Do you know what I'd like to see?

Jegersmart

Total tax receipts for 2012 should be around £550 billion, total spending is around £676 billion total government debt should be just over £1000 billion by year end.

1.5 million homes at say £150,000 each would cost around £225 billion.

J

GeorgeHowell

danothy wrote: »

But in the same vein, that kind of planning isn't what thinktanks do. I'm talking about running through a scenario as incepted from a (fictitious) government instruction to find the most likely outcome from its issuing, not debate what would be the most sensible instruction.

The idea is that it's not a vital issue to be decided, it's a consequence of the instruction.

But isn't the firstly likely outcome from its issuing every local authority in the country asking central government, "How many of these homes do you expect to be built in our area, and by when ?"

IveSeenTheLight

danothy wrote: »

The point of the exercise is not to work out how to publicly fund house building, it's to work out what the consequences would be if government instructed the local authorities to achieve such a level of development.

Surely the first cause is the funding and we should be discussing the effect on the country.

Your jumping beyond this discssuion point straight to where the decision has already been made.

Your implying the "think tank" are not going through the detail in small steps as you stated in your original post.

IveSeenTheLight

Jegersmart wrote: »

Total tax receipts for 2012 should be around £550 billion, total spending is around £676 billion total government debt should be just over £1000 billion by year end.

1.5 million homes at say £150,000 each would cost around £225 billion.

J

To be fair, it would not cost £150,000 each and as per my earlier suggestion, social housing should be considered very much on an economical basis.
IMHO flats / apartments / skyscrapers would be the best proposal to maximise properties on minimal footprint with the most economical financial cost.

IveSeenTheLight

danothy wrote: »

Seems that people are more interested in pointing out why any starting situation wouldn't work rather than running it through to its potentially glorious or ugly end. I guess any sort of thought experiment is scuppered and I was right that there could be no HP&tE thinktank.

I think any think tank has to consider the points being raise and then discuss them.
You started off this example by stating that the cause and effects steps needed "each point were small enough and reasoned (and no-one rushed to the end to draw a conclusion)"

danothy wrote: »

For example walking through the chain of cause and effect if the government insisted on 1.5 million new homes being built by August 2014 would be speculative by nature, but if the steps at each point were small enough and reasoned (and no-one rushed to the end to draw a conclusion) then that would be a thought experiment rather than merely an opinion.

It seems the steps and points raised are attempting to discuss in small stages are being attempted to be dismissed without consideration.

Maybe the think tank needs to be more open minded.

danothy

Maybe I've been misunderstood.

I'm not talking about starting from an idea of getting 1.5 million homes built and debating where the money would best come from and whether it would be a good idea or not. I'm talking about working forwards from some defined possible scenario to determine what the likely outcome would be.

If the government said we need 1.5 million homes built by August 2014 and each local authority will have an allocation of them (weighted by population) then the task I'm suggesting is figuring out what would happen as a result of that edict ... yes it's a vital question as to where the money comes from and where they're built, but the point is to predict how those questions will be answered as a result of the edict, not to find the optimum answer to them in a planning sense.

The first cause is the edict itself ... the cost resulting from that edict (and the consequences of how its met) are the effects and in turn become the causes to the next step of effects.

In this example as I see it, if government were to dish out a housing allocation in this way, the local authorities would then either need to sign of on private developments, cut other budgets/spending on other infrastructure to build social housing, or try to deal with another authority to offload the allocation. Working out how it should all be laid out and paid for isn't the same as reasoning through the consequences of how it would be if government simply issued the instruction.

Now if I'm somehow not being open minded by wanting to reason through what the result of some fictional government directive intended to reduce the housing shortage where the local authorities would be left to sort out the detail, rather than sit and debate the best planning approach that should have been applied a priori to it then so be it.

IveSeenTheLight

danothy wrote: »

Maybe I've been misunderstood.

I understand where you are coming from, but I think there should be a think tank to consider the cause and effect of building / not building those 1.5million properties in the timeframe proposed.

Without doing the valid up front analysis, the government would be unprepared to answer the questions posed by the public.

Nobody in government makes a decision to be implimented without the due consideration, especially one which would have an impact on the economy

zagubov

globalds wrote: »

I thought we hadn't got very far down the road ..This question of whether to split the build or stick it all in a couple of places ..seems to be but quite an important consideration for any further thoughts.

You don't see many examples of how to plan how to fit housing into a country intelligently, but here's one, by one of the original thinktanks; The RAND organisations proposal for a Palestinian state, planning to build housing for over 6M people in 2300 sq miles, based on public transport and medium sized cities.

danothy

IveSeenTheLight wrote: »

I understand where you are coming from, but I think there should be a think tank to consider the cause and effect of building / not building those 1.5million properties in the timeframe proposed.

Without doing the valid up front analysis, the government would be unprepared to answer the questions posed by the public.

Nobody in government makes a decision to be implimented without the due consideration, especially one which would have an impact on the economy

Well I think that running through the scenario would test the impact quite well, the economic consequences assessed as resulting from that many extra homes would be attributable, as would the effects of relying on various funding streams as found to be likely actions by local authorities. As for comparing it to not doing it, well that would be a case of applying the same assumptions minus the edict to time frame and playing it forwards too.

If it's all an unmitigated disaster then the principle of building that many homes that quickly could be considered to be unoptimisable, and if there are benefits found with limited undesirable consequences as a cost then analysis to iron out the wrinkles would be guided by the dry run.

The only reason I favour this kind of approach is that it's more engaging and accessible than what is essentially large scale town planning. Yeah the suggested edict is simplistic, but the less confining the start point the more scope the result has to be applicable, as any results can be attributed back to having the houses or trying to build them, rather than attributed to the specific method of building or trying to build them.

I truly believe that real thinktanks don't have much more than lofty concepts guiding their reasoning. The fine detail is too complex to analyse on this kind of scale.

GeorgeHowell

danothy wrote: »

Maybe I've been misunderstood.

I'm not talking about starting from an idea of getting 1.5 million homes built and debating where the money would best come from and whether it would be a good idea or not. I'm talking about working forwards from some defined possible scenario to determine what the likely outcome would be.

If the government said we need 1.5 million homes built by August 2014 and each local authority will have an allocation of them (weighted by population) then the task I'm suggesting is figuring out what would happen as a result of that edict ... yes it's a vital question as to where the money comes from and where they're built, but the point is to predict how those questions will be answered as a result of the edict, not to find the optimum answer to them in a planning sense.

The first cause is the edict itself ... the cost resulting from that edict (and the consequences of how its met) are the effects and in turn become the causes to the next step of effects.

In this example as I see it, if government were to dish out a housing allocation in this way, the local authorities would then either need to sign of on private developments, cut other budgets/spending on other infrastructure to build social housing, or try to deal with another authority to offload the allocation. Working out how it should all be laid out and paid for isn't the same as reasoning through the consequences of how it would be if government simply issued the instruction.

Now if I'm somehow not being open minded by wanting to reason through what the result of some fictional government directive intended to reduce the housing shortage where the local authorities would be left to sort out the detail, rather than sit and debate the best planning approach that should have been applied a priori to it then so be it.

Frankly I think that the idea of a 1.5 million target dished out on a population basis only is so unlikely in the real world as not to be worth time and effort in considering it.