Unused farmland (as in that which is not actively used for food production) is increasingly useful as sites for renewable energy production. A shift towards that and away from other forms of energy production are driving prices upwards.
Westminster Politics 2024-2029
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In the latest episode of the United Hour Podcast, Nik (@Rood) and Jamie (@Vault Dweller) are here to celebrate rare back-to-back victories for Manchester United! They analyse the late win in the Europa League vs. Rangers and then try and find things to analyse in a pretty dour game vs. Fulham. They also chat about the latest Marcus Rashford news, and look at the latest transfer news.
It was also called out months ago by anybody and everybody with any sort of involvement in construction. There are not the men or materials available in the UK to get remotely close to that goal, and now with the interest rate outlook deteriorating a lack of financing too.
The problem is as with most things, it's been hijacked by the Tories and Farage et al who are using the issue to increase their popularity when they couldn't give two fecks about Farmers. Then you get the usual suspects on social media spreading misinformation.
The BBC had an article on this in August
Without taking sides, I don't know enough about farming, one thing that seems to be spouted a lot though is food security, that ship sailed 200+ years ago when Wellington had his boots on making his Beef dinner whilst looking for water for his loo
I find some of the arguments a bit laughable from the farmers. They complain that the land should be used for grazing pasture and that gives us food security, but if they were truly bothered about that, a counter argument could be made that the land would be better put to use growing crops, with yields of crops and protein/acre far outstripping what can be produced with a dairy herd. And they also complain (quite rightly) that they get shafted by the big retailers on the price per pint. Seems an easy win to me switch to energy production and ditch the cattle, along with the associated emissions, pollution and cruelty.
Also, when those solar arrays reach the end of their life, after a month's work decommissioning, you pull up the concrete plugs and your ground should be as good as it was previously. The owner could return to grazing pastures if they wanted. It's much different to the vast areas of our coastline that have been given over to nuclear, that will remain out of use for centuries.
FFS!
Agreed. Upsetting the farmers is nothing alongside what Starmer has to do on this issue, releasing land, and adjustments to planning laws are imperatives, and will cause real problems. However it will need to be 'stress tested' soon and that the changes must be started as soon as possible using the commons majority.
It will also require national located and government backed training programmes to produce enough skilled 'house building focused' craftsmen/women, e.g. bricklayers, roofers, joiners, plasterers, electricians, plumbers and H&V mechanics/engineers. This could require a return to something like, e.g Training Board Models where employers are levied and get return of levies when they have trained enough people to the correct standards.
Housing/Employment/ Health/Education are all 'must do' targets for fundamental changes in the next ten years, not only in funding but in the way things are done... and then run. If not the UK will be for decades to come 'flitting' in and out of periods of 'austerity', whatever government is in power.
Starmer, has the power now to 'move the dial' significantly in the next ten years, he must not blink, but 'set his face like flint'.
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I agree with you but what about the first months and especially the first budget makes you think he's going to do any of that? I actually quite like Starmer but it seems clear to me they don't have the guts or the smarts to do anything remotely close.
Look at the cabinet and ask yourself who in there is truly inspiring.
Doesn’t it work out to about £16 a month? I’m not doubting that it’s big relief for some people to have that boost, but to suggest that 50k people will now be in poverty for losing £16 a month seems strange.
If you can’t afford to lose £16 a month, you’re already in poverty.
Isn't this just like Boris? I'm sure he'd have run Starmer a lot closer in the election. People like caricatures.
I don't support any of them, they are all sh*t at what they do. I work with 90% in the top companies in the UK and the states. Politicians are all incompetent when it comes to business in my opinion.
I thats why I said your bias in clouding your judgement of the facts and used the whataboutery comment - it's done, gone and can't be changed. Point scoring means nothing.
They are not just going after upper class its a knock on effect, both myself and my wife (she work for someone else) have been in ORG meeting this week with HR.
NI increase is hundreds of thousands for hers! Nuts.
For mine (it's more) we'll just close hiring in the UK and hire roles in other countries for lower skilled roles or automate administration tasks. For the ones highly skilled we'll suppress pay increases in April.
It's going to a rubbish Christmas for some people and it really irritates me because it didn't need to be.
It’s clear as day that the right wing machine is running a very successful campaign via Podcasts, Twitch etc where figures like Rogan and Tate are pushing young men to the right.
The UK Tories and Reform haven’t yet tapped into it and are still running on a very stiff platform targeted at boomers. It’s only a matter of time before they start tapping into the likes of Steven Bartlett and getting him to be more influential for them but they need a populist figure that isn’t ridiculed by younger generations to get behind first.
The UK right has failed to promote any youth from within because they’ve invested in dorks like Tom Harwood, Darren Grimes and Sophie Cocoran. Types that would get incessantly bullied by their peers and you find out they spend their Thursday evenings at the conservative club with your grandad playing dominoes.
Relative poverty. If the median income in society is £1m and you earn £600k, you're considered in relative poverty. 60% of the median is the criteria. In the UK that translates to an income of £21k. Likewise if you lived in the Congo and earned the average £250 a year, you would not be considered to be in relative poverty. It's a bit of an arbitrary number that's peddled far too much.
Big difference between relative poverty and absolute poverty, which is exceedingly rare in a country like the UK.
The "mistake" was not reversing the NI cut. But unfortunately they made a promise not to.
It's fecking terrifying I never imagined for a second that the generation behind me might end up as MAGA type cnuts. I get it's a generation that has been fecked over in many many ways though.
I think quite a few comments on that tweet show this group want someone like Clarkson who is perceived as a no bullshit anti-establishment figure. I don't think Farage and his lot can actually pull off pretending to be that with the younger generation.
Given the simulation keeps giving us the dumbest possible outcome I'm going to assume Brand someone has a revival and is the next PM.
Trump youth didn’t really go up that much. It was mostly young people staying home.
People under 50 in the US & UK aren’t right wing(Republican/Conservatives voting)due to specific economic and social conditions.
People under 50 in the US & UK aren’t right wing(Republican/Conservatives voting)due to specific economic and social conditions.
Personally I think their mistake was not just say we're auditing the financials and then push it out till 2025. Maybe drop one or two changes to see the impact.
The cost to business is more than the NI increase cost to the people, before people say why would I care about businesses it's a case of cause and effect.
It's been problem after problem, I think the next one is when they remove the the council tax cap of 5%, because councils will have a short fall with the increase of NI (i think they still have to pay it)
Last year mine went up 5% to 250 a month. If they remove that cap these feckers will go for more - we have private street cleaner and gardeners, even the road is privately owned. So I'm paying these feckers 250 quid a month to collect bins and change a street light bulb.
Yeah, this has definitely had an impact. Also pumping out YouTube and X type shorts which people pick up on when scrolling through TikTok or X or Insta etc.
Do you not drive or walk down any of the other roads in your area then?
Presumably they also enjoy living in a world where (generally) people aren't left to rot as they age (Adult Social Care) or where kids are protected (Children's social care), where kids are taught (Education), where homelessness prevention services exist (Housing/homelessness), or the hundreds of other services than councils provide.
But no, it's just the bins, of course.
Can't say I'm keen on measures that financially incentivise boiler firms to foist heat pumps on people, whether they're suitable for their properties or not.
I've got a heat pump for my my hot water - it was already installed in the house when I bought it. It does make a difference in terms of energy costs (a crude estimate would be saving circa £200-£300 per year) but they have shorter warranty periods, less reliable, hugely expensive up front and expensive to maintain. I've got an issue with mine and trying to find anyone to touch it, let alone fix it is a massive ballache. All the plumbers/engineers I've spoken to aren't a fan of them.
When it breaks down to a point where I can't use it, I'll almost certainly replace it with a standard immersion water cylinder and won't be going near an air source heat pump for the foreseeable future.
The upfront cost seems horrific and you hear about some having problems heating their rooms sufficiently with them. Worrying if few plumbers will fix them and no idea how reliable they are versus boilers longer-term.
Is the outside part noisy at all?
Mine is only for heating water and not for heating the air in the house we have electric heaters for that - I wouldn't say they are worse but electric heating vs water radiators does feel different, not necessarily in a bad way but you just have to play around with the settings to find what works best for you.
There isn't an outside part for mine, it's integrated as part of the house. I've got it on electric only mode until I can find someone to fix it for the time being.
Naturally on electric mode, it's silent - when it was heating the water via the air source heat pump component it wasn't all that noisy to be fair - noticeable if you're in the room where the cupboard is but not so loud it's a distraction. Conceptually I get the idea but from a practical perspective, they just cause you more headache than it's worth and I'd dread to be in a position where both my water and air heating is done via an air source heat pump.
Quite.
Yeah i drive a few times a week, I also pay £350 car tax.
I also like too see police, this isn't the point.
The point is that while they say they won't raise taxes, they have and did a terrible job at it.
Did you miss all those years where the council taxes were frozen and all the services went to shit? All under the previous government?
Did you also miss how our demographics are skewing older, so that more and more people require the social care services that are provided by councils? Are you planning to simply remain young and not use these? Councils need to raise taxes to pay for this, as well as all the stuff people take for granted or in most cases don't even realise they are providing.
All I get from your comments is that you own a big house and car and you don't like paying for things other people in your area need.
Also, car tax hasn't paid for the roads since the 1930s. It goes into the same pot as other taxes and gets spent on all government funded services and projects, so that point is moot.
I might be being a bit ignorant here but I don't quite get why we can't we have pumps that just heat, and do the transition in stages? Or combo Aircon + heat which might be quite attractive for people. My dad's Aircon when he lived in Cyprus, had a heat setting in winter. It's not as if these sorts of units aren't widely available elsewhere.
Has Starmer approved missile launches on the ICC yet?
but again....the NI raise will make it more expensive for council tax for everyone.
What I'm trying to say it's just another tax increase.
You know nothing about me, I wasn't talking about me - i was trying to give you an example. Lots of these new estates come with private maintenance companies which people do not realise, which is an extra cost - its a form of privatisation.
As for social care i wouldn't be able to use anyway, most people when they need it have asset/savings worth more than the threshold.
Anyway, let's hope they don't remove that cap, because a 10% increase will hurt everyone in that council region.
Have you checked the Heat Geek map to see if they have any members near you?
https://www.heatgeek.com/find-a-heat-geek/
They have expert training in heat pumps and related services, and they can come round to advise on already installed setups, as many older installs are poorly done. A Heat Geek company near me regularly post videos on YouTube of them visiting existing heat pump homes and highlighting problems with the original install and explaining what to look out for, etc.
I know that Daikin have an air conditioning setup that also heats water - it's called Multi Plus:
https://www.daikin.co.uk/en_gb/resi...gories/air-conditioners/multi-plus-split.html
I heard that this product had been available in Europe for a while but only recently here.
I think there's a decent chunk of people who don't realise that air conditioning is not just cooling but does heating as well. However the government's BUS doesn't cover air-to-air heat pumps so the focus is on radiator heat pump systems in this country right now. I believe air-to-air systems are generally cheaper to install, plus have better efficiency than a radiator system, but this is all anecdotal.
What the feck is wrong with my generation? As a young man I feel ashamed of my peers.
Ah, ok, thanks. Our flat is being let out while we live elsewhere, so not sure any more if we need to get a heat pump by a certain point or not- the requirement seemed to change under the last government, but not sure if that's since changed.
Also the flat is Victorian with sash windows etc...so not the best insulation, which seems not great for heat pumps.
Cheers mate, I'll check them out. The installation was definitely done poorly, it's annoying I didn't spot it at the time but it really is a shambles given where they installed it wasn't suitable (limited space to carry out maintenance) but even if it was done right, I think there are some fundamental flaws with them compared to traditional heating units. Parts are more fragile, expensive to repair and a lesser product life.
They're horribly noisy, I've told my next door neighbour not to get one, fortunately he's a relative. People who have them say they're not noisy, presumably because or their investment, because when you go round they clearly are.