The Lemon Fool

tjh290633 wrote:An article in today's Sunday Telegraph suggests that it is the planning system which will prevent Keir Starmer of reaching his goal of 1.5 million houses in his first five years. http://digitaleditions.telegraph.co.uk/ ... rticle/NaN

Near us, the small area of open country between our village and the next keeps being subject to attrition. Much of a golf course has now been built on. A development in our village was conditional upon several fields being given to the Parish Council for public open space. Preservation of some land from building is essential, let alone the limitations of water and sewerage systems, place restrictions on how much land can be devoted to housing.

Maybe the answer is to let the housebuilders get on with the job, with minimal restrictions?

AsleepInYorkshire wrote:Some facts

Builders have about 500,000 to 700,000 plots in their landbanks. That's approximately 2.5% of all the homes in the UK. It's not a significant amount of land when compared to the numbers being quoted by Labour and the Conservatives as they claim they have targets of 300,000 new homes per year.

The last time such number of new homes were built in the UK was 1977. The industry seems able to produce about 200,000 new homes per year, subject to the vagaries of macro-economic events. (The graph below was prepared by me using data from the ONS website)


As with many of today's statistics there are discrepancies with the following information. However, I've used those figures which seem to be the sort of average. It shouldn't make that much of a difference to the overall picture it paints.


Source

Overall, British golf courses are calculated to cover 1,256 sq km, an area roughly equivalent to the whole of Greater Manchester and, according to some estimates, just a little smaller than all the land covered by housing.

9.4% of UK land is peat bog


Source

The claim that our planning regulations and other bureaucracy associated with bringing a housing development to construction phase may be underpinned by the above information. Is it possible that we aren't planning as well as we think we are. We prevent building in many areas, putting pressure on those areas that are left. As we reduce the areas where we can build new homes we may well be increasing the value of land in that area due simply to the demand placed on it by several "bidding" builders?

We certainly don't appear to have used up huge tracts of UK land to build on. I'd suggest there's certainly some reasons to suggest that future planning is going to have to incorporate national interests in respect of energy independence and our carbon footprint. This could result in consideration of redevelopment of large areas in our conurbations, if we want to preserve the current land allocations.

AiY(D)

TUK020 wrote:Do golf courses count as "Green Urban"?
How would I find out what % of, say, Surrey is golf courses compared to built on?

Lanark wrote:One thing that never seems to be brought up in these conversations is the need for more dense/energy efficient housing in city centres

https://especiales.eldiario.es/spain-lives-in-flats/

Less American style car-dependent houses = less travelling required = less carbon emissions

The current modern estates with nothing but ugly cul-de-sacs and road after road with zero amenities are soul destroying.

None of the political parties have a coherent housing policy, they do nothing but parrot whatever the big house builders tell them to say.

The accusations flung at Enright were wild and varied, and mostly from people with no connection to Oxford, he said. Many were from outside the UK.

“It was quite alarming,” Enright told CNN, “I haven’t really had anything like that before in my many years in local government.”

Enright had been swept into a conspiracy theory, fast gaining pace around the world, which has rebranded plans to cut traffic, reduce air pollution and increase walking and cycling in cities as “climate lockdowns.”

Oxford has become a flashpoint, in part, because its traffic filtering plan has been conflated with a separate proposal in the city to create “15-minute cities,” the main focus of the conspiracy theorists’ ire.

What are 15-minute cities?

Type “15-minute cities” into social media and be prepared for a barrage of claims the idea will usher in dystopia, people will be fined for leaving their “district” or it is “urban incarceration.”

The concept, however, is pretty simple: Everything you need should be within a roughly 15-minute walk or cycle from your home, from health care and education to grocery stores and green spaces.

The aim is to make cities more livable and connected, with less private car use – meaning cleaner air, greener streets and lower levels of planet-heating pollution. Around a fifth of the world’s human-caused, planet-warming pollution comes from transportation, and passenger cars make up more than 40% of this.

ursaminortaur wrote:As I recall proposals made not that long ago for equipping areas with more local amenities under the banner of the "15 minute city" were demonised by the car lobby and climate change sceptics as somehow being an attack on free movement.

vand wrote:The question has to be asked - does the UK really need more housing?

Our population is growing at at rate of approximately 0.5%/yr and will probably trend even lower in the future. The current housing stock is about 25m; 0.5% of 25m is 125k that is required to keep up with population expansion.. anything above that is raising the supply of housing in relation to population size.

The only caveat to this is if the average household size is decreasing, however the stats show this is not the case, and our persons per household has remained pretty constant over time.

TUK020 wrote:

vand wrote:The question has to be asked - does the UK really need more housing?

Our population is growing at at rate of approximately 0.5%/yr and will probably trend even lower in the future. The current housing stock is about 25m; 0.5% of 25m is 125k that is required to keep up with population expansion.. anything above that is raising the supply of housing in relation to population size.

The only caveat to this is if the average household size is decreasing, however the stats show this is not the case, and our persons per household has remained pretty constant over time.

https://www.centreforcities.org/publica ... ng-crisis/
Compared to the average European country, Britain today has a backlog of 4.3 million homes that are missing from the national housing market as they were never built.

This housing deficit would take at least half a century to fill even if the Government’s current target to build 300,000 homes a year is reached. Tackling the problem sooner would require 442,000 homes per year over the next 25 years or 654,000 per year over the next decade in England alone.

Adamski wrote:Immigration is latest 504,000 per year. So we'd need to build a Birmingham ever 2 years along with all the schools, hospitals, infrastructure etc. Or 5 new Birmingham's every 10 years. Never happen, so house prices will continue to go up.

The headlines "house prices plunge" completely misleading. Just a minor blip on an ever upward trajectory. Nightmare for anyone under 50. But unfortunately that's how it is.

Lanark wrote:One thing that never seems to be brought up in these conversations is the need for more dense/energy efficient housing in city centres

https://especiales.eldiario.es/spain-lives-in-flats/

Less American style car-dependent houses = less travelling required = less carbon emissions

The current modern estates with nothing but ugly cul-de-sacs and road after road with zero amenities are soul destroying.

None of the political parties have a coherent housing policy, they do nothing but parrot whatever the big house builders tell them to say.

Adamski wrote:Immigration is latest 504,000 per year. So we'd need to build a Birmingham ever 2 years along with all the schools, hospitals, infrastructure etc. Or 5 new Birmingham's every 10 years. Never happen, so house prices will continue to go up.

The headlines "house prices plunge" completely misleading. Just a minor blip on an ever upward trajectory. Nightmare for anyone under 50. But unfortunately that's how it is.

vand wrote:

Adamski wrote:Immigration is latest 504,000 per year. So we'd need to build a Birmingham ever 2 years along with all the schools, hospitals, infrastructure etc. Or 5 new Birmingham's every 10 years. Never happen, so house prices will continue to go up.

The headlines "house prices plunge" completely misleading. Just a minor blip on an ever upward trajectory. Nightmare for anyone under 50. But unfortunately that's how it is.

Net or gross?
Don't forget people leave these shores, and some even die here.

https://www.worldometers.info/world-pop ... opulation/

NET increases:
2020 +0.42% 281k
2021 +0.34% 228k
2022 +0.34% 228k

I would say we NEED the immigration, wouldn't you?

Nimrod103 wrote:

vand wrote:
Seeing as most immigrants will never earn enough to reach the threshold for being a net contributor to the finances of the UK, immigration makes us collectively poorer. No wonder the GDP per capita has stagnated for years, productivity has stagnated, yet taxes inexorably rise and and people don't feel better off.

spasmodicus wrote:

Nimrod103 wrote:

where's the evidence?

this study says otherwise
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/economics/about-department/fiscal-effects-immigration-uk

S