Well, it’s one solution:
Labour also wants to give councils powers to force landowners to sell vacant sites to build new housing at lower prices than the compulsory purchase system currently allows.
So the council just steals the land then? Yes, forced sale at less than market value is theft, indeed it is.
And societies where government can just come along and steal your stuff tend not to work out very well. If you doubt this just think how that recent Liverpool City Council would have dealt with such powers……
Boris will probably be stealing this idea if he clings on to power for another year…
Councils are sitting on loads of unused or derelict sites that they already own
It’s a shame developers cannot compulsorily purchase those
Maybe central government should perform an audit of those sites?
A latter-day Domesday book
“Councils are sitting on loads of unused or derelict sites that they already own”
My local council owns several hundred acres of development land, with full planning permission for houses (first gained in 2005-ish) and had done the square root of bugger all with it for about 15 years, due to their own greediness and incompetence. Who is going to expropriate that land then?
What a fine proposal from Starfish. Make him the Tsar for Council Unused and Derelict Land. TCUDL sounds good.
An alternative that became TCOSY would be even better.
@dearieme
How about Council-owned UNdeveloped Terrain?
Starfish,
You can’t have that one, it was taken by the Controller United Nations Transport when I was serving in Cyprus in the ‘70s.
@BiND
Ah yes
We also had the Campaign to Undermine Naval Terminology when I was at BRNC
I need to think again…
There is probably a reason the sites are vacant. Perhaps they could loosen up a few regulations and the owners would build on them themselves. Or is the fear that the owners will only build what people want to buy and not what the council thinks they should have.
Forced sale at market value is theft. Forced sale at above market value is theft.
Forced sale is theft.
When I worked in Germany in the early 90s, our department was absorbed into another one and given some hieroglyphic title (in that strange German way), that even we couldn’t remember. Our boss (a twat) decided to have a competition to rename the dept and put to his bosses.
I came up with Computer und Netzwerk Team. It was rejected as being too boring. It kept me amused for weeks, though.
Agammamon and of course if councils started doing this, then the market value of those other vacant sites would fall, because of the likelihood they could be taken off the owners at the councils whim.
‘Forced sale is theft.’
Yep, Agammamon, when they force me to buy renewable electricity, I’d call that outright theft.