I wish that were remotely true. Every greedy request for planning gets through. It is even assumed consent unless the arcane limited acceptable objections can be made and in time. Developers need to stick to redevelopment or quit the sector. Not one new building on any square inch of green land.
1-Madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the results to be different. 2- There is an administrative class which manages the State for its PROFIT, and not for the NATION”
@@SaintWill70 You stick to redevelopment and keep your filthy houses off ANY inch of green field space and I and most will have less problems with the disgusting developer 'business'. Yes building regulations once they have easily got permission to rape the land by covering it in houses, ensuring houses are build to a decent standard would be irritating. Not a fan of red tape and regs but the Problem is so many cowboy builders, what else do you suggest instead? Yes most of it is make work for bureaucrats, civil servants all leaching great livings from the tax payer. They take the taxes anyway and just spend them on other rubbish so the costs to me are in fact zero. Have given up expecting decent principled well intentioned and acting, political and establishment class. They are only in it for themselves. Selling their fields etc. With Starmer looking like he intends being a grave robber, thief, nice man! Charity housing associations should not exist, or need radical changes, it is grossly unfair some get subsidised better homes than those paying their own way. Or some new balance is needed. Portacabins only for 'social' housing? Certainly should not be getting a penny from the taxpayer. Social housing, subsidised in any way, should be substantially less 'nice' than normal housing.
@@SaintWill70Such a stupid derogatory term "NIMBY" and it reveals your massive bias on the matter. People don't want to see green spaces built over - they can never be put back. They don't want to sacrifice SSIs and World Heritage Sites for the sake of shaving 15 minutes off an unnecessary journey. As for the regulations you disparage, they are there for good reason. We should be building better homes, energy efficient and safe homes, not just feeding an industry designed to maximise profits and the expense of long-term viability.
Well… What’s local & national to the UK can’t explain this. Most OECD countries have these issues - even in “rich” Norway. I suggest the reasons are transnational, or supernational. Four decades of handing ownership of [insert here] from the public to the private sector has consequences everywhere. Brexit, EU or being a US state or Scandinavian (former) social democracy - No real difference… Our governments & councils may have ‘money’ (central banks, QE, bonds), but investment without ownership is just rent (debt). Who owns this capital? Corporate entities do, where neither borders nor democracy legally matter. That’s _real_ power. Legislative change needed, but not wanted… 👍
We cannot do big Infrastructure anymore, we need to. However at some point it becomes unsustainable to keep building houses, just because of the UK population growth is out of control. People want a better quality of life, not GDP Growth that that Industry and CEOs keep asking for. Reduce population, increase productivity, embrace modern AI tools, grow GDP/ Capita for a sustainable and more environmentally friendly future.
Agree to a point. However, the financial crisis of 2008 didn't just happen. It was the result of "cheap and easy to get mortgages" creating a housing bubble as investors turned homes into investments. I bought a 2 bedroom flat in Davigdor Road, Hove for £193,000 in 2004 but the people next door bought a beautiful 6 double bedroom Edwardian house for £172,500 in 1997. I see it is now listed on Zoopla for £1,750,000. That property is "worth" more than 10x what the owners paid for it. If I were a little older and had been able to buy a home in 1997, instead of 7 years later, I would have spent considerably less and I would now literally be a millionaire. To make matters worse, my flat was leasehold, which is another whole new can of worms. To say our system is broken is the understatement of the century. However, apparently this has nothing whatsoever to do with institutional and systemic political and economic failure. Nope, those benefiting from this madness (government, banks and the establishment, not the owners who are actually really lovely people) want us all to just blame immigrants and hope they can continue fleecing the British people for another 5 years or so. Shame on us all for allowing these criminals to keep exploiting us.
They want a service sector country, and they do not like workers, they look down on manual labour. there is a program about the German car industry and the British and one of the last things said in the program is that in Germany a mechanic is a highly respected person like a doctor or solicitor and that is how it should be.
They know those workers have protection, so they can't over exploit them like service workers. But yes, most western countries are quite financialized and rent-based. The only industrious Western country is Germany but however they relegate car manufacturing in other parts of Europe/EU.
@@kobemop Sorry but Italy is the second largest manufacturing country in Europe after Germany and it doesn't "relegate", whatever that means, car manufacturing of groups like Stellantis. the 50/50 merger between FIAT Chrysler and PSA and SEAT manufactures cars in Spain. I don't think you live in Europe or know much about it either.
@@kobemop 'The only industrious Western country is Germany' There isn't any industry in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary? Hmmm, makes you wonder where are all the cars coming from... (the named countries)
@@nothereandthereanywhereI think he meant countries forming the developed west ie which are mainly from Western Europe. The countries you mention are Central/Eastern Europe and less developed (though Poland seems to be making good progress).
Profit over need is the biggest problem in this country, it needs a complete overhaul with a proper plan as with any task if the tax payer is involved it will cost alot more then if it were a private task, until the uk people smash the current system the constant asset stripping will continue and the rich poor divide will grow
There are 1.1 million homes in this country with planning permission that are not being built, planning is well ahead of developers. Our planning system is not perfect and needs change, but for some bizarre reason not one planner has ever been asked what to do and they only ask groups not involved and of all people the Bank Of England, who struggle with economics let alone other subjects.
Well my neighbour, a local planning officer, Applied and got away with permission to build an 'annex' bungalow effectively, in the back garden of a mid terrace. Having openly said previously in chatting with me that it is a well known scam they have problems stopping! Later they get separated off and sold as a home. Access difficulties and so costs, alone seen to have stopped him doing it so far. Someone would not roll over and let him have more then the foot only access to the back and width rights he had. :) He ended up with a police conviction (community resolution order) for harassment too, including a threat to kill. Greed is an terrible affliction of all involved in housing and development. Ban all green land building and then make redevelopment on existing building footprints effectively, easier. Bulldoze town centres shops no one will want any more. Stack up container conversion homes.
There are so many not being built because of the uncertainty of the planning system. Big companies buy several plots at the same time with the hope some get planning permissions. So they shoot everywhere at the same time, even when they do not have, or want to have, the capacity to build them all. They are just playing the numbers game. Why take the risk of only applying for the permission where you actually want to build and take the risk of being rejected, when you can do 4 or 5 at the same time and have them as back ups. Of course, the only companies that can do this are the big ones, with a huge financial muscle to resist that uncertainty. Small companies cannot do this strategy and they are essentially removed from the market. So that in part explains why there are more permissions than building sites. Another is, big building companies are now, after killing the small competitors thanks to these excessive regulations, became a cartel that fix prices and decides how much is going to be built. You dont really need a big conspiracy to do that. Just having the interest of these big construction companies aligned is enough to do it without even having a meeting. They "share" enough information already online in the data bases that dont even need to talk about it to make it happen.
@@juangomezfuentes8825 The people I know grasping the millions for their fields do not sell the land to the developers. They seem to sell 'rights' to buy it. Then when the developer thinks they have a chance they apply for the permissions and only when they get the permissions do they buy the land or there is some deal that pays for the land after the thing is done I suspect. That way all costs of having to put in stuff like roads ends up coming out of the land seller's pay off. Point being I am not sure there is so much land 'owned' by the developers and not with building permission. But as you point out in other parts, the whole thing is corrupt and manipulated, this is how the UK does corruption rather than gangsters and mafia. All the political class are neck deep in it too, as Starmer shows wanting to let even more rape of the land for housing to happen, even in Green Belt.
Stopped building? Are you joking? It's carnage in Kent. Goodbye countryside, and vast swathes of Grade 1 farmland. The only good thing is that the people doing this to us will go hungry too. You can't buy food if it's not there
The title says we stopped building. I thought I'd help humanity of the Uk and was building them for two years. No shortage of work or a career in it. Now back in Environmental monitoring again i find there's demand like never before cos of the population comproming the land, water and air! Have recently investrd in NG for new infrastructure. Well done raising the discussions. If things can be resolved in the next decade I will stop considering retirement in France. Thanks 👍
The UK doesn't have enough Green spaces left as it it. It doesn't need more "contrete for growth". Use the brownield space of which there is a lot of. Repurpose and reuse. These huge housing companies want flat clear green land. Because it's cheaper to build on. And houses which do get built !!! Here on the Wirral, they only seem to build five bedroomed detached houses with double driveways and gardens. And then you get two old people living in it. You could build DOUBLE the amount of decent smaller homes in that space. And home three times as many people.
Everyone is quick to say we need more houses but change their minds even quicker when they vant get a GP appointment in the next 2 months due to all the new arrivals.
Income can no longer be based on labor, whether intellectual or manual. And cost of necessary investments, such as infrastructure or anything else, cannot be the basis of whether that investment is considered affordable. Give everyone money enough to live and invest in any and all essential infrastructure and services. The problem then becomes - how to control runaway inflation. We will never solve that problem until economics evolves into something else, as physics did with Einstein.
The first to introduce planning law in 1947??? I very much doubt that. The first instance of planning permission in Denmark was in the 1850s, mainly based on fire and sanitation regulations.
If this was the 1930s we would not have the National Grid because the Nimbys and Bananas ( ban anything near anything) would have objected to the grid pylons striding over the hills and through the dales the same as they are objecting now to a grid route in East Anglia distributing power from the North Sea wind farms.
The best overview of british planning and the impact on UK infrastructure I have heard in 2024. Will any party take heed and plan for the long tern of UK infrastructure.
08:10 our planning system is disastrous. Ironically it was only really created because we were building too much and the government wanted to slow building down! Well that backfired! 😂
Had houses built on green belt land near us now there flooded and so are we .well done planning departments. You havent a clue . No extra doctors schools or services . Council tax increases though .traffic increases flooding well done Cheshire West and Chester Council.
Let's not forget the pincer movement of excessive immigration and the demographic 'boomer' ticking time bomb with an increasing number of available properties as numbers gradually dwindle.....
It's not all politics: Its about competence : I travelled 6000.miles to a job that Brits were not prepared to travel 20 miles to ... Furthermore , with the boom and bust approach to development, people do not have opportunity to develop skills. After 30 yesrs working abroad : they look at me like I am the Man from Mars with experience it is impossible to obtain in Britain ....The country is governed by the clueless ; the most expensively uneducated people in our society ..... They got away with it for a long time .... I expect we will be looking for them in the Bahamas soon...
The UK is a very unattractive investment. The planning process is a joke no one in their right mind would bother with. Invest in US property. 20% returns and hardly any hassle.
If I could save this edition, I would. We are in a doom loop. HS2 is a white elephant. The least desirable should not have been built first! We already have a line to Birmingham from London. Cancelling the remainder makes no sense whatsoever. When Wembley Stadium was re-built there was talk of placing the national stadium more centrally in Birmingham. But no London it had to be. I am glad you included Bureaucracy because that is what all of this is. It is what modern Britain does best. We have councils adding low traffic neighbourhoods, mayors reducing road speeds, cycle lanes taking up most of the road, six or seven recycling bins outside our doors and council taxes bearing no resemblance to services provided by virtue of 'precepts' added by mayors and other bodies. This edition really shows the UK to be caught in a Penrose Staircase.
It seems that you have a fundamental misunderstanding about some of the issues - particularly when it comes to traffic management. By quite a margin, the least efficient way to move anything is by road. I.e. they use a huge volume of resources and physical space to do a job that other modes of transport can do better. So what does this mean? When areas become congested, planning applications stop being approved as it would add more congestion. So the logical thing to do is to use a more efficient mode. For example, you can move (on the Conservative end) around 2.5x more people in a lane dedicated to cycles, when compared to mixed motor traffic. Therefore, less public money is wasted - and more can be invested into where it's needed. Low traffic neighbourhoods are great schemes that both prioritise walking/ cycling/ public transport, and make communities safer and more livable. In a similar vein, reducing residential speed limits feom 30mph to 20mph makes walking and cycling a more appealing activity. If we want to tackle low productivity in the UK, we need to stop wasting resources due to people's misunderstanding of transport.
Everywhere in the world where they have built high speed rail has benefited economically. It's only the UK that makes a huge fuss about costs in very bad faith. You just look at how much we spend filling potholes and maintaining roads and then try saying with a straight face that HS2 is a white elephant.
@@inbb510 Actually I may have given the wrong impression. I wish they would build the whole line. However, the reason it IS a white elephant is that we already have a good service to Birmingham from London whilst the Northern End has an abysmal service that needs investment. Now we have a high speed bit which will cost a huge amount to travel on which will necessitate you change from to the old service to complete your journey to Liverpool and Manchester. The line currently does not extend to Euston. It is a joke. Poor planning.
@@einseitig3391 , the reason it was started from London was that it was the capital city that had the greatest capacity concerns. It wasn't to spite the North as many people like to put it. British people love to complain about the railways but then are completely oblivious to the actual solutions that improve it. Until us Brits accept that not every infrastructure project has to directly benefit us, then we will continue have these problems. The profit margin that railway companies make is very small. Only about 3p-5p per £1 spending on the railway tickets go to profits. Nationalisation therefore would theoretically only reduce the prices by a maximum of 5% and that's assuming all of those funds will be reinvested into the railways - something which there is absolutely no guarantee. The real problem is capacity and the root cause like many infrastructure problems is nimbys and mostly village boomers not accepting that times have changed.
In all honesty, the HS2 got all plan ning permisions and land purchases, yet the part that actually mattered got cancelled, and whole thing run over budget. It must be something else.
The UK doesn't have existing suppliers and skilled workers to do the work required because we don't invest in infrastructure as frequently as we should.
We are building houses purely to house the growing population , the growth is driven purely on high immigration . Poor planning properly is definitely an issue .
@@stephenscaife9993 You aren't building houses. Point me to the year when house building targets were fulfilled. Second point , bigger population means more workers and projects to build, bigger tax revenues as well. Maybe stop voting for same old.
@@bartekpulkowski9765 “Second point, bigger population means more workers and projects to build, bigger tax revenues as well.” We’re experiencing the most massive levels of immigration in our entire history. Last year a record 1.2 million people immigrated to the UK. Yet we have labour shortages and housing shortages, taxes are at a record high, per capita GDP is declining, and labour productivity has collapsed. If the immigration bonuses you expect aren’t kicking in at that level, what level will they kick in at?
No it doesn’t. The VAST majority of the migrants are net drains on the economy and they create more competition for jobs and housing. You can literally map the housing crisis and the strain on services onto the population expansion on the same timeline. When you bring in million people in a year, you need a city the size of Birminghams worth of infrastructure to cope with them. We need to reduce the population by 20 million people, not build 20 million more houses.
@georgesdelatour we have a similar immigrant population percentage as the US. Less than places like Australia. Basically, immigration isn't actually the problem, is mismanagement and robbery from those in power
2:24 - it’s worth pointing out that the level of vacant properties is also ridiculously high: (from the ONS) “On Census Day, 21 March 2021, there were 1.5 million unoccupied dwellings in England and 120,450 in Wales.” “In 2021, we estimate that 89.7% of unoccupied dwellings in England on Census Day were truly vacant, while 10.3% were second homes with no usual residents.” (Wales has a slightly higher proportion of these that are 2nd homes) That OECD data suggests
@@georgesdelatour well, with the ability to work from home probably not, combine that with investment in local employment so that the area is where jobs are. In addition build the 1.1 million homes with planning permission that are not being built, then the government start building housing again and you've bascially solved the housing problem.
Those figures have been bandied about for years and yet those putting the figures forward never deal with the long running problems with the figures. The figures for vacant properties include, in no particular order, those which are uninhabitable, those which have planning permission for redevelopment which has yet to start or for which a planning application has been submitted but not yet granted, those subject to legal proceedings which prevent them being sold usually divorce or probate (the latter being a problem that has got a lot worse over the last few years). And of course there is the issue highlighted in other posts about the vacant properties not being where the jobs are - not everyone has a job that you can work from home on.
So what? They aren't your houses. If any owner wants to keep an empty house, that's their business. A significantly bigger problem, that's worth pointing out, is the ridiculous level of immigration. Which not only pushes up the demand for housing but actually increases taxes.
I briefly worked at a construction firm (temping) where I heard a horror story of an entire housing development being demolished because it couldn't be sold quickly enough, so it was cheaper for the developer to tear it down than cover the costs to leave it in place. House prices are too high for people to afford or being built in the wrong areas and developers aren't willing to carry the costs. It's all mad!
Communities would be more accepting of new houses if they were well designed and fitted in with the surrounding architecture. Cheap red brick houses next to pretty thatch cottages in small villages - and people wonder why local residents fight so hard with planning applications.
Big fan of the channel, but I have to disagree with a number of points. The lack of housing has nothing to do bats, newts, etc, that is just an excuse used by developers for years to increase their profits. Over the last 20 years 100,000's of flats and houses have been built in all major cities around the UK, the problem is all,
@edjones3410 100% 👍 but the point I was tyring to get across is that developers make the situation worse than it seems. We need to have these rules in place for wildlife and for humanity. Being in the business myself I know, if developers had their way ( and they are slowly getting there) they will just bulldoze St Paul's cathedral and build a block of flats if they could!! Hence why need to have a level of planning restrictions in place.
In the present U.K. political set-up, London and the south east will always get top priority, say 120 kilometer radius of Buckingham Palace. HS2 is merely the latest example.
Council tax higher in south and you have to pay to dump some stuff at tip. Also Barnet formula gives more money to Northern councils. Add to this wages do not compensate for much higher rents and house prices. If i lived near friends in Blackpool same house would be less than half that of Weymouth.
Back in the real world, the South East of England gets the lowest amount of govt spending per capita, despite being one of the top per-head tax payers.
The people who invested made their money so who cares if they cancel it !! Same with all the convid contracts , daylight robbery and they get to walk away smiling
Back in Brunel's day it was all about developing the country for the new industrial age (and making money). Now we are in a post industrial age, development has no purpose except to make money for developers. As has been pointed out elsewhere, there are loads of empty houses all over the place which are just investments. It needs to have an overall strategic aim which benefits people and the general environment not just piecemeal speculative development to make money.
We need Land Taxes to disincentivise land banking and higher council tax for lower density areas, which can lower if density increases this would realign the incentives and get us building again.
The problem is we favour the large developers to do all the building. They will use their large scale to take control and deliver massive developments for zero profit. However if they risk not making the money back they slow the builds to a few houses a month until the market returns that level of no loss on their project. The reason they do this is to them that 30 mill development is just a way to clear a large amount of money through our system without paying tax for their investors. The outcome for all this is just super slow development.
The newts bill here in Crewe for a new link road was £210000. 18 newts were found and "re-housed", so it cost £11666 to move each newt. The Hough By-Pass for the A500 cost even more. Leicestershire County Council spend £1.7 million looking for newts on the planned Earl Shilton By-Pass. One newt was found. Until barminess like this is eliminated, there is no hope whatsoever for this country. Yet this is an EU Directive that is totally ignored in the EU !
It's not an eu directive. In fact it was a conservation law from the uk that got adopted by the eu. The real issue if there was enough environmental services, as opposed to massive cuts, we would know beforehand where these populations were and could avoid the issue by planning accordingly. Saying we should just build over them or ignoring the conservation issues ends up where we are now, with increased sewage, a massive bio diversity loss in the uk and increased land soil. If hs2 had had a local info, it would have avoided that route. And no it wasn't 40 or even 4 million. This upfront info was available on projects that I worked on in the Netherlands. Stage 1 studies in the uk, by comparison, are incomplete. I am not surprised that people with no background in construction would fall for this. I work in a steelworks with three adjacent sssi. We have no issues on management in that regard and have increased the sssi areas. The biggest issue. Councillors ignoring the planners.
Yes barminess like that needs ending by not building ever more stupid roads! Or rail lines. The UK is one of the most nature denuded nations on earth! We can get everywhere we want to already! Not a single new road has any place being built for mere convenience or speed of traffic flow for selfish impatient drivers. There is also the fact in a few years there will be vastly fewer cars used. They will be on call and driverless. Few will want or need to keep one sat on the side of the road or in a drive for 95% of its existence.
7:55 this is actually more of a problem with news articles, if you look into it not very little of what they said is true, in fact the 300,000 pages figure is just made up from what I can find. The planning application was submitted in 2022 with an 18 months predicted date, however naturally the July election pushed it back. The planning fees thing is a huge misnomer and actually impossible to find out what they are talking about and what the costs even were and what was included was land acquisition included for example. The huge issue nowadays it cost so little in Norway because it was built by it's government with zero profit incentive from start to finish. Whereas here everything has to be done by contractors and consultants who charge thousands of percent in profit.
If you allow a small nation to have an excessive population, you will be faced with the increasingly acute choice between building enough homes and destroying the countryside. We are already highly dependent on imports for most of our food, which makes us highly sensitive to food price inflation. Its all about population. Incidentally, if we controlled net migration, our natural birthrate would see a gentle decline in population, which would ease pressure on everything, from public services to farming, from utilities and energy to housing costs.
I bought my house a bit over 5 years ago for £50,000. This week I looked up some similar houses on the street I live in that are on sale and those are going for £75,000. If the housing market was expanding (as in new houses and apartments being built) at any kind of rate that could possibly address the ever increasing consumer demands there is no way my house could add half again to it's value after just 5 years, even allowing for the amount of inflation we have experienced in that time-frame.
Due to energy costs a brick that cost 45 p ten years ago was £1.12 last time i bought some, costs of building have gone up a lot because nuclear industry privatised and Blair had gas ones built .
For the cost of HS2 we could have designed and built a new generwtion of zero-emission regional aircraft that only need a small runway at each end of the journey, instead of a massive concrete and steel barrier across hundreds of miles of countryside and habitat. The idea that trains are environmentally friendly is insane.
Totally agree. The UK doesn't actually have much land to build on. We already deforested everything and now selling off farm land. It can't all be housing
I'm working on a small office in my home town. It's planned to be built on an empty car park in the middle of town. Nothing crazy. 15 months to receive an official response from Cheshire East Council on the discharge of duties application.
Snug Architects got planning for 24 houses in the New Forest National Park. Impressive yes, but it wasn’t approved by the local planners or planning committee. It was won at appeal. Two years wasted by the council and councillors despite local residents supporting it…The local system does everything it can to prevent planning whilst central government inspectors eventually say ‘yes’. This conflict in approach is breaking the system. We need a consistent planning and political system all on the same page. Developers can then invest in what the country needs. Those houses are now built, look great, sold like hot cakes and are now used as an example of good design by the local planners!
Unless their house building targets are for social housing it is a waste of time. Also the truth is that they ie the government are lobbied by the banks and lenders to not hit their targets because it could crash their bubble.If they supplied the demand then house prices would crash and the lenders loans would be in negative equity.
Yes, yes, yes. There was a Time when Persia was the center of the known world (550-330 BCE), but times change. The Greeks suffered the same fate. Britian is no longer Great, it's just another middle ranking European power with lots of debt, the same is true for France. History is cyclical. Greatness and Prosperity never rest in just one or two places, they move around in both Time and Space.
The reasoning behind Greenbelt land is massively important, and should never be abolished. I don't want the UK to become like America - where planning is now TOO lax imo. It's at the other end of the scale to that of the UK. Both countries need to seek more of a balance. Planning needs to be more stringent in the US; and less unwieldy in the UK. Besides it's not really Greenbelt land that's the real issue here, but 'Brownbelt' land (old industrial land) that has been left to rot - with nothing done about cleaning it, and then clearing it up in order to build new housing, public transport amenities, shopping facilities, and the like. The issue with the UK is not so much that we're 'running out of land to build on' because we aren't! The issue is that there's masses of derelict Brownfield land that nothing is being done about; and no one is utilising it as they should be. But then this is because central government (Tories) have starved many Local Authorities all over the UK of funding. This means that L.A's now haven't the money to do anything about the former industrial brownbelt land within their cities, and immediately on the edges of it. And so a lot of new building in general has ground to a halt, because of this. Essentially the ball is in the court of the central government. But as with most things these days; a lot of the problems the UK now faces stem from the actions and decisions (government policies) taken by the Tories over the last 14 years. It was NOT this bad under the last Labour government. Nowhere near as bad as it is now re: Planning for new buildings. L.A's back then (2010) received more funding to actually complete large building projects. But as we know, the Tories are excessively 'pro centralisation' and anti- federal (anti- devolvement of power). This why the situation in the UK with so many things now, is vastly different from the situation back in 2010. Labour were not as crushingly pro-centralisation. They also trusted LA's much more than the Tories do. This too has made a huge difference. There's a real lack of trust shown by central government towards all LA's - even Tory controlled ones! This mindset needs to change. Hopefully it will do, with a Labour government in the near future.
@@robtyman4281the green belt is extremely misleading, a lot of it is shitty muddy fields next to motorway, the truth is we barely have any true green space left most of it is for farming. True nature is stuff like the peak district and snowdonia which should obviously be protected. just 1% of greenbelt land has space for hundreds of thousands of homes
This is an excellent channel: ever perspicuous, always edifying and helpful, and the presenter's placid mien has a positive influence on the viewer. True to its name, Economics Help UK really deserves great success and more subscribers.
A excellent summary. Ultimately, we can't afford not to make these investments, or we will get ever poorer. Some short term belt-tightening, especially by those who are better able to tighten their belts, to fund useful investment, is essential to our recovery. Two more impediments to building at reasonable cost here are safety laws, and our legal system. In Britain it is a legal requirement to implement safety measures that are disproportionately costly, in a tortuous chain of legal logic. A law requires safety risks to be made "as low as reasonably practicable". But how expensive makes something not "reasonably practicable"? In a case over interpretation of this, a judge ruled that if the cost is utterly disproportionate, then that is not "reasonably practicable". The implication is that if cost is only disproportionate, then it has to be spent. In 2021, the Office of Rail and Road, the regulator of Network Rail and Highways England published a paper sizing this, saying that cost that was only 3 to 10 times what a cost-benefit test would find reasonable, then the safety measure should be implemented. And so our cost-benefit guidance, which decides how to spend our money, is over-ruled. We have assessed a value of life, and a judge says we have to behave as if it was 3 to 10 times what research says they should be. Meanwhile our health system is using the lower value of life, and so improving the safety of public infrastructure grabs an unfair share of public funding vs the NHS. And then there's our legal system. A lawyer once complained that he supported a major railway contract in Spain, and the contract was only 20 pages long, in contrast to the 1000+ pages that would happen in Britain. Not much work for lawyers in that, nor indeed much negotiation support over all those details that had to be agreed. The reason is that so many of the things that have to negotiated and specified every time in British contracts are in a standard legal code in Spain, and other continental legal systems. It making the legalities of construction contracts so much cheaper, easier and predictable to deal with. I think it is no coincidence that the US, whose legal system is more similar to ours than to continental countries, also has a construction cost problem.
When was the last time you actually saw a public demonstration to build more houses locally?, it doesn't actually happen what you do get it lots of demonstrations NOT to build more houses locally. Sorry the problem is 99% house owners NOT wanting more houses, That's a problem with democracy itself not economics. If you can buy land easily (ie ignore local veto's) its not going to be that hard to find people to build property. Small builders would flock to it. In the end most the costs for a house aren't the building its the house allowed land. Basically you can either have local democracy o you can solve the housing crisis by ignoring it but you can't have both
... There's plenty of land to use that doesn't infringe on wildlife and conservation... A lot of agricultural land with very low ecological value that could probably do with more workers on hand to grow a greater diversity of crops to better standards. The trouble is you can't just put a dwelling on the corner of a field because you can't change land registered as agricultural use land to residential use very lightly. Even if in practice the square metres here and there on the margins of fields is hardly going to meaningfully reduce yields. (As in houses dotted around on margins, not housing estates in the middle of a big enough field) Then if you are growing a greater diversity of crops with more work related dwellings around it could potentially improve yields. This whole moaning about not being able to evict bat's or rate species of whatever from the few margins they have left is seriously out of all proportion.. It's just another line of attack on conservationists and environmentalist "Greenies." Perhaps if these new houses weren't so shoddy and fit into landscapes better (literally earthships style homes why not) perhaps people would be less adverse to having them around their back yards...
Planner here, 1:13 is not true, CIL and S106 delivers millions of £££ for public services - this omission is telling if the fact most people don’t realise how much land value uplift is levied towards public services
I know regulations are strict but that is for a reason. These houses need to last for decades. They cant be poorly designed. The whole community needs to be considered when these are built. Drainage, height, building materials and other stuff i probs dont know about. I dont want them to just throw up crap houses. Design them properly. Why dont they just limit the number of non UK residents who can own property. So we dont get investors from other countries just owning shit.
Stick to economics and not planning which you know little about. Local authorities do not have a veto. They operate within a national framework no one saw as being problematic for decades. The thing which has changed is public attitudes. There is widespread opposition, especially among older and more affluent people to any form of development. Politicians simply reflect that.
Why does everyone bang on about price?. It's infrastructure. It's the corruption jealousy thing: oh I should personally have that cash for my obsession.
In a democratic polity people have the right to have a say on the population size and density of their country. I suspect that building more houses is rather akin to building more roads i.e it has the effect of increasing demand further and ruining the once emblematic countryside of England. A rush to build on the countryside will be a terrible mistake for the quality of life of millions in England.
The project paperwork is now far more expensive than the building materials and most projects seem to have more office workers than construction workers.
The main problem is that there aren't enough people to build, not the bats. This is the same for several other EU countries. And you also nentioned nothing about land ownerships because bats are the low hanging fruit.
Can't the uk government start a state owned construction company to basically speed up the process of planning permissions and actually build more social housing throughout the country? Especially if the big private developers are just banking up the allotments and limiting the supply of properties.
Simply put: developments are by companies for profit. We need the government to step in and stop this nonsense, and actually build the million or so houses that have planning permission for the people
HS2 construction reminds me of the subway expansion in NY City. every area had ability to stop the project if they did not get everything they want, even after project started leading to way over cost. Also no attempt at having a general contractor, who hired subs. Instead so many contractors handling so many aspects of the project , many times without coordination. One comment was they could have given all the people in the area free bus tickets for 30 years and saved money. ( not fact checked)
I've advocated emigration for young people since 2010 and see no reason to change my mind. The decline into poverty is inevitable with our governance model. It's over.
7:12 Is the government responsible for construction of new reservoirs in the age of privately owned water companies? Shouldn't that investment come from said water companies? Isn't that what we pay our bills for? Same goes for power lines, National Grid is listed on LSE
Yes, but this is a failure of the water regulator which sets ridiculously low rates of investment for these firms. In an ideal world, nationalise them. For a compromise, regulate them properly. What we have right now is a joke. The companies do all they are legally made to do, and no more, and we should have expected that really.
@@will2brown50 No they do way less than they legally need to but the government told regulators not to test the water so the water companies stopped treating it
Also, I noticed UK has a substantial amount of activism and it goes beyond the rational scope. UK needs to find a balance and develop tier 2 - tier 3 cities.
@@MichaelPicklesWhat a stupid thing to say. I take you believe in bending over for anyone in authority to take advantage of. There is significant protest in my area over the building of a giant powerline from the coast to central cities like Birmingham. The electricity is generated in coastal windfarms, but needs to be transported to where the demand is. This means permanently scarring the landscape without benefit to the local people. Of course there is opposition to such a scheme and rightly so.
What do you mean "beyond the rational scope"? Isn't it right that people fight to protect the rural environment from the blight of industrialization and urbanisation.
It's all going to change as I've heard they have been given the go ahead to build new towns! Not a few houses,towns. Keep a look out I your local areas.
How long do you think it will take to build these new towns ? 25 to 30 years sounds realistic. And how many governments are we likely to see come and go ?
No, it is not. The UK is the 52th most dense country in the world. In Europe among the countries bigger than a single city is the third. But that is miss leading too, because it is not the same to leave in London than in the Highlands, or simply in Salisbury. If you live in Moscow, you wont feel that Russia has a low population density, because you dont really care what is 100 km from where you live being or not being in the same country. Doesnt France account for the Guyana province to do their average?. That is what I mean. Depends on what particular part you live, not the average of the entire territory. China has a density of half the UK, but I bet that is not what the average Chinese feels like. Build more in London is probably not that good, build more in Salisbury probably is. Everything is relative.
You can thank Brexit for that. Without Brexit you would've easily found workers from all over the EU to do bricklaying, plastering and carpentry. But you reap what you voted for. 🤗
That's exactly the reason why the 40 new hospitals in the new hospital programme can't be delivered by 2030, as identified by the National Audit Office. They will probably come up with the same answer to the house building target in due course.
I am pretty sure that all these problems will solve themselves if we only accept everyone as immigrants with very low bar for entry. The politicians would never lie to us, right?
Thanks for this video and the work that you do, it's brilliant. I think housing is one of the fundamental problems in this country and no politician wants to touch it, meaning the pressures on the NHS (who are the lowest social denominator) continue.
There's no point building new homes when by the time the new homes are built, the population will have increased by twice as many as the homes built. With the human madness that is going on with population out of control, if that were any other species, we'd be issuing major population culls and would have years ago. We are mammals and not immune to overpopulation and over consumption of the land. Fix the population crisis as a matter of international emergency, then deal with the rest. There is no higher priority, if you really want the problem solved for good, rather than just kicking the can for the next generation to suffer even harder with.
From Terence Wise in UK.........This is not really about the green belt because as someone who regularly travels to our old English cities as you approach them you do so trough hundreds of acres of desolate industrial areas.
I don't see anything wrong with protecting bats. We build stuff all the time and then they are environmental catastrophes. Its often just careless and short sighted. You just need competent people to handle these regulations. I think the government lack these people.
The French/Italians are building 170 mile slightly sub hi-speed rail link between Turin-Lyon with the second longest rail tunnel in the world of 36 miles long for a planned total cost of 25 billion Euro about a fifth of the cost of HS2. One heck of a tunnel.
@@TrevorWilliams-fq8mg How about the Swiss?The Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland is currently the longest railway tunnel in the world, not the French. It was completed in 2016 and stretches for 57.09 kilometers. The total cost according to my information, of the project was approximately CHF 12 billion (Swiss francs).
@@TrevorWilliams-fq8mg stating the obvious. But the longest tunnel in the world driven through the Alps for around £10 million only 8 years ago. Nowhere compares in England alongside that
By 'we're not building enough electric network' that is of course, the privatised national grid company, inexplicably taken out of the public domain by thatcher
Inexplicably?? The reason was to put any money made into private hands, shareholders, instead of into the treasury. Thatcher was looking after her city mates who have asset stripped the infrastructure by failing to maintain it in fully reliable condition and then leveraged hard to get more money out of the business, hence the debts. Pure social vandalism.
Yeah but they can't build anything because the planning permission. Where Margret Thatcher messed up wasnt privatising industries, but privatising without repealing the 1947 planning act.
If you want to make the environment loss, you should, for a proper argument, address the massive diversity loss. Local issues are generally due to local councillors ignoring planning advice.
I work in construction and I'm amazed anything gets built in this country. There's always a way of stopping anything being done.
I wish that were remotely true. Every greedy request for planning gets through. It is even assumed consent unless the arcane limited acceptable objections can be made and in time. Developers need to stick to redevelopment or quit the sector. Not one new building on any square inch of green land.
1-Madness is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the results to be different.
2- There is an administrative class which manages the State for its PROFIT, and not for the NATION”
Maybe is the things that were built were designed to look nice people wouldn’t have a problem.
@@SaintWill70 You stick to redevelopment and keep your filthy houses off ANY inch of green field space and I and most will have less problems with the disgusting developer 'business'.
Yes building regulations once they have easily got permission to rape the land by covering it in houses, ensuring houses are build to a decent standard would be irritating. Not a fan of red tape and regs but the Problem is so many cowboy builders, what else do you suggest instead? Yes most of it is make work for bureaucrats, civil servants all leaching great livings from the tax payer.
They take the taxes anyway and just spend them on other rubbish so the costs to me are in fact zero. Have given up expecting decent principled well intentioned and acting, political and establishment class. They are only in it for themselves. Selling their fields etc. With Starmer looking like he intends being a grave robber, thief, nice man!
Charity housing associations should not exist, or need radical changes, it is grossly unfair some get subsidised better homes than those paying their own way. Or some new balance is needed. Portacabins only for 'social' housing? Certainly should not be getting a penny from the taxpayer. Social housing, subsidised in any way, should be substantially less 'nice' than normal housing.
@@SaintWill70Such a stupid derogatory term "NIMBY" and it reveals your massive bias on the matter. People don't want to see green spaces built over - they can never be put back. They don't want to sacrifice SSIs and World Heritage Sites for the sake of shaving 15 minutes off an unnecessary journey.
As for the regulations you disparage, they are there for good reason. We should be building better homes, energy efficient and safe homes, not just feeding an industry designed to maximise profits and the expense of long-term viability.
I wish all the politicians would watch your videos, then they might have a better idea how to run the country, great content!
Politicians understand the problem, they just always trade long term benefit with short term populist ones.
Why would they watch this vid. They are off to hv tea party
Well… What’s local & national to the UK can’t explain this. Most OECD countries have these issues - even in “rich” Norway.
I suggest the reasons are transnational, or supernational. Four decades of handing ownership of [insert here] from the public to the private sector has consequences everywhere. Brexit, EU or being a US state or Scandinavian (former) social democracy - No real difference…
Our governments & councils may have ‘money’ (central banks, QE, bonds), but investment without ownership is just rent (debt). Who owns this capital?
Corporate entities do, where neither borders nor democracy legally matter. That’s _real_ power. Legislative change needed, but not wanted… 👍
We cannot do big Infrastructure anymore, we need to. However at some point it becomes unsustainable to keep building houses, just because of the UK population growth is out of control. People want a better quality of life, not GDP Growth that that Industry and CEOs keep asking for. Reduce population, increase productivity, embrace modern AI tools, grow GDP/ Capita for a sustainable and more environmentally friendly future.
From 2008 it all went downhill and never up
Agree to a point. However, the financial crisis of 2008 didn't just happen. It was the result of "cheap and easy to get mortgages" creating a housing bubble as investors turned homes into investments. I bought a 2 bedroom flat in Davigdor Road, Hove for £193,000 in 2004 but the people next door bought a beautiful 6 double bedroom Edwardian house for £172,500 in 1997. I see it is now listed on Zoopla for £1,750,000.
That property is "worth" more than 10x what the owners paid for it. If I were a little older and had been able to buy a home in 1997, instead of 7 years later, I would have spent considerably less and I would now literally be a millionaire. To make matters worse, my flat was leasehold, which is another whole new can of worms. To say our system is broken is the understatement of the century. However, apparently this has nothing whatsoever to do with institutional and systemic political and economic failure. Nope, those benefiting from this madness (government, banks and the establishment, not the owners who are actually really lovely people) want us all to just blame immigrants and hope they can continue fleecing the British people for another 5 years or so.
Shame on us all for allowing these criminals to keep exploiting us.
They want a service sector country, and they do not like workers, they look down on manual labour. there is a program about the German car industry and the British and one of the last things said in the program is that in Germany a mechanic is a highly respected person like a doctor or solicitor and that is how it should be.
They know those workers have protection, so they can't over exploit them like service workers. But yes, most western countries are quite financialized and rent-based. The only industrious Western country is Germany but however they relegate car manufacturing in other parts of Europe/EU.
@@kobemop Sorry but Italy is the second largest manufacturing country in Europe after Germany and it doesn't "relegate", whatever that means, car manufacturing of groups like Stellantis. the 50/50 merger between FIAT Chrysler and PSA and SEAT manufactures cars in Spain. I don't think you live in Europe or know much about it either.
@@kobemop 'The only industrious Western country is Germany'
There isn't any industry in Poland, the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Hungary? Hmmm, makes you wonder where are all the cars coming from...
(the named countries)
@@nothereandthereanywhereI think he meant countries forming the developed west ie which are mainly from Western Europe. The countries you mention are Central/Eastern Europe and less developed (though Poland seems to be making good progress).
@@thecrimsondragon9744 you are right, Im being silly!
Profit over need is the biggest problem in this country, it needs a complete overhaul with a proper plan as with any task if the tax payer is involved it will cost alot more then if it were a private task, until the uk people smash the current system the constant asset stripping will continue and the rich poor divide will grow
some one I know had to pay £45,000 for a newt pond for just 3 bungalows
There are 1.1 million homes in this country with planning permission that are not being built, planning is well ahead of developers. Our planning system is not perfect and needs change, but for some bizarre reason not one planner has ever been asked what to do and they only ask groups not involved and of all people the Bank Of England, who struggle with economics let alone other subjects.
Well my neighbour, a local planning officer, Applied and got away with permission to build an 'annex' bungalow effectively, in the back garden of a mid terrace. Having openly said previously in chatting with me that it is a well known scam they have problems stopping! Later they get separated off and sold as a home. Access difficulties and so costs, alone seen to have stopped him doing it so far. Someone would not roll over and let him have more then the foot only access to the back and width rights he had. :) He ended up with a police conviction (community resolution order) for harassment too, including a threat to kill. Greed is an terrible affliction of all involved in housing and development.
Ban all green land building and then make redevelopment on existing building footprints effectively, easier. Bulldoze town centres shops no one will want any more. Stack up container conversion homes.
There are so many not being built because of the uncertainty of the planning system. Big companies buy several plots at the same time with the hope some get planning permissions. So they shoot everywhere at the same time, even when they do not have, or want to have, the capacity to build them all. They are just playing the numbers game. Why take the risk of only applying for the permission where you actually want to build and take the risk of being rejected, when you can do 4 or 5 at the same time and have them as back ups. Of course, the only companies that can do this are the big ones, with a huge financial muscle to resist that uncertainty. Small companies cannot do this strategy and they are essentially removed from the market. So that in part explains why there are more permissions than building sites. Another is, big building companies are now, after killing the small competitors thanks to these excessive regulations, became a cartel that fix prices and decides how much is going to be built. You dont really need a big conspiracy to do that. Just having the interest of these big construction companies aligned is enough to do it without even having a meeting. They "share" enough information already online in the data bases that dont even need to talk about it to make it happen.
@@juangomezfuentes8825 The people I know grasping
the millions for their fields do not sell the land to the developers. They seem to sell 'rights' to buy it. Then when the developer thinks they have a chance they apply for the permissions and only when they get the permissions do they buy the land or there is some deal that pays for the land after the thing is done I suspect. That way all costs of having to put in stuff like roads ends up coming out of the land seller's pay off.
Point being I am not sure there is so much land 'owned' by the developers and not with building permission.
But as you point out in other parts, the whole thing is corrupt and manipulated, this is how the UK does corruption rather than gangsters and mafia. All the political class are neck deep in it too, as Starmer shows wanting to let even more rape of the land for housing to happen, even in Green Belt.
I’m going to send this to some of my colleagues who work in environmental consulting. They’ll love it.
Stopped building? Are you joking? It's carnage in Kent. Goodbye countryside, and vast swathes of Grade 1 farmland. The only good thing is that the people doing this to us will go hungry too. You can't buy food if it's not there
The title says we stopped building. I thought I'd help humanity of the Uk and was building them for two years. No shortage of work or a career in it.
Now back in Environmental monitoring again i find there's demand like never before cos of the population comproming the land, water and air!
Have recently investrd in NG for new infrastructure.
Well done raising the discussions.
If things can be resolved in the next decade I will stop considering retirement in France. Thanks 👍
The UK doesn't have enough Green spaces left as it it. It doesn't need more "contrete for growth".
Use the brownield space of which there is a lot of. Repurpose and reuse. These huge housing companies want flat clear green land. Because it's cheaper to build on.
And houses which do get built !!! Here on the Wirral, they only seem to build five bedroomed detached houses with double driveways and gardens. And then you get two old people living in it.
You could build DOUBLE the amount of decent smaller homes in that space. And home three times as many people.
Everyone is quick to say we need more houses but change their minds even quicker when they vant get a GP appointment in the next 2 months due to all the new arrivals.
Income can no longer be based on labor, whether intellectual or manual. And cost of necessary investments, such as infrastructure or anything else, cannot be the basis of whether that investment is considered affordable. Give everyone money enough to live and invest in any and all essential infrastructure and services. The problem then becomes - how to control runaway inflation. We will never solve that problem until economics evolves into something else, as physics did with Einstein.
High value - low volume - low quality...sounds better!
The first to introduce planning law in 1947??? I very much doubt that. The first instance of planning permission in Denmark was in the 1850s, mainly based on fire and sanitation regulations.
If this was the 1930s we would not have the National Grid because the Nimbys and Bananas ( ban anything near anything) would have objected to the grid pylons striding over the hills and through the dales the same as they are objecting now to a grid route in East Anglia distributing power from the North Sea wind farms.
The best overview of british planning and the impact on UK infrastructure I have heard in 2024.
Will any party take heed and plan for the long tern of UK infrastructure.
08:10 our planning system is disastrous. Ironically it was only really created because we were building too much and the government wanted to slow building down! Well that backfired! 😂
Had houses built on green belt land near us now there flooded and so are we .well done planning departments. You havent a clue . No extra doctors schools or services . Council tax increases though .traffic increases flooding well done Cheshire West and Chester Council.
Modern accounting practices don’t help with its obsession for annualised returns on any investment.
The Conservatives are the real reason Britain stopped building :-(
Let's not forget the pincer movement of excessive immigration and the demographic 'boomer' ticking time bomb with an increasing number of available properties as numbers gradually dwindle.....
London bridge has fallen down
It's not all politics: Its about competence : I travelled 6000.miles to a job that Brits were not prepared to travel 20 miles to ...
Furthermore , with the boom and bust approach to development, people do not have opportunity to develop skills. After 30 yesrs working abroad : they look at me like I am the Man from Mars with experience it is impossible to obtain in Britain ....The country is governed by the clueless ; the most expensively uneducated people in our society ..... They got away with it for a long time .... I expect we will be looking for them in the Bahamas soon...
HS2 massive waste of money
Yes, because everyone has been saying 'we are building' instead of actually building.
leeds watched Sheffield building its super tram network and said fuck that for a game of soldiers. years of misery and upheaval
I think you may find it was cancelled by a Mr Prescott same as the one for Liverpool. Where trams exist, Edinburgh, Nottingham, efc, they are popular.
The UK is a very unattractive investment. The planning process is a joke no one in their right mind would bother with. Invest in US property. 20% returns and hardly any hassle.
If I could save this edition, I would.
We are in a doom loop. HS2 is a white elephant.
The least desirable should not have been built first!
We already have a line to Birmingham from London. Cancelling the remainder makes no sense whatsoever.
When Wembley Stadium was re-built there was talk of placing the national stadium more centrally in Birmingham.
But no London it had to be.
I am glad you included Bureaucracy because that is what all of this is. It is what modern Britain does best.
We have councils adding low traffic neighbourhoods, mayors reducing road speeds, cycle lanes taking up most of the road, six or seven recycling bins outside our doors and council taxes bearing no resemblance to services provided by virtue of 'precepts' added by mayors and other bodies.
This edition really shows the UK to be caught in a Penrose Staircase.
It seems that you have a fundamental misunderstanding about some of the issues - particularly when it comes to traffic management.
By quite a margin, the least efficient way to move anything is by road. I.e. they use a huge volume of resources and physical space to do a job that other modes of transport can do better.
So what does this mean? When areas become congested, planning applications stop being approved as it would add more congestion. So the logical thing to do is to use a more efficient mode. For example, you can move (on the Conservative end) around 2.5x more people in a lane dedicated to cycles, when compared to mixed motor traffic. Therefore, less public money is wasted - and more can be invested into where it's needed.
Low traffic neighbourhoods are great schemes that both prioritise walking/ cycling/ public transport, and make communities safer and more livable. In a similar vein, reducing residential speed limits feom 30mph to 20mph makes walking and cycling a more appealing activity.
If we want to tackle low productivity in the UK, we need to stop wasting resources due to people's misunderstanding of transport.
@@matthewcornfield2150
Dictionary n.bureaucracy
excessively complicated administrative procedure.
"the unnecessary bureaucracy in local government"
Everywhere in the world where they have built high speed rail has benefited economically.
It's only the UK that makes a huge fuss about costs in very bad faith. You just look at how much we spend filling potholes and maintaining roads and then try saying with a straight face that HS2 is a white elephant.
@@inbb510 Actually I may have given the wrong impression.
I wish they would build the whole line.
However, the reason it IS a white elephant is that we already have a good service to Birmingham from London whilst the Northern End has an abysmal service that needs investment.
Now we have a high speed bit which will cost a huge amount to travel on which will necessitate you change from to the old service to complete your journey to Liverpool and Manchester.
The line currently does not extend to Euston. It is a joke.
Poor planning.
@@einseitig3391 , the reason it was started from London was that it was the capital city that had the greatest capacity concerns.
It wasn't to spite the North as many people like to put it.
British people love to complain about the railways but then are completely oblivious to the actual solutions that improve it.
Until us Brits accept that not every infrastructure project has to directly benefit us, then we will continue have these problems. The profit margin that railway companies make is very small. Only about 3p-5p per £1 spending on the railway tickets go to profits.
Nationalisation therefore would theoretically only reduce the prices by a maximum of 5% and that's assuming all of those funds will be reinvested into the railways - something which there is absolutely no guarantee.
The real problem is capacity and the root cause like many infrastructure problems is nimbys and mostly village boomers not accepting that times have changed.
Nimby boomers
In all honesty, the HS2 got all plan ning permisions and land purchases, yet the part that actually mattered got cancelled, and whole thing run over budget. It must be something else.
The UK doesn't have existing suppliers and skilled workers to do the work required because we don't invest in infrastructure as frequently as we should.
Friend of mine lives in Finland. They voted on getting a new tram network. Tram was built ahead of schedule and came in under-budget.
We are building houses purely to house the growing population , the growth is driven purely on high immigration . Poor planning properly is definitely an issue .
@@stephenscaife9993 You aren't building houses.
Point me to the year when house building targets were fulfilled.
Second point , bigger population means more workers and projects to build, bigger tax revenues as well.
Maybe stop voting for same old.
@@bartekpulkowski9765 “Second point, bigger population means more workers and projects to build, bigger tax revenues as well.” We’re experiencing the most massive levels of immigration in our entire history. Last year a record 1.2 million people immigrated to the UK. Yet we have labour shortages and housing shortages, taxes are at a record high, per capita GDP is declining, and labour productivity has collapsed. If the immigration bonuses you expect aren’t kicking in at that level, what level will they kick in at?
No it doesn’t. The VAST majority of the migrants are net drains on the economy and they create more competition for jobs and housing.
You can literally map the housing crisis and the strain on services onto the population expansion on the same timeline.
When you bring in million people in a year, you need a city the size of Birminghams worth of infrastructure to cope with them.
We need to reduce the population by 20 million people, not build 20 million more houses.
@georgesdelatour we have a similar immigrant population percentage as the US. Less than places like Australia. Basically, immigration isn't actually the problem, is mismanagement and robbery from those in power
2:24 - it’s worth pointing out that the level of vacant properties is also ridiculously high:
(from the ONS)
“On Census Day, 21 March 2021, there were 1.5 million unoccupied dwellings in England and 120,450 in Wales.”
“In 2021, we estimate that 89.7% of unoccupied dwellings in England on Census Day were truly vacant, while 10.3% were second homes with no usual residents.” (Wales has a slightly higher proportion of these that are 2nd homes)
That OECD data suggests
Are some of these homes just not in the places where the jobs are?
@@georgesdelatour well, with the ability to work from home probably not, combine that with investment in local employment so that the area is where jobs are. In addition build the 1.1 million homes with planning permission that are not being built, then the government start building housing again and you've bascially solved the housing problem.
Exactly. It has always been so
Those figures have been bandied about for years and yet those putting the figures forward never deal with the long running problems with the figures. The figures for vacant properties include, in no particular order, those which are uninhabitable, those which have planning permission for redevelopment which has yet to start or for which a planning application has been submitted but not yet granted, those subject to legal proceedings which prevent them being sold usually divorce or probate (the latter being a problem that has got a lot worse over the last few years). And of course there is the issue highlighted in other posts about the vacant properties not being where the jobs are - not everyone has a job that you can work from home on.
So what? They aren't your houses. If any owner wants to keep an empty house, that's their business. A significantly bigger problem, that's worth pointing out, is the ridiculous level of immigration. Which not only pushes up the demand for housing but actually increases taxes.
I briefly worked at a construction firm (temping) where I heard a horror story of an entire housing development being demolished because it couldn't be sold quickly enough, so it was cheaper for the developer to tear it down than cover the costs to leave it in place. House prices are too high for people to afford or being built in the wrong areas and developers aren't willing to carry the costs. It's all mad!
Communities would be more accepting of new houses if they were well designed and fitted in with the surrounding architecture.
Cheap red brick houses next to pretty thatch cottages in small villages - and people wonder why local residents fight so hard with planning applications.
Big fan of the channel, but I have to disagree with a number of points.
The lack of housing has nothing to do bats, newts, etc, that is just an excuse used by developers for years to increase their profits.
Over the last 20 years 100,000's of flats and houses have been built in all major cities around the UK, the problem is all,
Its a real thing, my brother in law used to work as a "newt officer" for the planning permission office in Gloucestershire.
@edjones3410 100% 👍 but the point I was tyring to get across is that developers make the situation worse than it seems. We need to have these rules in place for wildlife and for humanity. Being in the business myself I know, if developers had their way ( and they are slowly getting there) they will just bulldoze St Paul's cathedral and build a block of flats if they could!!
Hence why need to have a level of planning restrictions in place.
You need to include the population increase of some 8 to 10 million in 25 years.
It seems as if all major infrastructure projects are simply just mechanisms for moving money from poor people to ruch people.
How will dragging out the construction programme on HS2 be of any benefit to the Contractor ?
In the present U.K. political set-up, London and the south east will always get top priority, say 120 kilometer radius of Buckingham Palace. HS2 is merely the latest example.
Spoken like someone who has never been to Medway
Central London*
Even the south east get shafted now too 😂😂
Council tax higher in south and you have to pay to dump some stuff at tip. Also Barnet formula gives more money to Northern councils. Add to this wages do not compensate for much higher rents and house prices. If i lived near friends in Blackpool same house would be less than half that of Weymouth.
Back in the real world, the South East of England gets the lowest amount of govt spending per capita, despite being one of the top per-head tax payers.
The people who invested made their money so who cares if they cancel it !!
Same with all the convid contracts , daylight robbery and they get to walk away smiling
Back in Brunel's day it was all about developing the country for the new industrial age (and making money). Now we are in a post industrial age, development has no purpose except to make money for developers. As has been pointed out elsewhere, there are loads of empty houses all over the place which are just investments. It needs to have an overall strategic aim which benefits people and the general environment not just piecemeal speculative development to make money.
We need Land Taxes to disincentivise land banking and
higher council tax for lower density areas, which can lower if density increases this would realign the incentives and get us building again.
The problem is we favour the large developers to do all the building. They will use their large scale to take control and deliver massive developments for zero profit. However if they risk not making the money back they slow the builds to a few houses a month until the market returns that level of no loss on their project. The reason they do this is to them that 30 mill development is just a way to clear a large amount of money through our system without paying tax for their investors. The outcome for all this is just super slow development.
@rob-123 I agree bad incentives bad outcomes
The newts bill here in Crewe for a new link road was £210000. 18 newts were found and "re-housed", so it cost £11666 to move each newt. The Hough By-Pass for the A500 cost even more. Leicestershire County Council spend £1.7 million looking for newts on the planned Earl Shilton By-Pass. One newt was found.
Until barminess like this is eliminated, there is no hope whatsoever for this country. Yet this is an EU Directive that is totally ignored in the EU !
It's not an eu directive. In fact it was a conservation law from the uk that got adopted by the eu.
The real issue if there was enough environmental services, as opposed to massive cuts, we would know beforehand where these populations were and could avoid the issue by planning accordingly.
Saying we should just build over them or ignoring the conservation issues ends up where we are now, with increased sewage, a massive bio diversity loss in the uk and increased land soil.
If hs2 had had a local info, it would have avoided that route. And no it wasn't 40 or even 4 million. This upfront info was available on projects that I worked on in the Netherlands.
Stage 1 studies in the uk, by comparison, are incomplete.
I am not surprised that people with no background in construction would fall for this. I work in a steelworks with three adjacent sssi. We have no issues on management in that regard and have increased the sssi areas.
The biggest issue. Councillors ignoring the planners.
Brilliant summary.
Moses Attenborough has killed pragmatism.
It is not an EU directive stop spreading misinformation either edit your comment or delete it.
If it is an EU directive surely we don't have to do it (as we aren't in the EU).
Yes barminess like that needs ending by not building ever more stupid roads! Or rail lines.
The UK is one of the most nature denuded nations on earth!
We can get everywhere we want to already! Not a single new road has any place being built for mere convenience or speed of traffic flow for selfish impatient drivers.
There is also the fact in a few years there will be vastly fewer cars used. They will be on call and driverless. Few will want or need to keep one sat on the side of the road or in a drive for 95% of its existence.
The older I get the more bitter I become due to witnessing increasing incidences of complete ineptitude. I'll die a very grumpy old man!
I don't want hectares of poorly-designed sprawl trashing the environment.
No more India. That's why.
7:55 this is actually more of a problem with news articles, if you look into it not very little of what they said is true, in fact the 300,000 pages figure is just made up from what I can find. The planning application was submitted in 2022 with an 18 months predicted date, however naturally the July election pushed it back. The planning fees thing is a huge misnomer and actually impossible to find out what they are talking about and what the costs even were and what was included was land acquisition included for example. The huge issue nowadays it cost so little in Norway because it was built by it's government with zero profit incentive from start to finish. Whereas here everything has to be done by contractors and consultants who charge thousands of percent in profit.
How many thousands of a percent do you think they charge ? Contractors margins are 2 or 3%.
Reason .... MPs and policy makers have invested interest in property so want there assets rising due to supply and demand . Same old
If you allow a small nation to have an excessive population, you will be faced with the increasingly acute choice between building enough homes and destroying the countryside.
We are already highly dependent on imports for most of our food, which makes us highly sensitive to food price inflation.
Its all about population.
Incidentally, if we controlled net migration, our natural birthrate would see a gentle decline in population, which would ease pressure on everything, from public services to farming, from utilities and energy to housing costs.
Here in Shropshire you can bribe the local council for planning, I think it's the same in many counties
That certainly seems to be the case.
What evidence do you have for such a statement?
I bought my house a bit over 5 years ago for £50,000. This week I looked up some similar houses on the street I live in that are on sale and those are going for £75,000. If the housing market was expanding (as in new houses and apartments being built) at any kind of rate that could possibly address the ever increasing consumer demands there is no way my house could add half again to it's value after just 5 years, even allowing for the amount of inflation we have experienced in that time-frame.
Where's this. Where are there houses for under 200k ?
Due to energy costs a brick that cost 45 p ten years ago was £1.12 last time i bought some, costs of building have gone up a lot because nuclear industry privatised and Blair had gas ones built .
For the cost of HS2 we could have designed and built a new generwtion of zero-emission regional aircraft that only need a small runway at each end of the journey, instead of a massive concrete and steel barrier across hundreds of miles of countryside and habitat.
The idea that trains are environmentally friendly is insane.
Where do you live? All around where I live our farmland is disappearing under homes at an alarming rate with Services nowhere near able to respond.
Totally agree. The UK doesn't actually have much land to build on. We already deforested everything and now selling off farm land. It can't all be housing
I'm working on a small office in my home town. It's planned to be built on an empty car park in the middle of town. Nothing crazy.
15 months to receive an official response from Cheshire East Council on the discharge of duties application.
If Brunel was alive today he’d be turning in his grave
That doesn't make sense
He wouldn't be able to build anything with today's regulations.
Town planning act needs to be reformed.
if only normal people had an insight in the construction sector, the contracts, the money, the scams etc....
Snug Architects got planning for 24 houses in the New Forest National Park. Impressive yes, but it wasn’t approved by the local planners or planning committee. It was won at appeal. Two years wasted by the council and councillors despite local residents supporting it…The local system does everything it can to prevent planning whilst central government inspectors eventually say ‘yes’. This conflict in approach is breaking the system. We need a consistent planning and political system all on the same page. Developers can then invest in what the country needs.
Those houses are now built, look great, sold like hot cakes and are now used as an example of good design by the local planners!
Unless their house building targets are for social housing it is a waste of time.
Also the truth is that they ie the government are lobbied by the banks and lenders to not hit their targets because it could crash their bubble.If they supplied the demand then house prices would crash and the lenders loans would be in negative equity.
Yes, yes, yes. There was a Time when Persia was the center of the known world (550-330 BCE), but times change. The Greeks suffered the same fate. Britian is no longer Great, it's just another middle ranking European power with lots of debt, the same is true for France. History is cyclical. Greatness and Prosperity never rest in just one or two places, they move around in both Time and Space.
Can you do a video about green belts.
Those are huge barrier to get new housing build.
The reasoning behind Greenbelt land is massively important, and should never be abolished. I don't want the UK to become like America - where planning is now TOO lax imo. It's at the other end of the scale to that of the UK. Both countries need to seek more of a balance.
Planning needs to be more stringent in the US; and less unwieldy in the UK.
Besides it's not really Greenbelt land that's the real issue here, but 'Brownbelt' land (old industrial land) that has been left to rot - with nothing done about cleaning it, and then clearing it up in order to build new housing, public transport amenities, shopping facilities, and the like.
The issue with the UK is not so much that we're 'running out of land to build on' because we aren't! The issue is that there's masses of derelict Brownfield land that nothing is being done about; and no one is utilising it as they should be.
But then this is because central government (Tories) have starved many Local Authorities all over the UK of funding. This means that L.A's now haven't the money to do anything about the former industrial brownbelt land within their cities, and immediately on the edges of it. And so a lot of new building in general has ground to a halt, because of this.
Essentially the ball is in the court of the central government. But as with most things these days; a lot of the problems the UK now faces stem from the actions and decisions (government policies) taken by the Tories over the last 14 years.
It was NOT this bad under the last Labour government. Nowhere near as bad as it is now re: Planning for new buildings. L.A's back then (2010) received more funding to actually complete large building projects. But as we know, the Tories are excessively 'pro centralisation' and anti- federal (anti- devolvement of power).
This why the situation in the UK with so many things now, is vastly different from the situation back in 2010. Labour were not as crushingly pro-centralisation. They also trusted LA's much more than the Tories do. This too has made a huge difference. There's a real lack of trust shown by central government towards all LA's - even Tory controlled ones!
This mindset needs to change. Hopefully it will do, with a Labour government in the near future.
@@robtyman4281the green belt is extremely misleading, a lot of it is shitty muddy fields next to motorway, the truth is we barely have any true green space left most of it is for farming. True nature is stuff like the peak district and snowdonia which should obviously be protected. just 1% of greenbelt land has space for hundreds of thousands of homes
This is an excellent channel: ever perspicuous, always edifying and helpful, and the presenter's placid mien has a positive influence on the viewer. True to its name, Economics Help UK really deserves great success and more subscribers.
A excellent summary. Ultimately, we can't afford not to make these investments, or we will get ever poorer. Some short term belt-tightening, especially by those who are better able to tighten their belts, to fund useful investment, is essential to our recovery.
Two more impediments to building at reasonable cost here are safety laws, and our legal system. In Britain it is a legal requirement to implement safety measures that are disproportionately costly, in a tortuous chain of legal logic. A law requires safety risks to be made "as low as reasonably practicable". But how expensive makes something not "reasonably practicable"? In a case over interpretation of this, a judge ruled that if the cost is utterly disproportionate, then that is not "reasonably practicable". The implication is that if cost is only disproportionate, then it has to be spent. In 2021, the Office of Rail and Road, the regulator of Network Rail and Highways England published a paper sizing this, saying that cost that was only 3 to 10 times what a cost-benefit test would find reasonable, then the safety measure should be implemented. And so our cost-benefit guidance, which decides how to spend our money, is over-ruled. We have assessed a value of life, and a judge says we have to behave as if it was 3 to 10 times what research says they should be. Meanwhile our health system is using the lower value of life, and so improving the safety of public infrastructure grabs an unfair share of public funding vs the NHS.
And then there's our legal system. A lawyer once complained that he supported a major railway contract in Spain, and the contract was only 20 pages long, in contrast to the 1000+ pages that would happen in Britain. Not much work for lawyers in that, nor indeed much negotiation support over all those details that had to be agreed. The reason is that so many of the things that have to negotiated and specified every time in British contracts are in a standard legal code in Spain, and other continental legal systems. It making the legalities of construction contracts so much cheaper, easier and predictable to deal with. I think it is no coincidence that the US, whose legal system is more similar to ours than to continental countries, also has a construction cost problem.
When was the last time you actually saw a public demonstration to build more houses locally?, it doesn't actually happen what you do get it lots of demonstrations NOT to build more houses locally. Sorry the problem is 99% house owners NOT wanting more houses, That's a problem with democracy itself not economics.
If you can buy land easily (ie ignore local veto's) its not going to be that hard to find people to build property. Small builders would flock to it. In the end most the costs for a house aren't the building its the house allowed land.
Basically you can either have local democracy o you can solve the housing crisis by ignoring it but you can't have both
... There's plenty of land to use that doesn't infringe on wildlife and conservation...
A lot of agricultural land with very low ecological value that could probably do with more workers on hand to grow a greater diversity of crops to better standards.
The trouble is you can't just put a dwelling on the corner of a field because you can't change land registered as agricultural use land to residential use very lightly. Even if in practice the square metres here and there on the margins of fields is hardly going to meaningfully reduce yields. (As in houses dotted around on margins, not housing estates in the middle of a big enough field)
Then if you are growing a greater diversity of crops with more work related dwellings around it could potentially improve yields.
This whole moaning about not being able to evict bat's or rate species of whatever from the few margins they have left is seriously out of all proportion..
It's just another line of attack on conservationists and environmentalist "Greenies."
Perhaps if these new houses weren't so shoddy and fit into landscapes better (literally earthships style homes why not) perhaps people would be less adverse to having them around their back yards...
Planner here, 1:13 is not true, CIL and S106 delivers millions of £££ for public services - this omission is telling if the fact most people don’t realise how much land value uplift is levied towards public services
I know regulations are strict but that is for a reason. These houses need to last for decades. They cant be poorly designed. The whole community needs to be considered when these are built. Drainage, height, building materials and other stuff i probs dont know about. I dont want them to just throw up crap houses. Design them properly.
Why dont they just limit the number of non UK residents who can own property. So we dont get investors from other countries just owning shit.
Stick to economics and not planning which you know little about. Local authorities do not have a veto. They operate within a national framework no one saw as being problematic for decades. The thing which has changed is public attitudes. There is widespread opposition, especially among older and more affluent people to any form of development. Politicians simply reflect that.
5:00 if you think the costs & delays in Britain are bad, you should look across the pond to the National Children’s Hospital in Dublin failure
Why does everyone bang on about price?. It's infrastructure. It's the corruption jealousy thing: oh I should personally have that cash for my obsession.
In a democratic polity people have the right to have a say on the population size and density of their country. I suspect that building more houses is rather akin to building more roads i.e it has the effect of increasing demand further and ruining the once emblematic countryside of England. A rush to build on the countryside will be a terrible mistake for the quality of life of millions in England.
The project paperwork is now far more expensive than the building materials and most projects seem to have more office workers than construction workers.
The main problem is that there aren't enough people to build, not the bats. This is the same for several other EU countries.
And you also nentioned nothing about land ownerships because bats are the low hanging fruit.
Can't the uk government start a state owned construction company to basically speed up the process of planning permissions and actually build more social housing throughout the country? Especially if the big private developers are just banking up the allotments and limiting the supply of properties.
Why would the government solve a problem that they are profiting from creating?
Yes, they can. They won't though because they are all in kahoots with said companies
Simply put: developments are by companies for profit. We need the government to step in and stop this nonsense, and actually build the million or so houses that have planning permission for the people
I watched the entire video just to see if you will ever mention land ownership structure. I haven't heard one word being told about it, why is that?
Who would want their pleasant environment ruined by over-development and then destroyed by the incoming trash that the government was to house there.?
I only got a few seconds in and I was thinking channel tunnel, crossrail, hs2.
Go away now.....
Procurement Corrrrruuuuppptionnn!!!! No bid contracts and over invoicing.
No building in Aberdeen and surroundings there are new buildings everyehere.???????
HS2 construction reminds me of the subway expansion in NY City. every area had ability to stop the project if they did not get everything they want, even after project started leading to way over cost. Also no attempt at having a general contractor, who hired subs. Instead so many contractors handling so many aspects of the project , many times without coordination. One comment was they could have given all the people in the area free bus tickets for 30 years and saved money. ( not fact checked)
HS2 has a main Contractor for each contract. The project is too big to give to 1 single main Contractor.
Glad to hear you come from leeds mate! Best city in the UK! 😊
I was just in Portsmouth so surprised to see a video mentioning Brunel, one of the most famous and ingenious people to come from there…
I've advocated emigration for young people since 2010 and see no reason to change my mind. The decline into poverty is inevitable with our governance model. It's over.
7:12 Is the government responsible for construction of new reservoirs in the age of privately owned water companies? Shouldn't that investment come from said water companies? Isn't that what we pay our bills for? Same goes for power lines, National Grid is listed on LSE
Yes, but this is a failure of the water regulator which sets ridiculously low rates of investment for these firms.
In an ideal world, nationalise them.
For a compromise, regulate them properly.
What we have right now is a joke.
The companies do all they are legally made to do, and no more, and we should have expected that really.
@@will2brown50 No they do way less than they legally need to but the government told regulators not to test the water so the water companies stopped treating it
I'm Brazilian and I think your British accent is so charmy!!!
Also, I noticed UK has a substantial amount of activism and it goes beyond the rational scope. UK needs to find a balance and develop tier 2 - tier 3 cities.
The middle class in Britain are being hollowed out financially.
The way they stay relevant is to hector others about nature and our historic errors.
Sorry can you explain that again?
Activism needs to be banned. Well maybe designate a field in the middle of nowhere where they can protest. It will have the same effect
@@MichaelPicklesWhat a stupid thing to say. I take you believe in bending over for anyone in authority to take advantage of.
There is significant protest in my area over the building of a giant powerline from the coast to central cities like Birmingham. The electricity is generated in coastal windfarms, but needs to be transported to where the demand is. This means permanently scarring the landscape without benefit to the local people. Of course there is opposition to such a scheme and rightly so.
What do you mean "beyond the rational scope"? Isn't it right that people fight to protect the rural environment from the blight of industrialization and urbanisation.
It's all going to change as I've heard they have been given the go ahead to build new towns! Not a few houses,towns. Keep a look out I your local areas.
Is that the current Government promising that? The one that said they’d have built 100 new hospitals by now?😂
How long do you think it will take to build these new towns ? 25 to 30 years sounds realistic. And how many governments are we likely to see come and go ?
Mr. Tejvan Pettinger, you guys don't have skyscrapers in the UK?
People hate living in apartments. Particularly families. And it does deprive people of gardens, block sunlight and reduce community spirit
@@BittersweetMayhemif you build apartments people will come no matter what, as long as they do something about leaseholds
Maybe it’s best because isn’t England the most densely populated country in Europe now?
No, it is not. The UK is the 52th most dense country in the world. In Europe among the countries bigger than a single city is the third. But that is miss leading too, because it is not the same to leave in London than in the Highlands, or simply in Salisbury. If you live in Moscow, you wont feel that Russia has a low population density, because you dont really care what is 100 km from where you live being or not being in the same country. Doesnt France account for the Guyana province to do their average?. That is what I mean. Depends on what particular part you live, not the average of the entire territory. China has a density of half the UK, but I bet that is not what the average Chinese feels like. Build more in London is probably not that good, build more in Salisbury probably is. Everything is relative.
No, The Netherlands is.
Even if say you got permission to build say a million houses ,where would you find the bricklayers, plasters, carpenters
Exactly!
You can thank Brexit for that. Without Brexit you would've easily found workers from all over the EU to do bricklaying, plastering and carpentry.
But you reap what you voted for. 🤗
That's exactly the reason why the 40 new hospitals in the new hospital programme can't be delivered by 2030, as identified by the National Audit Office. They will probably come up with the same answer to the house building target in due course.
He cannot pronounce his "r"
I am pretty sure that all these problems will solve themselves if we only accept everyone as immigrants with very low bar for entry.
The politicians would never lie to us, right?
Thanks for this video and the work that you do, it's brilliant. I think housing is one of the fundamental problems in this country and no politician wants to touch it, meaning the pressures on the NHS (who are the lowest social denominator) continue.
There's no point building new homes when by the time the new homes are built, the population will have increased by twice as many as the homes built.
With the human madness that is going on with population out of control, if that were any other species, we'd be issuing major population culls and would have years ago.
We are mammals and not immune to overpopulation and over consumption of the land.
Fix the population crisis as a matter of international emergency, then deal with the rest. There is no higher priority, if you really want the problem solved for good, rather than just kicking the can for the next generation to suffer even harder with.
From Terence Wise in UK.........This is not really about the green belt because as someone who regularly travels to our old English cities as you approach them you do so trough hundreds of acres of desolate industrial areas.
Another great video.
I don't see anything wrong with protecting bats. We build stuff all the time and then they are environmental catastrophes. Its often just careless and short sighted. You just need competent people to handle these regulations. I think the government lack these people.
The French/Italians are building 170 mile slightly sub hi-speed rail link between Turin-Lyon with the second longest rail tunnel in the world of 36 miles long for a planned total cost of 25 billion Euro about a fifth of the cost of HS2. One heck of a tunnel.
The French only publish the cost of the railway track. Also they don't have the planning rules we do. You are comparing apples with oranges.
@@TrevorWilliams-fq8mg How about the Swiss?The Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland is currently the longest railway tunnel in the world, not the French.
It was completed in 2016 and stretches for 57.09 kilometers. The total cost according to my information, of the project was approximately CHF 12 billion (Swiss francs).
If it was completed in 2016 there are a lot of additional years of inflation to add for a comparison.
@@TrevorWilliams-fq8mg stating the obvious. But the longest tunnel in the world driven through the Alps for around £10 million only 8 years ago. Nowhere compares in England alongside that
By 'we're not building enough electric network' that is of course, the privatised national grid company, inexplicably taken out of the public domain by thatcher
Try and get permission to build a new power station or wind farm.
Inexplicably?? The reason was to put any money made into private hands, shareholders, instead of into the treasury. Thatcher was looking after her city mates who have asset stripped the infrastructure by failing to maintain it in fully reliable condition and then leveraged hard to get more money out of the business, hence the debts. Pure social vandalism.
Yeah but they can't build anything because the planning permission. Where Margret Thatcher messed up wasnt privatising industries, but privatising without repealing the 1947 planning act.
If you want to make the environment loss, you should, for a proper argument, address the massive diversity loss.
Local issues are generally due to local councillors ignoring planning advice.
Michael Gove.