The Government has placed a particular focus on new garden towns and villages as it looks to create scores of new communities across Britain.
Why do this?
Why not just build more houses where people already want to live? Take advantage of all the extant infrastructure? Why this insistence on big new schemes rather than just relaxing the regs so that folk can built 2 houses here, three there and 5 behind that hedge?
Is it because it’s easier to put photos of a brand new estate on re-election campaign literature than one or two scattered houses, perhaps?
If they’re trying to build New Islamabad, it’s a bit easier than adapting an existing English country market town.
Just a thought, UK is a small island, with about 60,000,000 residents……have you considered building 20 storey apartment blocks? Works for Singapore, HongKong, China? At a guess the olde wordles thatched cottage near the village green isn’t going to work anymore for you.
@Jimintheantipodes: Just wait for them to come up with a compromise that satisfies nobody – thatched 20 storey tower blocks that leak so you have a duck pond on every floor.
AtheC……hope some idiot town planner doesn’t discover your idea, probably think it would work well, now that windmills are back in vogue.
One can’t as a rule “create” communities: they form themselves loosely out of a sense of common interests and values.
There is a notable exception to this, namely when such communities are said to have “community leaders”, which recognises de facto that such communities are alien to a wider population that exists without community leaders .
This reflects the view held by the current government (comprising ministers and civil servants) that they know better than we do what is good for us. Planning rules that have traditionally been used to stop us doing things of which they disapprove are now to be used to force us to do things which they have approved in advance of asking us.
Maybe it’s because that extant infrastructure is already well past capacity and can’t cope with anymore being dumped on top of it so they have to start somewhere else?
Or maybe it’s because most of the extant infrastructure was designed by the powers that be and therefore needs the “aliens” approach, maybe Musk can lend us a spaceship?
@Arthur the Cat
You could also satisfy the eco warriors and “Insulate Britain” by putting huge straw bails inside the walls to make them efficient to heat. Never mind that would give you rooms so small you couldn’t fit a bed in them. Mind you a 20 story building with walls stuffed with straw walls and a thatched roof might make even the most ardent eco warriors think twice.
Since Barratt are the specialists in building rabbit hutches, Angela Rayner chose them to build garden villages
As the article indicates it’s to emulate Atlee. TTK is a sentimental bloke really…
Why not just not pay foreign citizens housing benefit? Then we would need less homes.
(No citizenship for anyone who is not a net taxpayer – don’t worry Doctors, Cricket managers and Bulgarian fraud inspectors* (I wish) would still be able to come here.
*I refer to Vassil Panayotov who found Britain’s ever benefits scam while being a policeman in Bulgaria. Ideally he – plus an interpreter if needed – would be given a very well paid job at the DWP.
He has already earned it and it might encourage others.
What Bloke in Wales said.
It’s a bit like a sewage farm. The public will accept a huge pile of shit if it’s a few miles down the road, but don’t like it if turds are dumped on their doorstep.
People know full well who the new houses are for.
How am I supposed to get a suitable bribe from someone building just 1 or 2 houses on their big garden?
It’s got to be an estate of rabbit hutches to fund the graft!
#CrichelDown
“Maybe it’s because that extant infrastructure is already well past capacity and can’t cope with anymore being dumped on top of it so they have to start somewhere else?”
Ding Ding Ding, we have a winner!
Our host, not being from these parts any more has very little idea what the UK is like nowadays, especially in the bits where everyone wants to live. The roads are at capacity (and are fucked), the sewers are straining at the seams (as we all hear about constantly), the electricity network has no spare capacity, ditto the water supply network. And increasing the supply of all those utilities is far easier (and cheaper) if you are starting from scratch in the middle of nowhere, than if you are trying to upgrade utility networks in highly urbanised areas.
Its all very well throwing off ‘free market’ epithets from the open spaces of rural Portugal, he should try coming and living in the cramped UK for a while and see how things are in the real world, not an economist’s pretend one.
BiW
If they’re trying to build New Islamabad, it’s a bit easier than adapting an existing English country market town.
Already been done. It’s called Luton.
@Jim
Can I also throw off free market epithets from up here (still in the UK)? Plenty space for development, not all the UK is cramped.
If you don’t like where you live, them why not move?
I confidently predict that none of these ‘garden towns or villages’ will ever happen, apart from a few existing towns and villages being blighted by estates of commuter rabbit hutches next door. Luckily for the inhabitants of the blighted villages, most of the newcomers will be native Brits fleeing the 3rd world inner cities.
Jim makes a v good point. Most of the UK, outside a few gilded postcodes, is starting to look like the third world. The roads are appalling. The grubby, unsafe but ethnically vibrant bits of our largest cities are the third world already. Although we still have potable water, for now,
Because even this government, rapidly becoming the worst in human history, was elected paying lip service to the need to do something about hordes of immigrants coming in annually.
If the immigration stopped then there would be a need for about 50% fewer ‘new homes’ at a minimum.
Obviously I appreciate the current political establishment has no intention of removing more than a fraction of those that are arriving here every week but if given the option to reduce building or simply concrete over the country, many choose the former.
There may be plenty of capacity in and around Aberdeen (and will be more when the oil and gas industry has been killed off); trouble is, it’s not where anyone wants to go.
The indigenous population is not growing. We do not need any new communities.
I detect movement by you on this issue, Tim. Within the last couple of years you were complaining about opposition to vast hectarages of the countryside near Bath being eaten up by big new developments. Fucking nimbys wingeing about their view, etc. These weren’t whole new towns but not so far off; certainly a lot more than a couple of houses being popped in here and there.
This is the most obvious economist shibboleth to fall after that of mass immigration.
No, the specific one I was complaining about was the South Stoke Plateau. Which is selfish bastard nimbies outside, in the green belt, complaining about the development of a farm just inside the town, off the green belt.
A farm.
Farms are the enemy now, haven’t you heard?
JuliaM: «Farms are the enemy now, haven’t you heard?»
No, no! “Rewilding” has changed all that and this enlightened practice is a gem in the socialist crown: a throng of unproductive landowners fills out a sheaf of forms so that taxpayers’ money can flow to them via a host of DEFRA bureaucrats working from home at the taxpayers’ expense.
@TMB
One can’t as a rule “create” communities: they form themselves loosely out of a sense of common interests and values.
I don’t think it’s possible to form communities any more in the UK. Coz curtain twitchers. So many people get their “society” by watching TV. The only things they know of the people live around is glimpses through the front room window by twitching the curtains. If a “community” did form, you can imagine the sort of people would form it. Sort of people who form your political class. Interfering cvnts.
In a sense, your lack of communities is why you have TTKier safely installed in No10. You didn’t have a party would deliver what a large part of the electorate want because you won’t get together to form the party.
I like the photo they used for the article… Broadly grinning real estate developers smelling a Trough the size of Enrichistan….
All you need to know, really…
Now… can we project the money flow and pinpoint the Usual Suspects who will be Tasked to do the Preliminary Feasibility Reports which such Grand Ideas neccessitate, and trace who has stakes with whom?
@David – “No citizenship for anyone who is not a net taxpayer”
You’ll run out of citizens if you do that. Small children are not known for being net taxpayers, so once all the current citizens have died, you’ll have very few left.
@Jim – “The roads are at capacity”
Road upgrading is almost impossible due to the green lobby.
– “sewers are straining at the seams”
Because bills are kept low by regulation so there is not enough money to upgrade them
– “the electricity network has no spare capacity”
because the NIMBYs refuse to allow pylons to add capacity, so it has to be done slower and more expensively.
– “ditto the water supply network”
The effects of both NIMBYs and constraints on financing.
But to answer the question in Tim’s article – I suspect it’s in the hope that the NIMBYs will be easier to deal with if you start with an empty site and build everything. If you build the same amount of housing in odd bits here and there, then each one gets its own set of local NIMBYs blocking it.
Maybe, just maybe it’s all to do with the plus 80 million that actually inhabit this country rather than the 65 million that it was built for?
I don’t think it’s possible to form communities any more in the UK. Coz curtain twitchers. So many people get their “society” by watching TV. The only things they know of the people live around is glimpses through the front room window by twitching the curtains. If a “community” did form, you can imagine the sort of people would form it. Sort of people who form your political class. Interfering cvnts.
I think BiS’s view may have been coloured by spending too much time in London. There are still plenty of village communities in the UK, and probably districts of larger towns, too. But they need a fair amount of human homogeneity, which is disappearing in a lot of places.