Housing supply and planning delay in the South of England

There is growing international interest in the impact of regulatory controls on the supply of housing The UK has a particularly restrictive planning regime and a detailed and uncertain process of development control linked to it. This paper presents the findings of empirical research on the time taken to gain planning permission for selected recent major housing projects from a sample of local authorities in southern England. The scale of delay found was far greater than is indicated by average official data measuring the extent to which local authorities meet planning delay targets. If these results are representative of the country as a whole, they indicate that planning delay could be a major cause of the slow responsiveness of British housing supply.

Access to the countryside of England and Wales: popular leisure; commodified culture

Risk and uncertainty are, to say the least, poorly considered by most individuals involved in real estate analysis - in both development and investment appraisal. Surveyors continue to express 'uncertainty' about the value (risk) of using relatively objective methods of analysis to account for these factors. These methods attempt to identify the risk elements more explicitly. Conventionally this is done by deriving probability distributions for the uncontrolled variables in the system. A suggested 'new' way of "being able to express our uncertainty or slight vagueness about some of the qualitative judgements and not From its modern origins, associated with the urbanising effect of industrialisation, walking has remained a popular form of outdoor recreation. It has, furthermore, remained an important site of class struggle, with the 'landless' seeking to establish their moral 'citizen' right to roam over open country in contradistinction to the 'landed', who have successfully limited this right to legally-defined public rights of way. In the face of declining farm incomes, however, farmers and landowners have, apparently, modified their attitudes towards public access, but only in return for compensation and management payments under grant schemes such as Countryside Stewardship and the Countryside Premium Scheme. With the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food now seeking to extend paid access arrangements to other grant schemes, as part of its response to the European Union's Agri-Environment Regulations, access 'rights' are assuming an increasingly commodified form, thereby questioning, if not undermining, the former citizen claims. For rather than being a benefit of citizenship, the existence of limited, often poorly maintained and inadequately signposted, public rights of way has tied inextricably the extension of legally-enforceable access to the needs of the landowners and farmers. At a time of falling prosperity in agriculture, therefore, they have now exercised their discretion by annexing the populism of consumer culture to reproduce the bourgeois liberal values of the market as a principal determinant of the extension of citizen rights of access to the countryside.

Access to the countryside of England and Wales: public/private partnership or the privatisation of public rights?

This paper examines the evolution of public rights of access to private land in England and Wales. Since the Eighteenth Century the administration and protection of these rights has been though a form of public/private partnership in which the judiciary, while maintaining the dominance of private property, have safeguarded de facto public access by refusing consistently to punish simple trespass. While this situation has been modified, principally by post-World War II legislation, to allow for some formalisation of access arrangements and consequent compensation to landowners in areas of high recreational pressure and low legal accessibility, recent policy initiatives suggest that the balance of the partnership has now shifted in favour of landowners. In particular, the new access payment schemes, developed by the UK Government in response to the European Commission's Agri-Environment Regulations, locate the landowner as the beneficiary of the partnership, financed by tax revenue and justified on the spurious basis of improved 'access provision'. As such the state, as the former upholder of citizen rights, now assumes the duplicitous position of underwriting private property ownership through the commodification of access, while proclaiming a significant improvement in citizens' access rights.

The credit relationship between Henry III and merchants of Douai and Ypres, 1247-70

This article looks at an important but neglected aspect of medieval sovereign debt, namely ‘accounts payable’ owed by the Crown to merchants and employees. It focuses on the unusually well-documented relationship between Henry III, King of England between 1216 and 1272, and Flemish merchants from the towns of Douai and Ypres, who provided cloth on credit to the royal wardrobe. From the surviving royal documents, we reconstruct the credit advanced to the royal wardrobe by the merchants of Ypres and Douai for each year between 1247 and 1270, together with the king's repayment history. The interactions between the king and the merchants are then analysed. The insights from this analysis are applied to the historical data to explain the trading decisions made by the merchants during this period, as well as why the strategies of the Yprois sometimes differed from those of the Douaissiens.

Evaluating the Bank of England density forecasts of inflation

We consider evaluating the UK Monetary Policy Committee's inflation density forecasts using probability integral transform goodness-of-fit tests. These tests evaluate the whole forecast density. We also consider whether the probabilities assigned to inflation being in certain ranges are well calibrated, where the ranges are chosen to be those of particular relevance to the MPC, given its remit of maintaining inflation rates in a band around per annum. Finally, we discuss the decision-based approach to forecast evaluation in relation to the MPC forecasts

Identification of forged Bank of England £20 banknotes using IR spectroscopy

Bank of England notes of £20 denomination have been studied using infrared spectroscopy in order to generate a method to identify forged notes. An aim of this work was to develop a non-destructive method so that a small, compact Fourier transform infrared spectrometer (FT-IR) instrument could be used by bank workers, police departments or others such as shop assistants to identify forged notes in a non-lab setting. The ease of use of the instrument is the key to this method, as well as the relatively low cost. The presence of a peak at 1400 cm−1 arising from νasym () from the blank paper section of a forged note proved to be a successful indicator of the note’s illegality for the notes that we studied. Moreover, differences between the spectra of forged and genuine £20 notes were observed in the ν(OH) (ca. 3500 cm−1), ν(CH) (ca. 2900 cm−1) and ν(CO) (ca. 1750 cm−1) regions of the IR spectrum recorded for the polymer film covering the holographic strip. In cases where these simple tests fail, we have shown how an infrared microscope can be used to further differentiate genuine and forged banknotes by producing infrared maps of selected areas of the note contrasting inks with background paper.

Ethics of care in supporting disabled forced migrants: interactions with professionals and ethical dilemmas in health and social care in the South-East of England

This article explores the interactions between disabled forced migrants with care needs and professionals and the restrictive legal, policy and practice context that health and social care professionals have to confront, based on the findings of a qualitative study with 45 participants in the South-East of England. In-depth interviews were conducted with 15 forced migrants who had diverse impairments and chronic illnesses (8 women and 7 men), 13 family caregivers and 17 support workers and strategic professionals working in social care and the third sector in Slough, Reading and London. The legal status of forced migrants significantly affects their entitlements to health and social care provision, resulting in prolonged periods of destitution for many families. National asylum support policies, difficult working relationships with UK Border Agency, higher eligibility thresholds and reduced social care budgets of local authorities were identified as significant barriers in responding to the support needs of disabled forced migrants and family caregivers. In this context, social workers experienced considerable ethical dilemmas. The research raises profound questions about the potential and limitations of health and social care policies, provision, and practice as means of protection and support in fulfilling the human rights of forced migrants with care needs.

Factors influencing the use of antitumoral chemotherapy in the South East of England

Influences on the use of chemotherapy for the treatment of cancer within the South East region of England for patients diagnosed with colorectal, lung, breast and prostate cancer were investigated. The variables investigated as possibly influencing the selection of chemotherapy were the sex of the patients, their age, the year of diagnosis, the cancer site, the cancer stage, the index of multiple deprivation (IMD) and the cancer network of residence. Logistic regression used to adjust the proportion receiving chemotherapy in relation to other variables considered showed significant differences in the proportion of patients receiving chemotherapy between different cancer sites and different networks. There was also a highly significant trend seen in use of chemotherapy over time; the adjusted proportion of patients receiving chemotherapy increasing from 10.6% in 1993 to 24.3% in 2002. Age, stage and cancer site seemed to have the most influence on the use of chemotherapy.

Effect of feeding intensity and milking system on nutritionally relevant milk components in dairy farming systems in the North East of England

There is increasing concern that the intensification of dairy production reduces the concentrations of nutritionally desirable compounds in milk. This study therefore compared important quality parameters (protein and fatty acid profiles; α-tocopherol and carotenoid concentrations) in milk from four dairy systems with contrasting production intensities (in terms of feeding regimens and milking systems). The concentrations of several nutritionally desirable compounds (β-lactoglobulin, omega-3 fatty acids, omega-3/omega-6 ratio, conjugated linoleic acid c9t11, and/or carotenoids) decreased with increasing feeding intensity (organic outdoor ≥ conventional outdoor ≥ conventional indoors). Milking system intensification (use of robotic milking parlors) had a more limited effect on milk composition, but increased mastitis incidence. Multivariate analyses indicated that differences in milk quality were mainly linked to contrasting feeding regimens and that milking system and breed choice also contributed to differences in milk composition between production systems.