New Towns - Old Ideas?

[00:00:00] The Why Curve, with Phil Dobbie and Roger Hearing. New Towns Think Milton Keynes, Cumberland Old, Wellingarden City, Telford. Post-war regeneration, shopping malls, concrete walkways, underpasses, roundabouts. Part of the modern British landscape. Not loved, certainly, but not universally hated either. So could that be what the UK needs now? The way to build houses and get the growth that the government wants?

[00:00:27] Keir Starmer's promising 12 new towns, location and cost to be determined, as part of tapping into the same spirit as that post-war regeneration. But there is a risk more badly built concrete creations in areas that there aren't any jobs will just repeat the mistakes of the past. So are new towns the way to rebuild Britain? Or a lazy rehash of an old idea that never really worked in the first place? The Why Curve

[00:00:53] Well, my money is on lazy rehash of an old idea that never really worked in the first place. I'm unsurprised, unsurprised. Well, I just, I feel like, you know, are there any great old towns, new towns, great examples of new towns? I mean, you know, no one really wants to live in Milton Keynes unless they really have to, do they? Well, it's not that bad, you know. I mean, you know, there are some of them. They're not loved, I grant you, but they're kind of part of the landscape now.

[00:01:18] I suppose the point is, will they do any good? Will it actually change things? Are we just getting fixated on that post-1945 idea of, you know, building white concrete and hope it all works? Well, is it just there because it's a, you know, it seems it's a policy announcement? And that's the sad thing of politics these days, isn't it? You make a call. It sounds big. It sounds brash. It sounds like a simple answer to a problem that we've got. The house prices are crazy. We've got a rising population and housing is not keeping up with it.

[00:01:48] And, oh, I know what we'll do. We'll build new towns. Problem solved. Rather than, you know, well, we are going to build more houses in existing towns because to that you get the instant answer of people saying, well, so long as they're not going to be right next door to me cramming in my neighbourhood and our busy roads and, you know, there's no place for kids in the schools and I have to wait for the hospital appointments. It's bad enough as it is. If you say, well, it's going to be a new town, then you go, OK, that's nothing to do with me. That's not going to affect my life. Yeah, that's fine. That's in a green field over the way.

[00:02:16] Well, let's talk to someone who's made a study of all this and, in fact, has quite a strong view on this whole idea. Amrita Kulka is Assistant Professor, Political Economy and Public Economics at the University of Warwick. She joins us now. So, Amrita, when we look at, you know, new towns of old, places like Milton Keynes and Welling Garden City and Telford, they haven't got a great name for themselves, have they? Have they been a success?

[00:02:41] So, I would say it varies, right? So, you mentioned three interesting towns that came up in the course of the 20th century through sort of different phases of building new towns. And I would say the towns that have been successful, that are definitely considered an economic success, would be towns like Milton Keynes, for example.

[00:03:02] And the reason that Milton Keynes has been a success in the long run has to do with the fact that it is on the train line between London and Birmingham, and that this has meant that there is extremely good access to very powerful labour markets, both in Birmingham and in the greater London area. Whereas, on the other hand, you mentioned Telford as well.

[00:03:25] And there's just places that have been kind of put with less access in areas that it's just harder to get people to move there or have access to jobs. So, access is the key. That's what we're really saying. I mean, there have been many new towns, and the idea was to give good housing, good quality housing, schooling, facilities. But you're saying access is what actually matters in terms of success.

[00:03:49] In the long run, it's very hard to get people to move to areas that they don't want to live in. And a big reason for people living where they do does end up being related to jobs and employment opportunities. So, it's going to be difficult to get people to move to places where those aren't available. So, yeah, I would agree with that. So, doesn't that mean, I mean, the pulling power, because it does nothing then, does it, to prevent the pulling power of London?

[00:04:17] So, if Keir Starmer wants to build 10 or 12 or whatever new towns, that whole access argument means, well, that's 10 or 12 new towns that really, ideally, are going to be within commuting distance of London. Right. We've got loads of places like that. Right. So, a few things here, I guess. So, on the one hand, the names that I've heard kicking around for potential sites do actually include places in the north as well, on the Scottish border as well.

[00:04:46] So, I think at least in terms of planning, it's not entirely focused or entirely related to the London area. So, I think certainly from the government's perspective, that's not how they're thinking. And the other thing that we actually find in our research is that housing affordability is a problem throughout the UK. So, this isn't simply a problem only in London.

[00:05:10] If you look at comparisons, especially with other European countries as well, housing affordability is an issue everywhere. And so, certainly allowing more housing, even in the north, further away from London and Scotland and Wales, is going to have an impact on that affordability, which is a crisis everywhere. So, what you're saying is that if we have lots of housing in lots of different areas, that should bring the price down. I mean, it's interesting you say it's the affordability is an issue.

[00:05:37] I mean, house prices are pretty low in, I don't know, the northeast or the northwest of England. Well, there's the thing, Roger. They're not actually. I mean, they're cheaper than they are in the southeast, but they, you know, compared to earnings, it's still pretty pricey up there. Yeah. So, we still have house price increases throughout. So, the average is, I think, now that the median house price is about six times the median income, annual income, annual salary.

[00:06:05] And so, that has increased in the last 20, 30 years substantially. So, the affordability issue is really a question throughout. And some of it is, I do think some of it, I think one thing that's important to remember is that places are connected with each other. So, in some sense, if there are people who live in areas where they cannot move from because they can't afford living closer to London or accessing a job in London,

[00:06:33] then actually allowing more housing in that area does help people to move and it does decrease the pressure on people who have built their life in places further away who don't actually ever want to move. So, it's not necessarily going to create more jobs, is it then? If you've got a new town that is built somewhere in the northeast, as a for example, where there's fairly high levels of unemployment compared to the rest of the country,

[00:07:00] building a new town might help lower house prices because you're increasing supply of housing. But it's not necessarily giving jobs to those people. It might just make houses more affordable for people who are struggling to earn a living. It's not actually necessarily going to help the economy to grow, is it? I think this, so getting the economy to grow is a substantially harder problem to solve in the sense that there are good reasons why businesses,

[00:07:29] why industries cluster together because they benefit from each other in terms of being able to share a labor pool. They benefit from each other in terms of being able to share knowledge. And so, trying to encourage businesses where there are no others has proven really difficult. And we have a lot of research to prove that in kind of different contexts, that these sort of place-based policies that try to encourage businesses, employment in rural areas,

[00:07:58] are quite hard to sustain in the long run what sort of subsidies of the government are being taken away. And so, I think a lot of this housing is really allowing, as you were saying, is allowing people to live close to areas where they do have jobs. Not necessarily, I think, even how the way that I see the new towns are supposed to be designed. It's not meant, it's meant to support sort of a local town center, but not necessarily bring new industry to those areas. That's my understanding.

[00:08:27] But surely, I mean, the whole thing with the new town concept was you have a place of people to live, a place of people to get education and health and also work. I mean, they were designed with that in mind. If you tried to get businesses to come alongside the development of these, as you say, clusters of business potentially, surely that might work. I think, in theory, that's a possibility.

[00:08:54] In practice, I think it's quite hard to shift the equilibrium of how businesses have located at the moment to a new area. And so, that requires substantial investment. And it's not clear that that's going to take off with just sort of putting one farm or one big employer in an area, because that just isn't how farms tend to locate if you let them locate sort of freely close to each other.

[00:09:24] And so, my sense is that the places that have been – so, what we've learned from the history of new towns, even just in the UK, is that if you put them in areas that are not well connected to already existing labor markets, it's going to be difficult to sustain those communities in the long run. So, as I understand it, a lot of these towns are actually almost like suburbs of existing places, aren't they?

[00:09:48] For that very reason, that there's jobs there that exist, there's thriving communities, and all it's doing is adding, you know, maybe another suburb, which just adds to urban spread. I mean, wouldn't it make more sense to say, well, actually, let's just look at more, you know, high-density housing in some of these towns. We've got the existing transport links. You know, let's just fill in on where we already have established dwellings and build on that,

[00:10:17] because we've got the infrastructure to support it. If you start to build sort of new satellite towns, then you've got to – you're taking up land, you have to build up infrastructure afresh, and presumably it would mean people are commuting further for their jobs as well, because their jobs probably are not in those new towns. Yes, absolutely, Phil. I think that's a really important point. And actually what we find in our research is that ultimately it might make more sense

[00:10:47] to build kind of urban extensions and definitely to densify and use any kind of infill sites that are available in already existing areas to build on there first. For multiple reasons. One of them is what you've mentioned already, that those are existing places. They already have infrastructure in place, which means you can use that already existing infrastructure,

[00:11:13] which then means secondly that these are also housing options that are simply much faster to be delivered as well. And so what we really find is that these big projects, so big towns, but even sort of substantial neighbourhood extensions or urban extensions, are the ones that take the longest to go through the current planning system as it stands. Yeah.

[00:11:38] There we know, of course, the planning system is supposed to be thinned out and eased, and that's part of the government policy at the moment. Absolutely. I think it remains to be seen how much that is going to end up speeding up projects in reality. At the moment, I think a lot of the thinning out has to do around defining sort of grey belt sites,

[00:12:04] so sites that are buildable within the green belt, finding brownfield sites, which are these infield sites, which I think is a really welcome policy change. A lot of it has to do with speeding up, with providing agencies such as natural highways, natural England with more resources simply to process applications, environmental reports faster than they are at the moment. And I think all of these are really welcome changes.

[00:12:32] I'm just putting more capacity in the planning system that would speed up these developments. It's potentially, but it also remains to be seen because the way it stands at the moment is even sort of a one dwelling house is going to take you about a year to get through the planning system. Now, Amrita, one of the big things about the newshounds, where they were all coming in, mostly in the 60s, I suppose, it wasn't just about jobs and the economy.

[00:13:02] It was to do with a better quality of life. A lot of it was clearing out of slums and putting people into different places. That's less of an issue, I guess, now. But to have... Well, Keir Starmer has said beautiful communities is how Keir Starmer has described what he wants to build. So, yeah, in other words, build new and it's going to be beautiful. Well, part of the problem with that, Amrita, of course, is the requirements of, I suppose, greener building, making sure you have the facilities, the water and everything else to do that.

[00:13:30] But, I mean, is that not a good reason to build new towns because you can start from scratch and you can actually build houses that are, you know, as Keir Starmer said, beautiful communities? Isn't that still a worthwhile aspiration, at least? I think it definitely is. There's a big difference here in terms of the short and the long run, I would say. So there's an acute housing crisis of housing supply, of housing affordability, and there's a plan to build one and a half million new homes over the next five years.

[00:14:01] Building new towns or new neighborhoods, which are very similar to new towns in a lot of ways, can certainly help in the long run. And it can build sort of new communities with nice town centers that people want to be in, nice amenities. But it's going to take a long time. I think even after speeding up these processes, this is not, you're not going to build 10,000 homes within two years.

[00:14:28] So there's sort of a very big difference that at the moment in the short run, housing supply seems to be essentially fixed within the span of a year. So nothing really moves faster than a year. And then the things that do move sooner or within one, two, three years are going to be smaller developments. And so in the long run, I do think it can certainly make sense to build new towns, new neighborhoods, because simply there's not enough.

[00:14:56] Well, the assessment on where we even have infill sites or grave field sites is quite murky. So I think step one would be also to get good numbers on those, to know where actually are sites that can be built in to densify in. And then I do think it makes sense to think of longer run expanding. And are those sites, even though they might be land that could easily be built on, are they actually in the right place? Are they close to jobs? Are they close to infrastructure?

[00:15:24] That's the question, isn't it? But I wonder whether the government is thinking, well, you know, if we build towns, if we get them approved, you know, maybe they are currently on a green site, but we provide approval for that, then all of a sudden we can get, you know, a town of 10,000. I don't know how big they're thinking of. You might have some numbers, but, you know, we can get 10,000 people located, and we can get cracking on that rather than the rather bitty process of trying to find land.

[00:15:53] You know, it would take a lot of time to try and find enough locations infilling to satisfy, you know, 10,000 households. So are they thinking, well, okay, we start off fresh, we can do it quickly. Okay, we lose a bit of green land in the process, but it should speed things up. I think that's certainly part of the thinking. Again, it's going to be sticky in the short run. And so it's not clear that we will see the sort of development happening very fast.

[00:16:21] But in the long run, I think that's certainly what's being thought of. And I think there are other issues here that need to be solved around building really, really big new towns and new neighborhoods, which have to do with how local communities are incentivized to build these as well. So one thing is sort of the government coming in and saying, okay, we're going to build here.

[00:16:45] But from the perspective of a local authority, their incentive comes from actually being able to recuperate some of the benefits of having a larger community or of having more residents. And this has something to do with how currently taxation is set up and how the budgets for local planning authorities work. You're not going to start advocating a land tax that gets collected by the local council

[00:17:13] so that they can meet some of their local services rather than having to go in the begging bowl to central government, are you? No. So I think there are. I was hoping you would. So I will say this is something that our research hasn't. So we haven't looked into this aspect of this directly yet. But there certainly are ideas out there to reform to, on the one hand, give local authorities simply more agency over their budget.

[00:17:43] So half of the budget currently comes from central government grants. Half of it comes from council tax and business rates that local authorities manage themselves. But there's another section. And so thinking about increasing that fraction that local authorities have agency over is one way of doing this. The other is, of course, and this is especially important in the context of new towns and new

[00:18:09] urban extensions where new infrastructure, completely new roads, new schools, everything is being built, is to think about who is building that and how is that process? How does that process work? So currently this comes through negotiations, case-by-case negotiations between the local authority and developers. And so this creates a lot of uncertainty for the housing developer because they don't know.

[00:18:38] They might have to spend 30 million extra pounds all of a sudden than they thought they would have to spend. And especially if you're trying to build new infrastructure, thinking about making that process more transparent from the developer will help to develop on the one hand and then will also help local planning authorities to actually recuperate or to gain a little bit from having these new residents there too.

[00:19:05] Now, Amrita, there's a place where I come from actually, near Dorchester in Dorset, Poundbury. Now, when I think of a new town, that's an interesting one because it's an extension, obviously, to Dorchester with some very interesting architectural styles and things. But it's become effectively a kind of retirement community. I'm sure they'd hate me to say it, but that's a lot of the truth, despite trying to get local industry in there. I don't know if you've looked at Poundbury and the way it works, but it's been an interesting experiment, I suppose, in trying both the style.

[00:19:34] And we were talking about, you know, beautiful homes or whatever, beautiful communities, but also trying, I suppose, to inject some kind of economic push doesn't really seem to have happened. So I haven't looked at this example in detail, but what was the economic push that was trying to be done? Well, I think what they were trying to do is just try and engineer local industry in some small form. There is a bit of it, but not much. And that's the whole build it and they'll come mentality, isn't it? Which has been shown time and time again, doesn't work.

[00:20:03] So, I mean, not a new town, but around my mum's house, they've built, you know, a new shopping complex. This is just a wide elephant because nobody wants to go there. I mean, you can't build stuff and just assume people will gravitate towards it. There's got to be a motivating reason. And normally it's going to be jobs. And that's the problem. So how, Amrita, does that work then? Do you, first of all, look where the jobs are and start building there? Is that what government really needs to do? I think so.

[00:20:31] So you want to build, so I guess ideal sites will have connectivity to existing labour markets. And, I mean, you can measure this. You can try and understand where people are searching for housing and how much vacancy exists in places.

[00:20:50] So this is not impossible to find out where the demand for housing is high relative to the available housing stock or the available units that people might be able to move into. And so identifying this is key. And then, of course, there's been discussions around sort of maybe extending Reading and urban extension near Reading. And this would make sense because, obviously, we've just had the Lizzie Line put in, which is giving a direct connection into central London.

[00:21:19] And so these sort of places which have good infrastructure, I think in the past there have been a few towns that have benefited from the fact that there was a good train connection to a bigger town with an existing labour market. And those have done really well because they've been able to capitalise on this existing transit infrastructure.

[00:21:41] I do think, though, to your point about no one wants to be somewhere or be in the centres of these new towns, I think that's not necessarily the case. I think it's possible to design new towns in a way that at least they have a town centre that people enjoy and that they might want to spend time in and that they're not always leaving so that they don't just become these sort of commuter communities. Great. That sounds fantastic, Amita.

[00:22:07] Can you give an example of a place like that that's been built as a new town that people actually want to be living in because it's got a beautiful town centre? I'm desperately trying to think of some. That's such an unfair question, isn't it? Come on, have you been to Milton Keynes? It's wonderful. You know, the concrete is superb. But I mean, my point is, I mean, so far it sounds like, I mean, maybe you can give examples from overseas where it's been done better.

[00:22:32] But we haven't got a track record, have we really, of building new towns which are aesthetically pleasing? I mean, Milton Keynes just feels just a bit concrete. Even the cows are concrete. So I do think that this is at least in the interest of the government, or this part of what the government is trying to do, as you were saying, is to build homes that look nicer. And I think one thing is sort of the aesthetic of a place.

[00:22:57] The other place is having community spaces being put in, having green spaces being put in that people want to spend time in. And I think here, some of what the government is proposing now is to have these ingrained in the planning from the start. And to design towns around infrastructure that people will want to use.

[00:23:19] I think that's at least a very good start in contrast to designing communities that are not meant to have these kind of amenities to begin with. And then if they're in the right places, I don't see why that may not actually lead to them being close as well. It's interesting. Or being close to, you know, green open spaces would be part of it as well.

[00:23:44] Also Roundhay is interesting in Leeds because it's right next to Roundhay Park, which is this massive 19th century park that is beautiful. So they built a suburb which is, you know, alongside that. So there's open spaces that people can enjoy. So that makes it a valuable place to live, obviously.

[00:24:03] So I guess if that's mapped out correctly, it's just that can you connect all those dots somewhere which is in within commuting distance to where people work, which is close to green open spaces that also has accessible infrastructure. So let's hope they get that right. But is this happening anywhere else in the world? Are we, or is it an old idea? Yeah. Have people moved on in other countries?

[00:24:30] So I know France, for example, used to be quite big on building new towns. Are they still doing that? There is an interesting, so there is interesting work on France building new towns. I think this was in the 70s. Multiple new towns were built. And at the very least, these are considered a success story in the sense that they increased the productivity of the local area.

[00:24:53] They increased the GDP of those places as well, of those cities and travel to work areas, essentially. So that's one example. I think the U.S. is certainly thinking about densification quite a bit at the moment. I think the problem there is a bit different.

[00:25:13] So if you look at the city of the greater Boston area, for example, as one example that I've studied, there's almost no vacant land available in that area. So it's something like 1% of lots are actually not built on. And so they really have to think about densification in a different way. And these are also areas where existing density tends to be extremely low.

[00:25:43] And so a lot of the discussion there, I think, is around increasing simply density. And so that's where it comes back to actually something that was proposed here recently as well, is thinking about increasing density around places that people really use, such as train stops, which we've already, I think, just connect back to our discussion from earlier. And that's where there's really a crossover. But you could build some of that infrastructure new as well, couldn't you?

[00:26:11] I mean, you don't necessarily need to be close to a transit system. You could say, well, OK, as part of this town, we're actually going to build a transit system, which is going to connect them with the rest of the world. We have to say in our neck of the woods, designing large new railway systems does have a great reputation. And certainly in terms of duration. I live next to an HS2. Or at Warwick, we're next to HS2 construction. Yes. We feel your pain. We feel your pain on that. Well, maybe that's maybe there we are.

[00:26:40] There's the land straight away. But actually, that takes us. Take the HS2 route into a bus route and stick houses along. And lots of trams. Problem solved. But, I mean, going back really to the point we made at the beginning in this, is that part of the government's idea was that there are certain areas that are, clearly focused. I mean, you know, London being the obvious one. And what they wanted to do is a bit of social engineering to try and upgrade, if you like, areas, forgotten areas, neglected areas.

[00:27:07] You know, that terrible levelling up idea from the previous government. But that's part of it. So this idea of just having building more densification in areas where we already are isn't really what they want. But could I mean, couldn't they do some sort of social engineering to reenliven areas that are really in a dire strait? Because that's where the money needs to go. But what are those people going to do for work? That's the problem, isn't it?

[00:27:31] So, again, I would be I there is significant evidence from many programs that have tried to revitalize areas economically that have shown that these are not not really viable.

[00:27:50] Once you take away support from the government, I think bringing housing there first before even many of these new towns that don't necessarily include wanting to bring a particular industry there or wanting to bring a particular company there or particular firms there. So sort of the evidence that we have around bringing in big, big firms that are supposed to be local employers is really mixed, I would say, as long as they're not well connected to other opportunities.

[00:28:22] So I certainly think that you can revitalize. The places make them and here's where it comes in, what we've already been talking about as well, making these places look nicer, making these areas, places that people want to spend time in. I think all of those are possible. And those are definitely goals that you can achieve with new housing. As I also mentioned, all these locations are connected.

[00:28:45] And so certainly bringing housing to some areas reduces the burden on other areas as well. I think it's harder. I think it's harder to have to orchestrate sort of a coordinated move of industry to two different locations. I think that's much harder to do. Yeah, it is. And it's a generational thing, isn't it? It's not going to happen in five or ten years, is it?

[00:29:13] You'd have to see that move over a long period of time. Well, I mean, they put in Nissan into Sunderland. Nissan was very transformative in Sunderland and almost became a one-industry town city. I mean, obviously, been there a long time. But there are occasions where you can attract that kind of thing as long as you have the people who can, who have the skills to work there. And that's really, again, what it comes down to, having an educated, skilled workforce that the big companies want and can then set up.

[00:29:40] And you have a circle effect, a ripple effect that revitalizes the area. There are, I guess, one issue around building a town around one industry is that that's, of course, not very resilient to shocks that hit that particular industry. And so I think that's, again, something that history has taught us as well.

[00:30:00] And so I worry a little bit about bringing one particular industry, one particular firm to a place where we're not necessarily a lot of other companies are going to locate because they benefit from being near similar industry in London or in Birmingham or in Manchester. And that's not necessarily the best for the community in the long run either. I wonder whether we need a bit of an attitude shift.

[00:30:27] I think he's, I think Keir Starmer is going down this road because this idea that you build something new and, you know, he can put his name to it. You know, perhaps there'll be Keir Starmer posters on every corner in these new cities. It's going to be Starmerville will be one of the new things. But I wonder whether, you know, we need an attitude shift where we start to appreciate actually that, you know, higher density housing in our existing cities is not necessarily a bad thing. I always think Paris is the great example here and that it's one of the most densely populated European cities.

[00:30:56] And yet it has these wide boulevards because people have got used to living in what, four or five story buildings, which, you know, are beautifully designed. And, you know, so they, and they walk, you know, a city which is at a scale that you can, you can walk around. So that's that human scale of building where there's less need for transport because things are close has to be the way forward, surely.

[00:31:23] But we have this big problem that where we've got low density housing, nobody wants to see high density because they assume it means an ugly tower block. And people obviously who've got land in their lower density housing don't want to lose their garden. But if we can, if we can fight that idea that higher density is bad, it just needs to be designed well, then that has to be the best outcome, surely. Yeah, I think you're exactly, I think you're exactly right there.

[00:31:52] It's always interesting, this question around density being, being good or bad, because obviously people love density. People love being in London and benefiting from the fact that there's, there's restaurants to no end, that there's cultural amenities. So people love certain aspects of density a lot. But then of course, people also value having access to green space. People value having just space in their home.

[00:32:20] And people value not, maybe not being on an extremely crowded train all the time. And so I think you're exactly, and there does come a point where you do reach sort of a level of congestion that adding more density isn't necessarily a good thing.

[00:32:39] From sort of a point of economic research, we haven't reached that level of density in most big cities, certainly within Europe. And so the idea of Paris, which is, for example, an extremely dense place, is a good one that can make this mix of amenities, having everything close by, work really well.

[00:33:05] But it's important to, that there's a really nice work by Hans Koster on just kind of the green belt and how people value this amenity, showing that the green belt does have positive, really positive impacts on welfare. It also makes housing really unaffordable. And so I think one thing one can do here is also to appeal to the fact that we need housing for younger people.

[00:33:33] We need the future generations to be able to live somewhere as well. And so if you have a really big garden, a really big house, and no one living next to you for miles or for quite a bit, that does have an impact on the affordability of the generations. So in conclusion, as we get to the end of this, new towns basically are not the way forward, in your view, in terms of economic regeneration, but also just addressing the housing crisis.

[00:34:01] You say densification is the thing to think about more than anything else. So I think if that's the message that came across, I would want to modify that a little bit in the sense that I think it has to do with the short and the long run trade-off. So I think in the short run, densification is certainly likely to bring gains sooner.

[00:34:22] In the long run, I think having new towns or urban extensions, I think new towns, it's a lot more difficult to think about because you cannot build on existing infrastructure almost at all. And so having new urban extensions or new neighborhoods in places where people want to live, I think can help certainly with housing affordability as well.

[00:34:46] And the other point you mentioned is making sure that local authorities have this incentive to embrace more building by actually seeing, having the money to be able to pay for the extra facilities that are needed. But also, you know, ensuring that there's a reason that they might say, well, actually, it'd be great to have some more houses because we get more money in. So that helps us to improve our town. And that's not, that's currently not, not the case. But, you know, we've got an answer to that. I gave it earlier.

[00:35:16] You gave it. Yes, exactly. And Rita, thank you so much for taking us through all that really interesting. And thanks for being with us. Yeah, thanks for having me. It's been fun. Well, let's hope Keir Starmer manages to pull together a solution that will get houses built quickly. I mean, it is just planning permission, getting planning permission happening. Well, yes. Amongst other things. But yeah, it is important to get that, I guess. And I know there's a housing estate which has been sort of like 350 houses they're building. Not far from us. So that's a pretty big project.

[00:35:45] And they just got the approval like a month or two ago. And they are going at it quickly. I tell you, I've never seen anyone working so fast. Those houses are popping up like there's no tomorrow. So once the, you know, so the building, it seems, can actually happen quite quickly. It seems to be the building approvals that are slowing things down. Well, next week we're going to talk about not so much building as destruction. Things coming down. Things falling down. That's for sure. Things being blown up in the air. I'm talking about, well, global diplomacy, really? I mean, it's been extraordinary. Vladimir Trump.

[00:36:16] I mean, it has to be said that jaws hitting the floor on all sides in diplomacy has been the theme of the last, well, three weeks, whatever it is, since Donald Trump was inaugurated. No one's seen anything like this. And it's chaos and potentially hugely damaging to some of the most sensitive issues in the world. Whether it's Gaza or Ukraine or even Greenland. I mean, it's all up in the air. And no one quite knows what's true and what isn't or where the pieces will land. And it's extraordinary. And what is his tactic?

[00:36:45] I mean, I understand that part of the tactic might be, well, if you cause enough noise, you can use that as a negotiation point. But when you get to the point, which is where I think a lot of people are now, which is, can America be trusted? Do we need to start working without them? Which, you know, certainly what's going through the mind of a lot of European politicians right now. You know, what do you gain from that? I mean, you might be the world's biggest power, but are you starting to isolate yourself? Yeah.

[00:37:12] And meanwhile, what happens to all those things that have been carefully positioned by, you know, diplomat professionals over many years? Maybe they haven't achieved much. But, you know, at the same time, these things take a lot of work to get through. And just throwing all the pieces into the air, well, it could cause absolute disaster. We just don't know. That's the problem.

[00:37:32] Well, if his solution to Ukraine is that they should basically just wave the white flag and then Europe should be there to clean up the mess with it on a deal that hasn't involved Europe or Ukraine, you can see that's not going to be particularly harmonious for European-US relationships. Well, no. And meanwhile, you know, Gaza on Sea is the new destination of choice for people bored of Florida. And then people can go holiday. The Gaza El Lago Resort. Yeah.

[00:37:58] And then going to the new state of Canada and its appendage, which would be Greenland. I mean, it's all... It all just seems so over the top, isn't it? Unbelievable, in fact. Well, maybe it is. I mean, we'll dig into it and see how much should we believe what is actually going on and what the impact is likely to be. That's what we're going to talk about next week. All right. Okay. Well, we look forward to that. That's next week on the Y-Curve. See you then. Bye. The Y-Curve.