I have had a very busy week so far, and have only just  caught up with the postings on this site. Delays are created if individuals post often and at great length. Sometimes a long posting with expertise and new information is necessary and helpful but endless long postings saying similar things are not.

I will have to simply delete some long postings from people who have already written in on the topic. I do delete long postings with references to sites I do not know and have not the time to read, and long postings with questionable allegations about people, companies and institutions.

We are awaiting a government White Paper to set out ways to promote the construction of more homes. The government believes the UK build rate needs to be considerably higher than the current one, given the large number of people needing homes.

I agree with those who write in to say that the government should deal with the demand side as well as the supply side. The government itself has pledged to cut inward migration to tens of thousands, but believes it needs to exit the EU first so it can extend migration controls to EU citizens as well as to people coming from the rest of the world. We await a statement of policy from the new Home Secretary on how migration controls will be tightened generally and especially for EU migrants. The indications are that the government wishes to limit work permits for lower paid jobs, but leave free movement for highly qualified and well paid people, and management  coming in under intra company transfers.

We need more homes just to deal with pent up demand from people already legally settled here. There are many young people who would like a home of their own, who cannot afford to buy so they  stay living with their parents. There are many young people sharing flats and houses with others of their generation, with the cost of housing being one factor that delays establishing their own household. Many more people would like to own a home of their own who are currently living in rented accommodation. There are also elderly people whose children have left home who are put off moving to a smaller and more manageable property by the high costs of moving, including Stamp Duty as a significant deterrent.

I would be interested to hear your ideas on what further measures the government should take in its White Paper and in the budget that follows. I want to see Stamp Duty brought down to lower levels. At the expensive multi million end it has greatly reduced transactions in  dear properties, leading to a fall in revenues from the tax. For the rest of us in the normal market it is still an expensive addition to the costs of first purchase or moving.

I support the government’s enthusiasm for more factory manufacture and pre assembly to speed and improve building. We are short of many building trades for on site work. The weather often delays their task. If more components of a kitchen, bathroom, structure of a home, window assemblies and roof can be made in the factory the time taken on site can be reduced and the available skilled labour concentrated on those tasks that can only be done on site.

The main housebuilders are all taking some steps in this direction. More homes will be built around a timber pre-fabricated frame. More sub assemblies will be done in the factory for systems and components going into the home. Progress is however quite slow. Where government itself is the customer it could require faster progress in this direction. The UK housebuilding industry was badly damaged and slimmed down by the Great recession of 2008-9. Most of the companies  now are strongly cash generative, but very cautious about expanding their output and their balance sheets too much. That is why demand so outstrips supply.

The rest of the EU clearly has a much bigger problem with Brexit than the UK does. They are the ones who lose our budget contributions, who need to keep access to our very lucrative market, who want full access to our successful jobs market to place more of their people who are unemployed or in lower paid work, who want to keep their surplus on public health payments, and enjoy the remittances from EU workers working in the UK.

There is likely to be strong disagreements between many member states who will want full tariff free access to our markets, and the EU Commission who want to design some kind of punishment settlement. The EU officials seem to want to prove a member state leaving wil be worse off, but would only succeed in proving the rest of the EU will be worse off if they have their way.

The strength of the UK position is its simplicity. Most of the things we want – freedom from paying contributions, control of our own borders and laws – do not require consent from the rest of the EU and are achieved by simply leaving, as we are entitled under the treaties to do. When it comes to trade we know trading under the most favoured nation status at the WTO works just fine, as that is what we do for the rest of the world at the moment. It is the rest of the EU that would suffer from the tariffs WTO allows. All our services and much of our goods exports are tariff free. Cars attract a 10% tariff, and agricultural products, where the rest of the EU sells us a lot, attract some high tariffs.

It will be interesting to see how the differences between the Commission and member states pan out in the forthcoming discussions. If the Commission succeeds in demanding tariffs, we need to know that soon so we can get on with an early exit and establishment of the WTO system to regulate our trade. As Civitas has pointed out this week, because we will collect around double the tariff revenue from them that they will collect from us, the UK can offer tax breaks and grants in compensation so we are no worse off. The pain will be felt instead on the continent, in a futile attempt to make the EU Commission’s nasty political point.

I have long argued that we are unlikely to trade less with the EU after we have left than we do today, whether we have a special deal or not. Clearly the rest of the EU will want to keep on selling their goods to us, so they will not be able to impose big barriers on trade. Nor can they under WTO rules. Both the rest of the EU and the UK will remain under WTO rules on our departure.

The good news about offering the rest of the EU the choice between confirming current tariff free arrangements and registering it as a Free Trade Agreement at the WTO, or accepting most favoured nation status with low average WTO tariffs is that either outcome will be fine from the UK point of view.

This obvious commonsense does not prevent some “experts” claiming we might lose trade and therefore they think lose some output. Indeed, one or two extreme Remain enthusiasts have suggested all trade with the continent will cease if we leave without an agreement, an absurd proposition. Trade will continue. Germany will not stop selling us cars nor France her dairy products.

It is interesting, however, to ask what happened to the UK economy when the extreme outcome did occur. In 1939-40 when war broke out with Germany, Germany soon took over much of the continent by conquest. It was also in alliance with the Axis powers, which included Italy, Hungary and Romania. The Axis countries and the conquered lands did not trade with the UK, so for a period there was no trade between the UK and most of the continent.

What happened to the UK economy? It leapt ahead, growing by 32% in real output and income between 1939 and the peak in 1943. Much of the growth in output was of course production of military transport and weapons. By 1943 the UK was producing a staggering 26,000 planes a year from widely dispersed component and assembly factories around the country. By the end of the war the UK had also developed the first jet engine fighter, and had produced 250 Gloster Meteors. Output of military vehicles, ammunition, military clothing and much else was massively increased.

The UK was also turning out large quantities of commercial shipping. There were strong advances in coal and steel output to fuel and supply the industrial activity. Much of this was paid for by public spending and public borrowing.It would have been equally possible to expand civilian production with private sector spending and lending if there had been no military imperative.

What 1939-45 demonstrated was the potential in the UK to have a much larger energy and industrial sector if the demand was available and if imports from the continent were closed off. The country also converted much more land to agriculture to produce much more of its own food.

Fortunately we will not be revisiting those extreme times. We can ,however, learn from them that the UK is very adaptable, and could also adapt in more benign conditions where it would be good if we produced more of what we want and import less from the rest of the EU. I doubt they will want to impose tariffs on their exports to us to encourage us to produce more of our own goods and farm products.

Jeremy Hunt yesterday gave a honest and detailed account of the state of the NHS and its response to winter demand. He told us just how big the increase in demand for care and treatment has been. There are 9m more visits to A and E than in 2000; He reminded us that there are 340,000 more people over 80 than in 2010, the age group needing most NHS care. He explained how more and more people go to A and E at the hospital, when quite often they do not need hospital treatment. Around one third of those who attend A and E do not need to be there but could be dealt with by a GP or other local health professional. Despite the large increase in demand, most hospitals and trusts are coping a little better than last year. A few Trusts are performing very badly, have poor records on keeping people waiting and are being placed into special measures to improve them.

The NHS has a target of no-one waiting more than four hours at A and E. Clearly if on admission the person needs urgent treatment, that is what they should get without waiting 4 hours. The NHS recruited 1600 extra doctors and 3000 more nurses this year, to help cope. Since 2010 there has been an increase of 11,400 doctors and 11,200 nurses overall. The NHS also commissioned more GP consultations for the holiday period to try to reduce the pressures on A and E. Over Christmas and over New Year 150,000 medical staff were on duty in hospitals to deal with all the cases.

Clearly we need to continue to expand the NHS to deal with extra demand. We also need to help users of the NHS understand how it is organised and how it is best to use it. All UK citizens should be registered with a GP, and should normally use the GP as the first point of call for diagnosis and possible treatment. The GP should be the gatekeeper to the hospital system. Only where someone has a bad accident or a serious looking medical condition happens suddenly should they seek direct access to the hospital via A and E. We offer free emergency provision to anyone in our country.

New migrants to the UK should seek doctor registration for the free NHS as soon as they have legally settled here. Anyone not qualifying for free treatment should be informed of their need to hold insurance or to be ready to pay for non emergency treatment should they need any whilst staying in the UK.

The regular disruption of a private rail company on the Southern franchise has caused a lot of trouble for commuters which we have talked about recently. The Mayor of London has been free with his advice to the Transport Secretary, telling him to intervene to prevent the strikes. The Mayor has also said if he took control of this franchise he would be able to run it better.

Today the Mayor has a chance to show his skills at peacemaking with transport unions, as this time it is his very own TFL which faces a damaging strike on the underground. Why hasn’t Mayor Kahn be able to work his promised magic and stop it? What does he intend to do to get the tube running again properly? Does he support the changes to station staffing that have caused the problems, as he says, or is he going to back down and side with the Union over it?

The Mayor is not having a great time with transport policy. He has decided to pull the plug on new orders for the UK manufactured new Routemaster bus. This iconic vehicle launched by the previous Mayor was said by the new Mayor to be too expensive. This was because the early orders had to cover start up costs and the possibility of low volume against the costs of all the tooling. Just at the point where the London taxpayers would get some relief, with lower prices for the next orders, the Mayor cancels. Worse still the new buses he wants to buy are coming from a partnership with a Chinese company, where the UK content in the buses will be much lower. So the UK loses jobs making the new buses and has a bigger import bill as a result.

The Mayor has also backed down on his promise to freeze all fares for commuters. He’s discovering it’s easier talking about national issues from the Labour party leadership to Brexit, than actually doing a good job running London transport and using after UK manufacturing in the process.

Dear Sir Andrew

I wish you and your business every success. I was pleased to read on your website that the initials of William Cook also stand for “World Class”. You are right to be proud of your family company’s achievements and to be concerned for the welfare and future of your workforce.
As a donor to the Remain campaign and to the Conservative party you will know that donations do not buy influence or change of policy. Donations are made to support causes and parties the donor wants to support. I am glad you have in the past chosen to support the Conservative party, and hope that when we approach the next election you will once again see that the Conservatives offer the best policy proposals that can work for everyone, including successful family business owners. It would never be right for the Conservative party to change policy just because someone who granted it money wanted it to do so. It would be especially wrong to do so in defiance of a large vote by the UK electorate to leave the EU following a long and thorough campaign where all the arguments were fully exposed by both sides and poured over by experts.
Listening to you this morning, your main worry appeared to be a possible loss of exports orders to customer companies on the continent when we leave the EU and its internal market. You will recall that both the Remain and the Leave campaign were clear during the referendum that a country cannot stay in the so called single or internal market if it is no longer a member of the EU. You will also recall that other member states and the Commission have explained endlessly that if a country is in the single market it has to accept freedom of movement, budget contributions and ECJ control over our laws which the UK electors expressly rejected. Inside the EEA the UK would not be allowed to negotiate free trade agreements with non EU countries, one of the bonuses of our departure.
The good news is we have reason to suppose we will retain good access to the markets of the continent when we leave the EU. 160 other countries around the world trade with the EU, some of them very successfully, without being members of the single market. Many individuals and companies in the rest of the EU are keen to retain open tariff free access to our market, as they sell us so much more than we sell them. If we all unite to offer the rest of the EU a friendly continuation of current tariff free trade they might, after some huffing and puffing, conclude that they should accept as it is strongly in their interest.
If by any chance our former partners are swayed by mean spirits to seek revenge at their own expense for our departure, then we can trade well with their companies and people nonetheless under WTO rules. The average tariff is only 3.5%. Half of all goods will remain tariff free. You were worried that such a tariff would prevent your sales. The pound has fallen 18% from its peak in July 2015 til today against the Euro. Most of the fall occurred well before the vote, but it is down 4% since its low in April 2016. Even this modest fall since the vote exceeds the amount of the tariff, so UK products will still be cheaper than in April and considerably cheaper than in July 2015. I am sure given your world class products and the greater pricing flexibility you now enjoy you will continue to sell to your customers on the continent, whatever the eventual outcome on the basis for our trade with them.
As someone who has in the past led industrial companies selling onto the continent as well as worldwide,I can see no great problems in leaving the EU and its internal market whilst retaining decent access to it under a special agreement or under WTO rules. I was used to dealing with long supply chain issues ranging across EU member states and non member states from a UK base. We were always able to use companies for supply from outside the EU without special problems and often did so where they had good quality, technology and were price competitive.
I do wish you and your employees every success in exploiting the more competitive level of our currency, and adding to your capacity to sell worldwide in these conditions.

Yours sincerely

John Redwood

(I am publishing tomorrow’s blog early as it seems to be topical with the media)

It was good to see the Bank of England confessing its mistakes in being far too pessimistic about the UK’s economic prospects in 2016. As they seek to correct the record, they need to look again at their so called gravity model for predicting the impact of European trade on the UK economy and the alleged damage leaving the single market could do. The model does not seem to attribute enough significance to common language, which is especially important in service trade.

Their conclusion that the UK will be hit over the longer term by leaving the single market is based on a dubious model and inappropriate data. The model assumes that a country trades more easily with a country it is close to. The Treasury analysed the impact on trade for all the members of the EU post war. Of course the EU had a more positive impact on those who joined early, when world tariffs were higher, than it did on the UK which joined later after world tariffs had come under GATT. More particularly, trade was boosted substantially for relatively poor closed economies in East Europe when they joined and started trading properly with the west for the first time. The UK’s experience of gains from single market membership have been much less than these two different dominant cases used in the data.

The numbers show that the UK growth rate did not accelerate either on joining the EU or on completing the single market. It is difficult from this past evidence to argue that the longer term growth rate will therefore slow when we leave.

We now know that the Treasury vector autoregressive model for the first two years after the Brexit vote was also hopelessly wrong. The establishment now accepts this and is busy changing its forecasts for the period June 2016-2018. It is high time they also acknowledged the weaknesses of the model and the data used for the longer term predictions. Had they applied their gravity model to our trade with the rest of the world it would presumably have said we need free trade deals with all those countries, which in turn requires us to leave the EU.

My time as Single Market Minister turned me into a strong critic of the single market we were meant to be creating. I had accepted the verdict of the 1975 referendum where people voted to stay in a common market, and did my best to help bring it about. The more involved I became, the more I realised the EU model was more bureaucracy and government than market. The Single market programme was used to extend EU power and control over more and more areas of business and life, often without helping business to compete or succeed.

Practically every item we were asked to negotiate caused problems to UK businesses. I was regularly lobbied to put off, amend or water down the proposals by large companies. A good week’s work was successfully lobbying other member states and the Commission to make sure something adverse did not happen. Various proposals were kept in limbo for many years, as lots of member states agreed with us they were not desirable. Other proposals were more difficult to arrest, as a majority of member states would go along with them. The careful construction of a blocking minority took time and effort.

The whole structure was based on the misleading idea that you need a comprehensive set of law codes regulating so many facets of life to be able to trade with each other. As far as I was concerned all I wanted to complete the common market others had voted for was the acceptance that if a product was of merchandisable quality in one country, the home country, it could be offered for sale in the other countries in the Union. Customers would make up their own minds as to its quality, desirability and value for money. Instead the EU wanted to control in minute detail not just the products, but also the workforces, environments, transport systems and much else vaguely related to producing the goods. Soon the Union also wanted a defence policy, a security policy, a foreign policy and all matters that a state undertakes.

When negotiating there was an assumption shared by most that the EU did want an agreement. The Commission had hundreds of ideas of things it wanted to control and regulate, and it kept pushing them forwards to get them ticked off its list of things to do and powers to assume. It exploited the weakness of member states in the structure. Only the Commission could make and draft a proposal. The Commission could use the rotating Presidencies to push different draft laws, depending on the preferences of each Presidency country. It was one way traffic towards ever more EU power.

The Commission was not interested in repeal or amendment of past laws that did not work well. When pressed for repeals, they usually came up with the idea of creating a large portmanteau Directive in place of lots of more limited ones, so it could both announce various repeals and still end up with more power overall. As the figures show, there was no increase in the UK growth rate in the years after we joined the EEC, and no improvement in the growth rate after they completed the Single market in 1992. Indeed, the longer term UK growth rate fell after 1972 and again after 1992. That was not surprising given the nature of the law making programme they jokingly called a market. Common EU policies like the Fishing and Agriculture policy were damaging to us, and the dear energy policy has made the EU less competitive. The European Exchange Rate Mechanism and the Euro of course conspired to depress growth for many member states.

Muddled thinking seems to rule in those who condemn it. To me muddled thinking is the idea that we need to negotiate returning control over our money, borders and laws. There are some in the government machine and in business who seem to think the UK should be willing to negotiate over taking back control. They need to grasp that this is very muddled thinking. You are not taking back control if you need someone else’s permission, and if you compromise on that control.

We are told we need to hang on to the knowledge and skills of those who have handled our EU negotiations in the past. That too is muddled thinking. How does it help to adopt the techniques which gave us such a poor result to Mr Cameron’s bid to get the UK a deal we could live with to stay in the EU? It was quite obvious that the bare minimum to get a majority for stay would be to stop free movement and to gain full control over our benefit system. The wise advisers persuaded Mr Cameron not to even ask for the end of freedom of movement, and helped him water down the benefit changes until they were minimal. We should learn from this. The EU will pocket any compromise you offer, and then expect you to make a further sacrifice.

The way to negotiate this issue is straightforward. We need an Ambassador who understands that the UK should not negotiate at all over taking back control. We have the right to do that, and the public voted to do that. The issues we can discuss relate to our future relationship with the rest of the EU after we have left. We can discuss future trade and future collaborations. There is no need to have a lengthy negotiation about trade. There are two ready made models. Carry on as we are, or shift to WTO most favoured nation. We offer them this friendly choice, and they can decide which they want. They are likely, after much grumbling and posturing, to opt for the tariff free version as they have so much more at risk than we do.We have a profitable and successful trade with the rest of the world based on WTO tariffs and rules.

As the outgoing Ambassador rightly says, good advisers tell truth to power. That is why more of us need to explain to our Ministers that negotiating the Cameron way will end in a poor result. The Prime Minister should not set out any compromises over money, law making and borders, because it is our right and necessity to take back control. The new Ambassador needs to understand this. He or she would add value if they have good contacts and are liked by the other member states, and if they grasp that the art of negotiating is to narrow the areas that need negotiating at all.

During our long membership of the EU there have been too many in government and business who have advocated giving in. They are all too ready to offer compromises in what we wanted, without insisting on real change in the EU demands. Let’s not make that same mistake on leaving which successive governments often made when staying. As someone who does not want to be Ambassador to the court of Brussels, who had to handle all too many EU negotiations as Single Market Minister, I can assure you it was always wrong to offer a compromise we did not like.