I’ll try to remember to post the articles I write and the podcasts I record here.
Street votes will unlock housing where it is needed most
The Telegraph
It's still possible to have a win-win housing policy, giving those streets that are desperate for more buildings the chance to develop them
12 May 2022
Housing is often seen as a competition between two groups only one side can win. Existing residents protecting their community fight young people who need a home. If that’s really the game, everyone loses. If we’re going to be serious about building a country that works for everyone, we need to change the rules.
You don’t need to live in the perfect curve of a Bath terrace or live in the density of Mayfair to know that beauty enriches us all. Liverpool’s Georgian quarter shows that architecture can turn a crowded community into a haven. We can learn from the past that beauty matters. We can encourage people to think about what we all want by giving people real power.
With a more creative approach to planning, we can create policies that are win-win for existing residents, for young people who need homes, and for future generations.
Today, disputes over new developments are often bitter because housing is forced on communities that get little say, and no share of the benefits. Watch any council planning committee and the expectation they can influence development as far as local residents want is wildly overstated. These local communities get all the potential problems that new development can bring, like added congestion and burden on public services but their representatives’ objections are often overridden by remote civil servants leading to a lack of trust in the system and enough blame for everyone.
Perversely, very reasonable local objections now often drive new development out to remote greenfield sites where opposition is weakest, but where the actual value of the housing to its would-be residents is lowest, because it is so far from jobs and amenities. Nobody wins.
Many existing homeowners would like more space too. Many people need another bedroom for their children, or a granny flat, or more shared space for the family. Existing rights to add roof stories and conservatories have seen massive take-up after they have been rolled out. But the current planning system means that change beyond this is rare.
The street votes policy, announced as part of the Government’s Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill in the Queen’s Speech on Tuesday, aims to reconcile these seemingly opposed interests and create a positive-sum housing policy.
The idea of street votes is simple. Residents of a street can get together, if they wish, and write a street plan. This plan would set out a range of rules around development on the street, within strict limits set by national regulation. For example, it could propose to redevelop a disused service alley into an inhabited mews with housing around it, or to allow mansard roof stories to be added onto existing terraces.
If this plan can secure an overwhelming majority of support among street residents, all residents on the street are given permanent planning permission to develop this way, if they so choose. The same rules apply to everyone.
Of course, many streets are already wonderful places, whose residents just want them to stay as they are. Such streets would probably not prepare a street plan, and would be free to reject any that was proposed. But we do not need every policy to be carried out in every street in the country.
Street votes would probably happen on only a very small minority of streets - Policy Exchange’s model suggested a maximum of 2%, all in existing urban areas and brownfield sites. But even that could create tens of thousands of new homes where they are needed most, making an appreciable contribution to meeting the aspirations of the next generation, and protect England’s countryside from development that it does not need.
The key is making sure they are not just a rebadged Neighbourhood Plans. In my community, there are no Neighbourhood Plans because neither Tonbridge and Malling or Sevenoaks District has an up to date Local Plan – they’ve both been rejected by the Planning Inspector on technicalities that has left both exposed to pressure from developers.
That over-powerful body caps today’s top-down planning that helps nobody. Street votes need to be free from such restrictions to be successful.
The Conservative Party has to fix the country’s housing problems, or we will face electoral oblivion. We need to make sure that young people have homes so that they can start lives and families secure in to the future. But to do that we have to work with local communities, not against them. With robust safeguards to prevent abuses, we can put in place a mechanism that allows those who see benefits in extra homes to create them, while protecting those who want their streets to stay the same.
Committee Corridor
The War in Ukraine
In the first episode I was joined by Fiona Hill, the former Senior Director for Europe & Russia at the United States National Security Council and fellow committee members SNP’s Stewart Malcolm McDonald MP and Conservative Alicia Kearns MP.
You can also access this podcast via: Apple Podcasts, Amazon Podcasts, Audible, or you can subscribe via the RSS feed.
We can’t level up without reforming the apprenticeship system
The degree scroll and the graduation ceremony have been the hallmark of success for many in our country and millions have proudly become the first in their family to attend university. That’s a huge achievement but it misses the other side of the coin.
11 April 2022
The degree scroll and the graduation ceremony have been the hallmark of success for many in our country and millions have proudly become the first in their family to attend university. That’s a huge achievement but it misses the other side of the coin.
Education is about recognising that all students learn differently, turning their efforts into outcomes and helping them succeed. For some, the path to opportunity is best achieved by a combination of learning alongside a skilled professional. That’s why apprenticeships matter.
Sadly, for many, they are becoming harder to find. Over the past decade, the number of entry-level apprenticeships available has more than halved.
As Onward’s report Course Correction shows, the average apprentice is more likely to be over 25 than under 19, studying in business rather than engineering or construction, and working in a large London office over a small business in the north or the Midlands.
This shows that apprenticeships are moving away from the manufacturing-focused skills agenda we need and becoming a subsidy for professionals doing in-work training.
It’s great that companies are investing in employees, and that’s an important part of our skills programme, but that’s not what apprenticeships are supposed to stimulate. More seriously, it risks the levelling up we need across the country.
This matters to Conservatives, as this government has shown, because it’s about opportunity. Increased standards and ending low-value apprenticeship frameworks promote trust in the system, while the apprenticeship levy is beginning to change corporate attitudes.
Yet at the same time we’ve seen the apprentice regime tighten, making it harder for small and medium-sized enterprises to hire an apprentice. We’ve also seen the larger businesses forced to spend their apprenticeship levy or lose it to the Treasury. Together that has swung the programme on to a different tack. This doesn’t need to happen.
We have a chance to refocus the agenda and encourage what could be a winning programme into companies across the country. We need to start making small changes.
First, the government should fully fund apprenticeships for 16 to 18-year-olds, as it does A-levels. This is about parity and not just accounting. It would show that we value a master apprentice as much as a master’s student.
Second, local authorities should have a bigger role in supporting smaller businesses to take advantage of apprenticeship schemes by removing the obstacles many face. Some are already successfully using their local links and their programmes should be rolled out in other areas. We will then see those apprentices move through a local company from trainee to management without having to leave their home town.
Last, we need the data that demonstrates that apprenticeships can be a success. We already know that apprentices are getting some of the best education in the country alongside the practical experience from qualified experts — those working in the industry today. We need better reporting on those achievements.
Given the need to bring back offshore jobs to this country, apprenticeships must succeed. We need a new skilled workforce, valued and appreciated for the talents it provides and adaptable to the work we need done. Unlocking this inequality in human capital could transform Britain’s productivity problem and lead to levelling up of opportunity across our country.
Onward’s work recognises the real reasons businesses are turning their backs on traditional apprenticeships and offers a way back. This is an object lesson in putting the apprenticeship system back on track.
We must take the Al Capone approach to bring gangster Putin to justice
Time for the president and his poodles to give back Russia's wealth so the country they’ve ravaged can be rebuilt. The West can help them
26 February 2022
The pattern of violence has been clear for years. For decades, President Vladimir Putin has used brutality at home to silence dissent and abroad to extend his ambitions.
In 2008, he invaded Georgia; in 2014, Ukraine. In between times, he’s tried – and sometimes succeeded – to murder people with nuclear poisons and nerve agents in the UK, Montenegro, Ukraine, and no doubt elsewhere.
More surprisingly, with all this killing, he’s managed to amass an enormous fortune.
Alexei Navalny, a now-imprisoned opponent, published photos of one of Putin’s many palaces. Hundreds of rooms decorated in gold, dictator chic included some that stood out. One was for pole dancing, perhaps explaining the president’s youthful looks and fitness.
Vladimir’s wealth is quite something. By some estimates he has assets north of $200 billion (£149bn). That’s enough to make even his poodle oligarchs jealous. But they won’t act. They’re his barking dogs - sent out to do and say what he demands, or face the consequences.
The obedient have done well. Yachts, houses, cars, are paraded around the world as though their wealth were their own. But before they can play with the cash, it needs laundering. After all, it was stolen from the Russian people.
That’s where our markets come in. Centres like London and New York introduce the world’s most successful thieves to the people best at hiding the origins of their loot.
Former journalists, diplomats, politicians, lawyers and more, will happily wipe away the filthiest truths and keep those who question it silent. For a little more than thirty pieces of silver, they’ll clean anything and leave the rest of us with the consequences—a criminal syndicate in our midst whose first victims were the Russian people.
This Kremlin isn’t really a government. It has no interest in roads or hospitals. It cares nothing for Russian education, only the princelings who make it to Britain’s private schools. Because the secret is Putin didn’t end the oligarchs’ rule, he nationalised it.
Along with old friends from the KGB, their greatest heist was to steal the state itself then go West to enjoy the profits, leaving the country with falling living standards, lower lifespans, and now the very real chance of dying in Ukraine.
All the while, those crime networks grew.
Today, stretching around the world, Putin is one of the richest men in the world. His connections and cut-outs hold billions for him in football clubs, property and fine art. They’ve stashed it in Switzerland and South Dakota. Their yachts are all over the world.
It’s time they gave it back to the real owners and rebuilt the country they’ve ravaged. We can help Russians with the rule of law.
While he’s still killing rivals in Moscow and innocents in Kyiv, we need to bring actions against him and his gang in every jurisdiction we can. Trying him in one for tax evasion and another for fraud, we’d be drawing on the lessons of the Chicago court that sentenced Al Capone in 1931. Assets stolen decades ago could be returned when Russians had a government, not a gang.
Then, perhaps, a second case could follow, modelled on a case 15 years later in Nuremberg. In 1946, a Soviet judge from Rostov on the borders of Ukraine, found those who started the Second World War guilty of participation in a criminal conspiracy to wage a war of aggression.
That same charge is now Article 353 of the Russian Criminal Code and could be brought against Putin and his enablers, bringing a fitting end to the second man in 80 years to order an unprovoked attack on Ukraine and fire rockets at civilians in Kyiv.
Crypto for the UK
2 June 2021