Tubby Isaacs wrote:seeingclearly wrote:The city itself needs huge inward investment, and support from government. It's not been getting that, HS2 will take some time, in the meantime nothing will happen, and frankly not hearing how difficult things are here doesn't help. We've got young people in desperate straits here, being told to lose their skills and ambitions. Many of them have excellent creative skills and knocking the heart out of our creative districts will not help that at all. Investment from the EU is what has held us together for a long time, thanks to this terrible government that is likely to slow down, and God help us if the Tories return. I just don't know how you can argue a rail link will help, it's not even coming directly into the city. It will only be useful if huge amounts of other things happen, and no one is even talking about that.
We've talked about this before. Your ideas on this do not stand up to any kind of Birmingham based scrutiny. People here do not need an influx from the south.
Birmingham City Council are strong supporters of HS2. Birmingham based scrutiny?
It's all but directly into the centre of the city, surely.
You get (commercial) inward investment as a result of things like good transport links. And in terms of public investment, once a big project is going to happen, the case is easier to make for other investment to get done to get full value out of it. See for instance Crossrail, where temptation was resisted to chop off one branch to get the headline figure down, because once you've done the central tunnel, you might as well run trains through it. And the temptation to terminate HS2 at Birmingham has been resisted.
What are we from "the South"? For a start loads of us come from outside London in the first place and moved to London for work reasons- including more than a few from the West Midlands. You wouldn't suddenly be taken over by Essex Boys- they can live in Essex anyway. You'd get people for various reasons making Birmingham their home, and people with roots there already would be more likely than others to do it. And at the same time firms think they might as well set up in Birmingham rather than London. So you have people living and working in Birmingham.
Lots of what's happened in London has been healthier than you probably think. Housing is the biggest problem, and it won't be anything like that for Birmingham.
We have loads of incomers to our colleges and workplaces from all over the Midlands. It's not London though. It's got a largely uninhabited city centre and narrow,for these times, arterial roads. It's also one of the areas of highest unemployment and our LHAs are way below those of London and the South. Local people would not be able to compete for housing, they can't compete against students now. We've got massive problems with HGVs on our roads and some serious issues that didn't really exist to any great degre prior to the Trojan horse nonsense. Your opinion that the housing problem won't be like London is only partly true, it won't be as visible but it will be every bit as real. I know people that Birmingham has had to house in Stratford, Kidderminster, and Warwick because they can find none here. Private landlords want what are for here massive deposits, for people from London and the South these are small, they can find them, we've got thousands who can't.
People say we are 'lucky', but we aren't, everyone I know is supporting adult children, some are well into their thirties. There's no signs of recovery, and I already explained why it will not help. We've already got commuters. I'm not being insular about this there really are other things to prioritise, we've got eleven year olds right now facing crossing some of our most dangerous roads with no wardens, having just crossed the city centre.
Like many other cities we are under pressure, but we have unique problems like Sheffield does, or Hull. These unique conditions, wherever they are don't get addressed, instead a railway link is seen as an answer. It isn't. It's a small part of a potential answer that is dependent on many other factors.