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> The reality for most graduates is even grimmer: > • £25,000 starting salaries at traditional engineering firms > • Exodus to consulting or finance just beca

> The reality for most graduates is even grimmer: > • £25,000 starting salaries at traditional engineering firms > • Exodus to consulting or finance just because it's compensated better This is _exactly_ my career so far. The key thing about the British economy is that while most things operate in a free market, construction is centrally planned by councillors who are incentivised to block most development. So the whole economy is struggling, but industries that need physical space are especially hard hit. Your local council can't block you from writing more code, but can stop you from building lab space near where people want to live and work. My first job out of uni was in a wonderful small engineering firm in Cambridge. Lab space there is eye-wateringly expensive because it's illegal to build enough, so we were based in a makeshift lab in an attic next to the sewage works. I loved working there, but it shows that we're restricting our small businesses unnecessarily through our planning system. The solution is frustratingly simple, but politically suicidal for any government that tried to implement it: just legalise development subject to basic design codes. I hope we see some planning reform before it's too late for our struggling innovation industries.

pjc50 2y ago
I used to live and work in Cambridge. In many ways it's a victim of its own success; people will, not unreasonably, argue that it's a beautiful little town of historic buildings, embedded in a primarily agricultural county of either prime agricultural land or protected wetland. They're not going to let you build Shenzen in Shelford no matter what the economic benefit might be. Meanwhile it's close enough to London that the property prices tick upwards to London commuter weighting. (This is also why we have expensive electricity, because people oppose building any infrastructure. I'm coming round to the idea that there should just be county-by-county referendums where people have to pick either blanket allowing energy development or having a bill surcharge.)
- glompers 2y ago
  The wiki editor(s) who wrote the boosterish Economy subsection of the wiki page on Peterborough [1] (thirty miles away, same county) make it sound as though it is a growing area that does want to grow more. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterborough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterborough
  - pjc50 2y ago
    I can tell that you've read the Wikipedia page rather than going to Peterborough.
    - vanderZwan 2y ago
      Could you clarify how the vast majority of people in the world who will never set foot in Peterborough (including me) should interpret that?
      - ajb 2y ago
        From the vantage point of Cambridge it has a reputation as a shithole, but I haven't been there either so would also like to know. The county council covering the Cambridge area is actually based in Peterborough, and so effectively controls a lot of the countryside around Cambridge, as it is in charge of transport. So arguably the lack of development could be their fault as well. Supposedly the government is plan is to reduce everywhere to one layer of local government (currently Cambridge is covered by both a county and district council). TBH the areas which are currently unitary seem to work a bit better but there's still massive opposition to building.
- dash2 2y ago
  Surely even prime agricultural land is vastly (thousands of times?) less valuable than lab space for engineering companies.
  - yurishimo 2y ago
    Only if you place no value on the land simply existing as it does now and providing aesthetic value. Most people privileged enough to sit on a planning council coincidentally also trend towards valuing peace and quiet and are hesitant to approve projects that may disrupt their assumed way of life. From the outside looking in, rural UK council politics seems like the epitome of “I got mine so bug off”. I think this is one reason why London is becoming a super hub (among other reasons). London broke the ice and now they are trying to keep progressing but physical distance is becoming a limiting factor. Other municipalities will need to embrace change if they want to keep developing into a place where people want to live and work.
    - TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
      All of the UK's cities - apart from museums like Oxford and Cambridge - are full of real estate investment sprawl. There is no reason some of those spaces couldn't be used as labs and light factories. In fact there are plenty of brown field conversion projects turning old mills (etc) into new light industry hubs. The bigger problems in the UK are business rates (extortionate), profiteering by landlords and land owners, insanely expensive utilities, crumbling physical infrastructure, and Brexit. We could have had a government that invested/fixed in all of those things, but the big landords and land owners decided they didn't like that idea. They'd prefer to keep the country struggling and backward, because it appeals to their sense of aristocratic self-importance.
      - ben_w 2y ago
        Cambridge(shire) has also been forced to allow more real estate; Northstowe, Waterbeach New Town, the Eddington neighbourhood within Cambridge city limits, Springstead Village, even been a few noticeable changes around Cottenham.
shawabawa3 2y ago
> but politically suicidal for any government that tried to implement it Labour just got into government and literally the third bullet point in their manifesto is: * Reform our planning rules to build the railways, roads, labs and 1.5 million homes we need and develop a new 10-year infrastructure strategy. So i would hope it's not political suicide to follow through on that
- tormeh 2y ago
  We'll see. Taking away local control over land development is going to be controversial. A lot of rich and politically connected people are not going to like this. The last three decades in the west has been an endless series of victories for landowners. It's hard to imagine that this time really is different.
  - immibis 2y ago
    New Zealand took away local control over land development, and then promptly elected a right-wing central government that hates land development. :/
- speedbird 2y ago
  1.5M new homes won’t even keep up with immigration. Not to mention schools and hospitals.
  - bombcar 2y ago
    It'd be better than not having them. Major problems are rarely solved with one fell swoop, but instead thousands and thousands of small improvements.
    - GasVeteran 2y ago
      It would be better if we just change the immigration policy. Last time I checked there was 400,000 leaving the country each year and somewhere between a million and 1.4 million entering. I live in the countryside (I live in a small flat btw so I don't care about property prices) and I don't want everywhere in the country built over, which seems to be something here everyone wants for some bonkers reason. If you want to live in a concrete jungle that is fine, I and many others don't. I moved out of Manchester because I hated it there.
ImHereToVote 2y ago
This is the true cost of the bank bailouts. This is the moral hazard incarnate.
- pjc50 2y ago
  Local councillors being against development is nothing to do with bank bailouts, which have (mostly) been repaid by selling off the banks again.
  - ImHereToVote 2y ago
    That isn't what I mean. The moral hazard is caused by the bailouts. It isn't about the sum itself. Merely the guarantee that the tab for large gambling losses will be taken by the taxpayers.
    - rjsw 2y ago
      We should have shot a few bankers in 2008 to encourage the others.
      - immibis 2y ago
        How about one in 2024?
        skywhopper 2y ago
        It’s 2025.
        immibis 2y ago
        But the CEO was killed in 2024.
      - pipes 2y ago
        Quite a broad term "bankers". Who does that include?
henryaj 2y ago
Yup. From Sam Bowman's Foundations[0]: > [The TCPA] moved Britain from a system where almost any development was permitted anywhere, to one where development was nearly always prohibited. Since [it] was introduced in 1947, private housebuilding has never reached Victorian levels, let alone the record progress achieved just before the Second World War. > Today, local authorities still have robust powers to reject new developments, and little incentive to accept them. Historically, local governments encouraged development because their tax bases grew in line with the extra value created, but this incentive has been eroded by successive reforms that have centralised and capped local governments’ tax-raising powers. [0] https://ukfoundations.co/ https://ukfoundations.co/
itissid 2y ago
I remember seeing tons of shipping containers repurposed as offices all over london last year. Was that a way to ease/get-around this real estate issue?
archsurface 2y ago
An illustration of this which I happened to be looking at: Average home sizes (sq ft, sq m): Australia 2,303 214 New Zealand 2,174 202 United States 2,164 201 Canada 1,948 181 UK 818 76 Edit: formatting.
- bombcar 2y ago
  Apparently, the UK size is roughly what the average US house size was in 1790 - though it really didn't start to grow much until the 1900s.
- davisoneee 2y ago
  ...that's not really an illustration of that. When you actually consider population and land size, the numbers don't seem so strange. Just looking at wikipedia population and area (and a very simple scaling) % area housing = area_house * population So... aus 0.08% nz 0.42% us 1.82% can 0.08% uk 2.14% The UK has comparably _more_ of it's land covered with housing than the other nations mentioned. When you consider population density, UK >> US >> NZ > Canada > Australia. You would _expect_ countries with much more wide open space to have bigger homes, and the other nations homes aren't so big _when you consider their countries' size and population_.
  - daz0007 2y ago
    it's not only the area of land but the material's used in the housing, as well as when the housing where built. The stagnation in other countries housing markets like the us is interesting, I don't know the answer but have they ever had social housing on the scale of the uk?
- dzonga 2y ago
  a simple metric is energy consumption look at this chat - courtesy of perpexity. United States 11,855 KWH China 5,474 Germany 6,483 Australia 7,000 (approximate based on recent trends) Singapore 9,000 (approximate based on recent trends) United Kingdom 4,701 Energy consumption of the uK is that of a poor developing country. people will cite the size of uk homes due to lack of land as if you can't build houses with a lot of sq/ft - sq/m vertically ? the only thing keeping uk afloat at the moment is the friendly immigration policy. money doesn't move in capital markets but people would rather pump money into property.
tormeh 2y ago
This is a disease that has infected the entire West. It's just become impossible to do anything that requires space. Even industrial giants like Germany are now de-industrializing because it's just too hard to get permits for building anything new. Sure, labor costs, energy costs, environmental regulations, etc. are all bothersome, but what really makes German industry emigrate is how hard it is to get permission to change anything. It's such a self-inflicted wound.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
  What statistic are you citing for your claim that "Germany is now de-industrializing" ?
  - ren_engineer 2y ago
    their energy policy has essentially crippled their economy
    - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
      Do you have a metric, or not?
      - throwawayffffas 2y ago
        https://www.statista.com/statistics/624297/employment-by-economic-sector-in-germany/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/624297/employment-by-eco...
        abm53 2y ago
        I assume PaulDavidThe1st was asking for one which actually supported the assertion.
      - 8338550bff96 2y ago
        Do you have any sources that you would recommend? So far, you're throwing out "got a source for that?" left and right and when you get a source you've nothing to say. Just curious if you have knowledge about this subject or if you're just trying to block the conversation from going in directions you don't like
pipes 2y ago
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O7PVEaPh6Fw&pp=ygUUYWRhbSBzbWl0aCBpbnN0aXR1dGU%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O7PVEaPh6Fw&pp=ygUUYWRhbSBzbWl... You might find that interesting. It's from the Adam smith institute. Central planning has been seriously damaging the UK since after ww2. Thatcher is blamed for destroying British industry. It started long before her.
dash2 2y ago
I like Sam Bowman a lot, but are you sure the construction issue is central to this issue in particular? I suspect that access to capital is equally important: the UK is very finance-centric. I wonder how many VCs have engineering expertise, for instance.
iNic 2y ago
The housing theory of everything is true [1]. When land is scarce landlords can eat up any surplus produced by both labor and capital! [1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/ https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...

pjc50 2y ago

I used to live and work in Cambridge. In many ways it's a victim of its own success; people will, not unreasonably, argue that it's a beautiful little town of historic buildings, embedded in a primarily agricultural county of either prime agricultural land or protected wetland. They're not going to let you build Shenzen in Shelford no matter what the economic benefit might be. Meanwhile it's close enough to London that the property prices tick upwards to London commuter weighting. (This is also why we have expensive electricity, because people oppose building any infrastructure. I'm coming round to the idea that there should just be county-by-county referendums where people have to pick either blanket allowing energy development or having a bill surcharge.)

glompers 2y ago
The wiki editor(s) who wrote the boosterish Economy subsection of the wiki page on Peterborough [1] (thirty miles away, same county) make it sound as though it is a growing area that does want to grow more. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterborough https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peterborough
- pjc50 2y ago
  I can tell that you've read the Wikipedia page rather than going to Peterborough.
  - vanderZwan 2y ago
    Could you clarify how the vast majority of people in the world who will never set foot in Peterborough (including me) should interpret that?
    - ajb 2y ago
      From the vantage point of Cambridge it has a reputation as a shithole, but I haven't been there either so would also like to know. The county council covering the Cambridge area is actually based in Peterborough, and so effectively controls a lot of the countryside around Cambridge, as it is in charge of transport. So arguably the lack of development could be their fault as well. Supposedly the government is plan is to reduce everywhere to one layer of local government (currently Cambridge is covered by both a county and district council). TBH the areas which are currently unitary seem to work a bit better but there's still massive opposition to building.
dash2 2y ago
Surely even prime agricultural land is vastly (thousands of times?) less valuable than lab space for engineering companies.
- yurishimo 2y ago
  Only if you place no value on the land simply existing as it does now and providing aesthetic value. Most people privileged enough to sit on a planning council coincidentally also trend towards valuing peace and quiet and are hesitant to approve projects that may disrupt their assumed way of life. From the outside looking in, rural UK council politics seems like the epitome of “I got mine so bug off”. I think this is one reason why London is becoming a super hub (among other reasons). London broke the ice and now they are trying to keep progressing but physical distance is becoming a limiting factor. Other municipalities will need to embrace change if they want to keep developing into a place where people want to live and work.
  - TheOtherHobbes 2y ago
    All of the UK's cities - apart from museums like Oxford and Cambridge - are full of real estate investment sprawl. There is no reason some of those spaces couldn't be used as labs and light factories. In fact there are plenty of brown field conversion projects turning old mills (etc) into new light industry hubs. The bigger problems in the UK are business rates (extortionate), profiteering by landlords and land owners, insanely expensive utilities, crumbling physical infrastructure, and Brexit. We could have had a government that invested/fixed in all of those things, but the big landords and land owners decided they didn't like that idea. They'd prefer to keep the country struggling and backward, because it appeals to their sense of aristocratic self-importance.
    - ben_w 2y ago
      Cambridge(shire) has also been forced to allow more real estate; Northstowe, Waterbeach New Town, the Eddington neighbourhood within Cambridge city limits, Springstead Village, even been a few noticeable changes around Cottenham.

shawabawa3 2y ago

> but politically suicidal for any government that tried to implement it Labour just got into government and literally the third bullet point in their manifesto is: * Reform our planning rules to build the railways, roads, labs and 1.5 million homes we need and develop a new 10-year infrastructure strategy. So i would hope it's not political suicide to follow through on that

tormeh 2y ago
We'll see. Taking away local control over land development is going to be controversial. A lot of rich and politically connected people are not going to like this. The last three decades in the west has been an endless series of victories for landowners. It's hard to imagine that this time really is different.
- immibis 2y ago
  New Zealand took away local control over land development, and then promptly elected a right-wing central government that hates land development. :/
speedbird 2y ago
1.5M new homes won’t even keep up with immigration. Not to mention schools and hospitals.
- bombcar 2y ago
  It'd be better than not having them. Major problems are rarely solved with one fell swoop, but instead thousands and thousands of small improvements.
  - GasVeteran 2y ago
    It would be better if we just change the immigration policy. Last time I checked there was 400,000 leaving the country each year and somewhere between a million and 1.4 million entering. I live in the countryside (I live in a small flat btw so I don't care about property prices) and I don't want everywhere in the country built over, which seems to be something here everyone wants for some bonkers reason. If you want to live in a concrete jungle that is fine, I and many others don't. I moved out of Manchester because I hated it there.

ImHereToVote 2y ago

This is the true cost of the bank bailouts. This is the moral hazard incarnate.

pjc50 2y ago
Local councillors being against development is nothing to do with bank bailouts, which have (mostly) been repaid by selling off the banks again.
- ImHereToVote 2y ago
  That isn't what I mean. The moral hazard is caused by the bailouts. It isn't about the sum itself. Merely the guarantee that the tab for large gambling losses will be taken by the taxpayers.
  - rjsw 2y ago
    We should have shot a few bankers in 2008 to encourage the others.
    - immibis 2y ago
      How about one in 2024?
      - skywhopper 2y ago
        It’s 2025.
        immibis 2y ago
        But the CEO was killed in 2024.
    - pipes 2y ago
      Quite a broad term "bankers". Who does that include?

henryaj 2y ago

Yup. From Sam Bowman's Foundations[0]: > [The TCPA] moved Britain from a system where almost any development was permitted anywhere, to one where development was nearly always prohibited. Since [it] was introduced in 1947, private housebuilding has never reached Victorian levels, let alone the record progress achieved just before the Second World War. > Today, local authorities still have robust powers to reject new developments, and little incentive to accept them. Historically, local governments encouraged development because their tax bases grew in line with the extra value created, but this incentive has been eroded by successive reforms that have centralised and capped local governments’ tax-raising powers. [0] https://ukfoundations.co/ https://ukfoundations.co/

itissid 2y ago

I remember seeing tons of shipping containers repurposed as offices all over london last year. Was that a way to ease/get-around this real estate issue?

archsurface 2y ago

An illustration of this which I happened to be looking at: Average home sizes (sq ft, sq m): Australia 2,303 214 New Zealand 2,174 202 United States 2,164 201 Canada 1,948 181 UK 818 76 Edit: formatting.

bombcar 2y ago
Apparently, the UK size is roughly what the average US house size was in 1790 - though it really didn't start to grow much until the 1900s.
davisoneee 2y ago
...that's not really an illustration of that. When you actually consider population and land size, the numbers don't seem so strange. Just looking at wikipedia population and area (and a very simple scaling) % area housing = area_house * population So... aus 0.08% nz 0.42% us 1.82% can 0.08% uk 2.14% The UK has comparably _more_ of it's land covered with housing than the other nations mentioned. When you consider population density, UK >> US >> NZ > Canada > Australia. You would _expect_ countries with much more wide open space to have bigger homes, and the other nations homes aren't so big _when you consider their countries' size and population_.
- daz0007 2y ago
  it's not only the area of land but the material's used in the housing, as well as when the housing where built. The stagnation in other countries housing markets like the us is interesting, I don't know the answer but have they ever had social housing on the scale of the uk?
dzonga 2y ago
a simple metric is energy consumption look at this chat - courtesy of perpexity. United States 11,855 KWH China 5,474 Germany 6,483 Australia 7,000 (approximate based on recent trends) Singapore 9,000 (approximate based on recent trends) United Kingdom 4,701 Energy consumption of the uK is that of a poor developing country. people will cite the size of uk homes due to lack of land as if you can't build houses with a lot of sq/ft - sq/m vertically ? the only thing keeping uk afloat at the moment is the friendly immigration policy. money doesn't move in capital markets but people would rather pump money into property.

tormeh 2y ago

This is a disease that has infected the entire West. It's just become impossible to do anything that requires space. Even industrial giants like Germany are now de-industrializing because it's just too hard to get permits for building anything new. Sure, labor costs, energy costs, environmental regulations, etc. are all bothersome, but what really makes German industry emigrate is how hard it is to get permission to change anything. It's such a self-inflicted wound.

PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
What statistic are you citing for your claim that "Germany is now de-industrializing" ?
- ren_engineer 2y ago
  their energy policy has essentially crippled their economy
  - PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago
    Do you have a metric, or not?
    - throwawayffffas 2y ago
      https://www.statista.com/statistics/624297/employment-by-economic-sector-in-germany/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/624297/employment-by-eco...
      - abm53 2y ago
        I assume PaulDavidThe1st was asking for one which actually supported the assertion.
    - 8338550bff96 2y ago
      Do you have any sources that you would recommend? So far, you're throwing out "got a source for that?" left and right and when you get a source you've nothing to say. Just curious if you have knowledge about this subject or if you're just trying to block the conversation from going in directions you don't like

pipes 2y ago

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O7PVEaPh6Fw&pp=ygUUYWRhbSBzbWl0aCBpbnN0aXR1dGU%3D https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=O7PVEaPh6Fw&pp=ygUUYWRhbSBzbWl... You might find that interesting. It's from the Adam smith institute. Central planning has been seriously damaging the UK since after ww2. Thatcher is blamed for destroying British industry. It started long before her.

dash2 2y ago

I like Sam Bowman a lot, but are you sure the construction issue is central to this issue in particular? I suspect that access to capital is equally important: the UK is very finance-centric. I wonder how many VCs have engineering expertise, for instance.

iNic 2y ago

The housing theory of everything is true [1]. When land is scarce landlords can eat up any surplus produced by both labor and capital! [1]: https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-everything/ https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-housing-theory-of-every...