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Nuclear power stations require lots of water for cooling. Britain is a relatively small island with no big rivers, that's why we build nuclear reactors by the sea. And try telling that to the people of Aldeburgh and Southwold, both very close to Sizewell.
In Cambridge we don't have enough water to drink, it is the biggest constraint on growth. So we definitely don't have water for cooling a nuclear reactor.
Point of order, if they can build a nuclear power station in the middle of the Arizona desert (Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station), with cooling towers filled with treated sewage effluent, we can build one in Cambridge!
But I'm not sure why we would!
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But a chemical plant explosion in a third world country? No one cares. And that's a real concern when we put nuclear plants in areas which we traditionally consider suitable. As in, places where only poor and politically irrelevant people live. Like Hartlepool, or Heysham, or Hunterston. If there's a radiation leak then no one really cares and it might help to sterilise the locals and cut the long term welfare bill, remember.
The original position was to build them where nobody lived. Hence nuclear power stations in places like Bradwell, Berkeley, Sizewell, Hunterston, Oldbury etc
Only later did they become confident enough in the safety of gas cooled reactors to adopt the current "semi urban criterion" - which led to plants like Heysham and Hartlepool in the AGR era.
When the water reactors came around, they actually returned to the Magnox-era "as rural as we can" criterion. Which is why the sites proposed for CEGB PWRs were Sizewell B, Sizewell C, Hinkley Point C and Wylfa B. All of which would be in deeply rural environments with almost noone around.
It's the same reason the fast reactors were put at Dounreay - because the population density up there is very very small.
People who live in the Home Counties can safely make decisions about nuclear plant safety margins or general political horse-trading without thinking of the consequences to themselves. But if the exact same plant is also next door to their old public school (and I pretty much would ensure that every traditional public school had a nuclear plant near it) and Oxbridge college (it's not unreasonable to have research + power generation reactors near our key science hubs) then that line of thinking no longer holds. And if you're making the plants safe enough for the rich and powerful, then as with aviation the standards mean that everyone ends up with the same level of safety.
What about all the nuclear power stations built in the South East?
Bradwell, Dungeness A and B, Winfrith (which also housed the bulk of the research reactors that weren't at Aldermaston) and Sizewell A/B (depending on how you define the South East)?
As to putting power reactors near science and research hubs? Why? Their day-to-day operations have nothing to do with R&D.
In Cambridge we don't have enough water to drink, it is the biggest constraint on growth. So we definitely don't have water for cooling a nuclear reactor.
Point of order, if they can build a nuclear power station in the middle of the Arizona desert (Palo Verde Nuclear Generating Station), with cooling towers filled with treated sewage effluent, we can build one in Cambridge!
I know that the climate in Cambridge is getting hotter and drier, but hopefully we are not going to be desert for a while yet. Cambridge is also near to capacity on sewage treatment, maybe we could kill two birds with one stone!?
Some of the science and research is becoming more energy intensive, especially anything using artificial intelligence. But Cambridge is quite close to two 400kv pylon lines.
The balance between property rights and the national interest is a moving target, and it’s currently far too much towards the rights of the individual to veto infrastructure of national importance.
I think that we’ll have struck the right balance when it becomes a normal occurrence to widen a main line railway with two more tracks at the expense and of a strip of residential homes. It’s disheartening to see how many places where a railway gets left congested or tunnelling is considered the only option and nothing is done to improve the service. It would improve so many lives at the cost of inconvenience to so few.
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What we need is new legislative to allow the widening of existing infrastructure corridors that enables mass compulsory purchase in one go, which can only be judicially reviewed as a whole rather than once for each property.
Maybe the compensation for the purchase should be negotiated such that if a majority of landowners approve of the sale, all the transactions take place ignoring the holdouts. Such a majority would need to be quite large in order to be legitimate.
The balance between property rights and the national interest is a moving target, and it’s currently far too much towards the rights of the individual to veto infrastructure of national importance.
I think that we’ll have struck the right balance when it becomes a normal occurrence to widen a main line railway with two more tracks at the expense and of a strip of residential homes. It’s disheartening to see how many places where a railway gets left congested or tunnelling is considered the only option and nothing is done to improve the service. It would improve so many lives at the cost of inconvenience to so few.
Tunneling does have other operational advantages to offset its cost - no need to mess around with utility relocations, no need to mess around with level crossings, no need to relocate roads etc etc etc.
I think it would be a more tenable solution to simply develop systems and expertise that make tunneling more affordable rather than trying to make surface construction less politically fraught
EDIT: A "strip ofresidential homes" could result in a hundred demolitions per kilometre. The cost of that of those seizures could easily run into the hundreds of millions of pounds per kilometre - way more expensive than tunnelling.
House prices are simply too high now for surface construction in residential areas to ever be justifiable.
The balance between property rights and the national interest is a moving target, and it’s currently far too much towards the rights of the individual to veto infrastructure of national importance.
I think that we’ll have struck the right balance when it becomes a normal occurrence to widen a main line railway with two more tracks at the expense and of a strip of residential homes. It’s disheartening to see how many places where a railway gets left congested or tunnelling is considered the only option and nothing is done to improve the service. It would improve so many lives at the cost of inconvenience to so few.
The balance between property rights and the national interest is a moving target, and it’s currently far too much towards the rights of the individual to veto infrastructure of national importance.
I think that we’ll have struck the right balance when it becomes a normal occurrence to widen a main line railway with two more tracks at the expense and of a strip of residential homes.
I would argue that it is too far in favour of the state. As per the motorways strategic policy versus specific routes I raised previously.
So people who, in reality object to the strategic policy but missed their chance, throw everything they can think of into an objection. Casually mentioning anything and everything which might just stick. Bats, newts, orchids, rumour that King Alfred once baked some cakes somewhere nearby but you, the promoter, are expected to seek out the evidence to rebut the argument rather than the objector having to provide some evidence of their assertions.
A key problem is the number of poorly informed objections by persons with no or limited knowledge of the subject on which they object which don't get swatted away. For example, Joe Public objecting on the basis that there is insufficient 'sewage capacity' (insert electricity supply, water, highways, school places etc.) when the water company (or similar) have been formally consulted and gone on record saying the system can cope or stating what improvements are required to allow the scheme to go ahead.
It’s disheartening to see how many places where a railway gets left congested or tunnelling is considered the only option and nothing is done to improve the service. It would improve so many lives at the cost of inconvenience to so few.
Are there any examples of this, or is it just that 'the railway' realised it was a 'nice to have' rather than an 'essential to have' so couldn't make a case for taking peoples property from them. Plus perhaps they didn't have the funding to build the scheme anyway. Four tracking of the WCML went ahead. Norton Bridge went ahead. Did British Railways or its successors have any CPO's rejected?
What we need is new legislative to allow the widening of existing infrastructure corridors that enables mass compulsory purchase in one go, which can only be judicially reviewed as a whole rather than once for each property.
Maybe the compensation for the purchase should be negotiated such that if a majority of landowners approve of the sale, all the transactions take place ignoring the holdouts. Such a majority would need to be quite large in order to be legitimate.
Mass Compulsory Purchase is already in place. You do one order for the whole of your project. That way it gets approved as a whole. The time taken to consider Judicial Reviews slows things down but that is a court resources / administration problem, not a problem with the CPO process itself. Each person affected by a scheme has the right to object, their objections have to be properly considered and responded to. Failure to properly consider (or at least a perceived failure to properly consider) leads to judicial review. Basically, again, it is often someone throwing everything including the kitchen sink at a scheme hoping something will stick in order to get it abandoned.
In lots of CPO's, including HS2, many property owners sell up willingly ahead of any order actually being confirmed. That then gives you the problem of managing empty properties if the scheme gets delayed or abandoned.
Despite what may appear to be widespread Nimbyism, lots of people do actually see the benefits of major infrastruture projects even when it affects them directly. Providing they are treated fairly. But that doesn't make an easy news headline to gather clicks.
Sure, but the tradeoffs would be different for national, regional, and local infrastructure projects. Mayors should totally have the ability to approve the building of new transport projects without going through the bottleneck of central government.
Sure, but the tradeoffs would be different for national, regional, and local infrastructure projects. Mayors should totally have the ability to approve the building of new transport projects without going through the bottleneck of central government.
Without the money to do these things, such approvals are meaningless, and the Central Government will be very leery to hand over financial powers like those.
After all, it would not be politically tenable for American style city bankruptcies to occur without a central government bailout (they are characterised by near total local government service collapse). Which means the central government is always on the hook for whatever money mayors decide to commit to win elections.
Society has decided that land ownership, with some value speculators in the mix, is acceptable/desirable. Society has decided that some kind of totalitarian state with powers to just do whatever whenever however is not acceptable. I'm happy with that status quo, along with most of the other 8 billion people on the planet not forming a queue to move to North Korea.
As Chernobyl showed, where you build a nuclear power station is pretty much irrelevant. If it goes bang, everyone gets a dose, just lessens as the distance increases. Do they still randomly test welsh lamb?
Our societal status quo isn't exactly working, though? Something is profoundly wrong and if we keep going with the current way of doing things, then we'll end up even worse off. HS2 is just the most obvious example of our inability to get things done.
Fair compensation under CPO is necessary to cover the disruption involved. That level of disruption is though often a consequence of other failures. I said in an earlier post that people may fight a CPO tooth and nail because there are no other suitable houses nearby which allow them to maintain existing connections like schools for their kids. If we don't start building up that excess supply, then every project will end up increasingly bogged down.
The demographic shift underway in this country is the single biggest issue facing us. It's coming like a tidal wave and it doesn't stop just because we voted one lot of politicians out and replaced them with another. You could even vote in a government that promises to revoke residency and citizenship rights from immigrants, but you can't go back in time and make British people in the 80s and 90s have more babies. Given the controversy around assisted dying, I don't think we're anywhere near the point of encouraging old people to die to make the numbers balance up again.
The only way we can manage an aging population is to rebuild society around it, and that means quite a lot of physical reconstruction. Level access is now an absolute necessity but our railways and most of our built environment were constructed before we really cared about it at all. We might just be able to manage by employing lots of people to help with temporary ramps and the like, but we don't have enough young people to fill all of those roles.
We've kicked the can down the road and it hasn't worked. I don't see a way out unless we quite significantly reduce our willingness to tolerate opposition. Not all opposition is actually justifiable; people just don't like having change imposed upon them. But change is happening whether they like it or not, and what we see is that people will pull on whatever emergency brake lever we give them in order to try to stop the change. Unfortunately, all of those emergency brake levers normally just mean the change happens even harder and more destructively. You see this when people don't want flats to be built near their houses, in cities like London. But the consequence is that families get outbid for traditional semi detached properties, and they end up occupied instead by a group of adults. The impact of extra cars taking up parking spaces on the street is felt even when adult children stay home with their parents because they can't afford to move out of their childhood bedroom.
CPO-induced development around stations often has the benefit that the station is a pretty perfect place for things to be built. If you're next door to a major railway station then you have no shortage of demand for residential, hotel, office and retail space because the station acts as a hub. There are obviously rail services, but it's also the natural place to bring together other modes of transport. It's also probably the place closest to all the existing services like banks and shops. All of this in turn means that it's the perfect place to put housing where people either cannot, or are not expected to, drive on a daily basis. This is absolutely critical for our aging population because there are going to be millions of Britons who we don't really want to be behind the wheel, but are still capable of being independent. If you're in a wheelchair or mobility scooter then even a driverless taxi might not be enough if you need help to get in and out. Meanwhile, a consistent built environment of level access and lifts from your home all the way to work, play or shopping means you can life a dignified independent life which also happens to be cheap.
The problem is that these places are almost entirely already developed. We're not bad at developing large plots of land which are owned by institutions, e.g. a Royal Mail depot or a farm. But we're running out of these places as they aren't really a renewable resource. Once a farm is developed into 1000 distinct land titles, we're back to needing 1000 units of bureaucracy to do anything with it.
On that note, there's something pretty important to remember. If the right to avoid disruption by CPO is so important, why do we not extend that right to pretty much all of the residential tenants in the country? All of the arguments about family life disruption and so on apply just the same whether you own or rent a home. Some people cannot afford to buy and so they must rent. But today, short assured tenancy landlords have a pretty absolute right to evict in order to demolish the property or move back in themselves. We know though that extending this right to tenants causes the whole housing system to grind to a halt.
Meanwhile, why do we seem more comfortable with CPO of properties owned as investments? If I own an industrial estate unit I'm really not going to get any sympathetic ear if the state comes along and announces it wants to build a bypass there instead. In that case, since I own it as an investment, I'm generally just looking for a return and a CPO is just a forced liquidation that should still get me my return.
If the special right of immunity from interference only exists in the specific case where someone owns the property in which they live, then that seems rather dubious. The right to live a life without disruption isn't applied to tenants, and the right to preservation of specific property isn't applied to landlords. Why should these rights magically appear only once I happen to rent a property from myself? Of course, the answer to that is that owner occupation has been put on a pedestal that doesn't make economic sense. People are desperate to buy because we've designed a system that means property owners (generally) are treated as a higher class of citizen than mere tenants. We seem to have designed a system where the former peasantry get to be the lord of their own very tiny manor. But, unfortunately, now we have 1000 tiny little landlords who rarely see beyond their own noses rather than just one or two who generally are more sophisticated and understand long term value.
Speaking of, I'm not proposing to put nuclear power stations on the playing fields of Eton in order to put one up the ruling classes. The kind of people who put their kids through Eton probably are more amenable, in principle, to the value of nuclear power and can understand the safety and national energy security cases pretty well. For them, a nuclear plant next door would be no different to flying, and they do that all the time. The reason we do it is to completely blindside any opponents who go and claim that the nuclear plants are being foisted upon poor and middle class people but not the upper class. The fact that your Ryanair flight uses the same CFM56s/LEAP-1B engine as the rich do on their BBJs means you can have confidence that it'll work just fine. We need to get more comfortable with nuclear technology so that we can really benefit from it, just as we have got very used to commercial jet travel.
Also, ironically, water supply is probably an even more important thing that we have to solve with CPO. The south east of England needs a lot more water supply and security. We need to build reservoirs to deliver that. As with most infrastructure, the economies of scale mean we're better off overbuilding and using the spare capacity to allow growth. Why not have the reservoir development be funded by all of the new housing developments it makes possible elsewhere in the region? The alternative is that all of that taxpayer or water bill-payer money spent on the reservoir will just make a landowner/farmer join the private jet set without lifting a finger.
CPO might be a specific way to use existing or altered legal procedures to benefit from land value appreciation. The better and more universal way would be to tax people, but the impact would end up being largely the same. You might not get a CPO for your field surrounding the new railway station and roads we just built, but your land will be revalued as if it were already filled with houses or flats. You won't want to hold onto that £10k worth of sheep grazing field if you'll need to pay 100x the annual tax on it, given that it's now worth £1m. The effect ends up being the same: unless you're totally irrational you will sell up to someone who is willing to bulldoze and build. Your nice old farmhouse with all of those memories disappears under a new housing estate, or your little urban terraced home near a station ends up flattened and replaced with a 10 storey tower block.
The tidal wave is a good analogy, it will wash over us and then it will be gone. The era of very high birth rates in the UK is roughly from 1960 to 1971, by about 2060 the wave will have passed.
The reason for that is simple. Properties owned for investment are purely financial. Residential ownership also includes emotional investment. They are places were people established their independence, built their most important relationships, and, in many cases, where they raised their offspring. For some, it is the last space that they shared with a partner.
Remember that "an Englishman's home is his castle".
it's the perfect place to put housing where people either cannot, or are not expected to, drive on a daily basis. This is absolutely critical for our aging population because there are going to be millions of Britons who we don't really want to be behind the wheel, but are still capable of being independent. If you're in a wheelchair or mobility scooter then even a driverless taxi might not be enough if you need help to get in and out. Meanwhile, a consistent built environment of level access and lifts from your home all the way to work, play or shopping means you can life a dignified independent life which also happens to be cheap.
This emotional attachment to home often applies to elderly people. Only some of them are prepared to uproot from their family homes, many of them want to remain where they have lived for decades, whatever the practical difficulties. Both my father and one of my grandmothers lived almost to 90 without moving out of the homes where they had raised their children.
But some are willing to move to somewhere more appropriate for their physical and mental wellbeing. I live in an apartment block for over 55s, so I see that up close. You are wrong that next to railway stations is a good place for these, the right place to build them is near hospitals. Most of my neighbours visit the hospital far more frequently than the railway station.
On that note, there's something pretty important to remember. If the right to avoid disruption by CPO is so important, why do we not extend that right to pretty much all of the residential tenants in the country?
This government has moved a long way towards that, by ending no fault evictions and changing tenancies from fixed term to periodic. For a rental property, the emotional and financial investments are with different people, which creates a conflict of interest; whatever its other disadvantages, with owner occupation the emotional and financial investments are congruent.
unless you're totally irrational you will sell up to someone who is willing to bulldoze and build. Your nice old farmhouse with all of those memories disappears under a new housing estate
All of this applies especially in farming, as has been demonstrated by the recent controversy about inheritance tax on farmland. The emotional investment in farms that have been in the same family for many generations is huge. Here in the Greater Cambridge area we are unusual in that lots of farmland is rented, and doesn't get passed down from generation to generation, so it is less of an issue. On the other hand, the landlords are often colleges or the County Council, which creates different issues.
water supply is probably an even more important thing that we have to solve with CPO. The south east of England needs a lot more water supply and security.
Which is why the government is proposing a Greater Cambridge Development Corporation so that the commercial and residential development helps to funs infrastructure, not just water but health and transport too. Similar is likely to happen in Oxford and the New Towns.
The tidal wave is a good analogy, it will wash over us and then it will be gone. The era of very high birth rates in the UK is roughly from 1960 to 1971, by about 2060 the wave will have passed.
But the gap can, and was, filled by inward migration.
Inward migration cannot continue to fill this gap, even overlooking the political problems with immigration in the current climate.
The globe is experiencing collapsing birth rates, we are going to rapidly transition to a situation where there were insufficient immigrations to go around, even if we could enocurage immigation without limit.
The demographic shift is not going to hit us and then be gone, its going to keep hitting us until our birth rate rises back up above 2.1 - so probably forever.
Japanification is going to hit us whatever we do it seems.
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The demographic shift underway in this country is the single biggest issue facing us. It's coming like a tidal wave and it doesn't stop just because we voted one lot of politicians out and replaced them with another. You could even vote in a government that promises to revoke residency and citizenship rights from immigrants, but you can't go back in time and make British people in the 80s and 90s have more babies. Given the controversy around assisted dying, I don't think we're anywhere near the point of encouraging old people to die to make the numbers balance up again.
The only way we can manage an aging population is to rebuild society around it, and that means quite a lot of physical reconstruction. Level access is now an absolute necessity but our railways and most of our built environment were constructed before we really cared about it at all. We might just be able to manage by employing lots of people to help with temporary ramps and the like, but we don't have enough young people to fill all of those roles.
We've kicked the can down the road and it hasn't worked. I don't see a way out unless we quite significantly reduce our willingness to tolerate opposition. Not all opposition is actually justifiable; people just don't like having change imposed upon them. But change is happening whether they like it or not, and what we see is that people will pull on whatever emergency brake lever we give them in order to try to stop the change. Unfortunately, all of those emergency brake levers normally just mean the change happens even harder and more destructively. You see this when people don't want flats to be built near their houses, in cities like London. But the consequence is that families get outbid for traditional semi detached properties, and they end up occupied instead by a group of adults. The impact of extra cars taking up parking spaces on the street is felt even when adult children stay home with their parents because they can't afford to move out of their childhood bedroom.
I agree that an aging population will force a radical reimagining of how British society operates, but I'm far from convinced that demolishing major cities to rebuild them at higher density is a good idea.
Even if we ignore the enormous political ructions from mass evictions and property seizures, starting our attempt to relieve the housing crisis by destroying millions of housing units seems counterproductive.
We only have a very limited number of people available to do jobs, as you note, so we have to pick the jobs we do carefully.
Complex demolition and brownfield redevelopment jobs are difficult and probably an inefficient way to spend our resources, especially as we only get (for example) two net housing units for every three built.
We should build new housing in a new area, probably a single large development area in the style of a super Milton Keynes.
As to railways - temporary ramps have been rendered obsolete by the arrival of level boarding units! Replacing every train in the UK with a level boarding one is likely to be cheaper than any major infrastructure programme.
CPO-induced development around stations often has the benefit that the station is a pretty perfect place for things to be built. If you're next door to a major railway station then you have no shortage of demand for residential, hotel, office and retail space because the station acts as a hub. There are obviously rail services, but it's also the natural place to bring together other modes of transport. It's also probably the place closest to all the existing services like banks and shops. All of this in turn means that it's the perfect place to put housing where people either cannot, or are not expected to, drive on a daily basis. This is absolutely critical for our aging population because there are going to be millions of Britons who we don't really want to be behind the wheel, but are still capable of being independent. If you're in a wheelchair or mobility scooter then even a driverless taxi might not be enough if you need help to get in and out. Meanwhile, a consistent built environment of level access and lifts from your home all the way to work, play or shopping means you can life a dignified independent life which also happens to be cheap.
The problem is that these places are almost entirely already developed. We're not bad at developing large plots of land which are owned by institutions, e.g. a Royal Mail depot or a farm. But we're running out of these places as they aren't really a renewable resource. Once a farm is developed into 1000 distinct land titles, we're back to needing 1000 units of bureaucracy to do anything with it.
I htink the time for station focussed high density development has passed.
Given the recent fire safety changes (personalised evacuation plans and the building safety regulator etc) I no longer believe housing old people in flats is practical. The costs associated are absolutely enormous, especially given our very limited supply of people.
If new housing is required for an aging population its probably going to have to be bungalows just from a safety and industrial capacity perspective - mobile homes built in a factory by (increasingly) robots do not consume valuable on site labour that will have a thousand other things to do.
I don't think we are going to have very many banks, shops or pubs in the future. eCommerce has ripped the heart out of the first two and Wetherspoons now has 9% market share with only 800 premises. I think we likely have an enormous oversupply of these sorts of premises as it is, so redevelopment to add more seems unlikely.
I'd suggest a far mroe sensible strategy is to build a new urban area or two (super Milton Keynes), then once the housing crisis eases off from construction catching up and then a falling population by midcentury, we allow housing that is unsuitable to go out of use and be demolished. Eventually some villages and towns will go the way of Old Sarum. No need for us to spend huge sums of money and people destroying buildings to build new ones that will start falling out of use by midcentury due to the falling population.
Speaking of, I'm not proposing to put nuclear power stations on the playing fields of Eton in order to put one up the ruling classes. The kind of people who put their kids through Eton probably are more amenable, in principle, to the value of nuclear power and can understand the safety and national energy security cases pretty well. For them, a nuclear plant next door would be no different to flying, and they do that all the time. The reason we do it is to completely blindside any opponents who go and claim that the nuclear plants are being foisted upon poor and middle class people but not the upper class. The fact that your Ryanair flight uses the same CFM56s/LEAP-1B engine as the rich do on their BBJs means you can have confidence that it'll work just fine. We need to get more comfortable with nuclear technology so that we can really benefit from it, just as we have got very used to commercial jet travel.
A nuclear power station next to Eton would be demonstrably less safe than one built in the middle of nowhere, though.
We cannot exclude the occurrence of an accident and the consequences would be much worse if it happens in the Western Suburbs of london than if it happens in the empty Western Lakes, or the North of Scotland or Rural Somerset. If you operate a fleet of nuclear reactors for long enough you will have a serious accident.
Contaminated farmland you can just buy, put a fence around it and forget about it - you can't do that to a big chunk of West London - and an empty field doesn't have many people to be irradiated.
We would be deliberately worsening the safety of nuclear power.
Also, ironically, water supply is probably an even more important thing that we have to solve with CPO. The south east of England needs a lot more water supply and security. We need to build reservoirs to deliver that. As with most infrastructure, the economies of scale mean we're better off overbuilding and using the spare capacity to allow growth. Why not have the reservoir development be funded by all of the new housing developments it makes possible elsewhere in the region? The alternative is that all of that taxpayer or water bill-payer money spent on the reservoir will just make a landowner/farmer join the private jet set without lifting a finger.
Given the forward climate projections, including the rising probability of near term AMOC ("Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation" - the gulf stream) collapse, I don't think building reservoirs would be sensible.
Again, picking a huge fight with loads of people trying to fit in a large enough set of reservoirs to matter is going to turn out much more expensive than just building a desalination plant. If AMOC collapse occurs the climate will get colder but much much drier, to the point that massive irrigation systems would be necessary to continue arable agriculture in much of Britain. (link to Academic paper on the topic)
Less than two years after the government's decision to significantly increase Israel's desalination capacity, IDE Technologies and Bank Leumi were selected as winners of the PPP tender for the construction of a new desalination plant in Sorek. IDE's proposal was at an unprecedented price of about NIS 1.45 per cubic meter of water, a price low of about 65 agorot of the lowest price per cubic meter currently paid.
CPO might be a specific way to use existing or altered legal procedures to benefit from land value appreciation. The better and more universal way would be to tax people, but the impact would end up being largely the same. You might not get a CPO for your field surrounding the new railway station and roads we just built, but your land will be revalued as if it were already filled with houses or flats. You won't want to hold onto that £10k worth of sheep grazing field if you'll need to pay 100x the annual tax on it, given that it's now worth £1m. The effect ends up being the same: unless you're totally irrational you will sell up to someone who is willing to bulldoze and build. Your nice old farmhouse with all of those memories disappears under a new housing estate, or your little urban terraced home near a station ends up flattened and replaced with a 10 storey tower block.
That just means that councils would be able to destroy anyone they have personal dislike for by granting planning permissions!
The potential for corruption would be enormous.
As I said, I agree that demographic change poses major challenges, but I disagree that our response to this should be to tear down vast amounts of currently serviceable housing that would then have to be rebuilt.
Inward migration cannot continue to fill this gap, even overlooking the political problems with immigration in the current climate.
The globe is experiencing collapsing birth rates, we are going to rapidly transition to a situation where there were insufficient immigrations to go around, even if we could enocurage immigation without limit.
The demographic shift is not going to hit us and then be gone, its going to keep hitting us until our birth rate rises back up above 2.1 - so probably forever.
Japanification is going to hit us whatever we do it seems.
It isn't correct that collapsing birth rates are global, the population in Africa and parts of Asia is still growing.
Inward migration doesn't need to fill a gap now, because it had been done already, but policy needs to recognise that there will be fewer elderly people after 2060 once the people from the boom period up to 1971 have mostly passed on.
Combine the change for elderly people, after the 1960-71 birth wave has passed, with the declining birth rate now, and UK population will peak sometime before 2060, then decline after that. What you call Japanification is 30-40 years away in the UK, but overaggressive action to increase housing supply now will lead to a bigger surplus in 30-40 years time.
It is entirely possible for those two things to occur simultaneously.
Birth rates are collapsing but have not yet collapsed below replacement, and population growth can still continue to occur for some time after birth rates fall below replacement - these systems have very long times to equilibrium.
But long before population in these places starts falling the supply of young people who are available to emigrate will dry up - especially with the stunning economic growth seen in many of these places.
EDIT:
World Bank/UN estimates the world total fertility rate to be only 2.2 and it has fallen significantly even over the last 20 years.
It was 3.7 in 1980, 3.1 in 1990, 2.7 in 2000, 2.6 in 2010 and 2.3 in 2020.
It will most likely soon drop below replacement on a global level.
Inward migration doesn't need to fill a gap now, because it had been done already, but policy needs to recognise that there will be fewer elderly people after 2060 once the people from the boom period up to 1971 have mostly passed on.
From the latest ONS statistical release on population projections, in 2026 there are 13.7 people in the population aged 65 and up. In 2050 it will be 18.0 million, in 2074 it will be 21.4 million, in 2090 it will peak 22.7 million and even in 2124 (the end of the projection) it will still be 22.1 million.
There will be no strong reduction in the population of elderly people in the next century. In the mean time the fraction of the population 65 and up will increase from 19% of the population to 34.1% of the population. It is also still rising at the end of the projection, the absolute number is only declining because the size of the population is dropping rapidly.
This is primarily a result of the fact that immigrants also get old.
Combine the change for elderly people, after the 1960-71 birth wave has passed, with the declining birth rate now, and UK population will peak sometime before 2060, then decline after that. What you call Japanification is 30-40 years away in the UK, but overaggressive action to increase housing supply now will lead to a bigger surplus in 30-40 years time.
The housing shortage now is so accurate (by some estimates ~20% of the housing stock) that it has catastrophic socio economic effects. I don't think ensuring the continuation of the housing crisis because there might be a housing shortage sometime near the end of the century is at all justifiable.
Especially given the awful condition of much of the housing stock - we should build as many houses as we need now, then if we end up with a surplus start discarding poor quality housing then.
The housing shortage now is so accurate (by some estimates ~20% of the housing stock) that it has catastrophic socio economic effects. I don't think ensuring the continuation of the housing crisis because there might be a housing shortage sometime near the end of the century is at all justifiable.
Especially given the awful condition of much of the housing stock - we should build as many houses as we need now, then if we end up with a surplus start discarding poor quality housing then.
We should. But we should work on building houses people want to live in, where they want to live, rather than units of production based on a top down assessment of where people "ought to" want to live.
There's a lot to be done to reduce the veto power of objectors, but that doesn't require the whole system of checks and balances to be thrown out in the process
We should. But we should work on building houses people want to live in, where they want to live, rather than units of production based on a top down assessment of where people "ought to" want to live.
There's a lot to be done to reduce the veto power of objectors, but that doesn't require the whole system of checks and balances to be thrown out in the process
The problem we face is that the system of checks and balances is intrinsically linked to the "veto power of objectors".
Any council that approves substantial local housing construction will probably be annihilated at the next election and replaced with a council who will never do such a thing.
I think local democracy and mass home ownership mean that a housing crisis is inevitable - homeowners simply benefit too much from strangling the supply of housing to increase their own wealth.
The housing market already tells us where people want to live - overwhelmingly the South East of England or in a handful of other major cities.
EDIT:
To clarify, we have a poisonous cocktail of high home ownership (creating a large group of voters incentivised to vote to restrict house construction), a planning system that functionally runs on local popularity (as decisions are in the hands of elected politicians) and an acute shortage of housing (that produed strong house price growth that homeowners have come to view as an investment).
Whilst all three things persist, I can't see how things can get better.
We have to break this system so that we can get housing costs down to reasonable levels and I can't see any way to do it whilst the planning system remains in place. Perhaps we could build a new urban area in the style of Milton Keynes, but even that requires fighting objector interests at least once, although divide and conquer could assist in that regard. If we tied the end of compulsory housing targets in most of the country for a development act that destroyed the planning system in the area to be developed, that might work.
Either way, we need more housing and the planning system has been coopted into a weapon that prevents housing being built.
The problem we face is that the system of checks and balances is intrinsically linked to the "veto power of objectors".
Any council that approves substantial local housing construction will probably be annihilated at the next election and replaced with a council who will never do such a thing.
I think local democracy and mass home ownership mean that a housing crisis is inevitable - homeowners simply benefit too much from strangling the supply of housing to increase their own wealth.
The housing market already tells us where people want to live - overwhelmingly the South East of England or in a handful of other major cities.
EDIT:
To clarify, we have a poisonous cocktail of high home ownership (creating a large group of voters incentivised to vote to restrict house construction), a planning system that functionally runs on local popularity (as decisions are in the hands of elected politicians) and an acute shortage of housing (that produed strong house price growth that homeowners have come to view as an investment).
Whilst all three things persist, I can't see how things can get better.
We have to break this system so that we can get housing costs down to reasonable levels and I can't see any way to do it whilst the planning system remains in place. Perhaps we could build a new urban area in the style of Milton Keynes, but even that requires fighting objector interests at least once, although divide and conquer could assist in that regard. If we tied the end of compulsory housing targets in most of the country for a development act that destroyed the planning system in the area to be developed, that might work.
Either way, we need more housing and the planning system has been coopted into a weapon that prevents housing being built.
The planning system can do a lot by restricting the veto power of local objectors.
An analogy. A while back, I prepared the premises license application for my church. We were nervous about the consultation process, but the local authority licensing officer was very clear about how narrow the grounds for objection were drawn. The result was that the few objections we had (broadly speaking, to do with the basic principle) carried no weight in the approval process.
This was helped by the local authority being on the clock - if they didn't make a decision within a specific time window, the application was deemed to be approved.
Put those two together, and a lot could be done quite quickly.
Importantly, in doing this, it would not undermine democratic oversight because it would give clear accountability for decisions, and put them within legal parameters.
There's a lot to be done to reduce the veto power of objectors, but that doesn't require the whole system of checks and balances to be thrown out in the process
You are both barking up the wrong tree. Planning isn't what stops houses being built. Here in the Greater Cambridge area we build lots of houses, for example in Trumpington, Eddington, Cambourne, Northstowe and Waterbeach. A bit further away St Neots, Huntingdon and Ely have all built lots of new houses.
House builders are in the business of building houses, but only if they can make a profit. But in recent years their costs have increased significantly:
Minimum wage
National Insurance Contributions
Energy costs
Raw material costs
Regulatory costs
Flooding the market with new houses lowers prices, thus reducing profit margins. I heard on the radio recently someone estimate that it is profitable to build in less than half the country at present.
Lower prices also tip people on mortgages into negative equity. If nominal prices fall by more than 5% then people on a 95% mortgage can go into negative equity.
The simple fact is that it is impossible to have lots more houses, stable nomimal house prices and low inflation, all at once.
You are both barking up the wrong tree. Planning isn't what stops houses being built. Here in the Greater Cambridge area we build lots of houses, for example in Trumpington, Eddington, Cambourne, Northstowe and Waterbeach. A bit further away St Neots, Huntingdon and Ely have all built lots of new houses.
House builders are in the business of building houses, but only if they can make a profit. But in recent years their costs have increased significantly:
Minimum wage
National Insurance Contributions
Energy costs
Raw material costs
Regulatory costs
Flooding the market with new houses lowers prices, thus reducing profit margins. I heard on the radio recently someone estimate that it is profitable to build in less than half the country at present.
Lower prices also tip people on mortgages into negative equity. If nominal prices fall by more than 5% then people on a 95% mortgage can go into negative equity.
The simple fact is that it is impossible to have lots more houses, stable nomimal house prices and low inflation, all at once.
I'm not going to argue on housing (and there's reason to think that price stagnation in some of the hotter spots may be doing quite a lot of work towards affordability). However, the planning issue runs wider than just housing, and is far from negligible - HS2 is merely the most conspicuous example.
You are both barking up the wrong tree. Planning isn't what stops houses being built. Here in the Greater Cambridge area we build lots of houses, for example in Trumpington, Eddington, Cambourne, Northstowe and Waterbeach. A bit further away St Neots, Huntingdon and Ely have all built lots of new houses.
They have built a number of new houses, but Cambridge should be growing like Phoenix, Arizona did in its heydey in the 1990s.
But it has been unable to do so because of planning and other limitations.
Flooding the market with new houses lowers prices, thus reducing profit margins. I heard on the radio recently someone estimate that it is profitable to build in less than half the country at present.
It's not quite that simple because the housing market is rather dysfunctional because planning restrictions impose pretty strict rules on what kinds of houses can be built.
Which is why houses are still overwhelmingly built of brick and blockwork when commercial buildings have almost entirely abandoned structural brick/blockwork for modular construction and steel frames with rainscreens.
If the planning system did not do this, the cost of building a housing unit would fall radically - even if some of the housing units ended up being mobile/manufactured homes. It would also break the oligopoly of the big housebuilders that also strangles innovation and cost reductions.
Lower prices also tip people on mortgages into negative equity. If nominal prices fall by more than 5% then people on a 95% mortgage can go into negative equity.
The simple fact is that it is impossible to have lots more houses, stable nomimal house prices and low inflation, all at once.
If house prices don't fall, some people will avoid negative equity, but the housing crisis will continue to blight the lives of tens of millions. Trying to fix this with merely stagnant prices would take many decades if inflation stays low.
I'm afraid someone has to suffer to unwind this debacle, because the consequences of not unwinding it are and will continue to be utterly devastating. (Personally falling house prices would cost me an awful lot of money)
Nominal house prices could fall by several percent per annum and only a handful of people would end up deeply in negative equity. We could then have a targeted programme to assist people who are trapped.
I didn't follow HS2 very closely, but my understanding is that one of its biggest mistakes was using the hybrid bill procedure. I have seen the Transport and Works Act Order process work well for Cambridge South station, and I'm waiting with interest to see the Development Consent Order process in action for East West Rail and the Reservoir in the Fens.
Last year the Stansted Airport expansion went through the normal local planning process. Anyone travelling by train to Cambridge from London can see continuous construction of phase 2 of the Biomedical Campus, all done on local planning consent which go though providing they are consistent with outline planning permission granted 10 years ago.
They have built a number of new houses, but Cambridge should be growing like Phoenix, Arizona did in its heydey in the 1990s.
But it has been unable to do so because of planning and other limitations.
Planning has not restricted housing growth in Cambridge. The main restriction is water supply, though a creaking healthcare system and transport congestion don't help either.
It's not quite that simple because the housing market is rather dysfunctional because planning restrictions impose pretty strict rules on what kinds of houses can be built.
Which is why houses are still overwhelmingly built of brick and blockwork when commercial buildings have almost entirely abandoned structural brick/blockwork for modular construction and steel frames with rainscreens.
This isn't a constraint either. Brickwork cam now be assembled offsite and installed as modules. I was first aware of this being done at London Bridge station 10 years ago and it has been used on various commercial buildings on the Biomedical Campus.
The big housebuilders don't have a monopoly. Cambridge has the Hill Group, a local company established less than 30 years ago. Only a few days ago it went into partnership with Homes England to build 10k houses on the Cambridge Airport site:
The Cambridge East scheme is set to become "one of the UK's largest urban extension projects".
www.bbc.co.uk
A new football stadium, thousands of homes and a railway station are among the ideas for a major redevelopment project in Cambridge.
It was announced on Wednesday that Cambridge Airport and its adjacent land, previously owned by the Marshall Group, had been sold to Homes England and The Hill Group, in a bid to create Cambridge East.
Negative equity can blight millions too. One estimate from the 1990s is that more than 20% of homeowners went into negative equity. It would be very expensive to fund a programme to help 20% of homeowners.
Negative equity can blight millions too. One estimate from the 1990s is that more than 20% of homeowners went into negative equity. It would be very expensive to fund a programme to help 20% of homeowners.
I didn't follow HS2 very closely, but my understanding is that one of its biggest mistakes was using the hybrid bill procedure. I have seen the Transport and Works Act Order process work well for Cambridge South station, and I'm waiting with interest to see the Development Consent Order process in action for East West Rail and the Reservoir in the Fens.
Planning has not restricted housing growth in Cambridge. The main restriction is water supply, though a creaking healthcare system and transport congestion don't help either.
The water supply and other restrictions is only effective because of the planning system though.
The statutory consultation with the water company represents the views of a pressure group (in this case of the water company), not necessarily the objective truth.
The water company would prefer not to have to spend money on new infrastructure prior to the government giving it a sweetheart deal on the capital spend.
Objecting to new homes on grounds of limited water supply is one of its primary levers to apply pressure to the government to that end.
If there was a pressing demand for more water, it could be provided comparatively quickly, likely through the provision of a desalination plant and probably a tunnelled aqueduct.
This isn't a constraint either. Brickwork cam now be assembled offsite and installed as modules. I was first aware of this being done at London Bridge station 10 years ago and it has been used on various commercial buildings on the Biomedical Campus.
Yes, it is commonly done on commercial buildings - hence why I said "structural" brickwork. On commercial buildings this prefab masonry is normally for decoration, applied as cladding to the steel frame. You can apparently also cast brickwork directly into the outer surface of precast concrete components if you want.
As far as I know this sort of thing is not commonly done for residential properties. I imagine it wouldn't save very much money on such a small scale, but there are probably other reasons.
Negative equity can blight millions too. One estimate from the 1990s is that more than 20% of homeowners went into negative equity. It would be very expensive to fund a programme to help 20% of homeowners.
It is estimated that the average loan to value on mortgaged homes is now 59% (down from 70% in 2012) and only 42% of housing units actually have a mortgage associated with them.
Even if house prices fall radically (say 5-6% nominal per annum) the amount of negative equity is probably likely to be limited, and only a portion of the people in negative equity would need rescuing - many people would end up only marginally in negative equity and this situation would resolve quite rapidly once housing values reach a new equilibrium.
5% nominal per annum would take 13 years to reduce values by half, which is a significant portion of the length of a typical mortgage.
And yes, it could end up expensive, but the status quo is extraordinarily expensive - merely less visible.
Correct. Anything more than 2 miles (possibly 2km, I forget) of ‘new‘ railway needs a Development Consent Order or Hybrid Bill. That includes opening old bits of railway.
And to get a DCO or Hybrid Bill needs the express agreement and support of Government.
The water supply and other restrictions is only effective because of the planning system though.
The statutory consultation with the water company represents the views of a pressure group (in this case of the water company), not necessarily the objective truth.
The water company would prefer not to have to spend money on new infrastructure prior to the government giving it a sweetheart deal on the capital spend.
Objecting to new homes on grounds of limited water supply is one of its primary levers to apply pressure to the government to that end.
If there was a pressing demand for more water, it could be provided comparatively quickly, likely through the provision of a desalination plant and probably a tunnelled aqueduct.
The water shortage in Cambridge is real and is a consequence of geography. Cambridge has always relied on a chalk aquifer for its water, using boreholes not pipes from reservoirs. This means that, until recently, there has been no need for water distribution infrastructure to bring water in from elsewhere. The equivalent of the reservoir is the aquifer which is underground. Its capacity for storage and replenishment are limited. The aquifer has gradually been over abstracted because of rising population and climate change (partly less rainfall and partly higher demand from agriculture) and we are literally running out of water.
It has always been the case that significant expansion of Cambridge would run up against a water supply constraint, requiring major infrastructure investment. Planning isn't the obstacle preventing that from happening, there is actually very little opposition to the Reservoir in the Fens, where it is widely regarded as an opportunity not a threat. The obstacle to increasing water supply for Cambridge has always been financial.
The same is the case for healthcare, where the Addenbrookes A+E runs at over 3 times its design capacity. There would be no planning objections to a new Addenbrookes A+E, almost everyone recognises it as essential, the obstacle is financial.
Anything more than 2 miles (possibly 2km, I forget) of ‘new‘ railway needs a Development Consent Order or Hybrid Bill. That includes opening old bits of railway.
Much of the problem is that our existing housing stock is either old, or it's just crap. It's not normal or reasonable to expect that the housing solution for 2026 is whatever a sprawl housebuilder put up in 1926. We have had society wide housing replacement programmes in the past, when we recognised that modern sanitation was essential for the good functioning of society. It's just that now, the problems are much less obvious than the lack of an internal toilet per dwelling. Houses fail the modernity test because there's a 100mm step level difference between the front and back rooms, or because a doorway is 56mm too narrow for a wheelchair. They also fail because their construction means they are stuck using high temperature fossil fuel-based heating systems and/or they cannot reasonably be air conditioned to handle a heatwave. An even more challenging problem is that they were designed around combined sewers, and we need expensive and disruptive sewage treatment plants to separate the water that came down the gutter pipes from the water that came down the soil pipes.
This post was about the side of CPO which acts like a quasi land value tax. Much of what people are responding to is the threat that change (in the form of a CPO notice) will be foisted upon innocent residents. But we did basically this in the past, in order to enforce standards on housing. Councils declared that entire neighbourhoods of houses were unfit for human habitation if they were not upgraded. Many homes were upgraded, but many were not and they were demolished. This isn't a cut and dry slum-vs-wealthy people problem either; all those fancy Georgian townhouses had to be retrofitted with internal toilets as well! Plenty of fancy houses were built on the assumption your servants would take away your chamber pot for you.
One of the reasons it worked then was that there was a very obvious story about housing getting better. You were being evicted, CPOed or otherwise forced from your existing house because your existing house was clearly crap, and you would instead be getting something much better. This is an underappreciated part of even some pretty serious slum clearance and urban renewal projects which we now consider to be a mistake. Cities were dark and dirty; suburbs and shiny new council estates and high rises were clearly better. It took a few years for the problems to emerge and then escalate out of control at the worst housing schemes.
The more that we redevelop, the easier it is to build something clearly better. Our housing quality has gone down because it's so expensive to build. If we want housing to be cheap again we need to get a supply chain churning out new houses. Most of the nicest parts of Victorian housing was all mass produced in factories and selected from catalogues. Even in upper middle class housing, the fancy parquet floors and cornicing were an industrial product where the middle class were trying to copy what the properly rich people had. There's not really any reason we can't do this today. Other than the unavailability of endangered and slow-grown virgin forest wood, we can pretty much make everything again. Fancy ceramic tiled floors? Ornate cornicing? Fancy stone and brick details? Why not? If you're building enough of them, you can always come up with a machine or process to do it nicely.
Milton Keynes is an interesting story because it demonstrates the limits of what you can do by turning a farmer's field into housing. First of all, MK is actually successful. But other New Towns around Britain have been failures. The reason MK works is that it's located somewhere that actually makes a good deal of sense, on the M1 and WCML and with good access to the economic zones of the UK. There might not have been a good road or railway connecting them, but it is also well situated on the Oxford to Cambridge arc. A lot of journeys within the prosperous south east of England can or do run through the general area of Milton Keynes.
But there aren't that many sites which are like MK with access this good. That's because the factors in play at Milton Keynes don't really change much over centuries or even millenia. I mean, Milton Keynes is on the A5, also known as Watling Street, and the main road artery of Roman Britain. The basic geometry that builders of high speed railways, and motorways, and conventional railways, and canals all favour is really the same as we identified two millennia ago for roads. You build settlements where these linear corridors intersect with each other, and with natural features like river crossings and good farmland. So, it's not a surprise that further along Watling Street you have the old settlement of Londinium, which is now the very core of not only London but the entire UK economy. All of those Victorian commuter railways followed the same logic as the Romans did, because new technology rarely invalidates previous design principles. New technology may mean that new settlements break through into viability, like Manchester appearing out of nowhere with the canals and industrial revolution, but it doesn't make old ideas worthless. Rather a lot of world trade is still dependent on shipping routes and ports that would be familiar to anyone from the last half millennium. A map of European truck cargo corridors in the 21st century looks basically the same as a map of trade routes from the 17th century!
This means that in most cases, the best places to live already have people living there. If it's a railway junction, then it almost certainly has at least a village. Junctions not having settlements grow around them is a novelty of motorways and high speed railways that provide non-stop, grade-separated links. These settlements grow up and out, with the oldest parts right at the core. You didn't put the market square and the church a kilometre away from the main junction unless there was a very good reason. You built houses and pubs and shops and schools and everything else in pretty close proximity, because transport was expensive. It was only really once we started laying down metal grooves for horse and cart that transport really started to get any cheaper or faster than it had been for millennia.
As a consequence, as urban areas grow, the natural order of things is that the centre of town with existing buildings will be replaced. The town will grow outwards, and eventually justify a new church or a new town square or a new whatever. Demand will grow for higher density housing in the centre, because the value of proximity to other things will exceed the cost savings from building on undeveloped land on the edge of the town. Cities grew this way and constantly had to rebuild core infrastructure to cope. If the Great Fire of London hadn't provided the opportunity anyway, we'd have done similar reconstruction later on, just as Paris did under Haussmann. Reconstruction and change is the norm, and over history it has generally made things get better.
But our vetocracy of individual owner occupiers gums up the works pretty badly. How can we grow a village into a town, if that means knocking down most of the centre? We may be able to preserve the historic centre but only by doubling down on densification around it. This is actually the big problem that we face right now with Oxford and Cambridge, and many other English towns with growth potential. We can't just keep adding housing to the outer edge without upgrading and urbanising the centre properly. Car commutes into the centre are already impossible in many cases, but you can't build a high capacity public transport system without pretty major alterations in the centre. Widening and straightening roads so that you can have trams means knocking down buildings, and going underground means you need a huge amount more density to make the costs stack up.
The new towns proposed for Cambridgeshire are unlikely to work because they're just an attempt at ignoring this problem. They can only really work if you give them really solid access to Cambridge and the jobs in it. New build houses cost so much in the SE of England that you really have to target the high earners who do actually work in Cambridge itself, as the kind of people who work elsewhere (e.g. a plumber) generally won't be able to afford them. We can sort of solve this by building infrastructure like East-West Rail but all that does is get you to Cambridge station. It doesn't mean that there are any more office buildings for employers to base themselves in. A whole new town means having thousands, or tens of thousands, of new commuters - where do they go? The answer can't just be office parks on bypasses, unless they are so close to Cambridge again that they incur similar local infrastructure problems.
A development company is a nice idea but the idea only really has legs when it's able to turn uninhabited, unloved land into inhabited land. There aren't many opportunities to do that in areas of meaningful economic opportunity. Canary Wharf and the Docklands worked, because the City wasn't growing to meet demand. Milton Keynes could be built to accommodate more office-park-like employers who didn't need to be in the city centre. But once you have developed it and you have residents move in, you're kind of stuck. The freedom to act has disappeared because residents don't like change, even when they live in buildings that didn't exist when they were born. We've already seen a bunch of this nonsense in Milton Keynes where local politicians now compete on being NIMBY and preventing MK from growing any further. The lesson is that new development does not actually address the fundamental problem of people resisting change, and every new development we do has to be harder than the one before. We've already built Canary Wharf.
Democracy is very difficult when it comes to the built environment, because the built environment influences who then gets to have a democratic vote. Who is the democratic representative of the possibly tens of thousands of people who would move in if a redevelopment goes ahead? Should 1000 existing local residents get a veto over their village growing to a town of 10,000? Those 9000 people mostly already exist but are spread out, and may not even know they might be interested in moving there later. Then there are all of the people who are yet to be born. We know that access to large family housing is now a critical part of the low birthrates. If it were easy to get a 5 bedroom family home as a couple, then more couples would end up having N+1 kids so they didn't feel so empty.
Given the recent fire safety changes (personalised evacuation plans and the building safety regulator etc) I no longer believe housing old people in flats is practical. The costs associated are absolutely enormous, especially given our very limited supply of people.
If new housing is required for an aging population its probably going to have to be bungalows just from a safety and industrial capacity perspective - mobile homes built in a factory by (increasingly) robots do not consume valuable on site labour that will have a thousand other things to do.
Negative equity can blight millions too. One estimate from the 1990s is that more than 20% of homeowners went into negative equity. It would be very expensive to fund a programme to help 20% of homeowners.
I wasn’t old enough to be reading the papers back then, but as I understand it they didn’t have a programme for those homeowners. It seems a false comparison to suggest that a modern programme would help everyone directly.
But once you have developed it and you have residents move in, you're kind of stuck. The freedom to act has disappeared because residents don't like change
Local matters are decided by local people, not the built environment that houses them. NIMBYs are saying no to what is beyond their property, but you want to take their property.
Much of the problem is that our existing housing stock is either old, or it's just crap. It's not normal or reasonable to expect that the housing solution for 2026 is whatever a sprawl housebuilder put up in 1926.
I grew up in a house built in about 1901, built as part of a sprawl development. Despite needing significant work (a 50 year overhaul), it is still very liveable and the area it is in is highly desirable.
By comparison, much of what has followed in the last 30 years or so is significantly worse. Modern homes (including mine) tend to lower ceilings, inflexible plumbing and heating (e.g. microbore set into concrete), smaller rooms, and poor sound insulation.
The deficiencies you go on to highlight are issues, but the track record of target driven development has been the do things to minimum legal standards, meeting compliance only, and to miss the liveability standards. And let's not get on to the question of cladding...
As for questions like city centres, you sound like the developers that my late grandfather had to deal with when at the City of London Corporation in the 1950s and 60s. Those older city centres are what give places their identity and strength, and should not be seen as obstacles per se. And that means that some, for example Cambridge, may simply not be able to develop more because what would be lost is more vital than what might come in its place.
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