Martin Vander Weyer
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Her approach was to take swipes both at developers for ‘land-banking’, or sitting too long on unbuilt sites for which planning has already been granted; and at local authorities for failing to release sufficient land and grant permissions quicker. Was she right in either respect? I asked a veteran housebuilder: ‘We build as fast as we can once we’ve got detailed permission. It’s a total myth that we sit on “consented” land for accounting gains. But there’s a limit to the number of houses we can build and sell in a year on any given site: it might be 100 to 150 — so a very large site will always take several years to complete. The real problem is the time it takes to get detailed permission: never less than two or three years, and on one site in [a provincial city], whose planners have a tremendously difficult reputation, 23 years. In other places — Newcastle, for example — planners are more switched on and we build much faster.’
So one practical answer is to find the most progressive local authority planning departments and make them the benchmark for the most obstructive and nimbyist. The problem is, of course, that the latter are highly likely to be dominated by councillors from Mrs May’s own party. But perhaps not after local elections in two months’ time.
On the matter of President Trump’s imposition of a 25 per cent tariff on US imports of steel and 10 per cent on aluminium, I cannot improve on the comments of the sage of Washington, the former Bank of England monetary policy committee member Adam Posen, who called it ‘straight-up stupid’ and ‘fundamentally incompetent, corrupt or misguided’. Indeed virtually all economically literate opinion was united in condemning a move which will hurt America’s steel-producing allies in Europe and South Korea without seriously impeding China’s advance, and will surely provoke a salvo of protectionist responses — contributing to a slowdown of global cross-border trade and investment that has been a visible trend since the beginning of this decade.
It’s the kind of bone-headed blue-collar populism embraced by the former Chrysler boss Lee Iacocca in the 1980s when he was briefly touted as a presidential candidate and compared himself to the revolutionary patriot Paul Revere: ‘I’m the only guy on a goddamn horse saying “The Japanese are coming, the Japanese are coming”… And it’s all the fault of the dumb sonofabitch who allowed them into our market free of charge.’ Yes, globalisation leaves its trail of victims; but a tariff war will ultimately be worse for everyone, including the workforce of America’s already diminished steel industry, with whom Trump has no genuine empathy at all.
The picture it brings to my mind is of the once mighty Bethlehem steelworks in Pennsylvania that was defeated by global competition in 1995, and whose site is now occupied by an exemplar of the one business sector Trump can truly claim to understand: a giant casino, built to exploit a politically disappointed populace that has been left with no other hope of prosperity.
Unilever, the consumer goods conglomerate formed in 1929 by the merger of Margarine Unie of Rotterdam with Lever Brothers of Port Sunlight, is a model of cross-Channel collaboration that pre-dates the European Union we’re about to leave. So the decision due this month as to whether the group will no longer maintain dual head offices — which means closing London but keeping Rotterdam — will be highly symbolic. If the move not only goes ahead but also entails doing away with dual fiscal entities and dual stockmarket listings, Unilever will henceforth be a wholly Dutch company with UK subsidiaries. That status may afford cost savings and stronger protection against unwelcome takeover bids such as the failed one by Kraft Heinz last year; but it won’t necessarily please London-based investors who like to see giant corporations kept on their toes by fear of predators. And the loss of Unilever’s listing would be a huge blow to the London Stock Exchange, which is more and more desperate to maintain its global status in the run-up to Brexit. Watch this space.
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