I dread to think what our county will be like in twenty years time. :angry:
http://www.shropshirestar.co.uk/2007/02/st...er-housing-bid/

So where are we to build the hundreds of thousands of very much needed new homes in this country? Shall we start with your back garden?

There's no population explosion in this area - so why the need for this massive amount of extra housing?
If there's a shortage of houses for local folk - then yes, by all means build them.But it's immigration and 'white flight' that's driving the demand for these huge building projects.

I think that the new Local Development plan is being prepared in Telford as is one in Shrewsbury. As such there should be full public consultation. Am I right in saying that a government inspector will have to approve it after a public inquiry?

Do you have to blame everything on immigration? :rolleyes:

1) The number of households is increasing because of smaller family units, more single adults (both young and old) and more second homes.

2) The population of the country is growing because of both net immigration AND natural increase (more births than deaths).

3) Why should Shropshire be somehow a special case when across the country hundreds of thousands of houses are planned to be built?

4) Housebuilding in Shropshire will be concentrated on the two largest towns - Shrewsbury and Telford. The real countryside and our best rural towns will be largely left alone.

5) All medium and large scale house building must include an affordable and/or local buyers quota of homes.

6) Not all the new homes will be houses - many will be apartments, etc. Overall densities of residential development (the number of homes per acre/hectare) is now much higher than in the past, meaning the amount of land used is less.

7) Most of the nation's projected housebuilding is in the South and East. You think it's bad here? Think again. Be glad Shropshire will be spared the sort of housebuilding that some counties, such as Berkshire, Cambridgeshire and Buckinghamshire, now face.

8) The hugely damaging house prices in this country are mostly a result of demand far outstripping supply. The best way to bring down house price inflation is to increase supply (decreasing demand is harder).

9) Back to your stab at immigrants - newcomers to this country tend to live in older, poorer, terraced housing stock. These new suburban houses being talked about are almost exclusively for the white, middle-class English.

10) Considering what a small percentage of Shropshire is covered by urban areas, and considering what little this proposed housebuilding will actually add to that, I really don't see the whole "concreting over Shropshire" point.

11) Most of the recent extensions to Shrewsbury's urban area in the past ten years have been either roads or business/industrial parks. Not housing. 90% of the town's new housing has been within the existing urban area.

12) The land being talked about for residential development in the Telford area is mostly ex-industrial/waste land. Not actual countryside really.

And as I've already mentioned, what alternatives to new house building (which some will have to be on greenfield land) can you come up with? Would you like to sacrifice your garden for an extra dwelling? And don't say "stop immigration" because that isn't going to solve the problem.

Some valid points PS - but Immigration lies at the heart of the problem.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml.../12/nimmi12.xml

The demand for more housing on a mass scale comes about primarily to accommodate the ever increasing flight of the native Brits from the towns and cities. It cetainly isn't down to our expanding birth-rate, which is something like 1.7 children per family. It is mass immigration - (legal, illegal and asylum seekers) and it's knock-on effect - 'white flight' that is destroying our country aesthetically.

btw, I'm no 'NIMBY' either.My concerns are for the entire country - not just Shropshire

I don't think that there is going to be any problem with 'concreting over shropshire'. Only 8% of land in the UK is currently developed (not counting agriculture or forestry as development) to house 60 million inhabitants and Shropshire is much less than that.

With the same density of housing as now therefore you could have 90 million people and still only 'concrete over' 12% of the total surface area.

As the trend is to build higher, more densely and on previously developed sites even this level would not be reached and the population is not going to reach anywhere near 90m for a long time, if ever.

The pressures of an increasing population would be more environmental in terms of water resources, waste and refuse disposal and air pollution from transport and power generation and congestion but improved technology will enable more people to live on the same resources if we are clever.

There is also an issue to do with trade, if we have more people with the same natural resources, we may increase our trade deficit by having to import more energy, food and raw materials to sustain our standard of living. This doesn't have to be the case though, Japan is more densely populated than us with fewer natural resources yet they run a huge trade surplus, they import lots of energy and raw materials but then turn them into much higher valued products and re-export them. We would need to do the same to improve our trade position and a higher population means more brains working on new ideas, we are already very good at exporting services but we need to get better at high-end manufactured goods too.

We need to build more houses because of various demographic trends and yes, immigration is one of those, but it is only one. Old people are living longer and young people are living singly for longer before starting families, the price of housing has rocketed because demand outstrips supply. We have lots of scope in our towns and cities to build on ex-industrial land and to bring back into use empty properties, unocupied houses and premises above commercial shops for instance. We may have to build a little on agricultural land bordering towns (a lot of which is not particularly 'green' as it is covered in pesticides which leach into rivers and they harbour little wildlife) but as long as important sites are protected and other options for development exhausted first I don't think it's a major problem.

Whether you like the cultural influence that immigration has on the country is a personal choice I guess and there are anti-immigration parties that stand at elections and people are free to vote for them if they feel strongly about it. The fact that they don't probably suggests that they are either in favour of cultural diversity, they are not really bothered either way or they are mildly opposed but think there are far more important issues.