Ray:
Why are you considering the UK or England as a whole, rather than the
distribution of population within them? 90% of the UK population lives on
8% of the land. The most populous borough in the UK (Kensington and
Chelsea) has over 15,000 people per square kilometre. What is the
justification for reserving most of the land in England for pastoral
farming? Why have we strangled the towns, with the resulting effects on
housing density and commuting? It's not often I agree with anyone from the
Adam Smith Institute about anything, but they argued recently that we can
supply enough land for housing development easily; releasing 5% of
agricultural land for development would provide enough space for 950,000
houses. (See
http://www.adamsmith.org/images/uploads/publications/landeconomy.pdf )
We're not short of space in the UK; we just use it very badly.
Why is the size of the UK more relevant than the density of housing or
population? Restricting the comparison of the UK to larger countries is not
obviously meaningful - there aren't very many big countries in the world,
and comparisons of the UK with the populations of the very largest would be
fatuous. But many smaller countries, and some parts of the UK , have much
higher population densities. Confining the argument to comparison with other
large countries seems to depend on the idea that high-density urban
development in larger countries must be balanced by a hinterland of
relatively thinly populated land. Why should it be?
The ability of local infrastructure to cope with housing expansion has very
little to do with environmental limits. (The Netherlands has a higher
population density in much more adverse environmental conditions than any we
experience in the UK.) In Scotland, we have a very limited capacity to
expand housing across large expanses of territory, but that is not because
of lack of land or physical resources. We have unsustainably low population
densities, which is why essential
services like schools, post offices, banks and health care are under threat.
The obstacles to housing expansion are first, that construction expenses in
remote areas are high; services like power cables, drains and sewers are not
in place; we have the inheritance of a semi-feudal system of landholding
which
concentrates massive tracts of undeveloped wilderness in the hands of
relatively few
owners; we have a planning system designed to obstruct development; and we
are infested with NIMBYs who are fighting tooth and nail to prevent change
of any sort - the resistance to wind farms is indicative.
Lastly, for what it's worth, housing demand and population expansion are not
equivalent. The UK has
undergone rapid expansion in the numbers of housing without a corresponding
increase in population.
Paul Spicker
Professor of Public Policy
Centre for Public Policy and Management
The Robert Gordon University
Garthdee Road
Aberdeen AB10 7QE
Scotland
Tel: +44 1224263120
Fax: + 44 1224263434
Website: http://www.rgu.ac.uk/publicpolicy/
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