Michael Hill

The Aylesham Centre is a rundown half-empty shopping centre built in the 1980s. It is a short walk from Peckham Rye station, which is itself only a ten-minute trip to London Bridge, one of the busiest stations in the capital. It is hard to think of a better site for new homes in a city that needs them desperately. Those in favour of ‘affordable homes’ often say that normal or ‘luxury flats’ do not meet local needs. But this misunderstands how markets work Yet to the surprise of no one, this week its planning application was rejected by Southwark council. The reasons the council gave are key to understanding why housing does not seem to get built in the capital, despite this government being elected on a pledge to build 1.5 million homes over the course of this parliament.

If you eat a banana, you get a tiny dose of radiation. Perfectly safe. Yet Britain’s nuclear regulator once forced a proposed Anglesey nuclear power plant to redesign its filtration system to cut potential exposure by exactly that amount. The result? Months of paperwork and meetings to eliminate an amount of radiation smaller than what you’d get from 20 minutes on a plane. What didn’t follow was a new nuclear plant on Anglesey. That is the absurdity strangling Britain’s nuclear ambitions. We have world-class engineers and a spotless safety record, but also a regulatory culture that prizes minimising non-existent risks over common sense. Every government talks big on nuclear. Every time, nothing happens. Ed Miliband now promises a ‘golden age’ of nuclear.