Holiday home creep

Over the Easter weekend me and Jackie have been doing our bit for the Labour cause and going round posting a leaflet for Colin Pickhall. The areas we had been given were Ross side, Arrad Foot and Newlands. It's a nice way to get to explore some of these small villages that otherwise you drive through or straight passed.  It's very interesting discovering tucked away pads of the very well to do that it makes you aware that we have some very rich folk nestled in our villages. Where once we had farm labourers cottages and Barns, where once was a forge or a mill is now a converted Grand design of a home, how the other half live.

But the thing that saddened us was the number of small houses, sometimes terraced, were unoccupied and were obviously holiday homes or weekend retreats. In every village that we visited I would say 10% of the houses were empty. I suppose the people that own these are escaping the astronomical prices of the National Park and opting for a little hideaway just outside the honeypot, but just a stones throw from the Lakes. How many of these properties are there I wonder, is there some way of counting them. Do SLDC have any idea how much of their housing stock has disappeared in this way, how many have we in Ulverston.

And of course this must push the prices up, especially in the villages, and it goes without saying that it saps the life blood of the social life in these villages.

It's a wonder we don't have some kind of campaign going on here like they had in Wales, not that I'm advocating it but something is very wrong. When we have all the backlash against building lots of new houses we are running headlong into a crisis where the young people, starting families can't find places to live. Maybe it's always been so, but unless you get out and walk these villages posting stuff through dead letter boxes you don't realise the scale of the problem, it certainly brought it home to us this weekend.

Look again, the answer should be 42

Full house last night, because on the bill,(agenda) we're going to debate this consultation document that's been a work in progress for a few years, I guess, by officers from SLDC. They had been asked to come up with proposals of how we cater for a growing population over the next 20 years. Now I don't know how they come up with the projected rises in population, but I suppose they look at births and deaths ratios and extrapolate. I'm naive enough to think that they have consulted with a few clever professors, looked stuff up in learned journals, and entered  data into sophisticated bits of computer software programmes. I also like to think that their hearts are in the right place and they are doing the best job they can, and that they are in these jobs because they're capable people.

When they finally reached their conclusions, about life the universe and everything, it ran to thousands of pages, and they present their findings to  Deep Thought, (read the town council), for them to debate the pro and cons of their findings

Bare in mind that these were not plans, these were proposed options, which should be looked at over time, and in some depth.

So last night, we, Ulverston town council, after a debate, which must have lasted, oh, all of half an hour, came up with our response to these proposed options..

So what profound wisdom did we come up with as a way forward.  We would write and ask them to "look again". Some wanted the whole exercise to be scrapped altogether, but we stepped back from the brink of that extreme view and settled for "look again".

So like in the hitch hikers guide to the universe, we  now expect these conclusions to be sifted, mulled over and extrapolated some more, perhaps for another 20'000 years whilst we wait for the answer we want to hear. We didn't want to hear that the answer was 1,600, we wanted to hear 42.

Meanwhile the young first time buyers, the lifeblood of the town are forced to move away from their place of birth, their home town because they can't afford to live here. It seems that even though the developers are legally bound to provide low cost homes, 35% it says in the proposals, most of the public and the councillors don't believe this would happen. We would only build homes for posh people and out of town 2nd home owners. Come on, this is such a defeatist attitude, this is a manifesto of doom.

My own opinion is that we should go back to building council houses, but that's a big national debate, long over due, but we are where we are.  If we have to do this with private building consortium's then we have to believe we can enforce the rules, otherwise we're going to end up with a town full of geriatrics and second home owners.

This thing called snappily the Local development framework, was just that, a framework for debate, but it was hijacked before it even started by the nimbys and the man in the pub. Shame on the council that all we could come up with as a response was "LOOK AGAIN."