Political Scientist. Main focus on the politics of housing with a particular interest in Post-war Britain. Researcher and Staff Writer at
@WorksInProgMag
.
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@WorksInProgMag
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Britain had its largest official rate of real house price growth in its history from October 1971 to July 1973. This was then followed by a house price crash and a government bailout. This is the story.
On this day 110 years ago, the Federal Reserve was created.
Since then, the US Dollar has lost more than 97% of its value.
Put another way, the US government and Federal Reserve have stolen 97% of your wealth, before you pay a penny in taxes.
It is long past time to end the
Given the cancellation of High Speed 2, I suggest we instead try to end the north-south (London) divide once and for all by building Crossrail 2 instead.
Wow if 1.3 million homes are immediately (!) built, rent on a London flat in a not very prestigious area might decline from £1800 a month to £1500 if we're very lucky? Problem solved.
Not only will building 300,000 new houses a year make little difference to housing affordablity, it will also completely blow out the UK's 2050 net-zero carbon budget.
Our new academic paper out today covered by
@guardian
Delighted to have made my maiden speech, in which I raised the wonders and challenges of life in West Suffolk. I argued we need to change our economic model, so as a country we reindustrialise, investing more, manufacturing more, allowing us to narrow the trade deficit.
Lisa Nandy announces Labour's mantra will be "council housing, council housing, council housing" and adds "housing isn't a market, it is a fundamental human right"
#Lab22
You can and we found that the income from slavery and colonial trade was less than 3% of GDP until the 1850s and nearly all industrial investment came from domestic sources. You can argue British rule kept its colonies poor, but you can't say it originally made Britain rich.
I think I hate history culture wars the most. They're so ahistorical. The rise of stable institutions and what those institutions spent their time doing can't be neatly separated out like a maths problem.
One street in Newcastle is 94% student HMOs. 94%!
Council officials admitted it had become unliveable for families.
The complete absence of planning in Britain, for virtually everything, is creating an extraordinarily dysfunctional country.
Really weird how YIMBYs say that allowing unlimited market rate construction will keep rents low and keep cities livable, and yet Manchester is overrun with unlimited market rate construction and rents are spiking and people are being forced out…
Fun fact, between 1964 and 1975 Sweden implemebted a social housing programme which built at a per capita rate which, if implemented in Britain today, would result in more than 750,000 social homes being built a year.
The state pension is "low" by European standards because in European countries their state pensions are also substitutes for private pensions in that they are explictly contributory with payment and the pension based on your salary. You are comparing apples and oranges.
Labour's housebuilding policies will have to account for the fact that the industry is currently dominated by corporate cowboys throwing up luxury-priced shanties
This basically boils down to "building through deserts is politically easier than building through some of the most ferociously NIMBY territory in recorded human history"
Just a reminder Spain has built over 10 high speed rail lines since 1992, most of them much longer than HS2.
Yet in 13 years HS2 is still a mess and no where near being operational
Since the end of the second world war housing in Britain has become increasingly expensive and scarce. However this was not always the case, in 1955 Britain had more homes per capita than the Western European average, including countries such as Switzerland.
Lib Dems have consistently argued for more housing to be built in the city to avoid exactly what we are seeing here. Jobs and houses should be built together in smaller localities. Not jobs in the centre of the county with other districts having to respond to that unmet need.
Translation: "Im mad at tall buildings in London blocking my view. So, my department produced an algorithm that cuts my local council's housing target by 40% and redistributes to Cumbria instead. This is despite 7,000 Greenwich families being on the housing waiting list"
This is not true. British housing production falls behind its European peers after 1955, driven entirely by a shortfall in private housebuilding. Equally social housing production peaked in 1952 and was in near continuous decline after 1968. Thatcher is not the watershed.
‘We haven’t been building nearly enough homes for the past forty years’
Toby Lloyd, former housing adviser to Theresa May, tells
#Newsnight
that the housing target is meaningless.
Growth 45-73 wasn't *fine*, this was the period Britain fell behind Europe and had substantive currency crisis and chronic regional unemployment in a time where this was unheard of anywhere else.
You can very easily flip this. It is central to Remainer thinking that Britain’s economic fortunes were transformed by joining Europe. But they weren’t. Growth 1945-73 was fine. It wasn’t fine 73-79. *Europe* wasn’t—and isn’t—the central problem or solution. That’s closer to home
Because the housing stock is the oldest in europe because we built the least private housing per capita in the post war era of any non comminist european country.
@RosieP4
@BBCr4today
There is also an entitlement culture. Too many people want a house or flat when they are young. Rather than rent a room in a house share, cheap digs, or caravan while saving for a deposit for renting house or buy house.
In most of the South East and especially London the price of a house is several multiples of the cost of the labour and capital necessary to build it. These factors are not the constraint on housing production in this country.
The obsession with GDP helps evade questions of distribution while promoting infinite expansion on a finite planet.
Only in the warped reality of our current growth obsessed economic model is expansion without end seen as a virtue. In biology, it's called a cancer.
This proposition is the first time I've seen a politician propose a housing target which is at the (lower end) of the range of what England actually needs to be building per year.
Its funny because after the election the poster is from the Labour party introduced the most restrictive planning system in British history and then lost the next election partly because they did not build enough housing.
It's often said that the UK only built enough homes when councils built at scale. So what's stopping them building today?
We've been taking a look at the latest survey on council housbuilding. Out this week from
@janicemorphet
and
@DrBenClifford
@UCL_BSP
Are you a young person in a commuter town?
Would you like the opprutunity to move to a nearby city for work, study or to experience a new place?
WRONG
Instead the entire economy should be moulded to shackle you to the place you were born. This is progressive for some reason.
And on homes 🏡
The government has abandoned their target to build 300,000 houses a year
Over one million families are waiting for a council house
While people moving to London and other major cities to find work is driving up rents & house prices
They've missed a trick. You could actually halve housing needs by making one-half of the population work between 9am and 9pm and the other half working overnight between 9pm and 9am. Then two people only need one room!
I've written a new piece for the
@IIPP_UCL
blog: Meeting housing needs within planetary boundaries requires opening the black box of housing "demand"
1/8
Going to the local democracy hub for a four hour meeting to beg to the local citizens assembly to not confiscate my broom cupboard in order to house 5 people.
@AFraserUrq
Alastair, a core argument is that "housing need" cannot be determined by politicians/specialists. The bedroom standard is one starting point for discussion. Ultimately this has to be decided by the public, e.g. in a citizens assembly (like climate assemblies).
Entirely agree. Government should make all infrastructure investments and R&D conditional on housebuilding. Makes no economic sense to prioritse projects where the majority of value created goes into inflating house prices and enriching landlords.
It was a poor economic decision by the UK government and the Treasury to spend over £6bn upgrading Thameslink to give St. Alban's world class infrastructure. The project ended with a benefit to cost ratio of 1.2, well below investments in the North's cities that were cancelled.
The idea house prices aren’t linked intrinsically to availability is…interesting as a theory.
@CentreforCities
has estimated we are short of 4.3m homes.
Corbyn supporters when journalists asked a potential prime minister questions instead of clapping for 30 minutes every time he said inequality was bad.
The sudden popularity of indentured servitude makes more sense when you realise that the modern conservative party sees anyone under fourty-five as a resource deposit to extract from on behalf their boomer voter base.
One reason libertarian communists historically lost to Leninists is that given the choice most people would rather delegate decisions to GOSPLAN than have to spend every evening going to the local democracy hub to vote on the bi-annual toothpaste production quota.
Vulture Capitalism, is all about how capitalism has undermined human freedom - and how grassroots experiments in democratic planning show the alternative.
Here’s how the book starts:
I would much rather emigrate than live in a country in which teenagers are conscripted into forced labour to do the worst jobs in British society that no-one else wants to do.
@AnthonyTeasdale
I’ve always supported a national service that does stuff around care work, climate change etc. Give young people an experience to meet others from totally different backgrounds, broaden horizons, learn skills (actual ones). Been attacked for saying it a few times 🤣
Every report like this has as in its calculation "the majority of emissions comes from the existing housing stock which is the oldest in Europe and generally not near transit ". You are not going to solve this problem without building (environmentally friendly) new homes.
How I’d solve housing:
- Cap on immigration - can’t exceed number of homes in UK
- Regional visas (the South East is overpopulated)
- Planning reform obvs
- Build up. A lot of us want to live in London not the Green Belt
- More Elizabeth Lines
- Rental reforms
I don't understand how two stairs would have prevented the Grenfell disaster given that the main problem was "the whole building was covered in flammable cladding and had no sprinkler system".
One of the many lessons from the Grenfell Inquiry was that its a mistake to use data from high probability, low consequence incidents to argue about what we will or won't need to prevent a low probability, high consequence catastrophe. Yet here we are again.
Given we define poverty as earning less than 60% of the median income why are people surprised that a demographic of people who choose not to be in work earn less than this?
Historian here. Common law was abolished by the 1974 Town and Country Planning Act which gave full power over everything in this country to a council of five homeowners in Surrey. However it will be restored if street votes passes.
Common law. The least understood part of the UK political and legal system, though we're terribly proud of it. And the most obstructive by far. Because Parliament can't just pass a Bill that forces building to happen.
(Similarly at the heart of "health and safety culture").
Calling for freedom of movement between a poor country with 1.3 billion people and a rich country that has been incapable of building > 200000 houses a year on non-derelict land since the 1930s would certainly be an interesting experiment on disglomeration effects.
Calling for Freedom of Movement between the UK and India really did bring some of the worst people out of the woodwork. The way many people referred to Indian people is disgustingly racist.
I'd love for the UK to open our borders to India!
👍🇬🇧🇮🇳
If you ever wondered why Britain and America have terrible infrastructure compared to Europe, my new Sunday Times article exploring our extortionate construction costs is out!
Unfortunately she forgets that, unlike her, some houses need to be built as most people are not able to claim £90,718 in "parliamentary" expenses to subsidise their parents mortgage.
It’s good Ministers are thinking again but saddened
@UKLabour
don’t back a law change to let
#Basingstoke
slow down house building to what we need in our community rather than building for needs of the region. Back my campaign here:
Rishi has got to come out on the front foot on the Concerns to hobble Fromage. How about giving an independent regulator the right to decide the numbers? Kick this political football offside, once and for all.
And you cant build retirement homes because councils will not give them planning permission for the obvious reason that they will have to pay for their social care. There is no way to short-cut actually fixing local government finances and planning.
We worry a lot about housing in the UK (with good reason). But when we look at solutions we mostly think about getting young people into them. We'd be way better to start with getting oldies out of them - and into lovely build to rent retiremt homes.
The CPRE was also a significant block on government policy in the 70s and 80s as well. In 1983, Thatcher tried to liberalise greenbelt restrictions, and the CPREs campaign successfully convinced over 100 of her backbench MPs to successfully oppose it.
Sorry, quick question, do you think the attempting lynching of disabled children on trumped-up blasphemy charges is acceptable? I can't actually tell whether you agree with it or not from this meaningless statement.
There is no economic justification for social housing construction. The constraint is the planning system, not the availability of capital. Even from a welfare perspective, giving people money is better than a lease that traps them in one place for the rest of their lives.
Restoring then expanding our shamefully low stock of social homes must be front & centre in any strategy to address the housing crisis
As
@pollyn1
says in this
@cjayanetti
piece "without enough social housing, every other area in the system bottlenecks"
Socialism "fails" because it has so far only governed countries already poorer than dirt. Some successfully, some meh, some terribly
I'd love to see socialism in a previously rich country, even just from a curiosity standpoint
Daily reminder that the entirety of the necessary tax take could be raised by ending the exemption for primary residences from capital gains tax at near-zero long term economic cost.
Housing Secretary Michael Gove knows planning is part of the housing crisis puzzle. Over the last year, MPs in his own party have expressed concern about his attempts to change the planning system, do the reforms he has announced go far enough?
@theipaper
Overall this is + 12k homes where there is actually demand for housing and +46k for areas where there isn't. This is not good and needs to be changed immediately to shift targets from the north and midlands to the South and London.
NEW: North East and North West England will see a 99% and 75% rise in housebuilding targets, respectively.
London is the only region to see its target drowngaded.
@DavidHenigUK
@lmrwanda
@tc1415
As the pieces author I would disagree. The intention was to say the central issue was the planning system gave the incentives and power to constrain housing supply. I then say planning reform is essential but politically difficult and suggested potentienal ways to bypass this.
"Economies of scale should be forcibly mandated for childcare above all else, except when the number is above four, then it should be illegal."
Absolutely marvelous levels of centrism here.
@s8mb
Because it's a lot cheaper for one person to look after several children than each parent to look after their own and not work. Plus the long term impact on (nearly always) women's career prospects which has a big effect on GDP.
"The victorians couldn't provide adequate infrastructure as the urban population increased by a factor of twenty, so we need to keep legislation introduced one hundred years later to prohibit housebuilding for completely unrelated reasons"
Ah yes, the Victorian era when famously people were housed well and in no way did deregulation lead to terrible slums that needed state intervention to address
Absolutely not. Despite having an overall benefit to society, it imposes a minor aesthetic cost on me. Therefore it should be built, but near other people such as you, not me.
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This will help:
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Such an incredible indictment of the ultimate failure of planning and housebuilding policy in the 1960s that we were still using prefabs more than 18 years after the war had ended.
Complaints about reading one book a week as "too much" for undergrads blows my mind.
I read 6-8 books, maybe a dozen journal articles, and wrote c.4000 words of essays every week, and I wasn't even trying for a First.
If you're doing that little, join a book club. Far cheaper.
Woah woah woah, i think that needs a full embodied carbon assessment. Insulating every house in Britain with XPS insulation would go someway to blowing our net zero budget.
Install a heat pump, an induction stove and solar panels in/on every house and insulate every house and do it for free. Don't make it a consumer choice. Just do it.
Here's the actual graph which I made. As you can see private sector house building is not in any way at 'pretty high levels' by historical standards.
Blue is private housebuilding, Red is local authority/Housing associations housebuilding.
I think this probably the best chart on English & Welsh house building.
Because it demonstrates that private sector house building is actually at pretty high levels. The difference with the post war years is that local authorities aren’t adding anywhere near as much stock.
The UK really lives on the stuff it built in the '60s and '70s.
So much of its civic infrastructure - schools, hospitals, water reservoirs, etc - comes from that era.
Went to Amsterdam and visited Het Schip, a social housing estate built in the Amsterdam School style which now has a built-in museum and does guided tours. Recommended!
A
@WestYorksPolice
officer is present when Cllr
@AkefAkbar
tells those gathered that the “highly autistic” 14-year-old boy has “rightly so been expelled” (for scuffing the Quran). There is no police action against (or expulsion of) pupils who issued death threats. Astonishing.
I mean its always been a political choice to slgenerously subsidise the unemployment of able bodied over 65s. Its not an iron law of demographics that this "has" to occur.
A lot of people are just in outright denial about what our ageing population means for public spending. We are going to have to spend a lot more just to stand still - look at these numbers and realise the state pension and NHS bills need to increase 2% a year just to stand still.