I’ve recently seen a plethora of articles supporting drastic changes in planning law, accompanied by the silly slur that all who oppose must be the dreaded ‘nimbys’, or live in fear of them. This can only mean one thing: the latest round in the battle to change planning law – potentially giving developers even more […]
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” Thus a 19th-century American novelist skewered the 21st-century Conservative Party. For there is no other way to explain so many Tories’ wilful blindness to the most fundamental truths of a market economy than just to acknowledge […]
Boris Johnson has promised a “radical shakeup” of the planning system – the “biggest shake-up in 70 years” no less – in order to fix the housing crisis. Call me a cynic, but I have heard this too many times to believe a word of it. We have been here before. Announcing a “radical shakeup” […]
Conservatives could be forgiven for feeling a little smug after this week’s Super Thursday elections. A big win in Hartlepool, convincing mayoral victories in Teesside and the West Midlands, a decent showing in English councils and a better-than-expected performance in London all suggest a government in rude political health. A giant inflatable Boris outside the […]
As Brits start returning to the pub, one of the big topics being discussed over frosty pints is bound to be the housing market. Homes have massively increased in price over the last few decades – much faster than the incomes. Getting on the property ladder seems an ever more remote prospect, regardless of how […]
Language has such power in politics. The very name Green Belt makes it hard to oppose. Who could be anti-green, after all? Who could be in favour of ‘urban sprawl’ or ‘concreting over the countryside’? It is entirely natural to favour a distinction between the countryside and our towns and cities. I recall during my […]
House prices are generally quite pro-cyclical: they tend to go up when the economy is doing well, and they tend to stagnate or fall when the economy is doing badly. With this in mind: by how much, would you guess, have UK house prices fallen during the current, pandemic-induced recession? Bear in mind how unusual […]
You’ve got to admire its staying power. Since it was launched by the Conservatives at their 2008 Autumn conference, HS2 has been rejected by the then Labour government, then subsequently adopted, it’s survived multiple reviews and budgets and it’s outlasted austerity, six Secretaries of State for Transport, four Chairmen of HS2 Ltd and three CEOs. […]
Last week the Government published the UK’s first official statistics showing how many people are going without food because they can’t afford it. Some of the findings are startling: 43% of those receiving Universal Credit are food insecure. And these statistics represent the situation between April 2019 and March 2020: before the pandemic took hold, […]
Intuition might tell us that big problems need big, centrally-planned solutions. But the experience of the last year has demonstrated the opposite: the greater the challenge, the more important the local response becomes. Even the best government strategy can be rendered meaningless by poor community-level implementation. The behaviours and actions needed for the biggest objectives […]
Throughout his Budget, Rishi Sunak stressed the theme of fairness. After six mentions of the word fair, the Chancellor finished up with a final commitment to being “honest and fair in all that we do”. But the truth is that he swerved the one action that could have led to a fairer country in a […]
Digesting a Budget in the hours after it’s delivered is always a rather frantic process, so I won’t attempt to go over every cough and spit. Rishi Sunak split things into three parts: recover from Covid, repair the public finances and rebuild the economy in the longer term. We heard a fair bit about parts […]
Covid-19 has turned society upside down in all sorts of ways, and British politics is no exception. Over the last few weeks, we have seen the almost surreal display of a Tory Chancellor clamouring for tax rises, while Labour urges the Government to keep the brakes firmly applied. So it is with Council Tax. As […]
Homelessness, and rough sleeping in particular, remains a blight in our society. If the Government is seeking to “level up” the country then there is no better place to begin than with those at their lowest ebb – rough sleepers. I have been engaged in the sector for over 30 years, usually as a volunteer, […]
Regular readers of this website will know we’re not huge fans of Stamp Duty. Long before Rishi Sunak decided to put in place a very substantial holiday to boost the construction industry, we were railing against the iniquities of SDLT. I shan’t repeat all those arguments, suffice to say it’s a bad tax that depresses […]
The Government has announced today that it will move much of the proposed new housing targets from rural areas to existing cities, encouraging more use of brownfield land and heeding the complaints of the 80 Conservative MPs concerned about a wave of new houses in their constituencies. Cries of relief are echoing around the Tory […]
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