There are reasons to suppose that the 10 year census under-counts by a lot, as the experience of vaccinating everyone appeared show a lot more people than the census counts. In some countries, it is common for people to be registered in their home town/village, but be renting a room in the city where they work. For example, I did some work in Prague once, and the local authority reckoned the "overnight population" was 50% higher than the number of people registered as living there.Trinucleus wrote: ↑Thu Aug 31, 2023 4:07 pmWhat they ought to do is every ten years or so, count how many people there are, and where they live. And also to levy developers to pay for the infrastructure improvements.........
Though of course in most of our neighbouring countries it is common for people to be registered at an address, and have an identity card with their address on, which it is hard to live without. That would seem like a good idea to me. You'd have a much better idea how many people there were and where they lived in such a case.
We do in fact have two systems of getting developers to pay for infrastructure.
One is the Community Infrastructure Levy. But it only funds transport improvements, and only exists in locations where there is new transport infrastructure being developed.
But more generally any planning application can be subject to a section 106 agreement. This covers any obligation that the planning authority places on a grant of a planning application. For large developments, it tends to involve them building infrastructure. What happens in practice, since it isn't ideal that they build this stuff themselves, is that they hand over an agreed sum of money in lieu of the obligation and the local authority uses it to improve infrastructure.
Section 106 agreements are unusual for small developments. But if councils aren't actively making such arrangements for larger developments, and putting the money towards the needed infrastructure, I would think that is more the council's fault than the developers.
Of course developers are very clever at getting a planning permission and coming back later and saying it is no longer financially feasible, and so getting any "affordable" housing obligations and section 106 obligations reduced. In fact it seems that a common sequence of events is get the permission, hang around until things look worse, renegotiate, then hang around until things are better again.
. Which only makes it worse but I'm nosey as to which one really gets your goat 
