Tom Tugendhat: evaluation

Transcript context

…Why do you think England in particular is so unbalanced economically compared, say, to the Netherlands or Germany? What is it in the history, or is it really just the infrastructure links? The infrastructure is hugely important. If you’re not willing to connect Britain, guess what? You get concentrations. You get real concentrations. Then the challenge is you get the concentrations, you don’t get the housing. If you don’t have the housing, you don’t have the ability to invest. One of the striking things, actually, is the mayor of London, who’s been in place now for eight and a bit years, has been a complete failure in building houses. He’s been really reticent on building houses, and he talks about rent control, which, as you know, at the moment when you start talking about rent control, nobody wants to rent a house and nobody wants to build a house because it . . . You don’t need me to tell you this, Tyler, but it’s one of the single greatest threats to the ability to house people, is to introduce rent controls. It’s a complete disaster of a policy that’s been tried 100 times and failed 100 times, and that’s what he’s talking about. That’s Labour’s controlling attitude rather than the ability to build. I think there is a strong argument for having greater devolved interest in infrastructure development. We’re a smaller country than the United States, so infrastructure can’t be all local. It can’t be all done at a state level, if you see what I mean, but nor can it be all national as we’re so much bigger than, say, Belgium or the Netherlands. We need that relationship. We need a better relationship between our devolved powers and our national power, and that’s something we haven’t achieved yet. What’s your most controversial opinion about London architecture?…

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