Starmer's plan to solve housing crisis faces first big test
Starmer's plan to solve housing crisis faces first big test
www.bbc.co.uk
Starmer's plan to solve housing crisis faces first big test
15 comments
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If it happens, this will be the highest level of housebuilding since the 60s.
It won't reverse how things currently are, but if it's sustained, it should help out a lot over time.
I just worry that some people will look at house prices in 4 years, see that they're obviously not cheap, and then give up entirely/vote in a party that will do nothing. Tackling the issue of decades of low building rates is a significant challange, and housing estates don't spring up overnight.
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I just worry that some people will look at house prices in 4 years, see that they’re obviously not cheap, and then give up entirely/vote in a party that will do nothing. Tackling the issue of decades of low building rates is a significant challange, and housing estates don’t spring up overnight.
Indeed, the political rewards might not come as we'd like, but they have to build anyway, as it's just the right thing to do!
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Leave the green belt alone, build on golf courses. It's a shit sport that toffs use to run private business meetings and uses far too much land.
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A lot of the 'green' belt is golf courses. Also, a lot of it isn't really all that green, certainly not if 'green' means something other than the colour (like 'biodiverse', for example). It's very often low-quality, inaccessible, economically unproductive land that would be much better off with people living on it.
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For what it's worth, "green belt" can be quite a misnomer.
The name implies luscious countryside and national parks. In reality much of it is unproductive fields, disused 'farmland', etc.
Misleading people with what "green belt" means is a typical tactic amongst NIMBYs.
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Cheers for the info. Useful.
My point still stands, fuck golf.
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Having not read the article and going by the picture....
Is the first test "what do we do about castles?" because I think that can wait.
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Convert the castles into affordable homes, perhaps?
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15 comments
A typically coherent NIMBY comment, here. 'The government is terrible at delivering infrastructure. That's why I'm opposed to the government delivering infrastructure.'
Also notable that 14 of those 18 years were under a Conservative government dedicated to cutting government services and infrastructure.
I don't think it's entirely unreasonable. "Infrastructure" in terms of discussing housing developments tends to mean roads, doctors surgeries, shops etc. The things that don't seem to get built (despite promises) when both green and brownfield sites get cleared and blanketed in suburbs.
There are always some who so deeply NIMBYish that they will oppose anything and everything for the sake of it, and there will never be any appeasing them. But the most common real complaint I hear about new housing is the lack of new services to keep up with the increasing population. If Labour could finally make those kinds of infrastructure commitments really stick to new housing projects I think a lot of NIMBYness would subside.
Most people don't object to having a few more neighbours, but they do object to feeling they have to fight them for a GP appointment.
But this is flatly untrue. There are laws requiring local authorities to take this into account and they can compel developers to contribute either financially or in-kind. What causes the problems with doctor's surgeries is not new developments, but austerity, which is why it's a problem everywhere.
But even aside from austerity, nimbyism significantly contributes to the problems you've identified, at the local level both directly and indirectly. E.g., here's an example of NIMBYs trying to prevent a school building a garden (a direct example). But, it also happens indirectly:
This is the reason that, e.g., many rural schools have shut down. There was a particularly good example within the last year or so of a councillor celebrating preventing a housing development and then, mere weeks later, the very same councillor complaining that the DfE had ordered the local school to be shut down because there weren't enough children in the village!
EDIT: A further indirect consequence of NIMBYs causing the kinds of problems they claim to oppose is that you simply cannot have economic growth without development. When so much development is blocked and delayed, it leads to less growth, which means government revenue falls, which means less money for development... etc.