Furthermore, how would a balanced mix of housing types and ownerships in the villages be established without strict market controls - a signature feature of the Attlee government that brought in the New Towns Act, and which attracts Lord Taylor’s fierce criticism? This leads other commentators to a more fundamental truth: it’s the developers’ profit motive, expressed in soaring land values, that lies at the root of the housing crisis – not NIMBYs, immigrants or town planners.
The point’s also made that statistics php projects with source code, used rhetorically, can be the last-but-one refuge of a scoundrel. A 3,000 dwelling ‘garden village’ is in reality a small town of up to 8,000 inhabitants. If each local authority area contained two such villages, that would yield 2 million new homes across England. And if each village contained not 3,000 but 6,000 1000 projects in java houses, wouldn’t that make 4 million? Simply put, they’re fantasy figures.
As Guardian contributor ‘Old Tom’ puts it: “The sort of thinking displayed in this report would be laughed out of a planning module in the first year of a Geography degree course. If (the government) want houses built, they need to rely on something more than expecting private housebuilders to do it, whatever freedoms they wish to give them.” And it’s not just the perceptive adminia bookmark, ashokbc bookmarks, aminap bookmarks but anonymous java project Guardian reviewers who give Taylor’s garden villages the thumbs-down. In a piece with the strapline ‘will this dumb think tank never learn’, the respected planning commentator Andrew Lainton gives them particularly short shrift,SSL CERTIFICATE AT CHEAPEST COST PROVIDERS as “yet again, a Policy Exchange dumb tank report abstractly removed from geography and place.”
A Coalition politician with a conflict of interests? Unthinkable!
This order is unchanged from the previous survey, and Redmonk’s Stephen O'Grady said "the simple fact is that the group of the most popular languages has changed little and shows little propensity for future change".
The points of interest are further down the rankings. In particular, Apple’s Swift (which the company said will be open source by the end of the year) has risen from 22 to 18, making the top 20 for the first time. However, O’Grady warns that the ranking may have been artificially boosted by Apple’s WWDC event in early June.
Another growing language is Google’s Go, up from 17 to 15. Since December 2014, it is possible to write complete Android apps in Go, and O’Grady speculates that if court decisions concerning Java continue to swing against Google, its usage of Go may increase.
But there’s more: Lord Matthew Taylor just happens to have a personal financial interest in these proposals. He’s a director and paid shareholder of Mayfield Market Towns Ltd, which is pushing to build a 10,000 home development in the West Sussex countryside. vb projects Both district councils affected by this have already made sufficient provision for new homes elsewhere in their Local Plans and have strenuously opposed Mayfield. A planning inspector rejected the scheme at appeal, pronouncing it ‘unsustainable’.
Others lined up against the noble lord include not just the Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) but two local Tory MPs. Speaking to the Guido Fawkes blog, Nick Herbert said that Taylor’s proposal for private developers to buy up land at 1.5 times the market rate to build new settlements “stinks more than the manure he wants to concrete over for profit.” Last December, Herbert’s next-door neighbour, the Member for Horsham, raised the matter as a Parliamentary Question. As Tory grandees go, few are grander than Sir Christopher Soames, who complements his prodigious girth with an equally prodigious lineage: he’s the grandson of Sir Winston Churchill.
Everything in the garden isn’t rosy
Lord Taylor’s response to the housing crisis complements the ‘garden cities’ initiative that both sides of the Coalition have been vigorously promoting. Last April, Nick Clegg announced that up to three garden cities, each with a population of around 15,000, would be built, with funding ‘top-sliced’ from the government’s existing £2.4 bn housing budget, and whose development would be hastened through flexible planning powers. The first is Ebbsfleet in Kent, on sites that already carry planning permissions for housing. Last December, the government confirmed that the second garden city would be cheap website hosting india Bicester, Oxfordshire: this, too, appears to be a cynical re-branding of existing development proposals that ran out of steam. Bicester is the sole example of Gordon Brown’s much-derided ‘eco-towns’ initiative that reached the bricks and mortar stage – a development that many of Bicester’s existing residents view in less than complimentary terms.
When LBC’s Nick Ferrari recently adminia bookmark, ashokbc bookmarks, aminap bookmarks but anonymous java project questioned Nick Clegg on how the garden cities would be funded, the Deputy Prime Minister became the living embodiment of evasiveness. Coming as it did in the aftermath of Ferrari’s now-legendary ‘brain fade’ inquisition of the Greens’ Natalie Bennett, it’s clear that no party has a properly structured or funded agenda for housing and planning. What’s also clear is that few inside the Coalition understand what their localism agenda’s about: it’s got more holes than a Swiss cheese. It’s hardly surprising, then, that their key spokespersons resort to flight-not-fight when asked to explain or affordable website hosting justify it, or worse – as in the Mayfield case – that they squabble among themselves.
But has Labour a clearer and more workable model of localism? Or the Greens? Or, indeed, UKIP? In the coming weeks, Localism Watch will be working hard to separate the fact from the fiction. All contributions welcome from whatever direction.
This article is part of the LocalismWatch series.
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