Protection of the Green Belt
…next time you are stuck in one of those inching lava flows of red tail- lights…
Kate Barker..has come up with a proposal..to release some Green Belt land for development, starting with the grottier bits, then the cost of housing would go down…
Do we really need these new buildings all over the Green Belt in the South-east? ..Is that really the objective of government – to maximise revenue, and wreck rural England?
The green way to save our Green Belt
You know that feeling you get when you are in a traffic jam, and you have been stuck there for about two hours, and you know that your children are once again going to bed without their bed-time story; and there is a sudden Incredible Hulk-style transformation in your metabolism, and your eyes roll, and you gibber and you chew your tie and rend your shirt and have fantasies of simply pulling over on to the hard shoulder and abandoning the vehicle and making a new life as a stress therapist.
Have you ever had that? I was once driving an old Peugeot, and after I realised that I had been stationed next to the same pointless traffic cone for about 20 minutes I started rocking in my seat and shaking the steering wheel until it suddenly bent like a pretzel, which was faintly embarrassing since it was someone else’s car. And I think of myself as a man of fairly equable temper.
Next time you are stuck in one of those inching lava flows of red tail-lights, think of what it must be like for people without the natural stoicism and self-discipline of Telegraph readers: think of the wails, the blubbering, the bust blood vessels. Think what is happening to our national quality of life. In the words of that despairing piece of graffiti by the side of the M40, “Why do we do this every day?” The answer is that we have no choice. We know that the traffic is getting worse every year; we know that the number of cars on the roads has doubled in the past 20 years. But what else can we do? The cost of a 40-mile round trip by rail seems to be more than a week’s holiday in Barbados.
We have to make these appalling and life-shortening journeys because we simply can’t afford to live any nearer our work. And why can’t we afford to live nearer our work? Well, the economist Kate Barker has looked at the map, and she has seen what she thinks is the problem.
Around every big urban development in this country there is this thing called the Green Belt. Beyond the Green Belt are smaller towns inhabited by commuters, and every morning these poor saps get in their cars and queue to pass through these sacred green reservations to their jobs in the cities, and every evening they return through the narrow tarmac defiles, sweating and swearing and degrading the atmosphere with their oaths and their carbon emissions.
So Kate has looked at the map, and she has come up with the obvious answer. If only we could release some of this land for development, starting with the grottier bits, then the cost of housing would go down! And people would have shorter journeys to work! And we would produce less CO2!
So let’s go really green, says Kate, and destroy the Green Belt. Well, I don’t need to rehearse all the objections, but we all know that if Barker’s suggestions were taken to their logical conclusion they would amount to the biggest change to the British landscape since the enclosures.
If she gets her way, future generations will look down on the South-east – as they flee, for the last time, from Gatwick – and see a kind of Mexico City. In days to come the name Barker will rank in the architectural lexicon with terms like Georgian or Victorian. “An attractive Barker terrace”, the estate agents will say; or “a chance to buy in the heart of this traditional ribbon-development Barker village”; and Berkshire might as well be renamed Barkshire.
The trouble with her proposal to develop the less idyllic pieces of the Green Belt is that one man’s pylon-infested dump is another man’s rural dream; and no sooner do the Barker homes march on to the pylon-infested dump than the developers start looking greedily at the really green spaces nearby, and soon big yellow machines are slicing up the fields and linking one village with the next.
Of course she is right that we need more housing. Every MP knows the misery of those who are stuck in inadequate council accommodation. But do we really need these new buildings all over the Green Belt in the South-east? Have we exhausted the potential of brown-field sites?
Above all, the whole business is so deeply anti-democratic. What is the point of having locally elected politicians, determined to do the best for their voters, if their opinions can be simply crushed?
These are precisely the questions that people care about with the deepest feeling, because it is a very ancient human instinct to want to see fields and trees and sky, and we don’t want to wake up and find we are in a Barker-devised suburbia imposed either by the quangocrats in the regional authorities or by this sinister new Independent Planning Office.
I’d still like to know why the Government is determined to knock down houses in the North, and force houses on the South, and I still suspect that it is because they are only interested in money. The South-east is the great tax generator, and the more it looks like Hong Kong the more money flows into the Treasury. Is that really what life is about? Is that really the objective of government – to maximise revenue, and wreck rural England?
I’d like someone to explain why it is so unthinkable for those who can’t afford housing in the South to look for somewhere in the North; and if you object that the jobs are all in the South, and that we would simply be worsening the dreadful transport problem with which we began, then I have a partial solution. If it is true that we have people stuck in traffic because they can’t afford to move, and if the Government really wants to bring down the cost of housing, then there is another option.
If Gordon Brown wasn’t charging such extortionate sums for each property transaction, houses would be cheaper and people would find it easier to live near their work. It’s green, it’s clean, and it might even be fiscally neutral, since the number of transactions would go up.
Come on, Gordon. Why not cut stamp duty, making housing cheaper in the South-east, and easing our motorway madness?
112 Comments
Steven_L said:
Interesting newmania, but will David Cameron build on the Green Belt? Seriously, come the election he’ll have to have some sort of policy regarding housing
If Cameron he doesn’t halt the run away development of the South East, Steven_L, he’ll need a massive tax fund to totally rebuild the entire infrastructure here – not just roads, schools, NHS, jobs, water and sewage systems, everything.
Take the Boscastle flood in waiting development above my community here, which is already putting up the red flag of surface water flooding. The vast amount of waste water, sewage and water run off from 13000 additional new houses (on top of the 4000 already built) on the high ground above here has nowhere to go, so it’s being filtered into experimental reed beds and a reservoir which filters down here and on to the neighbouring town. That reservoir is designed to flood down here too as development increases.We’re told to expect stand pipes in our streets when the treated water runs out, I envisage us standing up to our thighs in flood water to collect it.
The heads of the water companies tell us that the South East’s drainage system, sewers and their treatment plants are all operating at full capacity they cannot take any more. Our streams are operating at dangerously high levels now too and cannot cope with the additional run off from all these thousands of extra houses without bursting their banks and flooding us on a far more widespread basis than the surface water floods we have now. I wish I could send you one of the films or a pictures I have of this flooding.
So, you’ve built all along the M11 corridor, Steven_L and Cameron, now where does the money come from for a new sewage system and more treatment works and all the other infrastructual renewal?
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Forgot to mention the ecological distaster in waiting here too.
In a field on the high ground above me, the main sewer from the development has been flooding and periodically discharging directly into our stream for 18 months. The water company aren’t able to fix it – because it’s not blocked, there’s simply too much effluence and water up there.
That stream feeds into the river a mile or two away. How many other sewers are similarly discharging into streams? It’s going to cost billions to rebuild the sewage and waste water system for us and the neighbouring town – which is also being flooded by this development. And what do you know, no one has the money for it, so the council are proposing rubber band solutions.
Where will you find the money for this essential infrastructure, Steven_L?
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Like you, I am appalled by the idea of using up Green Belt land for housing.
How about this for an idea: in Norway there are generous tax breaks for householders who convert a part of their house into a self contained flat.
We have an aging population, a good many of whom own family houses which are now too big for their needs. People are reluctant to uproot and move -and to pay Stamp duty for the privilege. Why not encourage them to stay put but convert part of their house into a small flat for sale or rent? In our part of Hampshire the stock of smaller houses has been depleted by families who bought a small cottage and built on rather than move as families expanded.
Encouragement to convert should increase the supply of modest accommodation on the market and provide useful extra cash for the house-owner at a time when he is likely to need it.
And the incentive? How about abolishing IHT on the value of the whole house if a self-contained flat has been carved out of it – and occupied – for, say, a minimum of 5 years? That should focus a few minds!
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Sybil Venning said:
in Norway there are generous tax breaks for householders who convert a part of their house into a self contained flat. We have an aging population…Why not encourage them to stay put but convert part of their house into a small flat for sale or rent?
Seems a good idea to me, Sybil. A number of my neighbours with large gardens have used part of their plot to build a smaller house or bungalow which they move into, selling the larger house for retirement income, so raising income in this way seems to be popular.
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‘Where will you find the money for this essential infrastructure, Steven_L?’ (Auntie Flo’)
For a start the building work creates jobs and taxation. Re-zoning agricultural land to residential land suddenly increases it’s worth and creates wealth. Value is added by building the property and the added value is taxed. People move into the new homes and start to pay water rates.
Government can legislate to make the water companies fix infrstructure problems. It might mean everyone paying a bit more in water rates, but the job of upgrading the infastructure creates more jobs and the cycle continues.
It’s called progress.
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Your colleague IDS has the answer. It’s about families: every divorce creates two households where one existed. A divorce rate of 40% and falling household size (down from an average of 3 people per house to about 2.3 now) are closely linked, and the fewer people live in each house, the more houses we need.
On top of the effect on adults and childrens health, mental health, educational performance, proneness to invovlement in crime etc., loss of bits of Green Belt is another consequence of family breakdown. For 40 years or so we have run an experiment in family structure, and the experiment has failed. Even worse, the communities which are now being built have less and less community provision, and Labours proposed changes to the planning laws, skewed towards commercial interests, will only make this worse. This in turn makes families and couples more isolated and disconnected from neighbours and community, and puts more pressure on adult relationships.
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DAVID KEEN- If you look at my post above I linked housing policy to family breakdown and then onto all manner of social evils . Hardly fresh thinking I know but I must admit the lack of housing space itself is not somthing I thought of as connected .
The first and obvious thing to do is to restore the married couples transferable allowance.
Thanks for your contribution which has tied a few things together
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I’d just like you all to notice how restrained and professional I’m being right now.
Thank you.
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Idlex – see my email wrapped in the bloglink under my name in the previous comment, could you email me and I’ll try to help with your forum problem?
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David Keen: You make some good points. Re divorce increasing housing demand, up to a point that’is true, however doesn’t research show that most people from fragmented relationships go into other relationships and housesharing situations.
I remember attending a speech by a spatial planner, near the start of Blair’s reign, who claimed that by 2020 UK would need 30% more houses to accomodate divorced and single elderly people living alone. Rubbish, I told him! These factors account for just 9% of the forecast increase, what factor accounts for the other 20%? And of course it’s migration to the UK – which also increases the number of single households too.
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Auntie Flo – saves my sanity again.
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Auntie Flo’: a lot of people from fragmented relationships don’t go into new ones – just look at the census information on single parent households, which have shot up in the last generation.
Also, we’re going to need all that net migration to keep the economy going as the population ages. The birthrate among white britons is something like 1.7, so the white population is ageing and on a long term downward trend.
The other worrying thing about that birthrate is who is doing the birthing – there is a local man here in Somerset with something like 10 kids in the same council house, and 3 women all expecting children by him, who’s put in to be moved to a bigger property. Mind you, if we were all prepared to put up with a houshold that size, then problem solved!
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David – Good points
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David Keen said: we’re going to need all that net migration to keep the economy going as the population ages.
I’m a recruitment consultant and part of my recruitment association’s research panel. My experience from my business and the research findings – and it is supported by the national figures – is that unemployment is on the increase because there are too many people competing for too few jobs, far too may of which are moving overseas. Some skills are still in short supply, but many are not. In the town where my business is based, there have been around 800 redundancies that I’m aware of in recent months. Every day I’m registering new candidates newly arrived from from overseas and candidates from UK for whom there isn’t any work.
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And remember, we’re currently living in the Mickey Mouse Kingdom of Blairdom, where many 1000s of non jobs are created to cover up the real unemployment figures. Would all of these make work jobs be sustained by another government? Even Brown’s finding that we can’t afford this – though he scales down in the wrong areas such as NHS frontline staff.
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Yes and also inflation is rising .Phillips curve anyone ? not ideal. David`s point on the population and who is actually “breeding ” is quite right . In London when you add the white flight to immigration and differentail replacenment the picture is changing utterly
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Auntie Flo – good points well made.
David Keen & Newmania – we can’t stop the poor people breeding so perhaps importing in more poor people is not a good idea? I’m for immigration control.
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JAQ- “Poor” people ? Well I know what you mean although I usually have a lot less than nothing myself.
People on benfits have 8 children because for each child they get more .Working people are not replacing themselves because house prices as compared to wages are beyond a single salary usually.
Anti family and anti working family benefits and taxation policy is the heart of everything wrong with this country. IMHO
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Newmania – I think your opinion is spot on and am disappointed that the only new thing Cameron can come up with on the issue of families is government funded marriage guidance? That’s like saying ‘we’re not going to change anything we’ll just make you feel better about the mess’. I’m interested in the policies that will arise from the expensive study that stated the obvious. I suppose again it’s wait and see.
Which reminds me of the fabulous Jesse Norman : How many Conservatives does it take to change a lightbulb? It’s far too early to tell.
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idlex – hope all sorted and you will be commenting very soon.
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Jaq: I’m not a regular contributor here, but I can’t help smiling that on a thread about the Green Belt we’ve ended up talking about immigration control. And on a Tory website too, who’d have thought it?
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That David is because the green belt is dull and why is Boris being dull. Here was my theory ..
Your job is to sell opinions and yet as a C`mer roon faction member you quite simply are not allowed to have any .
…and I find it wholly creditable that Conservatives can be relied on to defend working class communities from the cheap Labour requirements of big business. having said that …..I know what you mean , I smirked myself
(and this is soon to become a no smirking public area)
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David Keen – your comments are much appreciated and Boris believes wholeheartedly in freedom and democracy for all so don’t hold back, tell us what you think.
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even Hong Kong is green an undeveloped on the south side of the island…
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If all else fails, there’s a brownfield ocean site opening up at the North Pole by 2040 (todays Times). We’ve started back with prison ships, so a floating community is just a logical extension of this. Bit difficult to mark your parking place though..
Newmania: if your greenbelt is dull, you’re probably living somewhere like the Midlands (flat), or Wiltshire (farmed into a monochrome green blanket), you should probably move to somewhere near the Pennines, or Cornwall.
What’s the problem with dullness anyway? Al Gore is dull, but right, on the environment, and we will sink burbling into the sea in a couple of generations unless we stop confusing real life with the X factor, insisting that our politics be entertaining. Do we have what it takes to do the hard slog of sorting out the environment, families, Iraq, the developing world, etc., or will we get bored part way through and give up? In the words of the prophet Morrissey “Tried living in the real world instead of a sham/but before I began/I was bored before I even began”. There’s nothing wrong with a decent soundbite, but if a politician isn’t prepared to work hard on analysing the issues and getting the answers right, then they’re better off in showbiz, and we’re better off without them.
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David Keen – the midlands isn’t flat – Clent Hills, Dudley, Wyre forest, and could you argue the start of the peaks are in the midlands? Fabulous gritstone in Derbyshire.
Good point about politics being about the mundane. And isn’t ‘may you live in interesting times’ a curse?
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, but if a politician isn’t prepared to work hard on analysing the issues and getting the answers right, then they’re better off in showbiz
I entirely agree and I would enjoy dull worthy analysis of the major policy planks than peripheral discussion of the symptoms. Boris has signed up the Cameroonian Faustian pact and cannot delve deeply into any subject .
The need to develop the Green belt is a symptom of housing policy which is related to tax and benefit policy in ways I described above , or perhaps not , but Boris will not be going there
He may not specifically say anything about
Tax
Immigration
Benefits
NHS reform
Most of all
The EU
Irwin Seltzer pulls the Broon taxation agenda to pieces to day in the DT . This the sort of thing Boris used to do and especially he used to do it to the EU. It’s a shame . Interesting times are not a curse if you are interested in the right things
BTW I live in London , I have seen the midlands on my way to the lake District but felt no need to stop.
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Kate Barker and her husband have objected to a barn conversion near their own, select, converted barn in the lovely, development free, country town of Thaxted where they live.
Nimby Kate is effectively saying build all over the Green Belt and South East – just not in her part of it.
Typical snulabbery, typical nulab hypocrisy and greed, grab everyone else’s countryside, pensions and wages while clinging so tightly to your own elitist priviledge.
In my view, Kate Barker has lost any semblance of objectivity or even handedness in the conduct of her Treasury job with this snout in the trough hypocrisy and greed. She should be sacked.
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Warning: Rant mode on.
Paul Newman said:
“BTW I live in London , I have seen the midlands on my way to the lake District but felt no need to stop.”
I could put up with Newman’s patronising comments and him being an insufferable snob if he was a person of any breeding. It is however apparent from the tedious streams of drivel that he presents that he is in fact a thinly-disguised and barely-literate oik. Bigoted London dwellers such as he should confine their utterances to their fellow dwellers in the ex-slum areas of the Great Wen where they seem to take such great pleasure in residing.
Yes, I’ve been to Islington. It seems to be Brixton with better diction. I don’t want to return.
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Chris , when I think of you fulminating with your distinctive nasal whine I immediately imagine the wonderful urban theatre it would make .Brixton is a marvellous place to live but I know why to you it is the obvious example of social ignominy. My cunning disguise is hiding the inner oik a little better than yours is it not?
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So… back to the protection of the greenbelt and housing issues. Someone suggested that people should only be allowed to own one property and believed that would help the housing situation. I think that measure would be along the lines of a totalitarian state and believe Blair has taken us far enough down that road already.
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Paul:
I will do my best not to make any direct reposts to your snide comments any more.
If you’re happy living in your urban jungle ghetto, then so be it.
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I agree with Jaq that state-directed restrictions upon the amount or type of property that one may own is unacceptably totalitarian.
There is the problem in much of the country though in that some outsider can come in (having sold an ex-slum property in Islington for example), with vast amounts of money in their possession and proceed to buy up a property for what is (to them) peanuts. They may only use the property for a few weeks a year, but it has been removed from the pool of property available to the impecunious locals. How can this be fairly dealt with?
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Riposte , do you mean Chris?
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I did indeed!
Mea culpa.
That’ll teach me not to emulate your flow-of-conciousness typing! (not without reading what I have written anyway)
I was too keen on firing it off in my impetuous anger.
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Newmania and Morriss, you’re a pair of herberts. Please cut it out or we’ll put you both on the nsughty step. xxxx
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What a plonker, I meant naughty step, not nsghty step. Sorry.
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He started it ……..
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Quiet!
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I am with Barker on this. The preservation of village greens & spreading chestnut trees, when it costs misery for people looking for homes, is wrong. It is also ineffective because what is actually being preserved are vast fields designed for modern machines not ploughmen, which already exist only on subsidy. Cutting stamp duty will be entirely ineffective because what is causing the rise in house prices is not the price of supplying housing but the restictions on supply.
This is straight supply & demand economics. We have an increasing population & more importantly smaller familiy units so housing demand is going up fast. On the other hand we are building under 1% of housing stock which, unless houses last an average of well over 100 years means the supply is static or worse.
That alone is why houses now cost 20 times that of a car when a century ago they were the same. There is no technical reason why we couldn’t produce houses off site like cars – and probably make them more leakproof & simonized too.
An alternative to not building or building in the suburbs would be building multi-storey, for which, in practice we would never run out of land. The “heritage” industry would be down on that too.
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Jaq said:
Someone suggested that people should only be allowed to own one property and believed that would help the housing situation. I think that measure would be along the lines of a totalitarian state and believe Blair has taken us far enough down that road already.
I agree, Jaq. We’ve gone far enough down nulab’s slippery slope towards totalitarianism. Sick to the back teeth of it I am too.
My view is that we must have balanced development, we cannot continue exacerbating the infrastructural crisis in the South East by continuing to dump increasing amounts of development in pockets of the South East. If Cameron is elected and goes down Blair’s road on this he’ll make himself very unpopular here very quickly.
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I’m most impressed with your blog, Neil Craig, it’s excellent. Should add too that I’m impressed with all of the blogs of Boris’s regular contibutors, just wish I had the time for my own blog.
Not impressed with your views on Barker though, Neil, you’re with her, I’m with Friends of the Earth – who say:
‘The food chain is becoming increasingly global – and big business has taken control. The world’s biggest company is a supermarket – Walmart/Asda.Farmers around the world are encouraged by bodies like the World Trade Organisation to grow whatever they can most cheaply and sell it worldwide. This helps the profits of the supermarkets, fertiliser and pesticide companies but it’s bad news for small farmers, people and the environment:
Give a fair deal for farmers who safeguard our future. Save food and farming from unfair global trade rules.’
I’m also interested in the views of the Optimum Population Trust, who argue that, for national sustainability, we need to reduce our population to 55 million – which perhaps doesn’t seem as absurdly unlikely as it once did in the light of the recent survey suggesting that 10% of us want to leave UK.
That would free up a lot of housing and cut prices.
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This is straight supply & demand economics. We have an increasing population & more importantly smaller family units so housing demand is going up fast. On the other hand we are building under 1% of housing stock which, unless houses last an average of well over 100 years means the supply is static or worse. (Neil)
Is it simply a straight supply and demand issue – or are we perhaps tackling other issues in the wrong way? UK encouraged mass migration in the 1950s/60s to cope with the post-war period’s aging population and skills problem. It worked for a while, but then those who’d migrated here aged and the whole aging population/skills issue came up again – as it will with those migrating here now.
Is it sustainable to use migration and a house building boom to deal with the recurring problem of our aging population or do we need to consider other possible routes to sustainability?
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Auntie Flo’ said:
“Is it sustainable to use migration and a house building boom to deal with the recurring problem of our aging population or do we need to consider other possible routes to sustainability?”
Of course it’s not sustainable to go down the route of thinking a continual increase in population solves these things. It’s as foolish as a person who is £1000 in debt thinking that if he borrows £2000 it solves his debt problem. All that the increase in population does is feed a bigger problem to our descendants. Why is it that only the Green party seems to realise this?
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Flo, Chris Morriss – am with you completely and farmers do need a fair deal.
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Why is it that only the Green party seems to realise this?
The Green Party doesn’t realise anything . The decimation of the Cities by uncontrolled migration has been deliberately allowed because the increase in red tape has destroyed the real economy. With inflation and unemployment rising there it is clear the economy cannot withstand increased demand. In any case this is beyond the Chancellors remit , the only good thing he ever did . Unreformed Public Sector resource munchers have been hosed down with taxpayer’s cash and like all their kind only react by needing more.
The endless long Summer of growth (actually begun under the chancellor ship of Norman Lamont) , can only be sustained by reducing costs to big business who collude in raising entry barriers to the markets and finance large Lobbying groups , like the Smith Institute ( see Guido). Broon has to have this growth to pay the political pipers of the public sector and he is selling out the country to do it .
It is for this reason that immigration has been allowed to balloon and will continue to be allowed to replace the indigenous people with the flood of further migrants from Bulgaria and Romania next year ( One of the1038 unanswered questions) . Meanwhile One in ten Britain’s actually live abroad and 500 permanently relocate every day (replaced by 1500 immigrants)
I am way past pansying around with the whole subject. The answer is lowering taxes reducing administrative burden getting out of the EU , restoring honesty to public finances . My side is winning the argument and will win in the end as the horror unfolds .Both Gordon Brown and David Cameron have signalled they knwo it . What a shame David Cameron has to be dragged like a scraggy old donkey, by the nose ,by the resurgent right .
The Green Party cannot help they are wedded to proto Socialist policies that destroy business and are useful idiots for the Socialists at best. The worst of this operates through the EU .( See new “Green “measures announced yesterday due to undermine the chemical industry) . They also encourage childish non engagement with big policy and single issue fraud of a typical Liberal kind .
When will we defend this country. The whole position is far far worse than it appears and we , the English are fast becoming no more than a scattering of aboriginies paid lip service but irrelevant to the country. I `m with Le Pen . Love this country or leave it . I `m with Winston Churchill I wish he was here to day to warn us we are sleepwalking towards the end of this country. I wish he was here to tell the people who the traitors are and what they have done .This was following the betrayal of the Munich appeasement
“They ,( The poeple of this country), should know that there has been gross neglect and deficiency in our defenses; they should know that we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road; they should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history.”
Resonates for us I think
Great Boris attack on the EU in the Tory graph today bring it on. Amusing and deadly
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I agree with most of what you say here, but not all. I am not anti-EU in the way that you and many others are. (A good job, as I may be one of those leaving these shores and relocating to France when I take early retirement!)
I continue to take issue with the misuse of the word ‘liberal’ that is so prevalent. Although I normally vote Conservative, I’m not really a Conservative, nor a neo-con. If anything I’m a paleo-liberal, who is disenfranchised by the fact that we don’t have a proper classic-liberal party any more and haven’t had since 1914. I intensely dislike Cameron’s move of the party towards a social-democrat stance. Surely I’m not the only one who has almost given up on the silly little man?
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‘Someone suggested that people should only be allowed to own one property and believed that would help the housing situation’ (Jaq)
This is obviously a silly idea, however why not build more new developments (perhaps on the Green Belt) that can only be sold to people who don’t already own property.
The fact that so many new developments get snapped up by the buy-to-let brigade must help keep prices up and first-times priced out. If more new developments were restricted to non-owners then that might help.
Anyway, I wonder how many of you lot actually would like to see a house price crash. I know I would, but I can’t see it happening.
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I would love to see a house price crash if it happened by the same percentage across the board. My house is only a small pre-war two-bedroomed semi and I have more savings in cash than the house is worth. The bigger the crash the better for me. I might even be able to afford a decent house in the UK rather than have to move to France.
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Thanks for the kind words Auntie Flo (particularly when I have not usually supportive of FoI). Britain’s population growthn is clearly immigration driven & think that unsustainable. I think differetnial population growth poses a much more severe world problem tahn anything in the UK. At present growth rates Yemen (3.4%) will have a larger population than Russia by 2050. Clearly something is going to intervene.
Then someday somebody is going to invent a pill that stops aging & then we really will have a housing problem.
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