In order to try and dispel and lingering suspicions that there's no land left in the UK on which we can allow any new houses etc to be built, allow me to summarise the statistics produced by the Department for Communities and Local Government for England only. The spreadsheet, which you can download from here, gives a break down of ten broad categories of land use for each of 7,969 local council wards and which can be briefly summarised as follows:
Homes and gardens - 5.4%
Non-domestic buildings - 0.7%
Roads, paths, railways - 2.4%
Other - 1.4%
Sub-total developed land - 9.9%
Farmland, forests, parks etc - 87.5%
Water - 2.6%
England is only 54% of the UK by area, but 83% by population, so across the UK as a whole, developed land is probably only about 6.4%. So potentially available agricultural land is in the order of 0.9 acres per person (even ignoring all the stuff we could grow in our back gardens), which is more than enough for the UK to be self-sufficient in food (should we so wish), provided farmers were allowed to use these dratted newfangled inventions like greenhouses or polytunnels.
The other useful statistics we can glean are to divide the total area of homes and gardens by the number of homes, which gives us the nice round figure of 400 sq yards per home and of those 400 sq yards, only a fifth, or 80 sq yards is covered by the actual buildings. I'm surprised it's as much as 400 sq yards, given how many people live in terraced houses or flats; I'm also surprised that it's as much as 80 sq yards 'foot print', given that most of us live in buildings which are two or more storeys high.
Just sayin', is all.
Thursday, 4 November 2010
"Generalised Land Use Database Statistics for England 2005"
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4 comments:
All of which just supports my theory that the NIMBY crusade is an aesthetics war being fought with economic weapons. If parish councils could stipulate the design of new houses, the majority of the NIMBY army would desert.
B, you take a very generous view.
It is a simple fact that a lot of UK housing is quite ugly to look at from the outside (the house we live looks like sh*t, frankly, as opposed to the ones next door which are quite beautiful), ergo most NIMBYs live in quite ugly houses. But the NIMBYs will oppose a new development even if the planned housing is very attrative
In my experience NIMBYs usually either
1. want a view that consists of green fields rather than someone's house/garden, or 2. don't want to look at some ugly building every day, or 3. don't want some noisy activity taking place within earshot or 4. want to be able to drive down the lane that leads away from their village without having to stop, back and pull in four or five times every mile or 5. a combination of the above.
All these represent a loss of amenity to the inhabitants of a place for which they will not be compensated, and to that extent, I have some sympathy. However, there are the die-hards who simply want to keep everything just as it was when they moved into the four-bedroom house with garage that the last developer built. I have no sympathy with them, but, in my experience, they are, mercifully, the minority.
B, good to see you taking your "Prime Ministerial being nice about everybody" role so seriously.
To be honest, I'm not too fussed either way, Land Value Tax will sort all this out. If the little country lane becomes too crowded, the local council can have it widened to two lanes and eveybody's happy, values go up a bit, LVT goes up a bit, more than enough to cover cost of road widening etc.
And if the NIMBYs really want to block all development, they can just voluntarily vote for a much higher LVT rate to apply to developed land in their area, so that new development becomes uneconomic. That's fine by me.
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