Politicians hoping to persuade young people in the UK to have more children should prioritise tackling housing affordability, according to research by the Resolution Foundation thinktank.
Abolish the TCPA, kill the Green Belt. ‘S for the children, see?
And deport the millions of foreign moochers clogging up housing stock at the taxpayer’s expense.
We’re running that experiment here. We’ve deported about 1% of our population and rents are coming down in many places. It doesn’t take much movement at the margins to change housing prices.
.
Or we could just halt all third-world immigration and roll the deportation flights…
.
As I said to Mrs Grist as we drove through the rolling hills of the North Downs yesterday, every blade of grass as far as the eye could see was untouched by any animal foot large enough for us to see. The admiration for the Green Belt seems to be a love of the idea rather than the reality. Though of course, as the BBC tells us, that could be because the countryside is racist, which may explain the absence of drug dealers. Strange then that they subject all their new cadre of employees to such torture in Countryfile…
Something is keeping the grass short. Winter? Silage harvesters? Locusts? Local council contractors? You suggest.
If I ruled the world I’d do an experiment on – say – Burnley.
You can currently buy perfectly decent two-bed terraced houses there for £40k.
Burney is in itself not a bad place to live – the Pennines and the Forest of Bowland are just outside it, and you’re not far from Manchester if that’s what floats your boat – but no-one wants to live there.
So take it over.
Treble the police (tasking them only to deal with real crime that bothers real people like rape, assault, robbery, burglary), build a nice big jail, and use the fucker with exemplary sentences for nasty bastards. Those who don’t get jailed get to clean off graffiti, pick up litter, do old people’s gardens, sweep the streets, with daily public horse-whippings for slackers.
Take over the town’s schools and sack all the bad teachers and employ new ones.
Take over the council and focus it on roads, bins, public parks and the stuff that real people care about.
Watch it become one of the most popular towns in the UK.
Tinse and repeat.
I can hear the Reeeeeeees already. How many apparatchiks would hate it if it worked?
That’s just a bonus.
The simple answer to this is to put power back into local authorities. They choose what gets built, they collect the rates.
Now, these are the incentives that follow that:-
Civic pride disappeared with civic power. Local politicians have very little say in what they can do. So serious people don’t bother wanting to be councillors. It means sitting through endless pointless committees and having to do things you think are a waste of time. You can’t say “right, let’s knock down that heap of listed junk” because English Heritage, a load of bureaucrats that don’t have to look at it every day overrule you.
Burnley was a pretty amazing place – once, a long time ago. It has many parks. As a kid I had a brief stint there with my parents. The house was nice and roomy, although the cellar was dank, the loft still had a collection of wartime gas masks (including one for a baby) but after all, it was 1953!
Scott Park still has its bandstand, so presumably, once upon a time, there was culture there!
If it’s a shithole, then some of the other places I’ve lived could count as the epitome of Shitholia.
It’s a terrible place now but no worse than many other northern towns, and non-northern too.
When my wife and I were deciding where to move our family to after my work changed a few years ago we went all over the shop looking round; my initial preference was Devon, until we got there and found how run down much of it was.
As a kid I would sometimes get the bus up from Rochdale to Townley Park. One time there was an exhibition on of TV equipment (why Townley Hall?) and when I got there there were lots of vans & bright lights. Turns out they were filming ‘Whistle Down the Wind’ there as well. The football fanbase at school was 50% Burnley and 50% Man U.
Bill Tidy’s ‘The Cloggies’ were based in Burnley I think. One of the strips had an ad for lager on a building wall – ‘Be a man, drink Giggle Water’…
There’s a Scott Park in a town once prosperous due to Mills? Fuiyoh
Burnley is now over 15% Pakistani, a proportion which can only increase absent repatriation.
Young people in the UK (which I would understand as young people already in the UK) are competing with foreign-born occupying around half of London’s social housing stock, for a start, and I notice the foreign-born seem adept at having kids at the taxpayer’s expense. So something else must also be going on. I wonder what?
Politicians can only, ever, stop making things more expensive.
They have no power to make things cheaper, but only to remove the additional costs imposed by the state.
They could reduce the regulatory and taxation burden that causes people to not have more kids. That would mean removing state added, or caused, costs on housing, energy, transportation, childcare, education, and working.
And try to fight education inflation. Tim Henman’s father was a solicitor but learnt on the job at 23 he should have had no debt.
Education inflation results in people starting to have children later – which reduces fertility
The other thing is going back to when local authorities did the planning AND collected the rates. At which point, they have incentives to approve development. Once you get to the thing of local authority spending mostly coming from central government, they don’t.
I would say they probably better not approving development (more cost).
Approving development means that you get more rates from the property being on it.
When local authorities collected (and set) their own business rates they had every incentive to try and tax businesses as much as possible, on the basis that a) not many people are business owners, so you aren’t losing many votes by taxing them, and b) business owners don’t want to be trying to move their business (or house) every 5 minutes, so you have a captive tax base. Thats why Mrs T created the Uniform Business Rate – to stop the local authority Trots from taxing everything into the ground.
Hey, Chuck, is it too much trouble to make two sentences of this?
Conservatives create a good environment. Totalitarians ‘persuade.’
This is becoming like the bloke in the pub who frequently says, “what we need is a good war”.
Fortunately, no one listens to him either.
The thing is its trivially easy to get planning for houses these days. There are new developments getting passed everywhere. The word has got out from central government to local authorities – issue planning consents, or else. The problem is not the planning, its the infrastructure. Its just not there to supply new houses, and installing it takes ages and costs an absolute fortune. New roads, new junctions, new bridges, new sewers, new sewage treatment works, new power lines, new water mains, the cost of building them all is constantly skyrocketing. The houses they can bang up in 5 minutes. Its everything else thats takes the time and £££. Then the price of fuel goes through the roof, and makes all the sums not add up any more. Lack of planning permission has little to do with it.
If that is so, why do planning authorities get away with demanding that developers spend £ms on stuff that the council should pay for as a condition for obtaining planning permission and why does a ruin (of a house or cottage) off-grid cost far more than an empty field?
“why does a ruin (of a house or cottage) off-grid cost far more than an empty field?”
Because you’ll never get planning these days for a single house in the middle of nowhere. National planning rules forbid it outright. Its increasingly hard to get planning for single houses or small developments on the edges of existing villages if there are no bus routes nearby. Apparently nowadays you can’t build a house anywhere that can only be accessed by car. There has to be public transport available within walking distance. An existing dwelling in the middle of nowhere therefore has a considerable value. A ruin, not so much, as you probably would not get planning to rebuild it, for the public transport reasons above.
All of this doesn’t apply to a larger scale development, because that will have public transport provision built in. I know all this because I wanted to build myself a little house in the middle of my farm, in an existing small farm yard, so a sort of brownfield site. I was advised there was no way the planners would let me, but if I wanted to put in for planning for 100 houses in my field half a mile away that was next to a main road (and a bus route) there was a very good chance I’d get it. Build one house, definite no. 100, maybe.
Yeah Jim. It’s the same in Oz.
In my suburb the blocks of land are being divided up again and again to let them build more and more houses on them.
Where the roads, sewers, power lines etc already exist.
Where I live in East Berkshire new houses are popping up like mushrooms on a damp autumn morning. Each new development gets hundreds of homes, a pub, a Co-Op, and a café. No school or medical centre though, the facilities in the pre-existing adjacent neighbourhood have to take the overflow.
They won’t be getting pubs for long. Perhaps they can be repurposed as private medical centres.