From City AM:
London’s Supersewer is a vital piece of infrastructure, a 24 mile tunnel that will prevent sewage from ending up in the Thames and bolster our capital’s antiquated Victorian system. It is officially called the Thames Tideway Project and is due to start construction in 2015. But it is becoming clear that the human cost of the project will be very high, with hundreds of homes blighted by extreme noise and other problems for lengthy periods.
The answer is not to ditch the project but to compensate the losers properly. The expected cost of the project is some £4.1bn – so generously paying off those affected, and in some cases buying their homes at a premium to market price (and reselling them when the work is finished) would hardly make much of a difference. It would be better to spend £4.2bn, protect affected individuals and speed up the planning process rather than risk the entire project descending into endless controversy.
In general, the UK needs to adopt a far more generous compensation regime for the losers in infrastructure projects. It is the only way to prevent nimbyism defeating all progress while protecting individual rights.
Which losers? Surely the point of infrastructure spending is that there are huge overall gains? So while there will be a few "losers" whose homes have to be e.g. completely demolished etc, why is there no concept of symmetry in the Home-Owner-Ist universe?
The coherent approach is to compare the rental value of all the affected land after the work is completed with the likely future rental value of the affected land if the works are cancelled. And as we know, there will nearly always be a huge overall uplift (whether this is enough to pay for the costs is a separate topic). That uplift is a good subject for taxation, which can be used to pay for the cost of the works and the compensation to the losers (to the extent there are any, which there won't be).
Prestigious
3 hours ago
7 comments:
I think the people who will have construction work going on next door to their homes for several years (24 hour working too, for some reason) have reason to be a bit put out.
The people whose homes are affected by the construction work also may not be the people who gain from the work. After all the first set of people can currently flush their loos perfectly well without crap appearing in their bit of the river. I'm guessing the winners will be those a bit further downstream or "the environment" as a whole.
In general yes you are right big projects tend to boost home values (my brother can't wait for Crossrail to arrive in his back yard) but what if the disruption is huge and lengthy?
BE, if in doubt, apply commonsense.
During the works, yes, a lot of people will suffer months or even years of disruption. If we had LVT, they would all automatically get an £x,000 a year reduction for the duration. And yes, it may be other people elsewhere who benefit, in which case they would end up paying extra.
Of course, if local authority finance was properly set up, then London as a whole would be benefitting from this project and London as a whole would be paying for it. If the people adversely affected by the construction were compensated, then the "winners" would be paying the "losers". However, now that most LA finance comes out of general taxation, thanks to the ongoing central government power grab, most people paying for this bit of infrastructure spending won't see a sniff of benefit.
the facts are that the sewer system in London is overloaded. At high tide, if the rain is falling, the Bazalgette sewers have no more than a few inches of capacity left - which tends to mean that Victoria Station - low-lying - gets shut.
The relief sewers are essential unless London depopulates. So I would favour some system so that people who live alongside the river - eg Nimby Helen Mirren - receive compensation while the works take place. I would prefer to be abloe to get home travel rather than that her favourite park for strolling i9n is obstructed with scaffolding.
In fcat you do not have to make the comparison at all, at least now that is. LVT rate is set now. Then by observation after the event if rents rise so will LVT. Or vikki verki.
G, fair summary.
L, also a fair summary.
24 miles = 38 km
at £4 million per km, the cost Norway cuts tunnels wide enough for 2 lanes, that is £150 million.
But to Brits 27 times as much.
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