To think England is too crowded

[toadworthy]

In my town on the South coast it really is chaos and getting worse all the time. Roads are a nightmare. There are never enough school places despite doubling the entry in all primaries. Soaring rents. Building sites all over.

AIBU to mind?
What's it like where you are?

Meeting future power demand is a big challenge. Made much bigger by having no idea at all how large the population will be in any given year in the future. Nobody wants to live next door to a new nuclear power station - do they? Or should we have fields full of solar panels and wind turbines? Rebuild some of the coal-fired power stations? Where will this all be built?

Buy electricity from the continent at lower cost than we can generate it ourselves through interconnectors? New gas capacity which was curiously missing from your list?

Btw - communities near nuclear power stations are generally quite favourably disposed towards them.

Just watched Farage and Cameron on Itv. Farage claimed that to house all the Eu economic migrants we would have to build a new house every four seconds round the clock . Can't remember for how many years. Sorry. The news team fact checked it afterwards and he had only been exaggerating slightly. The real figure was a house every eight seconds round the clock. Poor old fields and woodlands. That does really make me sad. And all so Sports Direct can keep its staffing levels up.

Why does being boringly white make it harder to recruit NHS staff? Approx 36% of NHS doctors and 21% of NHS nurses are first generation immigrants. They tend to be less likely to want to work somewhere where the population is overwhelmingly nth generation white British with very little prospect of, for instance, Muslim community, Sikh community, etc etc. Reduce the pool of potential applicants in the middle of a national recruitment crisis, and you really have a problem.

Obvs Scotland and NI are still pretty wild

I live in central Scotland a couple of miles from a decent-sized town. I'm in a little village and we're the very last house with fields on two sides and a lovely view over a loch. We're also less than 2 miles from a 24hr Asda, a multiplex cinema leisure complex and a large retail park. We can access two main trunk roads within 5 mins drive. I'm pretty wild about living here, there's even space for more people if they want to join us!

JassyRaddlet said Buy electricity from the continent at lower cost than we can generate it ourselves through interconnectors? New gas capacity which was curiously missing from your list

The electricity from the continent is from French nuclear power stations or gas from north Africa or Russia. There aren't big gas fields in Europe, as far as I know, a few in N Sea which are dwindling.

N Africa and Russia are hardly dependable suppliers. We could be held to ransome or ripped off.

So problems in

Not quite - a large amount of the gas on the Continent comes in liquid form from the Middle East, just like ours. Mainly Qatar.

What's the problem with French nuclear? Or more to the point Belgian? Or Dutch renewables plus nuclear? And of course last month France announced a massive increase in their rewewables programme.

Personally I'm looking forward to the NSN being built - lots of lovely Norwegian hydro which isn't going away any time soon. And if the tech gets better and costs come down, an interconnector to Iceland would be amazing.

On water - the first priority should be to be less insanely wasteful with water in this country. And after that look at decent community-level grey water schemes. But with climate change we're likely to get wetter weather. Lucky us.

In fact, for UK born women

This will of course include the children of immigrants. The figure you quote is not for "white British women".

Not full here. Outstanding schools at risk of clousure as not enough kids. Loads of jobs and virtually nil unemployment. Too many old people though.

Just been voted best place to live in England according to the mirror.

We have a massive rise in the number of single people and couples living in 3 and 4 bedroom houses. The average size of households has went down, especially in owner occupied housing. I know plenty of people who are childless and living in 3 and 4 bedroomed houses.

No cool, as I said re the NHS, you're describing my family, who wouldn't bat an eyelid working in a mainly white area, neither would their non white friends and colleagues. I have honestly never heard of that being referred to as a barrier to recruitment. If people are going to object to white English in their own country then so much has gone wrong.

I left the south east 16 years ago when I realised there was nowhere to go to hear perfect silence.
Am now in heaven, much better off financially and in every other way.

As far as housing goes, we could force owners to let investment properties instead of letting them stand empty. Thats about a quarter of a million properties.
We could give local councils back the power to bring derelict houses up to standard. This Govt took that away.
Not everyone needs a house, lets build someone and two bed flats.
Lets bring back council housing which is a long term investment in any community. The rents go back to the local council.
If people claim CHB it goes from one dept to another instead of out to a private landlord.

So many solutions being proposed. Anyone care to specify their upper limits to UK immigration, in numbers arriving per year? One million, two million, ten million? No point in scoffing, "but ten million would never arrive in one year!" - how do you know, seeing as you won't be able to control the numbers? There are already shanty towns and beds-in-sheds in most UK cities, and for many of the impoverished from E Europe, living in a shed in a UK city is preferable to doing the same in Bucharest/Sofia/Warsaw. The poverty-stricken countries queuing up to join the EU are only going to add to the problem.

Another way of solving housing issues is to force old people who under occupy their house to move to a smaller one. Would instantly help families round her as over 100 old people 1 and 2 bedroom flats for sale.

Forcing old people out of beloved homes not being cruel or bad for their health or anything like that

Oh absolutely.
Everybody over 75, round them up, send them to an old people's home and give their home complete with dog, toothbrushes and bed linen to family.
What a sensible suggestion.

Stupid argument. OP talks about "Eng;and" but only refers to one town on the south coast.

Also, "too crowded" is a loaded phrase. Unless you are literally packed cheek to cheek, nowhere is really too crowded if you have the facilities to cope. Millionaires pay massive premiums to live at the heart of some of the most crowded cities on the planet . It's analogous to that argument, "there's no such thing as bad weather, only the wrong clothes".

Why not "Anyone think the transport and schools infrastructure in my town inn not good enough?"

That old 'force elderly people to give up their homes' argument boils my pish. Old people are human too, they might even feel some sort of affection for their home, particularly if they have 50 years of memories in it. They might feel secure there. They might have good relationships with their neighbours.

The lack of compassion for the elderly astounds me sometimes.

Research has shown that if an elderly/frail person is forced to move house against their will they are likely to due much sooner than if they are allowed to stay put. So forcing the elderly to downsize is effectively a death sentence.

Having grants/loans available so that elderly people with large homes can convert them, reversibly, into two smaller homes so that they can stay put but rent out the unused part of their house would be good. The rental income could go 50:50 to repayment of the loan and kept by the owner as a pension boost. We need more flexible housing that can grow when people need space and be shared out like this when they don't.

No.

We live in the SE. Sometimes seems busy til get out the town and then there is nothing for miles and miles. If you train it or fly over the UK you can see it's pretty empty really.

But, spending on new schools, etc. is an issue. Lots of new developments going up near here, but not sure schools and GPs etc will arrive in time and not sure who will be paying for them.

England overcrowded though? No.

I live in Tokyo.

Tokyo is OK, mostly.

London terrifies me. It certainly feels more expensive, and the instability and churn in the population just feel kind of unnerving.

I have also heard that good and bad schools are often located within the same area and school boundaries are unstable due to population instability, meaning that you could move into the area of a school you like and then get told you have to go to the rubbish school that's miles away!

England is overcrowded; the UK is not.

If England were a nation, it would be the 30th in population density globally and second in Europe after Malta.

There are of course national parks, but what mostly benefits people are green spaces where most of them actually live - parks, playing fields etc.

Jobs and population needs to be moved to other parts of the UK. Plenty of people who end up in the South East only move there for work, and would rather live in other regions.

Even England would not feel overcrowded if the population were spread around rather than being crammed into the SE corner.

Population density stats are misleading, because some countries have substantial areas that are not able to support any density of population - a good example would be Switzerland. In contrast most of England is fairly flat and pretty habitable. A sensible regional policy would help.