Vocal Voices

The charity, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation says, that we need to build a city the size of Leeds by the end of parliamwnt in 2022.

Just to put that in perspective, Leeds is the UK's third largest city with a population of 782,000. It covers an area of 213 sq miles. It is home to 7 major hospitals, 9 specialist clinics or hospices as well as 203 Primary schools, 55 Secondary/High schools, 9 FE colleges and 2 universities. They are the basics, forget all the other infrastructure etc.

The government says it has already built one Leeds since 2011 but my bet is that it came nowhere near providing the facilities the real one has.

This madness has to stop, it really does.

Equally there is undeveloped planning permission, on the books, for nearly half a million houses. The market won't stand it.

What there is a need for is council led social housing for single tenants and couples without children. That will never happen until something is done about "right to buy".

A case of one good deed having consequences that were never expected. Or was it a good deed with unexpected consequences or more an act of temptation to the avarice of a certain sector of the voter base? I'm sure that question will never be answered.

Here's another interesting question. Demographics have told us, for a long time now, that we are producing less that 2 children for each couple. In short we should have a shrinking population. If we need several hundred thousand new homes every few years, then that is not a shrinking population. If it is growing then there is only one source, immigration. If they want to control the explosion in accommodation needed, then they need to control the demand for that accommodation.....

Not that we'll ever hear those two put together...

Suff wrote: Here's another interesting question. Demographics have told us, for a long time now, that we
are producing less that 2 children for each couple. In short we should have a shrinking population. .

When you say "we", you are of course referring to this country of ours.
Other countries in other continents are doing just the opposite, and are continually increasing their populations,
so that immigration is an obvious necessity, and is a solution to their problem of how to support such increased
numbers. The only solution I can see is, in some way, to get some sort of birth control put into operation there.

Aggers, it doesn't change the situation over there or the billions that are in it today.

What I have seen of the Indian colleagues I've worked with is that prosperity, a need for both husband and wife to work and the wish to generate wealth to pass on; has changed the family size to 2 children per couple. Totally breaking down the way society was. Without any need to push contraception down their throats, the younger generations have looked at the situation and decided for themselves that large families are unsustainable.

The biggest challenge is to generate prosperity there. It is a challenge because, just like China, it then becomes a threat to the very businesses that created the prosperity in the first place.

I don't see any solution in the short term. Perhaps Climate Change will be the final leveller. When the immigrants start abandoning the sinking ship as we start running out of food and other necessities.

I can see an Elysium situation happening in the next 100 years. It won't be pretty. Essentially the ignorant will inherit the Earth. What's left of the biosphere anyway...

Workingman wrote:The charity, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation says, that we need to build a city the size of Leeds by the end of parliamwnt in 2022.

Just to put that in perspective, Leeds is the UK's third largest city with a population of 782,000. It covers an area of 213 sq miles. It is home to 7 major hospitals, 9 specialist clinics or hospices as well as 203 Primary schools, 55 Secondary/High schools, 9 FE colleges and 2 universities. They are the basics, forget all the other infrastructure etc.

The government says it has already built one Leeds since 2011 but my bet is that it came nowhere near providing the facilities the real one has.

This madness has to stop, it really does.

Ah, the Josef Stalin Foundation! I wonder what old Joe Rowntree would think of his creation these days? It is somewhat to the left of Che Guevara.

True this - that the houses may get built but the hospitals, schools, GP surgeries etc etc? No chance.

Suff wrote:What there is a need for is council led social housing for single tenants and couples without children. That will never happen until something is done about "right to buy"..

Agreed!

Let's not leave "buy to let" out of the frame. It is "right to buy's" sibling.

If we are going to allow councils to build why can it be quality high rise apartments on old brownfield sites within towns and cities? There is no need for green belt to be gobbled up for detached houses, of any size, when the real need is for homes for what used to be known as the 'working classes'.

There is quite a difference between right to buy and buy to let. In buy to let the owner pays the full fee for the property and then makes money out of letting that property to tenants. This has been going on for generations, however it has rarely moved so far down the ladder of the incomes.

Right to buy is something very different. It is where the purchaser gets a deep discount from the rent they have paid over the years. Essentially discounting local government properties well below the market value, creating a huge bubble in the housing market.

Buy to let, for me, is the inevitable consequence of money moving down the income bracket in a country which rewards innovation and the entrepreneur. Most of the rest of the EU punishes individuals who try to do this. Repressing their property market and leaving the money bound up in a few super rich.

For me the two are not twins at all. One distorts the market and deters local government from producing exactly the kind of brownfield accommodation needed. The other is a natural consequence of that distortion.

More social housing, with no right to buy, and a cap on private rental charges would go a long way to sorting this out.

We should not get too rosy-eyed about buy-to-let.

I helped a friend set up a lettings agancy when I installed his IT system, I then worked there for a while till it got off the ground. One of the pies he had his fingers in was new build buy-to-let apartment complexes as it gave the potential to bring new lalndlords on his books. Developers would hold presentation lunches before busing the prospective buyers to the apartments where they would be met by representatives from banks and building societies offering bespoke buy-to-let mortgages... and he, of course, was there to help out.

What was noticeable from those who came on board was the difference between their mortgage payments and the rents they were to be asking. The mark-up was huge, obscenely so, but these 'investors' have to make a living: right!

The reason I say they are siblings, not twins, is that in both cases they take affordable 'homes' out of the rental or first time buyer market.

Kaz, I entirely agree, but is there a politician out there with the cojones to make the move? Probably not.