1 GROWTH FLASHPOINTS
The UK needs more growth, and should secure its place in the world of the future by taking steps now to attract high tech start-ups. These will ultimately create the jobs that will keep our own high-skills people in the country and will attract high skills people from overseas.
Business entrepreneurs claim that they find regulation the biggest bugbear. Instead of developing and expanding their businesses they have to spend hours ling compliance documents and meeting the minutiae of rules imposed by both national and central government. When they employ people they complain about the amount of time and effort taken up by PAYE tax returns and National Insurance. Their premises have to meet exacting standards, and it is claimed that firms such as Apple could never have started up in the UK because they would not have been allowed to operate from a garage.
In an ideal world we would not burden our start-up businesses with the costs of regulatory compliance, but in this less than ideal world we could have small pockets where start-ups could develop unhindered. The government should learn from the successes and failures of its Enterprise Zones project from the early 1980s. The idea was bold, but its execution was limited because the civil service put too many curbs upon the new zones. Its greatest success was in London’s Docklands, where skyscrapers could be built only because it was designated as an Enterprise Zone.
The government should announce a nationwide competition to have places designated as Growth Flashpoints. Syndicates of business, trade unions and local government should put together bids to be one of the chosen sites, listing in their bids the facilities and terms they were prepared to o er high-tech start-ups establishing with the flashpoints, including buildings that would be available and transport links. They could be about one square mile in area, with perhaps four or five to be chosen across the nation.
The rules would be simple. For their first five years new high-tech start-ups within the flashpoints would pay no taxes, local or national. They would be exempt from regulations that covered premises, employment, health and safety, or the need to file compliance documents. All those working within the flashpoints would be classfied as self-employed, with employers therefore not required to o er non-wage benefits such as holiday or sick pay.
The bids put in by local areas wishing to be one of the designated flashpoints would be adjudicated by a panel of people from high tech industries, not by ministers or civil servants. And applications by would-be start-ups to set up within a flashpoint would be approved or rejected by similar panels drawn from the technology sector.
2 CREATING LIVING SPACE
The UK’s housing shortage is not caused by lack of finance to build houses, or by lack of labour or materials. It is caused by a lack of suitable land that people are allowed to build on. It is exacerbated by some of the conditions that local authorities impose by tacking on to planning permission such things as the necessity of including a proportion of “social housing.”
It is the Green Belt created by the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act and revised since which prevents towns and cities expanding outwards as their population increases. Political pressures from environmentalist organizations and wealthy home-owners who have homes within it or overlooking it have conspired to prevent development.
Some towns and cities make the problem worse by putting height restrictions on buildings erected within them, effectively meaning that residences cannot expand outward or upward, so people are having to buy beyond the green belt and commute through it to work in the city.
People have recently softened their opposition to any kind of green belt development, and this creates an opportunity for a novel approach to be tried. Government should decide to slice a mile off the inner circumference of the green belt, and add a mile to its outer circumference. Verdant land within that inner mile would be preserved, meaning that meadows, woods and genuinely green land would be left untouched. But damaged land such as disused buildings, gravel pits and the like, would be available for development,
as would prime agricultural farmland, itself not particularly green.
The mile added to the outer circumference would not apply to buildings already there, and could be added in such a way as to create more verdant, genuinely green land. This would result in a net gain of green land, in that the inner circumference of the green belt is smaller than the outer one.
Environmentalists could draw consolation from the net gain of green, while the strip of land around the inner circumference would allow a million more new homes to be built where they are needed, in towns and cities where people want to live and work.
Families presently living in the green belt could console themselves with the thought that at least their children would have somewhere to live in the future. The building of a million new homes on the edge of the green belt would put downward pressure on the prices of existing homes, making it easier for young people to become home-owners. It would break the cycle of expectation in the UK that house prices must inevitably rise, and that a home is an investment rather than a place to live, and an investment that will yield greater returns than practically any other.
When this is no longer true, people will seek other assets in which to invest, creating opportunities for business expansion and job creation. The actual construction of a million new homes would put some strain on the supply of materials such as bricks and timber, but output could be stepped up to meet the new
demand. And the building, done over the course of several years, would itself give a massive boost to employment within the industry, creating well-paid jobs and opportunities for skilled craftsmen. The ultimate bottom line, however, is that many more people, especially young people, would gain the opportunity to become home-owners.
The UK needs more growth, and should secure its place in the world of the future by taking steps now to attract high tech start-ups. These will ultimately create the jobs that will keep our own high-skills people in the country and will attract high skills people from overseas.
Business entrepreneurs claim that they find regulation the biggest bugbear. Instead of developing and expanding their businesses they have to spend hours ling compliance documents and meeting the minutiae of rules imposed by both national and central government. When they employ people they complain about the amount of time and effort taken up by PAYE tax returns and National Insurance. Their premises have to meet exacting standards, and it is claimed that firms such as Apple could never have started up in the UK because they would not have been allowed to operate from a garage.
In an ideal world we would not burden our start-up businesses with the costs of regulatory compliance, but in this less than ideal world we could have small pockets where start-ups could develop unhindered. The government should learn from the successes and failures of its Enterprise Zones project from the early 1980s. The idea was bold, but its execution was limited because the civil service put too many curbs upon the new zones. Its greatest success was in London’s Docklands, where skyscrapers could be built only because it was designated as an Enterprise Zone.
The government should announce a nationwide competition to have places designated as Growth Flashpoints. Syndicates of business, trade unions and local government should put together bids to be one of the chosen sites, listing in their bids the facilities and terms they were prepared to o er high-tech start-ups establishing with the flashpoints, including buildings that would be available and transport links. They could be about one square mile in area, with perhaps four or five to be chosen across the nation.
The rules would be simple. For their first five years new high-tech start-ups within the flashpoints would pay no taxes, local or national. They would be exempt from regulations that covered premises, employment, health and safety, or the need to file compliance documents. All those working within the flashpoints would be classfied as self-employed, with employers therefore not required to o er non-wage benefits such as holiday or sick pay.
The bids put in by local areas wishing to be one of the designated flashpoints would be adjudicated by a panel of people from high tech industries, not by ministers or civil servants. And applications by would-be start-ups to set up within a flashpoint would be approved or rejected by similar panels drawn from the technology sector.
2 CREATING LIVING SPACE
The UK’s housing shortage is not caused by lack of finance to build houses, or by lack of labour or materials. It is caused by a lack of suitable land that people are allowed to build on. It is exacerbated by some of the conditions that local authorities impose by tacking on to planning permission such things as the necessity of including a proportion of “social housing.”
It is the Green Belt created by the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act and revised since which prevents towns and cities expanding outwards as their population increases. Political pressures from environmentalist organizations and wealthy home-owners who have homes within it or overlooking it have conspired to prevent development.
Some towns and cities make the problem worse by putting height restrictions on buildings erected within them, effectively meaning that residences cannot expand outward or upward, so people are having to buy beyond the green belt and commute through it to work in the city.
People have recently softened their opposition to any kind of green belt development, and this creates an opportunity for a novel approach to be tried. Government should decide to slice a mile off the inner circumference of the green belt, and add a mile to its outer circumference. Verdant land within that inner mile would be preserved, meaning that meadows, woods and genuinely green land would be left untouched. But damaged land such as disused buildings, gravel pits and the like, would be available for development,
as would prime agricultural farmland, itself not particularly green.
The mile added to the outer circumference would not apply to buildings already there, and could be added in such a way as to create more verdant, genuinely green land. This would result in a net gain of green land, in that the inner circumference of the green belt is smaller than the outer one.
Environmentalists could draw consolation from the net gain of green, while the strip of land around the inner circumference would allow a million more new homes to be built where they are needed, in towns and cities where people want to live and work.
Families presently living in the green belt could console themselves with the thought that at least their children would have somewhere to live in the future. The building of a million new homes on the edge of the green belt would put downward pressure on the prices of existing homes, making it easier for young people to become home-owners. It would break the cycle of expectation in the UK that house prices must inevitably rise, and that a home is an investment rather than a place to live, and an investment that will yield greater returns than practically any other.
When this is no longer true, people will seek other assets in which to invest, creating opportunities for business expansion and job creation. The actual construction of a million new homes would put some strain on the supply of materials such as bricks and timber, but output could be stepped up to meet the new
demand. And the building, done over the course of several years, would itself give a massive boost to employment within the industry, creating well-paid jobs and opportunities for skilled craftsmen. The ultimate bottom line, however, is that many more people, especially young people, would gain the opportunity to become home-owners.
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