“I am pleased that a plan to demolish a family home on Riddlesdown Road, Purley and replace it with a large block of flats has been refused,” tweeted Chris Philp – the Tory MP for Croydon South – yesterday.
“New homes are needed but the right place for new flats is Croydon town centre, central London and brownfield sites,” he added.
You may have noticed the fairly obvious. As many commentators were only too ready to point out to the minister, the application was for new homes on the very definition of a brownfield site.
Chalk another one up not for the NIMBY (‘not in my backyard’) alliance but the Army of the BANANAs – build absolutely nothing, anywhere near anything.
Philp is of course a constituency MP and like most Tory parliamentarians is keen to secure every vote he can. Those who live in his constituency – the neighbours, perhaps, who could do without a few months of vans and trucks trundling up and down a quiet suburban street – can vote, and those that might live in his constituency’s newest flats don’t.
The logic is impeccable; even if the damage it does is just as clear. Not building things is Britain’s curse.
Yesterday the Mayor of London hailed the potential arrival of the ‘Bakerloop’ – a grand name for what is effectively an express bus from the Elephant and Castle to Lewisham.
In a grown-up country, one that put spades in the ground, such a bus would be unnecessary – we’d have built a rail line, or extended the tube.
But we’re not, so a bus that stops in slightly fewer places trundling down the Old Kent Road is the best we’re going to get.
What a sorry state we’ve ended up in: incapable of building a block of flats in zone 6, 13 miles from London, and with an extra bus line hailed as a great leap forward for Britain’s infrastructure.
Can we please just get on with building something, anything?
We’ll be so busy doing it we won’t notice we’ve stopped talking about why our productivity numbers are so poor.