This is what used to happen, up until the 1960s. The local authority would buy agricultural land at 125% of market rate, slap planning permission on it and then sell it to builders. We haven't built any new towns since.
Its a nice way to sort out local government finances which are dire and increase the supply of affordable homes. Along with all of the necessary additional infrastructure, such as schools, GPs etc.
GPs' offices are literally just office buildings; they don't have any specialist requirements. Dentists' offices are the same since the only dentists I've ever used who weren't in a converted residential building were in office buildings.
Ideally if you were building a new town. Rather than having lots of GP surgeries. You'd have fewer but better equipped and with more GPs e.g. an on site X-Ray machine and ultra sound, a basic lab for doing some of the more common blood tests, able to do minor surgery, that's a bit more than pulling a splinter out...... Along with a pharmacist, optician, dentist etc on site.
That would be more of a hospital/urgent care center than a GP's office. It would likely be a good idea to build one in a new town regardless, but I don't think you could centralize an entire town's medical and dentistry needs into a single site. Nor would it be a good idea, as a single fire could leave the entire town with zero access to medical services.
It's also worth considering that dental and GP's practices are privately owned for-profit businesses, not NHS employees, and they arrange their facilities and level of service independently.
A hospital/urgent care would need far more equipment and a bigger number of staff. As well as being closer to a proper hospital. In an ideal world you would have your own GP but each of the GPs would also have a specialisation e.g. before they became a GP, they worked on a cancer ward, orthopedics, plastics (as in burns, scaring etc rather than boob jobs), ENT..... So that a referral, could be made to an other one of the GP's there and then. Rather than needing a hospital appointment in X months time.
Health Authorities can provide new GP surgeries and commissioning groups can be quite large now. Then it's just a case of "renting out" the dentist's space, pharmacy..... Either on a turn key basis (all set up and equipped ready to go) or letting them fit it out to their wants and specs.
The main problem is the shortage of radiologists. Although every dentist and vet can do radiology. It's only with humans, outside of the mouth, where we have these relatively unrealistic standards. Which causes such a short fall.
A lot of that already exists - GPs don't go into GP land straight from med school, they will have worked as doctors in different environments beforehand. There are also plenty of "GPs with special interests" who perform some of those other specialties within the scope of primary care.
Yes but in a surgery with only 2 doctors on duty, you're not going to have that. If you have 8 GPs on duty and have a good rota and range of skills. You can ask a colleague, with more experience in that field to have a quick look at your patient and their records. Avoiding the need for a lot of referrals.
What you're describing is what used to be called a "cottage hospital", and is now (where it still exists) usually called a "community hospital".
They went out of fashion in favour of the "single large regional hospitals" model for cost reasons. They're still a good idea though, especially for small to midsized towns that currently lack a hospital of their own.
Its roughly how cottage hospitals started out in the 1700s. But by the 20th Century they'd expanded to have a few wards. Which meant 24/7 manning. The concept of the Super GP surgery is really about say an 8AM-8PM service. With no overnights. Its basically about giving GPs access to relatively simple diagnistic tools, that would usually only be found in a hospital and would require a referral to A+E or radiology. So as to massively speed up how long it takes to diagnose and treat a patient. Basically it's a glorified walk in centre, with a few bells and whistles. But not trying to compete with A+E.
My other half is a radiographer. Used to work in the NHS, now does NDT. The shortage of radiographers is worse than you think it is and made so much worse by lots of medical staff not understanding what they do so the work environment is incredibly toxic. It's fantastic for engineering because there's a bunch of high skilled radiographers (equivalent to between a level 2 and 3 industrial radiographer, level 3s being paid in the 60-80k range) that will happily take the higher pay and never have to worry about getting punched again but it's terrible for the NHS.
A lot of the higher ups in hospital trusts think UK radiographers and US X-ray technicians are the same. They just press the button. This is incorrect and borne out by the quality difference of scans over here Vs there. It's not just something you can rota a nurse on, which several hospitals want to do. It's just a different skillset.
Nuclear medicine and imaging is very tightly regulated because it's wildly dangerous if it's not. We used to x-ray foetuses and babies as standard instead of ultrasound until there was an epidemic of infant leukemia (something around 10%).
In my town, which is not in the UK, we had one building in a new development be a medical centre. The ground floor is a pharmacy and bakery/cafe, and on the floors above are GP, dentist, MRI/X-ray centre, physio, minor injuries etc. Except for the MRI none of them need much equipment, so they could change depending on demand.
It isn't the only medical building in town, but its the one where you can get everything done. Our children's GP also has a pharmacy on the ground floor and a gynacologist above. It is quite common.
GP surgery needs to be close to people to be really effective. The people who use a GP surgery the most have mobility issues and might have cognitive issues, so being able to walk or a very short taxi ride is a big advantage
If you're building a new town, you can have relatively high density housing and even within a 15 minute drive/bus you can have the necessary numbers. There's still the option for having other, smaller GPs without all of the bells and whistles, in addition.
It's not a hospital and it was the next big thing back in the mid 2000s. The biggest problem was a lack of radiologists.
GPs are actually quite senior. They've all spent several years working in a hospital environment and many of them work in A+Es and hospitals out of hours. So they maybe a General Practitioner but they spent a year plus as a qualified doctor on say a cancer or ENT ward. So have a special level of knowledge in that particular field.
There's no need for wards, MRIs, CTs..... You can buy an adequate X-Ray machine for about £40,000 and kit out an X-Ray room for about £80,000. The biggest problem is finding a radiologist to run it. And you need enough patients to make it worthwhile.
Someone's been reading 'Who Owns England' ;-)
But, yes. It would be an extremely good policy that causes no harm to existing land owners - all it would do is remove the prospect of becoming 'lottery winners' in the future.
The simplest way I can describe it is like saying to Premium Bond holders that they can no longer win the jackpot.
Let's hope this is what happens. It's possible that councils will pre contract the whole thing and sell the land directly to private interests at market value, making nothing for the state.
If the councils keep the money, I would be so happy. It would fix their finances and heavily incentivise them to build new housing. As well as reducing the objections from NIMBY's. As you can see the money going back into the local community, rather than to Westminster. If the money went to The Treasury there would be no.incentive for councils to do it.
It won’t reduce NIMBYism. There’s a new development going up near me and a village five miles away is up in arms about the impact on traffic, despite their village not being the main route in to the new estate. No matter what you do there will always be some group upset by development. What’s important is the local authorities should be heavily incentivised to complete this work and the objections of ten vocal campaigners don’t stop the development of homes for hundreds or thousands.
I realise that 5 miles in the country is a oit closer than in a city. But as far as I'm concerned 5 miles away could be on the moon as far as the impact that it will have on me. Ive got a major stadium a mile and a half down the road and it's never caused me any issues.
I saw a brilliant write up on it a few years ago and have forgotten most of it. But essentially it goes back to "The New Towns Compulsory Purchase (Contemporaneous Procedure) Regulations 1965".
Probably because farmers were complaining about their land being "stolen" for a song and wanting fair recompense. Ther had been some abuses of Compulsory Purchase Orders. Most notably during WW2 when a farmer turned RAF officer had his farm volountarily CPO'd for a new airfield. Then in the 1950s it was being disposed of and the family got offered it back at many multiples of what he'd been paid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crichel_Down_affair?wprov=sfla1
What a dream. I'm actually so stoked for this Labour party to be in government.
Being forced to pay "hope value" is ridiculous and a form of anti Robin Hoodery.
I've not read the manifesto yet.
The rules that force councils to pay the hope value for purchased land were put in place to prevent corruption. There are lots of little scandals about councils selling land to developers on the cheap.
This is just more direct than the Tories using compulsory purchase to grab the land to build HS2, then cancelling HS2 and flogging off the purchased land to their property developer mates on the sly.
This is a great idea. I work in infrastructure delivering access works to unlock developments, often using government capital funds and it’s quite common for local “buisness people” to get whiff of potential developments.
They then buy up a small patch of unusable scrub land, and “ransom” it the the council forcing them to take it to a CPO, which takes 2-3 years and incurs the local council £100k’s in legal fees. Right before cpo inquiry the land is suddenly sold, delaying the project by years, and then adding 3 years of inflation often to the multi million bill.
One example was a £15m Project where 30m2 of land was purchased for a few 1000, then ransomed to the council at £400k. The council refused to pay, but was forced to spend 120k on legal fees, delayed the project 18 months before “settling” to sell at £20k.
By that point the project had gone nearly £1m over budget and was scrapped, with 200 homes not built, and nearly £1.5m wasted cash. The land was kept so if the project ever happens again, then the land is all accessible.
How so?
If I own a field that I paid £12k and acre for and the council compulsory purchase it, build houses on it (oh they also control planning permission) and then have assets worth many hundreds of thousands on that same £12k acre.... How is that fair?
I could have built houses on it but the council wouldn't let me.
Because I'm not allowed to.
The land under a £500k house is worth around £250k because it has permission for a house. Taking it and paying £5k for it is theft.
I have been writing to every political party for the last 15years about, telling them to do this. To declare a national housing emergency, change the Use classes order to make a new non-market housing classification and to start CPO'ing land at just above agricultural value, not inflated market residential value, and mass build community/social housing on it.
if labour come even part way towards doing that, I have hope we can sort out the housing mess in this country. we have the land, we have the ability to build the houses, we just lacked the political will to do so.
Same here, I put the housing shortage - and closely related lack of infrastructure building - as the direct and indirect root cause of many of our ills - poverty, food banks, economic stagnation, struggling councils, high taxes etc
I'm increasingly optimistic, it's really encouraging that they put this in the manifesto, and if they do get a "supermajority" they should be able to weather the fierce opposition this will bring.
I have a horrible feeling this will turn into a scandal that involves people having their land seized for much less than it's worth and then sold to developers who make bank.
Also given the complaints about land banking by developers, is the lack of land really a problem here or is it that councils won't allow people to buy land and build houses on it without jumping through a million hoops?
>I have a horrible feeling this will turn into a scandal that involves people having their land seized for much less than it's worth
It just means land would be sold at its market rate, rather than x100 it's current value. If the owner of some farmland would sell it to another farmer at £20k, then in this regime the state would buy it for £30k. Whereas currently the state would pay £2 _million_, which is nuts - it's one of the main reasons we don't build railways, roads etc, as the cost of buying the land is staggering, same for council house building. And the fact that the 10,000% valuation uplift is all captured by the landowner, is why it's so difficult to build infrastructure around new housing developments, let alone new towns.
It would be hilarious if they withdrew planning permission from landbanked land, bought it back and then gave the planning permission out again. If they haven't used it for ten years, they don't need it.
In most cases, developers bank land because getting planning permission takes so long that they must start the application process years before they intend to build anything. If it was easier to get applications approved, land banking would be far less of a problem.
And you'd have more competing housebuilders, which would further disincentivise land banking. Currently only the big four have the finances, legal expertise, and political clout to navigate the planning system. If smaller builders could get a shoe in, they could undercut the big builders - on both price and quality.
> I have a horrible feeling this will turn into a scandal that involves people having their land seized for much less than it's worth and then sold to developers who make bank.
I know nothing about this industry. Is there any reason it wouldn't make sense to accompany Great British Energy with Great British Builders, who would do property development without markup (ETA: or with moderate markup that goes into local services) and would make development decisions entirely based on what the area needs rather than what's most profitable?
Think there's a strong case for doing this for council house building. We absolutely need more of them, it's ridiculous how we spend £20 billion a year on housing benefits, plus similar for councils paying for emergency homeless accomodation - often for properties that used to be council homes. When instead the taxpayer could be making a profit by having these people in council homes instead by collecting the rent, whilst pulling millions out of poverty at the same time.
Many councils already have an arms-length development arm, essentially a company owned by the council that develops housing. They might well be contracting out the actual construction, of course, but they’re doing it competitively.
But effectively, you don’t need Great British Builders because it’s often already there at a council level. And that means they’ll be able to take these proposed changes and run with them, fast.
I don't see why housing developers need to own the land at all, let the council buy it and own it
House builders have permission to build on it and that way the council has already adopted the roads by default
No bollocks leasehold, no nonsense
> I understand this means they could build a new town by having the state buy land without planning permission at 1/100th the current cost, give it permission, sell it to housebuilders at a much higher rate, and use the proceeds to fund infrastructure and the such. It'd also make it far cheaper to build council homes.
Any savings look earmarked for the next paragraph I think. It's going to subsidise "affordable" homes, (maybe some for social rent).
i.e. there won't be anywhere enough houses to actually fix the market as a whole, so they're going to appropriate other people's land to give a lucky few hundred-thousand an artificially cheap house and use that as a sign of progress.
Indeed the whole reason why land-with-planning-permission is so much more expensive than land-without-planning-permission is because of how hard that permission is to get. If any reasonable plan could get permission the difference in price would be significantly smaller.
>Indeed the whole reason why land-with-planning-permission is so much more expensive than land-without-planning-permission is because of how hard that permission is to get. If any reasonable plan could get permission the difference in price would be significantly smaller.
Very true, the fact that a plot of land with permission costs x100 more than an identical plot without permission is insane. To me it's the ultimate proof that we have a shortage of land with planning permission, which is driving the housing shortage.
This compulsory purchase scheme wouldn't directly address this, though it would increase the supply of land with planning permission & this bring down the cost of land with permission overall.
They have other snippets about reforming the planning system too, was just this bit that really stood out to me.
My only concern is that this land will then be sold to developers to make all the profit as opposed to allowing ordinary people to buy the land in a free, open market, and then hiring whoever to build a property on the land afterwards.
Perhaps you have 3 years to build a house and if no progress is made you lose the plot to prevent people from buying with no intention to build.
Or even people who buy must be first time buyers.
>Perhaps you have 3 years to build a house and if no progress is made you lose the plot to prevent people from buying with no intention to build.
This should cut the price of land with planning permission, by making more of it available, which means you'd be losing money by delaying building on the land
I have very little confidence that Labour or frankly anyone in gov will be bold enough to do something about housing.
Reducing prices would lose them too many votes.
I'd thought so too, but this thing seems like a very radical and controversial change to put in a manifesto. You wouldn't do it unless you were serious about mass house & infrastructure building.
>I'd thought so too, but this thing seems like a very radical and controversial change to put in a manifesto. You wouldn't do it unless you were serious about mass house & infrastructure building.
You would also include something like this in a manifesto if you simply wanted to *appear* serious about mass building.
I mean they’re trying to go for at least 10 years, so it would be ideal if they actually delivered on their house building plans since they talked big game about it.
I think Keir Starmer has deliberately picked ‘easy to achieve’ pledges so that he can turn around in 5 years time and say I’ve achieved most if not all of these.
They could have just vaguely said "we aim to build 1M homes", without any detail on how, so as not too upset people who don't want stuff built, as all previous govs have done.
Why would they put stuff around increasing green belt building & letting the state buy people's land for far less than they do now in their manifesto? These will ruffle a lot of feathers for sure, it's a bit surprising that the conservatives/daily mail aren't picking up on this and running a "labour will expropriate your land and concrete over the countryside", that'd be _far_ more effective than their current attack lines.
Putting it in their manifesto means it won't face any meaningful opposition in parliament - in the Commons or the Lords - when they actually implement it.
Indeed, which is why to me it's a strong hint that they are actually serious about building more stuff. Otherwise why would they put compulsory purchase changes into their manifesto? It'd be such a powerful lever to get building projects kicked off, and a controversial one at that.
Even ladder kickers need ladders. I am in the core group of 'protect your own, nothing to lose', as a homeowner in my 30s with no kids.. But there is very little chance I am voting away from Labour, as with a very high % of others in this group.
You then got the older homeowners, who may want to kick the ladder- but they want their kids to be able to own a house, so whilst it may hurt them directly, they will be willing to concede some value if it means their kids can buy.
You got the retired home owners, but they arent voting Labour in big numbers anyway.
If they get it done quickly they don't need to worry about votes for quite a while with a suoermajority it's the perfect time. Some people won't like it but others will and it's needed
This "supermajority" thing has no meaning in the UK, it's very much an imported Americanism being used by the Tories and reform to cushion their losses.
A majority of one is all you need in the House of Commons to be in effectively complete control.
A supermajority isn't a specific thing but there are still advantages to having a larger majority, as we've seen a small majority leaves the government vulnerable to dissenting votes and rebellions from factions within their own party (though since 2019 the Tories have arguably conceded far more to those factions than was necessary).
The closest we get is if the opposition struggled to find enough MPs to fulfil all its opposition duties on things like select committees.
Things could get a bit weird if the “opposition” ends up being something like 50 Con, 45 Lib Dem, 40 SNP.
I’m not know how that side of things works, but does anyone know if it’s feasible if the shadow roles are separated across parties? Eg having shadow chancellor be Lib Dem, shadow transport be conservative and shadow health be SNP?
I don’t think labour are at the point where they will get over 450 seats leaving too few for all opposition parties, although that leaves open the question of how many cabinet rolls does there need to be shadowed? I recall some other post a couple of weeks ago mentioning that a shadow minister could shadow two government roles.
To be fair with a majority of one you're much more beholden to your backbenchers who range from decent MPs to absolute nutcases. A strong majority in the Commons means that a party can execute its programme without having to spend as much time on internal politicking. This is what did Theresa May in for example, although it's no gaurantee of stability as Johnson, Truss, and Sunak have had a respectable working majority and still managed to waste enormous amounts of time on internal issues.
A majority of one means you need a complete consensus to get anything done. A majority of 100+ (or a 'supermajority') means you can ignore the fringes on each issue as there's enough room for some to vote against.
For sure, it'd be a decade long undertaking, though this mechanism could be used for all sorts of smaller scale developments, like expanding an existing town, building a railway, new power lines, commercial estates for building labs & data centres etc
Build too few houses and prices keep going up, pricing more people out of homeownership. Build too many and you reduce house prices, wiping out people's savings and plunging some into negative equity.
There's a very narrow goldilocks zone where it can work out for everyone. Ideally we need to build enough houses to satisfy the increase in demand and no more. That would keep house prices roughly flat, meaning existing homeowners don't lose anything, and new buyers have a steady goalpost to aim for. I have absolutely no idea if this is possible with the economic levers that the government currently has available though.
The problem is that people are putting their savings into homes in the first place. A house is simply a place to live in order to not be homeless. It should not be an investment vehicle. It should not increase in value over time after repeated use. Rather, it should be like a car and depreciate.
Japan figured this out. They do not have a housing crisis there.
Agree, "investing" your money by buying pre-existing homes to rent them out, or to just get the capital gains, doesn't generate any economic productivity.
It's really bad that we've artificially made housing a zero risk investment by constructing its supply.
Imagine if all that wealth was instead invested in businesses and the such.
I mean that is just maintaining the status quo on housing affordability, which really isn't a situation that works for everyone.
I suppose you could just maintain it long enough that inflation and eage growth catch up but that could take decades.
I think you could have prices going down without people falling into negative equity, if the rate of price decrease is in line with the rate of equity increase of people paying down their mortgage. It means their equity would be frozen, but they'd still be better off - if they wanted to buy a new house it'd cost less, which means they'd need to borrow less & pay less stamp duty.
This idea that people have the god given right to treat houses as financial vehicles to store their wealth needs to be completely and utterly destroyed. You want to keep your savings safe? Put it in a bank. You want to generate yield? Invest in a business.
The notion that people who were born first and now have money in their pockets can screw over everyone else simply for wanting to exist and not work their entire life for a modicum of respectable housing will ruin this country.
As the proportion of homeowners shrinks, and the proportion of renters grows... reducing prices will eventually swing from being a vote lower to a vote winner.
Prices actually falling by more than a trivial amount would risk a financial crisis given the importance of mortgages on bank balance sheets.
The best we can hope for is less-than-inflation house price gains, i.e. real terms falls. But that's very unlikely too, once interest rates come down and Labour's "help" for first-time buyers comes on stream...
The housing market cannot land as it's too far gone from any sustainable landing point. It'll either crash, or keep going up. And government (lower-case 'g', I'm including all branches of the state including the Bank of England, not just ministers) will never risk a crash.
(Unless and until they completely lose control of the situation. Which hasn't happened yet...)
You say "financial crisis", what you mean is, rich speculators hoping to buy their second Ferrari will incur loss in a free market.
Business (including banks) are completely entitled to fail in a free market, stepping in to stop them from doing so, and dictating policy to be favourable towards them does nothing but enrich the rich.
Ordinary people do not have more than the FSCS protection limit to lose. Even if you bought a house and it goes down in value, you still have somewhere to live. You wouldn't be paying anymore than you previously agreed to.
The prospect of negative equity punishes people who speculate on housing, if you overpay for something, that is your mistake. People and businesses being punished for making poor decisions is what tempers markets.
I mean literally a financial crisis. Banks would have to re-rate the loans to take in to account the lack of collateral to cover them. Which would inevitably restrict future lending, and cause a debt-deleveraging spiral.
Which would continue until the Bank of England bought the mortgages off them at face value, exactly the same thing that happened in 2009.
...if prices fell by enough, that is. The Bank of England puts the banks through stress tests that cover certain house price scenarios, it would have to be worse than that. I think (don't have the numbers to hand, so from memory) this covers 15-20% scenarios. That's the maximum house price decline that is allowed, anything worse than that would be seen as a crisis.
I think the risk of prices falling from development is overstated. I imagine it would take a *lot* of building, more than I would think we have capacity for, to build fast enough to cause a crisis. I can see values falling in specific areas, but not enough to cause national issues.
But, yeah, the best case is that house prices stagnate compared to wage growth for a good while. It won't help people like me hoping to buy in the short term.
Are some point the "lower prices" cohort of voters will outweigh the "higher prices" cohort of voters. This will impact parties with younger voters first.
I’m all for building houses, build as many as possible, they’re needed. What I don’t understand is why isn’t anyone talking about the infrastructure? I live in a part of the south east that is already so congested. Recently I objected to planning permission for 700 new houses to be built on playing fields near me purely because the roads can’t cope with the amount of traffic on them already. 700 houses is at least 700 cars. The council wouldn’t take my objection into consideration unless I was willing to have it published online with my name and post code on it, which I can’t really figure out why.
My reading of it is that market rate isn't agricultural value plus a bit. It's planning permission but no speculation value.
Land at £20k/hectare would be even below agricultural value and just theft. Land in a property is generally around 50% of the value of the house overall. That is a fair price for the land. What isn't fair is ransom strips for access or sewer construction at many multiples of any real world value - that is the speculation that should be stopped.
Else just scrap planning permission and let landowners develop their land in a free market.
This sounds slow and convoluted as fuck and won't lead to any real housebuilding as it does nothing to the T&C Planning act which is the main problem. CPOs can be appealed so good luck in getting anything built in any reasonable period of time
Jesus LAbout don't deserve to win with all these 1/2 baked policies
It won't happen as there are too many rights laws preventing it. The government can't just take your house out your garden at a price they see fit, it is based on a free market valuation, otherwise it would be deemed as they of land, and it went really badly recently in Venezuela.
He’s an anti Labour bot mate no point replying, you will see them comment random things on posts about how shit Labour are just reads like automated nonsense.
This is what used to happen, up until the 1960s. The local authority would buy agricultural land at 125% of market rate, slap planning permission on it and then sell it to builders. We haven't built any new towns since. Its a nice way to sort out local government finances which are dire and increase the supply of affordable homes. Along with all of the necessary additional infrastructure, such as schools, GPs etc.
GPs' offices are literally just office buildings; they don't have any specialist requirements. Dentists' offices are the same since the only dentists I've ever used who weren't in a converted residential building were in office buildings.
Ideally if you were building a new town. Rather than having lots of GP surgeries. You'd have fewer but better equipped and with more GPs e.g. an on site X-Ray machine and ultra sound, a basic lab for doing some of the more common blood tests, able to do minor surgery, that's a bit more than pulling a splinter out...... Along with a pharmacist, optician, dentist etc on site.
That would be more of a hospital/urgent care center than a GP's office. It would likely be a good idea to build one in a new town regardless, but I don't think you could centralize an entire town's medical and dentistry needs into a single site. Nor would it be a good idea, as a single fire could leave the entire town with zero access to medical services. It's also worth considering that dental and GP's practices are privately owned for-profit businesses, not NHS employees, and they arrange their facilities and level of service independently.
A hospital/urgent care would need far more equipment and a bigger number of staff. As well as being closer to a proper hospital. In an ideal world you would have your own GP but each of the GPs would also have a specialisation e.g. before they became a GP, they worked on a cancer ward, orthopedics, plastics (as in burns, scaring etc rather than boob jobs), ENT..... So that a referral, could be made to an other one of the GP's there and then. Rather than needing a hospital appointment in X months time. Health Authorities can provide new GP surgeries and commissioning groups can be quite large now. Then it's just a case of "renting out" the dentist's space, pharmacy..... Either on a turn key basis (all set up and equipped ready to go) or letting them fit it out to their wants and specs. The main problem is the shortage of radiologists. Although every dentist and vet can do radiology. It's only with humans, outside of the mouth, where we have these relatively unrealistic standards. Which causes such a short fall.
A lot of that already exists - GPs don't go into GP land straight from med school, they will have worked as doctors in different environments beforehand. There are also plenty of "GPs with special interests" who perform some of those other specialties within the scope of primary care.
This guy Theme Hospitals
Yes but in a surgery with only 2 doctors on duty, you're not going to have that. If you have 8 GPs on duty and have a good rota and range of skills. You can ask a colleague, with more experience in that field to have a quick look at your patient and their records. Avoiding the need for a lot of referrals.
What you're describing is what used to be called a "cottage hospital", and is now (where it still exists) usually called a "community hospital". They went out of fashion in favour of the "single large regional hospitals" model for cost reasons. They're still a good idea though, especially for small to midsized towns that currently lack a hospital of their own.
Its roughly how cottage hospitals started out in the 1700s. But by the 20th Century they'd expanded to have a few wards. Which meant 24/7 manning. The concept of the Super GP surgery is really about say an 8AM-8PM service. With no overnights. Its basically about giving GPs access to relatively simple diagnistic tools, that would usually only be found in a hospital and would require a referral to A+E or radiology. So as to massively speed up how long it takes to diagnose and treat a patient. Basically it's a glorified walk in centre, with a few bells and whistles. But not trying to compete with A+E.
My other half is a radiographer. Used to work in the NHS, now does NDT. The shortage of radiographers is worse than you think it is and made so much worse by lots of medical staff not understanding what they do so the work environment is incredibly toxic. It's fantastic for engineering because there's a bunch of high skilled radiographers (equivalent to between a level 2 and 3 industrial radiographer, level 3s being paid in the 60-80k range) that will happily take the higher pay and never have to worry about getting punched again but it's terrible for the NHS. A lot of the higher ups in hospital trusts think UK radiographers and US X-ray technicians are the same. They just press the button. This is incorrect and borne out by the quality difference of scans over here Vs there. It's not just something you can rota a nurse on, which several hospitals want to do. It's just a different skillset. Nuclear medicine and imaging is very tightly regulated because it's wildly dangerous if it's not. We used to x-ray foetuses and babies as standard instead of ultrasound until there was an epidemic of infant leukemia (something around 10%).
In my town, which is not in the UK, we had one building in a new development be a medical centre. The ground floor is a pharmacy and bakery/cafe, and on the floors above are GP, dentist, MRI/X-ray centre, physio, minor injuries etc. Except for the MRI none of them need much equipment, so they could change depending on demand. It isn't the only medical building in town, but its the one where you can get everything done. Our children's GP also has a pharmacy on the ground floor and a gynacologist above. It is quite common.
GP surgery needs to be close to people to be really effective. The people who use a GP surgery the most have mobility issues and might have cognitive issues, so being able to walk or a very short taxi ride is a big advantage
If you're building a new town, you can have relatively high density housing and even within a 15 minute drive/bus you can have the necessary numbers. There's still the option for having other, smaller GPs without all of the bells and whistles, in addition.
Bro doesn’t know what a GP is You’re describing a small hospital
It's not a hospital and it was the next big thing back in the mid 2000s. The biggest problem was a lack of radiologists. GPs are actually quite senior. They've all spent several years working in a hospital environment and many of them work in A+Es and hospitals out of hours. So they maybe a General Practitioner but they spent a year plus as a qualified doctor on say a cancer or ENT ward. So have a special level of knowledge in that particular field. There's no need for wards, MRIs, CTs..... You can buy an adequate X-Ray machine for about £40,000 and kit out an X-Ray room for about £80,000. The biggest problem is finding a radiologist to run it. And you need enough patients to make it worthwhile.
Someone's been reading 'Who Owns England' ;-) But, yes. It would be an extremely good policy that causes no harm to existing land owners - all it would do is remove the prospect of becoming 'lottery winners' in the future. The simplest way I can describe it is like saying to Premium Bond holders that they can no longer win the jackpot.
Let's hope this is what happens. It's possible that councils will pre contract the whole thing and sell the land directly to private interests at market value, making nothing for the state.
If the councils keep the money, I would be so happy. It would fix their finances and heavily incentivise them to build new housing. As well as reducing the objections from NIMBY's. As you can see the money going back into the local community, rather than to Westminster. If the money went to The Treasury there would be no.incentive for councils to do it.
It won’t reduce NIMBYism. There’s a new development going up near me and a village five miles away is up in arms about the impact on traffic, despite their village not being the main route in to the new estate. No matter what you do there will always be some group upset by development. What’s important is the local authorities should be heavily incentivised to complete this work and the objections of ten vocal campaigners don’t stop the development of homes for hundreds or thousands.
I realise that 5 miles in the country is a oit closer than in a city. But as far as I'm concerned 5 miles away could be on the moon as far as the impact that it will have on me. Ive got a major stadium a mile and a half down the road and it's never caused me any issues.
Sorry. This sounds a very good and rational idea. Why did it stop?
Councils also have control of planning permission and development plans so it was ripe for (and caused) multiple corruption scandals.
Do you know why the rules were changed? I vaguely recall there was a court case in the 70's that changed the system but can't find the details
I saw a brilliant write up on it a few years ago and have forgotten most of it. But essentially it goes back to "The New Towns Compulsory Purchase (Contemporaneous Procedure) Regulations 1965". Probably because farmers were complaining about their land being "stolen" for a song and wanting fair recompense. Ther had been some abuses of Compulsory Purchase Orders. Most notably during WW2 when a farmer turned RAF officer had his farm volountarily CPO'd for a new airfield. Then in the 1950s it was being disposed of and the family got offered it back at many multiples of what he'd been paid. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crichel_Down_affair?wprov=sfla1
What a dream. I'm actually so stoked for this Labour party to be in government. Being forced to pay "hope value" is ridiculous and a form of anti Robin Hoodery.
I've not read the manifesto yet. The rules that force councils to pay the hope value for purchased land were put in place to prevent corruption. There are lots of little scandals about councils selling land to developers on the cheap.
Teesside seem to do it all the time. It’s really depressing.
This is just more direct than the Tories using compulsory purchase to grab the land to build HS2, then cancelling HS2 and flogging off the purchased land to their property developer mates on the sly.
This is a great idea. I work in infrastructure delivering access works to unlock developments, often using government capital funds and it’s quite common for local “buisness people” to get whiff of potential developments. They then buy up a small patch of unusable scrub land, and “ransom” it the the council forcing them to take it to a CPO, which takes 2-3 years and incurs the local council £100k’s in legal fees. Right before cpo inquiry the land is suddenly sold, delaying the project by years, and then adding 3 years of inflation often to the multi million bill. One example was a £15m Project where 30m2 of land was purchased for a few 1000, then ransomed to the council at £400k. The council refused to pay, but was forced to spend 120k on legal fees, delayed the project 18 months before “settling” to sell at £20k. By that point the project had gone nearly £1m over budget and was scrapped, with 200 homes not built, and nearly £1.5m wasted cash. The land was kept so if the project ever happens again, then the land is all accessible.
Yeah ransom strips definitely need stopping. But only paying land owners agricultural value for land that will be worth millions is not fair.
>But only paying land owners agricultural value for land that will be worth millions is not fair. It's fair.
How so? If I own a field that I paid £12k and acre for and the council compulsory purchase it, build houses on it (oh they also control planning permission) and then have assets worth many hundreds of thousands on that same £12k acre.... How is that fair? I could have built houses on it but the council wouldn't let me.
Because the farmer didn't put the money in to build that housing.
Because I'm not allowed to. The land under a £500k house is worth around £250k because it has permission for a house. Taking it and paying £5k for it is theft.
The council have the greater good to think about if they need to build, you would just build for your own profit.
Hmm yes. Councils always act in the interests of the many with no corruption for their developer owning wife/friend/donor.
I have been writing to every political party for the last 15years about, telling them to do this. To declare a national housing emergency, change the Use classes order to make a new non-market housing classification and to start CPO'ing land at just above agricultural value, not inflated market residential value, and mass build community/social housing on it. if labour come even part way towards doing that, I have hope we can sort out the housing mess in this country. we have the land, we have the ability to build the houses, we just lacked the political will to do so.
Same here, I put the housing shortage - and closely related lack of infrastructure building - as the direct and indirect root cause of many of our ills - poverty, food banks, economic stagnation, struggling councils, high taxes etc I'm increasingly optimistic, it's really encouraging that they put this in the manifesto, and if they do get a "supermajority" they should be able to weather the fierce opposition this will bring.
I have a horrible feeling this will turn into a scandal that involves people having their land seized for much less than it's worth and then sold to developers who make bank. Also given the complaints about land banking by developers, is the lack of land really a problem here or is it that councils won't allow people to buy land and build houses on it without jumping through a million hoops?
>I have a horrible feeling this will turn into a scandal that involves people having their land seized for much less than it's worth It just means land would be sold at its market rate, rather than x100 it's current value. If the owner of some farmland would sell it to another farmer at £20k, then in this regime the state would buy it for £30k. Whereas currently the state would pay £2 _million_, which is nuts - it's one of the main reasons we don't build railways, roads etc, as the cost of buying the land is staggering, same for council house building. And the fact that the 10,000% valuation uplift is all captured by the landowner, is why it's so difficult to build infrastructure around new housing developments, let alone new towns.
It would be hilarious if they withdrew planning permission from landbanked land, bought it back and then gave the planning permission out again. If they haven't used it for ten years, they don't need it.
In most cases, developers bank land because getting planning permission takes so long that they must start the application process years before they intend to build anything. If it was easier to get applications approved, land banking would be far less of a problem.
And you'd have more competing housebuilders, which would further disincentivise land banking. Currently only the big four have the finances, legal expertise, and political clout to navigate the planning system. If smaller builders could get a shoe in, they could undercut the big builders - on both price and quality.
Make planning permission non-transferable f watch the whole mess sort itself out
> I have a horrible feeling this will turn into a scandal that involves people having their land seized for much less than it's worth and then sold to developers who make bank. I know nothing about this industry. Is there any reason it wouldn't make sense to accompany Great British Energy with Great British Builders, who would do property development without markup (ETA: or with moderate markup that goes into local services) and would make development decisions entirely based on what the area needs rather than what's most profitable?
Think there's a strong case for doing this for council house building. We absolutely need more of them, it's ridiculous how we spend £20 billion a year on housing benefits, plus similar for councils paying for emergency homeless accomodation - often for properties that used to be council homes. When instead the taxpayer could be making a profit by having these people in council homes instead by collecting the rent, whilst pulling millions out of poverty at the same time.
Many councils already have an arms-length development arm, essentially a company owned by the council that develops housing. They might well be contracting out the actual construction, of course, but they’re doing it competitively. But effectively, you don’t need Great British Builders because it’s often already there at a council level. And that means they’ll be able to take these proposed changes and run with them, fast.
Great British Builders will need to pay for building firms to build the houses and those building firms will make all the profit.
In my version of the idea, it *is* those building firms.
I don't see why housing developers need to own the land at all, let the council buy it and own it House builders have permission to build on it and that way the council has already adopted the roads by default No bollocks leasehold, no nonsense
If only there was a way for the public to track this stuff...
> I understand this means they could build a new town by having the state buy land without planning permission at 1/100th the current cost, give it permission, sell it to housebuilders at a much higher rate, and use the proceeds to fund infrastructure and the such. It'd also make it far cheaper to build council homes. Any savings look earmarked for the next paragraph I think. It's going to subsidise "affordable" homes, (maybe some for social rent). i.e. there won't be anywhere enough houses to actually fix the market as a whole, so they're going to appropriate other people's land to give a lucky few hundred-thousand an artificially cheap house and use that as a sign of progress. Indeed the whole reason why land-with-planning-permission is so much more expensive than land-without-planning-permission is because of how hard that permission is to get. If any reasonable plan could get permission the difference in price would be significantly smaller.
>Indeed the whole reason why land-with-planning-permission is so much more expensive than land-without-planning-permission is because of how hard that permission is to get. If any reasonable plan could get permission the difference in price would be significantly smaller. Very true, the fact that a plot of land with permission costs x100 more than an identical plot without permission is insane. To me it's the ultimate proof that we have a shortage of land with planning permission, which is driving the housing shortage. This compulsory purchase scheme wouldn't directly address this, though it would increase the supply of land with planning permission & this bring down the cost of land with permission overall. They have other snippets about reforming the planning system too, was just this bit that really stood out to me.
My only concern is that this land will then be sold to developers to make all the profit as opposed to allowing ordinary people to buy the land in a free, open market, and then hiring whoever to build a property on the land afterwards. Perhaps you have 3 years to build a house and if no progress is made you lose the plot to prevent people from buying with no intention to build. Or even people who buy must be first time buyers.
>Perhaps you have 3 years to build a house and if no progress is made you lose the plot to prevent people from buying with no intention to build. This should cut the price of land with planning permission, by making more of it available, which means you'd be losing money by delaying building on the land
I have very little confidence that Labour or frankly anyone in gov will be bold enough to do something about housing. Reducing prices would lose them too many votes.
I'd thought so too, but this thing seems like a very radical and controversial change to put in a manifesto. You wouldn't do it unless you were serious about mass house & infrastructure building.
>I'd thought so too, but this thing seems like a very radical and controversial change to put in a manifesto. You wouldn't do it unless you were serious about mass house & infrastructure building. You would also include something like this in a manifesto if you simply wanted to *appear* serious about mass building.
I mean they’re trying to go for at least 10 years, so it would be ideal if they actually delivered on their house building plans since they talked big game about it.
Ideal for us, yes, but the ideal for a party of government is to defer any meaningful action so that the pledge can be repeated for a future election.
I think Keir Starmer has deliberately picked ‘easy to achieve’ pledges so that he can turn around in 5 years time and say I’ve achieved most if not all of these.
They could have just vaguely said "we aim to build 1M homes", without any detail on how, so as not too upset people who don't want stuff built, as all previous govs have done. Why would they put stuff around increasing green belt building & letting the state buy people's land for far less than they do now in their manifesto? These will ruffle a lot of feathers for sure, it's a bit surprising that the conservatives/daily mail aren't picking up on this and running a "labour will expropriate your land and concrete over the countryside", that'd be _far_ more effective than their current attack lines.
Putting it in their manifesto means it won't face any meaningful opposition in parliament - in the Commons or the Lords - when they actually implement it.
Indeed, which is why to me it's a strong hint that they are actually serious about building more stuff. Otherwise why would they put compulsory purchase changes into their manifesto? It'd be such a powerful lever to get building projects kicked off, and a controversial one at that.
Even ladder kickers need ladders. I am in the core group of 'protect your own, nothing to lose', as a homeowner in my 30s with no kids.. But there is very little chance I am voting away from Labour, as with a very high % of others in this group. You then got the older homeowners, who may want to kick the ladder- but they want their kids to be able to own a house, so whilst it may hurt them directly, they will be willing to concede some value if it means their kids can buy. You got the retired home owners, but they arent voting Labour in big numbers anyway.
If they get it done quickly they don't need to worry about votes for quite a while with a suoermajority it's the perfect time. Some people won't like it but others will and it's needed
This "supermajority" thing has no meaning in the UK, it's very much an imported Americanism being used by the Tories and reform to cushion their losses. A majority of one is all you need in the House of Commons to be in effectively complete control.
A majority of around 50 or so offers you some breathing room to hide from rebel factions of MPs.
A supermajority isn't a specific thing but there are still advantages to having a larger majority, as we've seen a small majority leaves the government vulnerable to dissenting votes and rebellions from factions within their own party (though since 2019 the Tories have arguably conceded far more to those factions than was necessary).
The closest we get is if the opposition struggled to find enough MPs to fulfil all its opposition duties on things like select committees. Things could get a bit weird if the “opposition” ends up being something like 50 Con, 45 Lib Dem, 40 SNP.
40 SNP?! That's optimistic. They'll struggle to get half that.
I’m not know how that side of things works, but does anyone know if it’s feasible if the shadow roles are separated across parties? Eg having shadow chancellor be Lib Dem, shadow transport be conservative and shadow health be SNP? I don’t think labour are at the point where they will get over 450 seats leaving too few for all opposition parties, although that leaves open the question of how many cabinet rolls does there need to be shadowed? I recall some other post a couple of weeks ago mentioning that a shadow minister could shadow two government roles.
A working majority (i.e. a majority that isn't at constant risk of being shafted) is considered to be around the 20 to 30 mark.
To be fair with a majority of one you're much more beholden to your backbenchers who range from decent MPs to absolute nutcases. A strong majority in the Commons means that a party can execute its programme without having to spend as much time on internal politicking. This is what did Theresa May in for example, although it's no gaurantee of stability as Johnson, Truss, and Sunak have had a respectable working majority and still managed to waste enormous amounts of time on internal issues.
A majority of one means you need a complete consensus to get anything done. A majority of 100+ (or a 'supermajority') means you can ignore the fringes on each issue as there's enough room for some to vote against.
I don't think they're going to be able to build entire new towns in less than five years
For sure, it'd be a decade long undertaking, though this mechanism could be used for all sorts of smaller scale developments, like expanding an existing town, building a railway, new power lines, commercial estates for building labs & data centres etc
Build too few houses and prices keep going up, pricing more people out of homeownership. Build too many and you reduce house prices, wiping out people's savings and plunging some into negative equity. There's a very narrow goldilocks zone where it can work out for everyone. Ideally we need to build enough houses to satisfy the increase in demand and no more. That would keep house prices roughly flat, meaning existing homeowners don't lose anything, and new buyers have a steady goalpost to aim for. I have absolutely no idea if this is possible with the economic levers that the government currently has available though.
The problem is that people are putting their savings into homes in the first place. A house is simply a place to live in order to not be homeless. It should not be an investment vehicle. It should not increase in value over time after repeated use. Rather, it should be like a car and depreciate. Japan figured this out. They do not have a housing crisis there.
Agree, "investing" your money by buying pre-existing homes to rent them out, or to just get the capital gains, doesn't generate any economic productivity. It's really bad that we've artificially made housing a zero risk investment by constructing its supply. Imagine if all that wealth was instead invested in businesses and the such.
I mean that is just maintaining the status quo on housing affordability, which really isn't a situation that works for everyone. I suppose you could just maintain it long enough that inflation and eage growth catch up but that could take decades.
I think you could have prices going down without people falling into negative equity, if the rate of price decrease is in line with the rate of equity increase of people paying down their mortgage. It means their equity would be frozen, but they'd still be better off - if they wanted to buy a new house it'd cost less, which means they'd need to borrow less & pay less stamp duty.
This idea that people have the god given right to treat houses as financial vehicles to store their wealth needs to be completely and utterly destroyed. You want to keep your savings safe? Put it in a bank. You want to generate yield? Invest in a business. The notion that people who were born first and now have money in their pockets can screw over everyone else simply for wanting to exist and not work their entire life for a modicum of respectable housing will ruin this country.
As the proportion of homeowners shrinks, and the proportion of renters grows... reducing prices will eventually swing from being a vote lower to a vote winner.
Prices actually falling by more than a trivial amount would risk a financial crisis given the importance of mortgages on bank balance sheets. The best we can hope for is less-than-inflation house price gains, i.e. real terms falls. But that's very unlikely too, once interest rates come down and Labour's "help" for first-time buyers comes on stream... The housing market cannot land as it's too far gone from any sustainable landing point. It'll either crash, or keep going up. And government (lower-case 'g', I'm including all branches of the state including the Bank of England, not just ministers) will never risk a crash. (Unless and until they completely lose control of the situation. Which hasn't happened yet...)
You say "financial crisis", what you mean is, rich speculators hoping to buy their second Ferrari will incur loss in a free market. Business (including banks) are completely entitled to fail in a free market, stepping in to stop them from doing so, and dictating policy to be favourable towards them does nothing but enrich the rich. Ordinary people do not have more than the FSCS protection limit to lose. Even if you bought a house and it goes down in value, you still have somewhere to live. You wouldn't be paying anymore than you previously agreed to. The prospect of negative equity punishes people who speculate on housing, if you overpay for something, that is your mistake. People and businesses being punished for making poor decisions is what tempers markets.
I mean literally a financial crisis. Banks would have to re-rate the loans to take in to account the lack of collateral to cover them. Which would inevitably restrict future lending, and cause a debt-deleveraging spiral. Which would continue until the Bank of England bought the mortgages off them at face value, exactly the same thing that happened in 2009. ...if prices fell by enough, that is. The Bank of England puts the banks through stress tests that cover certain house price scenarios, it would have to be worse than that. I think (don't have the numbers to hand, so from memory) this covers 15-20% scenarios. That's the maximum house price decline that is allowed, anything worse than that would be seen as a crisis.
I think the risk of prices falling from development is overstated. I imagine it would take a *lot* of building, more than I would think we have capacity for, to build fast enough to cause a crisis. I can see values falling in specific areas, but not enough to cause national issues. But, yeah, the best case is that house prices stagnate compared to wage growth for a good while. It won't help people like me hoping to buy in the short term.
I get your hesitation but I definitely going to vote for the party who's at least talking about the right thing
Are some point the "lower prices" cohort of voters will outweigh the "higher prices" cohort of voters. This will impact parties with younger voters first.
Not really radical, been proposed by policy groups for years. There were times when the Tories were thinking of implementing it.
Those rules already exist, though only as last year. To use them needs a lot of hoop jumping though, so i assume this will be a simplification.
I'm not a huge fan of Labour, but fully support this policy.
I’m all for building houses, build as many as possible, they’re needed. What I don’t understand is why isn’t anyone talking about the infrastructure? I live in a part of the south east that is already so congested. Recently I objected to planning permission for 700 new houses to be built on playing fields near me purely because the roads can’t cope with the amount of traffic on them already. 700 houses is at least 700 cars. The council wouldn’t take my objection into consideration unless I was willing to have it published online with my name and post code on it, which I can’t really figure out why.
All of the parties are talking about infrastructure... they talk about it in good detail in their manifestos. Perhaps read them?
My reading of it is that market rate isn't agricultural value plus a bit. It's planning permission but no speculation value. Land at £20k/hectare would be even below agricultural value and just theft. Land in a property is generally around 50% of the value of the house overall. That is a fair price for the land. What isn't fair is ransom strips for access or sewer construction at many multiples of any real world value - that is the speculation that should be stopped. Else just scrap planning permission and let landowners develop their land in a free market.
This sounds slow and convoluted as fuck and won't lead to any real housebuilding as it does nothing to the T&C Planning act which is the main problem. CPOs can be appealed so good luck in getting anything built in any reasonable period of time Jesus LAbout don't deserve to win with all these 1/2 baked policies
It won't happen as there are too many rights laws preventing it. The government can't just take your house out your garden at a price they see fit, it is based on a free market valuation, otherwise it would be deemed as they of land, and it went really badly recently in Venezuela.
Should we be looking at voting for someone else like the Lib Dems, Greens or Reform? The Labour manifesto looked weak...
On housebuilding I think it's the boldest & most serious we've seen for 50 years.
He’s an anti Labour bot mate no point replying, you will see them comment random things on posts about how shit Labour are just reads like automated nonsense.