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CTV News
13 hours ago
- General
- CTV News
Montreal's Housing Hotline fundraising to keep decades-old service running
Arnold Bennett wants to be there for tenants in trouble and is fundraising to keep the Montreal Housing Hotline connected. Moving day is just a month away for Quebecers, and Arnold Bennett wants to be there for tenants in trouble. He's been running the Montreal Housing Hotline since the 1970s. 'People call with all kinds of questions. We can do advocacy in the sense of steering them in the right direction and proposing strategies and referring them to lawyers and other things that the rental board will not do,' said Bennett. He says he about 30 calls per day, and the hotline is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday to Friday. All expenses are paid out of his own pocket, and now he's asking the community for help. Earlier this week, Bennett set up a GoFundMe hoping it will help cover some of the costs – which include phone and internet bills, electricity, technical support and a few staff members. It's also one of the few resources for anglophones in Quebec. The province is in the throes of a housing crunch, and Bennett is no stranger to housing policy. He says legislation has had some major improvements since the he started a housing clinic in the '80s. He was among those who fought for bans on condo conversions and pushed back against renovictions. Bennett Arnold Bennett wants to be there for tenants in trouble and is fundraising to keep the Montreal Housing Hotline connected. (Swidda Rassy/CTV) He remembers when rent increases between 12 and 30 per cent were allowed, 'and it had extremely serious effects on people.' Now he says politicians are rolling protections back. 'The right of tenants to be able to transfer or sign a lease was undermined by the current government, causing a serious problem in terms of being able to avoid discrimination in housing,' he said. 'The last three years got very bad, and that's combined with another cyclical problem, a housing shortage. And that housing shortage means that the door is open to gouging and units aren't available.' The problem isn't just hitting low-income families – it's extended well into the middle class. 'Everybody's having problems,' said Bennett. 'There's never enough services … Everybody's short-staffed and there's time constraints.' And Bennett isn't just getting calls from Montrealers. He says people from Laval, Quebec City and the townships reach out because 'there was nothing where they were, especially if they were anglophones or allophones.' Bob Jones Bob Jones was one of Arnold Bennett's first hires for his housing hotline. He calls Bennett a 'guiding light' for tenants. (Swidda Rassy/CTV) Bob Jones remembers when he first started volunteering with Bennett in the late '80s. A friend of his needed help with a repossession case, but Bennett was seeing hundreds of people every week. So, Jones decided to volunteer. Three months later he was one of Bennett's first hires. He remembers visiting tenants who had issues with their landlords who cut off their electricity and calling the police. 'We'd say, there's a theft of services here. Sometimes, we'd have to explain the process to the police, because they weren't that knowledgeable in rental law, and we tried to get the problem solved,' Jones told CTV News. 'Sometimes it involved sitting down, writing a letter. Sometimes it involved calling the landlord and seeing if they could fix it.' He says Bennett's dedication is needed. Even on weekends, Bennett will sometimes keep the phone line open. Jones calls him a 'guiding light' at a time where rents are skyrocketing, and people are facing evictions and false repossessions. 'If something doesn't happen soon, there'll be more people homeless on the streets than able to live in their apartments,' said Jones. 'Because right now for NDG, the average rent for three and a half is $1,300 that is unaffordable for most people working minimum wage or even two jobs at minimum wage … and some tenants don't know their rights.' Though he's hoping the community will have his back, Bennett says he's prepared to keep going 'hand to mouth.' Nothing will stop him from being there for tenants. 'Retire? You mean, when they carry me out on a stretcher. It'll have to be involuntary,' he said. With files from CTV News Montreal's Swidda Rassy
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Ebbsfleet: the ultimate commuter town that never was
On paper, Ebbsfleet should have been a huge success story: thousands of affordable homes built on a high-speed rail link into central London. But 30 years after the grand plan for 43,000 homes in north Kent was hatched, just 10pc have been built. Its huge train station, which Eurostar abandoned, is the 308th busiest in the country – little more than a ghost town even in peak commuting times. Trains take just 18 minutes to St Pancras. Snails-pace construction work at the so-called garden city, on the south side of the Thames estuary, has made it synonymous with Britain's failed planning system. While there have been improvements in recent years, the discovery of jumping spiders has slammed the brakes on part of the scheme. As the Government plots 12 new towns, how does it avoid another Ebbsfleet-style disaster? Plans were first mooted under John Major's government in 1994, with more than 40,000 homes suggested for the site. The initial idea was a utopia of avenues studded with trees, houseboats moored on the Thames and homes built among parkland. But output was incredibly slow for years, with the financial crash hurting builders' appetite, and concrete plans for Ebbsfleet failed to take off. Following years of stalled projects and revisions, that figure dwindled to 15,000 in 2014 under then-chancellor George Osborne, who christened it as Britain's first garden city for almost 100 years. At risk of the former quarry site becoming a gargantuan failure, an arm's-length body of central government, the Ebbsfleet Development Corporation, took the reins a decade ago in an attempt to speed up delivery. Now acting as the planning authority for the 2,500-acre site rather than the local council, the corporation has managed to raise housebuilding numbers under its watch – yet Ebbsfleet is still a shadow of what it was hoped to be. 'Last year we delivered 648 homes, and we're at about 5,000 in total,' explains Ian Piper, the development corporation's chief executive. 'We're around a third of the way through now. Until fairly recently we always talked about 2035 for completion, but I think it will go beyond that now to complete the job.' In its first phases of construction, Ebbsfleet – like most new-build estates – came in for criticism for its ugliness. 'We are looking for a higher quality than the normal and what we are getting [so far] is the norm – standard off-the-peg stuff,' the former chairman of Dartford's planning committee complained in 2016. There are fears that Labour's housing drive will spark a flurry of 'rabbit hutch' houses scarring the landscape, but as for Ebbsfleet, Piper believes the aesthetic has improved. 'If you look at some of the earliest stuff, before the corporation had been set up, it's still good but you can definitely see the transition and improvement compared with the more recent stuff,' he says. Whatever the perception, there is demand from buyers, adds Piper. 'About 50pc come from within around 5km, so from Dartford and Gravesham boroughs, and then there's a good proportion that come from south London and outer London boroughs.' In 2007, Ebbsfleet International station was opened, bringing high-speed services to St Pancras, as well as Eurostar services to Europe. When it first became operational it was billed as 'the ultimate park and ride station', but many of the town's residents instead opted to use the nearby Swanscombe station because of its cheaper commute. The cost of commuting from Ebbsfleet is high: three of the five car parks cost £15.60 a day to use (or £13.60 in advance), while a train season ticket taking the 20 miles of track to St Pancras costs £6,124. The station's 5,000 parking spaces are never full. In contrast, a season ticket from Swanscombe to London Charing Cross costs £4,060. It's a longer commute time, but the cheaper price is favoured by most Ebbsfleet residents. The ultimate commuter location has its drawbacks. The station itself is severed from the town, meaning those opting to walk face a 20-minute slog uphill. On our trip to Ebbsfleet on a sunny afternoon, we saw just one other person making their way to the station. 'I think it's probably fair to say that the walking route from the station up here is not a great experience,' says Piper. 'But we're involved in significantly improving it to make it as attractive as possible.' There are also gripes about the lack of facilities. A recent survey of residents found that just one in four were satisfied with the bus services in the area. Piper says: 'I think 95pc of homes are within a five-minute walk of a bus. A bus route goes right through the heart of the community and that is being expanded.' And while respondents gave high praise for the area's sense of community, the majority said they found the lack of amenities an issue. A lack of health provision and sport facilities, bars and restaurants, and cultural centres featured heavily in the replies. There's certainly not much around: there are two small Co-ops, a coffee shop, a pharmacy, and a community centre. There are plans to open a large supermarket. 'Timing is everything when delivering facilities,' Piper says. 'For instance, nobody's going to take on a coffee shop if nobody's around to go there because you'll [close down] within six months. Getting the timing right is tricky, and that's one of our key challenges now. You need to get the facilities there when they are needed – not too soon and not too late.' Despite dissatisfaction with the facilities, Piper says Ebbsfleet retains its residents. 'You really don't see many 'for sale' signs around here compared with other places. There is a high level of community satisfaction.' It's not just slow building that has hit Ebbsfleet; the latest saga to stall development involves the discovery of a small colony of jumping spiders. Derelict land previously home to a cement works was bought for £34m by the corporation in 2019, with the intention to build densely on the 309-acre site around the station. Fast-forward to today and the building potential has been stripped down to just 86 acres after Natural England dropped an arachnid-shaped bombshell on the garden city. The presence of rare jumping spiders led to the scrubland being granted Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) status. Its designation meant building work had to be shelved, with the government-funded Natural England declaring that 'sustainable development and nature recovery must go hand in hand'. HS1 Ltd, the company which runs the high-speed train line, warned that the 'designation will in effect void the whole purpose behind the construction of Ebbsfleet's station', yet the battle to overturn the ruling was lost. Piper says: 'We objected quite strongly to the designation. But it was made clear there was no right of appeal, so we soon decided there was little we could do to change that. Some of the money was written down.' As a result of the SSSI designation, which effectively bans any future development, the land's value plummeted to £9m – and the sum of that lost government cash is a hefty £25.2m. It also means around 1,300 homes have been wiped from the Ebbsfleet masterplan, along with a vast entertainment resort planned to rival Disneyland. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer waded into the debate earlier this year when he lambasted the spider dilemma for blocking his party's housebuilding drive. 'The dream of home ownership for thousands of families is being held back by arachnids,' he wrote in a Telegraph column. 'It's nonsense. And we'll stop it,' he declared. Yet stripping land of its SSSI designation is easier said than done. The Government has pledged to build 12 new Ebbsfleets, of at least 10,000 homes in size. More than 100 proposals have been submitted to the Government's 'New Towns Taskforce', which will review options and announce winners in the summer. No specific locations of the bids have been announced, but most are from the South East, South West, East and London. How does it avoid these future garden cities from going the way of Ebbsfleet? It's not yet known if arm's-length development corporations will be set up for each location. They were used in post-war new towns like Milton Keynes, and by Lord Heseltine to successfully rejuvenate dilapidated parts of London, Liverpool and Manchester in the 1980s and 1990s. Writing for the Adam Smith Institute think tank, Labour MP Chris Curtis has urged the Government to 'cut through red tape, streamline planning and empower development corporations'. 'We have seen what can be achieved when bold action is taken – Milton Keynes and the London Docklands are a testament to that,' he said. 'Now we must apply that same determination again, ensuring that Britain embraces a spirit of ambition and gets building.' The new towns plan is part of Labour's manifesto pledge to ramp up housebuilding and deliver 1.5 million homes by the end of this Parliament. The target, which the Government is falling shy of, is deemed unachievable by critics. Yet Piper backs the proposal. 'It's ambitious but I think you've got to have a target to aim for, otherwise you don't change behaviours,' he says. 'It's absolutely right to be highly ambitious. 'It's easy to deliver quality housing on small sites, working with niche builders and top-quality architects. The big challenge is getting volume housebuilders to produce that level of quality, which is obviously what the Government would want. 'I think we've done that successfully here, we have a mixture of housebuilders – Barratt, Persimmon, Redrow, for example – all delivering homes.' House prices in Ebbsfleet average £400,000 according to Rightmove, making it 'a relatively affordable place for the South East', according to Piper. Residents in neighbouring areas such Swanscombe and Greenhithe have complained of a strain on local services and traffic as a result of the emergence of Ebbsfleet. There have also been issues with local residents being unable to send their children to the town's new primary school as places were originally filled by those living further afield. Piper says: 'You need to build in your stewardship strategy right from the very beginning. We inherited a lot of things that were already in place, so we've had to do a lot retrospectively, which is 10 times harder. 'I also think in the very early days of the corporation the emphasis was almost exclusively on housing numbers. You can build houses but you're not actually building homes. You're certainly not building communities. We've therefore put a great emphasis on doing that.' But perhaps the biggest lesson from Ebbsfleet's fragmented creation and spider-gate for the Government's future garden cities is forming harmonious relationships between its own departments. After all, the Ministry of Housing (the department sponsoring Ebbsfleet's development corporation) and the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (the department sponsoring Natural England) work just metres away from each other in the same building in London's Marsham Street. 'Creating a place is dependent on a lot of other agencies and public bodies,' says Piper. 'There needs to be strong alignment at a national government level between different departments.' Broaden your horizons with award-winning British journalism. 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Telegraph
a day ago
- Business
- Telegraph
Ebbsfleet: the ultimate commuter town that never was
On paper, Ebbsfleet should have been a huge success story: thousands of affordable homes built on a high-speed rail link into central London. But 30 years after the grand plan for 43,000 homes in north Kent was hatched, just 10pc have been built. Its huge train station, which Eurostar abandoned, is the 308th busiest in the country – little more than a ghost town even in peak commuting times. Trains take just 18 minutes to St Pancras. Snails-pace construction work at the so-called garden city, on the south side of the Thames estuary, has made it synonymous with Britain's failed planning system. While there have been improvements in recent years, the discovery of jumping spiders has slammed the brakes on part of the scheme. As the Government plots 12 new towns, how does it avoid another Ebbsfleet-style disaster? A utopian vision Plans were first mooted under John Major's government in 1994, with more than 40,000 homes suggested for the site. The initial idea was a utopia of avenues studded with trees, houseboats moored on the Thames and homes built among parkland. But output was incredibly slow for years, with the financial crash hurting builders' appetite, and concrete plans for Ebbsfleet failed to take off. Following years of stalled projects and revisions, that figure dwindled to 15,000 in 2014 under then-chancellor George Osborne, who christened it as Britain's first garden city for almost 100 years. At risk of the former quarry site becoming a gargantuan failure, an arm's-length body of central government, the Ebbsfleet Development Corporation, took the reins a decade ago in an attempt to speed up delivery. Now acting as the planning authority for the 2,500-acre site rather than the local council, the corporation has managed to raise housebuilding numbers under its watch – yet Ebbsfleet is still a shadow of what it was hoped to be. 'Last year we delivered 648 homes, and we're at about 5,000 in total,' explains Ian Piper, the development corporation's chief executive. 'We're around a third of the way through now. Until fairly recently we always talked about 2035 for completion, but I think it will go beyond that now to complete the job.' In its first phases of construction, Ebbsfleet – like most new-build estates – came in for criticism for its ugliness. 'We are looking for a higher quality than the normal and what we are getting [so far] is the norm – standard off-the-peg stuff,' the former chairman of Dartford's planning committee complained in 2016. There are fears that Labour's housing drive will spark a flurry of 'rabbit hutch' houses scarring the landscape, but as for Ebbsfleet, Piper believes the aesthetic has improved. 'If you look at some of the earliest stuff, before the corporation had been set up, it's still good but you can definitely see the transition and improvement compared with the more recent stuff,' he says. Whatever the perception, there is demand from buyers, adds Piper. 'About 50pc come from within around 5km, so from Dartford and Gravesham boroughs, and then there's a good proportion that come from south London and outer London boroughs.' Resident gripes In 2007, Ebbsfleet International station was opened, bringing high-speed services to St Pancras, as well as Eurostar services to Europe. When it first became operational it was billed as 'the ultimate park and ride station', but many of the town's residents instead opted to use the nearby Swanscombe station because of its cheaper commute. The cost of commuting from Ebbsfleet is high: three of the five car parks cost £15.60 a day to use (or £13.60 in advance), while a train season ticket taking the 20 miles of track to St Pancras costs £6,124. The station's 5,000 parking spaces are never full. In contrast, a season ticket from Swanscombe to London Charing Cross costs £4,060. It's a longer commute time, but the cheaper price is favoured by most Ebbsfleet residents. The ultimate commuter location has its drawbacks. The station itself is severed from the town, meaning those opting to walk face a 20-minute slog uphill. On our trip to Ebbsfleet on a sunny afternoon, we saw just one other person making their way to the station. 'I think it's probably fair to say that the walking route from the station up here is not a great experience,' says Piper. 'But we're involved in significantly improving it to make it as attractive as possible.' There are also gripes about the lack of facilities. A recent survey of residents found that just one in four were satisfied with the bus services in the area. Piper says: 'I think 95pc of homes are within a five-minute walk of a bus. A bus route goes right through the heart of the community and that is being expanded.' And while respondents gave high praise for the area's sense of community, the majority said they found the lack of amenities an issue. A lack of health provision and sport facilities, bars and restaurants, and cultural centres featured heavily in the replies. There's certainly not much around: there are two small Co-ops, a coffee shop, a pharmacy, and a community centre. There are plans to open a large supermarket. 'Timing is everything when delivering facilities,' Piper says. 'For instance, nobody's going to take on a coffee shop if nobody's around to go there because you'll [close down] within six months. Getting the timing right is tricky, and that's one of our key challenges now. You need to get the facilities there when they are needed – not too soon and not too late.' Despite dissatisfaction with the facilities, Piper says Ebbsfleet retains its residents. 'You really don't see many 'for sale' signs around here compared with other places. There is a high level of community satisfaction.' 'Held back by arachnids' It's not just slow building that has hit Ebbsfleet; the latest saga to stall development involves the discovery of a small colony of jumping spiders. Derelict land previously home to a cement works was bought for £34m by the corporation in 2019, with the intention to build densely on the 309-acre site around the station. Fast-forward to today and the building potential has been stripped down to just 86 acres after Natural England dropped an arachnid-shaped bombshell on the garden city. The presence of rare jumping spiders led to the scrubland being granted Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) status. Its designation meant building work had to be shelved, with the government-funded Natural England declaring that 'sustainable development and nature recovery must go hand in hand'. HS1 Ltd, the company which runs the high-speed train line, warned that the 'designation will in effect void the whole purpose behind the construction of Ebbsfleet's station', yet the battle to overturn the ruling was lost. Piper says: 'We objected quite strongly to the designation. But it was made clear there was no right of appeal, so we soon decided there was little we could do to change that. Some of the money was written down.' As a result of the SSSI designation, which effectively bans any future development, the land's value plummeted to £9m – and the sum of that lost government cash is a hefty £25.2m. It also means around 1,300 homes have been wiped from the Ebbsfleet masterplan, along with a vast entertainment resort planned to rival Disneyland. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer waded into the debate earlier this year when he lambasted the spider dilemma for blocking his party's housebuilding drive. 'The dream of home ownership for thousands of families is being held back by arachnids,' he wrote in a Telegraph column. 'It's nonsense. And we'll stop it,' he declared. Yet stripping land of its SSSI designation is easier said than done. Lessons for Labour The Government has pledged to build 12 new Ebbsfleets, of at least 10,000 homes in size. More than 100 proposals have been submitted to the Government's 'New Towns Taskforce', which will review options and announce winners in the summer. No specific locations of the bids have been announced, but most are from the South East, South West, East and London. How does it avoid these future garden cities from going the way of Ebbsfleet? It's not yet known if arm's-length development corporations will be set up for each location. They were used in post-war new towns like Milton Keynes, and by Lord Heseltine to successfully rejuvenate dilapidated parts of London, Liverpool and Manchester in the 1980s and 1990s. Writing for the Adam Smith Institute think tank, Labour MP Chris Curtis has urged the Government to 'cut through red tape, streamline planning and empower development corporations'. 'We have seen what can be achieved when bold action is taken – Milton Keynes and the London Docklands are a testament to that,' he said. 'Now we must apply that same determination again, ensuring that Britain embraces a spirit of ambition and gets building.' The new towns plan is part of Labour's manifesto pledge to ramp up housebuilding and deliver 1.5 million homes by the end of this Parliament. The target, which the Government is falling shy of, is deemed unachievable by critics. Yet Piper backs the proposal. 'It's ambitious but I think you've got to have a target to aim for, otherwise you don't change behaviours,' he says. 'It's absolutely right to be highly ambitious. 'It's easy to deliver quality housing on small sites, working with niche builders and top-quality architects. The big challenge is getting volume housebuilders to produce that level of quality, which is obviously what the Government would want. 'I think we've done that successfully here, we have a mixture of housebuilders – Barratt, Persimmon, Redrow, for example – all delivering homes.' House prices in Ebbsfleet average £400,000 according to Rightmove, making it 'a relatively affordable place for the South East', according to Piper. Residents in neighbouring areas such Swanscombe and Greenhithe have complained of a strain on local services and traffic as a result of the emergence of Ebbsfleet. There have also been issues with local residents being unable to send their children to the town's new primary school as places were originally filled by those living further afield. Piper says: 'You need to build in your stewardship strategy right from the very beginning. We inherited a lot of things that were already in place, so we've had to do a lot retrospectively, which is 10 times harder. 'I also think in the very early days of the corporation the emphasis was almost exclusively on housing numbers. You can build houses but you're not actually building homes. You're certainly not building communities. We've therefore put a great emphasis on doing that.' But perhaps the biggest lesson from Ebbsfleet's fragmented creation and spider-gate for the Government's future garden cities is forming harmonious relationships between its own departments. After all, the Ministry of Housing (the department sponsoring Ebbsfleet's development corporation) and the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (the department sponsoring Natural England) work just metres away from each other in the same building in London's Marsham Street. 'Creating a place is dependent on a lot of other agencies and public bodies,' says Piper. 'There needs to be strong alignment at a national government level between different departments.'
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Ebbsfleet: the ultimate commuter town that never was
On paper, Ebbsfleet should have been a huge success story: thousands of affordable homes built on a high-speed rail link into central London. But 30 years after the grand plan for 43,000 homes in north Kent was hatched, just 10pc have been built. Its huge train station, which Eurostar abandoned, is the 308th busiest in the country – little more than a ghost town even in peak commuting times. Trains take just 18 minutes to St Pancras. Snails-pace construction work at the so-called garden city, on the south side of the Thames estuary, has made it synonymous with Britain's failed planning system. While there have been improvements in recent years, the discovery of jumping spiders has slammed the brakes on part of the scheme. As the Government plots 12 new towns, how does it avoid another Ebbsfleet-style disaster? Plans were first mooted under John Major's government in 1994, with more than 40,000 homes suggested for the site. The initial idea was a utopia of avenues studded with trees, houseboats moored on the Thames and homes built among parkland. But output was incredibly slow for years, with the financial crash hurting builders' appetite, and concrete plans for Ebbsfleet failed to take off. Following years of stalled projects and revisions, that figure dwindled to 15,000 in 2014 under then-chancellor George Osborne, who christened it as Britain's first garden city for almost 100 years. At risk of the former quarry site becoming a gargantuan failure, an arm's-length body of central government, the Ebbsfleet Development Corporation, took the reins a decade ago in an attempt to speed up delivery. Now acting as the planning authority for the 2,500-acre site rather than the local council, the corporation has managed to raise housebuilding numbers under its watch – yet Ebbsfleet is still a shadow of what it was hoped to be. 'Last year we delivered 648 homes, and we're at about 5,000 in total,' explains Ian Piper, the development corporation's chief executive. 'We're around a third of the way through now. Until fairly recently we always talked about 2035 for completion, but I think it will go beyond that now to complete the job.' In its first phases of construction, Ebbsfleet – like most new-build estates – came in for criticism for its ugliness. 'We are looking for a higher quality than the normal and what we are getting [so far] is the norm – standard off-the-peg stuff,' the former chairman of Dartford's planning committee complained in 2016. There are fears that Labour's housing drive will spark a flurry of 'rabbit hutch' houses scarring the landscape, but as for Ebbsfleet, Piper believes the aesthetic has improved. 'If you look at some of the earliest stuff, before the corporation had been set up, it's still good but you can definitely see the transition and improvement compared with the more recent stuff,' he says. Whatever the perception, there is demand from buyers, adds Piper. 'About 50pc come from within around 5km, so from Dartford and Gravesham boroughs, and then there's a good proportion that come from south London and outer London boroughs.' In 2007, Ebbsfleet International station was opened, bringing high-speed services to St Pancras, as well as Eurostar services to Europe. When it first became operational it was billed as 'the ultimate park and ride station', but many of the town's residents instead opted to use the nearby Swanscombe station because of its cheaper commute. The cost of commuting from Ebbsfleet is high: three of the five car parks cost £15.60 a day to use (or £13.60 in advance), while a train season ticket taking the 20 miles of track to St Pancras costs £6,124. The station's 5,000 parking spaces are never full. In contrast, a season ticket from Swanscombe to London Charing Cross costs £4,060. It's a longer commute time, but the cheaper price is favoured by most Ebbsfleet residents. The ultimate commuter location has its drawbacks. The station itself is severed from the town, meaning those opting to walk face a 20-minute slog uphill. On our trip to Ebbsfleet on a sunny afternoon, we saw just one other person making their way to the station. 'I think it's probably fair to say that the walking route from the station up here is not a great experience,' says Piper. 'But we're involved in significantly improving it to make it as attractive as possible.' There are also gripes about the lack of facilities. A recent survey of residents found that just one in four were satisfied with the bus services in the area. Piper says: 'I think 95pc of homes are within a five-minute walk of a bus. A bus route goes right through the heart of the community and that is being expanded.' And while respondents gave high praise for the area's sense of community, the majority said they found the lack of amenities an issue. A lack of health provision and sport facilities, bars and restaurants, and cultural centres featured heavily in the replies. There's certainly not much around: there are two small Co-ops, a coffee shop, a pharmacy, and a community centre. There are plans to open a large supermarket. 'Timing is everything when delivering facilities,' Piper says. 'For instance, nobody's going to take on a coffee shop if nobody's around to go there because you'll [close down] within six months. Getting the timing right is tricky, and that's one of our key challenges now. You need to get the facilities there when they are needed – not too soon and not too late.' Despite dissatisfaction with the facilities, Piper says Ebbsfleet retains its residents. 'You really don't see many 'for sale' signs around here compared with other places. There is a high level of community satisfaction.' It's not just slow building that has hit Ebbsfleet; the latest saga to stall development involves the discovery of a small colony of jumping spiders. Derelict land previously home to a cement works was bought for £34m by the corporation in 2019, with the intention to build densely on the 309-acre site around the station. Fast-forward to today and the building potential has been stripped down to just 86 acres after Natural England dropped an arachnid-shaped bombshell on the garden city. The presence of rare jumping spiders led to the scrubland being granted Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) status. Its designation meant building work had to be shelved, with the government-funded Natural England declaring that 'sustainable development and nature recovery must go hand in hand'. HS1 Ltd, the company which runs the high-speed train line, warned that the 'designation will in effect void the whole purpose behind the construction of Ebbsfleet's station', yet the battle to overturn the ruling was lost. Piper says: 'We objected quite strongly to the designation. But it was made clear there was no right of appeal, so we soon decided there was little we could do to change that. Some of the money was written down.' As a result of the SSSI designation, which effectively bans any future development, the land's value plummeted to £9m – and the sum of that lost government cash is a hefty £25.2m. It also means around 1,300 homes have been wiped from the Ebbsfleet masterplan, along with a vast entertainment resort planned to rival Disneyland. Prime Minister Sir Keir Starmer waded into the debate earlier this year when he lambasted the spider dilemma for blocking his party's housebuilding drive. 'The dream of home ownership for thousands of families is being held back by arachnids,' he wrote in a Telegraph column. 'It's nonsense. And we'll stop it,' he declared. Yet stripping land of its SSSI designation is easier said than done. The Government has pledged to build 12 new Ebbsfleets, of at least 10,000 homes in size. More than 100 proposals have been submitted to the Government's 'New Towns Taskforce', which will review options and announce winners in the summer. No specific locations of the bids have been announced, but most are from the South East, South West, East and London. How does it avoid these future garden cities from going the way of Ebbsfleet? It's not yet known if arm's-length development corporations will be set up for each location. They were used in post-war new towns like Milton Keynes, and by Lord Heseltine to successfully rejuvenate dilapidated parts of London, Liverpool and Manchester in the 1980s and 1990s. Writing for the Adam Smith Institute think tank, Labour MP Chris Curtis has urged the Government to 'cut through red tape, streamline planning and empower development corporations'. 'We have seen what can be achieved when bold action is taken – Milton Keynes and the London Docklands are a testament to that,' he said. 'Now we must apply that same determination again, ensuring that Britain embraces a spirit of ambition and gets building.' The new towns plan is part of Labour's manifesto pledge to ramp up housebuilding and deliver 1.5 million homes by the end of this Parliament. The target, which the Government is falling shy of, is deemed unachievable by critics. Yet Piper backs the proposal. 'It's ambitious but I think you've got to have a target to aim for, otherwise you don't change behaviours,' he says. 'It's absolutely right to be highly ambitious. 'It's easy to deliver quality housing on small sites, working with niche builders and top-quality architects. The big challenge is getting volume housebuilders to produce that level of quality, which is obviously what the Government would want. 'I think we've done that successfully here, we have a mixture of housebuilders – Barratt, Persimmon, Redrow, for example – all delivering homes.' House prices in Ebbsfleet average £400,000 according to Rightmove, making it 'a relatively affordable place for the South East', according to Piper. Residents in neighbouring areas such Swanscombe and Greenhithe have complained of a strain on local services and traffic as a result of the emergence of Ebbsfleet. There have also been issues with local residents being unable to send their children to the town's new primary school as places were originally filled by those living further afield. Piper says: 'You need to build in your stewardship strategy right from the very beginning. We inherited a lot of things that were already in place, so we've had to do a lot retrospectively, which is 10 times harder. 'I also think in the very early days of the corporation the emphasis was almost exclusively on housing numbers. You can build houses but you're not actually building homes. You're certainly not building communities. We've therefore put a great emphasis on doing that.' But perhaps the biggest lesson from Ebbsfleet's fragmented creation and spider-gate for the Government's future garden cities is forming harmonious relationships between its own departments. After all, the Ministry of Housing (the department sponsoring Ebbsfleet's development corporation) and the Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (the department sponsoring Natural England) work just metres away from each other in the same building in London's Marsham Street. 'Creating a place is dependent on a lot of other agencies and public bodies,' says Piper. 'There needs to be strong alignment at a national government level between different departments.'
Daily Mail
2 days ago
- Business
- Daily Mail
Here we go again! Defiant Majorcans vow this year's summer holiday protests will be bigger than last years as the mass tourism from Brits is making their lives 'unbearable'
Thousands of defiant anti-tourism protesters have vowed to bring the streets of Majorca to a standstill after they called for another major anti-tourist demonstration. The Spanish island's capital of Palma - a holiday hotspot popular among Brits- will be clogged on Sunday, June 15 as representatives of 60 groups today announced the protest. The move comes as Spain finds itself struggling to balance the promotion of tourism and addressing citizens' concerns over a housing crisis that they say has been fuelled by holidaymakers. The demonstration will be led by campaign group 'Menys Turisme, Mes Vida' (Less tourism, more life), which claims that the everyday life of locals has become 'unbearable' thanks to foreign holidaymakers. They have accused both the Balearic Islands' government of ignoring the pleas for drastic changes in their current tourism model. The platform is asking the island's residents to take to the streets to demand a change in the economic model and what they describe as 'touristification.' This will be the third major protest of its kind but the activists say they are getting nowhere despite calls to clampdown on tourists. The demonstration in Palma will be held simultaneously with similar marches in Ibiza, Barcelona, Donosti and other major Spanish cities. 'We stand for the right to a dignified life and to demand an end to touristification', said Jaume Pujol, spokesman for Menys Turisme, Més Vida. The group today also criticised the local government, accusing them of promoting policies that have aggravated the mass tourism crisis. They also warned that, with the start of the tourist season, 'unbearable situations' are already being repeated on the island, including road closures due to tourist events and genera; saturation of public spaces and markets. Menys Turisme, Mes Vida also argued that their island is 'not for sale' and that 'it is urgent to put limits' on a tourism model that they consider increasingly destructive. It comes a month after tens of thousands of furious Spaniards took to the streets across the country to demand a solution to the cost of living crisis they say has been exacerbated by tourism. The demonstrations on April 5 took place across major Spanish towns and cities including Madrid, Barcelona, Malaga and Palma. According to organizers, 30,000 people took to the streets of Malaga - a seaside town in the south of Spain - as they demanded solutions to the housing crisis, with banners reading: 'Houses for the people of Málaga. Hotels for tourists, affordable rents.' But police reported that around 5,000 demonstrators took part in the Malaga march. Residents were photographed holding banners with the slogan: 'Houses for the people of Málaga. Hotels for tourists'. Some also hung posters from their balconies and windows with messages saying: 'Housing is a right, not a business'. Meanwhile in Madrid, around 15,000 people gathered in the capital's neighbourhood of Atocha and marched towards Plaza de Espana shouting slogans like: 'Landlords are thieves' and 'Madrid will be the tomb of rentals'. Angry renters pointed to instances of international hedge funds buying up properties, often with the aim of renting them to foreign tourists. The question has become so politically charged that Barcelona's city government pledged last year to phase out all its 10,000 permits for short-term rentals, many of them advertised on platforms like Airbnb, by 2028. Marchers in Madrid last month chanted 'Get Airbnb out of our neighborhoods' and held up signs against short-term rentals. 'No more leaving our neighborhoods, our homes, or even our cities every five or seven years,' said Valeria Racu, spokesperson for the Madrid tenants' union, in a statement at the start of the demonstration. 'We're calling on the half-million households whose contracts expire in 2025 to stay home and resist,' she added. Incomes in Spain have failed to keep up with rising housing costs, especially for younger people in a country with chronically high unemployment Irate activists aired their grievances to the angry mobs filling the streets, taking aim at the 'touristification' of resorts along Spain's coasts. In the southern city of Murcia, 500 people chanted: 'We will not tolerate one more eviction'. Up north in Santander, a city on Spain's Atlantic coast, residents demanded public houses. 'No houses without people, no people without houses,' 'everyone under a roof, housing is a right', those in attendance chanted. A generation of young people say they have to stay with their parents or spend big just to share an apartment, with little chance of saving enough to one day purchase a home. High housing costs mean even those with traditionally well-paying jobs are struggling to make ends meet. According to Spain's central bank, almost 40% of Spanish families who rent spend nearly half of their income on housing. In April last year the government said it would scrap its so-called 'golden visa' programme granting residency rights to foreigners who make large investments in real estate in the country, which the Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez said would help make access to affordable housing 'a right instead of a speculative business'. The average rent in Spain has almost doubled in the last 10 years. The price per square meter rose from 7.2 euros in 2014 to 13 euros last year, according to real estate website Idealista. The increase is bigger in Madrid and Barcelona. Incomes have failed to keep up, especially for younger people in a country with chronically high unemployment. Spain does not have the public housing that other European nations have invested in to cushion struggling renters from a market that is pricing them out. Spain was rocked by mass demonstrations last summer, as tens of thousands of fed up locals filled the streets to protest mass tourism. Anti-tourism campaigners have long been contesting the current tourism model, claiming that many locals have been priced out by holidaymakers, expats and foreign buyers. Last year, Spain saw a record-breaking number of tourists, with over 15 million visitors flocking to the island of Mallorca alone. In response, protestors took to the streets across Spain, leaving countless visitors fuming after paying hundreds of pounds to enjoy their holidays abroad. Actions included marches on the street with protesters chanting 'tourists go home', as well as demonstrations on beaches which saw locals boo and jeer at sun-soaked tourists. In one particular instance, up to 50,000 locals descended onto the streets of the Mallorca capital Palma. Meanwhile in Barcelona, some 2,800 people marched along a waterfront district of Barcelona to demand a new economic model that would reduce the millions of tourists that visit every year. Protesters carried signs reading 'Barcelona is not for sale,' and, 'Tourists go home,' before some used water guns on tourists eating outdoors at restaurants in popular tourist hotspots. Chants of 'Tourists out of our neighbourhood' rang out as some stopped in front of the entrances to hotels.
