JULIA HARTLEY-BREWER
Thank God Labour is ripping up planning laws – Britain’s petty nimbys are stopping a much needed building boom
The pressures on housing are mounting and they aren’t going away any time soon
AN Englishman’s home is his castle.
But for most people hoping to get on the housing ladder these days, that castle is more likely to be a tiny one-bed flat with paper-thin walls overlooking a railway line, with a mortgage costing a third of their take-home pay.
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And not a turret or moat in sight.
Yet those first-time buyers are the lucky ones, as owning your own home is getting harder and more unaffordable every single year.
The reason for that is simple: Our population is growing but we don’t build enough homes and we haven’t done so for decades.
Why? Because Britain is a nation of Nimbys who cry “not in my backyard” at every planning proposal within five miles of their home.
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Indeed, we’re even worse than Nimbys. We’re actually a nation of Bananas: Build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone.
So we should all welcome Labour’s pledge to build 1.5million new homes over the next five years.
Deputy PM and Housing Secretary Angela Rayner is intent on ripping up the planning rules to override the objections of local people to force through major housing projects in every local authority in the land.
She's about to discover, just as the Tories did when they vowed to do the same, this will upset an awful lot of people.
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Remember when Kevin Costner’s character in the hit movie Field Of Dreams says: “If you build it, they will come”?
Well, in Britain, we do things differently: “If you build it, they will object.”
Angela Rayner struggles to explain how Labour’s housing plans will cope with 2.5m new migrants
But build we must — and not just houses. We need to build more of everything. We need more roads, more railway lines, more power stations, more reservoirs, more prisons, more hospitals, more factories, more airports...
You name it, we need more of them.
The trouble is, it’s very difficult to build anything here because, while most of us can agree we do need homes for people to live in, prisons to house criminals and power stations to keep the lights on, we don’t want any of those necessities built near us.
Meanwhile, eco activists have been able to use laws that absurdly (as Angela Rayner rightly pointed out) put the habitats of newts and bats above the rights of people needing homes to prevent any new infrastructure projects from getting off the ground.
It’s high time we all got behind government efforts to get Britain building
So it’s high time we all got behind government efforts to get Britain building.
The pressures on housing are mounting and they aren’t going away any time soon — from importing an extra million people to the country every year, to people living longer, marrying later and family breakdown, to name but a few.
Reap the rewards
Yet for decades, governments have focused their efforts on the demand side of the housing market, trying to boost the finances of first-time buyers with cheaper loans, rather than boosting the supply of homes to buy, which would inevitably bring down prices for everyone.
Truth be told, even Labour’s pledge — equivalent to 300,000 new homes a year — doesn’t touch the sides of our housing needs (not to mention the fact that no government in the past 50 years has managed to build that many homes).
We actually need a few million more homes, and they have to go somewhere.
Yes, we are already a crowded island but buildings cover only six per cent of our green and pleasant land.
And Labour are also right to say we need to build on parts of the green belt around our biggest cities, much of which isn’t green or pleasant at all.
The Nimbys, the Bananas and the newt lovers can shout their objections as loudly as they want
Julia Hartley-Brewer
A mass house-building plan wouldn’t just benefit those wanting to get on the housing ladder.
We would all reap the rewards of the jobs boom building projects would create; the cut in the £16billion annual cost of the housing benefit bill to subsidise renters; the lower mortgages and rents that would mean we’d have more money to spend on everything else.
Meanwhile, making it more affordable for couples to buy a bigger home and have more children could help with the looming demographic crisis of an ageing society.
The Nimbys, the Bananas and the newt lovers can shout their objections as loudly as they want.
But people need homes to live in and Britain needs to start building now.
How many more 'lessons'?
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THE heartbreaking story of ten-year-old Sara Sharif’s brutal killing – at the hands of her father and stepmother – has once again turned the spotlight on the people whose job it is to safeguard lives of vulnerable children.
The harrowing details of Sara’s life and death, suffering 71 external injuries and 29 broken bones, are hard for any parent to read.
Many of us choose to turn the page or turn off the TV to avoid them. But that is doing a disservice to little Sara and every other child in need of our help.
Her name has now been added to the long list of children – Victoria Climbie, Peter Connelly (Baby P), Star Hobson, Arthur Labinjo-Hughes – whose cruel deaths make the headlines.
But there are, sadly, many others we never know about.
There were 15 missed opportunities to prevent Sara’s murder.
From the day she was born to the day she died, there weren’t just tell-tale warning signs that Sara was in grave danger from her father Urfan Sharif.
There were huge billboards flashing neon red telling the world she was at risk.
Yet again and again, her evil father was given the benefit of the doubt by social workers, the police and the courts.
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How many times are we going to hear this story and say “lessons must be learned”, only to wait for the next child to be killed?
Surely one child’s tragic death is one too many?
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