> • £25,000 starting salaries at traditional engineering firms
> • Exodus to consulting or finance just because it's compensated better
This is _exactly_ my career so far.
The key thing about the British economy is that while most things operate in a free market, construction is centrally planned by councillors who are incentivised to block most development. So the whole economy is struggling, but industries that need physical space are especially hard hit. Your local council can't block you from writing more code, but can stop you from building lab space near where people want to live and work.
My first job out of uni was in a wonderful small engineering firm in Cambridge. Lab space there is eye-wateringly expensive because it's illegal to build enough, so we were based in a makeshift lab in an attic next to the sewage works. I loved working there, but it shows that we're restricting our small businesses unnecessarily through our planning system.
The solution is frustratingly simple, but politically suicidal for any government that tried to implement it: just legalise development subject to basic design codes. I hope we see some planning reform before it's too late for our struggling innovation industries.
I used to live and work in Cambridge. In many ways it's a victim of its own success; people will, not unreasonably, argue that it's a beautiful little town of historic buildings, embedded in a primarily agricultural county of either prime agricultural land or protected wetland. They're not going to let you build Shenzen in Shelford no matter what the economic benefit might be. Meanwhile it's close enough to London that the property prices tick upwards to London commuter weighting.
(This is also why we have expensive electricity, because people oppose building any infrastructure. I'm coming round to the idea that there should just be county-by-county referendums where people have to pick either blanket allowing energy development or having a bill surcharge.)
The wiki editor(s) who wrote the boosterish Economy subsection of the wiki page on Peterborough [1] (thirty miles away, same county) make it sound as though it is a growing area that does want to grow more.
From the vantage point of Cambridge it has a reputation as a shithole, but I haven't been there either so would also like to know.
The county council covering the Cambridge area is actually based in Peterborough, and so effectively controls a lot of the countryside around Cambridge, as it is in charge of transport. So arguably the lack of development could be their fault as well.
Supposedly the government is plan is to reduce everywhere to one layer of local government (currently Cambridge is covered by both a county and district council). TBH the areas which are currently unitary seem to work a bit better but there's still massive opposition to building.
Only if you place no value on the land simply existing as it does now and providing aesthetic value. Most people privileged enough to sit on a planning council coincidentally also trend towards valuing peace and quiet and are hesitant to approve projects that may disrupt their assumed way of life.
From the outside looking in, rural UK council politics seems like the epitome of “I got mine so bug off”. I think this is one reason why London is becoming a super hub (among other reasons). London broke the ice and now they are trying to keep progressing but physical distance is becoming a limiting factor. Other municipalities will need to embrace change if they want to keep developing into a place where people want to live and work.
All of the UK's cities - apart from museums like Oxford and Cambridge - are full of real estate investment sprawl. There is no reason some of those spaces couldn't be used as labs and light factories. In fact there are plenty of brown field conversion projects turning old mills (etc) into new light industry hubs.
The bigger problems in the UK are business rates (extortionate), profiteering by landlords and land owners, insanely expensive utilities, crumbling physical infrastructure, and Brexit.
We could have had a government that invested/fixed in all of those things, but the big landords and land owners decided they didn't like that idea. They'd prefer to keep the country struggling and backward, because it appeals to their sense of aristocratic self-importance.
Cambridge(shire) has also been forced to allow more real estate; Northstowe, Waterbeach New Town, the Eddington neighbourhood within Cambridge city limits, Springstead Village, even been a few noticeable changes around Cottenham.
This is a disease that has infected the entire West. It's just become impossible to do anything that requires space. Even industrial giants like Germany are now de-industrializing because it's just too hard to get permits for building anything new. Sure, labor costs, energy costs, environmental regulations, etc. are all bothersome, but what really makes German industry emigrate is how hard it is to get permission to change anything. It's such a self-inflicted wound.
Do you have any sources that you would recommend? So far, you're throwing out "got a source for that?" left and right and when you get a source you've nothing to say.
Just curious if you have knowledge about this subject or if you're just trying to block the conversation from going in directions you don't like
My response was to a post that did not provide a source, and at the time it was made, no source had been provided.
[EDIT: Having now reviewed the source that was provided, it certainly supports a drop in industrial production, but I'd be skeptical that it indicates "de-industrialization" ]
We'll see. Taking away local control over land development is going to be controversial. A lot of rich and politically connected people are not going to like this. The last three decades in the west has been an endless series of victories for landowners. It's hard to imagine that this time really is different.
The problem always ends up being that it's extremely local (read: NIMBY).
Everyone wants more Z, Y, X. Nobody wants to change where they are to support it. This is why even areas that redevelop in places that are friendly to it, take decades.
The "old" solution was to just build a whole new factory town elsewhere, but that doesn't work as well, and especially doesn't work when you're not building megafactories that employ entire cities.
It would be better if we just change the immigration policy. Last time I checked there was 400,000 leaving the country each year and somewhere between a million and 1.4 million entering.
I live in the countryside (I live in a small flat btw so I don't care about property prices) and I don't want everywhere in the country built over, which seems to be something here everyone wants for some bonkers reason. If you want to live in a concrete jungle that is fine, I and many others don't. I moved out of Manchester because I hated it there.
It's actually around 750,000, mostly third world, and around half of those are students.
Importing cheap foreign labour from the third world was always one of the goals of Brexit. This game gets played over and over - import cheap labour to keep wages down, lament about how the country is being invaded, and then blame immigrants for lack of investment, corporate profiteering, and other structural policy problems.
No, Brexit was about returning such decisions from Brussels to Westminster.
The UK may decide less immigration, or skill-weighted immigration, or lots more indiscriminate immigration - but the vote should be in the Mother of Parliaments, where else?
Whether it is part of the "goals of brexit" or not, is kinda irrelevant. The point is that we cannot build more homes easily, even if we could that has issues with other infrastructure and utilities. The easiest way is to at least maybe try to decrease demand and reducing immigration would be an obvious way to help with that.
Given whose muscle actually builds the houses (before I left the UK, the meme was all the builders were Polish), and what happened to the exchange rate (initially; it's harder to separate the increasing number of influences the more time passes), the UK could have build a lot more homes more easily in the EU than it can now it's out of the EU.
Again, the utilities cannot be scaled as easily. There are problems with building houses right now because there just isn't enough supply in some areas of the nation grid. That isn't something being in the EU would magically fix.
It's not magic, it's qualified workers already familiar with the necessary standards because the standards were (somewhat) unified by the EU specifically so that labour had an easier time moving.
That does also make utilities easier, but it's not magic… well, you could say it is but only in the sense of Penn and Teller: lots of effort that most people don't ever think of that already happened before the audience started watching.
It is amazing when it comes to any topic that is constantly thorny people will constantly twist your words. When I say "magically solve", I specifically mean that it wouldn't have solved the issue. The issue would still exist in some capacity.
There was problems with houses becoming to expensive (there are multitude of reasons for this) while we were still in the EU. Part of this was also do with the monetary policy of central banks after the 2008. Part of this is there is a shortage of housing. There was problems with utilities well before we left the EU, because of mismanagement.
This is all a deflection anyway from the point that high levels of immigration increase demand. Unless you don't believe in supply and demand, which is basic economics. BTW I don't believe that immigration is the only reason there is high demand, there are others. But it certainly doesn't help that we have record numbers of people entering the UK.
> This is all a deflection anyway from the point that high levels of immigration increase demand. Unless you don't believe in supply and demand, which is basic economics.
*Supply* and demand.
Immigrants supply, they don't just demand.
Immigrants (everywhere, not just to the UK) have a slightly higher supply-to-demand ratio than locals, owing to many of them not starting at age 0; likewise emigration tends to means supply going down faster than demand.
> Supply and demand. Immigrants supply, they don't just demand.
Why is there a massive shortfall then when we've had the largest amount of immigration then?
Why was there a shortfall previously when we were still in the EU?
> Immigrants (everywhere, not just to the UK) have a slightly higher supply-to-demand ratio than locals, owing to many of them not starting at age 0; likewise emigration tends to means supply going down faster than demand.
You can assert this but I don't believe it for a second. It is pretty much accepted by anyone that is doing any stats on this that demand is increased by immigration.
Almost everything says that immigration has raised prices on rent and buying (which is a proxy for demand). It depends on the area because each area has different rates of immigration.
> Why is there a massive shortfall then when we've had the largest amount of immigration then?
Of housing and public infrastructure in the UK? Politics: Green belt and similar planning restrictions, austerity, Thatcherism, privatisation, restricting local councils' ability to own and supply council housing.
> You can assert this but I don't believe it for a second. It is pretty much accepted by anyone that is doing any stats on this that demand is increased by immigration.
And supply. Not at the expense of supply.
The figures here show that in 2011 (when it was measured as "country of birth" rather than "nationality") were 9:1 ratio of locals to migrants in construction. The overall ratio for the entire population in that year was 8.4 to one.
Both have changed since then, of course; between the statistical value being measured (nationality vs country of birth, Brexit, Covid, austerity), this is just to give a flavour for a specific date when the numbers were easier to compare.
> Not sure what this has to do with anything.
You don't understand that keeping people from leaving was because of the economic catastrophe that the people in charge knew would have happened if they didn't keep people from leaving?
> Of housing and public infrastructure in the UK? Politics: Green belt and similar planning restrictions, austerity, Thatcherism, privatisation, restricting local councils' ability to own and supply council housing.
So you don't know. All you have done is provide a list of grievances with previous governments.
Even if I accepted all of this being true, then having more migrant construction workers wouldn't solve these problems anyway.
> And supply. Not at the expense of supply.
Yet the sources I cited indicated the opposite. You constantly assert that but there is no data I've seen that proves that. Supply of labour != supply of houses. It can certainly help, but they may not be directly proportional.
I also don't care whether it does increase supply. I don't think we should keep on constantly importing people at the expense of everything else to get the GDP numbers up a few percent.
There are other problems with high amounts of immigration that I have seen up close because I've lived in poorer areas. There is a lack of integration in the communities, language barriers and it causes tensions.
I used to be an expat. So you tend to actually notice this a lot more because you see your own country with a fresh set of eyes.
Additionally none of this matters now. The UK has left the EU. The situation has changed. If we can't import labour now (there is no reason we can't issue temporary visas), then demand has to be decreased. Like it or not, however much you want to dodge it, immigration has to be curbed to help lower demand.
> You don't understand that keeping people from leaving was because of the economic catastrophe that the people in charge knew would have happened if they didn't keep people from leaving?
Are you suggesting we should have kept people from leaving by force?
> So you don't know. All you have done is provide a list of grievances with previous governments
Thinking of "surely this is obvious" on the other thread, to me it seemed obvious that this is a list of things which caused the results, i.e. they are the why.
> Yet the sources I cited indicated the opposite
You seem to have difficulty understanding what I'm saying here, and I don't know why.
Your citations were about demand. Demand is not what I am disputing. You said yourself "supply and demand", but seem to be blind to half the equation.
> I also don't care whether it does increase supply.
> I don't want everywhere in the country built over, which seems to be something here everyone wants for some bonkers reason. If you want to live in a concrete jungle that is fine, I and many others don't. I moved out of Manchester because I hated it there.
Scale issue here: if "everywhere in the country" were build up to the population density of Manchester city, the UK would house 1.2 billion people.
I'm fairly confident there are not 1.2 billion people who currently want to live in the UK.
> Reform our planning rules to build the railways, roads, labs and 1.5 million homes we need and develop a new 10-year infrastructure strategy.
They could do this is one fell swoop with a single bill by the Parliament that dissolves these local councils, and land owners the right (and freedom) to build whatever they want on land they own.
Building safety codes would still apply; but zoning permitting could be erased in one fell swoop with a single bill.
A younger me would see this as too radical. After seeing some of this up close, now I tend to support this course of action. It would be a shame, but I think we’ve all collectively proven ourselves to be shortsighted and cheap with the great privileges we’ve been afforded.
Sure, let’s check in on this in 4 years time and see if they’ve made any significant progress on that. Many, if not most of our problems have obvious solutions, it’s actually executing on them that’s the problem.
United States 11,855 KWH
China 5,474
Germany 6,483
Australia 7,000 (approximate based on recent trends)
Singapore 9,000 (approximate based on recent trends)
United Kingdom 4,701
Energy consumption of the uK is that of a poor developing country.
people will cite the size of uk homes due to lack of land as if you can't build houses with a lot of sq/ft - sq/m vertically ?
the only thing keeping uk afloat at the moment is the friendly immigration policy.
money doesn't move in capital markets but people would rather pump money into property.
As someone said recently, abundant energy is the basis of prosperity. There are no poor countries that use a lot of energy per capita, and no rich countries that use little. (China is a "middle income" country, not a poor one.)
...that's not really an illustration of that. When you actually consider population and land size, the numbers don't seem so strange.
Just looking at wikipedia population and area (and a very simple scaling)
% area housing = area_house * population
So...
aus 0.08%
nz 0.42%
us 1.82%
can 0.08%
uk 2.14%
The UK has comparably _more_ of it's land covered with housing than the other nations mentioned.
When you consider population density, UK >> US >> NZ > Canada > Australia.
You would _expect_ countries with much more wide open space to have bigger homes, and the other nations homes aren't so big _when you consider their countries' size and population_.
it's not only the area of land but the material's used in the housing, as well as when the housing where built.
The stagnation in other countries housing markets like the us is interesting, I don't know the answer but have they ever had social housing on the scale of the uk?
> [The TCPA] moved Britain from a system where almost any development was permitted anywhere, to one where development was nearly always prohibited. Since [it] was introduced in 1947, private housebuilding has never reached Victorian levels, let alone the record progress achieved just before the Second World War.
> Today, local authorities still have robust powers to reject new developments, and little incentive to accept them. Historically, local governments encouraged development because their tax bases grew in line with the extra value created, but this incentive has been eroded by successive reforms that have centralised and capped local governments’ tax-raising powers.
You might find that interesting. It's from the Adam smith institute. Central planning has been seriously damaging the UK since after ww2. Thatcher is blamed for destroying British industry. It started long before her.
I like Sam Bowman a lot, but are you sure the construction issue is central to this issue in particular? I suspect that access to capital is equally important: the UK is very finance-centric. I wonder how many VCs have engineering expertise, for instance.
I remember seeing tons of shipping containers repurposed as offices all over london last year. Was that a way to ease/get-around this real estate issue?
That isn't what I mean. The moral hazard is caused by the bailouts. It isn't about the sum itself. Merely the guarantee that the tab for large gambling losses will be taken by the taxpayers.
Thankyou for this comment. The GFC is a complicated subject; there WAS a lot of reprehensible behavior, but it's often not correctly identified because people like simple problems with clear villains.
The history of Anglo-Irish Bank is an even more interesting story; Sean Quinn is one of the few bankers who was actually jailed, even if only for a short time.
> • £25,000 starting salaries at traditional engineering firms
> • Exodus to consulting or finance just because it's compensated better
This is _exactly_ my career so far.
The key thing about the British economy is that while most things operate in a free market, construction is centrally planned by councillors who are incentivised to block most development. So the whole economy is struggling, but industries that need physical space are especially hard hit. Your local council can't block you from writing more code, but can stop you from building lab space near where people want to live and work.
My first job out of uni was in a wonderful small engineering firm in Cambridge. Lab space there is eye-wateringly expensive because it's illegal to build enough, so we were based in a makeshift lab in an attic next to the sewage works. I loved working there, but it shows that we're restricting our small businesses unnecessarily through our planning system.
The solution is frustratingly simple, but politically suicidal for any government that tried to implement it: just legalise development subject to basic design codes. I hope we see some planning reform before it's too late for our struggling innovation industries.