Is that going to help the UK balance of trade?

Perhaps it will enable stupid ideas like the 60mph speed restriction for the M1 to be ditched!

That'll come down to 50 to reduce pollution - it's not caused by vehicles on the M1, its caused by industry in the Sheffield area.

Unless youre thinking about MacDonalds, or Meadowhall shopping centre....

Don't forget our national growth industry, piling Chinese/Indian made tat ever higher in sprawling ever larger warehouses, themselves built, naturally, on previously good green land, and filling our roads with ever larger lorries transporting it huge distances from port to warehouse, and thence to said shopping centres, a perma sustainable economic miracle i tell you, with smaller service type 'industries' keeping this charade going.

Notice how Yorkshire/North Notts/Derbyshire towns are spreading so close now that it's but a short stroll between the various outskirts.

Northamptonshire and its surrounds have benefitted greatly from this wonderful boom industry (insert face palm smiley or maniacal laughter here), which is leading to East Northants towns getting ever closer, another 30 years and the county will resemble Birmingham district too, where there is nothing but warehouses and retail parks and the odd public park where only the brave venture after dark separating the once individual towns which have also seen massive house building programs to cater for the effects of imported warehouse workers.

A veritable warehouse of cards?

Don't despair - only 5% of tha area of England is built on (2.5 % of Great Britain. But I'm the first to agree that, to keep it like that, the Government and local authorities need to make more effort to build on brownfield sites.

The much-too-frequent habit of Government inspectors overruling local authorities in favour of developers needs to be controlled too. They are too keen to meet targets for house-building without making enough effort to find the right sites.

We live in rural north Dorset in a village surrounded by dairy farms. Unsurprisingly where there were about 15 farms twenty years ago, now there are only four. Fortunately the four have bought up the land, and there isn't the pressure to build new houses as there would be if we were near a big town or city.

Sorry - a bit of thread drift there - no harm done!

Edited by Avant on 05/02/2017 at 15:45