Yesterday, the Government announced they were scrapping an £18 per tonne carbon on electricity.
In a new post, @michaeljahill.bsky.social explains the green case for cutting carbon taxes on electricity.
www.samdumitriu.com/p/why-the-ca...
I watched a 2022 documentary about Razorlight and this wasn't mentioned.
Nobody talks about the time when Razorlight got radiation poisoning from the polonium meant for Litvinenko.
In response to the Fingleton Review, the Govt didn't commit to legislating to fix the Habs Regs to avoid things like fish discos/bat tunnels.
However, they are legislating to do just that for offshore wind.
Why is it one rule for wind and another for nuclear?
www.samdumitriu.com/p/if-its-goo...
New: How our planning system makes the weekly shop more expensive.
Supermarkets are using planning objections and legal challenges to prevent cheaper rivals (Aldi/Lidl) from opening nearby.
www.samdumitriu.com/p/how-to-cut...
Britain is the most expensive place in the world to build a nuclear power station.
Labour have just announced an extremely ambitious supply-side reform agenda to change that.
Here's my analysis of what just might end up as the Starmer Govt's proudest legacy.
www.samdumitriu.com/p/how-seriou...
You’re not wrong but by building homes and roads they’ve made the most out of that endowment.
Remember the Preston Model? The council was meant to have saved their area by shifting spend to local SMEs. But the sums don't add up: council spend is just too small to explain it.
@michaeljahill.bsky.social on the real Preston Model: build homes and roads.
www.samdumitriu.com/p/the-truth-...
In the Guardian, I argue that Britain’s nature protections often lead to expensive, ineffective mitigations and, paradoxically, harm nature in the long run because they make it harder to build the clean energy infrastructure we need to tackle climate change.
Building on just half of these sites at terraced house densities would deliver more than 30,000 homes, while allowing the rest to be turned into genuinely open spaces for Londoners to enjoy nature, walk their dogs, and exercise. www.samdumitriu.com/p/homes-or-g...
There are 1,420 hectares of golf course (including 565 hectares of publicly owned golf courses) within walking distance of train stations, busy bus routes, and town centres.
Many are publicly owned. If London’s publicly owned golf courses were a borough, they would be larger than Hammersmith and Fulham.
One golf course pays just £13,500 in rent to Enfield council for 39 hectares. That’s £3,000 less than it costs to rent a one bed flat in Enfield.
Golf is a land-hungry sport.
London’s 95 golf courses (excluding courses with fewer than 9 holes) take almost as much land as all other sporting activities combined.
If London’s golf courses were a borough, they would be its 15th largest.
Roughly the size of Brent.
(Source: golfbelt.russellcurtis.co.uk)
Sadiq Khan has identified London's golf courses as potential sites for new homes.
Here are some facts about London's golf courses.
www.standard.co.uk/news/london/...
Labour's rewrite of planning policy is genuinely radical, but there's a real risk that good intentions are watered-down due to unclear drafting.
Michael Hill and I have set out three problems that could undermine an otherwise admirably bold document.
www.samdumitriu.com/p/whats-wron...
I am more relaxed than most about Palantir's role in the British public sector, but this is disturbing.
Not only did the CEO twice use a slur about the intellectually disabled, the company account then reposted it.
(His core message on Anthropic is hateful too.)
Starmer: “Every time I go to pull a lever, there are a whole bunch of regulations ... that mean the action from pulling the lever to delivery is longer than I think it ought to be”
He has a point. Some London boroughs won't be impacted by his housing target policy until the end of this Parliament.
Labour's plan to build 1.5m homes is reliant on housing targets.
One big problem: they are unlikely to impact London, which is meant to deliver a huge share of those homes, until the 2030s!
My latest explains how places like Camden can avoid higher targets.
www.samdumitriu.com/p/the-london...
There are a lot of motorists in Britain who will feel higher prices at the pump. They are unlikely to look kindly upon a policy to increase prices further.
There's a big risk that conflict in Iran forces Reeves to reverse tax rises, leaving the Government in an even weaker fiscal position.
Her plans bake in a 1p rise in fuel duty in Sep and a 2p rise in Dec. Is that politically possible in an oil crisis?
The Shoreditch Works application has taken 4 years and 9,000 pages of documents. Hackney Council has concluded what this project needs is… more documents.
What had this got to do with housebuilding?
This is interesting.
Looks like the EU is planning to reform the Habitats Regulations out of concern they restrict clean energy development too much.
www.tlt.com/insights-and...
NEW: Labour are on track to miss their 1.5 million home by a distance.
Our analysis of planning application data predicts only 800,000 homes will be built in England by 2029.
Just 3.4% of people in England live somewhere on track to meet their housing target.
www.samdumitriu.com/p/labours-15...
thread
Would you say a 9,054-page planning application for an office block and some flats is:
A) Too long
B) About right
C) Not long enough
If you answered C, congratulations! You could work at Hackney Council.
This is a must-read.
A forensic analysis of a planning application (and a report from planners recommending its refused).
Kafkaesque is over-used, but it is the perfect description of the process so far for the extremely popular Shoreditch Works scheme.
One of the big problems for marketeers such as myself is that people absolutely hate prices being used to indicate scarcity. Rent controls are exactly the same as calls for constraints on TicketMaster: requests to move towards a system of queuing for scarce products rather than money.
Britain is a very centralised country. Britain is also a very expensive place to build new infrastructure.
Are these two facts linked? @alonlevy.bsky.social, one of the world’s top experts on infrastructure costs doesn’t think so. Here’s why I disagree.
open.substack.com/pub/samdumit...