You implied if people wanted the houses then there is no problem with concreting over the countryside. Planning permission currently stops that (or hinders it at least).
I don't think the majority would want the countryside concreted over.
Yeah right. The majority want capital punishment, lower petrol tax, no invasion of foreign countries, less political correctness etc.
Isn't it? The availability of any particular house for any specific period is a unique resource which can only be either wasted or consumed.
Because its remit is to provide those things to local residents and the existing ones are about to have reached the end of their useful lives (in the case of the first two) or (in the case of the third) an underprovision has been identified.
If they want them and are happy to pay for them, there is no reason to involve the council.
Is it? In some ways it's not centralised enough. We need standards which are uniform, so that mobility is not discouraged by folk finding things they've taken for granted where they are, are not available where they are thinking of moving to.
agreed
No. There should be no discretionary services. Government (i.e. councils) should supply only essential services. Everything else, i.e. what's optional, can be left to free enterprise.
Disagree. People moving about need to be able to rely on basic services being the same everywhere. This should ideally extend right down to the detail of school curricula being compatible enough that kids moving from anywhere to anywhere wil be as good as guaranteed not to miss out on any essential part of them.
That's self-contradictory. Either there is a limit (in which case nothing, not even a referendum, can change it) or there isn't.
Everyone's taxes should be the same everywhere, and they should get the same basic services for them. Variations in the cost of providing those servioces in different localities should be smoothed out by the effect of central pooling of the funding.
You don't think value is proportional to size? [Of course it's proportional to other things as well, such as fiddle-factors associated with the three Ls].
In message , Ronald Raygun writes
1) The dictionary defines consume (In part) as 'waste'. 2) It isnt the space that is consumed, buts its availability.
I meant that it will either be consumed in the sense of used by someone, or wasted in the sense of used by no-one. But I take your point that the word "consume" may be used to cover both cases. Simplicity rules!
I wasn't referring to space, but these days space and time and matter and energy are all the same. Ye olde cottage up North by the sea has a finite (though indeterminate) life, and hence as time goes on, it is being consumed gradually, occupied or not. Whether that "it" is its availability or its life or its fabric, who's to say?
All this is sounding far too philosophical for this time in the morning.
"Andy Pandy" wrote
So, you think that the majority don't want to live with fewer "people per household" - so why are you complaining about it??!
"Ronald Raygun" wrote
I was merely pointing out that a house in location A (outside all major conurbations), eg twice the size of a house in location B (in a major city centre), might still have a similar value (& similar current council tax band).
Andy would have the house at location A taxed much more heavily than the one at location B, even though their values may be much the same.
It only takes a minority wanting to live in houses too big for them for the average "people per household" to reduce.
Yes, but if it's only a minority then it won't reduce the average "people per household" very much & there's not much point in going on about it!! :-(
Yeah, that's sound logic. May as well let the minority do what they want then, as it won't affect anything too much cos they're only a minority.
If 49% want three spare bedrooms in their house, then it'll obviously have a big impact on the number of houses needed.
Certain things like clean streets are a public good and should be provided by some level of government.
finding
It sounds like you would be happier in North Korea or Cuba. Why on earth should a politician in Westminster or a civil servant in Whitehall decide how much should be spent on street cleaning in my city?
They need not be provided by government employees, they can be provided by private enterprise. But yes, I agree that there is a case that they should be funded by the public purse (and there's nor eason why the public purse can't buy in services on the open market). Oh, by the way, water and sewerage services are also public goods, and the same applies to them, but guess what. They've been privatised, and by a Labour government too. Tsk. They're no longer funded by the rates (sorry, council tax) like wot they used to be, but the providers bill the households directly.
I think not.
Not a politician, a civil servant. Because he's the one who'll be getting private enterprise bills flooding in from everywhere in the country, and will be able to assess their reasonableness. It's not exactly rocket science to compare the cost of services, taking into account any special circumstances of the localities concerned, and the increased expertise deriving from such specialisation will trickle back advice to the local chaps who actually hire and fire the firms who do the work. Needless to say, standrads of cleanliness ought to be pretty well uniform.
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