, or at least popularised, “Bakerloo” and eventually the operators just came around and officially adopted it.
I was thus disappointed that what became the Suffragette line wasn’t called the Goblin line.
As a country bumpkin these days (well, living well west of Ealing Broadway which, as we all know, is the western edge of civilisation) I was intrigued to travel to London today.
Would it be the urban wasteland so decried by @Leon (late and very occasionally lamented of this parish) and his acolytes on here?
All was going well; Paddington is truly a masterpiece of Victorian engineering that I never properly noticed when going through it more regularly. But then I hit the circle line at Paddington (rookie error, obviously the H+C line was the better call).
IT'S NO LONGER A LOOP! Being a maths teacher, it was offensive enough that it was named the circle line when it actually connected up. Now? The sooner Putin nukes the whole city, the better.
What's even worse, you common-sense warriors blather on here about renaming the Suffragette line or some other wiffle waffle, but no-one ever speaks up for the poor yellow line. It's on a level with those who blather on about the little disagreement going on in Gaza right now without mentioning South Sudan or Boko Haram. Worse, probably.
If we are going to tolerate this monstrosity, we could at least rename it the spiral line.
Yours, Flabbergasted of the western wastelands.
I wonder where you were heading. Perhaps it would have been a good opportunity to take the wonderful Elizabeth Line, a marvel of modern British engineering excellence and an example of what all our infrastructure could look like if the good people at the Treasury weren't such penny pinching twats. Although just as the circle line is not a circle, you may have been disgusted to have discovered that the Elizabeth Line bears little resemblance to our late departed and much missed sovereign.
Kings X (well, 10 mins north). I was a bit late, otherwise I'd've definitely done so, I love the Elizabeth line. Maybe on the way back I'll walk to Farringdon.
Is this the Daily Express spinning against Labour or a genuine failure?
Absolutely damning new housing stats out this morning.
The number of net additional new dwellings during Labour's first year in office fell by 6% compared to the Tories.
The number of new builds fell by 8,000.
In total they oversaw just 190,000 new homes built in 24/25, suggesting they are seriously off course on their pledge to build 1.5m by the next election
It's so bad that the Tories managed to add 9,000 more additional homes *during the pandemic* than Angela Rayner managed during her time as Housing Secretary
Calgie say "built" not "starts" or "completions", which is meaningless, and since a house takes the best part of a year to build bearing in mind ground works etc, or at least 2-4 years if the whole process is taken into account, we just can't judge how much is the last Govt or this Govt.
And I'm not sure exactly what "start" means - presumably "commencement" under planning law.
OTOH we know that many of the processes towards building in London have been made much more constipated under this Govt for various "not joined up policy" reasons, so the pipeline in London will be constricted for some time.
Starts are also,down.
One big problem I have with Labour is they talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.
This govt has not helped but it’s also worth pointing out the last shambles also bear some blame.
This guy seems to have a good grasp of the situation. The market isn't conducive to housebuilding right now because financing for all capital projects has got a lot more expensive. To put it another way, housebuilders can't profitably build houses at prices people can afford to pay. The probable only way to break through this is if the government finances housebuilding directly, but it obviously doesn't want to take on even more debt.
They could if the cost of construction fell, which could easily happen by tackling the one artificially high cost that dominates . . . the cost of land.
The cost of land is artificially high because getting planning consent adds a 0 to the price of the land versus the exact same land without consent.
Revert back to our 1930s planning laws and we could lower the cost of land by roughly 90%, which would considerably lower the cost of construction, even without tackling any of the myriad of other costs that could also be tackled.
This is London, the issue isn’t the cost of land, a lot of it is building requirements such as second staircases that shift plans from achievable to not economically viable
According to the housing analyst I linked the issue fundamentally is financing costs. There are things you can do, some of which this government is doing relative to its predecessors, but these are at the margin. The only realistic way to unlock financing according to the analyst is if the government provides funding itself. Should it do so? The analyst implies, yes, but he will be seeing things from a housing perspective - the overall state of government finances isn't his concern.
The cost of financing is the one thing that has changed recently, and so that will look like the issue, but historically financing costs aren't that high, unless there's a specific issue with the capital market for housing that isn't functioning as well as it used to. Houses have been built at times of higher interest rates in the past, so there must be other issues that are different compared to then which are more fundamental.
I don't know the answer to that but I think the periods of big housebuilding in the twentieth century coincided with investment from government.
Private sector builders will build at the rate they can sell houses at, no quicker.
If sales on a site slow down then they will literally stop work on the site until sales pick up and it makes sense to finish the next set of houses.
If you want large house building you need the Government, housing associations or pension funds to start building. Personally I would be looking at how pension funds could build more rental properties
Is this the Daily Express spinning against Labour or a genuine failure?
Absolutely damning new housing stats out this morning.
The number of net additional new dwellings during Labour's first year in office fell by 6% compared to the Tories.
The number of new builds fell by 8,000.
In total they oversaw just 190,000 new homes built in 24/25, suggesting they are seriously off course on their pledge to build 1.5m by the next election
It's so bad that the Tories managed to add 9,000 more additional homes *during the pandemic* than Angela Rayner managed during her time as Housing Secretary
Calgie say "built" not "starts" or "completions", which is meaningless, and since a house takes the best part of a year to build bearing in mind ground works etc, or at least 2-4 years if the whole process is taken into account, we just can't judge how much is the last Govt or this Govt.
And I'm not sure exactly what "start" means - presumably "commencement" under planning law.
OTOH we know that many of the processes towards building in London have been made much more constipated under this Govt for various "not joined up policy" reasons, so the pipeline in London will be constricted for some time.
Starts are also,down.
One big problem I have with Labour is they talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.
This govt has not helped but it’s also worth pointing out the last shambles also bear some blame.
This guy seems to have a good grasp of the situation. The market isn't conducive to housebuilding right now because financing for all capital projects has got a lot more expensive. To put it another way, housebuilders can't profitably build houses at prices people can afford to pay. The probable only way to break through this is if the government finances housebuilding directly, but it obviously doesn't want to take on even more debt.
They could if the cost of construction fell, which could easily happen by tackling the one artificially high cost that dominates . . . the cost of land.
The cost of land is artificially high because getting planning consent adds a 0 to the price of the land versus the exact same land without consent.
Revert back to our 1930s planning laws and we could lower the cost of land by roughly 90%, which would considerably lower the cost of construction, even without tackling any of the myriad of other costs that could also be tackled.
This is London, the issue isn’t the cost of land, a lot of it is building requirements such as second staircases that shift plans from achievable to not economically viable
According to the housing analyst I linked the issue fundamentally is financing costs. There are things you can do, some of which this government is doing relative to its predecessors, but these are at the margin. The only realistic way to unlock financing according to the analyst is if the government provides funding itself. Should it do so? The analyst implies, yes, but he will be seeing things from a housing perspective - the overall state of government finances isn't his concern.
The cost of financing is the one thing that has changed recently, and so that will look like the issue, but historically financing costs aren't that high, unless there's a specific issue with the capital market for housing that isn't functioning as well as it used to. Houses have been built at times of higher interest rates in the past, so there must be other issues that are different compared to then which are more fundamental.
I don't know the answer to that but I think the periods of big housebuilding in the twentieth century coincided with investment from government.
No period of housebuilding in the 20th or 21st century met that achieved in the 1890s or 1930s, which was overwhelmingly private sector led.
Despite the fact that post-WWII we needed to replace homes destroyed or damaged in the Blitz, and this century we've had rapidly growing population.
I wonder what could have changed to harm our construction since the 1930s and what we could look at fixing to get back to those rates of growth?
Is this the Daily Express spinning against Labour or a genuine failure?
Absolutely damning new housing stats out this morning.
The number of net additional new dwellings during Labour's first year in office fell by 6% compared to the Tories.
The number of new builds fell by 8,000.
In total they oversaw just 190,000 new homes built in 24/25, suggesting they are seriously off course on their pledge to build 1.5m by the next election
It's so bad that the Tories managed to add 9,000 more additional homes *during the pandemic* than Angela Rayner managed during her time as Housing Secretary
Calgie say "built" not "starts" or "completions", which is meaningless, and since a house takes the best part of a year to build bearing in mind ground works etc, or at least 2-4 years if the whole process is taken into account, we just can't judge how much is the last Govt or this Govt.
And I'm not sure exactly what "start" means - presumably "commencement" under planning law.
OTOH we know that many of the processes towards building in London have been made much more constipated under this Govt for various "not joined up policy" reasons, so the pipeline in London will be constricted for some time.
Starts are also,down.
One big problem I have with Labour is they talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.
This govt has not helped but it’s also worth pointing out the last shambles also bear some blame.
This guy seems to have a good grasp of the situation. The market isn't conducive to housebuilding right now because financing for all capital projects has got a lot more expensive. To put it another way, housebuilders can't profitably build houses at prices people can afford to pay. The probable only way to break through this is if the government finances housebuilding directly, but it obviously doesn't want to take on even more debt.
They could if the cost of construction fell, which could easily happen by tackling the one artificially high cost that dominates . . . the cost of land.
The cost of land is artificially high because getting planning consent adds a 0 to the price of the land versus the exact same land without consent.
Revert back to our 1930s planning laws and we could lower the cost of land by roughly 90%, which would considerably lower the cost of construction, even without tackling any of the myriad of other costs that could also be tackled.
This is London, the issue isn’t the cost of land, a lot of it is building requirements such as second staircases that shift plans from achievable to not economically viable
According to the housing analyst I linked the issue fundamentally is financing costs. There are things you can do, some of which this government is doing relative to its predecessors, but these are at the margin. The only realistic way to unlock financing according to the analyst is if the government provides funding itself. Should it do so? The analyst implies, yes, but he will be seeing things from a housing perspective - the overall state of government finances isn't his concern.
The cost of financing is the one thing that has changed recently, and so that will look like the issue, but historically financing costs aren't that high, unless there's a specific issue with the capital market for housing that isn't functioning as well as it used to. Houses have been built at times of higher interest rates in the past, so there must be other issues that are different compared to then which are more fundamental.
I don't know the answer to that but I think the periods of big housebuilding in the twentieth century coincided with investment from government.
I think when PB looked at this in the past these past periods had high levels of both state and private housebuilding. Maybe state housebuilding provided competitive impetus for private housebuilders, or maybe they were contracted by the state and had a steady income from government work that they could more easily borrow against.
As a country bumpkin these days (well, living well west of Ealing Broadway which, as we all know, is the western edge of civilisation) I was intrigued to travel to London today.
Would it be the urban wasteland so decried by @Leon (late and very occasionally lamented of this parish) and his acolytes on here?
All was going well; Paddington is truly a masterpiece of Victorian engineering that I never properly noticed when going through it more regularly. But then I hit the circle line at Paddington (rookie error, obviously the H+C line was the better call).
IT'S NO LONGER A LOOP! Being a maths teacher, it was offensive enough that it was named the circle line when it actually connected up. Now? The sooner Putin nukes the whole city, the better.
What's even worse, you common-sense warriors blather on here about renaming the Suffragette line or some other wiffle waffle, but no-one ever speaks up for the poor yellow line. It's on a level with those who blather on about the little disagreement going on in Gaza right now without mentioning South Sudan or Boko Haram. Worse, probably.
If we are going to tolerate this monstrosity, we could at least rename it the spiral line.
Yours, Flabbergasted of the western wastelands.
I wonder where you were heading. Perhaps it would have been a good opportunity to take the wonderful Elizabeth Line, a marvel of modern British engineering excellence and an example of what all our infrastructure could look like if the good people at the Treasury weren't such penny pinching twats. Although just as the circle line is not a circle, you may have been disgusted to have discovered that the Elizabeth Line bears little resemblance to our late departed and much missed sovereign.
They could mould her face onto the front of all the trains? Like Thomas? It'd certainly be good for the Instas....
Well that would obviously be an excellent idea. Or you could have different ones for different kings and queens - ooh, look, here comes Henry V! - or different members of the royal family ('here comes Princess Eugenie!'). Brilliant.
And of course I am all on board with MaxH's simple and excellent suggestion of renaming the Circle Line to the Spiral Line. That's much more exciting.
“…will Sir Keir Starmer ensure the candidate for the by-election is from an all women shortlist.”
Seems like there would be an obvious route for Burnham in that case.
The header from @Cyclefree would be volcanic - I’m thinking Thera, maybe Deccan Traps?
Ha ha! There would not in fact be any sort of route for Burnham, no matter how much mascara he wears, because the Labour Party changed its own rules quietly and without fuss shortly after the Supreme Court judgment in April to state that only women - real ones - (not men claiming to be women) could be in all-women shortlists or other Labour Party positions reserved for women.
Other organisations bewailing how difficult it is to understand the judgment might learn from this.
That is the good news. Party in government understands the importance of complying with the law, even if some of its own Ministers say the opposite to the courts (yes, I'm looking at you Bridget Phillipson).
The bad news is that it opens the way for twits like Lucy Powell.
Has the Labour Party updated its own policy documents to say that men in dresses are not women?
They seem to be taking their own pretty time over updating the official government guidance on the subject.
Er ..... yes they are. Because they are cowards. Or they don't want to admit that the women who challenged them were right.
At any event, the guidance is not law and cannot change it, the judgment is clear, the law is effective now and has been in fact since 2010 and on toilets for years before that (since 1992) and quite a few bodies have started complying with it including, amusingly, NHS Fife, which is also spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayers money arguing the opposite.
Don't forget the trans men who now have to go into women's toilets, some of whom look exactly like cis men. I'm sure that will cause no problems whatsoever.
I'd block any politician selling themselves in a high viz jacket from standing.
That's, er, um, as logical as banning pols in lanyards. It's impossible to visit some workplaces (ie where real people work) without wearing them.
Edit: ditto eye shields.
I think you missed the line 'selling themselves'. I object on two grounds.
1. it reminds me of Johnson
2. it reminds me of Thatcher on a tank
Maybe I should have widened it to inappropriate props
On 1, er, well, you may have a point.
On 2, I think you misremember. Like John Major (IIRC) Mrs T didn't dress up in combats - though in the modern era one does need a helmet for safety as Ms Truss exemplifies (lots of pointy sharp bits inside a tank - not sure about the flak jacket).
I think I’ve dropped enough hints to expect it under the Christmas tree. If not I’ll toddle down to Waterstones before New Year. It can be first stage of my 2026 resolution (read more books!); unfortunately that was also one of this year’s 🙁
Labour are too frightened to just build and tell communities affected to suck it up . Trying to please everyone is going to end in failure . If they want to reach their target then they’re going to have to do more , ignore local objections .
This was clear when they first came into government. Their own think tanks, which helped develop what was intended to be Labour's planning reform, said precisely that.
At the first hint of pushback, Rayner et al basically folded.
They are now taking baby steps to resuscitate bits of the policy, but it's desperately slow going.
What baby steps are they even taking, I don't see anything meaningful. Sadly, as I voted for them to deliver this, and am desperately disappointed (but not surprised).
This, and far more, should have started a year and a half ago, of course.
If they'd really wanted to get building going, they'd have given local authorities enhanced compulsory purchase powers, and started to reverse the long decline in local authority housing.
And massively reformed building regs for new build.
Is this the Daily Express spinning against Labour or a genuine failure?
Absolutely damning new housing stats out this morning.
The number of net additional new dwellings during Labour's first year in office fell by 6% compared to the Tories.
The number of new builds fell by 8,000.
In total they oversaw just 190,000 new homes built in 24/25, suggesting they are seriously off course on their pledge to build 1.5m by the next election
It's so bad that the Tories managed to add 9,000 more additional homes *during the pandemic* than Angela Rayner managed during her time as Housing Secretary
Given how bad the construction industry statistics have been for some time I am surprised that the figures are not even worse. I guess there is some lag in housing completions and it will get worse in this year's figures.
A comparison with Ireland is interesting. There were just over 30,000 dwellings completed in Ireland in 2024 - widely seen as a large failure by the government, and way below the 40,000 they claimed would be built during the November 2024 general election campaign. Yet, with Ireland's population being about 1/13th of Britain's, it's the equivalent of building nearly 400,000 dwellings in Britain, more than twice the British figure.
I think I'd accept a government argument that it would take some time to turn this around, if there was evidence that they were taking action to turn it around. But at this stage I would be surprised if they managed to get 300,000 new homes built in any single year, let alone an average of that number for all five years of the Parliament.
I thought people were leaving the country like there was no tomorrow. Maybe there's no demand.
If there were no tomorrow, why would one bother leaving anyway ?
As a country bumpkin these days (well, living well west of Ealing Broadway which, as we all know, is the western edge of civilisation) I was intrigued to travel to London today.
Would it be the urban wasteland so decried by @Leon (late and very occasionally lamented of this parish) and his acolytes on here?
All was going well; Paddington is truly a masterpiece of Victorian engineering that I never properly noticed when going through it more regularly. But then I hit the circle line at Paddington (rookie error, obviously the H+C line was the better call).
IT'S NO LONGER A LOOP! Being a maths teacher, it was offensive enough that it was named the circle line when it actually connected up. Now? The sooner Putin nukes the whole city, the better.
What's even worse, you common-sense warriors blather on here about renaming the Suffragette line or some other wiffle waffle, but no-one ever speaks up for the poor yellow line. It's on a level with those who blather on about the little disagreement going on in Gaza right now without mentioning South Sudan or Boko Haram. Worse, probably.
If we are going to tolerate this monstrosity, we could at least rename it the spiral line.
Yours, Flabbergasted of the western wastelands.
I wonder where you were heading. Perhaps it would have been a good opportunity to take the wonderful Elizabeth Line, a marvel of modern British engineering excellence and an example of what all our infrastructure could look like if the good people at the Treasury weren't such penny pinching twats. Although just as the circle line is not a circle, you may have been disgusted to have discovered that the Elizabeth Line bears little resemblance to our late departed and much missed sovereign.
They could mould her face onto the front of all the trains? Like Thomas? It'd certainly be good for the Instas....
Well that would obviously be an excellent idea. Or you could have different ones for different kings and queens - ooh, look, here comes Henry V! - or different members of the royal family ('here comes Princess Eugenie!'). Brilliant.
And of course I am all on board with MaxH's simple and excellent suggestion of renaming the Circle Line to the Spiral Line. That's much more exciting.
Richard III wouldn't go under low bridges.
Charles I perfect for them, being a short man made even shorter.
House prices are too high because demand exceeds supply. Supply therefore needs to rise, ie build more. But private sector operators (quite rationally) won't do this because although for us, society, the economy, prices are too high and need to fall, for them prices are too low and need to rise in order to generate a satisfactory return over the cost of construction (given the low interest rate era is over and all the inflation we've had recently). That's the essential problem. The best way forward imo other than loosening planning regulation (which is needed) is direct government investment at scale. A major build programme of council/social housing. Break the impasse, stimulate the economy, solve the housing problem, in the longer term free up private resource for things more productive than residential property. Let's do that.
Private sector operators won't do that if there's no competition.
Private sector operators will do that if there's competition.
If anyone can build a home and make a profit, then better to make some profit than no profit and any skilled tradesperson could venture into construction.
In most countries with liberal planning laws houses are constructed more one at a time, rapidly and individually, by small firms. Not monolithic uniform blocs being controlled by housing behemoths.
You could build 20 houses on one of my meadows, good access to the road network and they would all be sold before they were built. I would be happy, 20 families would have excellent homes in a wonderful location. I would be wealthy enough not to have to think about IHT. There will be 100 like me within 15 miles of here. But no, my land is not in the development line and isn't adjacent. Oh but we need affordable homes. So, we would like to steal land next to the development line and build on that. Can I have a house, no fuck off ?
What a bloody mess. And, if you do get permission then they steal one house in three for lowlife scrotes. You really don't have to be as thick as Angela Rayner not to want to engage with the process. In a village close to me one family tried to donate a field for "affordable housing" but wanted 1 of the 10 houses for their own family. The way the planning officers spoke to them to their faces and of them behind their backs you would think they were wanting to open a nonce factory.
I am no fan of Nigel but I really do want to put an end to this bullshit about affordable housing, the biggest obstacle towards affordable housing in England today.
On topic, I don't give a huge amount of credence to the idea Burnham would want to go for Lewis' seat.
Burnham is a big figure in the Greater Manchester area with a strong reputation - it's no surprise Labour wins the mayoralty in Manchester, but his wins have been extremely comfortable, Manchester is broadly seen as a success amongst UK cities, and most are clearly happy with what he's doing.
In Norwich, not so much. People know the name, but he's Mr Manchester, not Mr Norwich. Greens came a clear second in Norwich South in 2024 and are polling well (oddly less sign in local by-elections, but their tails are up). There's an obvious anti-carpetbagger campaign they could run, and frankly I'd not fancy it if I were Burnham. There's surely a better option with an ally in the Greater Manchester area.
On the Lewis/Streeting rivalry, from the outside it looks like one of those personality clashes you quite often see where the two people fail to see how similar their personalities are. They are clearly from different wings, but the shared personality trait is "quite pugnacious, bit of a knob". One suspects Streeting has more going on between the ears, but they are both cut from not dissimilar cloth.
Is this the Daily Express spinning against Labour or a genuine failure?
Absolutely damning new housing stats out this morning.
The number of net additional new dwellings during Labour's first year in office fell by 6% compared to the Tories.
The number of new builds fell by 8,000.
In total they oversaw just 190,000 new homes built in 24/25, suggesting they are seriously off course on their pledge to build 1.5m by the next election
It's so bad that the Tories managed to add 9,000 more additional homes *during the pandemic* than Angela Rayner managed during her time as Housing Secretary
Calgie say "built" not "starts" or "completions", which is meaningless, and since a house takes the best part of a year to build bearing in mind ground works etc, or at least 2-4 years if the whole process is taken into account, we just can't judge how much is the last Govt or this Govt.
And I'm not sure exactly what "start" means - presumably "commencement" under planning law.
OTOH we know that many of the processes towards building in London have been made much more constipated under this Govt for various "not joined up policy" reasons, so the pipeline in London will be constricted for some time.
Starts are also,down.
One big problem I have with Labour is they talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.
This govt has not helped but it’s also worth pointing out the last shambles also bear some blame.
This guy seems to have a good grasp of the situation. The market isn't conducive to housebuilding right now because financing for all capital projects has got a lot more expensive. To put it another way, housebuilders can't profitably build houses at prices people can afford to pay. The probable only way to break through this is if the government finances housebuilding directly, but it obviously doesn't want to take on even more debt.
The solution is simple: take the housebuilders out of the equation. LHA builds the properties. If the private sector wants to pitch for the work then great - at a fixed %. Their PLC needs are damaging the country because they are preventing us from actually building.
Is this the Daily Express spinning against Labour or a genuine failure?
Absolutely damning new housing stats out this morning.
The number of net additional new dwellings during Labour's first year in office fell by 6% compared to the Tories.
The number of new builds fell by 8,000.
In total they oversaw just 190,000 new homes built in 24/25, suggesting they are seriously off course on their pledge to build 1.5m by the next election
It's so bad that the Tories managed to add 9,000 more additional homes *during the pandemic* than Angela Rayner managed during her time as Housing Secretary
Calgie say "built" not "starts" or "completions", which is meaningless, and since a house takes the best part of a year to build bearing in mind ground works etc, or at least 2-4 years if the whole process is taken into account, we just can't judge how much is the last Govt or this Govt.
And I'm not sure exactly what "start" means - presumably "commencement" under planning law.
OTOH we know that many of the processes towards building in London have been made much more constipated under this Govt for various "not joined up policy" reasons, so the pipeline in London will be constricted for some time.
Starts are also,down.
One big problem I have with Labour is they talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.
This govt has not helped but it’s also worth pointing out the last shambles also bear some blame.
This guy seems to have a good grasp of the situation. The market isn't conducive to housebuilding right now because financing for all capital projects has got a lot more expensive. To put it another way, housebuilders can't profitably build houses at prices people can afford to pay. The probable only way to break through this is if the government finances housebuilding directly, but it obviously doesn't want to take on even more debt.
They could if the cost of construction fell, which could easily happen by tackling the one artificially high cost that dominates . . . the cost of land.
The cost of land is artificially high because getting planning consent adds a 0 to the price of the land versus the exact same land without consent.
Revert back to our 1930s planning laws and we could lower the cost of land by roughly 90%, which would considerably lower the cost of construction, even without tackling any of the myriad of other costs that could also be tackled.
This is London, the issue isn’t the cost of land, a lot of it is building requirements such as second staircases that shift plans from achievable to not economically viable
According to the housing analyst I linked the issue fundamentally is financing costs. There are things you can do, some of which this government is doing relative to its predecessors, but these are at the margin. The only realistic way to unlock financing according to the analyst is if the government provides funding itself. Should it do so? The analyst implies, yes, but he will be seeing things from a housing perspective - the overall state of government finances isn't his concern.
The cost of financing is the one thing that has changed recently, and so that will look like the issue, but historically financing costs aren't that high, unless there's a specific issue with the capital market for housing that isn't functioning as well as it used to. Houses have been built at times of higher interest rates in the past, so there must be other issues that are different compared to then which are more fundamental.
I don't know the answer to that but I think the periods of big housebuilding in the twentieth century coincided with investment from government.
No period of housebuilding in the 20th or 21st century met that achieved in the 1890s or 1930s, which was overwhelmingly private sector led.
Despite the fact that post-WWII we needed to replace homes destroyed or damaged in the Blitz, and this century we've had rapidly growing population.
I wonder what could have changed to harm our construction since the 1930s and what we could look at fixing to get back to those rates of growth?
There were issues with a lot of the housing built in that 1890-1939 period.
As a country bumpkin these days (well, living well west of Ealing Broadway which, as we all know, is the western edge of civilisation) I was intrigued to travel to London today.
Would it be the urban wasteland so decried by @Leon (late and very occasionally lamented of this parish) and his acolytes on here?
All was going well; Paddington is truly a masterpiece of Victorian engineering that I never properly noticed when going through it more regularly. But then I hit the circle line at Paddington (rookie error, obviously the H+C line was the better call).
IT'S NO LONGER A LOOP! Being a maths teacher, it was offensive enough that it was named the circle line when it actually connected up. Now? The sooner Putin nukes the whole city, the better.
What's even worse, you common-sense warriors blather on here about renaming the Suffragette line or some other wiffle waffle, but no-one ever speaks up for the poor yellow line. It's on a level with those who blather on about the little disagreement going on in Gaza right now without mentioning South Sudan or Boko Haram. Worse, probably.
If we are going to tolerate this monstrosity, we could at least rename it the spiral line.
Yours, Flabbergasted of the western wastelands.
Presumably no longer a circle for reasons of line capacity. It's a better use of the limited capacity to bring passengers into the circle, now a loop, than have them go right round the circle. A boring explanation really.
But can students still spend the day doing the famous pub crawl?
There used to be an anarchist group who occasionally organised a circle line party. They'd take over the end carriage with a mobile sound system and (after covering over all the ads, natch) would feed wires through the last window of one carriage and into the first window of the next to gradually extend the sound system down the train as bemused commuters decided to join in.
Obviously, for legal reasons, it is important for me to state that I never participated in such an irresponsible activity, but I heard from a friend* that one year they got two loops in before the police cleared them out.
*I clearly admonished this friend for their nefarious tendencies.
Don't forget the trans men who now have to go into women's toilets, some of whom look exactly like cis men. I'm sure that will cause no problems whatsoever.
The final, i.e. not the interim EHRC guidance was leaked to the press last night.
The TL;DR is that the EHRC have accepted that they can't police single sex spaces via paperwork (it's legal to change gender markers on all common forms of photo ID) so have instead written guidance that allows policing of single sex spaces (not just toilets) by *appearance*.
Essentially anyone who doesn't conform to heteronormative beauty standards can be challenged and excluded. Can we see how this is an unworkable disaster?
My guess is the number of women 5'10" or over exceeds the number of trans women by an order of magnitude, not to mention all the butch lesbians with short hair (Hannah Botterman, the cis female England rugby player, has commented on being 'afraid to go to the toilet alone' now), plus the number of post-menopausal women who look less feminine as they age, due to lower levels of estrogen (if you want examples of older ladies who would definitely be challenged under the new guidance, look no further than the ones who brought the FWS case to the supreme court!).
The result of the guidance, if passed, would be a law that enforces heteronormative beauty standards on cis women, and enables the harassment of any who don't conform. This will be an order of magnitude greater than the number of non-passing trans women who get harassed, while under the new guidance, passing trans women would basically invoke passing privilege and be ignored in most circumstances, as the exclusion is de facto based on appearance rather than legal status.
Usually I bang on about trans rights here, not because I enjoy it but because one particular poster has a monomania for bringing it up at all opportunities, and I feel the need to tell the other side of the story.
But the real victims, by an order of magnitude, of the new guidance (if it were passed) would be cis women, who will be harassed for being too tall, too butch, or not feminine enough.
I cannot stress this point enough - in a desperate attempt to force trans women out of public life, the EHRC are happy to cause enormous collateral damage to many, many more cis women who don't meet arbitrary standards of femininity. And that's before you get into the flagrant human rights violations and contradictions with other laws and judgements, which will keep the lawyers busy for years.
If such guidance were passed, the only way I can think of for businesses and service providers to avoid lawsuits from angry cis women policed out of female spaces on the basis of appearance, would be to make almost all spaces and services unisex.
Nobody who supports women's rights (and here I mean cis women) could possibly be in favour of it. Unless, of course, they were driven mad by the trans debate and are willing to accept the harassment of cis women as collateral damage.
“…will Sir Keir Starmer ensure the candidate for the by-election is from an all women shortlist.”
Seems like there would be an obvious route for Burnham in that case.
The header from @Cyclefree would be volcanic - I’m thinking Thera, maybe Deccan Traps?
Ha ha! There would not in fact be any sort of route for Burnham, no matter how much mascara he wears, because the Labour Party changed its own rules quietly and without fuss shortly after the Supreme Court judgment in April to state that only women - real ones - (not men claiming to be women) could be in all-women shortlists or other Labour Party positions reserved for women.
Other organisations bewailing how difficult it is to understand the judgment might learn from this.
That is the good news. Party in government understands the importance of complying with the law, even if some of its own Ministers say the opposite to the courts (yes, I'm looking at you Bridget Phillipson).
The bad news is that it opens the way for twits like Lucy Powell.
Has the Labour Party updated its own policy documents to say that men in dresses are not women?
They seem to be taking their own pretty time over updating the official government guidance on the subject.
Er ..... yes they are. Because they are cowards. Or they don't want to admit that the women who challenged them were right.
At any event, the guidance is not law and cannot change it, the judgment is clear, the law is effective now and has been in fact since 2010 and on toilets for years before that (since 1992) and quite a few bodies have started complying with it including, amusingly, NHS Fife, which is also spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayers money arguing the opposite.
Don't forget the trans men who now have to go into women's toilets, some of whom look exactly like cis men. I'm sure that will cause no problems whatsoever.
Men don’t care who goes in their toilets.
Cat Man was talking about trans men, people who were born female but now look male, going into women’s toilets.
And… Speak for yourself. I would be unnerved if a woman or someone presenting as a woman came into the men’s.
Is this the Daily Express spinning against Labour or a genuine failure?
Absolutely damning new housing stats out this morning.
The number of net additional new dwellings during Labour's first year in office fell by 6% compared to the Tories.
The number of new builds fell by 8,000.
In total they oversaw just 190,000 new homes built in 24/25, suggesting they are seriously off course on their pledge to build 1.5m by the next election
It's so bad that the Tories managed to add 9,000 more additional homes *during the pandemic* than Angela Rayner managed during her time as Housing Secretary
Given how bad the construction industry statistics have been for some time I am surprised that the figures are not even worse. I guess there is some lag in housing completions and it will get worse in this year's figures.
A comparison with Ireland is interesting. There were just over 30,000 dwellings completed in Ireland in 2024 - widely seen as a large failure by the government, and way below the 40,000 they claimed would be built during the November 2024 general election campaign. Yet, with Ireland's population being about 1/13th of Britain's, it's the equivalent of building nearly 400,000 dwellings in Britain, more than twice the British figure.
I think I'd accept a government argument that it would take some time to turn this around, if there was evidence that they were taking action to turn it around. But at this stage I would be surprised if they managed to get 300,000 new homes built in any single year, let alone an average of that number for all five years of the Parliament.
I thought people were leaving the country like there was no tomorrow. Maybe there's no demand.
If there were no tomorrow, why would one bother leaving anyway ?
House prices are too high because demand exceeds supply. Supply therefore needs to rise, ie build more. But private sector operators (quite rationally) won't do this because although for us, society, the economy, prices are too high and need to fall, for them prices are too low and need to rise in order to generate a satisfactory return over the cost of construction (given the low interest rate era is over and all the inflation we've had recently). That's the essential problem. The best way forward imo other than loosening planning regulation (which is needed) is direct government investment at scale. A major build programme of council/social housing. Break the impasse, stimulate the economy, solve the housing problem, in the longer term free up private resource for things more productive than residential property. Let's do that.
Private sector operators won't do that if there's no competition.
Private sector operators will do that if there's competition.
If anyone can build a home and make a profit, then better to make some profit than no profit and any skilled tradesperson could venture into construction.
In most countries with liberal planning laws houses are constructed more one at a time, rapidly and individually, by small firms. Not monolithic uniform blocs being controlled by housing behemoths.
I did cover that. Looser planning regs. It's part of the plan. An important part.
Is this the Daily Express spinning against Labour or a genuine failure?
Absolutely damning new housing stats out this morning.
The number of net additional new dwellings during Labour's first year in office fell by 6% compared to the Tories.
The number of new builds fell by 8,000.
In total they oversaw just 190,000 new homes built in 24/25, suggesting they are seriously off course on their pledge to build 1.5m by the next election
It's so bad that the Tories managed to add 9,000 more additional homes *during the pandemic* than Angela Rayner managed during her time as Housing Secretary
Calgie say "built" not "starts" or "completions", which is meaningless, and since a house takes the best part of a year to build bearing in mind ground works etc, or at least 2-4 years if the whole process is taken into account, we just can't judge how much is the last Govt or this Govt.
And I'm not sure exactly what "start" means - presumably "commencement" under planning law.
OTOH we know that many of the processes towards building in London have been made much more constipated under this Govt for various "not joined up policy" reasons, so the pipeline in London will be constricted for some time.
Starts are also,down.
One big problem I have with Labour is they talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.
This govt has not helped but it’s also worth pointing out the last shambles also bear some blame.
This guy seems to have a good grasp of the situation. The market isn't conducive to housebuilding right now because financing for all capital projects has got a lot more expensive. To put it another way, housebuilders can't profitably build houses at prices people can afford to pay. The probable only way to break through this is if the government finances housebuilding directly, but it obviously doesn't want to take on even more debt.
They could if the cost of construction fell, which could easily happen by tackling the one artificially high cost that dominates . . . the cost of land.
The cost of land is artificially high because getting planning consent adds a 0 to the price of the land versus the exact same land without consent.
Revert back to our 1930s planning laws and we could lower the cost of land by roughly 90%, which would considerably lower the cost of construction, even without tackling any of the myriad of other costs that could also be tackled.
This is London, the issue isn’t the cost of land, a lot of it is building requirements such as second staircases that shift plans from achievable to not economically viable
According to the housing analyst I linked the issue fundamentally is financing costs. There are things you can do, some of which this government is doing relative to its predecessors, but these are at the margin. The only realistic way to unlock financing according to the analyst is if the government provides funding itself. Should it do so? The analyst implies, yes, but he will be seeing things from a housing perspective - the overall state of government finances isn't his concern.
The cost of financing is the one thing that has changed recently, and so that will look like the issue, but historically financing costs aren't that high, unless there's a specific issue with the capital market for housing that isn't functioning as well as it used to. Houses have been built at times of higher interest rates in the past, so there must be other issues that are different compared to then which are more fundamental.
I don't know the answer to that but I think the periods of big housebuilding in the twentieth century coincided with investment from government.
No period of housebuilding in the 20th or 21st century met that achieved in the 1890s or 1930s, which was overwhelmingly private sector led.
Despite the fact that post-WWII we needed to replace homes destroyed or damaged in the Blitz, and this century we've had rapidly growing population.
I wonder what could have changed to harm our construction since the 1930s and what we could look at fixing to get back to those rates of growth?
The private sector building here in the 1890s and 1930s was often shite, both the speculative BTL tenements and the employers' tied housing.
It's the council houses of the 1920s and 1930s which have survived en masse, plus the relatively few middle class turn of the century stone villas and between-wars bungalows (the former of which often show structural issues because of skimped foundations).
House prices are too high because demand exceeds supply. Supply therefore needs to rise, ie build more. But private sector operators (quite rationally) won't do this because although for us, society, the economy, prices are too high and need to fall, for them prices are too low and need to rise in order to generate a satisfactory return over the cost of construction (given the low interest rate era is over and all the inflation we've had recently). That's the essential problem. The best way forward imo other than loosening planning regulation (which is needed) is direct government investment at scale. A major build programme of council/social housing. Break the impasse, stimulate the economy, solve the housing problem, in the longer term free up private resource for things more productive than residential property. Let's do that.
Government (at whatever level) trying to build would hit the same problems. The government would be fighting itself.
A simple example - the regulations on not using A//C
Now that solar is all over the place - do what I did. Solar runs the Air Source heat pump*
Hilariously, the government legislated to encourage this - equipment and install is VAT free.
But the planners are trying to prevent A/C because “Luxury”
With A/C, you don’t need every flat to have multiple vistas to get ventilation (which doesn’t help once temps go over 25c, anyway).
This means you can build flats in the classic linear block - two lines of flats, either side of a long, straight corridor.
The corridor ends (at both ends) in a stairwell and lifts (if required).
So the resulting block of flats is
- denser without reducing space per flat. - simpler and cheaper to build - rooms don’t have funny shapes, which make them feel larger - meets the fire regulations, easily - When temperatures go above 25c, comfortable. Which is a serious issue for the elderly, and those with respiratory issues.
As a country bumpkin these days (well, living well west of Ealing Broadway which, as we all know, is the western edge of civilisation) I was intrigued to travel to London today.
Would it be the urban wasteland so decried by @Leon (late and very occasionally lamented of this parish) and his acolytes on here?
All was going well; Paddington is truly a masterpiece of Victorian engineering that I never properly noticed when going through it more regularly. But then I hit the circle line at Paddington (rookie error, obviously the H+C line was the better call).
IT'S NO LONGER A LOOP! Being a maths teacher, it was offensive enough that it was named the circle line when it actually connected up. Now? The sooner Putin nukes the whole city, the better.
What's even worse, you common-sense warriors blather on here about renaming the Suffragette line or some other wiffle waffle, but no-one ever speaks up for the poor yellow line. It's on a level with those who blather on about the little disagreement going on in Gaza right now without mentioning South Sudan or Boko Haram. Worse, probably.
If we are going to tolerate this monstrosity, we could at least rename it the spiral line.
Yours, Flabbergasted of the western wastelands.
Presumably no longer a circle for reasons of line capacity. It's a better use of the limited capacity to bring passengers into the circle, now a loop, than have them go right round the circle. A boring explanation really.
But can students still spend the day doing the famous pub crawl?
There used to be an anarchist group who occasionally organised a circle line party. They'd take over the end carriage with a mobile sound system and (after covering over all the ads, natch) would feed wires through the last window of one carriage and into the first window of the next to gradually extend the sound system down the train as bemused commuters decided to join in.
Obviously, for legal reasons, it is important for me to state that I never participated in such an irresponsible activity, but I heard from a friend* that one year they got two loops in before the police cleared them out.
*I clearly admonished this friend for their nefarious tendencies.
Saw similar things on the Tube back in the day. Great fun!
Is this the Daily Express spinning against Labour or a genuine failure?
Absolutely damning new housing stats out this morning.
The number of net additional new dwellings during Labour's first year in office fell by 6% compared to the Tories.
The number of new builds fell by 8,000.
In total they oversaw just 190,000 new homes built in 24/25, suggesting they are seriously off course on their pledge to build 1.5m by the next election
It's so bad that the Tories managed to add 9,000 more additional homes *during the pandemic* than Angela Rayner managed during her time as Housing Secretary
Calgie say "built" not "starts" or "completions", which is meaningless, and since a house takes the best part of a year to build bearing in mind ground works etc, or at least 2-4 years if the whole process is taken into account, we just can't judge how much is the last Govt or this Govt.
And I'm not sure exactly what "start" means - presumably "commencement" under planning law.
OTOH we know that many of the processes towards building in London have been made much more constipated under this Govt for various "not joined up policy" reasons, so the pipeline in London will be constricted for some time.
Starts are also,down.
One big problem I have with Labour is they talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.
This govt has not helped but it’s also worth pointing out the last shambles also bear some blame.
This guy seems to have a good grasp of the situation. The market isn't conducive to housebuilding right now because financing for all capital projects has got a lot more expensive. To put it another way, housebuilders can't profitably build houses at prices people can afford to pay. The probable only way to break through this is if the government finances housebuilding directly, but it obviously doesn't want to take on even more debt.
They could if the cost of construction fell, which could easily happen by tackling the one artificially high cost that dominates . . . the cost of land.
The cost of land is artificially high because getting planning consent adds a 0 to the price of the land versus the exact same land without consent.
Revert back to our 1930s planning laws and we could lower the cost of land by roughly 90%, which would considerably lower the cost of construction, even without tackling any of the myriad of other costs that could also be tackled.
This is London, the issue isn’t the cost of land, a lot of it is building requirements such as second staircases that shift plans from achievable to not economically viable
According to the housing analyst I linked the issue fundamentally is financing costs. There are things you can do, some of which this government is doing relative to its predecessors, but these are at the margin. The only realistic way to unlock financing according to the analyst is if the government provides funding itself. Should it do so? The analyst implies, yes, but he will be seeing things from a housing perspective - the overall state of government finances isn't his concern.
The cost of financing is the one thing that has changed recently, and so that will look like the issue, but historically financing costs aren't that high, unless there's a specific issue with the capital market for housing that isn't functioning as well as it used to. Houses have been built at times of higher interest rates in the past, so there must be other issues that are different compared to then which are more fundamental.
I don't know the answer to that but I think the periods of big housebuilding in the twentieth century coincided with investment from government.
Private sector builders will build at the rate they can sell houses at, no quicker.
If sales on a site slow down then they will literally stop work on the site until sales pick up and it makes sense to finish the next set of houses.
If you want large house building you need the Government, housing associations or pension funds to start building. Personally I would be looking at how pension funds could build more rental properties
Why would pension funds optimise the delivery of housing, rather than maximising investment profit?
To increase home building, reduce costs and increase competition.
Don’t grant local monopolies to housing giants. Layout towns, and sell the plots for each street to different companies. This is what the Victorians did.
Don't forget the trans men who now have to go into women's toilets, some of whom look exactly like cis men. I'm sure that will cause no problems whatsoever.
The final, i.e. not the interim EHRC guidance was leaked to the press last night.
The TL;DR is that the EHRC have accepted that they can't police single sex spaces via paperwork (it's legal to change gender markers on all common forms of photo ID) so have instead written guidance that allows policing of single sex spaces (not just toilets) by *appearance*.
Essentially anyone who doesn't conform to heteronormative beauty standards can be challenged and excluded. Can we see how this is an unworkable disaster?
My guess is the number of women 5'10" or over exceeds the number of trans women by an order of magnitude, not to mention all the butch lesbians with short hair (Hannah Botterman, the cis female England rugby player, has commented on being 'afraid to go to the toilet alone' now), plus the number of post-menopausal women who look less feminine as they age, due to lower levels of estrogen (if you want examples of older ladies who would definitely be challenged under the new guidance, look no further than the ones who brought the FWS case to the supreme court!).
The result of the guidance, if passed, would be a law that enforces heteronormative beauty standards on cis women, and enables the harassment of any who don't conform. This will be an order of magnitude greater than the number of non-passing trans women who get harassed, while under the new guidance, passing trans women would basically invoke passing privilege and be ignored in most circumstances, as the exclusion is de facto based on appearance rather than legal status.
Usually I bang on about trans rights here, not because I enjoy it but because one particular poster has a monomania for bringing it up at all opportunities, and I feel the need to tell the other side of the story.
But the real victims, by an order of magnitude, of the new guidance (if it were passed) would be cis women, who will be harassed for being too tall, too butch, or not feminine enough.
I cannot stress this point enough - in a desperate attempt to force trans women out of public life, the EHRC are happy to cause enormous collateral damage to many, many more cis women who don't meet arbitrary standards of femininity. And that's before you get into the flagrant human rights violations and contradictions with other laws and judgements, which will keep the lawyers busy for years.
If such guidance were passed, the only way I can think of for businesses and service providers to avoid lawsuits from angry cis women policed out of female spaces on the basis of appearance, would be to make almost all spaces and services unisex.
Nobody who supports women's rights (and here I mean cis women) could possibly be in favour of it. Unless, of course, they were driven mad by the trans debate and are willing to accept the harassment of cis women as collateral damage.
I do think this is wildly overcomplicating what isn't actually a new issue.
Gender segregated toilets go back (at least) to the Victorian era, and masculine looking women, feminine looking men and so on go back to time immemorial. There has always been potential for someone to complain that another person is using facilities intended for people of another sex, and for this to cause embarrassment when it turns out they are indeed using the correct facilities.
Has it ever been terribly common in practice? I suspect not. Is it becoming more common? Perhaps marginally. But there's always a tendency of each generation to believe that their dilemmas, complications and moral panics are all terribly new and complex, when really they just aren't.
“…will Sir Keir Starmer ensure the candidate for the by-election is from an all women shortlist.”
Seems like there would be an obvious route for Burnham in that case.
The header from @Cyclefree would be volcanic - I’m thinking Thera, maybe Deccan Traps?
Ha ha! There would not in fact be any sort of route for Burnham, no matter how much mascara he wears, because the Labour Party changed its own rules quietly and without fuss shortly after the Supreme Court judgment in April to state that only women - real ones - (not men claiming to be women) could be in all-women shortlists or other Labour Party positions reserved for women.
Other organisations bewailing how difficult it is to understand the judgment might learn from this.
That is the good news. Party in government understands the importance of complying with the law, even if some of its own Ministers say the opposite to the courts (yes, I'm looking at you Bridget Phillipson).
The bad news is that it opens the way for twits like Lucy Powell.
Has the Labour Party updated its own policy documents to say that men in dresses are not women?
They seem to be taking their own pretty time over updating the official government guidance on the subject.
Er ..... yes they are. Because they are cowards. Or they don't want to admit that the women who challenged them were right.
At any event, the guidance is not law and cannot change it, the judgment is clear, the law is effective now and has been in fact since 2010 and on toilets for years before that (since 1992) and quite a few bodies have started complying with it including, amusingly, NHS Fife, which is also spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayers money arguing the opposite.
Don't forget the trans men who now have to go into women's toilets, some of whom look exactly like cis men. I'm sure that will cause no problems whatsoever.
Men don’t care who goes in their toilets.
Cat Man was talking about trans men, people who were born female but now look male, going into women’s toilets.
And… Speak for yourself. I would be unnerved if a woman or someone presenting as a woman came into the men’s.
Used to happen all the time at clubs I went to in the 90s given the queues in the ladies
“…will Sir Keir Starmer ensure the candidate for the by-election is from an all women shortlist.”
Seems like there would be an obvious route for Burnham in that case.
The header from @Cyclefree would be volcanic - I’m thinking Thera, maybe Deccan Traps?
Ha ha! There would not in fact be any sort of route for Burnham, no matter how much mascara he wears, because the Labour Party changed its own rules quietly and without fuss shortly after the Supreme Court judgment in April to state that only women - real ones - (not men claiming to be women) could be in all-women shortlists or other Labour Party positions reserved for women.
Other organisations bewailing how difficult it is to understand the judgment might learn from this.
That is the good news. Party in government understands the importance of complying with the law, even if some of its own Ministers say the opposite to the courts (yes, I'm looking at you Bridget Phillipson).
The bad news is that it opens the way for twits like Lucy Powell.
Has the Labour Party updated its own policy documents to say that men in dresses are not women?
They seem to be taking their own pretty time over updating the official government guidance on the subject.
Er ..... yes they are. Because they are cowards. Or they don't want to admit that the women who challenged them were right.
At any event, the guidance is not law and cannot change it, the judgment is clear, the law is effective now and has been in fact since 2010 and on toilets for years before that (since 1992) and quite a few bodies have started complying with it including, amusingly, NHS Fife, which is also spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayers money arguing the opposite.
Don't forget the trans men who now have to go into women's toilets, some of whom look exactly like cis men. I'm sure that will cause no problems whatsoever.
Men don’t care who goes in their toilets.
Cat Man was talking about trans men, people who were born female but now look male, going into women’s toilets.
And… Speak for yourself. I would be unnerved if a woman or someone presenting as a woman came into the men’s.
..The Times has been passed a copy of the final guidance, which aims to preserve the dignity and safety of women, by Whitehall figures who are concerned that Labour is deliberately delaying publication to avoid a potential political backlash...
..(the guidance) also states that transgender people could be barred from single-sex services even when their biological sex matches, such if a trans man, who is biologically female but is “perceived” as a man, attempted to use a women’s changing room. It says that they can be barred because they are likely to be seen by others as the opposite sex..
Is this the Daily Express spinning against Labour or a genuine failure?
Absolutely damning new housing stats out this morning.
The number of net additional new dwellings during Labour's first year in office fell by 6% compared to the Tories.
The number of new builds fell by 8,000.
In total they oversaw just 190,000 new homes built in 24/25, suggesting they are seriously off course on their pledge to build 1.5m by the next election
It's so bad that the Tories managed to add 9,000 more additional homes *during the pandemic* than Angela Rayner managed during her time as Housing Secretary
Calgie say "built" not "starts" or "completions", which is meaningless, and since a house takes the best part of a year to build bearing in mind ground works etc, or at least 2-4 years if the whole process is taken into account, we just can't judge how much is the last Govt or this Govt.
And I'm not sure exactly what "start" means - presumably "commencement" under planning law.
OTOH we know that many of the processes towards building in London have been made much more constipated under this Govt for various "not joined up policy" reasons, so the pipeline in London will be constricted for some time.
Starts are also,down.
One big problem I have with Labour is they talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.
This govt has not helped but it’s also worth pointing out the last shambles also bear some blame.
This guy seems to have a good grasp of the situation. The market isn't conducive to housebuilding right now because financing for all capital projects has got a lot more expensive. To put it another way, housebuilders can't profitably build houses at prices people can afford to pay. The probable only way to break through this is if the government finances housebuilding directly, but it obviously doesn't want to take on even more debt.
They could if the cost of construction fell, which could easily happen by tackling the one artificially high cost that dominates . . . the cost of land.
The cost of land is artificially high because getting planning consent adds a 0 to the price of the land versus the exact same land without consent.
Revert back to our 1930s planning laws and we could lower the cost of land by roughly 90%, which would considerably lower the cost of construction, even without tackling any of the myriad of other costs that could also be tackled.
This is London, the issue isn’t the cost of land, a lot of it is building requirements such as second staircases that shift plans from achievable to not economically viable
According to the housing analyst I linked the issue fundamentally is financing costs. There are things you can do, some of which this government is doing relative to its predecessors, but these are at the margin. The only realistic way to unlock financing according to the analyst is if the government provides funding itself. Should it do so? The analyst implies, yes, but he will be seeing things from a housing perspective - the overall state of government finances isn't his concern.
The cost of financing is the one thing that has changed recently, and so that will look like the issue, but historically financing costs aren't that high, unless there's a specific issue with the capital market for housing that isn't functioning as well as it used to. Houses have been built at times of higher interest rates in the past, so there must be other issues that are different compared to then which are more fundamental.
I don't know the answer to that but I think the periods of big housebuilding in the twentieth century coincided with investment from government.
No period of housebuilding in the 20th or 21st century met that achieved in the 1890s or 1930s, which was overwhelmingly private sector led.
Despite the fact that post-WWII we needed to replace homes destroyed or damaged in the Blitz, and this century we've had rapidly growing population.
I wonder what could have changed to harm our construction since the 1930s and what we could look at fixing to get back to those rates of growth?
There were issues with a lot of the housing built in that 1890-1939 period.
Not relative to what came before it, there wasn't.
A whole lot of what came before it was cleared and replaced with much-improved newer stock that replaced the older stock.
Obviously technology and standards have moved on since then, and that should continue, but that's not the reason those rates have never been seen again.
Is this the Daily Express spinning against Labour or a genuine failure?
Absolutely damning new housing stats out this morning.
The number of net additional new dwellings during Labour's first year in office fell by 6% compared to the Tories.
The number of new builds fell by 8,000.
In total they oversaw just 190,000 new homes built in 24/25, suggesting they are seriously off course on their pledge to build 1.5m by the next election
It's so bad that the Tories managed to add 9,000 more additional homes *during the pandemic* than Angela Rayner managed during her time as Housing Secretary
Calgie say "built" not "starts" or "completions", which is meaningless, and since a house takes the best part of a year to build bearing in mind ground works etc, or at least 2-4 years if the whole process is taken into account, we just can't judge how much is the last Govt or this Govt.
And I'm not sure exactly what "start" means - presumably "commencement" under planning law.
OTOH we know that many of the processes towards building in London have been made much more constipated under this Govt for various "not joined up policy" reasons, so the pipeline in London will be constricted for some time.
Starts are also,down.
One big problem I have with Labour is they talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.
This govt has not helped but it’s also worth pointing out the last shambles also bear some blame.
This guy seems to have a good grasp of the situation. The market isn't conducive to housebuilding right now because financing for all capital projects has got a lot more expensive. To put it another way, housebuilders can't profitably build houses at prices people can afford to pay. The probable only way to break through this is if the government finances housebuilding directly, but it obviously doesn't want to take on even more debt.
They could if the cost of construction fell, which could easily happen by tackling the one artificially high cost that dominates . . . the cost of land.
The cost of land is artificially high because getting planning consent adds a 0 to the price of the land versus the exact same land without consent.
Revert back to our 1930s planning laws and we could lower the cost of land by roughly 90%, which would considerably lower the cost of construction, even without tackling any of the myriad of other costs that could also be tackled.
This is London, the issue isn’t the cost of land, a lot of it is building requirements such as second staircases that shift plans from achievable to not economically viable
According to the housing analyst I linked the issue fundamentally is financing costs. There are things you can do, some of which this government is doing relative to its predecessors, but these are at the margin. The only realistic way to unlock financing according to the analyst is if the government provides funding itself. Should it do so? The analyst implies, yes, but he will be seeing things from a housing perspective - the overall state of government finances isn't his concern.
The cost of financing is the one thing that has changed recently, and so that will look like the issue, but historically financing costs aren't that high, unless there's a specific issue with the capital market for housing that isn't functioning as well as it used to. Houses have been built at times of higher interest rates in the past, so there must be other issues that are different compared to then which are more fundamental.
I don't know the answer to that but I think the periods of big housebuilding in the twentieth century coincided with investment from government.
Private sector builders will build at the rate they can sell houses at, no quicker.
If sales on a site slow down then they will literally stop work on the site until sales pick up and it makes sense to finish the next set of houses.
If you want large house building you need the Government, housing associations or pension funds to start building. Personally I would be looking at how pension funds could build more rental properties
Why would pension funds optimise the delivery of housing, rather than maximising investment profit?
To increase home building, reduce costs and increase competition.
Don’t grant local monopolies to housing giants. Layout towns, and sell the plots for each street to different companies. This is what the Victorians did.
Bugger the Victorians - that's what the Scots did in the mid-18th century, with the New Town of Edinburgh, and (presumably) also the expansion of Glasgow westward from the mediaeval core.
Of course, they had planning systems and planning applications, including changes to existing buildings. And especially if they affected the neighbours! The records of the Dean of Guild Court in, for instance, Edinburgh are absolutely wonderful stuff, full of applications and drawings from the late C18 onwards.
“…will Sir Keir Starmer ensure the candidate for the by-election is from an all women shortlist.”
Seems like there would be an obvious route for Burnham in that case.
The header from @Cyclefree would be volcanic - I’m thinking Thera, maybe Deccan Traps?
Ha ha! There would not in fact be any sort of route for Burnham, no matter how much mascara he wears, because the Labour Party changed its own rules quietly and without fuss shortly after the Supreme Court judgment in April to state that only women - real ones - (not men claiming to be women) could be in all-women shortlists or other Labour Party positions reserved for women.
Other organisations bewailing how difficult it is to understand the judgment might learn from this.
That is the good news. Party in government understands the importance of complying with the law, even if some of its own Ministers say the opposite to the courts (yes, I'm looking at you Bridget Phillipson).
The bad news is that it opens the way for twits like Lucy Powell.
Has the Labour Party updated its own policy documents to say that men in dresses are not women?
They seem to be taking their own pretty time over updating the official government guidance on the subject.
Er ..... yes they are. Because they are cowards. Or they don't want to admit that the women who challenged them were right.
At any event, the guidance is not law and cannot change it, the judgment is clear, the law is effective now and has been in fact since 2010 and on toilets for years before that (since 1992) and quite a few bodies have started complying with it including, amusingly, NHS Fife, which is also spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayers money arguing the opposite.
Don't forget the trans men who now have to go into women's toilets, some of whom look exactly like cis men. I'm sure that will cause no problems whatsoever.
Men don’t care who goes in their toilets.
Cat Man was talking about trans men, people who were born female but now look male, going into women’s toilets.
And… Speak for yourself. I would be unnerved if a woman or someone presenting as a woman came into the men’s.
Trans men can use sex-neutral toilets like disabled etc toilets. Its really not that complicated.
I can't think of anywhere I've ever been in a long time that hasn't got sex-neutral toilets available.
No reason to make the whole women's toilets be compromised by men with penises to prevent a few individuals from using neutral facilities.
The problems re housebuilding are similar to many of the other problems in the UK - over-regulated, over-legislated, over-litigated.
There are at least a few people in the Labour Party who get that, I think. The issue is that Labour is too instinctively squeamish to be too radical in its solutions to that. Generally speaking, Labour (as with all mainstream parties) has been on board with the process state and the expansion of regulation over the past 30 years or so. As a result, they hope that they can fix or at least mitigate the issue by tinkering around the edges and pulling a few legislative levers, where the problem is much more deep-seated than that.
Immigration is a similar one, but Mahmood appears to be the closest person in Labour to “getting it” at the moment.
“…will Sir Keir Starmer ensure the candidate for the by-election is from an all women shortlist.”
Seems like there would be an obvious route for Burnham in that case.
The header from @Cyclefree would be volcanic - I’m thinking Thera, maybe Deccan Traps?
Ha ha! There would not in fact be any sort of route for Burnham, no matter how much mascara he wears, because the Labour Party changed its own rules quietly and without fuss shortly after the Supreme Court judgment in April to state that only women - real ones - (not men claiming to be women) could be in all-women shortlists or other Labour Party positions reserved for women.
Other organisations bewailing how difficult it is to understand the judgment might learn from this.
That is the good news. Party in government understands the importance of complying with the law, even if some of its own Ministers say the opposite to the courts (yes, I'm looking at you Bridget Phillipson).
The bad news is that it opens the way for twits like Lucy Powell.
Has the Labour Party updated its own policy documents to say that men in dresses are not women?
They seem to be taking their own pretty time over updating the official government guidance on the subject.
Er ..... yes they are. Because they are cowards. Or they don't want to admit that the women who challenged them were right.
At any event, the guidance is not law and cannot change it, the judgment is clear, the law is effective now and has been in fact since 2010 and on toilets for years before that (since 1992) and quite a few bodies have started complying with it including, amusingly, NHS Fife, which is also spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayers money arguing the opposite.
Don't forget the trans men who now have to go into women's toilets, some of whom look exactly like cis men. I'm sure that will cause no problems whatsoever.
Men don’t care who goes in their toilets.
Cat Man was talking about trans men, people who were born female but now look male, going into women’s toilets.
And… Speak for yourself. I would be unnerved if a woman or someone presenting as a woman came into the men’s.
Trans men can use sex-neutral toilets like disabled etc toilets. Its really not that complicated.
I can't think of anywhere I've ever been in a long time that hasn't got sex-neutral toilets available.
No reason to make the whole women's toilets be compromised by men with penises to prevent a few individuals from using neutral facilities.
No, they can't. Disabled [sic] toilets are very often key-access only these days, to stop abuse and overuse by able people.
Plus they're there for one reason. Not for getting trans warriors out of the assorted holes into which they have entrenched themselves.
“…will Sir Keir Starmer ensure the candidate for the by-election is from an all women shortlist.”
Seems like there would be an obvious route for Burnham in that case.
The header from @Cyclefree would be volcanic - I’m thinking Thera, maybe Deccan Traps?
Ha ha! There would not in fact be any sort of route for Burnham, no matter how much mascara he wears, because the Labour Party changed its own rules quietly and without fuss shortly after the Supreme Court judgment in April to state that only women - real ones - (not men claiming to be women) could be in all-women shortlists or other Labour Party positions reserved for women.
Other organisations bewailing how difficult it is to understand the judgment might learn from this.
That is the good news. Party in government understands the importance of complying with the law, even if some of its own Ministers say the opposite to the courts (yes, I'm looking at you Bridget Phillipson).
The bad news is that it opens the way for twits like Lucy Powell.
Has the Labour Party updated its own policy documents to say that men in dresses are not women?
They seem to be taking their own pretty time over updating the official government guidance on the subject.
Er ..... yes they are. Because they are cowards. Or they don't want to admit that the women who challenged them were right.
At any event, the guidance is not law and cannot change it, the judgment is clear, the law is effective now and has been in fact since 2010 and on toilets for years before that (since 1992) and quite a few bodies have started complying with it including, amusingly, NHS Fife, which is also spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayers money arguing the opposite.
Don't forget the trans men who now have to go into women's toilets, some of whom look exactly like cis men. I'm sure that will cause no problems whatsoever.
Men don’t care who goes in their toilets.
Cat Man was talking about trans men, people who were born female but now look male, going into women’s toilets.
And… Speak for yourself. I would be unnerved if a woman or someone presenting as a woman came into the men’s.
Used to happen all the time at clubs I went to in the 90s given the queues in the ladies
I remember objecting to the early 90 plans to improve Newcastle’s student union because they hadn’t put in enough ladies loos.
“…will Sir Keir Starmer ensure the candidate for the by-election is from an all women shortlist.”
Seems like there would be an obvious route for Burnham in that case.
The header from @Cyclefree would be volcanic - I’m thinking Thera, maybe Deccan Traps?
Ha ha! There would not in fact be any sort of route for Burnham, no matter how much mascara he wears, because the Labour Party changed its own rules quietly and without fuss shortly after the Supreme Court judgment in April to state that only women - real ones - (not men claiming to be women) could be in all-women shortlists or other Labour Party positions reserved for women.
Other organisations bewailing how difficult it is to understand the judgment might learn from this.
That is the good news. Party in government understands the importance of complying with the law, even if some of its own Ministers say the opposite to the courts (yes, I'm looking at you Bridget Phillipson).
The bad news is that it opens the way for twits like Lucy Powell.
Has the Labour Party updated its own policy documents to say that men in dresses are not women?
They seem to be taking their own pretty time over updating the official government guidance on the subject.
Er ..... yes they are. Because they are cowards. Or they don't want to admit that the women who challenged them were right.
At any event, the guidance is not law and cannot change it, the judgment is clear, the law is effective now and has been in fact since 2010 and on toilets for years before that (since 1992) and quite a few bodies have started complying with it including, amusingly, NHS Fife, which is also spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayers money arguing the opposite.
Don't forget the trans men who now have to go into women's toilets, some of whom look exactly like cis men. I'm sure that will cause no problems whatsoever.
Men don’t care who goes in their toilets.
Cat Man was talking about trans men, people who were born female but now look male, going into women’s toilets.
And… Speak for yourself. I would be unnerved if a woman or someone presenting as a woman came into the men’s.
..The Times has been passed a copy of the final guidance, which aims to preserve the dignity and safety of women, by Whitehall figures who are concerned that Labour is deliberately delaying publication to avoid a potential political backlash...
..(the guidance) also states that transgender people could be barred from single-sex services even when their biological sex matches, such if a trans man, who is biologically female but is “perceived” as a man, attempted to use a women’s changing room. It says that they can be barred because they are likely to be seen by others as the opposite sex..
That's literally what the Supreme Court said, yes.
Fortunately sex-neutral alternatives exist for the few individuals who can't use either main facility.
“…will Sir Keir Starmer ensure the candidate for the by-election is from an all women shortlist.”
Seems like there would be an obvious route for Burnham in that case.
The header from @Cyclefree would be volcanic - I’m thinking Thera, maybe Deccan Traps?
Ha ha! There would not in fact be any sort of route for Burnham, no matter how much mascara he wears, because the Labour Party changed its own rules quietly and without fuss shortly after the Supreme Court judgment in April to state that only women - real ones - (not men claiming to be women) could be in all-women shortlists or other Labour Party positions reserved for women.
Other organisations bewailing how difficult it is to understand the judgment might learn from this.
That is the good news. Party in government understands the importance of complying with the law, even if some of its own Ministers say the opposite to the courts (yes, I'm looking at you Bridget Phillipson).
The bad news is that it opens the way for twits like Lucy Powell.
Has the Labour Party updated its own policy documents to say that men in dresses are not women?
They seem to be taking their own pretty time over updating the official government guidance on the subject.
Er ..... yes they are. Because they are cowards. Or they don't want to admit that the women who challenged them were right.
At any event, the guidance is not law and cannot change it, the judgment is clear, the law is effective now and has been in fact since 2010 and on toilets for years before that (since 1992) and quite a few bodies have started complying with it including, amusingly, NHS Fife, which is also spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayers money arguing the opposite.
Don't forget the trans men who now have to go into women's toilets, some of whom look exactly like cis men. I'm sure that will cause no problems whatsoever.
Men don’t care who goes in their toilets.
Cat Man was talking about trans men, people who were born female but now look male, going into women’s toilets.
And… Speak for yourself. I would be unnerved if a woman or someone presenting as a woman came into the men’s.
Trans men can use sex-neutral toilets like disabled etc toilets. Its really not that complicated.
I can't think of anywhere I've ever been in a long time that hasn't got sex-neutral toilets available.
No reason to make the whole women's toilets be compromised by men with penises to prevent a few individuals from using neutral facilities.
No, they can't. Disabled [sic] toilets are very often key-access only these days, to stop abuse and overuse by able people.
Not all disabilities are visible and if premises have an obligation to provide neutral facilities they either need to remove that key or offer it to anyone who requires it, such as an individual who needs the neutral facility, or produce extra facilities.
House prices are too high because demand exceeds supply. Supply therefore needs to rise, ie build more. But private sector operators (quite rationally) won't do this because although for us, society, the economy, prices are too high and need to fall, for them prices are too low and need to rise in order to generate a satisfactory return over the cost of construction (given the low interest rate era is over and all the inflation we've had recently). That's the essential problem. The best way forward imo other than loosening planning regulation (which is needed) is direct government investment at scale. A major build programme of council/social housing. Break the impasse, stimulate the economy, solve the housing problem, in the longer term free up private resource for things more productive than residential property. Let's do that.
Government (at whatever level) trying to build would hit the same problems. The government would be fighting itself.
A simple example - the regulations on not using A//C
Now that solar is all over the place - do what I did. Solar runs the Air Source heat pump*
Hilariously, the government legislated to encourage this - equipment and install is VAT free.
But the planners are trying to prevent A/C because “Luxury”
With A/C, you don’t need every flat to have multiple vistas to get ventilation (which doesn’t help once temps go over 25c, anyway).
This means you can build flats in the classic linear block - two lines of flats, either side of a long, straight corridor.
The corridor ends (at both ends) in a stairwell and lifts (if required).
So the resulting block of flats is
- denser without reducing space per flat. - simpler and cheaper to build - rooms don’t have funny shapes, which make them feel larger - meets the fire regulations, easily - When temperatures go above 25c, comfortable. Which is a serious issue for the elderly, and those with respiratory issues.
*reversible A/C
Yep. Need reforms at that micro level to accompany the Big Beautiful Build. Otherwise, as you say, we won't get the maximum benefit from it.
Is this the Daily Express spinning against Labour or a genuine failure?
Absolutely damning new housing stats out this morning.
The number of net additional new dwellings during Labour's first year in office fell by 6% compared to the Tories.
The number of new builds fell by 8,000.
In total they oversaw just 190,000 new homes built in 24/25, suggesting they are seriously off course on their pledge to build 1.5m by the next election
It's so bad that the Tories managed to add 9,000 more additional homes *during the pandemic* than Angela Rayner managed during her time as Housing Secretary
Calgie say "built" not "starts" or "completions", which is meaningless, and since a house takes the best part of a year to build bearing in mind ground works etc, or at least 2-4 years if the whole process is taken into account, we just can't judge how much is the last Govt or this Govt.
And I'm not sure exactly what "start" means - presumably "commencement" under planning law.
OTOH we know that many of the processes towards building in London have been made much more constipated under this Govt for various "not joined up policy" reasons, so the pipeline in London will be constricted for some time.
Starts are also,down.
One big problem I have with Labour is they talk the talk but don’t walk the walk.
This govt has not helped but it’s also worth pointing out the last shambles also bear some blame.
This guy seems to have a good grasp of the situation. The market isn't conducive to housebuilding right now because financing for all capital projects has got a lot more expensive. To put it another way, housebuilders can't profitably build houses at prices people can afford to pay. The probable only way to break through this is if the government finances housebuilding directly, but it obviously doesn't want to take on even more debt.
They could if the cost of construction fell, which could easily happen by tackling the one artificially high cost that dominates . . . the cost of land.
The cost of land is artificially high because getting planning consent adds a 0 to the price of the land versus the exact same land without consent.
Revert back to our 1930s planning laws and we could lower the cost of land by roughly 90%, which would considerably lower the cost of construction, even without tackling any of the myriad of other costs that could also be tackled.
This is London, the issue isn’t the cost of land, a lot of it is building requirements such as second staircases that shift plans from achievable to not economically viable
According to the housing analyst I linked the issue fundamentally is financing costs. There are things you can do, some of which this government is doing relative to its predecessors, but these are at the margin. The only realistic way to unlock financing according to the analyst is if the government provides funding itself. Should it do so? The analyst implies, yes, but he will be seeing things from a housing perspective - the overall state of government finances isn't his concern.
The cost of financing is the one thing that has changed recently, and so that will look like the issue, but historically financing costs aren't that high, unless there's a specific issue with the capital market for housing that isn't functioning as well as it used to. Houses have been built at times of higher interest rates in the past, so there must be other issues that are different compared to then which are more fundamental.
I don't know the answer to that but I think the periods of big housebuilding in the twentieth century coincided with investment from government.
Private sector builders will build at the rate they can sell houses at, no quicker.
If sales on a site slow down then they will literally stop work on the site until sales pick up and it makes sense to finish the next set of houses.
If you want large house building you need the Government, housing associations or pension funds to start building. Personally I would be looking at how pension funds could build more rental properties
Why would pension funds optimise the delivery of housing, rather than maximising investment profit?
To increase home building, reduce costs and increase competition.
Don’t grant local monopolies to housing giants. Layout towns, and sell the plots for each street to different companies. This is what the Victorians did.
Bugger the Victorians - that's what the Scots did in the mid-18th century, with the New Town of Edinburgh, and (presumably) also the expansion of Glasgow westward from the mediaeval core.
Of course, they had planning systems and planning applications, including changes to existing buildings. And especially if they affected the neighbours! The records of the Dean of Guild Court in, for instance, Edinburgh are absolutely wonderful stuff, full of applications and drawings from the late C18 onwards.
It was a popular system from when town planning was invented - before the Romans. Layout and then get people building in parallel.
The reason I mentioned the Victorians was they rolled out the system on an epic, epic scale.
They also, in London, solved the spoil removal problem. By building retaining walls along the Thames. The areas being the embankments was filled in with the material excavated in building houses. Resulting in new *land* along the a Thames. Which was sold at a profit. Oh, and also massively reduced flooding and made the Thames more navigable.
Sarah Montague on WATO demonstrating that a very little knowledge is very dangerous. She is explaining that local authority derived waste has been found in Kidlington so that means local authority corruption is rife, an extrapolation I wouldn't make with some experience of how waste crime operates.
Mind you the spokesman from the Environment Agency doesn't seem to have a much better idea of reality than Sarah.
The Comey prosecution has become ever more bizarre. After the very unusual order to have all documentation from the Grand Jury released it has been established that the indictment put before the court was never passed by them. There were 3 charges on the draft indictment. The Grand Jury "no billed" the first charge. They indicated, by a very narrow majority that they would allow the remaining charges to proceed but a fresh indictment with those charges only was never put before them. This is incompetent. The Judge has demanded that he be addressed by the DoJ today at 5pm local time to explain how the indictment can proceed. The short answer is that it can't.
Lindsay Halligan, the interim US attorney appointed by Trump with no relevant experience, has completely screwed this up and the time bar for any new proceedings has now expired. She is in a world of trouble.
The Comey prosecution has become ever more bizarre. After the very unusual order to have all documentation from the Grand Jury released it has been established that the indictment put before the court was never passed by them. There were 3 charges on the draft indictment. The Grand Jury "no billed" the first charge. They indicated, by a very narrow majority that they would allow the remaining charges to proceed but a fresh indictment with those charges only was never put before them. This is incompetent. The Judge has demanded that he be addressed by the DoJ today at 5pm local time to explain how the indictment can proceed. The short answer is that it can't.
Lindsay Halligan, the interim US attorney appointed by Trump with no relevant experience, has completely screwed this up and the time bar for any new proceedings has now expired. She is in a world of trouble.
Remember Pam Bondi also signed off on this fiasco. Twice IIRC
“…will Sir Keir Starmer ensure the candidate for the by-election is from an all women shortlist.”
Seems like there would be an obvious route for Burnham in that case.
The header from @Cyclefree would be volcanic - I’m thinking Thera, maybe Deccan Traps?
Ha ha! There would not in fact be any sort of route for Burnham, no matter how much mascara he wears, because the Labour Party changed its own rules quietly and without fuss shortly after the Supreme Court judgment in April to state that only women - real ones - (not men claiming to be women) could be in all-women shortlists or other Labour Party positions reserved for women.
Other organisations bewailing how difficult it is to understand the judgment might learn from this.
That is the good news. Party in government understands the importance of complying with the law, even if some of its own Ministers say the opposite to the courts (yes, I'm looking at you Bridget Phillipson).
The bad news is that it opens the way for twits like Lucy Powell.
Has the Labour Party updated its own policy documents to say that men in dresses are not women?
They seem to be taking their own pretty time over updating the official government guidance on the subject.
Er ..... yes they are. Because they are cowards. Or they don't want to admit that the women who challenged them were right.
At any event, the guidance is not law and cannot change it, the judgment is clear, the law is effective now and has been in fact since 2010 and on toilets for years before that (since 1992) and quite a few bodies have started complying with it including, amusingly, NHS Fife, which is also spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayers money arguing the opposite.
Don't forget the trans men who now have to go into women's toilets, some of whom look exactly like cis men. I'm sure that will cause no problems whatsoever.
Under the SC ruling or the EHRC interim guidance (I forget which), it is specifically stated that female-to-male trans people who now look like men are forbidden from going into the men's toilet (because their birth sex is female) AND ALSO forbidden from going into the ladies' toilet (because their appearance may constitute a threat to the privacy/dignity/safety of women).
The Comey prosecution has become ever more bizarre. After the very unusual order to have all documentation from the Grand Jury released it has been established that the indictment put before the court was never passed by them. There were 3 charges on the draft indictment. The Grand Jury "no billed" the first charge. They indicated, by a very narrow majority that they would allow the remaining charges to proceed but a fresh indictment with those charges only was never put before them. This is incompetent. The Judge has demanded that he be addressed by the DoJ today at 5pm local time to explain how the indictment can proceed. The short answer is that it can't.
Lindsay Halligan, the interim US attorney appointed by Trump with no relevant experience, has completely screwed this up and the time bar for any new proceedings has now expired. She is in a world of trouble.
If it is dismissed then is it likely/certain to be dismissed with prejudice?
The Comey prosecution has become ever more bizarre. After the very unusual order to have all documentation from the Grand Jury released it has been established that the indictment put before the court was never passed by them. There were 3 charges on the draft indictment. The Grand Jury "no billed" the first charge. They indicated, by a very narrow majority that they would allow the remaining charges to proceed but a fresh indictment with those charges only was never put before them. This is incompetent. The Judge has demanded that he be addressed by the DoJ today at 5pm local time to explain how the indictment can proceed. The short answer is that it can't.
Lindsay Halligan, the interim US attorney appointed by Trump with no relevant experience, has completely screwed this up and the time bar for any new proceedings has now expired. She is in a world of trouble.
If it is dismissed then is it likely/certain to be dismissed with prejudice?
Almost certainly. I am not an American lawyer but prosecuting someone on the basis of a completely incompetent indictment? It really doesn't get much worse than that.
“…will Sir Keir Starmer ensure the candidate for the by-election is from an all women shortlist.”
Seems like there would be an obvious route for Burnham in that case.
The header from @Cyclefree would be volcanic - I’m thinking Thera, maybe Deccan Traps?
Ha ha! There would not in fact be any sort of route for Burnham, no matter how much mascara he wears, because the Labour Party changed its own rules quietly and without fuss shortly after the Supreme Court judgment in April to state that only women - real ones - (not men claiming to be women) could be in all-women shortlists or other Labour Party positions reserved for women.
Other organisations bewailing how difficult it is to understand the judgment might learn from this.
That is the good news. Party in government understands the importance of complying with the law, even if some of its own Ministers say the opposite to the courts (yes, I'm looking at you Bridget Phillipson).
The bad news is that it opens the way for twits like Lucy Powell.
Has the Labour Party updated its own policy documents to say that men in dresses are not women?
They seem to be taking their own pretty time over updating the official government guidance on the subject.
Er ..... yes they are. Because they are cowards. Or they don't want to admit that the women who challenged them were right.
At any event, the guidance is not law and cannot change it, the judgment is clear, the law is effective now and has been in fact since 2010 and on toilets for years before that (since 1992) and quite a few bodies have started complying with it including, amusingly, NHS Fife, which is also spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayers money arguing the opposite.
Don't forget the trans men who now have to go into women's toilets, some of whom look exactly like cis men. I'm sure that will cause no problems whatsoever.
Under the SC ruling or the EHRC interim guidance (I forget which), it is specifically stated that female-to-male trans people who now look like men are forbidden from going into the men's toilet (because their birth sex is female) AND ALSO forbidden from going into the ladies' toilet (because their appearance may constitute a threat to the privacy/dignity/safety of women).
Indeed. Hence why I keep saying the simple solution is sex-neutral facilities.
Which already exist almost everywhere anyway. And frequently already dual-up as not just disabled facilities but baby and toddler changing facilities too.
Ensuring the premise has sufficient neutral facilities for anyone who requires them is a superior solution to compromising the women's facilities, and ensures everyone's requirements are met.
“…will Sir Keir Starmer ensure the candidate for the by-election is from an all women shortlist.”
Seems like there would be an obvious route for Burnham in that case.
The header from @Cyclefree would be volcanic - I’m thinking Thera, maybe Deccan Traps?
Ha ha! There would not in fact be any sort of route for Burnham, no matter how much mascara he wears, because the Labour Party changed its own rules quietly and without fuss shortly after the Supreme Court judgment in April to state that only women - real ones - (not men claiming to be women) could be in all-women shortlists or other Labour Party positions reserved for women.
Other organisations bewailing how difficult it is to understand the judgment might learn from this.
That is the good news. Party in government understands the importance of complying with the law, even if some of its own Ministers say the opposite to the courts (yes, I'm looking at you Bridget Phillipson).
The bad news is that it opens the way for twits like Lucy Powell.
Has the Labour Party updated its own policy documents to say that men in dresses are not women?
They seem to be taking their own pretty time over updating the official government guidance on the subject.
Er ..... yes they are. Because they are cowards. Or they don't want to admit that the women who challenged them were right.
At any event, the guidance is not law and cannot change it, the judgment is clear, the law is effective now and has been in fact since 2010 and on toilets for years before that (since 1992) and quite a few bodies have started complying with it including, amusingly, NHS Fife, which is also spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayers money arguing the opposite.
Don't forget the trans men who now have to go into women's toilets, some of whom look exactly like cis men. I'm sure that will cause no problems whatsoever.
Men don’t care who goes in their toilets.
Cat Man was talking about trans men, people who were born female but now look male, going into women’s toilets.
And… Speak for yourself. I would be unnerved if a woman or someone presenting as a woman came into the men’s.
..The Times has been passed a copy of the final guidance, which aims to preserve the dignity and safety of women, by Whitehall figures who are concerned that Labour is deliberately delaying publication to avoid a potential political backlash...
..(the guidance) also states that transgender people could be barred from single-sex services even when their biological sex matches, such if a trans man, who is biologically female but is “perceived” as a man, attempted to use a women’s changing room. It says that they can be barred because they are likely to be seen by others as the opposite sex..
That's literally what the Supreme Court said, yes.
Fortunately sex-neutral alternatives exist for the few individuals who can't use either main facility.
...unfortunately, the final guidance (recently leaked) states that sex-neutral alternatives need not be provided if the cost is prohibitive. So a woman who has had a sex-change and now looks like a man
I) cannot legally use the male toilet, because their birth sex is female Ii) cannot legally use the female toilet, because their appearance is male Iii) cannot legally use the sex-neutral or disabled toilet, because there isn't one
Without overtaxing my swiss-cheese memory overmuch, I can think of a Caffe Nero and another coffee shop in my town that is covered by this.
“…will Sir Keir Starmer ensure the candidate for the by-election is from an all women shortlist.”
Seems like there would be an obvious route for Burnham in that case.
The header from @Cyclefree would be volcanic - I’m thinking Thera, maybe Deccan Traps?
Ha ha! There would not in fact be any sort of route for Burnham, no matter how much mascara he wears, because the Labour Party changed its own rules quietly and without fuss shortly after the Supreme Court judgment in April to state that only women - real ones - (not men claiming to be women) could be in all-women shortlists or other Labour Party positions reserved for women.
Other organisations bewailing how difficult it is to understand the judgment might learn from this.
That is the good news. Party in government understands the importance of complying with the law, even if some of its own Ministers say the opposite to the courts (yes, I'm looking at you Bridget Phillipson).
The bad news is that it opens the way for twits like Lucy Powell.
Has the Labour Party updated its own policy documents to say that men in dresses are not women?
They seem to be taking their own pretty time over updating the official government guidance on the subject.
Er ..... yes they are. Because they are cowards. Or they don't want to admit that the women who challenged them were right.
At any event, the guidance is not law and cannot change it, the judgment is clear, the law is effective now and has been in fact since 2010 and on toilets for years before that (since 1992) and quite a few bodies have started complying with it including, amusingly, NHS Fife, which is also spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayers money arguing the opposite.
Don't forget the trans men who now have to go into women's toilets, some of whom look exactly like cis men. I'm sure that will cause no problems whatsoever.
Men don’t care who goes in their toilets.
Cat Man was talking about trans men, people who were born female but now look male, going into women’s toilets.
And… Speak for yourself. I would be unnerved if a woman or someone presenting as a woman came into the men’s.
Generally, men don’t care if a “trans man” (a woman dressing male) goes into the men’s room.
Go to any nightclub and you’ll find women dressed very much as women using the men’s room because they don’t have to queue.
“…will Sir Keir Starmer ensure the candidate for the by-election is from an all women shortlist.”
Seems like there would be an obvious route for Burnham in that case.
The header from @Cyclefree would be volcanic - I’m thinking Thera, maybe Deccan Traps?
Ha ha! There would not in fact be any sort of route for Burnham, no matter how much mascara he wears, because the Labour Party changed its own rules quietly and without fuss shortly after the Supreme Court judgment in April to state that only women - real ones - (not men claiming to be women) could be in all-women shortlists or other Labour Party positions reserved for women.
Other organisations bewailing how difficult it is to understand the judgment might learn from this.
That is the good news. Party in government understands the importance of complying with the law, even if some of its own Ministers say the opposite to the courts (yes, I'm looking at you Bridget Phillipson).
The bad news is that it opens the way for twits like Lucy Powell.
Has the Labour Party updated its own policy documents to say that men in dresses are not women?
They seem to be taking their own pretty time over updating the official government guidance on the subject.
Er ..... yes they are. Because they are cowards. Or they don't want to admit that the women who challenged them were right.
At any event, the guidance is not law and cannot change it, the judgment is clear, the law is effective now and has been in fact since 2010 and on toilets for years before that (since 1992) and quite a few bodies have started complying with it including, amusingly, NHS Fife, which is also spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayers money arguing the opposite.
Don't forget the trans men who now have to go into women's toilets, some of whom look exactly like cis men. I'm sure that will cause no problems whatsoever.
Men don’t care who goes in their toilets.
Cat Man was talking about trans men, people who were born female but now look male, going into women’s toilets.
And… Speak for yourself. I would be unnerved if a woman or someone presenting as a woman came into the men’s.
Trans men can use sex-neutral toilets like disabled etc toilets. Its really not that complicated.
I can't think of anywhere I've ever been in a long time that hasn't got sex-neutral toilets available.
No reason to make the whole women's toilets be compromised by men with penises to prevent a few individuals from using neutral facilities.
No, they can't. Disabled [sic] toilets are very often key-access only these days, to stop abuse and overuse by able people.
Not all disabilities are visible and if premises have an obligation to provide neutral facilities they either need to remove that key or offer it to anyone who requires it, such as an individual who needs the neutral facility, or produce extra facilities.
Perhaps you could make trans people wear an armband identifying themselves as trans, so that they can access key-entry loos?
“…will Sir Keir Starmer ensure the candidate for the by-election is from an all women shortlist.”
Seems like there would be an obvious route for Burnham in that case.
The header from @Cyclefree would be volcanic - I’m thinking Thera, maybe Deccan Traps?
Ha ha! There would not in fact be any sort of route for Burnham, no matter how much mascara he wears, because the Labour Party changed its own rules quietly and without fuss shortly after the Supreme Court judgment in April to state that only women - real ones - (not men claiming to be women) could be in all-women shortlists or other Labour Party positions reserved for women.
Other organisations bewailing how difficult it is to understand the judgment might learn from this.
That is the good news. Party in government understands the importance of complying with the law, even if some of its own Ministers say the opposite to the courts (yes, I'm looking at you Bridget Phillipson).
The bad news is that it opens the way for twits like Lucy Powell.
Has the Labour Party updated its own policy documents to say that men in dresses are not women?
They seem to be taking their own pretty time over updating the official government guidance on the subject.
Er ..... yes they are. Because they are cowards. Or they don't want to admit that the women who challenged them were right.
At any event, the guidance is not law and cannot change it, the judgment is clear, the law is effective now and has been in fact since 2010 and on toilets for years before that (since 1992) and quite a few bodies have started complying with it including, amusingly, NHS Fife, which is also spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayers money arguing the opposite.
Don't forget the trans men who now have to go into women's toilets, some of whom look exactly like cis men. I'm sure that will cause no problems whatsoever.
Under the SC ruling or the EHRC interim guidance (I forget which), it is specifically stated that female-to-male trans people who now look like men are forbidden from going into the men's toilet (because their birth sex is female) AND ALSO forbidden from going into the ladies' toilet (because their appearance may constitute a threat to the privacy/dignity/safety of women).
Is the toilet guidance envisaged to require active enforcement? Eg people whose job it is to police the facilities from a gender perspective?
House prices are too high because demand exceeds supply. Supply therefore needs to rise, ie build more. But private sector operators (quite rationally) won't do this because although for us, society, the economy, prices are too high and need to fall, for them prices are too low and need to rise in order to generate a satisfactory return over the cost of construction (given the low interest rate era is over and all the inflation we've had recently). That's the essential problem. The best way forward imo other than loosening planning regulation (which is needed) is direct government investment at scale. A major build programme of council/social housing. Break the impasse, stimulate the economy, solve the housing problem, in the longer term free up private resource for things more productive than residential property. Let's do that.
You're half right, and half wrong.
You're bang on about supply and demand, and about why the private sector is reluctant to build.
However, the government building a load of houses which are too expensive is the wrong solution. That just means the government burning cash it hasn't got, at a time when government borrowing is almost as expensive as household borrowing, because the government is already borrowing far too much.
The correct solution is to cut the cost of building houses until we are happy with where we are on the supply/demand curve.
Three parts to this:
Nuke planning from orbit. Zoning and maximum density regs are all that's needed (we should be forcing builders to build far fewer homes per acre, rather than cramming as many as possible into a site, if we want a pleasant built environment). Return building regs to where they were 30 years ago. Getting compliance costs (eg building inspectors) down (see also the current stupidity over landfill taxes for hardcore).
Most of the increased cost is driven by the fact that building regs have tightened enormously over the last 30 years, as successive governments have assumed that all the stuff they are asking for is cost free. It really isn't (ask my parents, who, for instance, got the privilege of installing a sprinkler system into their modest 4 bed new build house, because Welsh buildings regs require it for every new house).
Comments
The other day I posted some stuff on how a religious belief that A/C Bad conflicts with the requirements for ventilation, a strange War On Windows, the post Grenfell requirements for simple evacuation….
These sum up to make it very difficult to build a block of flats that stay at a liveable temperature and provide easy egress in the event of a fire.
Another insane one is the equalising upwards of the cost of landfill for soil and rumble - which adds tens of thousands for building a single house.
For added comedy, an objection to a reservoir proposed near Didcot is that digging the material for the embankments will cause environmental damage. Joined up thinking - soil and rubble from….
https://builtplace.com/still-searching-for-success/
https://bsky.app/profile/resi-analyst.bsky.social
And of course I am all on board with MaxH's simple and excellent suggestion of renaming the Circle Line to the Spiral Line. That's much more exciting.
This is like the Central Powers in 1917, demanding the cession of huge tracts of unconquered France, and the reduction of France to satellite status, in return for peace. Quite unrelated to realities on the battlefield.
The more interesting question is what I call the Great Labour Divide - which members of the current government are too stupid or brainwashed by socialist garbage to realise this, and which are cynically feeding the Labour Party members and backbenchers what they want to hear for their career advantage, though they know that they are condemning the country to stagnation and decline.
I think Reeves is in the former camp and Bell, the real chancellor, in the latter, but I could be wrong.
Let's build some 'owses ffs. (Bob Crow)
And as far as I know London branches of Gail’s also are equipped with their own facilities and so the chances of finding one of their staff squatting in the corner of a carriage on the Bakerloo line are also slim.
Their own think tanks, which helped develop what was intended to be Labour's planning reform, said precisely that.
At the first hint of pushback, Rayner et al basically folded.
They are now taking baby steps to resuscitate bits of the policy, but it's desperately slow going.
I had a boss from the US who said ‘performance talks, bullshit walks’ Labour are the latter currently.
The video is really instructive. Look at the extra hazard created by those cars parked on DYL opposite the junction, and also by the parking bays by the entrance to the one way forcing turning vehicles to cut the corner.
I think there's probably also a factor of wide A pillars in the SUV he is driving.
https://www.itv.com/news/2025-11-20/children-in-need-boss-quits-after-conviction-for-crashing-into-cyclist
The location is here, at the end of the High Street.
https://maps.app.goo.gl/JpK7yU8EPD1MiuKM6
The cost of land is artificially high because getting planning consent adds a 0 to the price of the land versus the exact same land without consent.
Revert back to our 1930s planning laws and we could lower the cost of land by roughly 90%, which would considerably lower the cost of construction, even without tackling any of the myriad of other costs that could also be tackled.
The situation is likely to get much worse, the major memory manufacturers have already pre-sold their entire production capacity for 2026. It's so bad there's a rumour going around that NVidia and AMD are going to drop production of their cheaper GPUs to conserve memory for the higher end models, and those will be getting a significant price increase.
However the issue for London is similar, there is simply not enough land being used. Our population has grown this century by 20% and London has grown in population proportionately with that, but London's area has not risen in proportion with the growth of population.
The land assigned for London should grow by approximately 20% and all that land should be used for construction, without restrictions beyond building to code. Every year that our population rises, then cities and towns should be growing proportionately with our population growth - choking off growth might have made sense when our population was stable but it is utterly insane when we have a rising population.
Don't like it? Don't have a rising population. But we need homes for the millions already here even if population growth stopped in full, tonight.
PS liberalising construction and planning was done to a great extent in Tokyo [which has a rising population despite their nationwide declining population] which saw people building up, not just out, as with liberal planning laws they could build well (to codes still) without begging neighbours or officials for permission first. Building up, like that, is another solution for London that is also needed. It is everything that is required not either this or that alone as the problem is too severe to not throw everything at it.
Obviously, for legal reasons, it is important for me to state that I never participated in such an irresponsible activity, but I heard from a friend* that one year they got two loops in before the police cleared them out.
*I clearly admonished this friend for their nefarious tendencies.
Private sector operators will do that if there's competition.
If anyone can build a home and make a profit, then better to make some profit than no profit and any skilled tradesperson could venture into construction.
In most countries with liberal planning laws houses are constructed more one at a time, rapidly and individually, by small firms. Not monolithic uniform blocs being controlled by housing behemoths.
I was thus disappointed that what became the Suffragette line wasn’t called the Goblin line.
If sales on a site slow down then they will literally stop work on the site until sales pick up and it makes sense to finish the next set of houses.
If you want large house building you need the Government, housing associations or pension funds to start building. Personally I would be looking at how pension funds could build more rental properties
Despite the fact that post-WWII we needed to replace homes destroyed or damaged in the Blitz, and this century we've had rapidly growing population.
I wonder what could have changed to harm our construction since the 1930s and what we could look at fixing to get back to those rates of growth?
https://www.gov.uk/government/news/housebuilding-around-train-stations-will-be-given-default-yes
https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/reforms-to-the-statutory-consultee-system
For example.
This, and far more, should have started a year and a half ago, of course.
If they'd really wanted to get building going, they'd have given local authorities enhanced compulsory purchase powers, and started to reverse the long decline in local authority housing.
And massively reformed building regs for new build.
You will be pleased to know that BA classifies Die Hard as a Christmas movie…
What a bloody mess. And, if you do get permission then they steal one house in three for lowlife scrotes. You really don't have to be as thick as Angela Rayner not to want to engage with the process. In a village close to me one family tried to donate a field for "affordable housing" but wanted 1 of the 10 houses for their own family. The way the planning officers spoke to them to their faces and of them behind their backs you would think they were wanting to open a nonce factory.
I am no fan of Nigel but I really do want to put an end to this bullshit about affordable housing, the biggest obstacle towards affordable housing in England today.
Burnham is a big figure in the Greater Manchester area with a strong reputation - it's no surprise Labour wins the mayoralty in Manchester, but his wins have been extremely comfortable, Manchester is broadly seen as a success amongst UK cities, and most are clearly happy with what he's doing.
In Norwich, not so much. People know the name, but he's Mr Manchester, not Mr Norwich. Greens came a clear second in Norwich South in 2024 and are polling well (oddly less sign in local by-elections, but their tails are up). There's an obvious anti-carpetbagger campaign they could run, and frankly I'd not fancy it if I were Burnham. There's surely a better option with an ally in the Greater Manchester area.
On the Lewis/Streeting rivalry, from the outside it looks like one of those personality clashes you quite often see where the two people fail to see how similar their personalities are. They are clearly from different wings, but the shared personality trait is "quite pugnacious, bit of a knob". One suspects Streeting has more going on between the ears, but they are both cut from not dissimilar cloth.
The TL;DR is that the EHRC have accepted that they can't police single sex spaces via paperwork (it's legal to change gender markers on all common forms of photo ID) so have instead written guidance that allows policing of single sex spaces (not just toilets) by *appearance*.
Essentially anyone who doesn't conform to heteronormative beauty standards can be challenged and excluded. Can we see how this is an unworkable disaster?
My guess is the number of women 5'10" or over exceeds the number of trans women by an order of magnitude, not to mention all the butch lesbians with short hair (Hannah Botterman, the cis female England rugby player, has commented on being 'afraid to go to the toilet alone' now), plus the number of post-menopausal women who look less feminine as they age, due to lower levels of estrogen (if you want examples of older ladies who would definitely be challenged under the new guidance, look no further than the ones who brought the FWS case to the supreme court!).
The result of the guidance, if passed, would be a law that enforces heteronormative beauty standards on cis women, and enables the harassment of any who don't conform. This will be an order of magnitude greater than the number of non-passing trans women who get harassed, while under the new guidance, passing trans women would basically invoke passing privilege and be ignored in most circumstances, as the exclusion is de facto based on appearance rather than legal status.
Usually I bang on about trans rights here, not because I enjoy it but because one particular poster has a monomania for bringing it up at all opportunities, and I feel the need to tell the other side of the story.
But the real victims, by an order of magnitude, of the new guidance (if it were passed) would be cis women, who will be harassed for being too tall, too butch, or not feminine enough.
I cannot stress this point enough - in a desperate attempt to force trans women out of public life, the EHRC are happy to cause enormous collateral damage to many, many more cis women who don't meet arbitrary standards of femininity. And that's before you get into the flagrant human rights violations and contradictions with other laws and judgements, which will keep the lawyers busy for years.
If such guidance were passed, the only way I can think of for businesses and service providers to avoid lawsuits from angry cis women policed out of female spaces on the basis of appearance, would be to make almost all spaces and services unisex.
It has been dubbed a "misogynist's charter". https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/trans-supreme-court-ehrc-single-sex-b2868933.html
Nobody who supports women's rights (and here I mean cis women) could possibly be in favour of it. Unless, of course, they were driven mad by the trans debate and are willing to accept the harassment of cis women as collateral damage.
And… Speak for yourself. I would be unnerved if a woman or someone presenting as a woman came into the men’s.
It's the council houses of the 1920s and 1930s which have survived en masse, plus the relatively few middle class turn of the century stone villas and between-wars bungalows (the former of which often show structural issues because of skimped foundations).
A simple example - the regulations on not using A//C
Now that solar is all over the place - do what I did. Solar runs the Air Source heat pump*
Hilariously, the government legislated to encourage this - equipment and install is VAT free.
But the planners are trying to prevent A/C because “Luxury”
With A/C, you don’t need every flat to have multiple vistas to get ventilation (which doesn’t help once temps go over 25c, anyway).
This means you can build flats in the classic linear block - two lines of flats, either side of a long, straight corridor.
The corridor ends (at both ends) in a stairwell and lifts (if required).
So the resulting block of flats is
- denser without reducing space per flat.
- simpler and cheaper to build
- rooms don’t have funny shapes, which make them feel larger
- meets the fire regulations, easily
- When temperatures go above 25c, comfortable. Which is a serious issue for the elderly, and those with respiratory issues.
*reversible A/C
To increase home building, reduce costs and increase competition.
Don’t grant local monopolies to housing giants. Layout towns, and sell the plots for each street to different companies. This is what the Victorians did.
Gender segregated toilets go back (at least) to the Victorian era, and masculine looking women, feminine looking men and so on go back to time immemorial. There has always been potential for someone to complain that another person is using facilities intended for people of another sex, and for this to cause embarrassment when it turns out they are indeed using the correct facilities.
Has it ever been terribly common in practice? I suspect not. Is it becoming more common? Perhaps marginally. But there's always a tendency of each generation to believe that their dilemmas, complications and moral panics are all terribly new and complex, when really they just aren't.
Trans people could be banned from single-sex spaces based on how they look
https://www.thetimes.com/uk/politics/article/trans-women-only-space-guidance-tmrm9f3m5
..The Times has been passed a copy of the final guidance, which aims to preserve the dignity and safety of women, by Whitehall figures who are concerned that Labour is deliberately delaying publication to avoid a potential political backlash...
..(the guidance) also states that transgender people could be barred from single-sex services even when their biological sex matches, such if a trans man, who is biologically female but is “perceived” as a man, attempted to use a women’s changing room. It says that they can be barred because they are likely to be seen by others as the opposite sex..
A whole lot of what came before it was cleared and replaced with much-improved newer stock that replaced the older stock.
Obviously technology and standards have moved on since then, and that should continue, but that's not the reason those rates have never been seen again.
Of course, they had planning systems and planning applications, including changes to existing buildings. And especially if they affected the neighbours! The records of the Dean of Guild Court in, for instance, Edinburgh are absolutely wonderful stuff, full of applications and drawings from the late C18 onwards.
I can't think of anywhere I've ever been in a long time that hasn't got sex-neutral toilets available.
No reason to make the whole women's toilets be compromised by men with penises to prevent a few individuals from using neutral facilities.
There are at least a few people in the Labour Party who get that, I think. The issue is that Labour is too instinctively squeamish to be too radical in its solutions to that. Generally speaking, Labour (as with all mainstream parties) has been on board with the process state and the expansion of regulation over the past 30 years or so. As a result, they hope that they can fix or at least mitigate the issue by tinkering around the edges and pulling a few legislative levers, where the problem is much more deep-seated than that.
Immigration is a similar one, but Mahmood appears to be the closest person in Labour to “getting it” at the moment.
Plus they're there for one reason. Not for getting trans warriors out of the assorted holes into which they have entrenched themselves.
I think Tim Farron was the chair that year
Fortunately sex-neutral alternatives exist for the few individuals who can't use either main facility.
RFM: 32% (-1)
GRN: 18% (+1)
CON: 17% (+1)
LAB: 16% (+1)
LDM: 11% (=)
SNP: 2% (-1)
Via @FindoutnowUK, 19 Nov.
Changes w/ 12 Nov
The reason I mentioned the Victorians was they rolled out the system on an epic, epic scale.
They also, in London, solved the spoil removal problem. By building retaining walls along the Thames. The areas being the embankments was filled in with the material excavated in building houses. Resulting in new *land* along the a Thames. Which was sold at a profit. Oh, and also massively reduced flooding and made the Thames more navigable.
Mind you the spokesman from the Environment Agency doesn't seem to have a much better idea of reality than Sarah.
Lindsay Halligan, the interim US attorney appointed by Trump with no relevant experience, has completely screwed this up and the time bar for any new proceedings has now expired. She is in a world of trouble.
Oh wait, it's FoN using their interesting methodology. Not saying they are wrong, but...
Next.
"Find Out Now
@FindoutnowUK
Find Out Now voting intention:
🟦 Reform UK: 32% (-1)
🟢 Greens: 18% (+1)
🔵 Conservatives: 17% (+1)
🔴 Labour: 16% (+1)
🟠 Lib Dems: 11% (-)
Changes from 12th November
[Find Out Now, 19th November, N=2,566]"
https://x.com/FindoutnowUK/status/1991483230156177538
Which already exist almost everywhere anyway. And frequently already dual-up as not just disabled facilities but baby and toddler changing facilities too.
Ensuring the premise has sufficient neutral facilities for anyone who requires them is a superior solution to compromising the women's facilities, and ensures everyone's requirements are met.
Good line. Comey case is the "four seasons total landscaping of prosecutions."
https://bsky.app/profile/rparloff.bsky.social/post/3m5zj6dz2mc2t
I) cannot legally use the male toilet, because their birth sex is female
Ii) cannot legally use the female toilet, because their appearance is male
Iii) cannot legally use the sex-neutral or disabled toilet, because there isn't one
Without overtaxing my swiss-cheese memory overmuch, I can think of a Caffe Nero and another coffee shop in my town that is covered by this.
So far today's FoN has been posted twice (you were first) only 4 more to go.
Go to any nightclub and you’ll find women dressed very much as women using the men’s room because they don’t have to queue.
You're bang on about supply and demand, and about why the private sector is reluctant to build.
However, the government building a load of houses which are too expensive is the wrong solution. That just means the government burning cash it hasn't got, at a time when government borrowing is almost as expensive as household borrowing, because the government is already borrowing far too much.
The correct solution is to cut the cost of building houses until we are happy with where we are on the supply/demand curve.
Three parts to this:
Nuke planning from orbit. Zoning and maximum density regs are all that's needed (we should be forcing builders to build far fewer homes per acre, rather than cramming as many as possible into a site, if we want a pleasant built environment).
Return building regs to where they were 30 years ago.
Getting compliance costs (eg building inspectors) down (see also the current stupidity over landfill taxes for hardcore).
Most of the increased cost is driven by the fact that building regs have tightened enormously over the last 30 years, as successive governments have assumed that all the stuff they are asking for is cost free. It really isn't (ask my parents, who, for instance, got the privilege of installing a sprinkler system into their modest 4 bed new build house, because Welsh buildings regs require it for every new house).