Required; the one word explaining Britian’s building misery
In a piece about how the plan - by defining as flood plain and therefore making flood insurance impossible - has just killed off Eel Pie Island, we see this:
On Monday planning inspectors will deliver their verdict on a 341-page document that sets out what sort of buildings the London borough of Richmond-upon-Thames requires.
It’s that one word there. Requires. That explains all that afflicts us.
Planners do not know what is required. It is impossible to know what is required. As with the more basic observation about expressed and revealed preferences more generally. Until humans are allowed to get on with it we do not know what humans want. Therefore it is not possible to plan what is required.
This is before we get to the further point, that British planners are entirely and wholly ignorant of the most basics about housing technologies. That’s something that has been going on for near a century now, that insistence upon flats for the British without ever planning - even acknowledging - for that required second, country, place. Or, the traditional British solution to the same point, the des res house with front and back garden.
There are a number of different words that can be righteously used about planning. Planning for what is desired, to be allowed, forbidden even. But that we’ve an entire class of people planning for what is required is what produces the disaster that is the British built environment. We do, after all, produce the smallest new builds in Europe and it’s currently illegal to build what the 1920s thought was the minimum necessary as a council house for those returning war heroes.
The answer we all know - execute the Town and Country Planning Act then dig up the corpse and hang it again just to be sure. But the effrontery of pencil sharpeners even pretending to know what is “required” for 75 million people needs to be dealt with. They don’t know, they cannot know, we must stop them having the power to even think about it.
Tim Worstall