They own soggy land! Give them money!

Spotted by Mombers in The Telegraph:

Some new victims of flooding have seen premiums soar by up five times, while others have been told they must pay the first £5,000 of any future claim.

Following talks in 2008 between the Association of British Insurers and the government, insurers agreed to continue to provide cover to almost all homes provided improvements to flood defences were implemented, yet it was made clear that contracts would not be renewed beyond June 2013...

However, speaking in the House of Commons last week, Caroline Spelman, the Environment Secretary, reassured the flood victims that she was confident that a resolution was soon to be reached.

She said: "We are at an advanced stage in intensive and constructive negotiations with the insurance industry on alternative arrangements for when the statement of principles expires this time next year."

Hey, here's a cunning plan - seeing as having proper flood defences* often works out much cheaper than repairing individual buildings (which in turn works out cheaper than paying for insurance), why doesn't whoever it is in charge of flood defences work out what the cost of maintaining those flood defences is going to be and ask the owners of the affected land to chip into a common fund, pro rata to the value of the land and buildings which they own, to finance it? Sort of like Land Value Tax?

* Which is all mundane stuff like making sure rivers are dredged, drains are cleared etc, with the occasional spectacular sea wall or something.

She could make it rain by just casting a spell, man.

What's £14.73 between friends?

From Yahoo:

Plans to reinstate weekly bin collections have been shelved by the Government after a row between Cabinet ministers. Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman has announced the findings of the Government's Waste Review - a cross-department examination of how to tackle waste. It contains a u-turn on the Communities' Secretary Eric Pickles' pledge to bring back weekly rubbish collections...

Caroline Flint, shadow communities secretary, said: "This latest evidence of the Government in chaos is a personal humiliation for Eric Pickles. He has spent years leading people on with overblown promises to restore weekly bin collections, despite Labour's warnings that he would never be able to deliver. The Local Government Secretary should learn the lesson that chasing headlines is no substitute for properly worked out policies to make communities cleaner, greener and better places to live."

Estimates of the costs of reinstating weekly bin rounds have been put at £140m in the first year alone...

Ho hum.

I personally am perfectly happy with fortnightly for normal rubbish and weekly for kitchen/garden waste (which is what they have where I live), others clearly are not.

But if you divide £140 million/year by 9.5 million households, that works out at a princely £14.74/year per household (28 pence/week!), which is hardly unaffordable, even in these straitened times.

I left in the rant from Caroline Flint because it is another fine example of DuckSpeak (Labour politicians seem to be better at this than Tory ones), it sounds quite fluent and sincere when she says it, but it's actually completely devoid of any meaning or relevance to anything whatsoever.

Incorrect use of "we" etc.

From DEFRA's press release accompanying that report saying that nature is of value to us (well duh):

Environment Secretary Caroline Spelman said:

"The natural world is vital to our existence, providing us with essentials such as food, water and clean air, but also other cultural and health benefits not always fully appreciated because we get them for free. The UK National Ecosystem Assessment is a vital step forward in our ability to understand the true value of nature and how to sustain the benefits it gives us."

Or in plain English:

"The natural world is vital to our existence, providing a lucky few with essentials such as food, water and clean air, but also other cultural and health benefits, and we NIMBYs will fight tooth and nail to ensure that we continue to get them for free. But if any other f-er wants a bit of the action, well they can pay us oodles of money first. The UK National Ecosystem Assessment is a clue bat as to how much wealth is being transferred to Home-Owner-Ists thanks to them having monopolised the true value of nature and how we Home-Owner-Ists sustain the system whereby only we benefit."

Yippee! But...

From the BBC:

As well as withdrawing funding for the Sustainable Development Commission at the end of this financial year, which Defra contributes £1.9m annually, Ms Spelman announced that other publicly funded organisations would also be abolished.

These include:

• the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution
• the Inland Waterways Advisory Council
• the Agricultural Wages Board

But... there are still about a thousand quangoes to get rid of, and all this nonsense is dictated from on-high anyway (i.e. from the EU or the WHO or worse) so all these 'functions' will just get shuffled back into normal government departments.

My personal highlight from the BBC article:

SDC chairman Will Day said he was "deeply disappointed" by the announcement.

"Spelman must go"

Obo summarises.

I'd like to point out that An Englishman's Castle covered this last week, but he didn't mention what the husband was up to.

Vote NIMBY, go NIMBY

From a long article in yesterday's FT about future spending cuts:

"People agree that we need to cut debt as a principle so we don't burden future generations," says one Tory strategist. "They're not so keen on specific spending cuts."

Fair enough so far. But, from another article on Tory plans for what they'll do when they're back in government:

One of the Tories’ main housing policies has come under fire from housebuilders, which have warned it could create a “hiatus” in the planning system. Caroline Spelman, shadow communities secretary, has written to councils warning them not to make decisions on controversial planning issues until after the general election. She promised them they would be able to “put the brakes” on any elements of regional spatial strategies that they found “undesirable”. Ms Spelman also told local authorities that a Tory government would not pay “a penny of compensation” to speculative developers that saw their plans fall by the wayside...

F***ing horsey-faced bitch, as per usual. The still small voice of commonsense is Steve Norris:

The plans have also been criticised by Steven Norris, the former Tory minister, who wrote in a trade magazine that while Labour’s insistence on targets was imperfect the Tory policy was wrong. “To assume that progress will be made by reducing all decisions to local level is a grave mistake,” he wrote. “That path guarantees even fewer completions.”

But he is soon shouted down:

... Bob Neill, shadow local government minister, said there was evidence the government was pressing councils to sign up to “unsustainable housing targets” and removing green belt land.

FFS, we shouldn't have any target other than allowing more homes to be built. The market will see to it that construction will stop again once their market value comes down to a level where its uneconomic to build any more (i.e. once marginal land values reach nil, unlike the present situation where urban land is worth one hundred times as much as greenbelt land on the other side of a fence). If we leave it to the markets, then no target is "unsustainable".

These worshippers of The Hallowed Green Belt conveniently overlook that eighty per cent of the UK is agricultural land, it's only a very wide strip around towns and cities that is designated green-belt (over ten per cent of UK land). Sure, town planners ought to ensure that ten or twenty per cent of urban land is public spaces - be that parks, playgrounds, tennis courts or duck ponds - because that is a far more efficient use of land than everybody having a huge back garden - but that's got nothing to do with the greenbelt, as such.

"Ah yes, but what about the pressure on 'local services'" wail the NIMBYs. Wot? Houses don't put pressure on local services, people do! If people stay in the same town but move from a small flat to a new house a couple of miles out, there's no additional demand for local services.

If liberalised planning laws lead to more people moving Down South, then don't forget that local services are provided by local people; if there are more people then there's more demand for schools'n'hospitals, but more people living in the area who can work in those schools'n'hospitals, so it all cancels out.

In any event, if The Blue Wing of the Home-Owners' Party succeeds in choking off new development (with the corresponding cost to the economy in general) with the aim of keeping house prices as high as possible, how is that in any way not deliberately "burdening future generations with debt", thus exposing the first vague policy principle as complete hypocrisy?

I tell you, I'm starting to think that the next lot will be just as bad as the last lot.

Yup, that's the next house price bubble sorted

There are one-and-a-half decent idea in this melange of crap from the Tories, as reported by the BBC, namely these:

The Conservatives also propose making councils publish detailed information on expenditure, including senior staff's pay and perks and guidance to stop "rewards for failure" for sacked workers. Regional Development Agencies would lose their planning and housing powers to local councils and the party says it would scrap the controversial Infrastructure Planning Commission - set up by the government to take decisions on major projects like airports to streamline the planning process.

Of course, they are total hypocrites on airports, do they mean 'streamline' as in give to local NIMBYs more quickly, or 'streamline' as in push through wealth-generating infrastructure projects, who know?

But at the core is the usual shite:

Caps on council tax rises would also be scrapped. Instead, if increases broke a certain threshold, 5% of council tax payers could trigger a local referendum.

Here's a thought, why don't we allow people buying/selling homes in any area to set the amount of local property tax via the free market, by charging a fixed percentage on the amount that buyers are prepared to pay (and which sellers aren't prepared to pay) over and above the bricks and mortar value? Isn't it better to let people vote with their feet - if a council is badly run, then prices fall and the tax goes down, and vice versa. The council is thus more like a mutually owned service provider. This would have the added bonus of acting like a higher interest rate on the largely speculative land value and thus help keep house prices low and stable.

Instead, why don't we have a referendum on the the ninety per cent of taxes that relate to incomes and production? How about a referendum on scrapping VAT and National Insurance or doubling the tax-free personal allowance?

Oh, of course ... I've remembered why ... it's because people equate rising house prices with wealth and falling house prices with recessions (thus completely confusing cause and effect; it's the rising prices that cause the subsequent recessions), so if the Tories can keep council tax down (and all other taxes correspondingly higher) then money will flow from heavily taxed productive investment into lightly taxed property, house prices will start to rise ... (continued page 94).

Remind me, what was it that Dave studied at Oxford?

"This offensive behaviour is not only shocking but intolerable and completely unacceptable"

Guess who said this about whom:

a) Caroline Spelman, on the subject of Matthew Lewis, who engaged in a spot of McCann baiting at a New Year party (of which I am not entirely innocent), or

b) Matthew Lewis, on the subject of Caroline Spelman, who paid for her private nanny out of her MP's staffing allowance?*

* Please note, I accept that it is difficult for mothers of younger children to carry out their MP's duties. If a law were passed, openly and honestly, that female MPs with children under a certain age were entitled to an additional allowance (yeah, like a salary of £63,291 a year won't cover it), then so be it.

"MPs call for Spelman to be sacked"

She definitely looks like a witch. Question is, will she burn like one?

"Spelman facing expenses inquiry"

Tee hee!

"Tory chairman defends nanny pay"

I have long loathed Horseface Spelman (Con, Meriden) with a passion, as she is the Patron Saint of NIMBYs and sworn enemy of the Land Value Tax movement. As well as being singularly ugly and whiney-voiced.

It turns out that she's had her hand in the till as well.

Shameless f***ing bitch. I tell you, hanging's too good for them.

Garden grabbing

There was an article in yesterday's Times in which the RHS bemoaned the number of people who concrete over their front gardens for parking spaces, the issues being, it reduces 'biodiversity' (I'm not sure what that is, but from the context I'm guessing it's A Good Thing) and that it increases the risk of flooding (water runs off rather than soaking into the ground). Fair enough - and they provide a simple solution - if you want to park cars in your front garden, then just reinforce the area, making it hard enough to park cars on, but allowing grass to continue growing. All good stuff.

Then of course, they smuggle in the statistics that "30,000 gardens are lost to development every year ... In 1997, 11 per cent of housing developments were on land already classified as residential, but by 2006 this had grown to 22 per cent".

That 30,000 figure has to be seen in context of there being 25 million homes in the UK, so it's not a huge figure, and the percentage increase is meaningless - maybe the number of housing developments has halved? Maybe the housing developments on existing residential land tend to be far smaller?

This is all apparently a problem because "In towns and cities, the area of land used as gardens and other green space can be crucial to the survival of wild animals and plants."

Great, because there is a simple solution to this as well - instead of encouraging development on 'brownfield' sites (which includes homes with large garden on to which you can squeeze a block of flats) - allow towns and cities to expand instead - that way everybody gets a bigger garden, there's more biodiversity, everybody wins!

UPDATE: in reply to the comment by Longrider"It hasn't happened yet, but given sufficient pressure and developers will be encouraged to use compulsory purchase to force garden owners to relinquish them", this is AFAICS a total urban myth put about by patron saint of NIMBYs and sworn enemy of the land tax movement, Caroline Spelman MP (Con, Meriden) who claimed that "Worse could be to come, with even harsher planning regulations on the way and the prospect of compulsory purchase of gardens for 'social' purposes."

Does anybody have any real life examples of this happening? The NIMBYs oppose it just as vehemently when a neighbour perfectly voluntarily decides to sell his home and large garden to build a block of flats. If you are concerned about "property rights"', then which right is more important - one landowner's right to replace his house with a block of flats; or a neighbouring landowner's right to prevent him from doing so? The best way to find a compromise between these competing 'rights' is land value tax, but that's another topic.

The article also quotes the Tories as saying "Suburban neighbourhoods risk being 'over-developed' through a proliferation of 'one-bedroom pokey flats' instead of family homes built with sufficient space for parking and a garden, the shadow minister warned."

I couldn't agree more - but the reason for this is because the NIMBYs don't just oppose more concentrated development of urban areas; they don't want to allow people to build on a single square inch of the Hallowed Green Belt either. So where exactly are those 'family homes' going to be built?