Shiv Malik

stop writing this book because i'm going to spend another couple of years talking about it rather than actually just getting stuck in and involved and i think at the heart of this is this campaign and i realized look getting this done is actually politics the vast proportion of this stuff there is nothing in the laws of engineering or finance or economics or whatever it might be it's just politics is it politics or is it democracy would it be the same thing i mean okay you know use it where it's in our these are problems of our own making in our own mind it's about where

To take planning permission, right, sounds like quite a dry technical term, but the word is permission, right, in that.

Actually, the plans are easy enough to devise, right, but it's the permission.

Will we permit ourselves to do this, right, for ourselves, right?

That's basically what it comes down to.

So it's politics.

Yes and no.

I think, look, that doesn't make it easy, right?

So on the ground, it means persuading people.

And that is hard.

But if you're doing something that's big enough, suddenly you can talk at a regional level, right?

So, for example, make it more practical.

If we were talking about 2,000 homes, well, we know we'd be some private developer at the end of the day that no one would care about.

And we certainly wouldn't be able to break the economic model to deliver genuinely affordable housing.

And we'd still fight the same battle on the ground.

Right.

With people who'd go, look, we just can't stand another 2000 homes.

If you suddenly make this a lot bigger in terms of a project, you can actually talk about delivering all sorts of things in terms of infrastructure.

New hospitals.

Right.