Enjoyed this, good balance and you swerve away from blaming planning officers and departments to the system itself (which in current form is doing what it's designed to do - slow down development).
It would be great if in a future episode you could discuss historic england's and heritage rules in general roles in the planning system (which is under separate legislation) as you don't hear it talked about much. Heritage hugely valuable to place and built environment identity (and probably to English identity) - but as with eg natural england we appear to got to the point of being unable to make trade offs, and an inability to recognize economic reality, alongside esoteric rules (can someone define less than substantial harm?), and in London things like viewing corridors that will be preventing thousands of homes by limiting heights. Maybe this is all a bit niche but I would speculate it's a significant friction point in the system and there must be a heritage abundance model to consider.
That's a really nice idea, I've been thinking of writing a piece specifically on Natural England soon and it would be a great topic for the pod. It kind of touches on both topics this week as well, we didn't get into it here but the lab meat discussion also tips into long term questions of land use, trade-offs and 'what do we want Britain to look like in 50 years'.
It’s hard to pin it down exactly because we only have estimates for the final costs of HS2, but the lowest government estimate is £45bn while HS2 management reckon about £50-57bn and possibly up to £66bn, all of which is in 2019 prices so you can add on maybe 10% inflation, let’s call it £50-65bn. That’s for a 140 mile line between London and Birmingham, so you’re looking at roughly £360m to £460m per mile. That obviously includes stations at each end, like any railway, but a big cause of the cost is that they put so much of it in tunnels. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr54gv99dz1o.amp
Enjoyed this, good balance and you swerve away from blaming planning officers and departments to the system itself (which in current form is doing what it's designed to do - slow down development).
It would be great if in a future episode you could discuss historic england's and heritage rules in general roles in the planning system (which is under separate legislation) as you don't hear it talked about much. Heritage hugely valuable to place and built environment identity (and probably to English identity) - but as with eg natural england we appear to got to the point of being unable to make trade offs, and an inability to recognize economic reality, alongside esoteric rules (can someone define less than substantial harm?), and in London things like viewing corridors that will be preventing thousands of homes by limiting heights. Maybe this is all a bit niche but I would speculate it's a significant friction point in the system and there must be a heritage abundance model to consider.
That's a really nice idea, I've been thinking of writing a piece specifically on Natural England soon and it would be a great topic for the pod. It kind of touches on both topics this week as well, we didn't get into it here but the lab meat discussion also tips into long term questions of land use, trade-offs and 'what do we want Britain to look like in 50 years'.
But the £450 million per mile figure I’m having trouble believing it. Have you got any links referencing this cost? Thanks enjoyed the podcast.
It’s hard to pin it down exactly because we only have estimates for the final costs of HS2, but the lowest government estimate is £45bn while HS2 management reckon about £50-57bn and possibly up to £66bn, all of which is in 2019 prices so you can add on maybe 10% inflation, let’s call it £50-65bn. That’s for a 140 mile line between London and Birmingham, so you’re looking at roughly £360m to £460m per mile. That obviously includes stations at each end, like any railway, but a big cause of the cost is that they put so much of it in tunnels. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cr54gv99dz1o.amp