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There was a table in The Times on Wednesday showing "Israel's Tally" in the latest bout of middle east warfare. Bearing in mind we are told incessantly by the pro-Israel lobby that they are merely responding to being fired on and so on it's quite a shock really:

ISRAEL’S TALLY
In 14 days:

4 villages captured by Israel
40,000 shells have been fired
2,750 rockets and mortar fired into Israel
17 civilians killed
24 soldiers killed
381 Lebanese killed
75 soldiers injured

I did some searching about these "Katyusha" rockets. They can apparently manage a warhead of about 20 kg compared with motorized artillery (175mm/8in) whose projectiles are more usually 60kg.

Now, I would not want to live under either sort of fire, but if I had to choose I would take my chances facing 55 tonnes of projectile (assuming that most of that 2,750 projectiles are forty pound rockets and not ten pound mortars) spread across northern Israel than 2400 tonnes of missile fired into Lebanon.

So, even if you don't regard the human rights abuse of terrorising a whole nation as disproportionate, just on tonnage of weaponry fired, they are two orders of magnitude "disproportionate".

A fight ostensibly over two kidnapped soldiers has already resulted in three dozen or so Israeli families grieving for loved ones and an order of magnitude more than that Lebanese families grieving.

Stop defending this humanitarian disgrace!

For the first time ever I think, I have managed to get a consultation document that has clearly been sent to all households in Oxford. Usually these affairs seem to be "all households except Jock's". Or perhaps it's just that as a "tied worker" it's usually my employer that gets to answer on my behalf. Anyway, aside from the fact that over a thousand of them have been delivered to a now empty hall of residence, as consultations go I quite like it. And its ten questions about how we want to see Oxford develop over the next twenty years was very apt for me on Friday.

I'd just come home from a "Question Time" style debate on Oxford, its future development and the pressures this puts on Oxfordshire as a whole and in particular its natural and rural hinterland, organized by the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England. For anyone not familiar with the situation, as in most of the south of England there is tremendous pressure for housing, in and particular affordable housing, and in Oxfordshire Labour, whose remaining strength is largely in the city, are promoting urban extensions as part of a "Central Oxfordshire Growth Area" while the Conservatives, Lib Dems and Greens are largely against the sort of large extensions envisaged.

For their part, Labour point to evidence based housing need far outstripping both actual supply of housing and the potential land availability for more in the city. They claim that only their proposals can relieve the plight of the many artisans and other workers needed by the city who cannot afford decent housing, and believe that extensions to Blackbird Leys and Kidlington will prove to be the most sustainable and be somewhere people will aspire to live and magically create new communities of 7,000 homes each.

And their former housing portfolio holder on the city council, Ed Turner, now group deputy leader and Malik hugger, was on the panel to defend their different viewpoint alongside Christine Drury, chair of CPRE South Eastern region, Evan Harris, Lib Dem MP for Oxford West and Abingdon whose constituency straddles the town and country divide, and environmentalist and author Paul Kingsworth.

Now, not wanting to blow my own trumpet too loudly, but having got involved in strategic housing policy when on the City Council, I've done a lot of research and reading around the subject and my biggest personal project is all about providing affordable housing in innovative ways. And my vision for Oxford belies any accusation of wanting our fabulous city to stagnate. But I fundamentally disagree with Labour's approach, and here's why:

1.The evidence they cite does not in fact make a case for planning new homes, but for better organising the existing housing stock the better to match market needs.

2. It perpetuates the idea that outward growth (sprawl) is the only answer to housing affordability problems.

3. Crucially, it effectively ignores the need of the existing housing stock for regeneration and renewal, which, as I argue, is urgent and growing.

4. Creating communities is difficult, expensive and time consuming, and Labour's proposals primarily tag their new housing onto existing areas of multiple deprivation that prove that very point.

5. The proposals are less sustainable than other alternatives and are not, as they claim, likely to lead to places where people aspire to live.

6. The proposals, frankly, pander to rent seeking by local landowners at the expense of good sense and investment in our urban core (how ironic that Labour should side with big landowners!).

So, first and most crucially, the evidence of need is being wrongly interpreted.

Ed Turner on Friday evening trotted out numbers from a Housing Needs Assessment report carried out by Fordham Research in 2003/4 for Oxford City Council. Strangely, an otherwise very good council website does not seem to have this report on public view, but they do regularly review the figures and publish an annual report on housing need. But I've read the Fordham report and whilst I fully acknowledge that it concludes that 1750 more affordable housing units are needed every year for the next decade to cope with the backlog and emerging demand, that does not in my opinion translate into a need to build net new housing units.

Fordham state that some 75% of those they included in this figure are already living in the city. Yes, they may be in difficult, sometimes horrendous, conditions - overcrowding or substandard housing - but the basic message is that they need more affordable housing, not just more housing. Despite what Kate Barker might have said (the self confessed economist with no experience of housing markets before she was commissioned by Gordon Brown to do a national review of housing supply), house prices are not simply determined by supply and demand, but by the ability to finance more and more debt. Increasing the overall stock of housing in Oxford is not simply about having to build twice as many as you want to be affordable under planning obligations - it will also increase demand.

14,000 new homes, as Labour propose, is the equivalent of a twenty five per cent increase in the city's population. Now, they may think that is desirable, but it is a political position, not an evidence based projection, and not something they have spelled out as starkly as that, nor have they a mandate for such dramatic change. When they talk of relieving the housing needs for the citizens that are here already, they do not explain that it's also provision for major growth in the overall population, somewhat against national trends. Indeed the last set of projections based on the 1991 census about the population expected at 2001 were significantly undershot and subsequently revised downwards. Though admittedly the reason for this could be that people simply cannot afford to move here to fill the essential jobs we need to fill.

Actually what they'll find, I'd suggest, is that new incomers to the city will continue to desire to live in the urban core by and large, close to employers and so on, and the people who will be driven out to the new estates will be the poorer households - further gentrifying the core and impoverishing the peripheral estates.

Secondly, sprawl is no long term answer.

In refusing to face up to the undoubted challenges, which should not be underestimated of course, of finding ways of fitting more households into the already built up area, and instead opting for urban extensions at the first sight of housing pressure, it is, whatever Labour claim, the thin end of the wedge. Their 14,000 homes, coupled with the difficulties of redesigning a Green Belt that took fifty years to put in place in the first place and is only a decade old in its final form, will not even meet the Fordham demand even if we accept the city's interpretation that it translates easily into a demand for net additional housing. For they'll only get 50% of them affordable, and with the Green Belt issues it will likely take at least a decade to get started.

So whilst putting their eggs into that longer term basket, they will continue to accumulate that 1750 annual demand and by the time the new estates are ready for occupation they will be a drop in the ocean of affordable housing need. Then what? Propose another extension? And another? It is quite disingenuous in fact for them to propose an extension that won't even meet their own claimed need as if it's a solution. They are building up expectations that that solution cannot meet.

Thirdly, by focussing on urban extensions, they will ignore the pressing needs of the existing housing stock and the opportunities redevelopment and renewal present for more sustainable living.

Already we know that 30% of Oxford's privately owned housing stock fails to meet the government's very minimal "decent homes" standards, as well as the same proportion of the social rented stock. Most failures are because they do not meet current standards for energy efficiency and thermal comfort. As I have blogged before, these standards themselves will be worth little if we are entering an age of greatly increased energy costs and even overall shortages. Oxford University's Environmental Change Institute's 40% House project reveals the extent of the problem according to one group of experts. Others go further and suggest that our housing stock in the future will have to operate on just 10% of its current energy use.

And for all the problems of overcrowding and affordability in this city, whilst we don't have many actual empty homes, you can bet that for every teenager having to share a box room with their opposite gender sibling there's an empty bedroom somewhere in the city because of underoccupancy in the older population and other factors. You see, all the urban capacity studies only focus on where land can be changed to housing use from another use. Brownfield sites are important, and Oxford is making the most of converting such sites (though not as much as Site Value Rating for local business tax would achieve of course) but they ignore the fact that all built land, including that occupied currently by existing housing, is in fact "brownfield" - one day, like the slums of St Ebbe's, it will become ripe for redevelopment.

And that day, if oil runs out, is coming quicker than ever. Of course here is one area where the city council could make a huge difference on its own. It owns some 8000 homes and the land on which they stand. They are in the middle of proving that densities can be increased without undue discomfort with projects such as the Rose Hill Orlits redevelopment where just over a hundred household units are being replaced with more than two hundred (though I'll bet any money you like that they will not meet the 40% House standards let alone the 10% energy footprint that we may require).

If and when these council estates sport better homes and more desirable places to live as a result the sort of far-sighted large scale redevelopment I propose than the privately owned suburbs, I'll bet the ball will start rolling on those private neighbourhoods coming together to secure their energy futures and sustainable living. Face it, we have a huge amount of inter-war semi-detached housing that will soon be unsustainable, and if not actually slum by the old definition of the word, then at least anti-social in the sense that they will be guzzling up more than their share of energy and land resources.

The city is in long term decline as far as its residential neighbourhoods go. You can't wander around for more than a few minutes to see the problems created by haphazard redevelopment, by the imposition of more cars crammed into residential streets, the lack of investment in infrastructure (check out the pavements in any part of the city). The pressures for more affordable housing, for living with climate change and/or dwindling fossil fuel reserves and for having generally nice places to live and play offer a great opportunity to get neighbourhoods, even private ones, redeveloped to everyone's benefit.

Fourthly, creating new communities is expensive, difficult and time consuming.

Most notably, the proposals to add 7,000 homes on the edge of Greater Leys, at the time the largest council estate in Europe I understand, are tagging more housing onto an area already plainly struggling to cope with its recent vast growth over the past couple of decades. Whilst much of the Northfield Brook ward is new or newish commuter housing, including the planners' holy grail of intermingling owner occupied and social rented housing, it is still amongst the most deprived areas of the country.

It is not the organic development of a community, but the dislocation of people from other areas to fill the (much needed) new housing that causes the problems. It is not a problem of people but of planning. Even somewhere like Bicester, a market town with all the facilities that self-sufficient settlements need, is struggling to cope with a similar amount of housing to what is proposed on the edge of an area with few facilities. And what facilities there are in Greater Leys are artificially subsidised in order to try to generate that elusive community feel.

Mgadalen College and the city's Labour party say that they plan to include such facilities in their new developments. But it's just not the same as reivigorating an existing community. Better by far to concentrate on areas that already have community. My proposals for redevelopment keep people in the communities in which they have heir roots whilst creating more space for new households to join those communities. If they focus on these peripheral extensions they will inevitably have to skimp on maintaining existing communities and they in turn will degenerate.

Fifthly, and related to the sprawl argument, Labour claim their proposals are more sustainable.

But this is only in relation to other proposals for housing further out into the county from which city workers will have to commute longer distances. Oxfordshire is a remarkably self-contained housing market. Most (95%) of its emerging households are self-generated - children wanting to leave the family home, pewople remaining single longer and so on. And most moves are within Oxfordshire. Promoting a single solution of urban extensions risks the destruction of rural communities. Village schools are dependent on young families with school aged children being able to afford to remain in the settlement they are rooted in. So whilst it might be more sustainable than building whole new super-settlements around the county towns of people predominantly dependent on Oxford itself for work, it is far less sustainable than ensuring our existing communities remain viable.

And the sustainable argument as I have already said, ignores the potential for increasing overall sustainability of the city by redeveloping existing communities in place.

And finally, we have the unholy alliance of Labour lobbying for the big landowners that surround the city.

We do not even know, for example, whether there are more suitable sites that other landowners may offer at a lower cost for development. If, and it is a big if, there is no alternative to building urban extensions, we should seek suppliers of land as we do suppliers of other goods and services - at best value. Lib Dem policy of "community land auctions" sounds interesting - where landowners seek to offer land free of planning consents to capture the hope values in their land, but the community captures the uplift in values arising from the actual planning consents and can use this money to provide infrastructure.

A Postscript on the CPRE.

I just want to say something about the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England who organized the debate that led to this essay. In my opinion they get a bad rap, especially over housing. They are seen by many as being made up of a hardcore of anti-development activists. I my experience, whilst there may be a few who are drawn to them because of that reputation, in fact they have a lot of constructive ideas of their own and are open to those of others. Already Oxfordshire Community Land Trusts has presented our ideas to their Oxfordshire executive committee and got, I think, a good reception for our vision of keeping rural communities sustainable.

Many of the issues aired on Friday were not about whether Oxford and Oxfordshire was full, but about how to address the obvious and pressing needs they too recognize as blighting the lives of many and putting the prosperity of the city and its hinterland and all its citizens at risk. They prompt us to look at alternatives to Labour's all to easy solutions of helter-skelter sprawling growth. Part of the attraction of Oxford is that it is compact. That will become even more important as fuel costs rise and working patterns and demographics change. There are better ways to achieve equity for all in meeting their housing needs, for anyone brave enough to promote them.

Technorati Tags: affordable housing, climate change, community land trusts, oxford, politics

The new man at the helm of Universities UK, the "trade body" for university vice-chancellors, is saying that universities ought to be teaching remedial English lessons to students who arrive at university not being able to communicate very well in written English:

Universities 'must offer basic grammar classes' - Telegraph:
By Graeme Paton, Education Editor
Last Updated: 1:48am BST 14/09/2007

Rick Trainor, the president of Universities UK, which represents vice-chancellors, said that universities should do more to ensure graduates are properly prepared for the world of work.

Employers have already criticised the standards of basic skills among teenagers, saying too many are leaving school with a poor grasp of the three Rs.

Wlk b4 u rn plz!!!
Originally uploaded by Ryan Pierini

Now, he would apparently label me "nostalgic" for hankering after the days when pupils were able to string a sentence together by the time they left school. Apparently they more than make up for this basic inability in "new capabilities" in "IT, in group and independent working, in spoken presentations and in creativity well beyond those of their predecessors." After all, he says, every generation whines that the next is not "up to scratch".

I'm sorry, in the words of former Glasgow University Rector Richard Wilson, I don't believe it! This is in a country where we now spend nearly £80,000,000,000 a year on education. Prof Trainor can call me old fashioned all he likes, but I don't believe that it is acceptable to be spending that sort of money for people hoping to go on to higher education to be leaving school with only SMS level English. We are failing them not least if they enter work or higher education without the ability to communicate complex ideas in a way that everyone ought to be able to understand.

It's not that new a problem either. I remember as a new Hall Warden ten or so years ago being asked to "proof read" someone's essay which turned out to have the feel of a Joycean stream of consciousness with little structure, and even worse grammar. But I suppose the modern way of looking at this is that if we universities can take someone barely able to write on the basis that they can "Powerpoint" (which I am assured is now a verb in its own right) well and turn them into a world class graduate, our "value added" is significantly greater than if that person had arrived with a full set of basic academic skills after fourteen years of schooling.

And yes, I suppose if we're going to graduate them at all we're going to have to engage in this remedial work. But it should be with much protest not resignation. First and foremost we should be screaming out that this level of entry to higher education is just not good enough and that schools, not universities, ought to be addressing it.

Today's Guardian carries a nice enough piece by Simon Jenkins in praise of devolution and localizing taxation, in particular through "ability to pay" local income tax. Clearly Daahling has yesterday set the scene for another big spat about Council Tax as it seems that the local government settlement is going to leave little option but for local authorities to raise the hated tax by more than they otherwise would.

Of course I think Jenkins, and the Lib Dems, are wrong on LIT - and are certainly wrong on removing all forms of property tax - but we in ALTER are prepared to accept LIT I think now on the proviso that we replace some other tax with a land tax at a national level (preferably a whopper like income tax for me!). Anyway - here's a taste of the Jenkins article (of course he's also wrong that it was a Tory script Daahling was cribbing from but don't let that get in the way of an otherwise good article!):

It was a Tory tax proposal that rewrote Darling's script:

The way forward can only be the European way, to devolve a major slice of spending on public services back to where it was before the mid-1980s, to local authorities. There it must be covered by some element of ability to pay - as bravely proposed by the Liberal Democrats. Darling cannot go on financing central programmes with above-inflation rises in a partly regressive property tax. There is no alternative, one day, to some form of local income tax. Council tax could be cut by a quarter with roughly one pence on income tax. Scotland is even now contemplating such a proposal. Yet ask Brown or Cameron for a view on such fiscal devolution, and they will look as if you wanted to murder their cat.

Giving taxpayers some scope to determine the level and quality of their public services is the only way to sustain future rises in public expenditure. That scope can come only through the local ballot, over health, police, education or whatever. Local income-related taxes exist in almost every country in Europe. They are intelligent taxation. Only in Britain do they scare party leaders witless.

We should be grateful to Lord Justice Sedley for one thing - re-igniting the debate about the national DNA database. His prescription, however, is completely wrong, and unjustifiable. He is right when he says that:

...the current database, which holds DNA from crime suspects and scenes, was "indefensible" because it was unfair and inconsistent.

but we should be very wary of his suggested fix for that, that...

...whole population and every UK visitor should be added to the national DNA database.

He is of course correct that the current situation is indefensible, Black men are more than twice as likely to be on the database than white, just because of the disproportionate way in which the police target black men for stop and search operations. But his prescription that:

"Going forwards has very serious but manageable implications. It means that everybody guilty or innocent should expect their DNA to be on file for the absolutely rigorously restricted purpose of crime detection and prevention."

So, we are to be scared from committing any crimes because we know they already have our DNA and when they find that at the scene it'll be an easy next step to "pull" anyone whose DNA is found for questioning. With no other probable cause than that their DNA was at the scene - Paul Walter's Liberal Burblings puts this much better than I have, describing it as "presumed guilt", overturning what must probably be, after Habeas Corpus perhaps, the key principle of English law.

One could imagine a situation where, for example, a victim of crime in the hours before being raped or murdered or whatever was in a place with lots of other people - perhaps a bar or a club. He or she brushed up against countless innocent bystanders, some of whom left a hair on the victim's clothes or sneezed over them or somehow transferred DNA to them or to another item of evidence. The police could just pull all of those people for questioning. Or perhaps that the crime scene was quite a publicly frequented place, and countless innocent samples are collected and the owners of that DNA pulled for questioning.

And as if that weren't enough, what sort of access would the defense have to be given to make this fair? Someday one could imagine the argument succeeding that with evidence disclosure rules, the defense could subpoena anyone whose DNA sample was found to try to create reasonable doubt for their client.

And in future, when the purpose of individual genes are steadily discovered, a witness statement might describe someone that may or may not be involved at the scene and based on that physical description the police could pull all blond men with blue eyes and the obesity gene in the local area to question?

The judge talks also about how many "cold cases" have been solved using DNA evidence. Yes, that may be one of the advances that has been made possible with DNA technology. But I wonder how many of them have actually been solved simply by matching up with the database. I rather suspect very few. That most have probably been a case of arresting the person first suspected many years ago and then checking them up against the DNA. Ie that DNA is used merely to corroborate existing evidence that somehow proved insufficient at the time to convict. That's a very different proposition from having a pro-active database from which to go and pull every person that brushed past the victim twenty years ago and happened to leave DNA that was subsequently collected.

No, storing our DNA is storing a little part of each and every one of us. As I said last week, our DNA should be subject to habeas corpus. It's like putting us all on bail for further questioning, sometime, about any other matter they feel we might be able to help with. The implications even now, let alone in some future time when we may have a seriously authoritarian regime in power or where the technology is available to extrapolate from descriptions what the suspect's DNA might look like, are horrendous.

In an accompanying article, the BBC puts the other side of the case. We already hold proportionally more DNA samples than any other country. Since it was first allowed in 1995 it has been steadily extended. The evidence of "mission creep" is clear already. We cannot trust any government with this sort off information. One only has to have seen the film Gattaca to know why. We must go back to the 1995 regulations, and strengthen them indeed so that people have rights to know and control whether their DNA is held if they are not currently in the criminal justice system for a good reason.