This Pieria article provides some new
evidence that the miserable shoe box size
houses currently being built and which most Brits are condemned to live in is
down to planning restrictions. As it says: “The aim here is to ensure that the
pressure on green belt is reduced.”
I calculated those restrictions added £40,000 to
the cost of the average house about a year ago. And a study by Policy Exchange got about the same £40,000 result.
However the article didn’t spell out
one of the main causes of this problem perhaps because it’s not politically
correct to do so. So let’s spell it out. It’s down to the combined effects of planning
restrictions and increased population which in turn is mainly due to immigration – though other factors like people
living longer are significant.
In Britain in 2013, as in Stalin’s
Russia or Nazi Germany, it’s best not to express “unacceptable” political views
if you value your career. So I don’t blame anyone who chooses not to mention
immigration when discussing shoe box size houses.
The article also takes a de rigueur
swipe at profit motivated builders. It says: “While house builders are no
innocents in all this…” Really? There was no evidence in the article that house
builders were guilty in any way whatever for our “little box” houses.
If it were profitable for house
builders to build thousands of mansions, each occupying an acre of land, why wouldn’t
they? They’re motivated by profit, aren’t they?
And that all rather knocks a hole in
those recent studies which look simply at the FISCAL effects of immigrants and
conclude that immigration makes us better off. Yes: if immigrants pay more tax
and/claim less benefits than natives (which it seems they do by a small margin),
that makes stuff provided by government (e.g. healthcare) cheaper for natives.
But of course that completely misses the standard of living hit suffered by
natives when they find they have to live in shoe boxes rather than decent sized
houses.
You could blame it all on planning
restrictions rather than immigration. But planning restrictions are there for a
reason, namely that green belts are of value: they are a form of wealth. That
is, build on them so as to accommodate immigrants, and the wealth of existing
UK citizens is diminished.
I personally have housing to the
North, South and East of me, with green fields to the West. If those fields to
the West were built on I’d consider myself far worse off. But that wouldn’t
show up in the official GDP figures.
There's also the pressure on agricultural land. More houses = less food. I don't think agricultural productivity has increased that much recently.
ReplyDeleteHouse builders are not guilt free. They clearly hoard land to hold up prices, and any review of the moribund planning system should make the building land much more liquid, to the point where it would be a hot potato for any commercial entity to hold.
Immigration is fine as long as it is controlled. Something along the lines of what they have in Australia, NZ, and Canada is perfectly reasonable.
Open door policies and neo-liberal ideas that essentially try and turn everybody into wandering gypsies moving from one insecure job to the next across an entire continent are no longer acceptable.
Which is why the EU as it stands is really no longer acceptable.
In Canada we have lots of room although immigrants tend to congregate in our larger cities. The UK just doesn't have the space for large scale immigration.
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