Thursday, February 26, 2015

And with a wave of a wand.....

.......we can build a city the size of Newcastle. Or it is to be hoped we can. So Nett Migration is just short of 300,000 for last year. Forget it is migration. How do we support 300,000 extra people with infrastructure each year. And to be fair, that isn't population growth which will be higher than that. It has taken 4 months to get Planning Permission to change the windows at our flat. A third of a year. As a country we needed to have built a third of Newcastle in that time. I bet we haven't.

And I'm sure we wouldn't, because the more you look at the way things work in the UK, it seems to involve no decision making but a lot of discussions and consultations. We will talk about how we accommodate all the extra people, what we need to do, how much do we need to do, how will we do it, and, oh heck, another party has got into power so we need to re-discuss all this again.

Oh well, at least the figures for this year will be two less than they would have been.

Although we are moving lock stock and barrel to France, when we retire we will have a place there and another back here, as we always planned come our glorious retirement. We can never afford to come back to London and so we know it will probably be halfway between London for seeing M's daughters and Nottingham for seeing M's sister. I suspect by then we may have had to build so many houses, particularly around the Capital, that we may be moving to the London Borough of Peterborough.

5 comments:

Masher said...

Look at you, with your home in the south of France and your weekend residence back here!
Good luck to you, fella.

But why have a place here at all? If you are just coming back to visit family occasionally, a couple of nights slumming it in a Premier Inn would be fine, I would have thought.

kennamatic said...

Masher - Ah, it's just a revamped plan based on the fact that we were going to move north at retirement but have a holiday home in France. When it comes to retirement we'll decide whether to have both or just slum it. If M's daughters have dispersed all over the place there will be less impetus to buy here. Or of course, if you've got a spare room for a couple of weeks........

Anonymous said...

All those choices, you lucky chap.

kennamatic said...

Toffeeapple - Yes, I am lucky, and I'm painfully aware that it's down to M's life decisions that we can afford to rather than mine.

Brennig said...

Not cutting your ties is definitely a sound plan.

I'm sure Dave said that he was going to cut immigration to 'tens of thousands'? Anyway, I'm not too sure how people who leave the UK are counted - we certainly weren't when we upped and moved to Spain. And were we counted back in? No, I'm confident that we weren't.

Not only is the infrastructure not up to the job of supporting an influx, but accounting systems which keep a tally of ins and outs doesn't work. It's a double set of requirements that our politicians can't fix.