From the BBC:
Some £500m of public money is being made available to private developers in England to help them get housing and commercial projects off the ground. Ministers say projects have stalled due to problems with road access, contaminated land and flood risks. They say local enterprise partnerships will now be able to apply for money to overcome those sorts of hurdles.
But Labour said the move was an admission that scrapping regional development authorities was a mistake...
And why are Labour complaining..?
Labour's shadow communities and local government secretary Hilary Benn said: "This announcement is a huge admission from the Tory-led government that abolishing the regional development agencies and the £1.4 billion of funding they received each year was a mistake. If this funding is simply to help the new local enterprise partnerships do some of the work that was previously done by the RDAs unlocking and co-ordinating investment projects, but with much less funding, then people will feel short-changed."
Ah right. He's not complaining that the government is giving property developers (i.e. land owners) too much taxpayers' money, he's complaining that the government is not giving them enough taxpayers' money.
H/t Rant And Rave at HPC.
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6 comments:
But as Danny points out, the roads and flood defences and brownfield site contamination are "vital" to these private developments going forward - so, being glib, we can perhaps assume that the money is to be directed towards completing private housing developments being built in usually inaccessible flood plains with a large amount of ground contamination, so jolly good eh. After all, it isn't as if there are vast expanses of the countryside which aren't in flood plains and aren't contaminated in some way and are actually accessible - well there are, of course, but probably the people who already have houses there or nearby object to new houses being built because of the effect it will have on the value of their properties - well, that is just an off the wall guess ...
Sorry pardon - that should of course have read "the roads and flood defences and brownfield site decontamination are "vital" to these private developments going forward.."
Anon, I hadn't considered that point. I was incensed enough that the government are giving my money to landowners to help prop up house prices in the first place.
If we look at it your way, it's even more infuriating.
Much as you would expect: the Tories give money to the developers (Tory voters), who give some of it back as contributions to the Tory Party, Labour gives money to unionised bureaucracies (Labour voters), who give some of it back as union contributions to the Labour Party.
If LVT were collected, money spent on flood defences, decontaminating and giving road access to new developments, could actually be money well spent. If reduction in NIMBY-incentives doesn't make such developments redundant.
Kj
B, fair enough.
Kj, true, but I don't think that's the idea here.
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