Brexit and the waning days of the United Kingdom

[Gups]

Apparently some of the schemes have already been built!

[Sheilbh]

Bolded part is: political suicide!

As sure as day follows night


I quite enjoyed Colville's thread on this:
https://twitter.com/rcolvile/status/1711649207742775673

In particular pointing out that every option Jenkins suggests as an alternative is something that he has previously attacked in another column, or just paragraphs earlier

[Tamas]

 

[crazy canuck]

If the UK is anything like the projected numbers for housing over the next 5 years, it will be impossible to come close to the demand without private builders who are well capitalized.

[Sheilbh]

Estimates by one think tank are that we need to be building about 450,000 new homes a year to end the housing crisis within 25 years. Labour are aiming for 300,000 a year which was the target the Tories had - but Sunak got rid of any target. I am a little concerned that the Guardian line on this is "Labour want to build 1.5 million homes - but how green will they be?" As I say I think Labour need to get ready for arguing with their own side if they really have ambitions on housing and development more generally.

I'm a little worried that Labour are a bit too focused on social housing - comparatively we have quite a lot of social housing and spend a lot on it (because of the housing crisis which means we need a lot and it's expensive). I worry it slightly underplays the need to build more and the role of private developers which a lot of Labour are simultaneously very close to and very suspicious of On the other hand Starmer did include a paean to home ownership and how important it was to his family growing up so it may just be a focus. Angela Rayner, who would be the responsible minister, left school pregnant and without any qualification and she lived in council housing which was really important to her. Starmer, as he keeps repeating, is the son of a toolmaker and a nurse who were able to buy a small, pebble-dashed semi - again very important to him because his mum had Still's disease, had to leave work young and required care.

Having said all that - a lot of the individual policies have been well received by people who look at this stuff. It's clearly a focus which is really good (Sunak didn't mention housing once in his conference speech) and the mood music is good (e.g. Starmer on the need to "bulldoze through our restrictive planning system").

Separately I think the protester probably made Starmer look better Made him a bit more authentic, gave an excuse to move to rolled up sleeveshirts which is a thing Sunak's doing a lot lately and guaranteed an interesting spot on the news - I think Starmer's used the "power or protest" line, but it's pretty good (I think he used it at another Labour conference when he was heckled before ):

[Josquius]

More social housing has my support.
Create plentiful cheap homes to rent then you knock the floor out from under the landlords thus freeing up lots of other homes for the general market.
In particular we should be focusing more on making modern euro style flats and getting a lot for our money and space.

I'm really curious where these new towns will be. All sounds very like stuff I've been shouting for right down to bulldozing through planning

[Tamas]

More social housing has my support.
Create plentiful cheap homes to rent then you knock the floor out from under the landlords thus freeing up lots of other homes for the general market.
In particular we should be focusing more on making modern euro style flats and getting a lot for our money and space.

Indeed.

[Sheilbh]

I agree in theory but I slightly wonder about it.

It strikes me as possibly a bit like the "we have enough houses, they're just in the wrong places". Which is maybe fine and in an ideal world we should make Hartlepool as desirable for people looking for somewhere to live and work as, say, Bristol. But I think at the minute it's mainly just preventing us from building where there is demand.

Along with Ireland and the Netherlands we have the lowest proportion of people living in flats in Europe. Some of that will have other reasons, but I think part of it is that a lot of people quite want to live in houses not flats. Also I don't trust developers/builders to build high quality and safe flats or the owners of blocks of flats to maintain them very well (especially communal areas). I think post-war blocks of flats - how they look, how they were built and how they were maintained - are a big driver of NIMBYism. I feel like there's a risk that focusing too much on flats re-ignites that type of opposition. They've got a place particularly in cities but I think focusing on them might fuck it all.

Broadly my view is building what people want where people want to live, that other people don't think are monstrosities is basically the way to moving to more building in general. Not what we think people should want where we wished they'd live - which I think has a risk of reminding people of that 1960s approach.

Edit: And Labour's press team quick to respond to the protester - great bit of PR:

[Josquius]

Building more 4 bedroom detached homes in London zone 1 isn't exactly practical however.

It's about building what we can where we can.

Yes people moan they don't want a flat in Luton. They want a lovely cottage in the country (1 hour our from central London max) with goats and all that. But they also expect to pay under 200k for this property.

People might not want to live in a flat. But when it's between a perfectly decent flat or homelessness those who would turn their nose up at a flat deserve to be homeless.

The UK having a low percentage of the population living in flats is a key national problem to be solved. So many of our problems have this as a core factor.

Needs noting quite how many otherwise perfectly serviceable family homes have been subdivided into HMOs and flats. This suggests there is a definite need there no matter what people's ideal world may be.

[Sheilbh]

I mean that doesn't sound unlike post-war town planners (often in Labour towns and cities) I just don't think people like being "solved" and in a democracy that means they turn against you and whatever policy you were pursuing.

There is a need and flats will be part of the solution particularly in cities. But around 80% of people live in houses (about the same as the Netherlands and Norway - Ireland is even more). Houses are probably going to be a bigger part of it especially if Labour are talking "new towns" (which I think is probably a bad idea) or building on empty land around commuter train/tube stations.

I think most people get that they're not going to get a 4 bedroom detached house in Belgravia, because that's not where the 80% are living. It's in terraces and semis in small towns and suburbs up and down the country. I don't think you're a fan, but lots of people want a Barratt House, for example. I'd like Britain to have a more urban culture and maybe some changes will nudge us in that direction but we're not there at this point. And just like political parties need to meet people where they are, so do governments (at least if they want to be re-elected) providing services or meeting needs.

Incidentally - apparently on the protester. I did not suspect a sortition enthusiast Also whenever I read this I can only assume people who want a legally binding randomly selected assembly of citizens have never spoken to any citizens outside their bubble:

Pro-PR group called People Demand Democracy says it organised glitter protest

A group called People Demand Democracy has claimed responsibility for a protest in which Keir Starmer was covered in glitter, PA Media reports. PA says;

The organisation, described as "friends" by Just Stop Oil, is calling for a "a fair, proportional voting system for Westminster elections", as well as a "legally binding national House of Citizens" to be selected by democratic lottery.

In a press release, the group said:

The people of the UK are more disillusioned by the state of our politics than at any time in living memory – look at the polls. After years of battling over Brexit, lockdown parties, abuse claims, crumbling public services and crashing living standards, people are sick to the back teeth of politicians. And we are furious there is no way to make our voices heard. This has got to change.

    We need a democratic alternative that gives the people of the UK a voice to deal with the major challenges of our time: rampant inequality, an escalating climate crisis, political corruption and on. But what do we have instead? A Labour party offering very little in terms of real change.

The group included a quote from the protester, whom it did not name in its press release, saying:

The Labour party has been captured, donors and lobbyists have more control over Keir Starmer than his members. A House of Citizens will force politicians to listen to people, it dismantles their relationships with the rich, it would create meaningful change in our economy and fix inequality. It would address the climate and ecological emergency and transform our country.

It would listen to scientists and communities and unearth consensus, not profit off conflict and division.

In the nicest possible way, and I think there may be a role for citizens' assemblies, a House of Citizens might deliver the politics the protester would like. But I think it is more likely to support forced labour for Just Stop Oil protesters and citizenship for dogs.

Edit: By the by if people supporting PR start blocking traffic, I do not think the public will respond well.

Just looked at their website - I can't believe this is for electoral reform

People Demand Democracy has written letters to the leaders of the two leading political parties - Labour and the Conservatives - with an ultimatum: implement our demands by 30th September 2023 or we will take proportionate action to get our message across.

[Tamas]

This massive fire on top of the luton Airport Car Park 2 building is going to be a massive pain. It was already difficult to get empty spots without one of two building going out of commission who knows how long.

[Josquius]

I mean that doesn't sound unlike post-war town planners (often in Labour towns and cities) I just don't think people like being "solved" and in a democracy that means they turn against you and whatever policy you were pursuing.

There is a need and flats will be part of the solution particularly in cities. But around 80% of people live in houses (about the same as the Netherlands and Norway - Ireland is even more). Houses are probably going to be a bigger part of it especially if Labour are talking "new towns" (which I think is probably a bad idea) or building on empty land around commuter train/tube stations.

I think most people get that they're not going to get a 4 bedroom detached house in Belgravia, because that's not where the 80% are living. It's in terraces and semis in small towns and suburbs up and down the country. I don't think you're a fan, but lots of people want a Barratt House, for example. I'd like Britain to have a more urban culture and maybe some changes will nudge us in that direction but we're not there at this point. And just like political parties need to meet people where they are, so do governments (at least if they want to be re-elected) providing services or meeting needs.

Sounding like post-war Labour sounds good to me. A similar effort is needed in building and getting the country in order.

I'm not suggesting we ban houses. People want to live in houses. I live in a house.
I'm just calling for prioritising the bottom level rather than what is the most profitable. Way too many developments these days of nought but rather expensive 'detached' (not enough room to squeeze between them) homes.
Under the current situation many millions are forced to live in a house, where rather than a room in a HMO, having their own private flat would be a better situation. A purpose built flat. Not a bedsit that was formerly the second bedroom in an otherwise perfectly serviceable Edwardian terrace.

My main priority for tackling the housing crisis is to tackle it on the lowest end. Get young people housed for an affordable price as priority number one and a lot of work will be done towards getting everyone else housed too. 20 somethings are less picky about having a garden and more likely to want to live in a central place. This then has "trickle up" effects of a sell off of HMOs to house buyers.

Ideally new building should contain a mix of different buildings. Bungalows I'd probably "Ban" (not literally...but certainly make it very awkward to build them) and ensure houses that are built have a fully usable third story (in very recent years I notice this is common I notice in new builds, which is good), but try to ensure closer to a 50-50 mix at least for houses and flats. This still means more land going to houses, but it ensures that developments will contain affordable housing.

In the area immediately around transit hubs, even in small towns, I'd go further than this and make new house building very awkward indeed. Going full post-war and knocking down terraces for tower blocks we know to be an error, but certainly ensuring new housing development is out of keeping with the character is something to be done.

As I keep saying the UK has a huge density problem. This idea of concreting over the entire countryside is a key source of opposition to house building- in being more efficient with building we counter this and make places that are more liveable and more future-proof

[Sheilbh]

Interesting Economist take on Labour's conference - all very much in line with what I've been banging on about in this thread. So we may be in for a terrifying experiment in Josquius and Sheilbh Thought government

Britain's Labour Party embraces supply-side social democracy
Sir Keir Starmer's agenda for government starts with planning reform
Britain's main opposition Labour Party leader Keir Starmer in silhouette.
Oct 11th 2023 | Liverpool

At its gathering in Manchester this month, the Conservative Party put on a repertory-theatre production of Margaret Thatcher's most popular works. Liz Truss called for corporation-tax cuts. James Cleverly, the foreign secretary, announced he would visit the Falkland Islands.

This week a more subtle and intriguing tribute act to Thatcher was on show at the Labour Party's conference in Liverpool. It was not just that Rachel Reeves, the shadow chancellor who hankers to be Britain's first female finance minister, conceded a debt to its first woman prime minister. It was because Labour promises a supply-side revolution to ignite an ailing economy. Red tape will be cut; utilities shaken up; growth made the first priority.

Thatcherite, then—up to a point. Labour has embraced an idea in vogue among centre-left parties in the West. This idea goes by various names: "modern supply-side economics", "productivism" or, in Ms Reeves's coinage, "securonomics". It is an effort to rehabilitate the state as a driver of growth, says George Dibb of the Institute for Public Policy Research, a think-tank.

This version of supply-side economics fuses tools and rhetoric conventionally associated with the free-market right—deregulation and creative destruction—with the left's emphasis on industrial subsidies, labour rights and public services. It stresses an abundance of infrastructure, energy and housing, as well as stable government to drive investment. Old priorities, such as state ownership of industries and redistribution, are a secondary concern. "Every new era of growth must start with an expansion of the country's productive capabilities. That is an iron law," said Sir Keir Starmer, the party's leader.

It is also a political necessity. At the next election, due before the end of January 2025, the party will offer a few small handouts paid for by closing tax loopholes worth several billions of pounds. But if Labour wins, its electorate, activists and trade-union backers will want more—a rapid uptick in real incomes and a flood of cash into hospitals and schools. Since Ms Reeves is reluctant to raise the tax burden beyond its post-war high of 37% of national income, and unwilling to borrow for day-to-day spending, a leap in growth is the only way to spend more on public services without raising taxes.

Labour is targeting the highest GDP growth in the G7. It also aims to lift persistently weak business investment by 1% of GDP. That will not be easy. The International Monetary Fund currently predicts that growth in GDP per person will be tepid for the next five years; see chart. To make a real difference, says one shadow cabinet minister, Labour must win a landslide victory, hold power for a decade and move faster and harder than Sir Tony Blair in 1997.

The first item on the agenda is Britain's sclerotic planning system. New rule books for the building of national infrastructure—railways, power plants and roads—will be drawn up. Applications for high-value private-sector projects such as battery factories and laboratories will get fast-track treatment. The party thinks it can streamline applications and cut down on litigation by devising off-the-peg processes for planning consultations, environmental mitigations and forms of compensation for locals affected by development. The state will decide, not haggle.

The party claims it can fully decarbonise Britain's energy supply by 2030. Doing so will require a vast and rapid expansion of the ageing electricity grid. Around £200bn of green energy projects are in limbo, says Labour, with some of them offered grid connections in 15 years' time. Part of the problem is a lack of competition in construction. Ms Reeves plans to open the market to tendering, including by a new state-owned builder, and to standardise procurement of cabling and components.

Its ambitions in housing are a bit more modest. It promises to hit the existing government target of 300,000 new houses per year, using existing laws to encourage councils to build more and re-designating low-quality land for development. That is a sensible short-term fix, says Anthony Breach of the Centre for Cities, a think-tank, but to turn housing from a drag into a driver of growth will require legislation and deeper reform.

Labour's appetite for deregulation has grown as the party's plans for subsidies to stimulate clean-energy manufacturing have been pared back. In 2021 Ms Reeves earmarked £28bn a year in green subsidies. That remains official policy, but the target for reaching that level of spending has been postponed to 2027; all mention of the sum was struck from platform speeches in Liverpool. Instead Labour now emphasises a smaller "national wealth fund" of £8bn, earmarked for ports and factories, and designed to unlock private capital.

The supply-side agenda provides a new intellectual vehicle for some old Labour priorities. Better child care and health care are recast as supply-side interventions to increase workforce participation (though analysts disagree on how far NHS waiting lists contribute to economic inactivity). On labour markets Ms Reeves argues that there is a "mountain of economic evidence" that Labour's policies of banning zero-hours contracts and enhancing sick pay will increase productivity. Perhaps, but a party born of the trade-union movement would want to do it either way.

Thatcher waited years before her reforms turned into tax cuts. Sir Keir also warned of a long slog to transform Britain, but he skirted a harder truth—that his supply-side agenda will not quickly raise wages or transform public services. Even if a stable government and deregulation unleash a wave of investment, an uptick in growth will take years to materialise. However much Labour would like to believe in the magic of the Reform Fairy, the party will face hard choices in the meantime over whether Britons are willing to pay more tax in return for better services.

As politics, however, supply-side social democracy may be a triumph. At a conference breakfast, Jonathan Reynolds, the shadow business secretary, mused that the global centre-left appeared more cohesive than the right, which has turned to culture to mask deep economic splits. Right on cue the head of the Centre for Policy Studies, Thatcher's favourite think-tank, said it was a disgrace that the Tories had let Labour steal their clothes. The Adam Smith Institute, another free-market disciple, reckoned Sir Keir's speech "serious, innovation-focused, positive". Where there is discord, may he bring harmony.

I think Reynolds point is interesting and true. I really really like Starmer and Reeves' framing of issues right now as being an age of insecurity. At the big picture level there's supply chain shocks, geopolitical competition and war, "de-risking", at the micro level there are more insecure forms of work (the whole gig economy), stress on public services etc. And the big challenge for government is security - particularly when you also think about net zero and its potential for energy security. I think in Britain's case this is reinforced by Brexit because post-Brexit you have two options: deregulate more and become a more open, more globalised Singapore on Thames, or you do more state aid, less level playing fields, maybe a little bit of light protectionism.

Particularly with the additional context of net zero which is a cross-party commitment. Practically as Colville says that means electrifying everything currently running on fossil fuels in our economy, de-carbonising our electricity and de-centralising the National Grid away from power plants it turns on and off to myriad of sources. Any one of those is a big project - and we're doing all of them at once, and at pace.

I can't really see a route for a party like the Tories with traditional Tory economic policy in that context. I think that is part of the challenge and I think it is a challenge for the right across the developed world. I don't see a route for dealing with the insecurity, far less net zero that doesn't ultimately involve pretty heavy state intervention: industrial policy, some fairly big interventions in the market and a little bit of protectionism towards China - none of which are things that the free market right are particularly comfortable or able to do even if it's where both votes and policy leads at this point. It's why I think Johnson had the right idea for the Tories with levelling up which he always tied to net zero and green jobs. But he couldn't deliver (and never could have delivered), and since then they've given up on that idea because Tory MPs don't like the policies it requries (but kept the inability to deliver).

Of course the big risk - particularly in Britain - is do we have the state capacity to actually do any of this. Or has the ability of the state to do things been so eroded over the last 40 years. Again it's why I've always liked the New Deal language (though it doesn't resonate here where that was a Blairite training scheme for the unemployed ) or the Second World War because I think it is that sort of marshalling of forces and transformation of the state that's required for net zero and I don't know if we'll get there. Still haven't read it but it makes me think of the thesis of that new book on the emergence of the twentieth century state (in totalitarian and democratic states) as a project state.

[crazy canuck]

We have already gone through our version of let's just build a whole bunch of social housing. Social housing was built and over the last several years a large number of homeless people, or people at risk of living on the street have been provided with more secure housing. But that has not made a dent in the increase in prices. Everyone here is now coming to the realization that what needs to be built is not social housing, but Housing that middle and upper middle-class families can move into. Whether that be through purpose built rental or multi family dwellings that can be purchased.

Our situation sounds more dire than yours (as a percentage of population). It is estimated that we need 3.5 million additional housing units by 2030. Additional meeting in addition to those that were already planned to be built. It's a huge task and I'm not sure government is taking the necessary steps to come even close to tackling that number.

[Jacob]

I think there's more than one usage of the term "social housing" in play there.

Providing single room occupancies and small apartments to a few hundred or maybe low thousand homeless and social vulnerable individuals such as drug addicts is definitely social housing. No doubt about it.

And it doesn't appear to have been a smashing success in combatting homelessness nor drug abuse (though I notice reporting on those issues have dropped significantly almost imediately after we got our new right wing mayor), that is very true. Likely you are correct that we also need hundreds of thousands if not millions of housing units that suits various parts of the middle class (North American definition).

If you look at housing in Singapore (77% of the population live in social housing) and Copenhagen (43% of housing is market rentals / privately owned, 20% is social housing, and 30% is private co-ops*)

*which I'd argue counts as social housing by most North American standards.

I agree with you that we need massive number of housing units of various sorts for  our growing population. Personally, I believe intelligent use of public funding and models other than standard home ownership can help us get there.