Last Thursday in Queen’s Square, Bloomsbury a small party was held to celebrate some of the finest architectural designs of the past year. All were by respected specialists in the field and each had been submitted to the Royal Academy for their Summer Exhibition – and all but one had been rejected out of hand. […]
Shaun Spiers, until recently Chief Executive of the Campaign to Protect Rural England, has written a fascinating, profoundly significant, and at times deeply frustrating book. Reading How to build houses and save the countryside filled me with excitement and hope. But occasionally I had the urge to hurl it at the wall. It offers compulsive […]
Roll up, roll up. The Conservatives are looking for a candidate to be the Mayor of London. But there’s a catch. A Tory source tells The Sunday Times: “We are likely to lose anyway, so it is better to send a visible message to voters that we are changing.” That is taken to mean either […]
So, you want to heal the generational divide? Thinktankers and policymakers have been out in force over the past few weeks throwing ideas around about how to shift some of the burden from the shoulders of my generation – the student loan generation, generation rent, “those entitled millennials”. The vast majority of those ideas are, […]
Seattle is, by many measures, one of the fastest-growing cities in America, if not the fast-growing city. A few big tech companies, including Amazon and Microsoft, plus other large, successful businesses such as Boeing and Starbucks, have fueled this explosive rise. But prosperity hasn’t necessarily bred contentment, as the traditionally left-wing city turned on the […]
Conservatives can’t agree on much at the moment. But one view that the vast majority of them would struggle to disagree with is that there are fundamental problems with the party’s pitch to the electorate. The fault lines have been there for some time, but the issue became impossible to ignore after last year’s general […]
The Resolution Foundation published a report this week, “The New Generational Contract”, aimed at redressing the breakdown of a contract between baby boomers and millennials: namely that pensioners’ social care is being paid for by today’s taxpayers (millennials) who cannot afford baby boomer-priced houses. The report is debilitated by two crippling misunderstandings. First, that millennials […]
The Intergenerational Commission has published its final report and, according to the findings, young people have a pretty raw deal. Young workers are forced to “shoulder huge risks” bearing the brunt of “insecure work”: their chances of building up a decent pension are slim, and their prospects of owning their own home one day are […]
Affordable housing is one of the key policy challenges of our time. But as with so many other major policy problems, we face a continued lack of imagination that leads many to think that the housing crisis can be solved with more of what worked last time, commanded from offices in Whitehall. This is not […]
Using the long arm of the law to force-fill empty homes is getting very vogueish. From the far left to the Tory back benches everyone seems to be getting on board with the idea. The Government is legislating to permit greater tax surcharges on empty homes. The Resolution Foundation is arguing for more active steps […]
By anyone’s reckoning Britain faces a housing crisis. We simply do not have enough houses in the places that people want to work and live. Why is our planning system so broken? Well, folks, the clue is in the name: planning. We have tested to destruction the idea that “plan-led” economies ever work. We know […]
In her party conference speech last year, Theresa May dedicated her premiership to “renewing the British Dream” by “fixing our broken housing market”. And so it is reasonable to assume that the ideas of anyone advising the prime minister of housing are likely to be fairly important. That is exactly what Toby Lloyd, formerly head […]
A Commons Committee has – quite seriously – argued that an Englishman’s home should no longer be his castle. You could also describe their proposal as a return of the Star Chamber – where doing something the powers that be didn’t like ended with you forfeiting your property. The English spent a number of centuries […]
The Resolution Foundation’s depressing claim that one-third of millennials face renting their whole life has made headlines today. But the think tank’s report also contained the encouraging — and unsurprising — revelation that countries building plenty of homes have generally not seen huge price rises, despite low interest rates and a big banking sector. Perhaps […]
You can get to Cambridge from Oxford directly in a roundabout sort of way: there are 53 of them between Oxford and Bedford alone. That’s one roundabout every 2 minutes and 21 seconds. It is why the proposed £3bn Expressway from Oxford to Cambridge, with a high-speed rail line to boot, can’t come soon enough. […]
How can we end the housing crisis? Would a better planning system ensure more well-designed homes with local support where they are most wanted, over time making homes more affordable than they would otherwise be? Of course it would. When it comes to whether or not something should be done about Britain’s planning system, that […]
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