Theresa May - the Broken Housing Market 1

When even a Tory Prime Minister expresses concern for the inadequacy of modern spec-built homes, something has certainly gone very wrong in the house-building industry. In addressing the Chartered Institute of Housing conference on 26 June 2019, Theresa May said, 

“I cannot defend a system in which owners and tenants are forced to accept tiny homes with  inadequate storage… Where developers feel the need to fill show homes with deceptively small furniture… And where the lack of universal standards encourages a race to the bottom.”

May says that she wants her successor to introduce mandatory universal regulations to provide clear national standards. She is not wrong about the lack of standards. There are so called "Nationally described Space Standards" which were introduced in 2015, but these are nor mandatory. Whilst they are required by some councils before planning permission is granted, many more would appear to ignore them.

As for the race to the bottom, what does she expect? Most developers are not philanthropists, they want to make money and  when the government have ensured that councils now have so few powers and are so underfunded that they can't employ people to enforce the few powers they have left.

Together, We can be Strangely Better

 'Top Girls’ by Caryl Churchill and the ‘Vamps, Vixens and Feminists Conference’ gave top billing to feminism at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds early in March.  The Playhouse’s Courtyard Theatre hosted these two significant events which highlighted the position of women in society and in theatre.  The most widely publicised and best attended was the touring production of ‘Top Girls’. This is Caryl Churchill’s great play on the cost, to 1980’s women, of the ‘I want it all and I want it now’ culture.  However, Top Girls ran for twelve days before moving on to Exeter Northcott Theatre, it took something else to single out the second March as a special day.

For thousands of years, women have been subjugated by the systems established by and for the benefit of men.  Over the past hundred years, some of these systems have been challenged and changed to the benefit of us women in Western society.  But for a number of years now, this rate of change has levelled out.  Although we can see there is still much that needs changing, we are living on a privileged plateau compared to most of the women in the world.  And the warning to us is, pay attention, because even though we can still see the unfairness and systemic prejudice against women in the existing set up, “This may well be as good as it gets.” 

Localisation Bulletin One - Spelling

An architect of my acquaintance, after listening to a certain politician espousing the Government’s latest scheme for hiving off public assets and responsibilities via ‘localisation’, declared there was no such word. They were making it up, just like the policy.
As a writer, I felt obliged to investigate. Immediately on typing the word onto my elderly grey slab of a Toshiba, I found my first clue. The spellchecker didn’t query it, so localisation clearly predates the coalition by some years.
So I went further into history and consulted a dictionary – remember them? Large books with all the words you ever knew and even more that you didn’t! My 9th edition Concise Oxford English Dictionary (which I shall now call COED for brevity) spells localise with an S, but localization with a Z. Had creeping AmericaniZation got into the COED?
Next I did a bit of weight-training – well I put the bins out – then I went for the so-called Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary. This I shall call the TOB – short for Ton of Bricks. Compact it may be, lightweight it isn’t. My copy came out in 1979 and the print is miniscule. With my trusty microscope I found the letter L. The words derived from ‘local’ came between ‘lob-worm’ and ‘loch’. I dare say you could locate lob-worms in the locality of lochs, but are they localised to that locale?