Solving level crossing problems in built up areas through wider urban redevelopment

[NotATrainspott]

That is potentially more acceptable, however you still need to watch for gotchas. Will the new properties be less valuable? Smaller gardens? Leasehold rather than freehold? Etc.

Overall on balance I think using CPOs for housing redevelopment simply isn't OK. There is enough farmland to build on, along railway lines where a new station could be added in many cases.

There's no fundamental reason why a redevelopment has to cause improper land title issues than any other new build development. Indeed, it might also provide an opportunity to fix some problems with existing titles. I believe the UK Government is now very keen on commonhold for new developments and has heavily restricted the eligibility of leasehold properties for the latest Help to Buy scheme.

With a proper architect designing the scheme, a denser development can be better in pretty much every way than the status quo. For instance, it is extremely land inefficient to have detached houses. There's a reason that places like the Edinburgh New Town have very few detached properties. Gaps between mass-built detached houses end up reduced to the legal minimum and are essentially non-spaces. You'd be able to get the bins through them, yes, but any windows end up looking straight at the wall of the house opposite. The only reason detached houses are built like this is that there's been an irrational price premium put on houses that can tick the 'detached' box even when they're the minimal distance from each other. On the same plot size you can fit in a terraced house with larger rooms without any loss of utility, while massively reducing the amount of heat loss to the outside. Terraces also reduce the amount of land required for access roads down to the bare minimum. An absurdly high proportion of the land in a new suburban development is just used for roads and parking, rather than critically-needed housing.

Gardens might be smaller, yes, but with the way that properties prices are going, people are going to end up redeveloping their gardens to make them smaller anyway. Every time someone has a grand idea to build a granny flat at the bottom of the garden and move their parents out of the big house into it, so that a younger growing family can afford to live in the big house, the amount of garden space available goes down. There have been all sorts of illegal shed constructions built across London to house desperate working people who need any sort of space they can afford. Nice big gardens cannot hold against market pressures forever.

Also, density does not mean there isn't any open space. Indeed, because you stack properties on top of each other, you can often end up with more land free for parks and so on. The critical problem for a lot of recent high density urban development is that they've shoehorned huge blocks of flats onto tiny, tiny plots of land because they've not been able to redevelop the wider area. You need to be building a lot of homes on a large plot before it becomes feasible to put in meaningful open space. There's plenty of templates around for what's possible. A popular arrangement in Georgian and Victorian times was to have a grass square or oval surrounded by terraced properties. Everyone in the nearby properties has the right to come and use the shared ground in the square/oval, which can be professionally maintained through management fees. It's a lot better than everyone putting down tiny squares of daft astroturf on the promise that they'll never need to mow their grass again (and then see weeds grow right through it!)

By building up and new, you have the chance to build shaded balconies for all the flats. These are now increasingly common in London as a low-energy, low-land take solution to providing fresh air and cooling to people in the city during the summer. Not redeveloping, and allowing the market to slowly subdivide all the properties in inappropriate ways, means no one will have an escape during a heatwave. In turn, that increases demand for air conditioning, with all the problems that brings.

You probably find that the highest percentage of regular rail users, particularly in a commuter place like Egham, are those living within close walking distance of the station, who have bought there specifically for that reason. Demolishing them for the convenience of the railway seems like a spectacular own goal against your customer base.

Em. If properties within walking distance of the station are desirable, because they're within walking distance of the station, then redeveloping to increase density means even more people will be able to have a property within walking distance of the station! It's not an own goal, but a triumphant result of the scheme. More people able to live within walking distance of the station means more railway passengers into the future, and fewer car journeys required for people to get to work in the morning.

Higher density does not mean it can only be flats. Townhouses and terraces can be provided too. You'd easily be able to provide all types of properties between a studio and a 5 bedroom townhouse (covering everyone from young graduates up to established families). Of course, a 5 bedroom terraced townhouse will cost a lot more to rent or buy than a studio, but that's true today already.

I agree with the sentiment, but such a scheme would primarily be for the convenience of road users.

They would be one of the beneficiaries. I think everyone tends to benefit from level crossing closures. They mean, for instance, that you can reliably run bus routes at peak times. We can sort out traffic lights and congestion with traffic priority measures and bus lanes, but you can't fix level crossings for buses alone. Footbridges are also going to be barriers to people crossing, even if they have ramps or lifts. If the town wished, it could even make the replaced railway crossing be a restricted access road at peak or all times so that only public and active transport, plus emergency vehicles, would be allowed to cross.

I don't think it is OK anywhere, but I refer you again to my point that the UK is not China (thank goodness), and what is acceptable differs between the two types of political administration. China is an authoritarian state where you exist at the behest of the Government. The UK is not.

But as I've mentioned upstream, we do use CPO powers in the UK. Every developed country uses CPO powers. Sometimes, the result of those CPO powers is that old housing is redeveloped into newer housing. That does not make us a China-style dictatorship. The UK is a democracy and in a democracy it is perfectly legitimate for the majority of voters to approve something which inconveniences a minority, up to a point. CPO power with the right to appropriate compensation is a fairly minimal inconvenience in the grand scheme of things. Political administrations across the length and breadth of these islands have used these powers over decades to provide everything from motorways to public transport improvements to schools to employment zones.

 

[Bletchleyite]

There's no fundamental reason why a redevelopment has to cause improper land title issues than any other new build development. Indeed, it might also provide an opportunity to fix some problems with existing titles. I believe the UK Government is now very keen on commonhold for new developments and has heavily restricted the eligibility of leasehold properties for the latest Help to Buy scheme.

Commonhold, while a better tenure for flats than leasehold, is inferior to freehold. And a flat is inferior to a house anyway.

Higher density does not mean it can only be flats. Townhouses and terraces can be provided too. You'd easily be able to provide all types of properties between a studio and a 5 bedroom townhouse (covering everyone from young graduates up to established families). Of course, a 5 bedroom terraced townhouse will cost a lot more to rent or buy than a studio, but that's true today already.

To be fair to you, 3 storey townhouses are quite a good use of space and do feature in many new developments.

They would be one of the beneficiaries. I think everyone tends to benefit from level crossing closures. They mean, for instance, that you can reliably run bus routes at peak times. We can sort out traffic lights and congestion with traffic priority measures and bus lanes, but you can't fix level crossings for buses alone. Footbridges are also going to be barriers to people crossing, even if they have ramps or lifts. If the town wished, it could even make the replaced railway crossing be a restricted access road at peak or all times so that only public and active transport, plus emergency vehicles, would be allowed to cross.

That's a case for burying the railway, though.

But as I've mentioned upstream, we do use CPO powers in the UK. Every developed country uses CPO powers. Sometimes, the result of those CPO powers is that old housing is redeveloped into newer housing. That does not make us a China-style dictatorship. The UK is a democracy and in a democracy it is perfectly legitimate for the majority of voters to approve something which inconveniences a minority, up to a point. CPO power with the right to appropriate compensation is a fairly minimal inconvenience in the grand scheme of things. Political administrations across the length and breadth of these islands have used these powers over decades to provide everything from motorways to public transport improvements to schools to employment zones.

We certainly have and use those powers, but using them simply for changing a load of perfectly good houses into a load of different houses is in my view not a valid use for those powers even if it is legal.

I think you are overtalking the use of the powers. I've certainly never heard of them being used to build a school - normally, schools are built with new developments. And I never, ever heard of them being used in recent years (I'm not talking of "slum clearance" as that was years ago and even then was fairly debatable) for simply replacing one type of housing with another.

 

[Meerkat]

And I never, ever heard of them being used in recent years (I'm not talking of "slum clearance" as that was years ago and even then was fairly debatable) for simply replacing one type of housing with another.

https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/sheerwater-regeneration-residents-say-councils-13810683

The council needs to buy 123 homes in Sheerwater, possibly under compulsory purchase orders (CPOs), to make way for the controversial regeneration scheme.

 

[Bletchleyite]

https://www.getsurrey.co.uk/news/surrey-news/sheerwater-regeneration-residents-say-councils-13810683

Thanks. That article nicely highlights why it is a bad idea and why CPOs should not be used in that manner, and so why the OP's scheme is a non-starter and not appropriate.

 

[Meerkat]

Thanks. That article nicely highlights why it is a bad idea and why CPOs should not be used in that manner, and so why the OP's scheme is a non-starter and not appropriate.

Does it? Sounds like they are getting pretty good offers, and it’s replacing an old and pretty ugly estate with a much better density.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Does it? Sounds like they are getting pretty good offers, and it’s replacing an old and pretty ugly estate with a much better density.

But the thing is people actually tend to like where they live (yes, even in sink estates). Better would be to provide grants to invest in the quality of the housing if that is necessary. But nobody can resist making a profit out of housing, local authorities included.

These are peoples' homes, not an investment mechanism.

Of course, Egham is hardly a sink estate, the homes look quite nice there, so you really are taking something in which people have significant emotional investment.

 

[Meerkat]

But the thing is people actually tend to like where they live (yes, even in sink estates). Better would be to provide grants to invest in the quality of the housing if that is necessary. But nobody can resist making a profit out of housing, local authorities included.

These are peoples' homes, not an investment mechanism.

Of course, Egham is hardly a sink estate, the homes look quite nice there, so you really are taking something in which people have significant emotional investment.

They are being offered cheaper houses in the same estate (which will be much cheaper to run).
Upgrading old housing is a very expensive and inefficient way of improving insulation etc.

 

[Taunton]

Back to crossings, it is notable, of the ones I'm familiar with (including the Richmond/Egham ones), that each generation of operational update gives longer road closure times than the one before. The old days where there was an individual crossing keeper, who could time it to the second in their box, have been replaced by CCTV from a centre where, purely for the railways' convenience, one operator is running multiple crossings. Then more recently we had the Obstacle Detector fiasco, where NR seemed to be ignoring the regular disruptive failures until local MPs and then the Sec of State had to get involved. Now that we have the paranoid standoff between NR and TOC over delay minutes charges if the train so much as gets a double yellow, no regard whatsoever is meanwhile given to delaying the local inhabitants. And then you have events like the complete incompetence at Athelney, near Taunton, ending up with the fatal crossing accident there.

 

[NotATrainspott]

Commonhold, while a better tenure for flats than leasehold, is inferior to freehold. And a flat is inferior to a house anyway.



To be fair to you, 3 storey townhouses are quite a good use of space and do feature in many new developments.



That's a case for burying the railway, though.



We certainly have and use those powers, but using them simply for changing a load of perfectly good houses into a load of different houses is in my view not a valid use for those powers even if it is legal.

I think you are overtalking the use of the powers. I've certainly never heard of them being used to build a school - normally, schools are built with new developments. And I never, ever heard of them being used in recent years (I'm not talking of "slum clearance" as that was years ago and even then was fairly debatable) for simply replacing one type of housing with another.

Commonhold is freehold but solving the problem of mutual title dependency. It's the solution for flats, where a freehold title creates a title defect as you cannot force the other freeholder(s) to resolve maintenance issues together. Scottish tenements are a sort of commonhold and it works just fine. Any annoyance caused by being made to pay for common repairs is massively outweighed by the benefit of being able to force your other title holders to pay their share!

As far as I'm aware, many modern developments of multiple separate houses in Scotland are also titled as a sort of tenement. This means that shared facilities (e.g. grassed areas or access roads) that will not or have not been adopted by the council can be managed between the owners on the estate. It seems quite possible that a denser, redeveloped area may be titled as a small number of commonhold/tenement properties. For instance, you'd probably need this if you had underground car parking underneath a terrace. The buildings along the street might be aesthetically and practically split up into separate blocks of flats or townhouses, but needing only one underground ramp and access system for all of them would save a lot of space and cost.

The benefits of fixing a level crossing are a case for fixing a level crossing. How you do this is beside the point, really. If the aim is fixing the crossing, then you need to come up with options. It is my belief that if NR, or some other development body, were bold enough to come up with a town centre redevelopment option to compare against burying/elevating the railway or doing nothing, that the redevelopment option would have the best BCR.

As Meerkat's link demonstrates, the principle of CPO as a solution for redevelopment of housing for better/more housing is already in use just along the road at Sheerwater in Woking. It's interesting to see this page, which seems to explain why the council is so keen. The before/after figures for the number of affordable homes is 448 and 523, but for private homes it's 125 and 619. More than that, the number of habitable rooms will go from 1189 to 1391 for affordable housing but from 410 to a massive 2346 for private housing. The council here are using CPO powers and they're getting away with it because they're diluting their council housing population with lots of large, private homes. They're looking at all the extra rates they'll get from all the new houses and how that'll help deliver essential council services. There doesn't seem to be any national infrastructure benefit at all, other than replacing some local facilities with better ones the new private residents would prefer. If it's not fair to do CPO to replace housing with more housing, then is Woking Borough Council doing the work of the devil?

Interesting to note that in the link posted above, the complaint is that the existing private owners want more money. They don't care about the principle of the scheme at all, it seems. As much as they might have cared about their (likely right-to-buy) private property, they really just care about the money.

Back to crossings, it is notable, of the ones I'm familiar with (including the Richmond/Egham ones), that each generation of operational update gives longer road closure times than the one before. The old days where there was an individual crossing keeper, who could time it to the second in their box, have been replaced by CCTV from a centre where, purely for the railways' convenience, one operator is running multiple crossings. Then more recently we had the Obstacle Detector fiasco, where NR seemed to be ignoring the regular disruptive failures until local MPs and then the Sec of State had to get involved. Now that we have the paranoid standoff between NR and TOC over delay minutes charges if the train so much as gets a double yellow, no regard whatsoever is meanwhile given to delaying the local inhabitants. And then you have events like the complete incompetence at Athelney, near Taunton, ending up with the fatal crossing accident there.

I wonder if some of it is that it isn't in NR's interest to have level crossings work any more efficiently. They're not going to be able to run any more paths over the crossing, and they bear the risk of anything going wrong. If they had the legal power to close the crossing, regardless of consequences for the local area, then they might well do it!

 

[zwk500]

At the fire station near us which has comparable wig-wags for when the fire engine is coming out, you see people driving past quite oblivious to them (including overtaking stopped vehicles) more often than not when activated.

That sounds like a matter of compliance not comprehension. Raise the number of penalty points for passing a wig wag to 9, then have ANPR cameras, and see how quickly it changes.

 

[Bletchleyite]

That sounds like a matter of compliance not comprehension. Raise the number of penalty points for passing a wig wag to 9, then have ANPR cameras, and see how quickly it changes.

Or just put traffic lights there, and other than the odd "amber gambler" people won't run them. I don't see loads of people running reds when driving, it's relatively rare, and if it does happen it's generally when it's only just gone red. I think I've seen people wilfully* running a red that wasn't "amber gambling" a low single figure of times in the 24 years I have been driving.

I do genuinely think there is a "psychological barrier" here and so that conventional lights genuinely would work better (by all means add a visible yellow camera to act as a visible deterrent to "amber-gambling" and to catch and penalise people who do it).

* Except where the lights were defective, and so people were treating them as a "give way", which I've seen (and done) slightly more than that, and I've also gone through one into the "overlap" to let an emergency services vehicle through.

 

[zwk500]

If they can read the Highway Code they can read the sign that tells them to stop when the lights flash!

Agreed.

Rather than move the platform they can also move the protecting signal back, which on old stations with long platforms can just be the signal move and some fencing rather than any building

Very few stations with level crossings in the overlap have platforms long enough to move the signal back far enough while maintaining sufficient operational length for the longest train.

 

[BrianW]

No end of lights, Highway Codes, penalty points, moved platforms will 'solve' this. People are people, fallible, selfish, 'deranged', distracted, foreign, ...
Maybe something more 'fail-safe' like a solid rising barrier referred to upthread will be effective? Is there evidence out there?
The costs of 'accidents' are substantial, including 'collateral damage' like mental health of traincrew, families, etc. Some kind of cost-benefit analysis required?

 

[Meerkat]

Agreed.

Very few stations with level crossings in the overlap have platforms long enough to move the signal back far enough while maintaining sufficient operational length for the longest train.

Really? In the London commuter zone maybe but in places where you have sprinters trundling around old main lines?

 

[zwk500]

No end of lights, Highway Codes, penalty points, moved platforms will 'solve' this. People are people, fallible, selfish, 'deranged', distracted, foreign, ...
Maybe something more 'fail-safe' like a solid rising barrier referred to upthread will be effective? Is there evidence out there?
The costs of 'accidents' are substantial, including 'collateral damage' like mental health of traincrew, families, etc. Some kind of cost-benefit analysis required?

Selfish people will chang their behaviour if it adversely impacts them. Penalty points and Camera enforcement achieve this.
A solid raising barrier could work, although it could easily have the undesirable impact of increasing danger to bystanders by ejecting debris across the road. It would also cost a vast amount to install, and would need to be capable of stopping a HGV. There's also the additional cost to the National Health Service of treating the resulting casualties of the car impacting the barrier.

Really? In the London commuter zone maybe but in places where you have sprinters trundling around old main lines?

A standard overlap is 180m. Very few stations have >200m long platforms that don't regularly see long trains call there. There are other options available, such as restricted overlaps, but these require restricted aspects to ensure the train stops, lengthening the run times of trains and impacting capacity.

 

[Meerkat]

A standard overlap is 180m. Very few stations have >200m long platforms that don't regularly see long trains call there. There are other options available, such as restricted overlaps, but these require restricted aspects to ensure the train stops, lengthening the run times of trains and impacting capacity.

Ok, there are a few around that look set back but only by 50m max.

 

[zwk500]

Ok, there are a few around that look set back but only by 50m max.

Sounds like a Restricted Overlap, or possibly there's some equipment that needs to be after the signal but before the crossing.

 

[HSTEd]

That sounds like a matter of compliance not comprehension. Raise the number of penalty points for passing a wig wag to 9, then have ANPR cameras, and see how quickly it changes.

Or the simple solution is to abolish these lights and fit conventional traffic lights.

We shouldn't have complexity in the Highway Code that doesn't need to be there.

We certainly shouldn't spend enormous sums fitting ANPR cameras to "catch people out" and destroy their lives when we can eliminate the comprehension problem that causes this.

 

[zwk500]

Or the simple solution is to abolish these lights and fit conventional traffic lights.

We shouldn't have complexity in the Highway Code that doesn't need to be there.

Wigwags and Steady Red lights have different meanings. Having 2 signals for 2 different meanings is not complexity, it is clarity.

We certainly shouldn't spend enormous sums fitting ANPR cameras to "catch people out" and destroy their lives

It's not catching people out, the requirement to stop is clear and there will be at least 1 red triangle warning, 1 written instruction to stop when lights flash and 2 big flashing red lights visible prior to a driver running the lights. The only lives being "destroyed" are people who will now have to take the bus and train because they aren't prepared to drive a car safely. I think, as a society, that is an acceptable restriction instead of letting them potentially ruin hundreds of lives by causing a collision with a train. You can delay the activation if you wish as well, so that anybody chancing the yellow gets let off. If you don't know that a flashing red light means stop, you don't deserve to keep hold of your license.

when we can eliminate the comprehension problem that causes this.

There's a duty inherent in holding a driving license to know what the different symbols mean. That's why the theory test exists. Given that the usage of a red flashing light is fairly universal to mean 'Danger, keep clear', I remain to be convinced that the survey quoted upthread is accurate, and not the result of people fibbing to the policeman in the hope of a ticket rather than a date with the magistrate.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Wigwags and Steady Red lights have different meanings. Having 2 signals for 2 different meanings is not complexity, it is clarity.

They don't have different meanings to a regular car driver. Both mean "stop, do not pass the line".

They do to certain professional drivers, but it's much easier to train professional drivers of different situations than everyone.

 

[HSTEd]

Wigwags and Steady Red lights have different meanings. Having 2 signals for 2 different meanings is not complexity, it is clarity.

In practical terms they have the same meaning: Stop

EDIT:

I understand there are exceptions for traffic lights that do not apply to wig wags, but I can't find out what they are - noone seems to have a list.

However mounting traffic lights with a suitable extra sign below them would seem a much better solution than a whole other class of signal that people very rarely see.

 

[Bald Rick]

There’s a reason why just about every developed country in the world has flashing red lights at level crossings. There is no confusion by drivers (at least not by any that are remotely competent). However two pairs of flashing Red lights is rather more conspicuous than regular traffic lights. I have, more than once, gone through a red light because of ‘reading through’ or simply not seeing it. Much more difficult with red lights, especially when there’s a barrier in the way too.

I don't see loads of people running reds when driving, it's relatively rare, and if it does happen it's generally when it's only just gone red.

I saw two in the last hour!

 

[GusB]

There are projects which use CPO to replace housing with higher density housing, but obviously they dont do it to their mates in the posh houses!

Of course not - they wouldn't dare. Oh, and poorer people are less likely to vote anyhow.

Interesting. I certainly would not want to see any more of this; it is an affront to the idea of freehold. It is unavoidable sometimes (e.g. if you need to build a railway) but it is totally wrong to do it as a method of changing round a residential layout you just happen not to like or building a shopping centre.

Of course if it's not a nice area, what would be morally better would be to make excellent, above-value offers to the residents, or even consider offering them quality temporary rental accommodation and one of the new units for free which they might then take voluntarily. That's a morally acceptable way to achieve the same thing, but with less developer profit. Almost invariably, compulsory purchase leaves the former owners in a worse position than they were in, often unable to afford an equivalent replacement.

"If it's not a nice area"... An "affront to the idea of freehold"... If ever there was a walking advert for gentrification, this is it. Any development is fine as long as it gets rid of council house / housing association scum and increases the value of *my* property.

So, you could build flats which are actually larger than the properties that were demolished to make room for them. You can still have ground floor flats with direct garden access, then flats with private balconies above.

Or you could build tenements around a central garden which is made available to all residents of the development, regardless of tenure. Not everyone has time to tend their own gardens anyway.

If you're over-developing your property for its market value then you have problems without CPO ever coming into view. You can't plan everything on an assumption you'll live there forever. Developing a property that you own is taking a risk, which can have a payoff. Creating the expectation that people will always get repaid for the amount they put into a building means detaching people from economic reality, and that something is only worth as much as someone else is willing to pay for it.

There seems to be a strong mental block in some people on this thread. They can't imagine towns growing up as well as out. Larger towns and cities need to be built more densely at their centres to be sustainable. However, the process of building up necessarily means replacing existing buildings. Towns and cities across the world have seen buildings in their centres replaced again and again with larger and denser ones as the town grew around them. This didn't use to be controversial. People didn't mind knocking down rows of old cottages to replace them with the then-new terraces and commercial buildings we have today in most towns.

Owning and developing property is no different to gambling, really. You might get a decent return on your investment if you're in the right place at the right time. It's not too much of an issue if you're buying a place to live in long-term.

This is the reality of why urbanisation continues to increase in the UK despite the enormous rise in London property prices.
Despite how insanely expensive it is to live there, people dont' want to live in random small towns.

People didn't want to live in random small towns because there were little or no opportunities there for higher-paid jobs. It's possible to work from home, or from local offices, without the need for anyone to commute into a large population centre. If the conditions are right, and everything that anyone needs is on the doorstep without having to travel a huge distance there and back for work. The Covid situation has proved this. City life isn't suitable for everyone.

I fear we've moved some way from the discussion of level crossings, but it's high time we stopped thinking that we all have to be in one central location for some arbitrary time simply because that's the way it has always been.

 

[Bletchleyite]

"If it's not a nice area"... An "affront to the idea of freehold"... If ever there was a walking advert for gentrification, this is it. Any development is fine as long as it gets rid of council house / housing association scum and increases the value of *my* property.

I think that is quite presumptuous given that I live in an average area on the edge of a Council estate (albeit one where many have bought the houses) - exactly the sort of place that doesn't necessarily look nice but is a decent place to live.

Upthread I did say as a baseline that a minimum acceptable situation would be that the existing owners should get one of the new properties (and a rental property funded while they were built), so they would not lose out in that sense. Many if not most people would like a genuine free upgrade if they lived in a tatty looking estate?

 

[NotATrainspott]

I think that is quite presumptuous given that I live in an average area on the edge of a Council estate (albeit one where many have bought the houses) - exactly the sort of place that doesn't necessarily look nice but is a decent place to live.

Upthread I did say as a baseline that a minimum acceptable situation would be that the existing owners should get one of the new properties (and a rental property funded while they were built), so they would not lose out in that sense. Many if not most people would like a genuine free upgrade if they lived in a tatty looking estate?

This is entirely possible. I also mentioned upstream that councils are used to doing this as part of regeneration schemes. Not all regeneration schemes are about kicking out council tenants in favour of private home owners. Indeed, councils are more than aware that there's just as much variation within the council housing population as there is in the private market! Councils regularly look at existing housing stock and see if it suits modern requirements. If nothing else, council housing lists put people with special needs (e.g. wheelchair accessibility) right at the top, so there's always a huge amount of demand for suitable properties. Where land values are low, councils can afford to build reasonably large houses to suit these needs.

A scheme to make sure that existing residents are able to stay in the local area is critical. If there is going to be a gap between the CPO value and the cost of a new build, then there are standard schemes that would solve this. For instance, replacing a £300k property with a £500k property with a title condition that the extra £200k has to be recovered when the property is sold (or after e.g. 25 years, depending on expected lifespan of the residents). That means the residents (or their beneficiaries!) don't get a windfall, but they don't get chucked out of their local community.

What you'll probably find too is that a lot of the owners in this situation will be older. Giving them the opportunity to have a fully accessible property (e.g replacing a two storey 4 bedroom house with a 4 bedroom ground floor flat) means allowing them to live at home for longer. The housing monoculture in these towns mean there just aren't many suitable properties for older people. Bungalows aren't economically efficient, and it is too economically rational to develop the roof into a second storey with dormers, so they all disappear over time. Being closer to the town centre makes life easier when it's no longer appropriate for them to have a car. If you're not able to walk far, then having a local shop within a few hundred metres is a lifesaver for your personal independence. Upper storey flats are fine too when new builds would have a lift.

 

[Meerkat]

For instance, replacing a £300k property with a £500k property with a title condition that the extra £200k has to be recovered when the property is sold (or after e.g. 25 years, depending on expected lifespan of the residents). That means the residents (or their beneficiaries!) don't get a windfall, but they don't get chucked out of their local community.

I don’t see why the residents shouldn’t get a bit of a windfall (the difference in price wouldnt all be profit due to rebuilding cost) - everyone else is gaining and they are in effect putting in the most.

 

[stuu]

I understand there are exceptions for traffic lights that do not apply to wig wags, but I can't find out what they are - noone seems to have a list.

Blue light vehicles can go through standard traffic lights, and a policeman can also signal road users to pass them. Also I believe you can pass them if there appears to be a fault. None of that applies to flashing lights

 

[Bletchleyite]

I don’t see why the residents shouldn’t get a bit of a windfall (the difference in price wouldnt all be profit due to rebuilding cost) - everyone else is gaining and they are in effect putting in the most.

If you're densifying the actual value may well be lower, anyway. (I don't mean the new-build list price, which like new cars is typically somewhat inflated over the actual value).

 

[Meerkat]

If you're densifying the actual value may well be lower, anyway. (I don't mean the new-build list price, which like new cars is typically somewhat inflated over the actual value).

In the Sheerwater example I reckon the value will go up significantly due to the better quality and insulation and the general public realm improvements.

 

[Bletchleyite]

In the Sheerwater example I reckon the value will go up significantly due to the better quality and insulation and the general public realm improvements.

Interestingly round by me there is a very controversial case of a tower block (Mellish Court, known locally as Melrose) being demolished due to being unsafe, for both structural and fire safety reasons which are not feasible to resolve. The block is Council owned and the tenants are being rehoused locally. However, there are a number of leaseholders who bought their flats, and they are being paid the pre-decision market value. The problem is that there is no other property in the area anywhere near that cheap, so many are being forced from ownership back into private rent or to move away from the area and friends/family.

This seems rather unreasonable to me.