webofevil | Eschew the Estuary (Reply)

The ODPM: reducing reliance on cars

The Taliban famously never tried to provide any food for their starving country, on the grounds that God would provide. A similar impulse is at work at the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister (honest, John, it's just like being a real Prime Minister, oh, and be a poppet and take my dog for a walk, would you), where, in the face of all the evidence from the last ten years of what happens when you build houses on a flood plain (can you guess, readers? Best suggestion wins a strawberry Chewit), they're engaged in building a huge amount of housing on flood plains.

At the same time, there's the problem of where the water will come from for all this extra housing. The south is having huge problems meeting its existing demand. (In fact Sussex is still technically under a hosepipe ban, as it has been since summer, although they never appear to have informed anyone—you have to go to the water company's website to find out.) Asked directly about where they were going to magic all this extra water from, the Government's response was that they were "talking to the water companies", firmly shoring up their image as radical, "blue-sky" thinkers.

In the event that they're not actually expecting God to pick up the slack in secondary legislation, is their ambitious plan to let all the housing developments flood and then somehow use that same water to supply them, perhaps from special buckets? This would be genuinely radical, and at least ensure that Prescott's name was remembered 50 years down the line, which appears to be the underlying purpose of the project. (His plans for public transport, getting cargo off the roads and back on to rail, and... all the other stuff have been quietly laid to rest one by one, but there's no way you can ignore half a million poorly constructed houses crammed along the Thames Estuary on—I honestly can't stress this enough—fucking flood plains.)

It's in keeping with this administration, though. If there's a problem—in this case, lack of worker housing—then at least do something, even if it will make things worse. After all, if your intention is good, what could possibly be bad about it?