Simon Heffer is one of those occasionally convincing but also maddening right-wing commentators who talks the free market talk, but is as prone as any Fabian socialist to the idea of preventing the market from operating if it suits. His latest tirade is against the UK government’s aim to build more housing and hence meet skyrocketing demand. Heffer is of course correct to lambast what might be a state-driven process, but I get the impression that he is pretty much deaf to the idea that high house prices reflect a serious scarcity of supply, which needs to be met if people who are not as rich as Croesus have a chance of buying a home.
The old bogeyman of “concreting over southeast England” is brought up; yes, the southeast is densely populated, but not as densely, say, as Holland or some other parts of the world. And one possible consequence of our planning laws is that it may have unwittingly encouraged people to build on floodplains, which clearly has borne bitter fruit for some householders this year due to the torrential rains of the English “summer”.
John its very much a question of NIMBY when it comes to house building. Its not like there are not a lot of brown field sites to build on either. Surely building houses in East London would have been better than the “Olympic village.”
What I like best about that film is the look of awe, love and admiration on Michael Caine’s face when he realises that he’s been conned.
It’s got a perfect ending, too.
Ahh an English summer.
Newspeak says it should now be known as Summer in the regions. England no longer exists within this government.
Corsair, nice comment, wrong thread!
If the word “is” can be given to interpretation, so can the word “summer”.
Johnathan,
Comment threads take on a life of their own. Trying to control them only introduces distortions.
I would have thought Holland was a total flood plain. How do they cope? And maybe the answer to overcrowding in the SE would be to move the Govt (incl Parliament) to somewhere like Hull. Plenty of open space up there.
nostaligic, I agree. I’ve always said the government can go straight to Hull.
They don’t have a lot of choice in the matter. In Britain the situation is rather different. The problem with the “green belt” planning laws is that a lot of the places that are above flood level in England are off-limits so people cannot live in such low-flood risk areas even if they want to.
Which is what I would love to see happen! I am all for paving over Kent. Why not?
My concern is not so much that they build houses, but that they are almost always incredibly UGLY and appear not to be capable of lasting more than 50 years.
How about some more high density Georgian terraces? How about rows of Chinese Shophouses, even? I am sure they can be built with the main living quarters on the upper floors and the utility or parking on the ground in case of, erm, flooding.
I do wonder how long so-called “green homes” will last. Considering the main complaint about trad homes is the energy for bricks, it is rather unfair as bricks can easily be recycled or last literally centuries.
p.s. Andrew .I.D. : the Olympic Village is going to become housing.
‘They’ (the government) should never ever be in the house building business. All they have to do to make housing affordable is stop messing up the market. Scrap all the Planning Acts and just allow anyone with land to damn well do what they want with it. The result will indeed be that Kent gets paved over and the sooner the better.
Any chance of an example of Heffer talking free-market talk? I can’t say I recall one myself.
…the Olympic Village is going to become housing…
I’m sure that’s a great comfort to the people who are being evicted now to make way for the UN sports day.
“the Olympic Village is going to become housing.”
Unfortunately it will be occupied by all the Olympic athletes who claim asylum.
Just as nimbys who oppose power stations should be disconnected from the electricity grid, nimbys who oppose house building shouldn’t be allowed to live in houses.
Simon Heffer has a rather better record of being critical of government spending and the death-to-liberty discrimination laws than the Conservative party has Guy (not that this would be difficult – although Conservatives did talk a lot about getting rid of the antidiscrimination industry before the 1979 election they backed down in office, just as they talked about recognising the Bishop Prime Minister of Zim-Rho and then demanded new elections that were bound to give the country to Comrade Bob).
As for housing.
The once “garden of England” is been paved over Perry (this has been going on for many years) – so you can be happy.
There is nothing “free market” about development in Britain.
The roads, sewers and so on are mostly government provided and government maintained (well supposedly government maintained, the sewers are not maintained very well).
If developers were told that they had to provide everything the residents demand (from roads and sewers to “school and hospitals”) I doubt that very many developements would take place.
People move to these places because they expect government (local and national) to provide these things.
Of course I favour providing nothing at all. Let the substandard roads and sewers in the new developments collapse and forget about such things as “schools and hospitals” but the various “plans” make it all compulsory.
Every new development in or near (for example) Kettering means more government spending (lots more) – as I said development has nothing to do with the free market.
This is the way of “progress”.
Having often attacked the “Economist” I must praise the article on the island of Sark in its most recent edition.
“Democracy”, “progress” and “human rights” mean (in practice) tax law going from one page of paper to a book of regulations, the employment of government administrators, and such a burden of red tape and expense that independence will be lost and tax rates no longer set locally.
A bit like Britain and the E.U. – accept that “evil feudal Sark” did not have income tax.
As normal the forces of statism get helped along by big business types. In this case the vile Barclay twins – who only arrived in Sark in 1993 and are already (via their endless bringing of the British government and the “European Convention on Human Rights”) well on the way to ruining the place.
“But surely when income tax comes to Sark the Barclays will lose to”.
Who knows? I am sick of trying to understand the twisted minds of such folk.
All I can do is make a comment on it – in fact I might as well send this in as a post (even though I have written on Sark before).
It is a little-known fact that London has only half the population density of Paris.
One of the problems of low density housing is the demand for (usually subsidised) transport that it creates (simply because everything is more spread out and people have to travel further to work and to amenities. That transport subsidy then makes low density housing more attractive. Catch 22.
The reason the Victorians, etc. built high density housing was that transport was difficult, slow and expensive so you wanyted to be nearer amenities and work. I’m inclined to think that if public transport subsidies were removed and if road transport had to pay a normal return on the asset value of the roads, there would be more demand for high density housing and less suburban sprawl – and all without central planning.
I apologize for being off-topic, but the thought continually occurs to me when the subject of London housing is broached, why doesnt labour or any party ever enter into serious discussions about liquidating the London corporation or the Earl of Marlybone’s holdings? These seem to me, dont know that much about them really, to be anachronistic vestiges of the oligarchic 18th century and ripe subjects for de-regulation. No one ever mentions them and it doesnt make sense…Punt out a few billion quid and dispossess them–it would normalize rental properties and encourage private development. To think that large sections of London are “owned” only under long-term leases is incredible.
People talk a lot of rot about ‘paving over England’. A salutary exercise is to LOOK AT A BLOODY MAP. One of the most noticeable things about England from the air is how green it is, even in the South East.
Perry
Scrap all the Planning Acts and just allow anyone with land to damn well do what they want with it
That would mean that i can buy a piece of land next to, say, St. Paul’s Cathedral, erect a 250 floor skyscraper adjacent to it, and then completely obscure the cathedral from sight?
Why not? St Paul’s is a huge pile of Baroque tat. It’s odd to think it enjoys a ‘protected view’ given that it’s crowded in with office blocks anyway.
In any case, there’s nothing more delightful than discovering a church hidden away behind a marketplace, and the skyscrapers will bring the wealth people need to enter St Paul’s, at £8 a head and no photography allowed. St Paul’s is clearly a commercial enterprise these days and should be treated no differently from an office block.
For a country with the population it has on a landmass the size of Tasmania, the UK has a weird aversion to high-quality, high-density housing.
Surely some of the bigger cities should start allowing development of residential buildings over 3 feet high in classy neighborhoods – not your typical outlying slum tenement building, but New York-style upper Manhattan apartment buildings, or even Parisian style medium-rise apartments.
Here in Australia we have the same psychological problem though – better to build bungalows 30kms from the CBD than a decent high-rise apartment building IN the CBD, it seems. Hello, gridlock.
Ian,
Yeah, well, why not indeed. 8 quid for St Paul’s now – eek!
Patrick,
You know. I have no idea.
Paul,
The news about Sark is disappointing for me to hear. I’ve been wanting to move eventually (as in, years and years from now), and Sark has been on my list of places to look into further.
David,
Seriously! I live in southern California and was looking up directions using Google maps (satellite pictures turned on), and on a whim decided to scroll over and see what the streets halfway across the world were like. The color difference was jaw dropping.
And what is wrong with that? St Patrick’s Cathedral in New York seems to have survived so far…
I don’t object to developers building on any available site, but they should be made legally liable for any damage caused to third parties. Typically, new build on a flood plain has a flooding impact on pre-existing properties, which subsequently become almost uninsurable. If the developers want to make the money, they should be made to face up to their liabilities too.
pommeygranate
The towns in this country were ruined AFTER the Town and Country Planning Act (not before it).
Read the “Sack of Bath”, or Roger Scruton’s “England: A Eulogy” (if you have not already done so).
For my own town (Kettering, Northamptonshire) the little book to look at is “Old Kettering and its Defenders” by Tony Ireson.
A real town evolves over time ( F.A. Hayek or M.J. Oakeshott tried to give some indication of the process by which such results of human action evolve).
Human beings make judgements about the houses they want live in and the business enterprises they want to either run or be customers of. Even the poorest people gradually get better homes over the years (as changes are made to buildings).
Over time (as a result of human choices but no overall “plan”) an attractive prospect emerges, with houses, shops, offices and factories (yes even factories can be attractive – and their owners will prize this as representing themselves) – all in violation of the “scientific” principles of “planning” (what Americans call “zoning”).
People are able to walk to work or to the shops or to the local lawyer – or to various cultural institutions (churches, clubs, socieites covering various things, and so on) without their being any overall plan.
All the above is what used to be called “a town”, a place where farmers sold their produce (often in stores they had family connections with), and where people bought things sometimes made locally, sometimes from far away. The people of the town would support themselves either by making things (different towns specialized in different traditions of manufacture – and they would be living traditions, i.e. the products would be improved over time) or by selling things – either goods, or their services (as lawyers, doctors or whatever).
Sound too much like (spelling alert) “Chigley” or “Camberwick Green”? If this is regarded as a fantasy it shows how far from healthy towns we have come. I was in Bury St Edmunds a few days ago and was shocked to find two factories (a brewery and a sugar beat factory – yes I know sugar beat is subsidized, before anyone points that out). – only a few decades ago a person would be shocked not to come upon factories in a town of a decent size.
What the plan does (by such things as compulsory purchace) is to destroy fine old houses (both ones that had always been grand, and those that had been improved by many different hands over the years) and destroy individual and family owned business enterprises – replacing them with chain stores, owned by the same corporations all over the country.
It (along with national taxes and regulations) also drives out established manufacturing enterprises – supposedly to “out of town areas”. In reality these “developements” “out of town” tend to be warehouses for imported goods (the manufacturing being driven clear out of the country).
“But the service industries are the wave of the future”
Too often the “service industries” do not mean such things as farmer owned butcher shops (they get hit by special regulations) or banks that take in local savings and lend them out to enterprises for inestment. Too often the “service economy” just means playing with a vast credit-money bubble.
And even if the “Austrian School” is wrong and such a bubble can carry on for ever – there is no way it can support a population of tens of millions of people.
So one will, for example, be “paving over Kent” to create endless housing estates for people who have no productive means of support.
Kettering used to have a brick makers, an iron foundry, many shoe factories (and so on and so on), and (on the retail side) many long established business enterpries.
Now it has virutally nothing (there are a few enterprises about that make things – but a ghost of what there used to be). For example all the, wildly expensive and destructive of fine old buildings, shopping centre did was to FORCEABLLY replace locally owned enterprises with chain stores), what is left of the town is full of boarded up enterprises (due to taxes and to “planning”).
And yet the population is vastly LARGER – and is going to going to be much larger still. Endless housing estates have been built for decades and are going to continue to be built – housing estates with no economic base.
“This is progress Paul – this is the service revolution”. What services?
No, it will all end in tears (if it does not end in blood), but I will not convince people who live so far from the ordinary world.
Paul,
I agree entirely.
What you fail to mention though, and a major cause of the collapse of small service businesses in the UK is that the burden of tax and regulation falls disproportionately on small businesses.
TESCO and their ilk can support major departments of people to deal with this nonsense, the local green-grocer can’t. My suburb of Manchester is literally dying. The businesses are boarding up. Business rates are too high, regulation too ridiculous. It’s pathetic and sad and nonesensical. I was considering getting a little shop a while back, until I saw the business rates – ouch! Why penalise people more for providing a service for the community and for creating wealth than just living there?
Oh, and as a native of Gateshead, born in ’73 I never got to see the Victorian arcafdes of Newcastle before T Dan Smith and Poulsen had them flattened for the Eldon Square monstrosity.
I second Nick M (as I so often find myself doing).
If residents in a town want more organic growth, apart from sacking (and stringing up) the council, they could club together and buy the land being sold for development and subdivide it for onward sale to individuals and small speculators. This way you do not get a monolith but a patchwork. What is standing in the way of this is the unstretched brass necks of the Town Councul.
Perry: When I said “they” I meant housebuilders in general, not the State.
Don’t you dare move any of those slags to Hull.
It is a Port.
You can still go on the town on a Friday night, get drunk, speak foreign languages, wander about, crash in a hotel and wake up in time for the early train the next morning, all for fifty quid.
If those prawn-slurping wine-quaffing pooftas ever took over, Hull (Kingston Upon) would just die.
Look at Leeds; Harvey Niks one year, United in division three the next.
pietr,
Yeah, but Leeds United are shite and their fans are most obnoxious bastards on the face of the earth. I lived in Leeds once. The Leeds fans hate Man U with a passion beyond comprehension. They would genuinely rather see the Mancs get beaten than Leeds win. It’s pathetic. Not least because Man U fans couldn’t give a toss about Leeds.
A little reported aspect of the Woodgate / Bowyer “Paki-bashing” farrago (Thank you NUFC for buying the appalling scoundrels, thank you) is that this occurred outside a scumbag, cheap-ass night-club, Majestyks (sic). I was a student in Leeds and on less cash in a year than these buggers made in a day and I wouldn’t have gone to Majestyks. Why not? Because it was bloody awful. I suspect that if I ever get to earn tens of thousands of pounds a week I will find more edifying entertainment than getting sloshed on weak lager from a plastic “glass”, groping some slags and then rounding it off by kicking the bejesus out of a Pakistani.
I hate Leeds. The “Milan of the North” they boast. I’ll take that seriously when a certain North Italian city starts calling itself the “Leeds of the South”. Back-to-backs, awful air quality, stunningly over-priced and a truly dreadful restaurant scene in the city-centre. Leeds is shocking. Liverpool is dreadful but Leeds is something else.
Leeds is a rugby town (well the Leeds people I know are more interested in using swords and guns – but that is another story). And Association Football (of all its many virtues for people who like that sort of thing) is not a Yorkshire sport – wrong side of the Pennines (not that I have anything against Lancashire folk – I liked many of them when I lived up in Bolton for a year).
“What about Sheffield” – well, what about it?
By the way the Leeds people I know detest Leeds United fans – although they do share an interest in unarmed combat with them. Although things like the “Guild” and the “firms” of Association Football fans are rather different things.
As for Newcastle up in Northumberland.
A place with a very great history. Armstrong, the resistance to local government control of things like water and gas (and so on).
If I ever get to use a time machine I must visit Newcastle – in the early summer of 1914 (I would love to visit Kettering then to).
I missed Nick M’s comment about “back to backs”.
Yes they are not nice, but there is a good side to them.
In 1875 building back to back houses (i.e. houses with no back yards – the back of the house fits on to another house) was banned by Act of Parliament – apart from in a few places where special Acts of Parliament laid down the powers of local government. Leeds was one of these places.
“How is this a good side”.
It is good because housing was cheap in Leeds (thanks to the back to backs) – and a cheap rented back to back is better than the street.
For years now the Royal Armoury museum in Leeds has been better than any museum in Manchester (well for people of my tastes anyway) – not just with the things one sees there, but with different events every day (on the use of virtually conventional weapons).
However, the place was put in a neglected area of Leeds – but this is now changing.
Nick M. – the place is worth a visit (check in advance to see what is on that day). The area is quite pleasant now.
Also have a look at the near by church – it is big contrast to the cathedral in Manchester.
I like both the dark and grim style of Manchester (not just the W.W.II damage, but the I.R.A. bomb damage) and the light and pretty style of the Leeds church.
Just as I like both Durham cathedral and York Minster.