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AFFORDABLE HOUSING & CLIMATE CHANGE
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EMPIRE BUILDING - Every house and factory that is built increases our carbon footprint. As each council in the UK does the same as Wealden District Council, the country adds to desertification and rising sea levels that affect another country. Our indulgences cause great harm and suffering to refugees in Africa who cannot grow enough crops to feed themselves, let alone put up yet another industrial estate in the middle of nowhere. Then there are the islanders, whose homes are being flooded by us. Building the wrong kind of houses - business as usual - is contributing to geographic genocide, alongside ecocide.
Genuinely affordable homes and social housing, in the context of climate change, meaning carbon neutral, or zero emission, is something that banks and local authorities abhor.
Affordable means that an ordinary working man in that location, might buy a house with a mortgage he or she can support from his local wage. That is the benchmark.
Councils greenwash their agendas and public relations, advertising homes (usually shared ownership) as being affordable. But in fact, the very need for sharing with another family is because the purchase price for a/the standalone unit, is not affordable.
The lack of genuinely affordable homes is appalling. A reflection of a society from a bygone era, where enslaving a human meant physically shackling them and forcing them to work as being the property on another human. Slaves would be flogged if they did not do as they were told. Men with guns and whips would oversee plantations, ruling with fear.
Bankers and Councils work the same way, except the guns and whips have been replace by mortgages, and only providing housing options that mean forcing youngsters to take on a financial burden that will effectively enslave them for life.
Part of this regime, is brainwashing the electorate into believing that the system cannot change. It is rigid, and you may as well get used to it.
The upshot of this is that people in their geographical region have to work harder and longer hours. Sometimes with two jobs, just to keep their heads above water financially. Financiers should be shamed of themselves for taking advantage of a system that is corrupt. But they are not. They like the system, where they can profit personally on the sweat of another human's toil.
SHOW US THE AFFORDABLE HOUSES - Wealden can't, because they have not built any. You won't get planning consent in this area of Sussex for low cost housing, because there is no profit in that. It's all about money and the Community Infrastructure Levy. There is no CIL on affordable housing. What these councillors want is lots of expensive houses to generate more rateable taxes that they can then pay to their overpaid planning officers, legal staff and executives - and of course pension plans.
THE MODERN SLAVE TRADE
If houses were genuinely affordable, the cost of borrowing over a lifetime would be substantially less. Maybe even 70% lower. With benefits for the planet.
A stable social background reduces crime, gives youngsters pride in joining a fair society, and a basis for being more productive.
PROVIDING A ROLLING STOCK OF AFFORDABLE LAND FOR SUSTAINABLE HOMES
Self-builds and flat-pack housing should be encouraged, especially where they are timber and so lock up carbon.
Flat packs offer a simple solution to providing low cost housing quickly and at a fraction of the price of a conventional brick built home.
The problem is, and this is the log-jam, that councils control the release of land.
COMPULSORY PURCHASE
Where local councils refuse to use their powers of compulsory purchase for fear of falling out with influential landowners, and not getting re-elected, the government should identify areas of land where values will remain low, and force councils to use their powers, or take those powers away from them with revised policies, perhaps by setting up a Commission, especially to identify areas without affordable social housing, identify suitable land locally, serve Purchase Notices and secure land for for genuinely sustainable homes.
This may upset a few landowning farmers who have been buying up land on the pretext of farming it, but actually using grants to snap up a local bargain, hoping for windfall profits. This practice must cease. Global warming dictates urgent revision of policies and politics.
You can always tell a council that has fallen in with favoured house builders, because the same old names keep cropping up year after year. In Wealden you will find Robert Standley and Nigel Coltman in power, time and again. Look at the election record and you'll see they have been floating around for years. In that time they have been sucked into a corrupt system, reliant on their expenses and any other payments they might generate by the back door. Reliant also on keeping in with the local developers, so voting for their planning applications, and generally pushing forward high price developments, regardless of the lack of affordable housing in their area.
Why not check out the records in your area, and see if it the same.
At the moment, councils are hiding behind Covid, as a shield to prevent their records being inspected.
Don't believe us. Try and get an appointment to audit their accounts and visit their paper or photographically reduce records on microfiche.
Councils up and down the country are now shredding documents routinely, to prevent such patterns being identified. Covering their tracks. That is because their profiteering may come under the heading: Proceeds of Crime. So become subject to Confiscation Orders.
Some Wealden officers enjoyed holidays paid for by developers. One long serving planning officer was caught in a cabinet selling a planning application too committee members, that belonged to his (Mason) father in-law builder. He was not prosecuted. He was promoted. If that sounds like cronyism to you, you are right.
CLIMATE OSTRICHES - A typical councillor in the Wealden district buries their head to local climate corruption - making complete arses of themselves.
PACKING THEM IN - Filling in all the gaps, it is boom time in Wealden, with climate change on the back burner as the go-ahead is given to thousands of new builds that have no climate mitigation features.
NATURAL BEAUTY - Wealden are converting our beautiful countryside into a top heavy suburbia, loaded with climate unfriendly buildings. They are just as bad as those chopping down the rain forests. But these climate criminals are operating right here on our doorsteps.
TOKEN SOLAR PANELS - Wow! At last we see signs of intelligent life in Herstmonceux on this building site exiting onto Gardner Street. Pity there are not more photovoltaic panels, and where are the EV charging points. In this village there are no school spaces for the children, meaning that parents will have to drive their kids to another location, or a bus will have to take them. The roads locally are a potholed disgrace and narrow. Travel to Eastbourne is nearly always delayed by the level crossing at Pevensey and the A22 and A23 are slow roads to London and Brighton because East Sussex County Council failed to ensure that our transport system was efficient. There are of course very few electric vehicle charging points.
WEALDEN'S OFFICES - This council has virtually no climate change features in their relatively new offices in Hailsham, and now they are thinking of demolishing the site to build more houses. That was great planning !!! They are not worried in slightest about the carbon footprint used in re-development - all they care about is the money.
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