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Nearly a month ago, when Chief Constable Peter Fahy of Cheshire went on his rant about upping the alcohol age limit I wrote the following piece but ended up not posting it. Now that thanks to Tim Martin of Wetherspoons (somewhat ironically as I would hold his company to be part of the problem - cashing in on the drinking shed culture and pricing out many estate pubs) an alternative argument similar to mine below has been posited, and picked up by Liberal England and Niles, I thought maybe it was worth reviving. It was a theme I mentioned actually in my candidate vetting interview as one potential way in which local authorities might be able to influence this "binge drinking" issue:

There's all this chatter about alcohol fuelled crime and anti-social behaviour going on. Most sensible folk seem to agree that raising the drinking age is no answer (I would in fact abolish any minimum age completely of course). But I wanted to take a different tack that has niggled away at me for a while. Kind of on the "Bowling Alone" theme of declining social capital. I believe a lot of this trouble is because of the demise of the local pub.

more from san joan's evening
Originally uploaded by J_G_R

Everyone now seems to get together (usually on the same night of course) and gather at drinking sheds in town and city centers. Long ago, when people weren't so mobile late at night and so on, they would go to their local pub. Many of our housing estates even had one built as part of the original planning for the estate, at least as important as a church or a medical centre or a Co-op.

But in there you would not just have the Club 18-30 hell bent on a little youthful havoc. You'd have people of all ages and all social groups on an estate. And it was probably the only one within walking distance so if you were barred it was a real pain to go anywhere else. If you got a little obnoxious or worse on the booze your family and neighbours would get to hear about it pretty quick through someone else who was at the pub when you kicked off. You would have to apologize, and perhaps even beg, or at least eat a bit of humble pie, to get back in. Be a little shamed by the incident.

Now, nobody who knows you sees you out in these anonymous booze barns in the centre of town. One is much like another so if you embarrass yourself at one you can go to half a dozen others for the same bus journey. Reprimands are all down to the police, assisted perhaps by bouncers. And all have to stay within strict boundaries - your cousin is not going to take you out the side door and box your ears (not that I'd advocate such violence as a cure!) until you stop acting like an idiot and can go back in and apologize. You might even feel proud to be on "Police, Camera, Action" rather than ashamed to be acting the idiot in front of your family and neighbours.

I doubt we can roll back the years that have made some city streets (like George Street here in Oxford) end to end gin palaces. Who knows though, maybe climate change, fuel costs, environmental concerns, might one day make us go back to the real local pub and have to face up to our families when we act the alcohol fuelled arsehole.

I've been thinking about affordable housing, urban design, community involvement and climate change.

I think back to the aerial photographs of Headington Quarry tucked away in the Coach House taken in, if memory serves, 1930. The familiar streets we know today as Weyland Road, Margaret Road, Mark Road, Wharton Road and so on are laid out in plan form with half built houses dotted about. Clearly a big estate in the making.

And I recall also reading of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century development of much of inner suburban Oxford, like the terraces and semis around Summertown and between the Iffley and Cowley Roads that were carried out in swathes by organisations, often mutual, like the Oxford Workers' Temporary Building Society.

Until the past few decades the development of our cities has been through big waves of development on what were at the time greenfield sites, effectively concentric rings rippling out from the centre, both public and private sector development, often side by side, at least in adjacent streets. Of course most of any public sector ones in these parts of town are now private, and the only big areas of publicly owned housing land are in the large council estates, now largely around the edges of the current built up area. And of course, since right to buy, even these have been peppered with privately owned plots.

All very obvious really. Add a green belt to all of this though and the ripples no longer have anywhere to go. Big waves of development are not really possible any more. And often for good reason. We want to avoid sprawl. We want to have countryside around us. We want to be near the centre of things.

The only place for new development is through the conversion of existing sites within the built up area, first from non-housing use and then, in theory at least, redevelopment of existing residential land to meet different market needs.

But it is this latter that causes problems. Whereas the estates themselves were developed as a whole, because of the growing preponderance of private freehold ownership of housing plots throughout the second half of the twentieth century in the main, so called "site assembly" is now difficult and expensive. So you tend to end up with small scale conversions - you know the sort of thing - a pair of semis divided into six flats with a couple of big extensions into the garden, not enough parking space and often rented not sold so a "fear" of short term residents with little interest or connection with their area. Or, often viewed as even worse, small scale infilling, backland development and just generally "squeezing things in".

Some would no doubt say that such piecemeal development is the best way because things only change slowly, there's no sense of major disruption for a neighbourhood or community. But given the number of times concerns about even a small number of conversions are raised it's clearly not terribly comforting to neighbours. And far more dangerously in the long term, it produces a hotch-potch of development, by squeezing things into existing patterns of development you're really reducing quality not enhancing it. A steady erosion of the overall quality and coherencce of the built environment.

Whilst it may be possible, as is being done with Oxford's Rose Hill, for large landlords such as in that case Oxford City Council to embark on large scale redevelopment because ultimately they retain, until now anyway, a controlling interest in the land, this simply does not happen in private housing areas, regardless of how decent or fit the general state of the stock in those areas is. At least not until, as in the case of some of the well known examples of whole terraced streets in northern towns standing empty, there is complete failure in the local land market - unlikely anywhere there's a shortage of affordable housing.

Now here's the shocker. We all read about the problems of the public sector housing stock in meeting the so called "decent homes" standard. In fact the ambition at least extends to all housing, private, public, social. All of it. But according to the English House Condition Survey for 2004 nearly 30% of all private tenure housing fails the decent homes standard as well as the just over 30% of the social sector stock. Most fail on the energy efficiency criteria. And it's easy to see why. For most of the history of mass house building in this country we didn't apply greatly different standards to public and private sector development. The houses of the thirties and forties are pretty similar whether they are council estate or private, at least technologically in areas like energy efficiency.

And these energy standards are in turn the standards of yesteryear. If we are approaching or past "Peak Oil", if we are going to start to demand that our housing stock should enable us to live on significantly smaller energy supplies than previously, even the decent homes standards will seem pretty tame. We probably only have a relative handful of homes that would cope, for example, with running on 10% of the current average household energy consumption.

And whilst it might be possible technologically to adapt some of such housing to late- and post- oil-age requirements, it would not address the other pressing issue of market renewal and adaptation to modern demographics. There's little point in spending a fortune making a five bedroomed house fuel secure if there is no market for five bedroomed houses, in the longer run anyway.

So, a whole bundle of issues are putting unprecedented strain on our housing stock. And this is not just in the south east of course. Some of the issues will vary in importance. In some cases there may be too much housing for the market which in turn makes it difficult to improve properties for an energy efficient future because there's no profit in it. But it is still, wherever you are, difficult to picture the sort of investment needed in our housing stock or the difficulties we face bringing it about in a way that does not lead to a helter skelter of haphazard piecemeal development.

So you see why I have great trouble with the philosophical basis for freehold land ownership. Because tenure is of an indeterminate length, unlike a well managed leasehold estate for example, no great number of adjacent plots come up for recycling at once. The fragmented market and land amongst so many different individual owners means that there can never really be, without drastic change, the sort of phenomenon like the great public health acts stimulating large scale redevelopment of slum areas and so on. Not that I'm saying that Headington Quarry is anything like a slum - but come the day say high energy consuming homes are socially unacceptable perhaps or seen as below standard there is no mechanism, without huge scale intervention at least, for major redevelopment, for remodelling whole estates. Because they are not estates, they are rows of "Englishman's Castles" and therefore untouchable without the consent of the owner effectively.

Now, this is not a call for some kind of Stalinist land grab, centralised planning and massive public subsidy. Nor for a return to landlordism or for people to lose their biggest asset somehow. Somehow we need to find a voluntary solution whereby communities can build on their social capital, quite literally, and mutually gain from redevelopment. An incentive for people to pool some of the "sovereignty" in their own plot in return for more involvement and control in the development of their own neighbourhood.

Even if that were achievable, could one reasonably expect a whole neighbourhood, even a whole city block, to agree to a redevelopment scheme when their own familiar home in on the line? Is there any real alternative on both environmental and housing shortage grounds to some radical change in our relationship between land, occupier and community? I say without such change our cities are destined to slowly die. Unable to breathe and heave and sigh in response to the different pressures and trends its citizens put on them.

I believe there is a vehicle that could achieve such change - Community Land Trusts

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

There's a lot of chatter in the media today about this:

ConservativeHome's ToryDiary: Lowering and simplifying tax for small business

George Osborne is giving a speech to the Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development and the British Chambers of Commerce today, about simplifying the administration of income tax, national insurance and VAT.

Here's the original:

Liberal Democrat Manifesto for Business (2005)

Liberal Democrat top policies for business:

• Carry out the biggest act of deregulation by scrapping the DTI.
• Carry out independent impact assessments on new regulations.
• Introduce a sunset clause on new regulation.
• Reform business rates with an allowance for small businesses.
• Simplify the tax system to ease the burden on small businesses in particular
• Focus on increasing skills of the workforce.

You can read the rest on the Lib Dems' publicly accessible policy pages. Cut and paste as much as you like George!

Little mentioned in the Lib Dem Voice open thread on Thursday night's Question Time Leadership special was the prolonged discussion on coalition. And in particular an exciting, intriguing possibility that I find myself returning to frequently; the notion that we could have a Labourvative or Conservalab government with a genuinely and revolutionary Liberal opposition ready to wow the electorate with a "REAL alternative"® (or even a "real ALTERnative"®) at the following election.

Such a suggestion is usually derided as fanciful by even the most optimistic Lib Dem commentators, and it had its share of derision from some in the QT audience. Indeed, at this exact moment, I believe our policies are still too timid to count as such a revolutionary vision that could trigger a widespread sense amongst the electorate that a different type of political economy is possible and could win.

But I do think that if we had the cojones (Lib Dem word of the week?) truly to push our liberal credentials, in the way that Nick Clegg seemed to suggest when he said he would like to move us "out of our comfort zone" in this leadership contest (but neither candidate has yet managed to do at least from my perspective), the circumstances are right for it to grab the public imagination.

The fact that Gideon can be named "Politician of the Year" for making what must be the single most insignificant tax reorganization policy announcement in modern history simply proves the poverty of political discourse currently going on in our country, how completely we are in thrall to spin over substance. Since the Liberal Party were last in government at Westminster we have seen nearly a century of swings from rampant socialism (and let us not forget just how close to total state control of industry we were at by the seventies) to government by the aristocratic friends of capital. Yet as the socialist experiment failed and was consigned to history by Margaret Thatcher so also her remedy, a sort of authoritarian free market capitalism, failed because it did not address the most fundamental flaws of the unequal distribution of the common wealth caused and exacerbated by her party's protectionist past.

Labour remained unelectable until they abandoned as much of their socialist background as they could get away with and became the Managerial Party, a strange utilitarian beast whose only aim was to gain power and keep it, tinkering with this and that as public opinion shifted but essentially ideology free. David Cameron is taking the Tories the same way. And yet what they seek to manage, both of them, is decline, just as John Hoskyns suggested to Margaret Thatcher in the seventies.

And so we have the possibility of a new two party state. One party is the two halves of the Managerial Party, both untroubled by ideology, vacuously rearranging the deck-chairs according to opinion polls and focus groups in their marginal battlegrounds. On the other side there is room for a party that not just disagrees on minor aspects of management but which offers, as it did a century ago, a completely alternative ideologically driven vision of self-ownership, minimal government ("small government", as a term, is now meaningless as everyone seems to promise it but ends up being corrupted by the power of big government), free trade on a fair and level playing field where protectionism and its devil-spawn monopoly is ruthlessly rooted out, and where everyone is entitled as of right to their fair share of the common wealth as their primary safety net.

A few months ago the Libertarian Alliance posed the question, in their annual essay competition, of whether Britain needs a specifically libertarian political party. Having once decided to make common cause with the Tories when it appeared that Thatcher was adopting some of their ideals, they too have, it appears, grown tired of the banal micro-management politics from their former champions. I'd say that it's not a specifically libertarian party we need but a radically Liberal one.

To be that party, however, we have to sing from the same hymn sheet. No more of these artificial divisions, largely in the minds of others of course, between "social liberals" and "economic liberals". We have to believe, and believe instinctively, that individual choice enabled by self-ownership is the ultimate goal that can set people free to achieve their optimum potential. That intervention is for when there is total market failure and should be seen as an essentially temporary measure to redress some economic issue that has got so far out of balance it leaves a good number of people unable to engage in a truly free voluntary exchange for some good. We need to rediscover that the way to increase the returns to labour is to eradicate protectionism and monopoly, especially the great monopolies of enclosure of our planet's common wealth, of the creation of credit and the monopolization of ideas. We need to recognize that interference very often if not always fails in the longer term to address the needs of the most unfortunate because it tries to provide for the fortunate as well. As Herbert Spencer observed a century and a half ago:

To mitigate distress appearing needful for the production of the “greatest happiness,” the English people have sanctioned upwards of one hundred acts in Parliament having this end in view, each of them arising out of the failure or incompleteness of previous legislation. Men are nevertheless still discontented with the Poor Laws, and we are seemingly as far as ever from their satisfactory settlement. [Herbert Spencer, Social Statics, 1851, Introduction]

Now we spend upwards of £150bn on pensions and social security, yet the poorest pensioners end up with a very low quality of life and the poorest benefits recipients literally cannot afford to work. We spend £85bn on education yet we find ourselves having to compel people to stay in education till 18 and create 7.5 million new training places, says Broon, to make up for the lack of skills our economy needs to function properly. We spend £110bn on illness and still cannot provide cutting edge treatments to people who might benefit from them or prevent people making life decisions that will lead them to medical complications sooner or later and once in hospital their chances of catching something fatal are increased.

Transforming Britain into an ultra-competitive, free trade based nation of individuals empowered by their own economic productivity will be a huge job. Not a one parliament affair to be sure. But just as Thatcher caught the public mood by introducing people to quite complex ideas like monetary austerity as the "big idea" towards which she would work in power, so we don't have to have all the answers as to exactly how bits of the state of welfare and dependency we have become will evolve in Liberal Britain. It's the big vision, the end game, one so totally different and beneficial to the vast majority of people that counts. And we can start selling that tomorrow if we choose to. As the leadership candidates said - it's an "unprecedented opportunity". And one for me that deserves serious consideration more than derision.

...so says Shirley Williams on Question Time. Nice phrase. Were I a truly principled Prime Minister I would thank the likes of Iris Robinson for her regards and tell her to go screw herself and take her vote with her. And if her husband stands by everything his wife says, he should go diddle himself with his voting lobby too. A real "progressive alliance" Gordo - well done!