Who Still Thinks That The Uk Is Not Overcrowded?

[anotheoldgit]

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/590397/Population-overload-Britain-houses-one-in-eight-ALL-EU-residents

/// Despite its tiny size, Britain now has the third largest population in Europe behind Germany and France, the European Commission statistics show. And it is more densely populated than both. ///

[jourdain2]

If to have two children were to be the norm, surely that would solve the problem (apart from the contentious issue of immigration). Two children merely replaces the parents. Some couples will only have one and some might have three. Immigration is a very big factor as is the number of children per couple. I would halt child allowance after 2 children. Have more if you want, but they will not be funded.

[THECORBYLOON]

If folk are living longer, they must be contributing to an increase in population since in those extra years they would not have been expected to have been counted. If births remained constant since 1935 for example but 100,000 folk born in 1935 are alive when they were expected to have died a few year ago, the population must be 100,000 higher than expected.

[retrocop]

The turmoil in the Middle East was not expected to bring the baggage to the UK that it has either.Ditto Somalia,Nigeria Eritrea and all the others who fancy up rooting just to find a better life for themselves in the UK .Once they have duped the H.O. as to their "refugee" status the whole tribe follows so that family life is maintained under the Yooman Rights. Boy from Eritrea aged 16yrs, "My mum and dad are poor and can't afford to keep me so I want to go to the UK and be a professional football player". Yes great. Like we can accommodate these people??

[Hypognosis]

Major thanks to TheCorbyLoon, for saving me from a lot of typing and a possibly botched attempt at mathematical modelling. Birth rate, death rate and average lifespan are all cogs in the formula for calculating population as a time series (needs a spreadsheet to do it justice, really).

Also, a bit of genealogical research shows that some families run at 25 years per generation, some can be 20. These days, I would imagine that no one would bat an eyelid if glamorous grandmother contestants were in their (low) 30s. The papers love having photos of (always white, for some reason) families where the great-great grandmother is holding the newborn, 5 generations in ~75 years, instead of three or four.

@New_Judge (page 2?)

//Last year over 600,000 people arrived to settle here. The calls for “affordable” housing are misplaced Even the name is misleading because why on earth would any developer want to build unaffordable housing. What is really meant by that term is taxpayer funded housing //

That is a gross misuse of the term. The *nature of the problem*, when that policy (and associated jargon) was thought up was that "servicers", everyone from cleaning staff, to nurses and --firefighters-- (!!!) were being priced out of city centres by:-

i) General market conditions (chronic under-supply)
ii) Wealthy speculators buying to make capital gains, not take residence
iii) Wealthy others aiming for buy-to-let (rents out of reach to abovementioned social categories)
iv) Failure to replenish council housing stock, post Thatcher.
v) Developers want fat profits, which they get by "Rolls-Royce-ing" their output. (The Mini was great but they, reputedly, lost money on every unit).


//and there is no earthly reason why taxpayers (many of them struggling to afford their rent or mortgage repayments themselves) should be forced to pay for housing so that people already here can have excessive numbers of children or so that people who fancy their chances of a better life here can be accommodated. //

I have zero recollection of taxpayer subsidy for private housing development companies ever being proposed. The fork which the government was in was that free market economics applied to house building, the market fails to provide what customers need, want and *can afford* and legislative behavioural forcing is just damnably ugly. Not mere shades of fascism but actual fascism.

[Hypognosis]

The wilful(?) misinterpretation of Gromit's comments by at least four of you speaks more to your own anxieties and internal thought processes than anything Gromit actually said.

The entire mindset on display is one of "getting rid" of a cause of a problem, so, as soon as Gromit offers up something as an additional contributory factor, you *immediately* leap to the conclusion that he wants to adopt the same "shift/get rid" solution as you do to your (perceived) problem.

Having said that, I fully sympathise with anyone who customises their property, cultivates their garden for 40-odd years, gets comfortable where they are, likes their neighbours and the wider community. They are not to be shunted around at the behest of a goverent which is too weak to get the housing industy's act together.

Council tenants? Surely the shunting around comes with the territory, can be anticipated a generation ahead of time and, like all rental property, customisation and decorating is not permitted and that includes the garden.

[stuey]

One hundred and six responses, not counting this one, and the rhetoric, hyperbole,misinterpretations, misuse of statistics, and the well known ostrich phenomenon still prevail. I'm aware of the fact that most of you do not want a foreigner commenting upon your situation; however, sometimes a view from a distance is much clearer: you just have too many immigrants pouring into your country through an unfiltered funnel.

[Hypognosis]

Just for my own curiosity (and I lost a 2000 character draft, links and all, just as I was was about to finish, so this is the second attempt)

Part One

Population at time t, with initial population P_init, growth rate r (convert percentage to decimal), e is natural logarithm

P = P_init ( e ^ (r t) )

Worked example here
http://www.coolmath.com/algebra/17-exponentials-logarithms/06-population-exponential-growth-01

[Hypognosis]

Part Two

Population growth has occurred throughout human history because of the discrepancy between birth rates and death rates and despite short term dents caused by plague, wars, genocides etc., even *before* considerations like immigration.

UK birth rate, crude, per 1000 = 12 (was 13, before 2011)
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.CBRT.IN

UK death rate, crude, per 1000 = 9
http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.CDRT.IN/countries

Which I take to mean a growth rate of 3 per 1000, or 0.003 for the purposes of the formula, above.

United Kingdom, Population 64.1 million (2013) (Google)

So, with t = 1 and immigration of ZERO, the population estimate for 2014 would be

64,292,588
64,100,000 -

192,588 people to house
96,294 new homes, if ALL of them pair off (and we know 20% of them will not but let's keep the figures simple.

Number of homes built? (I open this to the floor, or your chosen search tool).

[Hypognosis]

I haven't addressed the immigrant influx so far and, since the government target for newbuilds is 240,000 per year, it is evident that they are taking the influx into account.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-30776306


Note: these newbuild homes have to be *bought*. No one is handing them out to immigrants. How they are being housed (council houses? Surely these are fully utilised already?) is a matter of personal curiosity.

[sevenOP]

Excellent contribution Hypognosis, and a very interesting thread with important consequences and good inputs.

[anotheoldgit]

/// One hundred and six responses, not counting this one, and the rhetoric, hyperbole,misinterpretations, misuse of statistics, and the well known ostrich phenomenon still prevail. I'm aware of the fact that most of you do not want a foreigner commenting upon your situation; however, sometimes a view from a distance is much clearer: you just have too many immigrants pouring into your country through an unfiltered funnel. ///

Excellent post stuey, Some will go to any lengths rather than point the finger at immigrants, makes one wonder if they are immigrants themselves.

[retrocop]

aog
Only yesterday we had some OLD distinguished gentleman invited to attend the Battle of Britain celebrations.These "few" ensured we are not all speaking German.
It would seem that some here see them as selfish and hogging property that they would rather see occupied by those who wish us to speak Arabic.
Some Gratitude.!!!

[New Judge]

Thanks for your algebra, hypo. All quite correct but not very useful for the sake of this argument because it pre-assumes growth rates (i.e. difference between births and deaths) and the entire thrust of my argument is that since deaths are being delayed, births must be reduced – a principle which few people seem to agree with as they are happy to see an ever-increasing population.


It is interesting that the government has a target of 240k new build homes. Last year they achieved less than half that. Last year over 600,000 people arrived to settle here. Assuming that most of them do not have the wherewithal to buy their own homes or rent at the market rate some sort of subsidy (either in the form of housing benefit or subsidised social housing rents or both) must be provided. It is unlikely that they will be able to occupy the homes left vacant by those emigrating (hence the misleading nature – as far as housing goes – of “net” migration figures). To address your curiosity regarding where so many new arrivals are being housed, all new developments have to include a considerable element of (so-called) affordable housing and this housing is effectively subsidised in its construction and will very likely be subsidised in occupation. To suggest that housing recent arrivals lays no cost on the population already here is fanciful to put it politely.

I’m not a great lover of businesses managing demand rather than supply but I make an exception for housing. It is far more important to manage the nation’s housing demand instead of its supply and that’s something that successive governments seem reluctant to do.

[Ellipsis]

> If nobody else arrived it would not matter if those already here lived forevermore, the population would not increase.

Of course it would.

Those already here would have children, and those children would eventually have children and so on, also forever more; so if nobody ever died the population would eventually become infinitely large ...

[New Judge]

Sorry, ellipsis, you misunderstood (and that’s mainly my fault).

By “nobody else arriving” I meant no immigration and no new births. I think (though have not looked) that I also mentioned “those already here”. By that I did not mean arrivals from abroad, but all those here and alive, whether born here or not.

I realise that neither of these are likely but I was trying to demonstrate the fallacy of Mr Boles’s statement when he said that two thirds of the increase in population was due to ageing. I suggested that only immigration and new births can add to the population. If nobody else was born in the UK and no immigrants arrived it would not matter how long those already living here lived for, the population would not increase. I accept that an ageing population will see an increase in overall numbers because the birth rate and immigration will continue to be high enough to maintain the increase. But those living longer cannot be the cause of increased population. They’ve added to it once (when they were born or arrived here) and they cannot add to it a second time.

[Old_Geezer]

Longevity can produce but a single small increase in the population. Folk still arrive at a set rate, folk leave, but a little later. There is the near insignificant one off increase. Eventually input and output rates settle down again. Once noted/counted once it can't be counted again as lives would have to get continually longer (to infinity) to increase further.

[anotheoldgit]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-31082941

/// London's population has topped 8.6m, the highest since its 1939 peak, the Greater London Authority has revealed. ///

/// The figures show Hillingdon has had the greatest growth in population, while 44% of the city's people are now of black or ethnic minority origins. ///

Has the elderly living longer, got anything to do with these figures?

[retrocop]

Labour has called for further spending on infrastructure.

Len Duvall, London Assembly Labour Group leader, said: "Londoners are desperate to see much needed investment in the capital's transport and wider infrastructure, and today's population figures show why that funding is so necessary."

Ironic isn't it. A Labour spokesman puts his tuppence worth in as to what is needed to support the growing population whereas his party partially caused the problem by trawling for immigrants to boost their election chances. They failed there as well.

[mushroom25]

//Labour has called for further spending on infrastructure.//

in 2005, the then labour government put all its london infrastructure eggs in the crossrail basket, and postponed indefinitely any number of smaller scale projects that would have made a real difference at the local level (the west london tram, for instance) and if implemented then would be making that difference now.