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 Kilkrazy wrote:
Another possible solution is to create prosperity in cities like Liverpool which have been massively depopulated in the past 30 or so years. There's plenty of empty housing in lots of places. The problem is that everyone wants to live in the SE because that is where the jobs are.

What employer should be encouraged to move there? What incentives are you going to give a business and what guarantees?



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 Steve steveson wrote:
We need to reconsider the green belt. It is treated as sacrosanct, but is now out of date. It is strangling cities and leading to gridlock. They also need to restrict building work much more on existing houses. A whole layer of small homes is being striped out. Both these planning laws are massively in favour of those who already own a home, and designed to keep house prices going up and up. We need to build more houses where people want them and stop people turning 2 and 3 bed houses in to 4 and 5 beds. But this won't happen as long as the red tops hold so much sway. We need house prices to go down, but too many people are reliant on their homes to provide income or just prop up unaffordable mortgages. it will never happen.

For the record, I am a home owner, and I accept the need to lose value on my house to sort out the problems. But then I got a house to live in, not as an investment.

I would actually agree here. The 'green belt' is used as a mysterious block on development, going far beyond its original purpose.




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 Silent Puffin? wrote:

 Mr. Burning wrote:

As a home owner I would like to ensure that my property can pay for my retirement and inevitable decline, my house makes up what my pension cannot.

Yes but the housing market has already priced out a significant segment of the population and its only going to get worse. There needs to be a fundamental rebalancing.

There certainly does. But i'm not sure any government really has the balls to do anything other than pay lip service to the idea.

Maybe there needs to be a complete social turnaround, regarding the notion of home ownership as well?

 Silent Puffin? wrote:

 Mr. Burning wrote:

New housing inevitably means breaking ground on sites not previously used for building. It also means infrastructure doing the same. It also means taking a long hard look at what we already have in place and to realise that some of it isn't fit for purpose and needs to be remade or rebuilt.

As a lot of current housing in built on flood planes the future is not looking good for home ownership.

As increased house building would mean that house prices would decrease I can't see the right wing press being on board and the cost would be high. I can't see anything positive happening on this issue until the whole system breaks, as usual.

Flood plains are easily sorted with some geo-engineering, but it takes time, hard work, and a lot of money. Seeing as there's always billions to spend on Trident, perhaps flood plain management could also get a cash injection of that magnitude?

We know it rains In Britain, we know that flooding is on the increase, is getting worse by the year, and we know what areas are effected. An infastructure project of this scale is exactly what is needed post BREXIT.


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 Kilkrazy wrote:
Another possible solution is to create prosperity in cities like Liverpool which have been massively depopulated in the past 30 or so years. There's plenty of empty housing in lots of places. The problem is that everyone wants to live in the SE because that is where the jobs are.

It's what people have been saying for years - London and the SE are a black hole which sucks up jobs and investment, thus creating a vicious circle where they have to keep running just to stand still = more jobs and investment.

If the Tories start re-structuring the economy away from London, then I know they're serious about building a UK fit for the 21st century, but knowing the Tories, it'll be business as usual for them...


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 Future War Cultist wrote:
I hear that the EU is demanding that we continue to pay for the pensions of the British commissioners/meps etc after Brexit. I hope May draws a line in the sand on that. Simple reason is, especially for the Commissioners, when they joined the EU they had to take an oath of allegiance to the EU that places it above their home nation. So, they're apparently European rather than British, except when it comes to footing the bill for them. It's another example of the bare faced cheek of the EU.

That and their pensions are overly generous anyway. It's one reason why we left.

I can see the argument for not paying them, but I think we should honour the deals we signed up to...


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 Mr. Burning wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:
Another possible solution is to create prosperity in cities like Liverpool which have been massively depopulated in the past 30 or so years. There's plenty of empty housing in lots of places. The problem is that everyone wants to live in the SE because that is where the jobs are.

What employer should be encouraged to move there? What incentives are you going to give a business and what guarantees?



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 Steve steveson wrote:
We need to reconsider the green belt. It is treated as sacrosanct, but is now out of date. It is strangling cities and leading to gridlock. They also need to restrict building work much more on existing houses. A whole layer of small homes is being striped out. Both these planning laws are massively in favour of those who already own a home, and designed to keep house prices going up and up. We need to build more houses where people want them and stop people turning 2 and 3 bed houses in to 4 and 5 beds. But this won't happen as long as the red tops hold so much sway. We need house prices to go down, but too many people are reliant on their homes to provide income or just prop up unaffordable mortgages. it will never happen.

For the record, I am a home owner, and I accept the need to lose value on my house to sort out the problems. But then I got a house to live in, not as an investment.

I would actually agree here. The 'green belt' is used as a mysterious block on development, going far beyond its original purpose.




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 Silent Puffin? wrote:

 Mr. Burning wrote:

As a home owner I would like to ensure that my property can pay for my retirement and inevitable decline, my house makes up what my pension cannot.

Yes but the housing market has already priced out a significant segment of the population and its only going to get worse. There needs to be a fundamental rebalancing.

There certainly does. But i'm not sure any government really has the balls to do anything other than pay lip service to the idea.

Maybe there needs to be a complete social turnaround, regarding the notion of home ownership as well?

There are plenty of incentives to encourage employers to move away from London. Give them free tax for 2 years, or a dividend for every skilled worker they hire from that area etc etc

We need to encourage industry. This goes beyond financial inentives to move.

Which comes back around to what the country needs and if we have a government that will start the wheels turning.

 Mr. Burning wrote:
We need to encourage industry. This goes beyond financial inentives to move.

Which comes back around to what the country needs and if we have a government that will start the wheels turning.

The only language that industry understands is money.

On a serious note, what would industry have against say, Liverpool? Great port facilities, plenty of universities in that neck of the woods for R & D, skilled graduates, and it's close to major urban areas such as Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, and of course, Liverpool itself...

There are plenty of solid foundations for growth in other parts of the UK, so in my book, there's no excuse for industry not moving from London and the SE.


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Will add the following to my post about Liverpool.

I think the reason why the Tories have 'abandoned' the north and the mid-lands, and are reluctant to send industry up there, is purely for political reasons.

The Tories power base is in the Home Counties and the South East, whilst places like Liverpool, which we know the Tories tried to abandon in the 1980s, are Labour heartlands, or are switching to UKIP.

Why are businesses so focused on London in the first place?

It is not the geographical centre of the UK. Its relative proximity to the continent helps explain that, being a few hours from Paris. Historically this came about partly because the River Thames granted sea traffic an easy route from the continent to the Port of London, and from London onwards by barge and boat on rivers and canals.

London is the centre of the rail and road communication system, the centre of government, finance, law, publishing and media, and a major population centre. Considered as part of the south-east, I think there's about 20 million people within 2 hours commute of central London. Also in this area are three of the world's best universities -- London, Oxford and Cambridge -- and their associated science parks and publishing industries, plus several other well-regarded universities (Reading, Brunel, and others) and the M4 tech corridor. Then you've got the museums, art galleries, theatres and many tourist attractions both ancient and modern.

All of this really depends on network effects that create a mutually supporting environment for business.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
It is not the geographical centre of the UK. Its relative proximity to the continent helps explain that, being a few hours from Paris. Historically this came about partly because the River Thames granted sea traffic an easy route from the continent to the Port of London, and from London onwards by barge and boat on rivers and canals.

London is the centre of the rail and road communication system, the centre of government, finance, law, publishing and media, and a major population centre. Considered as part of the south-east, I think there's about 20 million people within 2 hours commute of central London. Also in this area are three of the world's best universities -- London, Oxford and Cambridge -- and their associated science parks and publishing industries, plus several other well-regarded universities (Reading, Brunel, and others) and the M4 tech corridor. Then you've got the museums, art galleries, theatres and many tourist attractions both ancient and modern.

All of this really depends on network effects that create a mutually supporting environment for business.

Agree with every word of this, but a similar case could be made for the north west and midlands. Liverpool, Manchester, Leeds, Birmingham, and even Bristol and Wales, are pretty close to each other, could be better linked up with new motorways, have universities and industry, and are pretty good for things like culture and finance.

And of course, Liverpool is a major port and gateway to the Atlantic, which could play an important part if we're serious about trading with the world in a post-BREXIT UK.

So, the question is this: why hasn't the potential been acted upon, and my answer is this: because of incompetence, and/or Tories happy to keep their powerbase in the South happy at the expense of the rest of the UK.

Yes, regional transport infrastructure development is key, hence the proposal for a new trans-pennine tunnel.

As for why this kind of stuff hasn't been done before, I think there are various reasons.

The south-east power base idea has some truth in it. The influence of the City of London financial industry has been too powerful for too long.

I don't think incompetence is necessarily the right word. Any of these kind of schemes take many years to work out, build, and to have an effect, which doesn't encourage national politicians to put a lot of effort into them since they probably won't see the benefits of the results.

Also I think there has been too much reliance on business to do this kind of stuff, under the general mantra of the Thatcher and post-Thatcher era that private industry is better than government at investing, managing, and creating industries and jobs. It turns out private industry hasn't been much good at this, but it has taken decades for this to become clear.

Of course the south east is not the gold-pavemented wonderland it might seem. While there are jobs here, housing is increasingly expensive and commuting is over-crowded, expensive and unreliable.

Isn't a whole bunch of these last posts basically arguments for HS2?

Which, well, isn't going to strongly, last I heard. Partly because of my previous point of "NIMBYs, NIMBYs everywhere."

 Compel wrote:
Isn't a whole bunch of these last posts basically arguments for HS2?

That's what I was thinking.

Surely one of the best things to do would be to build high speed rail infrastructure across the country, and make a huge push towards public transport. It's got a double effect - less reliance of foreign oil & cars, flights benefits to our ecnomy.
Take Japan for instance - you can get really high speed (just under 200mph) trains from pretty much any city to any other city every half hour or so. I'm not saying we should try and beat that, but we should at least be trying to get a bit closer.
Imagine what we could do if it was possible (and affordable) to get from Glasgow to London in about 2 hours, with stops at (for instance) Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham.

Birmingham doesn't need a fast train to London. It needs fast trains to the north. Coupled with a fast trans-pennine link this would help to form a midlands-north and east triangle of power that would be separate to London.

Bringing Birmingham into the south-east is likely simply to absorb it into the Greater London SE power locus, which would concentrate things even more.

By the way, I don't think NIMBYism should be sneered at automatically. The whole of the country is not merely a dormitory for workers, and a transport system to get them to their jobs. There are other, I dare to say better things in life than wage slavery.

Herzlos wrote:

 Compel wrote:
Isn't a whole bunch of these last posts basically arguments for HS2?

That's what I was thinking.

Surely one of the best things to do would be to build high speed rail infrastructure across the country, and make a huge push towards public transport. It's got a double effect - less reliance of foreign oil & cars, flights benefits to our ecnomy.
Take Japan for instance - you can get really high speed (just under 200mph) trains from pretty much any city to any other city every half hour or so. I'm not saying we should try and beat that, but we should at least be trying to get a bit closer.
Imagine what we could do if it was possible (and affordable) to get from Glasgow to London in about 2 hours, with stops at (for instance) Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham.

nimbys!

More seriously every urban conurbation remotely near to the proposed route wants a slice if the action.

HS2 just caused a ruckus when talks landed in Sheffield. They want to be part of it too! With the proposed line redrawn (again).

Even more seriously. KK gets it. A HS trans pennine route makes a lot more sense especially if you are serious about economic prosperity beyond the South East.

It still collapses under the weight of NIMBYism and the town of Barnackle & Whelk wanting to be a stop on the route.

Yeah, the major problem with HS2 is that, as designed, it seems intended purely to allow people who live further away to commute to London.

Something much more ambitious, basically linking every major city, would have more of a decentralising effect.

 Graphite wrote:
Yeah, the major problem with HS2 is that, as designed, it seems intended purely to allow people who live further away to commute to London.

Something much more ambitious, basically linking every major city, would have more of a decentralising effect.

THAT is needed anyway since there can be no real expansion of services in any of the major UK train hubs. Stations are in the wrong places. Points are in the wrong places and cannot be moved.

My vision would be something like a Birmingham-Liverpool-Manchester-Leeds-Sheffield-Birmingham high speed network, with stops or good branch lines to all the important nearby towns.

The point about Barns and Whelks wanting to be on the network is that connection to the national rail network is an important factor for prosperity. There is evidence that towns which lost their railway in the Beeching reforms, have become clearly less prosperous than similar nearby town which kept their stations.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
My vision would be something like a Birmingham-Liverpool-Manchester-Leeds-Sheffield-Birmingham high speed network, with stops or good branch lines to all the important nearby towns.

The point about Barns and Whelks wanting to be on the network is that connection to the national rail network is an important factor for prosperity. There is evidence that towns which lost their railway in the Beeching reforms, have become clearly less prosperous than similar nearby town which kept their stations.

Which is all well and good if it means new branch lines. My god do we need a decent train network.

But if HS2 is anything to go by smaller towns like Stoke. Stafford. Warrington. Stockport. Rochdale. Huddesfield. Barnsley. Mansfield. Bradford et al may want to be on the HS link. And you better believe that if x has it, concerned citizens of y are going to ask pointed questions of their representatives as to why THEY are not involved in it.

You then have to consider the smaller towns and villages in the way of any proposed route. Landowners. wildlife, geography.

Then you can consider establishing or re-establishing branch and connecting lines.

Decades on you'll maybe have a vague idea of a plan worked out.

Let's put infrastructure plans to one side for a moment, because we have a new political civil war on our hands - UKIP

I doubt Kilkrazy is the least surprised by this, but UKIP's NEC is acting like a bunch of amateurs.

We always wondered what UKIP would do after the referendum, but I believe they still have a role in holding the government to account over Article 50.

The Tories must be laughing up their sleeves. Labour a shambles, UKIP a shambles, the Lib-Dems reverting back to their non-entity status, and the only seriosus and effective opposition, the SNP, obviously limited in how much support they could gain.

May might be tempted to call a snap election...

I'm not opposed to the Greenbelt, because I think that maintaining the environment for future generations to enjoy is vital in and of itself. That being said, I also don't view it as an either-or scenario with new housing.

There are two other alternatives, namely accepting that London has built as far out as it can go and pouring future redevelopment funds into areas outside it, or building upwards (much like Japan). I accept that people would rather live in a house than a flat, but all building on green belt land ultimately does is shuffle the problem two or three generations down the line. It doesn't fix anything. Once the Greenbelt has been tarmacked over, our descendants will be in exactly in the same scenario fifty years from now. More sustainable and effective planning is required than 'Let's put some concrete on those fields'.

I think a main problem with redevelopment funds is that they tend to get spread out, which reduces the effectiveness. In order to make a town or city an economically viable and self-sustaining hub, you need to reach a certain critical mass, and it always seems to fall short of that. I'm of the opinion that two city locations should be selected, one in the Midlands and one in the North, and all funds focused there for the next five to ten years. Build a rail link between those two and London, renovate the town centres, open up a handful of grammar schools, pour funding into the local universities for large scale expansion, and, this is a big one, shuffle Parliament to an appropriately built venue for a term. The House of Commons is already crumbling and needs to be relocated for a period of five to ten years in order to effect repairs.

Once you've done all that, I would wager six-seven years from now, those two cities would be doing just grand. Then you can identify another two cities and move on to them. I'd probably pick Birmingham and Newcastle for the first two. Then I'd stretch out to Sheffield, Edinburgh, and Bristol probably (Bristol and Edinburgh both do alright for themselves, so you could spread the investment around a bit more). Then Manchester, Cardiff, and Glasgow. Then Leeds, Liverpool, & Swansea. If you keep adding good rail links between them, and substantial local investment as mentioned above each time, in twenty years we'd have a much more decentralised economy. It would also help to tone down this 'Westminster doesn't care for the rest of the country' rhetoric.

I think the problems with building up is that the solutions tend to be either absolutely crap tower blocks, or absolutely eyewatering luxury apartments, with no sensible middle ground for normal families.

There must be an option somehow to build a condo-style development that still allows some outdoor space for families within a sane budget and minimal footprint.

I'm thinking about things like having the ground floor being service facilities, car parking, utility rooms, shops, communal gardens, and then a couple of floors above with large apartments and private outdoor spaces. potentially stagger them so that their garden is open to the sky.

I mean, I like having a garage/shed, a private garden, and a reasonable amount of floor space, but I certainly don't require it to be on the ground with no-one above me. All the multi-dwelling spaces here are a huge compromise.

There must be hundreds of possibilities if we can think outside of the box a bit further.

I like the idea of moving Parliament for five or 10 years. Also the idea of concentrating development in specific areas.

My Peak District Ring Railway is more of a national level infrastructure project. However when designing that, you could prepare a development plan for the Leeds-Bradford-Huddersfield triangle. This would be linked into the high-speed network by the station at Leeds. I'm just throwing these names out half at random. I don't know how populous that area is, or what infrastructure and industry they have got now.

I bet we could learn something about building "mansion" type apartment buildings from the Scandis and the Japanese. There are some nice modern developments around Reading, which has a lot of post-industrial brownfield sites on its edges. The problem is the cheap ones are £250,000 for a 2LDK type of unit.

Herzlos wrote:
There must be an option somehow to build a condo-style development that still allows some outdoor space for families within a sane budget and minimal footprint.

Well the budget might not necessarily be sane, but Highbury (the old Arsenal stadium) probably isn't a bad example of what you're talking about.

The reason for the concentration of wealth in the south is very simple. Thatcher did it. She remodelled the countries infrastructure to favour services and banking and stripped manufacturing and industry to the core.
In order to rebalance, money needs to stop being invested in the south, and used to revitalise our industries once again.
The infrastructure outside of the south east has been overwhelmingly neglected for decades, there are less dual carriageways in the whole of Lincolnshire than in my home town of Crawley, for example. In fact, stroll outside the London, West coast corridor and it's common to find virtually every county struggling with infrastructure built and suitable only for the 1950s.
East Anglia, East Midlands, the north east and west, Wales, and the south west have been ignored and have had to go cap in hand to the EU to fund basics like bus routes and communications. It's not right, and these areas are stifled and strangulated by this lack of investment.

It's not so simple as just to blame Thatcher. Heavy industry in the UK had already been in decline for 100 years by the time Thatcher arrived.

 r_squared wrote:
The reason for the concentration of wealth in the south is very simple. Thatcher did it. She remodelled the countries infrastructure to favour services and banking and stripped manufacturing and industry to the core..

Not quite. The manufacturing and industrial sectors were utilising highly out of date equipment and infrastructure, and had only survived to her tenure through massive government subsidies. They were no longer competitive in a globalised economy, sadly, and couldn't match the technological edge brought by countries investing in our traditional manufacturing sectors for the first time (like South Korea in shipbuilding). Our infrastructure had decayed and ceased functioning effectively in an economic sense before she arrived.

What she did do, was accept that we couldn't compete in those areas any more, and funnelled all those subsidies and all that funding into areas where she felt we still could compete. As it turned out, she was right, the banking sector is one we're still very dominant in, as is the high tech and educational sectors. New Labour reaped the benefits of that remodelling you're referring to, and since it seemed to have worked, carried on with it as their strategy for growth.

Sadly, now that leaves 3/5 of the country wallowing in high unemployment, decaying infrastructure, and as of 2016 following vast overspending under New Labour and subsequent Tory cuts to adjust for it, less public services to compensate. Clearly something needs to be done, simply carrying on with business as usual is unjust and disproportionate to the rest of the country. The question is, what? We'll see what happens next, but my suspicion is that May's economic focus will be on Brexit. What comes after that will be left until the last minute.

I want to see a new project to create an entirely new motorway network specifically for freight between cities. (not railways, they're screwed)
Take the trucks off the current motorway, thus alleviating the congestion problem.
I think that 'tunnel through the pennines' idea should be for that - i like the drive up to scotland because of the views!

I'm very much in agreement with the suggestions to promote business growth further north than the M25.

My argument is that even though those industries were in decline, it was neo-liberal ideology that decided that subsidies for industry should be stripped in favour of "subsisdies" for the financial sector. By remodelling our political environment, and investing in fashionable city ideas the govt has decided to concentrate wealth in one corner.
I like to compare the idea that neo-liberals were happy to collapse industry and destroy communities throughout the country, but fell over backwards to ensure that when banking imploded it didn't wipe out their corner of the world. They were more than happy to use taxpayers money to subsidise failed banks, but not any other industry.

That idea cannot survive now. Outside of the EU, the UK needs a diverse portfolio to survive economically, to be more self reliant, and to improve the quality of life for all. Outside of the EU, we cannot maintain a specialisation as we have in the past.

 r_squared wrote:
The reason for the concentration of wealth in the south is very simple. Thatcher did it.

Historically south east England has been the economic and cultural centre of England from the Normans onwards. Its a little on the simplisitc side to suggest that it was all thatchers fault.

 Silent Puffin? wrote:

 r_squared wrote:
The reason for the concentration of wealth in the south is very simple. Thatcher did it.

Historically south east England has been the economic and cultural centre of England from the Normans onwards. Its a little on the simplisitc side to suggest that it was all thatchers fault.

To be fair, when travel takes a long time by land, and you're invaders from Northern France, South East England seems like the best place to be settling.

Now that we can travel the length of the country in a couple of hours rather than weeks, and can communicate instantly round the world, there should be a lot less requirement to be within walking distance of the channel


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 SirDonlad wrote:
I want to see a new project to create an entirely new motorway network specifically for freight between cities. (not railways, they're screwed)
Take the trucks off the current motorway, thus alleviating the congestion problem.
I think that 'tunnel through the pennines' idea should be for that - i like the drive up to scotland because of the views!

I'm very much in agreement with the suggestions to promote business growth further north than the M25.

Why are railways screwed? They are ideal for freight if you're not in a rush*. I regularly see freight trains passing with ~1200 tons of load on them, which you'd need in the region of 30 trucks to deal with. Freight railways would need to use less space than a roadway would, should allow higher speeds and be entirely electrified. You'd still need distribution hubs and trucks from there, but you'd likely need to do the same thing with a haulage motorway.

I'd be all for a massive boost to the rail network, rather than the motorway network, with the aim of moving as many drivers into trains as possible. If done properly, you should be able to avoid having to upgrade the motorway network at all.


*If you're really not in a rush, then canals are even better. Being able to move hundreds of tons of stuff with a <4hp engine is amazing.

Freight by rail isn't screwed. It has been increasing for some years, the same as passenger traffic.

 Kilkrazy wrote:
It's not so simple as just to blame Thatcher. Heavy industry in the UK had already been in decline for 100 years by the time Thatcher arrived.

This is a response to r_squared's point as well (I'm linking them both in)

Now, I don't expect you guys to know everything about this, but I could be wrong, as I'm going to use Aberdeen as an argument that wealth has been deliberately concentrated in the South East of England, and this has been government policy for decades...

Aberdeen as you know, is the oil capital of the UK, thanks to the boom we had in the 1970s and 1980s...

And yet, Aberdeen has been waiting for a new city by pass for decades, needs a new airport, and has generally poor infastructure.

And yet, billions of pounds has flowed through Aberdeen over the years..

Where did the money go? Why doesn't Aberdeen have a skyline to match Dubai?

For sure, oil workers have been paid, house prices have been high, but it's not hard to feel that money was siphoned off from Aberdeen by the Thatcher government and spent elsewhere...

The Scottish parliament recommenced in 1999, so they can't be blamed for the 1980s, and although local political factors such as planning permission could explain delays, it's not hard to conclude that money was taken from Aberdeen and spent on the London area...

People will rightfully argue that's how it works, but the excuse that the money has never been there to help areas outside of London and the South East, is shot down by the example of Aberdeen - a city that could have been so much more, and boasted world class infastructure...






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 r_squared wrote:
The reason for the concentration of wealth in the south is very simple. Thatcher did it. She remodelled the countries infrastructure to favour services and banking and stripped manufacturing and industry to the core.
In order to rebalance, money needs to stop being invested in the south, and used to revitalise our industries once again.
The infrastructure outside of the south east has been overwhelmingly neglected for decades, there are less dual carriageways in the whole of Lincolnshire than in my home town of Crawley, for example. In fact, stroll outside the London, West coast corridor and it's common to find virtually every county struggling with infrastructure built and suitable only for the 1950s.
East Anglia, East Midlands, the north east and west, Wales, and the south west have been ignored and have had to go cap in hand to the EU to fund basics like bus routes and communications. It's not right, and these areas are stifled and strangulated by this lack of investment.

The Aberdeen point was addressed to you as well to agree with what you were saying about the lack of investment outside London. Aberdeen has shown that even when the money is there, you still don't get the investment