Build homes people want to live in (it is that simple)

Hardly a day passes without another seemingly creative solution to the UK's (well mostly London's) housing problems being presented. And, since nearly all these creative solutions don't involve increasing the supply of land for housing where people want to live, nearly all of the solutions are wrong. It really is that simple - more land, more homes, more affordable housing:

A 2016 academic analysis by David Albouy, Gabriel Ehrlich and Yingyi Liu estimated that, in general, rents decrease by 3 percent for each 2 percent increase in the housing stock

As the author, Patrick Wolff, here points out (talking about San Francisco and Silicon Valley):

The Bay Area must increase its total housing stock by 50 percent over the next 20 years to bring affordability down to a reasonable level.

Wolff also reminds us that this degree of growth is perfectly possible:

Detroit and Texas grew far faster during their booms, as did our own Bay Area in the 20 years following World War II.

As, of course, did London in the 1930s. I don't have the detailed figures to hand for London, it's not growing as fast as the Bay Area and growth may be slowed a little by Brexit, but there's already an undersupply (high rents tell us this). So let's go with Wolff's 50% and reduce a bit to, say, 40%. There are currently about 3.27m households in London and I'll assume they're all housed. Using Wolff's model London will need 1.3m new homes over 20 years to meet demand and address the problem of affordability (which is 65,000 per year). The current London plan proposes fewer than 50,000 per year resulting in a shortfall on demand of 320,000. The absolute effect of this will be higher rents and house prices. And remember that all this assumes London's growth is lower than San Francisco's - if the city matches that growth it will need a further 300,000 homes just to keep pace.

I'm not going to set out what should be done - everybody knows. We just need to ask why we're not doing it.

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The London Plan - building a playground for the elite

Today, the Mayor of London published his "London Plan", a strategic look at development in the world's greatest city (except for Bradford, of course, but we hide our light under a bushel and don't call ourselves a city any more despite being one):

It's a strategic plan which shapes how London evolves and develops. All planning decisions should follow London Plan policies, and it sets a policy framework for local plans across London.

Exciting. And there will be some good analyses of the plan from assorted consultants, lobby groups and academics over the next few months as its consultation plays out. The Mayor - as these sort of people are wont to do - is bigging up the Plan:

“I am using all of the powers at my disposal to tackle the housing crisis head on, removing ineffective constraints on homebuilders so we make the most of precious land in our capital,”

I gather the Mayor went on to talk about "tearing up" planning rules that prevent housing development (while proposing new rules to stop people opening businesses in case children might get tubby). There's going to be 650,000 new homes rammed into an already crowded city, piled up on top of railway stations, stuffed into gardens, perched on top of shopping parades. Densification is the order of the day - London, in housing terms becomes Mr Creosote. After all, even the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England - NIMBY central - think the plan is ace. CRPE tweeted:

We're pleased to see a commitment to protecting and enhancing the Green Belt from @SadiqKhan in his draft London Plan. A protected and thriving Green Belt is just as important for our cities as our countryside.

OK, so they tweeted this with an attached photograph of a view across Windermere - about as far from London as it's possible to be and stay in England - but the CPRE are clearly happy.

The thing is that this is the problem. London isn't so much overheating as burning to a cinder, at least in housing terms. Yet the Mayor smiles saying, 'we won't touch the Green Belt, heavens no, that might cost me votes'. And the result of this is what geographers, Joel Kotkin and Wendell Cox call a "playground for elites":

Once exemplars of middle-class advancement, most major American cities are now typified by a “barbell economy,” divided between well-paid professionals and lower-paid service workers. As early as the 1970s, notes the Brookings Institution, middle-income neighborhoods began to shrink more dramatically in inner cities than anywhere else—and the phenomenon has continued. Today, in virtually all U.S. metro areas, the inner cores are more unequal than their corresponding suburbs, observes geographer Daniel Herz.

For London, the sort of middle income places I was brought up in (Addiscombe between Beckenham and Croydon) aren't really middle income places these days. The cramped - for a family of six large and loud people - three-bed semi we lived in would now sell for £400,000 or more, way beyond the means of the sort of people doing a middling sort of job in an insurance company like my Dad did back in the 1960s. These days, couples like my Mum and Dad aren't having families in London because they can't afford it.

What London's Mayor doesn't understand (something he shares with his left of centre mayoral colleagues in Barcelona, New York and San Francisco) is that the policies he thinks, to use a Blairite term, triangulate between the need for housing and the NIMBYs are the very policies that create the rising prices and rising rents, that make for that "barbell economy", and that make a place like London increasingly dysfunctional. Urban containment - zoning restrictions, densification, focus on what the Yanks call transit loci - is the problem not the solution. It's sustained by the fact that those childless younger people having fun in the city can't understand that their loud, brash and busy lives are a fin de siècle.

The suburbs, consigned to the dustbin of history by many urban boosters, have rebounded from the Great Recession. Demographer Jed Kolko, analyzing the most recent census numbers, suggests that most big cities’ population growth now lags their suburbs, which have accounted for over 80 percent of metropolitan expansion since 2011. Even where the urban-core renaissance has been strongest, ominous signs abound.

For London, those suburbs are no longer Grove Park, Eltham or Chiswick but Milton Keynes, Ashford, Basingstoke and Reading. And:

Nearly 80 percent of all job growth since 2010 has occurred in suburbs and exurbs (see chart, page 45). Most tech growth takes place not in the urban core, as widely suggested, but in dispersed urban environments, from Silicon Valley to Austin to Raleigh. Despite the much-ballyhooed shift in small executive headquarters to some core cities, the most rapid expansion of professional business-service employment continues to happen largely in low-density metropolitan areas...

Put simply, failing to grasp the urban containment nettle will be fine for London short to medium term - it has the advantage of being the world's top financial centre and having the UK government (sort of New York and Washington combined) - but not facing up to this problem will do just what Kotkin and Cox describe in New York, Seattle and San Francisco, create a playground for the rich elite serviced by a low paid population living in a city they can't afford.

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Three errors in Laudato Si' - and why it's ideas are bad for the poor

Goit Stock - a bit of that wonderful nature we love

All the pomp, power and might of the Catholic Church has been used to promote a social and economic agenda centred on an environmentalism that is sweetly bucolic and profoundly anti-development. I'm not qualified to comment on the theology in the latest Papal Enclyclical letter - Laudato Si' on "care for our common home"  - but it steps beyond that theology when it addresses matters of demonstrable fact. The Pope, and the Church he leads, promotes ideas are not in the interests of the poor nor especially helpful in addressing the challenges of a changing environment.

Before we look at three errors in Laudato Si', let's remember that, at the heart of the matter is the idea of 'climate change'. This is not - whatever its advocates want to tell us - settled science. There is enough challenge to the basic 'greenhouse' argument of climate change's causes to merit scepticism. And there is sufficient inconsistency in the empirical record for doubt to be a valid response to the doomladen predictions of some who believe in both climate change itself and also in the idea that man's actions are causing that climate change. These statements aren't a 'denial' of climate change but rather an honest reflection on the debate as seen by one curious layman. We should recall, moreover, that the Catholic Church is not (and would not claim to be) a scientific institution so, in the matter of climate science and environmentalism, is no better qualified to express opinion than I am. Nevertheless, the jury is out on climate change and there remains a very strong case, given this, for preparedness in the face of its possible effects.

My concern doesn't lie, therefore, with the Catholic Church's diagnosis (although I might take issue with some of this) but rather with the consequences of the anti-growth programmes that are more-or-less explicitly endorsed in Laudato Si'.

Pope Francis begins his Encyclical with St Francis of Assisi:

He was particularly concerned for God’s creation and for the poor and outcast. He loved, and was deeply loved for his joy, his generous self-giving, his openheartedness. He was a mystic and a pilgrim who lived in simplicity and in wonderful harmony with God, with others, with nature and with himself. He shows us just how inseparable the bond is between concern for nature, justice for the poor, commitment to society, and interior peace.

Anyone brought up in the Catholic tradition will know of St Francis's love for the natural world, his rejection of earthly wealth in favour of simplicity and his concern for the poor. So this Saint perhaps represents the ideal patron for an encyclical about the natural world - 'our common home' as the Pope describes it. The idea of stewardship - this is the only world we've got let's not ruin it for our children - flows beautifully from St Francis's preaching to the birds and flowers.

The problem I have is that the Pope, for all his unquestioned concern for the poor and excluded, fails to see that his environmentalism is largely against the interests of those poor people in that it wants to reduce growth in the world's economy so as to better preserve the resources of the Earth. In the developed world there might be a case for less growth (and this is exactly what we have today, largely accompanied by cries about 'austerity') but the idea that less growth is in the interest of the poor - whether in Buenos Aires' slums or the Sahel's isolated farms - is quite simply wrong.

Let us look at three of the Pope's errors in this regard:

Exposure to atmospheric pollutants produces a broad spectrum of health hazards, especially for the poor, and causes millions of premature deaths. People take sick, for example, from breathing high levels of smoke from fuels used in cooking or heating.

The error here isn't in the concern about pollution or even that this pollution disproportionately affects the world's poor but rather in the assumption that a developed economy is more polluting that a less developed economy. Using the example of fuel for cooking and heating we can observe that most of us living in developed economies do not breathe in choking, carcinogenic fumes every day from the simple process of feeding and warming ourselves (other than from a barbeque in the garden). This is not true in the poorer parts of the world contributing to over a million deaths a year from respiratory diseases. Even worse the use of 'biomass' for fuel is not very sustainable - something the Pope recognises when talking about paper:

We have not yet managed to adopt a circular model of production capable of preserving resources for present and future generations, while limiting as much as possible the use of non-renewable resources, moderating their consumption, maximizing their efficient use, reusing and recycling them.

And - for Europe and the USA at least - the Pope is wrong about paper recycling since over 70% of paper in Europe is recycled and around two-thirds in the USA. Perhaps we could do still better but we should also remember that:

Paper is made from a natural renewable resource, wood, which has the capacity to be produced in an endless cycle. To safeguard this cycle, our forests have to be managed and harvested in a sustainable manner.

The European paper industry, whilst producing approximately 30% of the world's paper, is a responsible guardian of European forests, 33% more new trees grow in Europe than are harvested each year. According to the UN FAO, forest cover in Europe has increased by 30% since 1950. The 6,450 km² annual increase of European forest cover corresponds to a daily increase the size of 4,363 football pitches.

Deforestation is not about paper but rather about either the gathering of biomass for fuel, the clearing of land for agriculture or the replacement of forest diversity with non-food monoculture. For the first of these switching to cleaner fuels (and almost every other fuel is cleaner than burning wood on a fire) represents the right solution and the others require governments to change their attitude to unsustainable subsistence farming methods and the use of productive land to grow biofuels rather than food.

The Pope's next target is water:

Even as the quality of available water is constantly diminishing, in some places there is a growing tendency, despite its scarcity, to privatize this resource, turning it into a commodity subject to the laws of the market. Yet access to safe drinkable water is a basic and universal human right, since it is essential to human survival and, as such, is a condition for the exercise of other human rights. Our world has a grave social debt towards the poor who lack access to drinking water, because they are denied the right to a life consistent with their inalienable dignity.

Here we see the first example in Laudato Si' of the Pope's anti-market message - a message that rather condemns to poor to poverty rather than offering them a route from out of that poverty. As you drive up the M1 from Nottingham to Sheffield you pass Severn Trent Water's treatment plant at Church Wilne attached to which are large signs proclaiming "30 glasses for less than 1p" - this is the reality of a market-led and privatised water system: clean, fresh water delivered by pipe to a tap in your kitchen at less than a penny a gallon. Even better, that penny-a-gallon includes collecting all the waste water, cleaning it up and recycling it!

The contrast - in places where water is either owned in common or owned by the state -  is like this:

Every day millions of people in Africa, usually women and girls, walk miles to have access to any water at all. The length of time it takes to collect the little water they can get means that they do not have time to do anything else during the day. Children do not get the chance to have an education simply because they are too busy collecting water.

To make matters worse, the only water they have access to is from streams and ponds. That water is usually full of diseases and makes themselves and their families very sick. Adults face the decision on a daily basis between dehydration and sickness from the water they drink. Even worse, they have to face this decision for their children.

We give money so charities can install wells with a safe supply, drill boreholes and improve sanitation in urban slums. But the long term solution is the same solution we had in the UK - having the resources to build the systems that deliver water to homes, build treatment systems and ensure quality. This came about because of foresight in investment (often by local authorities) and the ability of people to pay for that water supply. It may be a 'universal human right' to have water but it's a right that's better served in the capitalist world where businesses charge us for supplying clean water than in places where such businesses don't exist.

After pollution and water, the Pope promotes his third error when he speaks of cities:

Nowadays, for example, we are conscious of the disproportionate and unruly growth of many cities, which have become unhealthy to live in, not only because of pollution caused by toxic emissions but also as a result of urban chaos, poor transportation, and visual pollution and noise. Many cities are huge, inefficient structures, excessively wasteful of energy and water. Neighbourhoods, even those recently built, are congested, chaotic and lacking in sufficient green space. We were not meant to be inundated by cement, asphalt, glass and metal, and deprived of physical contact with nature.

We see in this observation the understandable reaction to the unsanitary, chaotic, mish-mash that is the developing world slum - self-built shacks precariously perched on hillsides, mud and waste mixed together in the tiny passages between the rows of these shacks, and thousands of people crammed into the tiniest of spaces looking out onto the shinier, cleaner and richer parts of that city. It is a painful sight to anyone who cares for the poor.

Yet people have chosen that life over another life - they have crammed themselves into these places because they think it will be better than the subsistence farm up-country where they were brought up. And cities - by virtue of their very concentration - use fewer resources than dispersed agricultural communities:

For many nations, rapid urban change over the last 50 years is associated with the achievement of independence and the removal of colonial controls on people's right to move in response to changing economic opportunities. The concentration of population in urban areas greatly reduces the unit costs of providing good quality water supplies and good quality provision for sanitation, health care, schools and other services. It also provides more possibilities for their full involvement in government. And, perhaps surprisingly, urban areas can also provide many environmental advantages including less resource use, less waste and lower levels of greenhouse gases.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't worry about the spread of disease, the safety of buildings, the exploitation of children and the provision of education but it does mean the Pope is wrong to suggest that the urbanisation of the past two centuries "has not always led to an integral development and an improvement in the quality of life". Leaving aside the sort of rejectionist bucolic dream of Thoreau (and generations of hippies since), there is no aspect of life's quality that isn't better today for the mass of humanity than was the case at almost any point in the past two centuries. And for all that wealthy westerners now dream of a rural idyll (albeit with every mod con from running water and sewage through gas and electricity to the now essential broadband) the truth is that the city, despite its crowding and chaos, is an essential element in allowing that better life.

Others (better qualified than I am) will have noted that the Pope's anti-consumption, anti-markets, anti-capitalist message - for all its compatibility with a man who took St Francis of Assisi as his guide - really does the poor no favours. We know (but need reminding time and time again) that the impact of neoliberal ideas on the world has seen the fastest decline in poverty in mankind's history - far from capitalism (for all its sins) being the problem, it is a great deal of the solution.

As so often with these grand proposals, a detailed analysis reveals them to lack the foundations needed to deliver - they are, as the parable goes, built on sand. The Pope, in setting out his Church's 'social teaching', has made too many errors of fact.

It is welcome - it is always welcome - that people, whether religious leaders or not, step back and remind us of our duty to the poorest in our world. And it is right too that we are reminded about the need to conserve and preserve the only planet we've got. But it is not right to so conflate these two concerns that the result is a 'social teaching' that neither serves the interests of the poor nor addresses the imperative of environmental stewardship. The poor stay in poverty, trapped in a back-breaking, hand-to-mouth existence that both fails them and destroys the planet's resources, while the poor old planet gets an endless round of international meetings combined with an almost childish rejection of the very market mechanisms that can both 'save the planet' and also lift the poor from out of that poverty the pope so rightly condemns.



I don't doubt that Pope Francis cares deeply for the poor but I'm afraid he is another victim of sentiment's triumph over evidence. It seems wrong that some have great wealth while other starve and it suits the sentimentalist narrative for that ownership of wealth to somehow be the cause of others' poverty. But it ain't so and it would be more exciting if, instead of simply hugging the poor, Pope Francis had sent the world the message that neoliberalism, market capitalism, property rights and freedom are the central elements in both eliminating poverty and saving the planet.

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On what makes for successful cities...

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Aaron Renn reviewing research by the Manhattan Institute:

Among the commonalities they did see, they noted that successful cities tended to have higher educational attainment; a higher professional, scientific, and technical job share; more large corporate headquarters, and less dependency on government spending in an era of state and local fiscal retrenchment. Laggards suffered disproportionately from over-dependency on housing construction.

A familiar list of reasons - we hear often of the importance of 'STEM' jobs, high order skills and corporate HQs. The bit that we aren't reminded of often enough is that high levels of dependence on government spending holds back regional economic development. This isn't just about benefits or the relocation of government jobs to depressed areas but encompasses other parts of popular regional development strategies such as university-led schemes of research funding.

The challenge here is for government - local or national - to develop strategies that promote regional development without its spending squeezing out private-sector growth. This is especially noticeable when we look at how middle-income jobs are distributed - in the big northern cities a far higher proportion of these jobs are public sector workers (teachers, social workers, local government officers and so forth). If the route to a decent living is seen to be via the public sector then people will choose that route.

Finally that point about housing construction speaks for itself.

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Robots are great and we need more of them to make stuff for us...

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I get ever more irritated by the bonkers notion that technological advance and improvement is a bad thing for the economy. You see it churned out all over, mostly (but not always) by the good thinking Guardian left. These folk just don't get it:

It's about technology taking jobs, about what it can and can't provide. Hoskyns quotes Jaron Lanier's new book Who Owns The Future?, in which he argues: "Capitalism only works if there are enough successful people to be customers." Lanier, a computer scientist and a musician, is rightly called a visionary because he sees what is happening, when everything is live-streamed but no one knows the name of the person who made the music any more. Content is free.

This is just plain daft. Free is good. We like free - not only is it a magic word but, more to the point, it's an improvement on 'costs so much only people such as Guardian journalists can afford it'. Now in one respect, Lanier is right but his emphasis is still on production rather than consumption. We aren't here to produce stuff, we're here to consume stuff - even if we love our fabulous creative industries job, that's consumption (we're eating up the pleasure).

So yes robots and digital wizardry will "destroy jobs" (this translates as 'makes things a whole lot cheaper because you don't have to pay wages') but all the while new playthings are being invented - think how many people are scraping an adequate living from creating stuff to make use of that digital wizardry, for example. And, so long as the idiot protectionist lefties don't get to control things, stuff gets cheaper so we don't have to work as hard as we do now to get the good stuff. Brilliant!

So no, it's simply not the case and never has been the case, that technical innovation is bad for the economy. Protectionism, subsidised overmanning and the refusal to embrace technology - that was what caused China's 500 year stagnation. And if we adopt the same approach, we will stagnate, there really won't be the jobs we need and future Suzanne Moore types really will be scraping by in some rat-plagued garret.

So let's grab that technology, let's get it working for us, let's shove aside the barriers - unions, business oligopolies, MPs and silly Guardian writers - and get the robots working. We'll all be richer, less frazzled by work and more able to have a bloody great time with the few years we get living on this wonderful planet.

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There is no moral basis for taxation...

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This isn't an argument against tax but a simple statement of fact. We pay taxes because we have to and, possibly, because we get some sort of benefit from the payment of those taxes. And in paying those taxes it is entirely proper for us to arrange our affairs so as to pay only the tax that is due and nothing more. I would add that it is for the tax authorities - and no-one else least of all parliament - to assess what we pay and determine whether we have complied with the rules parliament has prescribed.

If parliament believes that I do not pay enough taxes (and assuming that I am not guilty of evading taxes which is a crime) then parliament has it within its power to change the rules that determine how much tax I pay. None of this is about any sort of moral duty or responsibility. Taxation is merely expedient - the means whereby government secures the revenues that government needs to carry out its purpose.

It rather worries me that - for reasons of political opportunity rather than good government - politicians (aided by their friends and relations in the broadcast media) have decided to whip up some sort of mob, to conduct a sort of moral crusade targeted primarily at large corporations.

Why does it worry me? Quite simply because corporations - businesses of one sort or another - are what will lift us out from the ire of recession. It won't be government however much they wish to scatter the magic fairy dust from the basement of the Bank of England across the land. It won't be shiny new value-destroying railways, ridiculous floating airports or delving ever more tunnels under London (there is something wonderfully Swiftian about today's infrastructure schemes) that will provide that elusive growth.

Yet every politician is now dragged into condemnation of tax 'avoidance' - from committees of MPs asking impertinent questions of people who actually contribute to the economy (unlike those MPs) to cabinet ministers writing pleading letters to jurisdictions with tax regimes that have met with disapproval. All to pretend that somehow this attack will help make the economy better and, worse still, accompanied by words like 'evil', 'corrupt' and 'immoral'.

There is no moral basis for taxation - government imposes a levy on our incomes, wealth and expenditure because it can do just that. But this is not a moral act and seeking to reduce how much tax we pay is therefore not immoral. What we see in a ghastly ignorant mob egged on by politicians and other hacks who point at businesses and successful men crying: "look there, wealth and money! We should have more of that for us to spend. These people are moral pygmies for not paying more tax than they owe!"

And the business people are dragged before the media - the court of mob rule - and accused of what? Essentially of complying with the rules set down by parliament, the European Union and contained in solemn treaties between sovereign nations.

Put yourself in the place of those businesses - international in scope and purview. Do you decide to develop your UK business? Or do you go somewhere else? Perhaps China, Brazil or Indonesia - places where the government welcomes your acumen, investment, jobs and wealth.

There is so moral basis for taxation - saying so is stupid and damages our economy.

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Why we need immigration...

This isn't a plea for no rules or no controls but a reminder that the "we're full, stop anyone coming here ever again" brigade want to cut their nose off to spite their face. Here's why:

Low-fertility societies don’t innovate because their incentives for consumption tilt overwhelmingly toward health care. They don’t invest aggressively because, with the average age skewing higher, capital shifts to preserving and extending life and then begins drawing down. They cannot sustain social-security programs because they don’t have enough workers to pay for the retirees. They cannot project power because they lack the money to pay for defense and the military-age manpower to serve in their armed forces.

You have got that haven't you? Although the article is about us not having babies, it applies as well to us not letting people come to live here. If we are to suceed - to grow, to prosper, to keep up with the international Joneses then we need immigrants. Or more babies. Or both.

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Thoughts on tax from JFK...

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It's hard not to smile at the likely discomfort that this might cause for all those "progressives" who wish to tax anyone with slightly more income than average until their bones crack. Here's JFK on tax:

An economy hampered by restrictive tax rates will never produce enough revenues to balance our budget just as it will never produce enough jobs or enough profits… In short, it is a paradoxical truth that tax rates are too high today and tax revenues are too low and the soundest way to raise the revenues in the long run is to cut the rates now.

So there you have it "progressives", one of your saints believed that cutting taxes led to growth and higher tax revenues. And he is right. Go watch the whole speech.

If we want growth, we must cut taxes. It really is as simple as that. And not the cut taxes for one set of folk while raising them for others. Not the cut taxes and load it on to duty. Actually cut taxes - and if that means government has to do a little less, that the welfare system is simpler and targeted to the needy and that people take more responsibility for their own health, then so be it.

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Perhaps if they stopped to think of those less fortunate?

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Yesterday I reminded the world – or rather that small part of it reading my tweets – that raising taxes doesn’t create economic growth. It was a simple statement of fact – or that was what I thought. After all taxes are a cost rather than a benefit (which doesn’t mean the same as saying taxes aren’t spent on things that bring us benefit). And public spending – where those taxes go – is almost entirely consumption, no different in effect from me buying a new food processor or a meal out when it breaks down.


My mistake, of course, was to mention the dreaded words “economic growth” - forgetting that there are a group of ‘flat-earth’ believers out there who want economic growth to end. After all they’re fine doing stuff like this and earning (in terms of average global incomes) really good money:

Director of Shelf Life Strategic Sales, co-instigator of @thesourceleeds, verbal identity expert

This fine activity (whatever it all might mean) sits quite a long way towards the top of Maslow’s jolly pyramid. I’m sure clients benefit from the great insight but surely such folk realise that their creative and exciting industry exists as a consequence of economic advancement – we no longer need to work in back-breaking conditions regardless of the weather, we can be a “verbal identity expert”.

So what it is with these wealthy, privileged, educated people that makes them say things like:

…and economic growth for the benefit of the few and the detriment of the environment taxes us all in the end...

Do they simply not understand that economic growth benefits everyone – not least because the government has more money to spend on schools, hospitals and other public service wonders? I wonder why it is that their sweeping assumptions about growth – that they do not benefit from it (when their very industry is a consequence of that growth)?

Maybe the answer sits with that little word “environment”? These are the victims of the “Great Green Con”, the triumph of propaganda suggesting that economic growth threatens our very existence. In their oh so progressive world, “unbridled capitalism” is a thing of ultimate evil, gobbling up the resources of the planet and bringing us to the point of collapse.

And what is their alternative? It is hard to discern from under the pile of platitudinous slogans, from beneath the drifts of received wisdom but I think they want some sort of “steady state” economy where verbal identity experts can ply their arcane craft secure in the knowledge that the planet is safe.

In this world people will no longer indulge in exploitative binges of consumption (other than on the products benefiting from improved “verbal identities” I guess) preferring instead a simpler, lower impact life of allotment gardening, home knitting and shopping at craft markets for ‘home made’. Our “verbal identity expert” will eschew a car, refuse foreign holidays and look sneeringly as those terrible, common people for whom such things are a break from the tedium of a job less interesting that the development of “powerfully authentic, precisely accurate statements”. Jobs on farms, in factories, power stations and sewage works. Jobs in shops, banks and insurance companies, job making the things we need and providing the services we want. Jobs that generate enough value for the businesses to afford such indulgences as a “verbal identity expert”.

And further afield, we’ll see African and Asian subsistence farmers and unemployed slum-dwellers whose chance of advancement – from securing the benefits of economic growth – have gone because the “verbal identity experts” have had their way and stopped the growth. Men and women condemned to scrat in the earth, struggling to survive let alone afford the iPad our “verbal identity expert” takes for granted (or the 4x4 truck they really want – but our expert won’t approve of that either).

The argument for zero-growth, for stasis – whether couched in progressive, “capitalism is evil” terms or wrapped in a green coat – is one of the most offensive of all the indulgent philosophies of our educated western society. It captures “I’m all right, Jack” and builds it into an entire system, it is promoted by successful, high-income people and directs its attention to denying the poor the good things those people already enjoy.

Perhaps if they stopped to think of those less fortunate?

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Did we have employment land strategies during the industrial revolution?

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The body that 'represents' senior local council planners - the Planning Officers Society - has been having its say on the National Planning Policy Framework. And its main criticism is that without a grand strategy on "employment land" we won't get any economic growth. Or something like that:

"...new rules would create a weakening of stipulated employment land at a local level, due to the potential for building housing on land previously set-aside for businesses, according to the POS.

‘The basis for planning for housing has not yet been clearly thought through,’ it said.

‘A local reservoir of such land is essential to facilitate the growth of small and medium-sized enterprises, to provide … employment and to attract inward investment.

Apparently under these rules Jaguar wouldn't have been able to expand as the land would have gone for housing.

Remember folks that these are the people who think they can plan our futures! Heaven help us!

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The City without a government - and it works

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Introducing Gurgaon, one of India's fastest growing and wealthiest cities:

The city is only thirty years old and undergoing a growth spurt, so some problems are to be expected. The big picture, however, is that a modern city has been built from the ground up based almost entirely on private development, it is attracting residents and jobs and leading the country in economic growth. A remarkable achievement.

Meanwhile, we are stuck with the old model. A model that, if the growth of city region economies is anything to go by, isn't really working.
 
Worth a go?
 
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Perhaps the RTPI might like to provide some evidence that planning supports growth?

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As part of their "myth-busting" campaign the RTPI are banging away at the lunatic idea that somehow planning helps the economy:

However rather than act as a barrier, the planning system can positively contribute to the Government’s long-term plan for sustainable economic growth in the UK. 

For a minute I shall suspend credulity and give the planners a listen - after all, with all their vast resources, with all those planning academics, all those think tanks, they might just present some evidence in support of their contention. It appears that this is about it - a quote from the RTPI President is all the evidence they can muster:

“It’s not said often enough or strongly enough that planners will be essential to sustained economic recovery. If they are not involved buildings will be constructed without the necessary infrastructure, development will not be sustainable, our environment and heritage will be put in peril and our communities will risk becoming socially dysfunctional. Far from being the enemies of enterprise, planners are critical to business development and economic growth.”

Without the benign guidance of planners all civilization will end. And we won't get wonders like the Aire Valley Enterprise Zone which is apparently:

"...an area of economic underperformance, where the planning process is key to re-establishing the area as the economic heart of the City (e.g. through infrastructure provision)."

That's it - that is the totality of the planners' argument  - essentially that planning is good for economic growth because they tell us it's good for economic growth.

Planners don't "deliver" anything - they control the development process. And in doing this they act as a drag on that development. So the economic benefits that come from planning must outweigh this negative impact on development and the additional cost to business involved in running the planning process (a direct cost in fees, a cost in lost time and an indirect cost in higher taxes and land prices).

This isn't to say that planning isn't needed or that planners do not do something of value. But it is to say that, ceteris paribus, planning has a negative impact on growth. Maybe there is some hard evidence - so research rather than the opinion of a planner - that says I'm wrong but until the RTPI produce that evidence, I'll continue to believe what my eyes and ears tell me. That planning makes it harder to do business, harder to develop and harder to grow the economy.

....

A depressing thought for those who like the North...

From a conversation this evening:

All the professional jobs in the North are in the public sector or in businesses servicing the public sector. If you want a good job in the private sector you have to look in the South East

I don't know if this is entirely true - although a quick scan of jobs websites does show a real paucity of professional jobs outside London and the South East.

If this is true - and it could well be - then there's no doubt at all that the public sector continues to throttle the private sector, to push it aside. There has to be a way out from under this problem but I'm absolutely sure it isn't through resolutions of councils, through economic development strategies or through another round of regional initiatives.

Perhaps we should try a little less government?

....

See I'm right, planners do see the planning system as a brake on economic growth!

****

I commented the other day on how planning was ipso facto a brake on economic growth - whatever the President of the RTPI may say. Seems that the top planner from the Town & Country Planning Association thinks this too:

"The definition in today's announcement places economic growth as the driver, undermining the principles of sustainable development which sought to integrate economic development, environmental concerns and social justice.

There you have it folks - planning is bad for economic growth and when the Government (sort of) makes it less so the planners don't like it!

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Spotting the planning myth that isn't a myth...

The Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) are launching a campaign to dispel myths about planning. So says their President:

"We will shortly launch a major campaign to dismiss planning myths, like the myth that planning is a drag on economic growth, that it fails to address climate change, that it allows the countryside to be concreted over and that it is weighted in favour of saying ‘no’ to every planning application. You know and I know that these myths are simply not true"

Unfortunately for the President one of those myths isn't a myth at all - planning does act as a drag on economic growth. It might be desirable to exercise some control over development but that acts simply to add costs to the development process - ergo less productivity and less growth.

....

Planning system as a driver of economic growth? You don't really believe that do you?

****
It seems that "rural campaigners" are worried that the National Planning Policy Framework will be used to "drive economic growth" rather than protecting the environment:

Ministers must recognise the planning system’s vital role in protecting and improving the environment rather than just as a tool to drive economic growth, rural campaigners have warned ahead of a key Government announcement.

The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) said the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) natural environment white paper, due out early next week, must deliver for the whole natural environment, not just wildlife. 

The CPRE don't really think that the planning system - our biggest market distortion and barrier to business development - is there to promote economic growth do they?

....

Growth

Spring is on its way, things are starting to wake up from winter's slumber. From resting out the deep cold. Growth begins - in tiny ways at first with the shoots of snowdrops and daffodils poking up through last years dried leaves, with the little pink buds on the currants and with the pale signs of future flowers now visible on the rhododendron buds.

However, winter isn't over yet - February, the month of snow, lies between us and the full flowering of spring. It may not snow - we might have got our measure with that hard, tough month of snow and frost before the New Year. But I wouldn't count on it - they aren't called snowdrops for nothing!

I've spent this morning in the garden. Just tidying, trimming and checking stuff out - plus shifting another ten barrow loads of leaves to a place where they can rot unmolested. And I was struck by nature's ability to spring anew - fresh from what seemed a dead world. The rhododendron our neighbours hacked back almost to the ground has sprung shoots - plus one or two buds. The big copper beech is lighter, somehow feels happier for having its canopy lifted and the roses - pruned right back before the winter - are showing how they'll grow again bringing with that growth those glorious flowers.

In our mad, rushed, tangled urban lives we find the seasons inconvenient - for many they've been replaced with 'climate control'. With systems regulated to provide an even temperature all year round. So we step safely from unvarying office temperatures, to air conditioned cars and from there to hermetically sealed, temperature controlled homes. Technology has banished the seasons.

So when those seasons fight back - when the winter throws snow at us or the summer delivers a heatwave - we moan and grumble. It is so sad that we - little ants scratting on the surface of a huge planet - think ourselves so important that the audacity of nature takes us aback. Why have the government not done something, we cry! It's getting warmer - it must be man's fault, we are after all so huge, so important.

Nature will win, dear reader. She always does - we watch helpless at floods, droughts and snowdrifts trying to pretend somehow we are at fault. We are not at fault - although it is perhaps the vengeance of Caradhras that we are seeing in these things. Nature is putting us back firmly in our place, laughing in the face of our hubris.

And then blessing us with new growth. Magic.

....

A little on the glory of the garden....

****

After a day hacking. chopping, digging, mowing and trimming I feel rather better than I did yesterday. For sure most of my body feels like someone's been over it with a meat tenderiser but the garden now looks cared for - able to grow a little, to bud and to flower.

And the garden needs this care. After a week of so of letting it rip and few judicious cuts, a little reality for the burgeoning green stuff and termination for the weeds that get in the way of the garden's glory.

Nature does the good stuff - what I do is make it possible for that to happen.

.....