Do we expect too much as a right in Great Britain?

We need land tax.

And where should they build these houses? Does the south-east have to give up more of its countryside so people can live and work near London? A better answer might be to move industry away from the SE.

Now you're talking, Jings. But not just industry, also financial services, head offices of national and global businesses, government departments, all kinds of employment providers.

Whenever that has been tried, there is a great outcry from those who would have to be transferred away from the capital to "the sticks"!

There was an interesting article on the BBC News site a few weeks ago www.bbc.com/news/business-26472423
discussing this and saying that countries that have been successful in geographical economic diversification have second cities that are at least half the size of the main city and this is our problem, we have a first city and several third cities.

Governments since the 1960s have been trying to get industry and offices out of London and the south east, none of the schemes has worked. Labour (Harold Wilson and Tony Benn) subsidised industries like the car industry to build factories in the north west and Scotland, but the moment a recession started, these were the first close, the company owning them had invested so little money in building them that it cost nothing to close them. Civil Service Departments may be moved out, but private industry/commerce do not follow.

In recent years many companies have moved HQs out of London, but not out of the south east, they have moved to Berkshire, Bucks and Oxford.

I think this article is an interesting thought. Perhaps all the houses planned for the South east should be built around Manchester and the government should invest more in transport links (HS2!!) and cross links, not London-Manchester but Liverpool-Hull, for example

Yet, there are houses sitting abandoned or being sold for £1 in various parts of the country. Against that there is a lack of social or affordable homes and overcrowding in others.

Of course these are areas where there are few jobs to be had. Investing in these run down areas is one answer, but if industry and commerce have already withdrawn from or failed in such places, how can we do this??

Cheap imports from abroad saw off much of the steel-making industry in this country. Other industries, such as car manufacturing, didn't do themselves any favours in the 60s and 70s with their militant trade unions. Thatcher managed to complete what they starteded by closing the pits. And so the rot set in.

The Midlands are seeing investment in transport link via HS2 and industry is certainly picking up here, but how about a concerted effort to regenerate the North, parts of Wales, etc. Scotland will sort herself out after independence I'm sure.

So to return to the OP, yes, we do expect a lot from GB as our right, but perhaps we are expecting the wrong things. Rather than hand outs in whatever form, I'd prefer to see full employment prospects and people who aspire to having a job.

It seems that most people want to live in or near fashionable London.

Or, of course, it could be the better weather we have in the SE.

The theatre industry could help by opening their big shows in, say, Manchester, or Liverpool., instead of London's West End. But they won't. Shame London is n't more in the centre of the country.

My husband was an architect. In the 70s we moved to Peterborough where there was a huge housebuilding programme. Many of the new residents were from London, and rented houses from the development corporation. This could happen again. The reason we moved to Peterborough was because there was a recession in the building industry, so the company he worked for in Norwich was making people redundant.
He moved before it happened to him.
The idea was to get builders back to work, provide housing for those who could not afford them in London and provide work.
In the early 80s the Development Corporation began to wind down, and hand over to the council, so again we had to move on to where the work was.

In the North East there is Nissan building cars and lots of houses going up near Washington.
What happened with housing was that the councils were forced to sell their houses but could not use the money to build new ones. That should change. Housing Associations build now, but not many compared with in the 70s and early 80s.
There are many private builders who have bought land and are hanging onto it in the hope that house prices will go up. Then they will build and get more money. They should have to pay business rates on all land that is banked like that. They should also not be able to hold councils to ransom over affordable houses.
We need affordable houses, so they should have to build those first, before they are allowed to build the expensive ones.
The government should be forced to make up its mind on renewable energy. They were voted in on the promise of being the greenest government ever, and have done u-turn after u-turn on wind power. There were going to be many jobs in renewable energy in the North East, but company after company has pulled out because of the government changing its mind on subsidies.

I have just been looking at the local newspaper website, and noticed a job as a collector of unpaid taxes.
Applicants need 3+ years experience and have a level 3 NVQ in accounts.
They have to be able to understand the technically difficult changes in the new laws and be able to represent the local authority in court.
For doing this they will get pay of between £17-20,000 per year, or between £8 and £10 per hour.
Even in Darlington they will not be able to get much of a mortgage with that pay. If it's someone with a family, they will probably get a tax credit subsidy.
Not right.

I agree durhamjen. The price for the supposed improvement in the UK's economic situation (though even that is questioned by some) has been paid by those on low and moderate wages.

It always has been.

I would hate to see all "expensive" houses replaced by affordable ones. It would change the face of Britain. Sad to see some old architecture go by the board to be replaced by modern cheap housing.

I think planners need to protect the past as well as trying to comply with government demands for more housing any-old-where.

In Surrey, all the wonderful old expensive houses are being pulled down and replaced by huge modern piles massively more expensive!!! Awful.
Even worse.

Its not only the change of government policy that is causing companies to pull out of the wind power industry durhamjen. Windpower is not the energy solution we were told it would be and the proof is just coming to light. Firstly the wind turbines themselves are very expensive. They are terribly fickle and will not work in high winds or (obviously) when there is no wind. The wind has to be "the right sort of wind". Many of the existing wind turbines are "down" awaiting servicing/adjusting/ maintenance and land owners are not happy about having them on/near their land or landscape. To be honest I think they are a bit of a white elephant.

I think it would be easy to force companies out of London and the surrounding areas by offering incentives and/or refusing them permission to set up in those places in the first place. The truth of the matter is that this government and those before consider the South to be the only place to do business and the North is somekind of forgotten waste land. Just look at the proposed new rail link which is again to benefit the South of England.

What I never understand is why new houses are built in huddled clumps, like sheep in a field, jumbled together, with hardly any gardens or even a back yard - and then surrounded by acres and acres and acres of barren grass with the odd tree planted here and there, which never seems to have any human use apart for the occasional jogger or dog-walker to run/walk across on their way to somewhere else.

There are at least half a dozen new estates like that near me. Why do they not just give the houses bigger gardens or build more houses in the barren space.

Which is something we DO have in common with Australia, FlicketyB! New builds there seem to have very tiny plots, although many of them are bungalows. And they have far more space than us.
It is not even a case of squash 'em in, sell 'em cheap here (or there).

This is from Keep our NHS Public website, rose. Obviously in Australia they are having as many problems as we are with a coalition government.
https://www.greenleft.org.au/

Britain has been a low income tax nation since Thatcher cut income tax in the 1980's. For over 30 years our vital services have been funded by what's politically known as known right wing trickle down economics.

Where I live, every available blade of grass is having blocks of one bedroom flats built. We need 3, 4 and 5 bedroom houses to accommodate families with children.

I was Margaret Thatcher who stopped building council houses in the 1980's during her "right to buy". So, if there are any Tory voters on this site, it is you who have helped to create Britain's homeless, and housing crisis.

Hello Margaret.

oh! but I thought .... (oh no, I won't say it!)

Aka

And rosequartz!

Yes, Ivanhoe, it was Maggie Thatcher, and she also stopped the councils from using the money to build new social housing. She definitely started the housing crisis.