12...Local Housing Development

Ideas 12...Local Development

Mr. Nigel Allen

Birmingham

Wednesday, September 30^th, 2015

Birmingham City Council

Dear sir or madam,

Thank you for allowing me to comment upon this local housing development.

I visited the information centre on June 24^th to see the plans. The plan consisted of traditional terraced housing facing the existing roads. At the time I asked the question, "why aren't the main axis' of the roofs of these houses east-west so that photo-voltaic panels can be mounted to them efficiently?" I was told that it would be too expensive.

I therefore have serious reservations regarding the fundamental design of these properties.

Shortly after this meeting there appeared in the news media details of two research projects investigating the design of eco-friendly homes, by Cardiff University, Bridgend and the Building Research Establishment, Watford. These homes were priced at not more than 70,000 pounds, thereby complying with HMG's sustainable homes requirement which it has since abandoned, due to pressure from the Home Builders Federation. These homes are designed to be so warm that they do nor require central heating. Homes designed to have a low carbon footprint are not new. I remember a similar project in Milton Keynes over a quarter of a century ago. In addition, I used to work for a company that manufactured mass produced 'Elizabethan Homes' bungalows at Rushden, Northants by a company called Nene Valley Caravans back in the 1960s, and I worked for Taylor Woodrow Anglian, whose factory across the road produced walls and floors for tower blocks of flats for the London area. The construction industry appears not to have advanced one iota since then. The ability to mass produce homes quickly and affordably is essential if we are to accommodate millions of refugees and economic migrants from the Middle East and Africa in the near future. They have seen Dallas on satellite TV and now want a piece of the action. Unlike the Palestinians, they are not prepared to spend decades in a refugee camp. With a little assistance from the Kremlin, no doubt the English Channel will be as welcoming as the EU made the Aegean Sea.

Don't you think it's about time we built homes for the twenty-first century and not the twentieth?

Thanks to HMG's restrictive mortgage assistance, I had to pay 100,000 pounds for my home in March 2014. One year later BCC sent me a circular asking me if I wanted to buy my 'council house' at 70% off. (I had just vacated a flat rented from a housing association for over 24 years. I was not allowed to buy it, so I was definitely not amused by the circular.) As a result I haven't got a clue how much my home would fetch on the open market right now. I have spent 20,000 pounds on improving my home, including 4,700 pounds on PVA on the roof. I also had to install a dozen rolls of insulation in the loft myself, in order to bring it up to 200mm despite having an injured hip. I could not get anyone else to do it because the EPC stated that the loft already had it. The certificate stapled to the roof truss stated that only six rolls had been installed. Not enough to cover the loft even once. I also had problems with heating the kitchen. I had to fill in the two air bricks with expanded foam along with the cooker extract vent, but still the kitchen was cold. A year later I noticed a worm crawling across the kitchen floor which alerted me to the fact that there was a hole in the floor where the sink drain pipe went. This I covered over with form-work and concrete. All this made me doubt the effectiveness of my cavity wall insulation and the accuracy of my EPC (Energy Performance Certificate). Had my cavity wall insulation been installed correctly, years ago? Did my bay windows have sufficient insulation top and bottom? For thee and a half years I put up with a moderately warm kitchen. Then one day I looked closely at the double banked radiator, and noticed that it was full of fluff, preventing air circulation. Using a 2m long bottle brush, used for Koi-Karp spawning, I removed the dust. Overnight the kitchen became warmer than the lounge. And then the combi-boiler remote control packed up.

As for my electrical circuits, I had to get electricians in to check the circuits since the lighting in the master bedroom and landing did not work. The electrician discovered that the new consumer unit had not been connected up correctly, whilst there was a break in the ring main. It's now two spurs. There was only one fluorescent bulb in the house, since everywhere else they were either halogen or GLS. This is what happens when owners cannot afford to employ electricians at 45 pounds per hour, and instead decide to do it themselves, with no knowledge of The On Site Guide and BS7671. Property owners can't do this themselves easily because the electrical standards are antiquated. Cables and pipes should be in dado trunking making it easy to access and repair/update. And of course the combi-boiler also needed fixing, the previous owners not providing my solicitor with a detailed maintenance report.

It's about time local authorities carried out regular energy, structural and utility (electrical/gas/water) checks on properties, together with checks on the owners and their deeds. 122 billion pounds of properties in the UK are owned offshore, much of which has been bought with dirty money. It is possible that these will be sequestrated by HMG, seeking instant revenues, at some future time resulting in a major adjustment of property values.

I take ecology and the threat of global warming very seriously. I have watched Grand Designs on Channel 4 TV ever since it started. However, what they regard as a low carbon home is not my interpretation. To be truly eco-friendly, the residents should have to produce their own energy to a high efficacy, recycle their own water and grow their own food. Generally speaking, homes last at least one hundred years, so designing one to be successful throughout a period of dramatic social and technological change is not going to be easy. My own view is that people should live in biomes in extended 'family' groups. Inside each biome would be at least four living modules and one community module. Plant food would be produced hydroponically, whilst meat would come from small creatures, namely rabbits, chickens and fish. In a world where there would be little employment due to AI, etc., it is essential that the masses are kept occupied through 'housework' and hence out of trouble with the law. Such a home would enable the government to dispense with welfare benefit payments.

All the money I spent on my home came through an inheritance. I never managed to save any money. I was simply working, simply to pay for the cost of commuting. My parents were boot and shoe machine operators, their earnings protected by wage's councils. They bought a detached house on a double plot, eventually selling off some of the land. Despite ten years of higher education and training, I worked mainly as a draughtsman and CAD technician at forty companies, mainly on a contract basis, over a period of twenty years. I was effectively retired at forty. It's about time government woke up to this new age, stopped talking about the economy and instead concentrated on improving people's quality of life.

People are getting poorer. Thanks to laws over the last 50 years promoting casual divorce, legalised homosexuality, women's lib based upon welfare benefits paid directly to women, council homes handed to single parents and single women, and now homosexual marriages, none of which was offered to referendum, we now have a society which is totally screwed up. Due to our low pay structure and the failure of government to invest heavily in scientific research in the fields of IT, space, nuclear and bio engineering, young people cannot earn enough to buy a home, and can therefore offer a prospective partner nothing. As a result wealth is not being passed on from one generation to another. I live on my own. I have no one to pass my estate onto except HM Treasury. Without the above reforms in social housing, racial integration and population control, the situation will only get worse.

Multi layered inflated biomes are quicker to construct, whilst their materials require less energy to produce. It's time HMG thought out of the box, or we'll all end up in one sooner than we think when the Greenland ice cap collapses and its flotilla of icebergs off the western approaches plunges northern Europe into a mini ice age.

As companies shed their workforce, governments will be obliged to manage the masses directly, necessitating that they find alternatives to traditional employment. The need for a National CV Centre will become apparent, something that BCC should consider creating, together with a construction base for the Skylon spaceplane at Birmingham International Airport.

Alternatively, BCC could provide an alternative site for similar 'biomes' designed in a contest between architectural companies worldwide.

It's about time government, including BCC, created events instead of belatedly reacting to them.

Many of my neighbours are against this project because they fear that the area will turn into a dirty construction site for years, whilst others complain of the reduction in recreational land, loss of privacy, introduction of undesirable tenants or devaluation of their homes. Also, I notice from the site plan on BCC website that some of these properties will have no off road parking space. I live in a quiet area which at times gets very crowded with parked vehicles. The existing road network should be extended to provide these properties with parking space.

I hope you will take these suggestions seriously.

Yours truly,

Mr. Nigel S. Allen

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Of course, once these developments are built, they have to be maintained. No sooner did the builders leave, than the vandals moved in. The street furniture did not get repaired. The rubbish piled up to the point where local residents gave up cleaning the streets. The place was made worse by drug pushers. I even had a tub of my magnificent canna-tropicana stolen from my front garden, whilst later on, even the pod from my recycling wheelie bin disappeared. Just how low can life become on this estate? I now knew how my neighbours felt at having their parked cars vandalized.

I have no idea what the outcome of this investigation has been. It shows just how out of date thinking is regarding the construction of eco-homes. The houses were constructed and they look very nice, but they are not eco-friendly. The construction industry plainly needs more time than is available, to come to terms with global warming. If present trends continue, seventy-five per cent of species will become extinct within the next two hundred years. As I write, in 2019, Siberia is burning, over an area the size of Belgium, whilst the Russian government refuses to put the flames out. It is therefore conceivable that all of the methane trapped within the world's perma frosts will end up in the atmosphere very soon, thereby accelerating global warming. At some point the problem will become irreversible. At the same time, in Ethiopia and the PRC, its citizens supported by the government, have planted millions of trees. Elsewhere, the world plainly lacks the necessary political intelligence and willpower.