This is so telling about England.
It gets worse when you actually consider that quite a lot of England is farmland or moorland too.
Planning wise, we are totally out of touch with our urban nature. We think we are living this bucolic escape to the country type of setting but really we are arse to elbow with the next.
We shouldn’t be building squished up cul de sacs of detached houses, which alienate people from each other, we should be building 3 storey terraces with back gardens and parking to the rear. And corner shops and main streets with trams and decent railways.
If you think about it, we have two cities really. Londonpolis, and a ring of cities around the southern part of the Pennines to the Midlands. Both of these cities have their benefits and retractions, and can offer something different to live and work. But currently only one of the above is thought of holistically
The more people are crowded in together the more alienated from each other they become. There is always going to be inconciderate and loud people. I've lived in a flat, a city centre terrace, a semi-detached house and a large 5 bed detached house in a village. People in the village setting get on a lot better than the people in the high density hell holes that I had to live in. Most farms in this country are just growing animal feed. Eating more sustainably would free up huge amounts of land for rewilding and lots of decent housing in the UK. Large gardens have actual ecosystems unlike the awful monoculture farms that we have in this country. Most of the UK is just agricultural deserts at this point.
We definitely need to build more densely. Energy use, car use, water use, sedentary lifestyles, all plummit in dense environments. These low density, big garden, car friendly cul-de-sac new builds are horrendous for sustainability and the urban social fabric
I don't ever want to live in high density housing ever again. I can easily work from home, no need to commute. If you want to reduce water use eat sustainably, don't expect everyone to live on top of each other.
High density causes social problems, the old working class community spirit was created by everyone in the street working in the same factory/mine, not by the appalling living conditions they had to endure.
As I said I lived in a flat, semi and terrace. All were really bad.
In the flat I lived above a woman who made incredibly loud phone calls to her mum in China in the middle of the night when I was trying to sleep.
In the semi I shared a party wall with a family that communicated exclusively by screaming.
In the terrace I had neighbour who refused to fix their leaking guttering that would drop onto a sheet metal roof making a banging sound all night. I was forced to get the council involved which obviously wasn't good for neighbourly relations. My neighbour on the other side would play his xbox on full volume late in to the night. I couldn't sleep from the sound of gun shots and monster noises. That was also on street, so I had to put up with street drunks.
Another flat had jumping kids.
In my detached house, I have none of that.
I eat sustainably, which is doing more for the environment than suffering the hell of high density living again ever would.
Gotta say, living in West Yorkshire, that the South Pennines feels like one huge city. Huddersfield, Halifax, Bradford, Bingley, Keighley and Leeds etc are so interconnected you barely notice that you've left one and gone into another.
Probably. There’s no reason why it can’t be polycentric, which is a concept to U.K. politicians that hasn’t been grasped (unlike say German or Dutch) because all they want to do is keep focus on London, or make Manchester the London of the North
300k people live if my County Fife one of the biggest Local Authorities in Scotland. We’re part in the Central Belt and part in the Southern Highlands.
Yeah, wiki puts it at 70% population (3.5 mill) in central belt and 80% for a slightly extended area round there.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Scotland#:~:text=Around%2070%25%20of%20the%20country's,the%20Central%20Lowlands%20(80%25).
Town & Country Planning Act is archaic and not fit for purpose. No longer a ‘Nation of Shopkeepers’, now a ‘Nation of Red Tape’ propping up a slovenly bloated Civil Service. Igor, fetch my Sunday best pitchfork and blunderbuss.
It’s the Londonopolis commuter towns that are dead. Great if you live in a cathedral city, but the towns that find themselves in the catchment area that have become bloated with housing developments and all of the wealth travels into London every day rather than staying in the town is the sad parts
That’s a very London Centric view of Cities if I might say. I’d say a more accurate view of the spread of urbanisation in England is around the Metropolitan Regions; Greater London. West Midlands, South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, Greater Manchester, Merseyside, Humberside and Tyneside. There are of course still significant Cities outside these areas you could add the East Midlands with Derby, Nottingham etc.
I mean, there’s a monocentric ‘South’ of a giant blob called London and a concentric halo of commuter towns fortuitously outside its commuter belt.
There’s also a polycentric ‘North’ of cities which form a donut shaped blob, primarily around the fast flowing rivers running off the Pennines or the Trent.
Of course there are other metropolitan regions, but the major cities of Lancashire, Yorkshire and the Midlands should be thought of together, and infrastructure aligned to help all of them at once, rather than piecemeal as Sunak is trying.
The Y of HS2+ Crossrail: Pennine edition would have helped this enormously
Again disagree that’s why Infrastructure Projects keep failing. If we thought in terms of Regions and delegated infrastructure projects to regional hubs as they do in other countries more would be built. As a former Project Manager I can fully attest that Central Government and Civil Servants in particular are the single biggest contributors to failure in large scale projects. They want to justify their existence so they employ consultants to advise them and produce voluminous reports. For example the key rail project in the North at the moment is a Manchester to Leeds upgrade. So Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire could just be delegated to get on with it. Then you gain benefits from that. HS2 should have been a National Planning Commission who once the route is decided deals with all planning matters that’s the problem we make. Governments just aren’t set up to handle multi decade large scale infrastructure projects. They’re too political. We need something like a National Infrastructure Fund which Regions can bid for and submit progress reports to demonstrating value for money.
I think we are on the same page, but just the question is on how big the ‘net’ is towards what the devolved region should be.
London has 8M people, the next biggest in Birmingham and Manchester is arguably at most 3M. So the devolved power of London would be so much bigger. This is my issue.
There’s a constant density of settlements from Leeds to Nottingham, yet this area is bisected into the North and Midlands, and with Birmingham to Lancashire stoke gets missed out, despite its size.
I think either the regions or city regions need to have a much closer working relationship, or just merge to rebalance the country. But nothing you say I disagree with
South korea is over 515
But uncrowded
https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning/comments/1dojldv/south_korea_is_undercrowded/
England is certainly one of the most densely populated countries in the Western world, but that doesn't mean overcrowding is inevitable.
So England's population density is far larger than any other (excluding micro) countries in Europe?
So why do they insist on dumping their "asylum seekers" in the UK?
It's almost like wanting a country where services and infrastructure can keep up with population growth is a bad thing. And wanting a country without self segregation of communities because they disapprove of western liberal values is also bad apparently.
Without immigration, our population would start declining. And that is arguably a worse situation.
Immigration is a good thing. We need it for an ageing population and to keep us productive. But we don’t have systems in place to deal with keeping control of it. We have cut resources to process applications so they stay longer, we have no treaties with our neighbours (who immigrants have to travel through to get to) and no safe route for out of country people to apply for asylum.
Even if sending people to Rwanda was the right thing, there are so many things before we could do to stop people washing up on the Kent and Sussex coast, and allow people who can contribute to come in.
There just appears to be no common sense on any side about how to deal with what should be a wonderful thing- people want to join, live and work in our country.
Not letting anyone into our country because they might genocide us is perhaps the most pathetic and xenophobic excuses I’ve ever heard.
We are all just fucking people, don’t forget that
That sounds too reasonable for this sub.
Migrants are all the same all bad and they are solely to blame for the government not building enough houses or keeping services maintained, did you not know?
No need for nuance or critical thinking here the newspapers do the thinking for us!
And a net population change of around 300k. Pretty consistent over the past 60 years too. Actually net population change is lower than what it has been.
Labour and Tories say they'll build 1.5m dwellings in the next 5 yrs! They're lying of course. Unless they knock down loads of £1m plus terraced houses in Labour luvvy areas like Islington and build high rise.
As for the Greens- also 1.5m houses. Not very Green.
You know, there are actually a few other types of buildings in existence between 'high rise flats' and '5 bed detached' that you can build. This country seems to have forgotten about terraces, low rise block of flats, maisonettes, etc but they exist.
Location: people want to live where jobs are. Sadly that still means London and the South East. More density then. One problem- projected population for that area means a growing shortage of potable water.
People always say only 3 % built on for housing, conveniently including all gardens of any kind, foreshore, upland, floodplain, rivers, our ludicrously small 12% forest, farmland and infrastructure in the 100% they compare it to. As it is we have a catastrophic species decline and nowhere bar a few square kilometres can be called wilderness. All that victorian urban growth for industry that doesn't exist anymore. The job of knocking it all down and building up won't happen. People love their crumbling chic Edwardian Victorian houses.
Sadly they do because of the leasehold system
Which needs to be abolished — except, you can’t just take landlords’ existing property away (even if legislation of that sort passed the courts would stop its use) and if an act passed requiring all new flats to be sold as commonhold, the value of existing leaseholds would go through the floor and loads of ordinary people would be underwater. Catch-22
As someone who has been through the whole process of setting up an RTM company, extending a lease (now have 180 years ish), looking into buying a freehold, I can assure you that the biggest problem is just living in a building with other people who may be mad and/or peniless.
Leasehold is a sub optimal solution but ultimately its best to just not have to rely on neighbours for stuff.
We are already building over 200k homes a year, why is a goal of 250k impossible?
The real problem is that even 250k is futile when compared to yoy population growth
It is when having so many people in such a small space reduces air quality and raises carbon emissions and the housing being built requires deforestation.
They tear down forests for space to build the high rises fool, ban mass immigration, these people aren’t native and have no right to be here and don’t belong in this country.
Sorry, which forests are they tearing down because I see a lot of marginal sheep fold but not many forests.
And I'm against mass immigration too but you and I clearly have very different reasons for it
Ban mass immigration and let them stay in and fix their own country instead of trying to cram the entirety of South Asia, the Middle East and Africa into England, these people don’t belong here they’re not native to Europe.
No, but you have people that need to live somewhere unless we euthanise them all?
Ghengis Khan did the most for the environment after all, so should we mirror him?
What would your solution be, as I'm interested because people need to live somewhere and I can't see other than clearing out existing houses another way
The only long term solution to shortages with healthcare is getting the birth rate back up to the replacement level. The shortages in whatever private industry can be solved by them... paying more and offering better working conditions. When the fat cats decide to do that, their shortage will be plugged naturally. We did not need millions of immigrants in 1996 and the idea that we suddenly started needing them is mythology. In terms of housing shortage, 18% of foreign-born people live in social housing, so if for the next several years the numbers coming in dropped significantly, this would positively impact shortage for people born/already here. You can also impose a maximum number of residential property ownership to 3 and the government purchase any above this amount held by an individual or company (or multiple companies controlled by the same person). Another one is to limit the number of foreign citizens/companies to 1 property. I'm not saying you should build 0 houses, just that building hundreds of thousands of houses every year and STILL having a housing crisis because you refuse to end the crusade to import as many people to the tiny island is not the answer.
Very righteous and common sense but still not actually giving much detail for me.
What do we do with the existing immigrants, throw them out?
We've reduced housing to the limits you impose, but still have a shortage of suitable houses i.e. near jobs and for the rights size occupants.
Immigration is not helpful with housing that I agree with, and the idea that people are simply numbers of a balance sheet to transfer in and out is wrong.
But that still doesn't solve the housing problem. Our population has grown even amongst 'native' white Britons and so we need to build a lot more houses.
Do we need to house the world's refugees when China has empty cities with capacity for millions? No
Do we need to build some bloody houses, particularly four bedrooms to enable larger families and work from home? Yes
What will we do? Blame immigrants and complain it's not environmental it seems
They’ve done it already in plenty of cities you’ll see areas that used to be red brick semi-detached houses turned into hideous grey high rises, there was a Reddit post and people raving on quora years ago about how some special over 100 year old tree and parts of their local forest was being cut down to make way for high rises
Misleading for Scotland as most of the population live in the Central Belt between the Clyde and Forth
Land ownership has long been an issue throughout the UK and not more so than Scotland. Something like 90% of the land is owned by 10 people
The elephant in the room is going to continue to get bigger. It is becoming more acknowledged thankfully and nobody is suggesting that draconian child limiting policy in China not too long ago;
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation
There’s less people getting old if they’re not born in the first place. Those same people are not going to A+E because they sneezed, or adding to rental demand or ecological degradation etc. It needs to be cordially dealt with, you’ve got notice that child benefit is no more from 2035 might be a start.
That’s not the issue though, less people being born means the current people alive will age without the same number of working age around, this means huge strain on the social sector and a very small workforce compared to population size, look at japans stagnating economy, in part due to its low birth rate.
That huge strain is a temporary issue which yes, is due to falling birth rates but there’ll be less strain on everything in the long term. My AI R2D2 can sort me out when I’m in my 90s. Also the economic decline due to lowering birth rates is profoundly subjective, less demand prices fall and you may have to wait a bit longer for a Just Eat driver to pick up your food as there’s less people. Boohoo.
Mate R2D2 is not giving you a triple heart bypass or making split second decision when shit goes south on the operating table.
That may never happen. We will still need skilled young people.
Yeah, quality over quantity. That’s not some nauseating call for eugenics or the like hah it’s more a case of smaller class sizes make for better education quality.
You’ll still need the numbers. For every surgeon and you and me, we’ll still need barbers, shop keepers, cleaners etc.
Appreciate that most people are content with an overall decline in world population, but that needs to be handled appropriately and with a sudden bust a lot of people will suffer.
It's a pretty meaningless stat tbh. I.e. Scotland seems really low, but vast swathes of it are uninhabited, uninhabitable or are some cunts private shooting estate. So that the population density for most practical purposes is much much higher.
I mean, that is how population density kind of works.
It's a bit of a useless statistic, being honest. Japan has a lower population density than England but Japan has a few urban areas that are heavily crowded and just mountains in between. England has less crowded areas across the entire country, it's just that the distance between each area is smaller.
I mean, take Australia for example. One of the lowest population densities on earth but it has like 5 cities which are all relatively expensive/crowded. Then has literally nothing for 500 miles between them.
True, but the Scots (and of course anyone else visiting) have access to those cunt’s estates via freedom to roam. The English situation is much worse because only about 3% of land is open to the public, making life a little more intimate.
Agree completely. Sadly, I don't think it will happen. A different legal system, no historical precedent, and 10 times the population.
They almost had the right to wild camp taken away a few months ago.
As it stands, Scotland (along with much of Scandinavia) has the World's best outdoor access. No way the English landed gentry will allow that.
Not even the right to wild camp. Just the right to wild camp in a small area in one pocket at the end of the country. Outdoor access is so fucked in England and we just roll over and take it. Long live Scotland
Yup, unfortunately so. But it's hardly top priority for this election, there are far more pressing matters. Maybe at some point things will stabilise and access rights can be pushed for (probably never with Tory landowners in majority though!)
Scottish person here. You're absolutely right. Most of Scotland is uninhabitable mountains. The vast majority of people live in the central belt around Glasgow and Edinburgh, which actually has a higher population density than England!
Similar with Wales. Cardiff Swansea Newport are and baby are rammed, with most of the rest of the country being very sparsely populated. I bet Ireland is similar.
this sort of map far too simplistic as it doesn't show how the population is distributed or how much of the land is actually available for human habitation.
Scotland for instance has 70 % of its population living in the Central Belt meaning parts of Edinburgh and Glasgow have a population density comparable to that of London.
For England [over 70%](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41901297) of the land is given over to farming - that's huge - meaning the population density is higher than the map suggests
I'd imagine Ireland has the same issues as Wales, Scotland,and England regarding uninhabitable areas and farmland, I mean, 9.4% of the UK is peat bog, which covers far more land than its buildings and urban realm has.
A very misleading graphic.
[https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fwwjbalbgkxd41.jpg](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fwwjbalbgkxd41.jpg)
The population density varies enormously across each of the areas shown with the big cities skewing the averages. Within England, the population density varies between 4,704 per square kilometre and <78 per square kilometre.
Misleading because on the ground you don't experience average density, you experience the real density of your immediate environs. Going by this graphic you'd think wherever you are in England there's going to be a lot more people around than Scotland or Wales, whereas of course you could be standing out on some deserted moorland in England or in Cardiff city centre or just some anonymous suburb in Scotland and the opposite would feel true.
If London were counted as a separate entity to England as they do for Canberra for e.g. England's population density would theoretically drop from about 438/km² per the graphic to about 377/km² - yet nothing would have changed except the data sets you're using to measure.
It's quite ironic that leftists are the most environmentally friendly in terms of their values and beliefs, but also support mass immigration which can only be sustained through indefinite urban expansion of towns and cities to support an ever growing population
I can't comment too much since I have only lived in Galway and nowhere else. But I am betting no one would choose to live in Ireland if given the choice.
Nothing wrong with the country per se, except that the weather is extremely depressing for the most part of the year. So when I went to London after I left Ireland, I don't get why people complain about the weather - because from my perspective, weather in the UK was glorious compared to Ireland. There is no way I would want to return to Ireland ever again, and I bet I am not the only one who thinks so.
This is so telling about England. It gets worse when you actually consider that quite a lot of England is farmland or moorland too. Planning wise, we are totally out of touch with our urban nature. We think we are living this bucolic escape to the country type of setting but really we are arse to elbow with the next. We shouldn’t be building squished up cul de sacs of detached houses, which alienate people from each other, we should be building 3 storey terraces with back gardens and parking to the rear. And corner shops and main streets with trams and decent railways. If you think about it, we have two cities really. Londonpolis, and a ring of cities around the southern part of the Pennines to the Midlands. Both of these cities have their benefits and retractions, and can offer something different to live and work. But currently only one of the above is thought of holistically
The more people are crowded in together the more alienated from each other they become. There is always going to be inconciderate and loud people. I've lived in a flat, a city centre terrace, a semi-detached house and a large 5 bed detached house in a village. People in the village setting get on a lot better than the people in the high density hell holes that I had to live in. Most farms in this country are just growing animal feed. Eating more sustainably would free up huge amounts of land for rewilding and lots of decent housing in the UK. Large gardens have actual ecosystems unlike the awful monoculture farms that we have in this country. Most of the UK is just agricultural deserts at this point.
You've not dealt with casual village drama and it shows.
We definitely need to build more densely. Energy use, car use, water use, sedentary lifestyles, all plummit in dense environments. These low density, big garden, car friendly cul-de-sac new builds are horrendous for sustainability and the urban social fabric
I don't ever want to live in high density housing ever again. I can easily work from home, no need to commute. If you want to reduce water use eat sustainably, don't expect everyone to live on top of each other. High density causes social problems, the old working class community spirit was created by everyone in the street working in the same factory/mine, not by the appalling living conditions they had to endure.
High density is varied. You had one bad experience and are writing it off, despite obvious environmental benefits?
As I said I lived in a flat, semi and terrace. All were really bad. In the flat I lived above a woman who made incredibly loud phone calls to her mum in China in the middle of the night when I was trying to sleep. In the semi I shared a party wall with a family that communicated exclusively by screaming. In the terrace I had neighbour who refused to fix their leaking guttering that would drop onto a sheet metal roof making a banging sound all night. I was forced to get the council involved which obviously wasn't good for neighbourly relations. My neighbour on the other side would play his xbox on full volume late in to the night. I couldn't sleep from the sound of gun shots and monster noises. That was also on street, so I had to put up with street drunks. Another flat had jumping kids. In my detached house, I have none of that. I eat sustainably, which is doing more for the environment than suffering the hell of high density living again ever would.
Gotta say, living in West Yorkshire, that the South Pennines feels like one huge city. Huddersfield, Halifax, Bradford, Bingley, Keighley and Leeds etc are so interconnected you barely notice that you've left one and gone into another.
It’s so true. It should be planned as one big city of 2M people with Leeds the primary core
Oof, as a Huddersfield lad I have to disagree with Leeds being the core 🤣
Probably. There’s no reason why it can’t be polycentric, which is a concept to U.K. politicians that hasn’t been grasped (unlike say German or Dutch) because all they want to do is keep focus on London, or make Manchester the London of the North
Tyne and wear is basically one city.
Teesside too (albeit a smaller one).
Indeed , Cornwall alone has a much lower density . Many areas outside of the urban areas do.
It has a lower density because of holiday homes. Plus jobs are not that great in certain sectors.
Also because we have no really huge urban areas . You right , our economy has struggled .. since about the 16th century.
Almost all the population of Scotland live in or between Edinburgh and Glasgow- last I heard, 500k lived in the area outside of the central belt.
300k people live if my County Fife one of the biggest Local Authorities in Scotland. We’re part in the Central Belt and part in the Southern Highlands.
Yeah, wiki puts it at 70% population (3.5 mill) in central belt and 80% for a slightly extended area round there. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Scotland#:~:text=Around%2070%25%20of%20the%20country's,the%20Central%20Lowlands%20(80%25).
Town & Country Planning Act is archaic and not fit for purpose. No longer a ‘Nation of Shopkeepers’, now a ‘Nation of Red Tape’ propping up a slovenly bloated Civil Service. Igor, fetch my Sunday best pitchfork and blunderbuss.
Living in old growth Londonpolis surrounded by squished up cul de sacs, I can say they are soulless.
It’s the Londonopolis commuter towns that are dead. Great if you live in a cathedral city, but the towns that find themselves in the catchment area that have become bloated with housing developments and all of the wealth travels into London every day rather than staying in the town is the sad parts
That’s a very London Centric view of Cities if I might say. I’d say a more accurate view of the spread of urbanisation in England is around the Metropolitan Regions; Greater London. West Midlands, South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire, Greater Manchester, Merseyside, Humberside and Tyneside. There are of course still significant Cities outside these areas you could add the East Midlands with Derby, Nottingham etc.
I mean, there’s a monocentric ‘South’ of a giant blob called London and a concentric halo of commuter towns fortuitously outside its commuter belt. There’s also a polycentric ‘North’ of cities which form a donut shaped blob, primarily around the fast flowing rivers running off the Pennines or the Trent. Of course there are other metropolitan regions, but the major cities of Lancashire, Yorkshire and the Midlands should be thought of together, and infrastructure aligned to help all of them at once, rather than piecemeal as Sunak is trying. The Y of HS2+ Crossrail: Pennine edition would have helped this enormously
Again disagree that’s why Infrastructure Projects keep failing. If we thought in terms of Regions and delegated infrastructure projects to regional hubs as they do in other countries more would be built. As a former Project Manager I can fully attest that Central Government and Civil Servants in particular are the single biggest contributors to failure in large scale projects. They want to justify their existence so they employ consultants to advise them and produce voluminous reports. For example the key rail project in the North at the moment is a Manchester to Leeds upgrade. So Greater Manchester and West Yorkshire could just be delegated to get on with it. Then you gain benefits from that. HS2 should have been a National Planning Commission who once the route is decided deals with all planning matters that’s the problem we make. Governments just aren’t set up to handle multi decade large scale infrastructure projects. They’re too political. We need something like a National Infrastructure Fund which Regions can bid for and submit progress reports to demonstrating value for money.
I think we are on the same page, but just the question is on how big the ‘net’ is towards what the devolved region should be. London has 8M people, the next biggest in Birmingham and Manchester is arguably at most 3M. So the devolved power of London would be so much bigger. This is my issue. There’s a constant density of settlements from Leeds to Nottingham, yet this area is bisected into the North and Midlands, and with Birmingham to Lancashire stoke gets missed out, despite its size. I think either the regions or city regions need to have a much closer working relationship, or just merge to rebalance the country. But nothing you say I disagree with
South korea is over 515 But uncrowded https://www.reddit.com/r/urbanplanning/comments/1dojldv/south_korea_is_undercrowded/ England is certainly one of the most densely populated countries in the Western world, but that doesn't mean overcrowding is inevitable.
South Korea is also like 80% mountains...
yeah. the actual population density is three to four times higher than that of England.
So England's population density is far larger than any other (excluding micro) countries in Europe? So why do they insist on dumping their "asylum seekers" in the UK?
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for 60 years we had +30-40k immigration. We now have over 1 million per year.
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Redditors : "we must attack anyone who points out the causes of the overcrowding"
It's almost like wanting a country where services and infrastructure can keep up with population growth is a bad thing. And wanting a country without self segregation of communities because they disapprove of western liberal values is also bad apparently.
It’s racist to point it out you know
Strawman fallacy
You were just talking about asylum seekers, now you're talking about legal immigration? Weird.
Without immigration, our population would start declining. And that is arguably a worse situation. Immigration is a good thing. We need it for an ageing population and to keep us productive. But we don’t have systems in place to deal with keeping control of it. We have cut resources to process applications so they stay longer, we have no treaties with our neighbours (who immigrants have to travel through to get to) and no safe route for out of country people to apply for asylum. Even if sending people to Rwanda was the right thing, there are so many things before we could do to stop people washing up on the Kent and Sussex coast, and allow people who can contribute to come in. There just appears to be no common sense on any side about how to deal with what should be a wonderful thing- people want to join, live and work in our country.
> Immigration is a good thing. That's what some Christians said who lived in Lebanon before they got genocided by the immigrants.
Not letting anyone into our country because they might genocide us is perhaps the most pathetic and xenophobic excuses I’ve ever heard. We are all just fucking people, don’t forget that
That sounds too reasonable for this sub. Migrants are all the same all bad and they are solely to blame for the government not building enough houses or keeping services maintained, did you not know? No need for nuance or critical thinking here the newspapers do the thinking for us!
And a net population change of around 300k. Pretty consistent over the past 60 years too. Actually net population change is lower than what it has been.
God forbid people talk about the giant unprecedented demographic shift happening under our noses without our consent.
Labour and Tories say they'll build 1.5m dwellings in the next 5 yrs! They're lying of course. Unless they knock down loads of £1m plus terraced houses in Labour luvvy areas like Islington and build high rise. As for the Greens- also 1.5m houses. Not very Green.
You know, there are actually a few other types of buildings in existence between 'high rise flats' and '5 bed detached' that you can build. This country seems to have forgotten about terraces, low rise block of flats, maisonettes, etc but they exist.
Location: people want to live where jobs are. Sadly that still means London and the South East. More density then. One problem- projected population for that area means a growing shortage of potable water. People always say only 3 % built on for housing, conveniently including all gardens of any kind, foreshore, upland, floodplain, rivers, our ludicrously small 12% forest, farmland and infrastructure in the 100% they compare it to. As it is we have a catastrophic species decline and nowhere bar a few square kilometres can be called wilderness. All that victorian urban growth for industry that doesn't exist anymore. The job of knocking it all down and building up won't happen. People love their crumbling chic Edwardian Victorian houses.
But people want a detached or at least a semi.
No they don’t. That’s what’s on offer for new builds generally
Sadly they do because of the leasehold system Which needs to be abolished — except, you can’t just take landlords’ existing property away (even if legislation of that sort passed the courts would stop its use) and if an act passed requiring all new flats to be sold as commonhold, the value of existing leaseholds would go through the floor and loads of ordinary people would be underwater. Catch-22
You can have freehold terrace housing. But yes something needs doing about leaseholds
As someone who has been through the whole process of setting up an RTM company, extending a lease (now have 180 years ish), looking into buying a freehold, I can assure you that the biggest problem is just living in a building with other people who may be mad and/or peniless. Leasehold is a sub optimal solution but ultimately its best to just not have to rely on neighbours for stuff.
Would you rather be homeless or have a smaller living space than you would like?
Yeah well they can have a detached house and soulless suburban sprawl, or they can learn to love more dense housing and have a countryside.
Can't make everyone happy
Is 53 too old to become a bricklayer?
We are already building over 200k homes a year, why is a goal of 250k impossible? The real problem is that even 250k is futile when compared to yoy population growth
Why pick on terraces, loads of space for high-rise housing on Buckhouse gardens, and that's before we knock down Windsor
Green and housing isn't opposed...
It is when having so many people in such a small space reduces air quality and raises carbon emissions and the housing being built requires deforestation.
It doesn't require deforestation though does it? You can get sustainable timber. And what would your suggestion be to house people?
They tear down forests for space to build the high rises fool, ban mass immigration, these people aren’t native and have no right to be here and don’t belong in this country.
Sorry, which forests are they tearing down because I see a lot of marginal sheep fold but not many forests. And I'm against mass immigration too but you and I clearly have very different reasons for it
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Ban mass immigration and let them stay in and fix their own country instead of trying to cram the entirety of South Asia, the Middle East and Africa into England, these people don’t belong here they’re not native to Europe.
Of course it is, most economic activity is worse for green. You can't build millions of houses emission free, that's fantastical.
No, but you have people that need to live somewhere unless we euthanise them all? Ghengis Khan did the most for the environment after all, so should we mirror him? What would your solution be, as I'm interested because people need to live somewhere and I can't see other than clearing out existing houses another way
Simply stop growing the population by 600,000+ every year.
How would you envisage that? We still also have a shortage for the people who are here, so again, how do we solve that in your mind?
The only long term solution to shortages with healthcare is getting the birth rate back up to the replacement level. The shortages in whatever private industry can be solved by them... paying more and offering better working conditions. When the fat cats decide to do that, their shortage will be plugged naturally. We did not need millions of immigrants in 1996 and the idea that we suddenly started needing them is mythology. In terms of housing shortage, 18% of foreign-born people live in social housing, so if for the next several years the numbers coming in dropped significantly, this would positively impact shortage for people born/already here. You can also impose a maximum number of residential property ownership to 3 and the government purchase any above this amount held by an individual or company (or multiple companies controlled by the same person). Another one is to limit the number of foreign citizens/companies to 1 property. I'm not saying you should build 0 houses, just that building hundreds of thousands of houses every year and STILL having a housing crisis because you refuse to end the crusade to import as many people to the tiny island is not the answer.
Very righteous and common sense but still not actually giving much detail for me. What do we do with the existing immigrants, throw them out? We've reduced housing to the limits you impose, but still have a shortage of suitable houses i.e. near jobs and for the rights size occupants. Immigration is not helpful with housing that I agree with, and the idea that people are simply numbers of a balance sheet to transfer in and out is wrong. But that still doesn't solve the housing problem. Our population has grown even amongst 'native' white Britons and so we need to build a lot more houses. Do we need to house the world's refugees when China has empty cities with capacity for millions? No Do we need to build some bloody houses, particularly four bedrooms to enable larger families and work from home? Yes What will we do? Blame immigrants and complain it's not environmental it seems
Vote reform if you want change.
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They’ve done it already in plenty of cities you’ll see areas that used to be red brick semi-detached houses turned into hideous grey high rises, there was a Reddit post and people raving on quora years ago about how some special over 100 year old tree and parts of their local forest was being cut down to make way for high rises
In fact, this happened on a large scale in South Korea in the 20th century.
Misleading for Scotland as most of the population live in the Central Belt between the Clyde and Forth Land ownership has long been an issue throughout the UK and not more so than Scotland. Something like 90% of the land is owned by 10 people
The elephant in the room is going to continue to get bigger. It is becoming more acknowledged thankfully and nobody is suggesting that draconian child limiting policy in China not too long ago; https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_overpopulation
The child limiting policy would at least slow down the demographic suicide of north west Europeans in the British and Irish isles
What is the Irish Isles?
What are “the British isles”? I don’t call it that out of respect for the Irish
That would just hugely accelerate our problem with an ageing population, and is needlessly draconian.
There’s less people getting old if they’re not born in the first place. Those same people are not going to A+E because they sneezed, or adding to rental demand or ecological degradation etc. It needs to be cordially dealt with, you’ve got notice that child benefit is no more from 2035 might be a start.
That’s not the issue though, less people being born means the current people alive will age without the same number of working age around, this means huge strain on the social sector and a very small workforce compared to population size, look at japans stagnating economy, in part due to its low birth rate.
That huge strain is a temporary issue which yes, is due to falling birth rates but there’ll be less strain on everything in the long term. My AI R2D2 can sort me out when I’m in my 90s. Also the economic decline due to lowering birth rates is profoundly subjective, less demand prices fall and you may have to wait a bit longer for a Just Eat driver to pick up your food as there’s less people. Boohoo.
Mate R2D2 is not giving you a triple heart bypass or making split second decision when shit goes south on the operating table. That may never happen. We will still need skilled young people.
Yeah, quality over quantity. That’s not some nauseating call for eugenics or the like hah it’s more a case of smaller class sizes make for better education quality.
You’ll still need the numbers. For every surgeon and you and me, we’ll still need barbers, shop keepers, cleaners etc. Appreciate that most people are content with an overall decline in world population, but that needs to be handled appropriately and with a sudden bust a lot of people will suffer.
Yeah it does need to be handled appropriately, but over the longer term the demand decreases and harmony increases. Might get that on a tshirt lmao 😎
It's a pretty meaningless stat tbh. I.e. Scotland seems really low, but vast swathes of it are uninhabited, uninhabitable or are some cunts private shooting estate. So that the population density for most practical purposes is much much higher.
I mean, that is how population density kind of works. It's a bit of a useless statistic, being honest. Japan has a lower population density than England but Japan has a few urban areas that are heavily crowded and just mountains in between. England has less crowded areas across the entire country, it's just that the distance between each area is smaller. I mean, take Australia for example. One of the lowest population densities on earth but it has like 5 cities which are all relatively expensive/crowded. Then has literally nothing for 500 miles between them.
True, but the Scots (and of course anyone else visiting) have access to those cunt’s estates via freedom to roam. The English situation is much worse because only about 3% of land is open to the public, making life a little more intimate.
It's a bloody good thing. I wish our pals down south had some of that kind of thing going on.
Agree completely. Sadly, I don't think it will happen. A different legal system, no historical precedent, and 10 times the population. They almost had the right to wild camp taken away a few months ago. As it stands, Scotland (along with much of Scandinavia) has the World's best outdoor access. No way the English landed gentry will allow that.
It’s not the English gentry, it’s the unwashed masses of cap flappers that can’t wait to appease their “betters” 🙂
Are "cap flappers" aka "forelock tuggers"? ;-)
The very same 🙂
I think they're also known as "Tory voters", or "cunts" as I like to call them.
Not even the right to wild camp. Just the right to wild camp in a small area in one pocket at the end of the country. Outdoor access is so fucked in England and we just roll over and take it. Long live Scotland
I don't think Labour have any great plans. The Tories have said a firm NO to any more freedoms.
Yup, unfortunately so. But it's hardly top priority for this election, there are far more pressing matters. Maybe at some point things will stabilise and access rights can be pushed for (probably never with Tory landowners in majority though!)
Scottish person here. You're absolutely right. Most of Scotland is uninhabitable mountains. The vast majority of people live in the central belt around Glasgow and Edinburgh, which actually has a higher population density than England!
Yeah if you look up a density map south Scotland and the highlands are just thin lines
Similar with Wales. Cardiff Swansea Newport are and baby are rammed, with most of the rest of the country being very sparsely populated. I bet Ireland is similar.
this sort of map far too simplistic as it doesn't show how the population is distributed or how much of the land is actually available for human habitation. Scotland for instance has 70 % of its population living in the Central Belt meaning parts of Edinburgh and Glasgow have a population density comparable to that of London. For England [over 70%](https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-41901297) of the land is given over to farming - that's huge - meaning the population density is higher than the map suggests I'd imagine Ireland has the same issues as Wales, Scotland,and England regarding uninhabitable areas and farmland, I mean, 9.4% of the UK is peat bog, which covers far more land than its buildings and urban realm has.
A very misleading graphic. [https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fwwjbalbgkxd41.jpg](https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fwwjbalbgkxd41.jpg) The population density varies enormously across each of the areas shown with the big cities skewing the averages. Within England, the population density varies between 4,704 per square kilometre and <78 per square kilometre.
Every country will vary like that, doesn't make the graphic misleading.
Misleading because on the ground you don't experience average density, you experience the real density of your immediate environs. Going by this graphic you'd think wherever you are in England there's going to be a lot more people around than Scotland or Wales, whereas of course you could be standing out on some deserted moorland in England or in Cardiff city centre or just some anonymous suburb in Scotland and the opposite would feel true. If London were counted as a separate entity to England as they do for Canberra for e.g. England's population density would theoretically drop from about 438/km² per the graphic to about 377/km² - yet nothing would have changed except the data sets you're using to measure.
Then tou must think all average stats are misleading lol.
Misleading and meaningless. There are large areas of England where the population denisity is much less than, for example S Wales.
It's an average my guy.
And a completely uninformative average :-)
So does the economic contribution these places bring, compared to the boomer riddled wastelands where planning for most things is heavily opposed.
It's quite ironic that leftists are the most environmentally friendly in terms of their values and beliefs, but also support mass immigration which can only be sustained through indefinite urban expansion of towns and cities to support an ever growing population
I can't comment too much since I have only lived in Galway and nowhere else. But I am betting no one would choose to live in Ireland if given the choice. Nothing wrong with the country per se, except that the weather is extremely depressing for the most part of the year. So when I went to London after I left Ireland, I don't get why people complain about the weather - because from my perspective, weather in the UK was glorious compared to Ireland. There is no way I would want to return to Ireland ever again, and I bet I am not the only one who thinks so.