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Here you will find the latest articles on urbanism, architecture, and the future of our spaces.
4 June 2022City VoiceUncategorised(0)
Nine months since the last consultation on the Oxfordshire Plan 2050 closed, there has been no
public progress on the Plan. This spatial plan for Oxfordshire is important because it will cover
development in the County for the next thirty years and will need to be approved by the City and
District authorities. NNGO is asking – what is going on?
Where is the project timetable?
A decision on the level of housing growth to be embedded in the Plan was initially due in December
last year. In January, it was said ‘officers are reviewing the work programme and timeline for the
Oxfordshire Plan … and we aim to conclude that review soon’.
There is still no published timetable.
What is the OP2050 team currently working on?
Where is the scrutiny? How much money is being spent on an OP2050 team that is working behind
closed doors?
How can they be developing a spatial strategy without agreeing the number of houses to be built?
Or, if they have decided on the level of housing growth already, why has this decision not been
made openly and transparently?
There have already been failings in the Councils’ Scrutiny process. Bringing the next version of the
Plan to councillors for sign off at the last minute, when the work has already been completed and
there is no realistic prospect of any amendments, is unlikely to be acceptable to Oxfordshire
residents.
How will criticisms of the growth options be addressed?
NNGO, together with other respected community groups, has criticised the figures being used to
dictate proposed housing levels and called for an independent Peer Review of last year’s housing
assessment, known as the Oxfordshire Growth Needs Assessment.
NNGO was told a decision on this would be taken after the summer 2021 consultation responses had
been reviewed. The response report was published in January but there is still no decision on a Peer
Review.
Meanwhile, an independent review by experienced housing market consultants, Opinion Research
Services (ORS), commissioned by Cherwell Development Watch Alliance, has reinforced fears the
methodology used does not stand up to scrutiny. It found:
“The unjustified use of adjustments made to official projections and the Standard Method together
with the lack of a conventional central economic forecast call into question the soundness of this
document as supporting evidence for the development of the Oxfordshire Plan”.
Planning for Real NEED not Speculator GREED in Oxfordshire
Coalition Secretariat, c/o CPRE Oxfordshire, First Floor, 20 High
Street, Watlington, Oxon OX49 5PY.
www.neednotgreedoxon.org.uk E: info@neednotgreedoxon.org.uk
Should there be a re-run of last year’s consultation?
NNGO would support a re-run of this consultation (known as a Regulation 18) with the public given clearer information and genuine choices about levels of housing growth.
What is the Future Oxfordshire Partnership (FOP) doing?
The FOP, made up of all our local authorities, is supposed to be in charge of this process through its Oxfordshire 2050 Advisory Group. However, questions to the FOP are deflected with meaningless statements. It has even failed to address the advice of its own Scrutiny Panel which said a project timetable, a peer review of the growth evidence and a new consultation were all needed.
The next FOP meeting is on 13 June. NNGO will once again be seeking answers to the above questions.
NOTES
The Oxfordshire 2050 Plan is the major long-term development Plan for the County. It will set the housing numbers and broad locations for growth and will be crucial in tackling our climate and biodiversity emergencies. It also needs to be in place so that District and City level plans can be agreed. NNGO supports the Plan in principle, providing it reflects the needs and wishes of local people, not an exaggerated growth agenda.
NNGO is grateful to you for your support in seeking clarity on important aspects of the Oxfordshire Plan 2050 (OP2050). NNGO feels that this Scrutiny Panel, like those of the City and Districts, has a crucial role to play in the OP2050 plan-making process.
However, as has happened in the past with the City and District Scrutiny Panels, we feel that this panel’s role is being undermined. A good example of this is provided by the response of the Future Oxfordshire Partnership (FOXP) to the Panel’s recommendation last month.
The recommendation was: That the Future Oxfordshire Partnership be requested to:
a. undertake a further Oxfordshire Plan 2050 Regulation 18 consultation.
b. provide a detailed update on the timetable for the production of the Oxfordshire Plan 2050.
c. initiate a peer review of the Oxfordshire Growth Needs Assessment.
d. set out how decisions relating to future housing numbers within the Oxfordshire Plan 2050 will be taken in an open and transparent way.
The response given by FOXP was:
As we have previously explained, these are matters for decision by the individual councils and not by the Future Oxfordshire Partnership itself.
The local planning authorities are currently reviewing the evidence base, the programme and the timetable of the Oxfordshire Plan 2050 in light of consultation responses and comments received.
Formal decisions will be taken openly in meetings of the city and district councils.
The whole point of the FOXP is that it co-ordinates the councils’ work on the Oxfordshire Plan 2050 via the Advisory Group. We already know that decisions will be made by individual councils, but the local planning authorities are working under the FOXP umbrella and we can reasonably expect FOXP to provide more transparent answers than this – particularly when the same questions have been asked repeatedly for months. We feel this response is indicative of the general attitude to this Scrutiny Panel which is merely to deflect major concerns with meaningless statements. We believe that this attitude undermines the value of the Scrutiny function that you perform.
It is obvious from the minutes of the OP2050 Advisory Group that a lot of work has been taking place including joint workshops between the Advisory Group and the Council Leaders, but little detail is provided. For example, why are these joint workshops taking place and what does the “six stage, step by step process to securing consensus” that is mentioned in these minutes refer to? And will the output of each of these meetings be published?
The lack of transparency being offered to this Scrutiny Panel is disquieting. We urge you to:
3 February 2023City VoiceUncategorised(0)
Philip Crawford (@Davis7Philip) is a leaseholder, investor, and (for over 30 years) professional manager of UK residential blocks – so he can see most of the angles.
Here he gives a snap, 15-line intro to the problems of leasehold. We are hoping he will develop this into a fuller article outlining the disaster scenarios which the present situation can give rise to – and how they need to be corrected.
#Leasehold101
Leasehold is a form of ‘limited ownership’ – for a term of years, after which all rights revert to the head owner.
The only exception is if the lease is ‘extended’, which will always be for a price.
This system of ‘ownership’ has been called ‘feudal’ – it is over 400 years old, and today needs urgent reform.
Five basic problems can be summarised:
1. Owners have no control of how the money that becomes their service charge is spent.
2. Property Management companies are not regulated. Regulation would make them accountable.
3. Management companies are often limited companies, thus have to follow the Companies Act 2006.
4. The government-funded Leasehold Advisory Service advises on the Landlord and Tenant Act 1985, not the Companies Act 2006.
5. The First-tier Land Tribunal is costly and generally not within the financial reach of average leaseholders.
There are other regulatory or ombudsman bodies, which lack either teeth or remit.
In a fuller article, I will discuss all these aspects, and horrific situations that can arise from them.
Philip Crawford – Property manager, leaseholder, investor
14 January 2022City Voiceartigos sf(0)
Mad Council Disease (MCD) is a bovine encephalopathy that affects some councils, sometimes unexpectedly, even when the body politic is apparently healthy and in possession of all its faculties.
It has to be guarded against – rather like thunderstorms, which can come unpredictably and require severe and strong channels in place to deal with them.
The idea of MCD striking suddenly should perhaps become part of the normal vocabulary for all discussion in and about the UK’s local councils.
The disease arises when about three or four factors intercept, interacting to create a perfect ‘storm’.
These factors are ‘legion’:
Because –
(i) so few people of the electorate oversee the process (only some 20% of the electors in a local council election actually take part and vote – so how much fewer of them actively oversee from the public arena?), and
(ii) elected councillors may tend to hold career officials in awe,
– as a result even a small combination of these factors can be fatal to common sense in a final decision.
Here is a possible partial list:
This 20%-vote factor means that the degree of active interest, supporting actual content of thought, feeling, or opinion about matters such as town planning or other spatial arrangement for which a council is responsible, simply get a minimal, almost zero or even negative, coverage from public opinion, and consequently its tools and/or media of expression.
The problem is that absence of robustness in so many of these processes can simply mean that the system does not have the necessary proteins, enzymes, immune system devices, processes, muscles, nerves, connection to the brain and indeed exercise of brain that are necessary for the council’s normal active health.
This is when a local authority decision is at risk of Mad Council Disease.
What is essential is that there should be
(a) knowledge, understanding and realisation by the public that this takes place;
(b) concern and determination among the public (even if only on the part of a few leaders) to reverse this situation when it arises; and
(c) widespread use of tools in this correction process: for this to happen, the tools have to be
(Trying to make this information commonplace and popular will be one of the aims of the site www.city-voice.org website when in full format.)
Typical bad cases
Some features of outbreaks include:
Defend your predecessors
Sometimes those responsible for enacting an idiotic and illogical action find themselves, rabidly, passionately, determinedly defending actions put in train by their predecessors, who may even be of a party that is ideologically their opposite – or they may be defending a decision that was made by some friend they had on the council two years previously (having perhaps committed to it at that time and lost interest in continuing to consider whether it is still useful or desirable).
Familiarity breeds Dilution of Conviction
Another departure from the need for permanent vigilance in terms of logic and good sense is because even when elected by and passionate about determinedly opposed lines of political thinking, the fact of having to work together on council committees to solve local, non-political problems, creates another vice:
– the Dilution of Conviction (DofC), in the interests of the Cosy Convenience of Working Together (CCWT).
In this syndrome, repeatedly, small errors of thinking, logic, persuasion, conviction, and even ethics are overlooked in the course of reaching consensus.
The result of this is that people gradually lose their political, artistic, architectural, town planning or other convictions – which were already fragile plants to cultivate – to the overweening drought represented by the need for consensus and “getting things done” in the day-to-day council business.
It is essential that:
(a) people should have conviction;
(b) there should be tough and determined fight based on those convictions;
(c) since the electorate are the overseers, the electorate should be conscious of these differences and clearly take part in voting for them, in larger quantities; and indeed
(d) the people in general should have artistic, architectural, design, or other spatial convictions, ideas and passions about town planning in the first place. To break the logjam represented by the absence of so many of these factors, it will frequently become essential for an individual, who may appear to be eccentric, to raise his voice in the extreme, over some issue regarding spatial design or use, to awaken the other participants – in a council, for example, or committee – to the need to actually discuss various positions of opinion on these matters.
Currently the danger is of these matters not even being raised or discussed – which merely contributes to the possibility of the transparent stream of careful architectural, spatial and planning thought being muddied and diluted into a great, mediocre, river, which floods along in an endless series of mediocre decisions.
Some examples
Here is a little list of just a few instances of Mad Council Disease, and their extremely deleterious results:
( – many of these recent cases, tweeted in @CityVoicEd)
Now in many of these cases you will say that it was the planning laws themselves that caused or enabled the inappropriate and damaging decisions.
This is true in some cases, or in part.
We need indeed to correct quite a lot of the planning law, and it seems that the recent proposed revision of the NPPF has not really achieved this.
One suggestion by the present author is that the whole basis of the law of town-and-country – spatial – planning should be reconstructed on the basis of a newly-recognised “human right”: the right for an individual to continue to have the same environment, unless that individual agrees.
This is proposed because the system at present has clearly not succeeded in protecting the right of the individual, the person, the citizen or a collective based on the citizen, as much as might be desired.
In this author’s opinion it is necessary to pull back the ring fence of permitted collective action extremely close to the individual, to set off a process in which the individual has to be involved and has to give an opinion on – and, effectively, approve – any radical, or even most large or even small-scale, changes.
– This means also a complete inside out reversal of the process of “development”. It will not be, in future, the “developer” who takes the initiative of apportioning value to a piece of land or a property, and proposing changes to it.
– It will be local individuals, grouped into street-sized units, perhaps, who will devise, dictate and plan changes to their environment. It is they who will hire developers, to do their will, rather than vice-versa.
This of course sounds extreme, but it is a suggestion to fend-off the increasing instances of #MadCouncilDisease (MCD) – to force decisions to be taken in a way that avoids MCD – since the present process has not satisfactorily provided the right outcomes.
Local people, local individuals, local initiative takers, local residents, a local council will devise individual initiatives for their locations, and put them into practice.
Local councils will have “design factories” available – for example to help local citizen-users devise, in terms of the artistic and technical experience of the architect, ways of putting their desires into effect.
But the desires will be theirs – of those citizens –not those of some outside economic interest which has identified the source of profit, and directs its action towards that aim and goal.
These ‘outside individuals’ have included councils themselves.
An example is the following case study:
( Case study 1 )
(Example (6) above): The Botley proposal by Vale of White Horse.
This was a proposal to rebuild not only the council’s own land, namely a slightly fading 1960s shopping centre, but by using the tempting process of compulsory purchase, to ‘enable’ financing of this by offering an apparently speedily chosen ‘developer’ the chance to make an unspecified, probably large, profit by redeveloping most of the surrounding existing community.
This had the adverse effect of seriously involving the anxiety of perhaps thousands of people, of whom approximately 1,200 actually wrote in a written objection – and suffered severe sources of anxiety, and the depression of seeing disappointment with the existing system of local councils taking shape under their noses in the form of a scheme of idiotic proportions and extreme lack of talent – as well as weird decisions such as demolishing a small old peoples’ home only to build another one (ditto for a church) – for about a year and half.
This involved several people who became community leaders – by default, due to need – exercising their own time on a hugely voluminous basis precisely to articulate campaigns against the developer’s weird plans.
Their time was not financed by anybody – they were supported by voluntary individual effort.
To be successful this calls for a process of speedy professionalisation in campaigning, vast use of individuals’ valuable time, and in general a process that broadly speaking is useless and wasteful for a large number of people.
Meanwhile, developers are financed by their own instinct for speculative profit – in which they have finely honed skills – which are ‘trained’ to act against the local interest.
This system simply cannot be a good system.
This was a case of Mad Council Disease. Due to two years’ passionate and sincere campaigning, the planning committee of the Vale of White Horse Council voted unanimously against the proposal put forward by its own majority party (Conservatives) – but only because their conscience was informed, and changed, by individuals, and
members of minority parties in the elected council, taking on huge burdens of work, commitment, passion, involvement and exercise of will – which should not rightly be the necessary component burdens of a local democracy.
If the council had never had those powers of compulsory purchase; if all town planning had, by obligation of law, to emerge initially from local communities where local means local – a completely different outcome would have resulted.
After the first attack of Mad Council Disease, what emerged in the second scheme proposed by the ‘developers’ was mediocre, once again cost-containing and profit-seeking, and in general doomed visually to be a failure before it began (a case of accept-anything-because-better-than-the-previous [‘AABP’?]).
An example of the cost-containing is: one of the campaigners at a public consultation-show for the second scheme spoke to the head of the development company, proposing,
(a) that shop fronts only a few yards back from a major highway were no better than “Kilburn High Street” and offered no sense of amenity to shoppers at that location – and that a different treatment (setback or arcade) should be given to that shop front area; and
(b) that since shoppers wish to be able to shop comfortably in the rain, there should be arcades – shelter from the rain – built in to the front of all the shop buildings – the solution adopted in many cities and town squares in Italy, in which pavements are arcaded (sheltered from rain and sun inside the ground floor of the shopping space), thus achieving some sense of distinction, quality, pleasure, joy of city-space-ness and other proper space amenities of a planned community space.
The developer’s CEO said, slightly smugly, and perhaps too rapidly: “Oh no, we can’t afford to give any arcade space – look at what that will do to our shop rental income”. The result was a scheme that was mediocre visually, in terms of use of space and in terms of inspiration for a new major city hub: this scheme that was fully and totally mediocre, by default, was approved, by default, simply because the entire community – planning committee, officers, local citizens, campaigners, and all potentially helpful and intelligent people involved – had simply been “worn down” by the enormity of the first scheme
and after its removal were willing to accept almost anything in its place [AABP syndrome].
Further, when this author asked ALL the 5 architects from the chosen office (MAKE, I think, correct me if wrong) whether they had read Jane Jacobs, not a single one them said they even knew who Jane Jacobs was…!! This is an extraordinary experience – diligent author could not believe his ears!
This is Institutionalised Mediocrity (IM) – another product in this list of casualties of proper administration.
Another side-symptom of #MadCouncilDisease.
CV_8912 MadCouncilDisease.docx
14 January 2022City Voiceartigos sf(0)
1 These ideas are from a person, “P*”, who has been a ‘campaigner’ since the 1970s.
He came up with them based on an instinctive emotion-legal reaction to four decades (!) of observing ‘protest’ – a matured and considered reaction which says:
it is really time we updated our culture to take into account
the mix of common law, equity (cue: indignation..) involved in citizens’ protest of all types.
‘P’ has some experience in wrestling with these legal thoughts –
– he wrote legislation (a Private Bill) that Mrs Thatcher voted for (in 1977) !
– In 1976 (?) he was imprisoned BY the House of Commons.
– In 1976, in a case which he brought in person, before a high court judge sitting in Chambers, he established locus standi for a ratepayer to sue the Greater London Council for building without planning permission (using cases provided by then top law professor Jeffrey Jowell) – perhaps quite a step for administrative law at the time…
– So his instinct may offer some idea maybe for something – be it only a nuance, an inflection ..
He says:
2 The factors below are reasons that aim to express in common law and equity why one protests.
– a ‘Defense’ (the actual legal term),
not some vague ‘statement of motivation’ to be spoken by the defendant appealing to emotion, mercy or some other piety. The emotion is already in the law, in our tradition and history: as Lord Denning so ably pointed out: “The Law is in the heart of the judges.”
Protest must always be argued to be LAWFUL.
– because by the principles of our country, it in fact IS..
In particular:
3 In the Law on public activity:
– A proposed principle for juridical/cultural convention on ‘opinion protest actions’:
I. Where there is (i) invasion of (a) public or (b) government space
– and (ii) no damage to property,nor assault
[the physical government-chartered plane of the Stansted 15 is a case of I. (i) (b) ] –
II. – then,
English custom, equity, history and liberty – and hence [if necessary, new,] common law –
require leniency and a charge no stronger than
‘invasion of public space contrary to regulations’
( – presumably punishable by, e.g., short community service ).
In detail:
Custom – because: in school we are taught the nobility of England’s historic protesters;
Equity – because: government property or enterprise may be of such a scale and power
as to be asymmetric related to the citizen;
hence equality of power for the citizen as party in any matter between them
requires an asymmetric right of the citizen to question / challenge;
History – because: our school history lessons foster and exalt tales of courageous protest;
Liberty – because: with the imbalance represented by the scale of government power today,
there must be a presumption in favour of an absolute liberty to protest
i.e. the ‘scale of that liberty is not strained’ – it is presumed specifically unrestricted.
(For the Stansted 15) the charge ‘endangering an airport’ should be rejected:
(a) because no danger was caused, and
(b) due to the common-law/equity principle that : the relative powers of the ’endangered’ interest
(a government, a large airport, rife with security staff) and the accused, were unequal and thus asymmetric:
hence there can be no ‘offence’ of ‘endangerment’.
While thos 15 protesters were being tried for an offense (wrongly) ‘related to terrorism’ (something for which the A-Gen gave consent), a similar number were arrested for lying in the road in Parliament Square, no less, this week, and released without charge –
– serving as an example of an appropriate treatment for this case.
4 ( Comments from an experienced HRights barrister: )
“Very good. Inequality of power . No harm, no damage. Right to be represented, heard. Standing up for international humanitarian and human rights, refugee law, International Conventions our government is violating.
Carry on. People, civil society space shrinking dramatically, less opportunities to be heard in equality. Home Office in shambles , unlawful deportations.
So good luck on this. Really pursue this. Interesting. (.. — Trouble is that lawyers as a bunch are not that progressive. You should focus on Doughty Street. Try people there. ) ”
FURTHER comments / argument:
What are the new phenomena that did not exist in more ancient common law situations?
6. i) The Suffragettes were the first cases of demonstrative civil disobedience in favour of public policy.
The fact of civil action to promote idealistic causes (not one’s own case) is a new phenomenon in law
– a new phenomenon in our history, and thus a matter for creation of common law.
6. ii) Disobedience ( or disturbance etc ) for an issue of policy is not motivated by personal gain, by aggression against another, by a desire to deprive another party of rights or liberty.
6.(iii) It is an infringement – a misdemeanour perhaps – of a different type altogether.
a – a noble one; and
b – one with a noble intention.
6.iv) SUBMISSION:
6.v) where noble intention can be proven,
the Cape of Malignity,
– the Cloak of Crimiiality,
must be lifted – and discarded – by the Court.
6.vi) For Authority to have recourse in these cases to allegation of
– for example, damage to property – as some kind of golden ideal of law,
6.vii) is, before the transparent throne of the Common Law, a puny, even cowardly, subterfuge,
6.viii) – an attempt to punish and disguise idealism and statement-of-desire-about-policy
under the guise of malicious intent to damage property or disturb the peace for its own sake.
6.ix) Those who seek to damage or disturb the peace for gain or personal animosity,
or for simple lack of discipline, or aggressive intent, yes shall be coerced by the Courts.
6.x) Those who put stability temporarily at very minor risk for a greater cause,
6.xi) for an ideal of public policy which they believe, or which can demonstrate is
not being heard in the normal channels of democratic submission, debate and discourse
– something that if and when accepted might even be accepted by history as valid or needed..
6.x) – these defendants are free of the odium of acting against the Law.
They are free of the taint of illegality in its normal sense
6.xi) They are acting in favour of the Law (though by technically unlawful means. !
They are, indeed, acting in favour of Law – a principle even higher than ‘the Law’.
In favour of lawfulness itself –
Hence,
6.xii) Their offence can only be at worst a misdemeanour.
6.xiii) If indeed they have infringed a public law of heavier import,
such as requirements for security from attack
(the case of airports and a temporary context of terrorism)
then yes the courts should make all aware that this is not to be tolerated
– but only in proportion to the degree of the vexation caused.
6.ix) Also: if in the situation the security is so lax that mere wire cutters give access
then the importance of that security cannot be very great
and this goes importantly to proportionality in the punishment.
6.x) Also if the access is to (for example) a plane that is
(perhaps inequitably, in their argument) doing wrong,
– for example to prevent a government ( a LARGE ORGANIZATION )
from causing loss of life
then the act is an act of public safety
6.xi) then – a principle of law – (in all these circumstances)
the scale of their misdemeanour must be mitigated by the Court.
6.xii) If the A-G, for example, sends an order saying
“try them under a law that will hang them”,
then the instruction of the A-G
must be mitigated (by the court) in the light of the circumstances of the case.
7) The point about that this argument is that it comes ‘from the heart of the litigant’
– someone who by chance has experienced first-hand
the rolling ineptitude of large systems in promoting failed plans;
the frustration that evil or incompetent plans are afoot
and the existing authorities are deaf or unable.
7a. In these circumstances the citizen must act, and in acting must be pardoned.
7b. And in his reaction there is equity, and common law, and .. justice –
– A particular type of justice that aims to promote the interest of the small against the large,
the weak against the strong, the individual against organised large-scale power, the citizen … against government.
“This is the law.”
And every new case, now, is a great moment to build it !
Ends
14 January 2022City Voiceartigos sf(0)
Response to GOV.UK ‘feedback’ request after responding to OxCam Arc survey
Question 1
“ – Whether I have sought information elsewhere and if so from whom”:
Answer:
My sources of information are primarily all the noble campaigners whom I see on Twitter or as contributors to City Voice Website.
Question 2
“- Any other comments?”
Answer:
The impression from these sources is that the forces behind the OxCam Arc idea are:
(1) developers and other businesses that see it solely as a source of profit
(2) local auth chiefs in cahoots with these developers (the so-called LEPs and Growth Boards are precise examples of this unsatisfactory alliance;
(3) certain hidey influencers such as the Universities (heavily invested in the land between Ox and Cam and looking for planning gain;
(4) – and lazy government thinking.
– and that all this has nothing to do with proper planning.
Further exacerbation is that I hear from a member of the Public Accounts Committee that the reasons why the Establishment
– and there clearly is one, just above described and further including complacent MPs and Ministers –
wishes to concentrate on development here in the SE where growth productivity and wealth are already good, is that:
“it’s easier to get funding from Whitehall
for areas that are already growing !!!!!!!!!”
Excuse the thousand exclamation marks: the purpose of planning and new development must in high proportion be developing and channelling growth and influence to the LESS developed areas
– the North etc –
– where INATTention by Westminster strongly caused the Brexit vote = dissatisfaction with status quo.
All this is OBVIOUS to Man in Street.
WHY WHY is it not obvious to Man in Whitehall ?
We can only dare to assume: (blinkered / corrupt / lazy ).
Someone has to say these sharp things and I am happy to do so.
But will not waste time polishing my text until someone replies to me and tells me I am being listened to.
Then you must also please invite to Whitehall STELLA STAFFORD and ROSIE PEARSON, Chris Church, Steve Dawe, Peter Jay, NNGO, Friends of the Earth, and (just as an example) all the people you will see corresponding about planning on @CityVoiced (Twitter).
THAT would be a start of public consultation, and these people will guide you further on biodiversity, etc etc etc.
DO IT NOW please
editor@city-voice.org @CityVoiced 07866 470 409
14 January 2022City Voiceartigos sf(0)
“If London was built to the same density as Milton Keynes it would cover East Anglia – this is precisely what worries many of us”
– Stella Stafford was transformed by events from being an author of cosy fiction into a campaigner – dealing with brute fact – or at least weird proposals.
The one she came up against first was the #AllegedOxCamArc – the proposals for an “expressway” and 1,000,000 houses between Oxford and Cambridge
“THE ARC” AND OTHER THOUGHTS ON HOUSING (and profit)
The “Arc” project is one that was never intended to be of any useful value to anyone except investors and developers.
To be fair to its devisors, the veil of pretence about why this area has been ‘chosen’ has always been very thin: see this excerpt from
(https://www.nic.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Partnering-for-Prosperty-Report.pdf …)
If we look at the area on Google Maps it doesn’t exactly look like an ‘economic heartland’ of industry and scientific research establishments. It’s quite clearly mainly greenfield
The Arc is now expanding its mythical status even further. It now encompasses Bucks, Berks, Beds, Cambs, Herts, Northants, Oxon and Swindon and has its eyes on East Anglia. The number of houses projected for the area seems to continue to rise. I am now hearing possible totals of between 2M and 8M. This is ludicrous.
Here you can see a tweet from this month (Jan 2019) from Christopher Price, Director of Policy and Advice at the Country Landowners Association (CLA) who has attended one of the vast proliferation of conferences and meetings on the Arc.
TWEET : Christopher Price @CLAChristopher Replying to @stephhilborne
I spoke at an event on [The Arc] a couple of weeks ago and it was much the same, no interest in impact on climate or biodiversity – just the needs of overseas investors.
If the CLA feels like this, surely this says something truly terrible about the whole project.
It is in the project’s own publications that you can find most of the evidence against both the existence of the entire Expressway and the Arc Project itself. They are, in general, Excessively Good Spin so they are awfully hard to read and the worst facts are all buried in later pages under the ‘eco friendly’ sections – so you have to read the whole thing.
This is the document that the Chancellor’s announcement in Nov 2017 was based on. There are many, many documents on the Arc/Corridor/Lozenge going back for many years. Also quite a few subsequent to this one. (and yes, they have misspelt Prosperity in the web reference, it’s the only funny thing about it) is here…
https://www.nic.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/Partnering-for-Prosperty-Report.pdf …
Then there are the original Expressway documents like this one which is from before the Arc document above.
This gives info like these two diagrams, again RIGHT AT THE END.
Lots of spin on top of course:
Ox Cam Expressway is the best Spin name EVER for an M25 bypass.
Until I found this document I was COMPLETELY baffled at their claims of saving half an hour between Oxford and Cambridge since it is only 88 miles and we have speed limits in the UK.
But if one realises it starts much further back at Chieveley and refers to freight traffic it becomes slightly more likely.
Even so it will never reduce journey times.
1) More roads -> increased traffic, proven in many studies.
2) It is the usual disastrous combination of local bypasses, which means lots of entries and exits AND a long distance road.
As can be observed any normal day on the A34 every single junction causes a jam reducing speeds to 0 to 20mph for several miles.
On the M4 near Reading one can add several crashes at junctions every single morning.
The local roads Ox-Cam (as if the Expressway was anything to do with travelling Ox-Cam but let’s pretend for a second) actually move quite well.
3) It is the LAST bits into Oxford, Cambridge, Bedford, Milton Keynes etc where everything jams.
The Expressway will make PRECISELY NO DIFFERENCE to this.
Especially as its real purpose is to divert traffic including lots of heavy lorries from the M25 for traffic from new Heathrow Terminal 3 and also up from Southampton that is travelling North.
It is also, naturally, going to be the way to bring heavy construction vehicles, heavy construction materials in to build AT LEAST 1M unnecessary houses on Greenfield sites (NO Local demand for these, not even on the Gov’s own figures, esp their revised figures) and then there will be 2M extra vehicles. Outcome disastrous before even starting.
On top of which we already have the M11, M1, M4 and M40. If you look at a map of motorways in the UK you will see our area is NOT as the documents say, motorway-short, it is already POSITIVELY CRAMMED with them.
It will also make no difference to the M25, which has to be the best counter-example ever to the idea that bypasses in any way speed up travel or decrease traffic flow in the places they bypass.
There are excellent statistics on the number of new homes that HAVE BEEN COMPLETED to add to Government figures from the last census (unfortunately 2011 which is rather a long way ago now) then NHBC have figures for all the ones they insure.
They only insure homes from LARGE sites SO, as they say themselves, assume their figures are 80% of actual total.
THUS take their total, divide by 4, multiply by 5 and you should have the correct one. e.g. http://www.nhbc.co.uk/cms/publish/consumer/Media-Centre/Downloads/Q3-Stats-2018.pdf …
This is just for the 3rd quarter of 2018.
If the number of new homes completed is added to the figures from the 2011 census then 27.4M homes is approximately where we are now.
This is ample for a population of 66M especially as over 20% of them have 4+ bedrooms.
The Resolution Foundation has good statistics too although they can’t do percentages. (Note that there hasn’t been a 30% increase in UK Residents owning more than one home. It’s a 44% increase). If 5.2M UK residents own AT LEAST one more home then at least 20% of the total homes available are owned by people who own another home. This is an enormous percentage. Most of these will not be in long term rental by families as a first home but either empty or in very short term lets. https://www.resolutionfoundation.org/media/press-releases/21st-century-britain-has-seen-a-30-per-cent-increase-in-second-home-ownership/ …
This is before adding corporate ownership of dwellings and the number owned by non UK residents.
These houses are not being used as long term lets.
Very good reasons for this.
1) long term renters are hard to remove
2) AirBNB style lets pay a lot of money
3) if you have a mortgage on the house you can ONLY rent it out short term. The proportion owned by non UK residents is now so high that the design of new homes is being changed to appeal to the non UK resident buyer, who is buying from Artists
Impressions in general as they are totally absent from the entire procedure. Most investment buyers are totally absent from the entire procedure.
A whole new business of firms who manage investment buying for short term letting has sprung up everywhere. Imagine how what a wonderful opportunity this is for developers, people who pay well over the local premium price and buy from artist’s impressions and sales brochures on estates of homes where only ONE home is ever inspected by the local planning inspectorate.
The disastrous rise in investment property sales is now making the price of new homes completely separate and far higher than second hand ones. Even in areas of depressed employment and falling population like Watchet in Dorset has much smaller, inferior houses to the ones in old Watchet being built on the cliffs. They were much more expensive than the second-hand ones.
Barton Park Oxford is being developed by Barton Oxford LLP. See Companies House for details of this company, it is half Oxford City Council and half Grosvenor Homes. Look at who used to own the land (greedy landowner???)
SO….you would think that the houses on this site would be a reasonable price? Far from it. Surely nobody local would buy a 1 bed flat at £377,000 that is directly on the Eastern Bypass (not more than a few yards away despite artist’s impressions). Or a 3 bed terrace at £675,000.
OCC claim that they have to sell the new houses at these prices they are now because they are going to use the profits to build ‘truly social’ houses on 42% of the site. You can get entire houses in Barton for the price of a 1 bed flat and much nicer houses in Headington for the price of a 3 bed terrace.
Quite where all the AirBNB-style clients (not being used for 90 days, no one to enforce this, full time rental) COME FROM is a mystery to me.
Unfortunately current low interest rates do mean that property investment is a much better option for people with savings and there are lots and lots of agencies to help them and the developers don’t even bother to pretend anything else anymore.
See : https://sevencapital.com/development/graven-hill-apartments/
Also see Leon Towers, Croydon.
Here you can buy a 1 bed 27 m sq flat for £338,000. OR if you buy it via an SHA it will cost £304,000 and there is a subsidy of £30,000. These blocks are described as ‘decadent living’.
The minimum salary required to get one of these SHA flats it is £35,000 to be allowed to get a quarter share mortgage, plus paying 3/4 in rent and paying a service charge, and it’s leasehold so the value of the freehold remains in the developers possession.
You also need a £15,000 deposit and if you have a baby you have to move out because SHA rules mean that would be overcrowded.
I looked into SHA houses near me about 6 years ago.
They were overpriced: you needed a quite high income to get one, like this, and the rules and regulations were extremely restrictive after purchase. It was a lose–lose offer when there were very nice second hand options in the nearest town that you could have got a better value house with the same deposit.
The salary that you need to get ‘affordable’ housing is usually now in the top 25% of local incomes, and this is to get a mortgage on a quarter share.
Here is Oxford City Council (average salary in Oxford: £26,000) saying who they think ‘affordable’ housing should be for: yes, middle professionals earning £40,000. It’s just a measure of how detached house prices have become from reality due to purchases for property investment and not as first homes >> :
Other matters of concern are:
New Homes Bonus payable to local authorities for many years after they give planning permission for more houses but only available for houses built on greenfield sites;
Help to Buy – available for current houseowners as well as first time buyers and up to a limit of £600,000 but only on New Homes;
S106 payments – only paid for dwellings which are built on land which should not be built on, like farmland say;
the fact that many obligatory payments or community constructions like S106 are never paid or constructed due to the extraordinary inability of developers to make profits – indeed they are now trying to evade these conditions even before getting planning permission, (see photo below with ref to the much publicised Northern Gateway to Oxford project);
the fact that planning departments have been reduced to almost no staff;
the willingness of councils to find ‘exceptional circumstances’ in applications for 1000s of houses on greenfield sites because (and it really is now at this ratio) 1 in every 9 will be ‘affordable’ while the rest are ‘totally unaffordable’;
planning inspectors recommendations after inquiries being disregarded by local authorities as if they were some sort of minor peccadillo (see Essex Garden Cities)……
On top of every other objection
to the Arc / Corridor / EconomicHeartland / Expressway schemes there is ….
Climate Change which is being totally ignored. We can’t afford to lose more greenfields. Greenfield sites are not just somewhere to be removed from ‘rich landowners’ and converted into tarmac and concrete. They are where everyone’s food is grown, everyone’s water is collected and stored from rainfall, everyone’s oxygen is regenerated by trees, and other green plants, and everyone’s local wild ecology lives.
The truth is that despite Professor Rae’s claims in last year’s report (see note at end*), which was based on complex and misleading nomenclature and definitions, we do not have any greenfields to spare in the UK and the area of Grade 1, 2, and 3 farmland where most food is produced is also only a small proportion of the UK landscape.
Despite the claims of Garden Settlement enthusiasts it is impossible for Garden Settlements to be self-supporting without forcing most of the inhabitants to lead a medieval existence of subsistence farming.
Even then the amount of land required to achieve this would be massive and the life that was led by the inhabitants would be very hard and very basic survival.
Blue sky concepts like hydroponic growth inside buildings are energy consuming and have similar problems of tending and caring in reality especially as they also require all the nutrients to be imported, presumably from the fields that were destroyed to create the development?
Natural soil nutrients are created from fallen leaves, dung and dead bodies. Even then to produce enough food for everyone to eat this requires the addition of fertilizer.
No garden settlement in the UK has yet produced any commercial food output despite many of them being in existence for 60 or more years.
We also have to consider the following fact:
We cannot grow arable crops that humans can eat on most of the earth’s surface.
To feed people, the crops that do grow in many places already have to be processed through animals. In the UK 90% of Wales, 90% of Scotland, 70% of Northern Ireland is only able to support Livestock or Sparse. The areas called the ‘wheat belt’, i.e. those where many arable food crops grow, are moving towards
the poles at 160 miles per decade. As they move south in the Southern Hemisphere they will rapidly be in the sea, in the North, as they move north, they will soon be in areas with steep slopes, rock and/or very thin soils. This can’t be corrected. As climate change accelerates the movement will accelerate. https://e360.yale.edu/features/redrawing-the-map-how-the-worlds-climate-zones-are-shifting …
CLIMATE AND ECOLOGY; WATER AND SOIL
Modern building methods are not like traditional ones.
They rip all the topsoil, all the trees, all the plants straight off the site with huge heavy plant machinery because this is fastest and cheapest.
The topsoil and trees store and control the local water supply. Tarmac and concrete do not. The rain either runs off rapidly to cause floods elsewhere, vanishes down drains or stands uselessly without soaking in. Without topsoil and trees the results will be both droughts and floods.
Topsoil and trees store all the things that create the local biodiversity. Roots, seeds, plants, bulbs, minibeasts, hibernating minibeasts, hibernating small mammals and reptiles, larvae, eggs, fungi, spores, the type of soil they all need to thrive and grow, the type of trees they need to thrive and grow, the type of plants they need to thrive and grow.
It is absolute nonsense to suggest you can ever even replace the destroyed biodiversity in that place, let alone increase it. Regular walkers will tell you that each small stretch of their walks has different plants, different wild flowers and with these go different insects, different small animals. You cannot develop the site and then even replace these. You certainly can’t stick two saplings in for every mature tree and claim you have increased biodiversity. It is foolish and ignorant to suppose you can and it is also inexcusable. Similarly you cannot put two saplings ‘somewhere else’. There is nowhere else that matches that geological strata, that height above sea level, that rainfall, that climate, that particular topsoil and trees which contain all the elements needed to produce that particular biodiversity. In any case where are you going to put it? You can only put it ‘elsewhere’ by destroying the biodiversity that is in that place in the first place. You certainly can’t replace it with a money payment. Of course none of this applies to the Expressway or the Arc as they are National Infrastructure projects ‘of vital importance to the country’. (!!!!) So they don’t even have to pretend to replace or increase the biodiversity. Even without climate change, the current disastrous loss of insects, the loss of birds and fish and, indeed, every living thing, this destruction of nature would be appalling. As it is it is rash and foolish in the extreme. Topsoil takes 10,000 years to replace, trees 50-500, that particular local ecology can never be replaced.
HISTORY and IRONY
I started looking into all this after the November 2017 budget because I was so angry that this was being imposed without enquiry or local consideration. I heard a Cherwell Councillor on the radio celebrating after the announcement. She was saying words to the effect that they were already building lots and lots of houses in Cherwell so lots and lots more wouldn’t matter and how honoured they had been to have secret discussions with NIC for months and months and how super it was that Cherwell had been ‘specially chosen’ (together with every other local authority in the Arc one would surmise).
A year later I continue to be staggered by new discoveries about the depth to which everything connected with property development has now sunk.
For example the ‘gentrification’ of cities by the forced eviction of 100,000s of people who are at salary levels which cannot even allow commuting. It is completely extraordinary. urbantransformations.ox.ac.uk/blog/2018/challenging-the-gentrification-of-council-estates-in-london/
After a year’s investigations I am now sceptical about putting social housing back into the hands of the local authorities and giving them powers of compulsory or other land purchase, especially as there is not a shortage of houses but a price crisis. Compulsory purchase of existing investment properties that are only being used for very short term lets or are lying empty would seem to be a much more effective strategy. The other solution that would be fairly instant and very effective would be to impose a tax of around 10% of the value on all properties not in use as first homes (i.e. the main dwelling of a family, not first time homes). These can either be first time owner occupied or first home long term rented, i.e. for periods of at least 1 year. Clearly given the number of property investors this would be unpopular but it would either reduce house prices to levels that people who wished to live in them could afford
or else it would raise a lot of tax which could be used to fix the housing problem.
In reality I suspect that the only hope to prevent more and more greenfields being destroyed for short term profits is if the house price plummets. It’s happened before. https://www.irishtimes.com/life-and-style/people/weekend-read-the-ghost-estates-that-still-haunt-ireland-1.3181498 …
How much land in UK is built on (etc.)?
Professor Rae’s much quoted report had correct results for the definitions he was using. However both the nomenclature and the definitions were complex and misleading and thus led to errored conclusions by people who had not read the actual details.
Not surprisingly, once you read the actual definition, the UK has less than 0.5% ‘Contiguous Urban Fabric’. See the below definition.
This does not mean it does not have huge areas of urban development.
15% of the South East and 11% of England is already developed.
Who owns the land ??
– and the logic of what it’s worth
Yes, certainly the colleges DO own most of the land from Oxford to Cambridge.
It certainly used to be true that you could walk from Ox to Cam without leaving land owned by St John’s College. But they are by no means the only one.
On top of that, there are various other charities (like Ewelme Charitable Trust) and large estates like the Vernon’s estates at Steeple Claydon.
I suspect this may be another reason for choosing this swathe of land for the “Arc”: the whole area tends towards tenant farmers rather than people who own their own farms.
The tenants have almost no rights in cases like this even if their families have held those farms for hundreds of years. It is very sad.
The income from a tenant farm and the value of farmland are very low compared to being the Dukes of Westminster and having development land with property tenancies.
I can see the £s in front of their faces, think how much they could borrow against a whole lot of development land. For I suspect that if they can stop the Local Authorities making a compulsory purchase grab for it they will not give up the freehold but hold on to it, thus getting property value lease rents instead of farmland. And even if it is compulsory purchased they can all close their expensive-to-run estate departments down. All short term £s and ps these days. No looking ahead.
However the ENTIRE Arc project relies on some very false logic
1) Development land in Cambridge/Oxford itself is in very short supply and very high demand because in both cases it surrounds a beautiful tiny city and yet in a lovely rural area. So development land multiplied up to an acres costs £6M per acre compared to farmland at say £20K max per acre.
2) – So if we make hundreds of square miles MORE of it into development land, right out into far cheaper property areas like Milton Keynes and Bedford, provided it is joined on to Ox and Cam at each end then it will STILL all be worth £6M per acre and we will be RICH
3) – and when Oxford and Cambridge have vanished into a huge urban conurbation of acres and acres of brand new tacky houses and all the countryside has gone and the medieval centres are miles from any countryside it will STILL all be worth £6M per acre…….
………AH!!! Maybe not…..! I don’t know at what point they will realise this problem.
Unless of course they can continue to fool absent investors into thinking they are buying houses in either Oxford or Cambridge.
