(This is also why we have expensive electricity, because people oppose building any infrastructure. I'm coming round to the idea that there should just be county-by-county referendums where people have to pick either blanket allowing energy development or having a bill surcharge.)
The county council covering the Cambridge area is actually based in Peterborough, and so effectively controls a lot of the countryside around Cambridge, as it is in charge of transport. So arguably the lack of development could be their fault as well.
Supposedly the government is plan is to reduce everywhere to one layer of local government (currently Cambridge is covered by both a county and district council). TBH the areas which are currently unitary seem to work a bit better but there's still massive opposition to building.
From the outside looking in, rural UK council politics seems like the epitome of “I got mine so bug off”. I think this is one reason why London is becoming a super hub (among other reasons). London broke the ice and now they are trying to keep progressing but physical distance is becoming a limiting factor. Other municipalities will need to embrace change if they want to keep developing into a place where people want to live and work.
The bigger problems in the UK are business rates (extortionate), profiteering by landlords and land owners, insanely expensive utilities, crumbling physical infrastructure, and Brexit.
We could have had a government that invested/fixed in all of those things, but the big landords and land owners decided they didn't like that idea. They'd prefer to keep the country struggling and backward, because it appeals to their sense of aristocratic self-importance.
A lot of Cambridgeshire is frankly flat, ugly monoculture.
Labour just got into government and literally the third bullet point in their manifesto is:
* Reform our planning rules to build the railways, roads, labs and 1.5 million homes we need and develop a new 10-year infrastructure strategy.
So i would hope it's not political suicide to follow through on that
Major problems are rarely solved with one fell swoop, but instead thousands and thousands of small improvements.
I live in the countryside (I live in a small flat btw so I don't care about property prices) and I don't want everywhere in the country built over, which seems to be something here everyone wants for some bonkers reason. If you want to live in a concrete jungle that is fine, I and many others don't. I moved out of Manchester because I hated it there.
Importing cheap foreign labour from the third world was always one of the goals of Brexit. This game gets played over and over - import cheap labour to keep wages down, lament about how the country is being invaded, and then blame immigrants for lack of investment, corporate profiteering, and other structural policy problems.
That does also make utilities easier, but it's not magic… well, you could say it is but only in the sense of Penn and Teller: lots of effort that most people don't ever think of that already happened before the audience started watching.
There was problems with houses becoming to expensive (there are multitude of reasons for this) while we were still in the EU. Part of this was also do with the monetary policy of central banks after the 2008. Part of this is there is a shortage of housing. There was problems with utilities well before we left the EU, because of mismanagement.
This is all a deflection anyway from the point that high levels of immigration increase demand. Unless you don't believe in supply and demand, which is basic economics. BTW I don't believe that immigration is the only reason there is high demand, there are others. But it certainly doesn't help that we have record numbers of people entering the UK.
*Supply* and demand.
Immigrants supply, they don't just demand.
Immigrants (everywhere, not just to the UK) have a slightly higher supply-to-demand ratio than locals, owing to many of them not starting at age 0; likewise emigration tends to means supply going down faster than demand.
Berlin wall was there to keep people in.
Why is there a massive shortfall then when we've had the largest amount of immigration then?
Why was there a shortfall previously when we were still in the EU?
> Immigrants (everywhere, not just to the UK) have a slightly higher supply-to-demand ratio than locals, owing to many of them not starting at age 0; likewise emigration tends to means supply going down faster than demand.
You can assert this but I don't believe it for a second. It is pretty much accepted by anyone that is doing any stats on this that demand is increased by immigration.
https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/mi...
https://www.migrationwatchuk.org/briefing-paper/514/record-n...
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...
Almost everything says that immigration has raised prices on rent and buying (which is a proxy for demand). It depends on the area because each area has different rates of immigration.
So your statement doesn't pass the sniff test.
> Berlin wall was there to keep people in.
Not sure what this has to do with anything.
Of housing and public infrastructure in the UK? Politics: Green belt and similar planning restrictions, austerity, Thatcherism, privatisation, restricting local councils' ability to own and supply council housing.
> You can assert this but I don't believe it for a second. It is pretty much accepted by anyone that is doing any stats on this that demand is increased by immigration.
And supply. Not at the expense of supply.
The figures here show that in 2011 (when it was measured as "country of birth" rather than "nationality") were 9:1 ratio of locals to migrants in construction. The overall ratio for the entire population in that year was 8.4 to one.
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populati...
Both have changed since then, of course; between the statistical value being measured (nationality vs country of birth, Brexit, Covid, austerity), this is just to give a flavour for a specific date when the numbers were easier to compare.
> Not sure what this has to do with anything.
You don't understand that keeping people from leaving was because of the economic catastrophe that the people in charge knew would have happened if they didn't keep people from leaving?
So you don't know. All you have done is provide a list of grievances with previous governments.
Even if I accepted all of this being true, then having more migrant construction workers wouldn't solve these problems anyway.
> And supply. Not at the expense of supply.
Yet the sources I cited indicated the opposite. You constantly assert that but there is no data I've seen that proves that. Supply of labour != supply of houses. It can certainly help, but they may not be directly proportional.
I also don't care whether it does increase supply. I don't think we should keep on constantly importing people at the expense of everything else to get the GDP numbers up a few percent.
There are other problems with high amounts of immigration that I have seen up close because I've lived in poorer areas. There is a lack of integration in the communities, language barriers and it causes tensions.
I used to be an expat. So you tend to actually notice this a lot more because you see your own country with a fresh set of eyes.
Additionally none of this matters now. The UK has left the EU. The situation has changed. If we can't import labour now (there is no reason we can't issue temporary visas), then demand has to be decreased. Like it or not, however much you want to dodge it, immigration has to be curbed to help lower demand.
> You don't understand that keeping people from leaving was because of the economic catastrophe that the people in charge knew would have happened if they didn't keep people from leaving?
Are you suggesting we should have kept people from leaving by force?
Thinking of "surely this is obvious" on the other thread, to me it seemed obvious that this is a list of things which caused the results, i.e. they are the why.
> Yet the sources I cited indicated the opposite
You seem to have difficulty understanding what I'm saying here, and I don't know why.
Your citations were about demand. Demand is not what I am disputing. You said yourself "supply and demand", but seem to be blind to half the equation.
> I also don't care whether it does increase supply.
Ah, that explains it.
You're arguing in bad faith.
The UK may decide less immigration, or skill-weighted immigration, or lots more indiscriminate immigration - but the vote should be in the Mother of Parliaments, where else?
Scale issue here: if "everywhere in the country" were build up to the population density of Manchester city, the UK would house 1.2 billion people.
I'm fairly confident there are not 1.2 billion people who currently want to live in the UK.
It's not Poe's law, but it's close: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
β) 1.2 billion demonstrates there's enough room for 90% of the UK to be completely empty at the same time as the population doubles.
Everyone wants more Z, Y, X. Nobody wants to change where they are to support it. This is why even areas that redevelop in places that are friendly to it, take decades.
The "old" solution was to just build a whole new factory town elsewhere, but that doesn't work as well, and especially doesn't work when you're not building megafactories that employ entire cities.
Get a grip of bat and heritage protections which slow everything down by months or years.
They could do this is one fell swoop with a single bill by the Parliament that dissolves these local councils, and land owners the right (and freedom) to build whatever they want on land they own.
Building safety codes would still apply; but zoning permitting could be erased in one fell swoop with a single bill.
Just change default NO to default YES, BUT..
I don’t think there should be any restriction on what people can build.
You could have a rule on bad smell, that applies to equally to everyone, so a farm would be legal, if they can control the smell.
Egg-laying chicken farm in between two multi-family units would be perfectly legal. I see this as a good thing.
Noise pollution? Chickens don't have much of a reputation for being quiet.
Also various farming can have quite different hours compared to residential living.
- not in the end a loss (banks taken into government ownership eventually sold for about the acquisition price
- bank shareholders lost their money
- you don't want to see everything turned into Northern Rock bank runs
They ended up with 100% of Northern Rock and Bradford and Bingley; 84% of RBS, and 43% of Lloyds.
The history of Anglo-Irish Bank is an even more interesting story; Sean Quinn is one of the few bankers who was actually jailed, even if only for a short time.
> [The TCPA] moved Britain from a system where almost any development was permitted anywhere, to one where development was nearly always prohibited. Since [it] was introduced in 1947, private housebuilding has never reached Victorian levels, let alone the record progress achieved just before the Second World War.
> Today, local authorities still have robust powers to reject new developments, and little incentive to accept them. Historically, local governments encouraged development because their tax bases grew in line with the extra value created, but this incentive has been eroded by successive reforms that have centralised and capped local governments’ tax-raising powers.
Australia 2,303 214
New Zealand 2,174 202
United States 2,164 201
Canada 1,948 181
UK 818 76
Just looking at wikipedia population and area (and a very simple scaling)
% area housing = area_house * population
aus 0.08%
nz 0.42%
us 1.82%
can 0.08%
uk 2.14%
When you consider population density, UK >> US >> NZ > Canada > Australia.
You would _expect_ countries with much more wide open space to have bigger homes, and the other nations homes aren't so big _when you consider their countries' size and population_.
The stagnation in other countries housing markets like the us is interesting, I don't know the answer but have they ever had social housing on the scale of the uk?
look at this chat - courtesy of perpexity.
United States 11,855 KWH China 5,474 Germany 6,483 Australia 7,000 (approximate based on recent trends) Singapore 9,000 (approximate based on recent trends) United Kingdom 4,701
Energy consumption of the uK is that of a poor developing country.
people will cite the size of uk homes due to lack of land as if you can't build houses with a lot of sq/ft - sq/m vertically ?
the only thing keeping uk afloat at the moment is the friendly immigration policy.
money doesn't move in capital markets but people would rather pump money into property.
https://energyforgrowth.org/article/how-does-energy-impact-e...
Just curious if you have knowledge about this subject or if you're just trying to block the conversation from going in directions you don't like
[EDIT: Having now reviewed the source that was provided, it certainly supports a drop in industrial production, but I'd be skeptical that it indicates "de-industrialization" ]
You might find that interesting. It's from the Adam smith institute. Central planning has been seriously damaging the UK since after ww2. Thatcher is blamed for destroying British industry. It started long before her.
[1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...
> • £25,000 starting salaries at traditional engineering firms
> • Exodus to consulting or finance just because it's compensated better
This is _exactly_ my career so far.
The key thing about the British economy is that while most things operate in a free market, construction is centrally planned by councillors who are incentivised to block most development. So the whole economy is struggling, but industries that need physical space are especially hard hit. Your local council can't block you from writing more code, but can stop you from building lab space near where people want to live and work.
My first job out of uni was in a wonderful small engineering firm in Cambridge. Lab space there is eye-wateringly expensive because it's illegal to build enough, so we were based in a makeshift lab in an attic next to the sewage works. I loved working there, but it shows that we're restricting our small businesses unnecessarily through our planning system.
The solution is frustratingly simple, but politically suicidal for any government that tried to implement it: just legalise development subject to basic design codes. I hope we see some planning reform before it's too late for our struggling innovation industries.