Saw a Newcastle council person deal very well with questions about this from some BBC News dickhead at lunch time. The dickhead was giving it âdo you think local authorities arenât doing enough to build new housesâ and our hero was straight back in with âwe canât do it without Treasury approval to borrow the money weâd need. This planning permission stuff is a red herring.â
10% of homes to be affordable is too low, and below what a lot of major sites are building anyway, or at least, what developers are paying councils to build elsewhere. âAffordableâ needs to be more strictly defined and more generous.
Too woolly. This should be the crucial part of these measures and the only way to combat it is to tighten legislation and fund planning departments properly so that they can have the expertise necessary to challenge developersâ viability assessments.
This is what Labour tried to do back in the 00s, but Tory councils refused to play ball and the coalition government basically scrapped the idea. Itâs a good measure and will see a battle between the national government, conservative councils in the shires and NIMBYs. Good. Itâs needed.
They kind of already are, but not to the extent that they should be. I think this could go two ways: either councils refuse to allow any house building because they donât have school spaces, or the government are proposing a much more european-style pro-active planning framework allocating land for development. I think they may go for the latter in selected areas or development zones.
This already happens after three years automatically, so I donât see this making much of a difference.
I donât know about this one. Younger trees and managed woodland can be more valuable than aged trees and ancient woodland in many circumstances.
Until the national government allows local government to borrow to build new council homes that are then protected from right-to-buy, I canât see much progress being made on house-building, and detaching home ownership from financial speculation and security will take many more changes on a structural level, none of which this government seem willing to considerâŚ
In planning terms, yes, for rented accommodation, although some local authorities (especially in London) are tightening up the definition and pushing down the rental threshold
Thought so. Because like fuck is that affordable in an increasing number of areas.
tbf I do actually get the sense Theresa May is reasonably sincere about trying to do something about housing. Can imagine anything she says about housebuilding however is going to go down like a plate of sick in her own constituency.
I think sheâs aware that the situation is untenable in terms of future Conservative electoral success and she may even be aware that itâs untenable in terms of the UKâs long-term economic success.
Iâve yet to see many measures proposed in the past 8 years that would alleviate the current situation, however, and many that actively accelerate it.
If sheâs genuine about the desire to tackle it, sheâll have to take on the local Tory councils in the shires and possibly lose those councils in elections to do so.
I mean is she even trying? She hasnât even mentioned increasing the amount of social housing or Housing Partnership housing. I mean I guess that would be entirely antithetical to being a Tory but affordable housing does practically nothing for the majority of people looking to buy houses.
FWIW, I think sheâs one of the Tories who genuinely believes much of the stuff they say about social mobility, opportunity and so on, but she hasnât got the foggiest about how to actually do it. The fact that she sees 10% âaffordableâ housing and âconsideringâ revoking planning permission after 2 years as bold steps really says everything about her approach to this stuff.
I donât always agree with John Elledge on housing (itâs not just a case of âbuild more bloody houses,â for example), but this is a decent summary of the speech:
imo âaffordable housingâ should mean that a small room in a shared house can be rented for less than 30% of full time work on minimum wage
i appreciate that many people - including on here - will think that definition is too low or that itâs unfair to base affordability on the income of single people who work full time is unfair but itâs the best i can do right now
At the risk of the kind of glibness we were talking about in the âhow we debateâ thread.
Talking to voters during last yearâs election campaign
I thought Mayâs thing during that campaign was talking at Tory activists rather than voters? That whole part of the speech is actually written reasonably well, but it reads really poorly considering reality.