• Bigger

For Trump, size matters. Vice News compiled this short clip of his own superlatives which makes sobering watching. He sees himself as the biggest beast, the strongest man, the toughest dealmaker, the wisest guy. What should therefore be more logical but that he should rule over an even bigger country? Perhaps even the biggest? Would this super-sized USA be number one?

Not quite. The USA is currently 3,809,525 sq km and his planned acquisitions would take it to 15,971,227. This would leapfrog the USA from fourth to second place, behind only Russia. Of course, Putin is currently trying to make Russia bigger as well but let’s stick with the current official area of 17,098,242 sq km. This would leave Trump 1,127,015 sq km short of the top spot. Would he settle for silver? Not on your life. So, which other countries might be vulnerable?

Assuming he wanted to do this with one purchase, invasion or deal, South Africa, Mali, Angola, Niger, Chad and Peru should be worried. If Russia annexes the whole of Ukraine – something which Trump seems fairly relaxed about – then Russia would be 1,707,777 sq km larger than the USA. This would make Indonesia or the USA’s neighbour to the south, Mexico, as the likely targets. It’s easier to see which of the two would be the more appealing.

So, there we have it: North America plus the Panama Canal would be bigger than Russia plus Ukraine. I think that makes the foreign-policy aspirations clear.

Trump regards Greenland and the Canal as vital for security reasons and has not ruled out military force to acquire them. France and Germany have warned him this might not be a good idea. As for Canada, the main motive here seems to be that the counry’s shared border with the USA is an “artificially drawn line”. This is an interesting objection. I’m trying to think of any land frontier which could not be so described.

As for how much this might cost, assuming Trump offered to pay for these places rather than just sending in the Marines, The Week quotes Forbes as suggesting that Greenland would require perhaps “hundreds of billions of dollars.” Denmark has rejected the idea out of hand but Trump probably sees this as an opening gambit. Perhaps it is. Forbes goes on to suggest that the Danes might be keen to shed the cost of subsidising the territory. Greenland also has form in changing its status, having left the EU in 1985. Could full secession followed by amalgamation be next?

• Policing

At the most recent meeting of Hungerford Town Council, it was reported that it was likely that the local Thames Valley Police (TVP) neighbourhood policing team – which many feel is already under-staffed for the large area it covers – would probably be losing its Sergeant. It was suggested that the Sergeant who’d cover Hungerford would be based in Thatcham, 12 miles away the other side of Newbury. The Town Council is thus gearing itself up for yet another battle, this time with the TVP and, less directly, the Treasury.

This is a pattern that’s being repeated across the country. The biggest force, the Met, is getting a 3.5% increase in funding for next year (which just about covers inflation) but the Commissioner has claimed that cities like New York and Sydney spend about 50% more per capita than does London. The Met has other, well publicised, problems as well. None of this will be making recruitment any easier.

Figures from Statistica point to a decline in the number of officers of about 14% between 2010 and 2018 which has, despite more recruitment since, still not been made up. A lot of experience has been lost as a result of these cuts. Moreover, as this article in The Guardian points out, about 6,000 officers are doing jobs away from the front line because of a shortage of police staff.

Policing is also now more expensive, with more IT skills and equipment being needed to deal with crimes that are also increasingly plotted or committed a long way from the victims. PCSOs, who might have been expected at least partly to fill the deficit, have seen an even more dramatic fall in numbers in England and Wales, from nearly 17,000 in 2010 to about 7,500 in 2024.

So, who might plug the gap? For some, it’s private security firms. As this article considers, these are not police but are starting to look increasingly like them. This is particularly a problem in spaces which might appear to be public but which are actually privately owned or managed, in which case landlords tend to call the shots as regards the “officers'” conduct and priorities.

One firm, which even uses a colloquial word for police officers in its name, claims to offer residential clients a “security solutions” package which “provides tailored protection for homes and communities, delivering peace of mind to residents and their families.” There are a good many emotive words and phrases here. The cost is between £1,200 and £2,400 per year per household. Some can afford this: many others can’t.

To some extent, the same argument applies with private education and healthcare. The existing systems are less good than we would like and so, if we can afford to pay for it, we can opt in to a paid-for service.

Whether in these two cases this is any better, certainly to the extent of what they cost, is open to debate. The subliminal message about private education is that not to go for it is to fail your children. In a lesser way, so is your choice of car, supermarket, holiday destination or pet.

Extending this to policing seems, however, to be a very different matter. The other choices are essentially personal. Law and order is something that affects us all. For it to make any sense at all, legislation has to apply equally to everyone and that surely extends to the way it’s enforced.

To have some neighbourhoods policed in a different way simply because some communities can afford to pay for it not only creates a dangerous two-tier system but also further deepens the socio-economic divide that already exists. However, policing changes like those mentioned above in Hungerford will only hasten this trend.

• Planning

Much the same can be said about the planning system, about which I find myself writing a good deal. I’ll take a quick look at the government’s plans to reform this in a moment.

My current point is that it shares two things with the law: firstly, it’s incredibly complex, and with aspects of it that seem to have been designed by someone on drugs; the second is the disconnect between the number of conditions which a planning authority demands for any application and the number of people which it has to enforce these. The fact that planning enforcement is not a statutory responsibility for a council is a staggering fact which tells you all you need to know about how problematic the system is.

I spent over an hour on Tuesday talking to a highly intelligent, knowledgable and dedicated local councillor. We were sitting in his kitchen and looking at a series of planning applications from the same applicant which involved what seemed to be sleight of hand. The applicant would start work, then apply for a retrospective application, then withdraw it, and then continue the work. Somehow, this seemed to make everything compliant.

This is a simplistic summary but somehow the particular combination of tactics employed seemed, on several occasions, to result in it being decided by West Berkshire Council that no permission was required; that the change of use or physical changes to the buildings could proceed without further formalities. This was despite an email I saw which suggested that permission, retrospective or otherwise, would be required.

There were other inconsistencies. A temporary permission to site a mobile office and to paint it and for it to adhere to specified opening times had expired or were breached but no action was taken. On two occasions about a year apart, an access road to the site was deemed dangerous and then not dangerous by WBC’s highways experts. A building that was explicitly specified for agricultural use has been turned to quite other purposes, the very clear original condition now seeming to have no weight at all.

The 15 or so applications on the site, and the strange grandmother’s-footsteps way in which they’ve been conducted, give no clue to either the consultees or the planning authority what the long-term intentions for the site are. An over-arching masterplan seems to be needed and yet this has not been demanded.

You may think that I’m advocating a heavy-state approach, with every change requiring a laborious permission process. You might also think I’m engaged in a vendetta against the applicant, or others like them. Neither is true. However, either you have a system or you don’t: and, if you do, it has to be intelligible, logical and consistent.

Neither I nor the person I was talking to – who had spent untold hours looking into these issues as a result of his municipal responsibilities – could understand how or what the decisions had been made.

The applicant is perfectly entitled to play the game according to whatever complicated rules prevail. The more complicated these are allowed to become, the more (paid-for) expert opinions are needed to navigate through the minefields and quicksands of local plans, legislations, judicial decisions and precedent. This can’t be a co-incidence.

Those without the funds for advice or the experience of the system cower before the implacable rules (the recently resolved CIL scandal in West Berkshire is but one example). Those who do have the funds can afford the help to find a short-cut through the maze, or else decide that non-engagement with the planning system has little risk. Again, and as with policing, health and education, we have a two-tier approach.

• Targets

In December 2024, the government announced a new National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), the guiding document with which all local decisions on development need to be consistent. As a result, many districts, including West Berkshire, will need to create over twice as many homes as they’d originally expected.

The National Association of Local Councils (NALC) judged that the following were the key changes:

• “Mandatory housing targets for principal authorities to drive housebuilding, with increased targets in areas facing the highest levels of unaffordability.
• Measures to ensure that principal authorities develop or update local plans that cater to the needs of their communities.
• Principal authorities must identify and prioritise lower-quality grey belt land to meet housing targets.
• New Golden Rules for greenbelt development require developers to provide essential infrastructure for local communities, such as nurseries, GP surgeries, transportation, and a higher proportion of affordable housing.
• Increased emphasis on affordable housing, particularly social rent.”

The over-riding ambition is to create 300,000 net new homes a year, a figure which is merely a repetition of the Conservative’s target and one the country hasn’t come close to reaching since the late 1970s. The big difference in the figures between then and now has been the almost total collapse of homes built by local authorities.

West Berkshire Council, which was created in 1998, hasn’t built a single home. Housing associations have taken up only a small part of the slack and are not building as many social-rent homes as are needed. Private developers do not wish to build them as they aren’t as profitable: and they are answerable to shareholders. Permitted development rights have resulted in some former offices being turned, without the planning authority being able to influence this very much, into studio flats, which may or may not be what the area needs. Opportunities for local communities to develop their own schemes through land trusts or rural exception sites exist but have not yet produced nearly enough. When a system is, effectively, out-sourced to the private sector, this is what happens.

There are also two other challenges which Labour’s vision needs to overcome.

The first is that, although the locally-administered planning system – which certainly has some problems – is held up as the main culprit, there are other forces which are working at their own pace. Planning Resource claims that about a million homes for which permission has been granted since 2015, about 40% of the total, have not been built. Private companies have their own schedules, which may not accord with the government’s.

There are also perhaps the same number of actual homes which are unoccupied. These two million homes would be the best part of seven years’ supply on their own.

Another question is who is going to build them. One of the reasons the above-mentioned permissions haven’t been even started is because of a shortage of skilled labour – Construction News says that about a quarter of a million workers will be needed between now and 2028 to meet the expected levels of work. From where are these going to come? Like properly trained dentists, nurses or police officers, these cannot be created out of thin air. Brexit (sorry to bring that up again) hasn’t made this any easier either.

• Disparity

The problem, which no political party has admitted, is there’s a widening gulf between what we feel we deserve and what we can pay for. We like to believe that we live in a country which is sensibly regulated: but do we?

We have a government that passes laws but doesn’t fund the police. We have a planning system that imposes permissions and conditions but doesn’t enforce them. We have organisations like our National Landscapes/AONBs that are charged with preserving swathes of our countryside but without sufficient resources to look at every application or issue that crops up. We have designations like SSSI and SAC for our waterways that don’t prevent water companies from using them as sewers.

Our communications are dominated by a few big-tech companies, at least one of whose owners has become overtly political. We have organisations like the Post Office and our rail companies which seem to behave in a manner which owes nothing to the people they’re meant to serve but everything to their desire to maintain their reputation. We have a parliamentary system that is wholly dominated by the executive and is not very good at scrutinising legislation.

Although this is a better place to live than many other countries, we’re deluding ourselves if we think that matters are on-track for long-term success. No political party will be able to solve this because they will, as has always happened, immediately become part of the problem.

I’m not saying you shouldn’t vote next time you’re asked. However, everything is really a choice for the least bad. Even revolutions don’t work: look at pretty much every example, as brilliantly distilled in Animal Farm. One way or another, we will perhaps always be ruled by pigs…

• And finally…

• The most recent (1640) Private Eye claims on p13 that, despite its previously expressed reticence about bidding for future government contracts until the PO Inquiry is complete, Fujitsu has secured a deal to provide both hardware and cloud-based services to the Home Office. As the final paragraph comments, when in opposition, Labour happily criticised the Conservatives for issuing new contracts. Now it’s business as usual.

• I’ve never trusted anything I’ve read on Facebook unless I can verify it. Now it seems that Mr Z has decided to do away with fact-checking altogether, initially in the USA (though other territories will doubtless follow). The EU seems worried by this, which I shouldn’t think bothers Zuckerberg at all. Trump will probably be delighted. Looks like job done, then.

• Great to have regular domestic football back and everyone, apart from their fans, will be delighting in the rather rocky form of the two Manchester clubs. Nottingham Forest is currently many people’s second-favourite team. They couldn’t win it, could they? Have we earned another Leicester-style miracle only ten years after the last one?

• Quite a few movies watched over Christmas. Repeats of a couple of Die Hards and the second Terminator (the good one) hit the spot, as did in a very different way, The Station Agent and – at the Valley Film Society yesterday – One Life, which made me weep (in a good way) in the three-and-nines at the back towards the end. The new Wallace and Gromit was disappointing, Carry On awful and A Triangle of Sadness interesting but confusing. A mixed bag, all in all…

Across the area

• A look back at 2024

We’ve covered a great many stories relevant to the Penny Post area in 2024 in this column and in our eight regional news sections. Some have been mentioned more than once for the simple reason that they take time to go away (and in some cases still haven’t). Just before Christmas, we summarised in each of these the main things that we’d covered over the year. It turned out to be quite a long list.

Unlike almost every publication, we don’t produce an annual each year with a glossy hardback cover and a £15.99 price tag. Instead, we’ve gathered all of these summaries, for the whole Penny Post area and the eight sub-areas into which we divide this up, in a separate post. Click here to see it.

Please email brian@pennypost.org.uk if there’s anything you feel should be included in these.

• Devolution

The government has announced that it wants to see a reorganisation of the administrative geography of England, which is in many ways a big fat muddle. This is part of a bigger “devolution” project which is described in more detail in this Gov.uk document.

“This government is committed,” Angela Rayner writes in the preamble, “to resetting the relationship with local and regional government, empowering local leaders and Mayors to make the right decisions for their communities, and working together to grow an inclusive economy, reform public services and secure better outcomes.”

The matter of elected mayors is unlikely to be an issue any time soon in the largely rural area covered by Penny Post. More relevant, however, are plans to reform the council structure. Wiltshire, for instance, is a county with no districts; Oxfordshire and Hampshire are two-tier authorities with responsibilities split between the counties and the districts; Swindon is a unitary authority carved out of Wiltshire; and West Berkshire is one of six unitary authorities created by the dismemberment of Berkshire, which no longer exists except ceremonially. This confusing pattern is repeated across the country

There may well have been good reasons for all this but few now know what these were. The two things the government seems keen to do is, first, to encourage a move to one-tier authorities where possible; and, secondly, the ensure that unitary authorities are of a minimum size.

The first of these won’t concern West Berkshire or Swindon, which are already unitary. It is, however, relevant to two-tier Hampshire and Oxfordshire. There’s also the possibility that Wiltshire might be better as several unitary authorities rather than one county. These are all decisions that the areas will have to take in conjunction with each other, their residents and Angela Rayner.

Many of the unitary authorities that would be created would be well below the ideal minimum size of 500,000 people. Currently only four out of 58 unitaries in England pass this test and West Berkshire, with about 158,000, is far from the smallest. If at some point WBC is told it needs to get bigger, the obvious solution would be to re-create Berkshire.

However, the area has in many ways far more in common with the Vale of White Horse and South Oxfordshire to the north than it does with Reading, Maidenhard, Bracknell and Slough to the east. The Vale and South Oxon have been doing almost everything together, including a local plan, for many years: a more-or-less co-habiting couple that haven’t got round to tying the knot. Would they consider a ménage à trois with West Berkshire? The combined populations would be about 456,000, within touching distance of Angela’s ambition. Watch this space…