Vocal Voices

I have been reading and listening to various reports about the Wednesday's Budget and I am wondering if I have entered dreamworld.

300,000 new homes, every year. Who is going to pay for them, what type will they be and where will they be? With an average of three occupants per home the represent a city in size somewhere between Leeds and Birmingham. OK they will be all over the UK (England mainly) but they are still quite a number.

We are also to get £400m for rapid car charging stations, which at price for each installation coming in at about £10,000 that's 40,000 or so. Will there be that many electric vehicles to use them and how much are the electricity companies stumping up? I am assuming £0, but I bet that the oil companies didn't get a penny for all their service stations. So, it is us taxpayers who will be paying for the vault to volts instead of the electricity companies and the car owners.

He is also spending £100m on clean car purchases, whatever they are. I wonder if he truly realises that there is no such thing. Electric cars are not emissions free or green. The production of their bodyworks, tyres, seats.... is the same as any petrol or diesel car, but when you throw in the batteries and their use of rare earth materials and their charging costs it all goes pear shaped.

The best one, though has to be the £75m for 'artificial intelligence': really? A few bob spent on the real thing might be more cost effective, certainly more necessary.

Then we have the driverless cars. Why not, we appear to have a driverless government.

I'd call it a sound byte budget. Probably one of the worst in living memory.

Well the homes stuff is a total pile of BS. Unless they give it to councils, to build on Brownfield, with constraints on what kind of accommodation they make (1-2 bedroom low price accommodation), then it's just going to be a money maker for someone. Even then with Councils having no building capability and the UK still bound by EU public tender rules, the money would go to fill the coffers of Polish and German companies.

However if they give it to private companies, they get to bump up the construction stats and that looks good. Even if it does nothing for the people most in need of accommodation...

As for this kind of "Green" credential idiocy? I'm sure that this has more to do with the Paris accord than it has to do with UK budget policy. You forgot the biggest misnomer in the "green" credentials of electric vehicles (EV). The fact that more than 50% of UK power is generated by fossil fuels and you can increase that significantly in winter when solar produces less than half the power it produces in summer. Also, where are they going to get all the power from to charge said EV's? I've spent the last 10 years reading, every year, that we're going to run out of power in the winter. Now, suddenly, we've got the power to charge millions of EV's.....

Now if the Chancellor had come up with a package of money for end to end Biomass power stations with subsidies for farmers to grow the crops which produce the Biomass and with an infrastructure to support them, on top of a move to EV and along with a suspension of the removal of traditional fossil fuel power stations, I would have thought his credentials were possible.

100M I would also have been OK with for EV. If we actually made them. But to push 100m on EV we have to import makes no sense to me at all when it's applied via something like the scrappage scheme we saw to keep car production high during the financial crisis.

As for the 75M in AI? In fact that is the most sensible of all the money they are putting out. I'd rather have seen it as 750M and can a lot of the other BS. The UK is a world leader in AI and, in terms of the technical revolution (second industrial revolution), AI will be one of the leaders of the whole revolution. It is the best thing to be investing in of the whole lot.

IMHO they don't need to be applying a touch of real intelligence, they have enough of that.

What they really need is a large chunk of real integrity.

THAT is the biggest thing they lack of all.

If we are going to build 300,000 new houses a year, I would like to know where all the skilled (and unskilled) workmen are coming from. Not the UK, obviously.

Additionally, there is enough evidence around that the big building companies are producing shoddy sub-standard new housing (the latest scandal apparently being [report in the Times] selling homes with a "theoretical" energy efficiency rating whereas in practice, on certain developments, the actual rating was anything but; they forgot to install the underfloor insulation) - are we just going to see more of the same?

As for rapid car charging stations, you have a whole new infrastructure to think about - new parking bays (which will possibly require extra land) laid out at service stations for electric cars to queue in whilst waiting for a charging point to become available. I've read an 80% recharge will take 30-40 minutes and that's once you've found an available charging bay. And where are we going to spend our 40 minutes waiting while the charge is applied - you know what most filling stations are like now for "ambiance" ....

My local one now has a Greggs, Costa and a Subway - so much ambiance. They had to knock down a few few trees for the extension, but hey it's just a few! A few more for the charging bays in the future should not be a problem. Sheesh!

TheOstrich wrote:If we are going to build 300,000 new houses a year, I would like to know where all the skilled (and unskilled) workmen are coming from. Not the UK, obviously.

They throw people on a few weeks course now and then call them tradesmen.

TheOstrich wrote:Additionally, there is enough evidence around that the big building companies are producing shoddy sub-standard new housing (the latest scandal apparently being [report in the Times] selling homes with a "theoretical" energy efficiency rating whereas in practice, on certain developments, the actual rating was anything but; they forgot to install the underfloor insulation) - are we just going to see more of the same?

Yes, if my daughter's experience is anything to go by. The amound of snags they've had with their new house is nobody's business. Not as bad as their neighbour though. Her landing was 25mm higher at one end than the other...

There are roughly 300,000 houses in Leeds (I looked it up!). So we are proposing to build one new Leeds every year.

Thing is, the houses need to be where the jobs are, which is the south east. You could build 100,000 houses in the Scottish highlands, but why would you? There are no jobs there, hence no reason for masses of people to go there.

If London is too big or too expensive then build them elsewhere. As we said on another thread, there is plenty of room in the Liverpools, Middlesboroughs, Hull, the old industrial cities whose populations of declined. But the reason their populations declined is - the jobs disappeared.

So if you are going to build in those cities, you need some sort of industrial strategy to relocate jobs there.

Or will we see just a crude numbers game? As long as the houses get built the government can just say "Look - we have built X number of houses!". The fact that a lot of them will be four and five bed detached in wealthy areas that will do nothing to make housing more affordable won't count.

We need strategy and long term planning, but will we get it?

cromwell wrote:We need strategy and long term planning, but will we get it?

Do be brief, all we get are words. Suff hits the nail when he says it is all 'sound bites'.

And I see the SWIM (Scouser working in Mancland) Andy Burnham, has given his SB wisdom to us all today. We Northerners are apparently less productive than those in the South because of poor road and rail traffic infrastructure spending making us late for work!

Of course it is, Andy, I mean the £gazillions spent in London have brought the speed to get across London a bit faster than it was in the mid 19th Century. Ain't technology and a fat wallet wonderful? But I have an issue Andy. Being late for work does not mean you are less productive once you get there. Not having a job to go to in the first place... now that makes you less productive.

Where are the jobs Andy? The South and SE. And what did you and other Northern MPs do about getting some of them shifted up here, what have you ever done along those lines?

The future looks decidedly crazy to me.

The people who dream up plans certainly don't seem to give much thought to the consequences of them.

How many more people can GB accommodate ? And will there be employment available for these increased
numbers when A I robots take over in our factories?

Plenty of land here in the West Country, but far too many NIMBYs who are more concerned with the view from their windows than homelessness!