Originally posted by appletree

Originally posted by Wilf
Make your mind up son.

Originally posted by onetwothree
Successive governments, by failing to tackle population growth, are turning Britain into a human battery farm - the ugly, congested, unsustainable, urban backyard of Europe.

UK population has grown 20 per cent since 1950. It is 59 million and still rising, projected to grow another 5 million by 2040.

London and the South-East are rapidly becoming a single megalopolis of gridlocked urban sprawl. In its announcement of the Communities Plan for England on 4 February 2003, the UK government planned for the construction of 200,000 more homes by 2016, in addition to 900,000 already planned by local authorities.

In a nightmare vision of the English countryside in 2020, a report to the government's Countryside Agency [The state of the countryside 2020: Scenarios for the future of rural England] published in March 2003 passively accepted that demographic developments will lead to the building of two million new homes across the countryside.

Pent-up and future population growth will be the main cause, made worse by the splitting of households into smaller units - the number of people per household is expected to shrink from 2.5 to 2.25 over the 20 years from 1990 to 2010. So a projected further increase in population of some 4 million by 2026 (7 per cent), and a possible 7 million by 2050, will be even more damaging than previously thought.

Extra housing needs extra roads, energy and other infrastructure. If governments continue to act on a predict-and-provide basis the problems caused by overpopulation will simply spread. Without a policy to gradually reduce UK population there can be no long-term solution to the UK housing problem. Extra housing means extra infrastructure to support it, which multiplies the impact of urbanisation.

Nearly 90 per cent of Britain's population now lives in urban areas, and those areas are continuously expanding to meet the need for ever more houses, roads, airports, shops, offices, factories, hospitals, leisure facilities, power stations, prisons and waste dumps (housing is not the only source of continued land loss spurred on by population growth: an average nuclear power station requires 40 hectares and, if gas cooled, will not be dismantled until 85 years after shutdown. The prison population in England and Wales grew by 25,000 from 1990 t0 71,000 at the end of 2001 and is likely to reach 110,000 by 2010, so that 40 new prisons may have to be built).

According to the Council for the Protection of Rural England, government plans are to build three million new homes in England by 2020 - one million of them in London and the South-East. In spite of recent moves to promote urban regeneration and the use of brownfield sites, up to 60 per cent of new homes may have to be built on greenfield sites and farm land. Both greenfield sites and Green Belt are already being sacrificed to urbanisation and a further 50,000 hectares of countryside (nearly five times the area of Manchester) would have to be concreted over. Every additional home also creates additional demand on resources such as energy and transport, and is therefore likely to increase greenhouse gas emissions.

A whole generation of Britons is being priced out of the housing market. House prices in the UK have now been rising for more than a decade, since the bursting of the stock market bubble. This phenomenon is usually attributed to: low interest rates, easy borrowing at high multiples of income; lack of land supply for building; and, more recently, to the attraction of property as an investment compared with falling equities. While all these factors are real, booming population growth is rarely mentioned. It is a fundamental factor. Population growth curbs freedom. The current Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill threatens to remove yet more rights from people to control their own environment in order to carry out large infrastructure projects - to accommodate population growth (whether by natural increase or net inward migration) that could easily have been prevented.