The Great British Housing Crisis: Is a Brand New Mega-City the Answer? (Shiv Malik)

22:11Amol Rajan:60 years ago, Dubai was sand. Yeah. It's hard to conceive now. In places like, if you want, Tel Aviv and also all the way, you know, most of the cities in China that were part of that 600, again, didn't exist 40 years ago in any kind of noticeable way that they do certainly now, right? Whereas we've had Milton Keynes, which is a wonderful place in lots, lots of ways. Well, actually, you know, you kind of had that list, right? People have been visiting Britain to understand how we do it because they think we do it best, right? So Milton Keynes, you'll find these kind of little designs repeated around the world when you go to other places, right?

22:44For better or for worse, people have visited Britain continuously to learn and understand how we do what. It's not build buildings. It's actually how we place make, right? That's the kind of technical term. But it's how we build, yeah, it's how we build places, how we do political economy, if you want, in all these kind of very sort of weird and curious ways that we think are kind of semi sort of inventive, but the rest of the world finds fascinating. They go, wow, you can do this, you can do that, right? We forget who we are and ourselves. And you only really understand that, I think, when you do, in fact, travel.

23:14But look, Amol, this is another part. I wouldn't be honest if I was saying, look, this is, you know, the notions of Forest City are all about kind of being inspired by what's in the rest of the world. That is actually is not true. It's almost partly being embarrassed by how slow we are. So I'll give you another story. Some very rich people from Malaysia are part of the kind of Malaysian sort of sovereign wealth funds. They said, look, you know, we'd love to invest in a project like this for our city, but we just don't believe in Britain. We had a project where I think we had, they said it took nine years to build nine bungalows.

23:46They were being slightly derisory of the whole thing. They said this to you. But they said this to us. So why you guys just don't know how to build? You can't build. Why would we invest? It would take us ages to build and get nowhere. What did you say? I mean, I was embarrassed and I didn't know what to say because they're right. Right. And obviously, I sort of also said, look, well, we have these special tools called development corporations. And look, we built the Olympics. You know, we got into an argy-bargy about that. But there's always a sense of confidence that just isn't there about the built environment in Britain at the moment.

24:15So you speak to anyone abroad, they want us to succeed. They really want us to succeed. We have, you know, partly because of our language, our history and yes, all the things that we've given to the modern world. We have so many Anglophiles, either by sort of distant relation or just because they love our culture. And so they want us to succeed, but they realise, well, look, you can't do it. The professionals realise that you just can't. What are you doing? Can you get your act together?

24:41Amol Rajan:So why is a city for a million people in East Anglia the answer? Well, here's the other part to that thing. So it's not just inspiration and it's not just kind of slight depression or embarrassment of the rest of the world. But it's at the heart of this project is really this, which is the social contract and repairing the social contract. Right. So what does that mean? It simply means you have to have a country where people can work hard, buy or rent a home and raise a family. If you can't do that, your country is broken. And that is basically what the heart of that book was in 2010. um the jota generation and so that's been my motivation and it's actually imbued with a lot of you know i seem very positive and happy and i am an incredibly optimistic person but there is a sadness a welter of sadness inside of me having watched this for 15 years nothing get better but more than that losing my friends and family to abroad to america to germany to norway you know i've lost my community of people you know i thought our children would grow up together they have not

25:46Amol Rajan:I really hope you're enjoying this conversation with Shiv Malik. If you are, please do subscribe to this podcast on BBC Sounds and that way you will not miss future episodes. And if you do subscribe, just make sure you've got your push notifications turned on and that way you will get an alert whenever we publish a new episode and you'll never miss out. How good would that be? Thank you so much. And now back to Shiv Malik.

26:11Amol Rajan:I remember just to put a kind of timestamp on this I remember working in newspapers in about 2013-14 and getting a phone call from a very senior member of the government a coalition government at the time saying you're going to love this young guy I think it was from a very senior minister probably a member of the cabinet saying we've got a big announcement tomorrow I think it should be all over the front of the Independent which is a paper I worked at at the time we're going to have a raft of garden cities we're going to have a massive new raft of garden cities cities they're gonna be like well in garden city let's with garden city you're gonna love it you should go go to town on it i can't remember what the independent coverage was at the time but i remember thinking this would be so cool i hope one day 12 years from now where maybe i'm lucky enough to be blessed with uh children maybe a garden city would be a cool place to grow up you know i've been to well in and letchworth these are cool places they've got parks and schools and transport links and nice houses what happens it's then absolutely diddly squat which is where Shiv Malik and Forest City comes in.

27:09Amol Rajan:Why are you going to succeed where others have failed? So I was in the midst of writing another book, a third book, called The Mutual Future. And in it was the showcase of this idea was that you could build actually 10 cities, if you want, premised on some interesting lines, right? That you could have genuinely affordable housing, people where you're taking it back to the historic rate of about three and a half to five, kind of price to earnings ratio, but beautiful housing. And you could placemake at scale and you could sort of this disgruntled. And I thought, you know what, I'm just going to just go and do it.

27:42Stop writing this book because I'm going to spend another couple of years talking about it rather than actually just getting stuck in and involved. And I think at the heart of this is this campaign. And I realised, look, getting this done is actually politics. The vast proportion of this stuff, there is nothing in the laws of engineering or finance or economics or whatever it might be. It's just politics. Is it politics or is it democracy? would it be the same thing i mean i could you know use it where it's in our these are problems of our own making in our own mind it's about whether to take planning permission right sounds like quite a dry technical term but the word is permission right in that actually the plans are easy to enough to devise right but it's the permission will you get will we permit ourselves to do this right for ourselves right that's basically what it comes down to you who doesn't

28:28Amol Rajan:so it's politics i tell you who doesn't always seek planning permission um i imagine i don't I'm going to cast aspersions in case he sues us, but is Xi Jinping. This is an astonishing stat which Julian, who works on this program, pulled out. In the first decade of Xi Jinping's rule, builders in China poured more concrete than America did in all of the 20th century. Now, Xi Jinping can do that. China's building cities at an extraordinary rate. Urban areas expanded by 40%. Two-thirds of its population now live in one. Extraordinary things happening in China. China's an autocracy. And we'll get into in a moment some of the objections to Forest City.

29:01Amol Rajan:But have you found that essentially, you know, some of the great schemes, if you think about, you know, your forest cities near another city called Cambridge. Cambridge is my favorite place in the world. It's, I think, the most beautiful city in the world. Cambridge was born of a time, a long time ago, before you had to consult people before you built beautiful colleges on a gorgeous river with a lovely kind of bends in it. Do you think that fundamentally democracy and this kind of ambition cannot be reconciled?

29:33Yes and no. I think, look, that doesn't make it easy, right? So on the ground, it means persuading people. And that is hard. But if you're doing something that's big enough, suddenly you can talk at a regional level, right? So, for example, make it more practical. If we were talking about 2000 homes, well, we know we'd be some private developer at the end of the day that no one would care about. And we certainly wouldn't be able to break the economic model to deliver genuinely affordable housing. And we'd still fight the same battle on the ground. Right. With people who'd go, look, we just can't stand another 2000 homes.

30:05If you suddenly make this a lot bigger in terms of a project, you can actually talk about delivering all sorts of things in terms of infrastructure. new hospitals right people go ah but well you know um where's the hospital going to be well where's the gp surgery it's not just a gp surgery it's a hospital right you kind of have to move beyond their broken trust relationship with private development and actually kind of expand horizons and you can say to a place that as we are uh the town of haverhill well actually you haven't had a train station you're 30 000 people one of england's largest towns without a train station.

30:39It's a nightmare for them to commute to Cambridge. It takes 45 minutes. It's a few miles down the road. It shouldn't take that long. It's nuts, right? We can build a train station because it makes sense, right? We don't have to go begging the treasury for extra funds or whacking up taxes till everyone bleeds dry. Actually, you'll create value. So people get it because the scheme is big enough, right? So if you actually think big enough, you can talk big enough and you can sell big enough and you can actually bring enough people into the tent. Why this spot? Why East Anglia? Why here? It's actually because it's a no-brainer, right?

31:10If you're going to pick anywhere in the country, Cambridge is at the top of everyone's list, both economically and politically, for getting things done.

31:17Amol Rajan:Let's get into the specifics. The big dream is, you know, people can look at the pictures online. This thing doesn't exist yet. They might feel inspired. Let's get into the nits and grits. God, I've got too many children. The nitty-gritty. How much is this going to cost? So the infrastructure, we've costed at about 45 billion. Now, it should be a lot cheaper to build in this area because it's what is known as greenfield development, right? So you haven't, unlike if you wanted to put a tram into Cambridge, it would cost a lot more because you're going to dig up a lot of medieval streets and it'll take a decade longer if you want.

31:48So that is the benefit of doing it in a place like this. But that's what roughly we've costed at. That doesn't include the cost of the homes, but you sell those. And obviously the commercial buildings and the commercial land, again, you sell that, you lease that and you reap that money back.

32:03Amol Rajan:But your argument is that this will be a net contributor within how many years to the British economy? You have a outlay to begin with, but in time, you know, obviously a nice place for people to live, but in time, there's going to be a net contribution. Absolutely. I mean, you know, and it's not always the case. So Milton Keynes was known as Millstone Keynes to Buckinghamshire Council, I think, for a very long time because it does suck up resources. But with this, again, you have to do it at scale, right? So all economists know, look, if you build a place and it's 50 ,000, right? It's a big town.

32:32Then people are basically still commuting to somewhere else. Employers don't really regard you as a kind of, you know, hot, ambitious place to find extra talent, right? So you need to say, this is going to be big where you're going to find talent and you can, you know, locate here strategically over the long term, right? So then the land is valuable to them, right? If not the Malaysian Sovereign Wealth Fund, who's going to provide the dosh? So actually, you know, I've had those conversations with loads of funders, people who do debt financing at huge scales, billions, trillions of assets. Trillions?

33:03Well, they've got, you know, these people have got you know kind of a trillion of assets under management right in some cases but certainly tens of billions hundreds of billions so they do this I've had those conversations they are they would love to invest in something like this and really it's just about bottoming out the kind of case for have we got the politics right right have we got the development corporation that can actually make this happen and then have we got the ultimate business model right do the finances stack up hang on if there are people who've got it's an AUM assets under

33:29Amol Rajan:management people will be familiar if there are people who are managing over a trillion dollars You're talking about some of the biggest institutions of modern capitalism, people who are basically massive, massive, massive funds that manage money all around the world. And you're saying that those people would come on board. They're keen. They're interested. They are. All investors are always looking for good places with low amounts of risk, with high returns. Right. The kind of magic thing. But now we're not necessarily. Yeah. So the return would be standard returns. But the question is, for them, it's about political risk.

34:05That's constantly what, you know, I talked to several billionaires, talked to lots of people with lots of money. And their number one concern is political risk. Right. We don't think this particular government is ambitious enough and would back it. So they put it to me this way. It was put to me this way. If this was the Trump government saying it, and I'm no Trump supporter per se. Right. That's not where my politics align. But this is what was said to me. If it was the Trump government, we know that it would get done and we'd feel comfortable backing it. But we just don't trust this particular administration.

34:33And they wouldn't have trusted the last administration either, the conservative one. So it's about Britain again and our political system.

34:40Amol Rajan:Is this British billionaires or foreign billionaires you're talking to? They are British-based billionaires, in this case, for this particular story. Do they want to put their money into Forest City? Yeah. Yeah, they do. I mean, they would love Britain. I'll put it this way. To be really precise, they would, of course, love Britain to be doing ambitious things because they already have their money invested here. They already have businesses that make them hundreds of millions. Of course, they want Britain to be on the front foot on the global stage and not a kind of sort of semi-embarrassment in that.

35:11So, of course, they would want to see Britain build a city.

35:14Amol Rajan:Why is what the government is doing not sufficient? So the Ministry of Housing and Communities local government told us 342 ,100 net additional homes have been delivered in England between the start of Parliament, July the 9th, 2024, and the 15th of March, 2026. they would say they're doing what they need to they're building homes hundreds of thousands i mean everyone knows that they had a target which is 1.5 million homes by the end of this parliament they're not going to make it they they know that everyone knows that um and in 1.5 million homes is simply not enough they say they will they say you start slow and then you accelerate they're going to hit that sure 1.5 million homes in the parliament wouldn't be bad if they got there well look the new towns program was kind of is a flagship of theirs and that will deliver something like 200 ,000 at most homes.

35:57It's not enough in your view. It's not enough. I mean, everyone knows it's not enough. That's not just my view. The question is, what more can you do and how can you do it better? So it's not just about homes. The New Towns program, again, is very simple. It has no political economy to it, right? The idea is you get a bunch of private developers to build the homes, they sell them off and that's it. Jobs are good and everyone goes home at the end of the day. These aren't places, right? These aren't new places, certainly, And they aren't where we're thinking kind of ambitiously. Look, how do we strategically not just deliver homes, but infrastructure and, of course, commercial land and space so you can actually treat these as whole places, right?

36:36Amol Rajan:How would you characterize the reception you've had from local residents? It's because I don't want to misrepresent it. I don't know what you think. look it's it's really really difficult um turning up to a place where people have very so so just so people kind of know this it's a huge plot 45 000 acres is not small people aren't going to know what that means i guess so if you live in for example if you live in london it's from hamstead to dulwich right of which sort of two million people live in that spot it's four and a half times the size of cambridge so it's a massive city yeah it's big it's big it needs to be big in a sense.

37:12And it incorporates, at the moment, there's about 8 ,000 people who live there currently. And there's about 24 villages. And some of those villages are really, really quite beautiful. They would be totally chocolate box in the way they'd be classified. Do they survive? So yes, in terms of the houses and the villages, of course, they remain exactly that. But I can't get around the fact that as soon as you step outside of that village and you can placemake in all sorts of interesting ways, you can use those 12 ,000 and acres of forest to kind of envelop and kind of protect the village itself from the rest of the city but they will step out and eventually they'll drive a minute and a half and it will be a city so there's no getting around that right why you know i'm not gonna lie and say it's otherwise and of course there's compensation you can pay but i've had those conversations and people who've said look someone said to me look i am 70 years old i have deliberately retired in this is my choice to retire in a village in the quiet of the beauty and beauty of the English countryside and I will live in a building site until I die if you if this goes ahead and when you hear stuff like that firsthand and you sit with people and you talk to them in their gardens and they're serving you tea and telling you this it's really hard to hear and it's this isn't an easy trade-off in that sense it's just it needs to be done for the sake of not just the country but a million people who need hope that this country and their own lives can actually be better, right?

38:41It's a hard trade to make. Are these homes going to be beautiful? Yeah. We've got one of the best architects in the country, Amin Taha. We just kicked off our project to actually build a demonstrator house for a four bedroom terraced home. And I think, again, people have a reference point for new build and it's ugly. They're awful. I would never want to live in basically any of those buildings.

39:04Amol Rajan:So glad you said that because it's quite hard. I've tried to survey public opinion or look into kind of public opinion about this. You know, there's a lot of fashionable opinion about architecture, which kind of really puts some people off. I've got a very, I think, unfashionable opinion, which is a huge amount of new build homes are absolutely horrific to look at. What are they going to say when they see your buildings in Forest City? I hope they say this is one of the most beautiful places they've ever lived in. Is that beauty affordable? Of course. Yeah, it is. It really is. And look, why it's affordable is because you're actually, look, agricultural land costs 9 ,000 an acre.

39:37As soon as you get planning permission, it costs 400 ,000 an acre. As soon as you build anywhere in London, it's going to cost you upwards of 10 million an acre. Right. So people, they're not even comparable in terms of costs. Right. So that's the basic beginnings of how you start to get affordable housing. Isn't the only thing that you need. But yes, they will be beautiful. And actually, here's the intellectual problem, which is how do you then not do pastiche, right? Which is much derided. And people can also argue the other way and go, hey, look, you're just taking the best of the past and re-emulating it.

40:08But for me, there's a problem, which is to say, look, if the whole point of Forest City or one of the major points is to say the future is better than the past. Right. If you simply adopt the aesthetics of the past wholesale, without any kind of modulation or reformation of it, then what are you saying about the future? You're like, oh, no, they did it better. The golden age was yesteryear.

40:29Amol Rajan:When you say affordable, what are you kind of... I mean, obviously, you can't put a price on a house that hasn't been built in a city that doesn't exist. We can. We can, actually. We've said, stated, for not... It contains... It's a city. it'll contain all kinds of housing from you know mansion blocks and big apartments in in tall towers all the way to kind of you know two-bedroom sort of houses but the four-bedroom home is what we focused on to start with because i think that's a kind of it's ambitious and it's certainly bigger than the three-bedroom victorian terraced house i think lots of people in the country kind of live in and think that that's the best thing since sliced bread and it's not it could be better it It could be bigger.

41:04But the price we've set is£350 ,000, right? For the South, in Cambridge, new homes that you're kind of mentioning, they go for£600 ,000 to£650 ,000 now, right now.

41:16Amol Rajan:One of the reasons I ask you about opposition is because we were struck by the proactiveness of people who took against your view. And I really, by the way, I don't want to misrepresent this. I don't want to cast this as kind of, you know, Shiv's got this idea and people can hear the extraordinary passion with which you speak and they might even sort of lord your ambition. I don't want to misrepresent the opposition because there might be people who live locally who think this is fantastic because it gives them hope for their children. But it's worth saying there are a lot of people who are pretty cheesed off.

41:43Amol Rajan:Nick Timothy, who's the local MP, Conservative MP, he thinks you're in la-la land. But Nick Timothy aside, when you went on BBC Radio Suffolk and were interviewed, some of the responses were strong. So Cheryl said, and I quote, I'm absolutely livid. I cannot believe somebody has the temerity to say that he spent lockdown here for the peace and the quest to get away from it all. And he now wants to destroy the very place he came to for peace and quiet. He wants to come here, build a city, make his millions and disappear, probably back to London and leave us with the aftermath. Well, no, he's also building on prime agricultural land.

42:14Amol Rajan:How are we going to feed people? We've already got solar farms going up everywhere. In 10 years time, people will say, we've not got enough food. We've not got enough land. Just go back to London, do whatever you do there and leave us alone. That's not an atypical response I get that on Facebook I get that And actually this is why I like to talk to people in person And it's difficult It's really hard and difficult And the best outcome I ever get From people who really inherently Inherently kind of object to what we're doing Is I get why you're doing it I think it's actually a pretty good idea But I just don't want it here And that's where Not in my backyard, NIMBYism Yeah and I don't want to derive people who are kind of with that phrase.

42:53Amol Rajan:I think NIMBYism is often not very helpful. But can I tell you Cheryl's point? I mean, look, there's a lot of passion in what Cheryl says, but there's some specific points here, which is, first of all, are you going to stand to make millions? Myself? Yes. So I've already said very publicly that I'm happy to give up absolutely everything. I don't care about the money. Right. Did you go to this area during lockdown and enjoy the peace and quiet there? I've written, I've been, I've lived probably a year and a half of my life in Suffolk over the both the pandemic for writing books and all sorts of things.

43:20That's true.

43:21Amol Rajan:Okay. are you building on prime agricultural land I'm just going to say yes it's true but at the same time it turns out you can when you really kind of drill down into it it turns out we can give water to vegetable farmers elsewhere in Suffolk and start to increase productivity farmers don't need more land to be more productive right if people are worried about food security the answer isn't never build over any agricultural land you've got to be more invented and we can be Gerry in Stone Market on this phone echoed the point about farmland but added for a city is a property developer's dream.

43:52Amol Rajan:They'll buy up the farmland at low prices, get a change of use. Once they've got that, the prices will rocket. Also, how many of these places are going to be built are to be for social housing? I don't see any benefit at all. Again, let's take his point in turn. Is it a property developer's dream? It would be if it was a private development, but it's not. We're asking the government to actually build this. There's no way you could do it. So the government's got to find the 45 billion. Ultimately, our job is as this private company, ACDC, right, to kind of, and you know, by the way, there's a bunch of other people also doing infrastructure projects in this way they're just fed up is the name of the company so the albion city development corporation um is we set it up in back in sort of september time is that a pun on the acdc yeah you know a bit of kind of rock and roll i guess to it um it's the best name we could come up with for uh for what we were doing i guess there's a bunch of other people also wanting desperate to see britain build infrastructure right and they can't get planning or the civil service or you know the you know national infrastructure board to kind of do anything right and so they're getting frustrated like me so our job is a bit like sebco to create all of the necessary conditions for this to happen including all of the planning etc we don't actually build the city that's down to ultimately the development corporation which might be a joint venture with maybe us but a bunch of other actual proper builders right that's how we've structured it so of course what you're reading out is not that we can have a long set of rational arguments about why this is wrong and that's wrong people feel basically two things they want to live in villages because that's what they've chosen or that's and it's not just like what they know it's what they've deliberately in many cases chosen right they understand what cities are they don't want to live in one and the second thing is a huge deficit of trust, rightly so, around the development that's already happened, where they live and, again, what they know.

45:44And their right to not trust private developers. Yeah, and I want to be really clear. So that's what's going on. Sure, and I want to be really clear.

45:50Amol Rajan:In reading out this opposition, I want to be really clear that I just think this gets us into the trade-offs of kind of what is involved in living in modern Britain. We approached Geoff Wilkinson, who's a chartered surveyor with 40 years experience, and he said, there is no way we can build this as we have a huge construction skills gap. Loads of professionals, and especially the ones who can build and sign off something like this are all heading into retirement. We need another thousand building control officers just to sign off what's been built or fixed post-Granfell. However, 15 % of the UK's 3 ,000 building control officers will retire in the next two years.

46:23Amol Rajan:Now, I don't imagine, Shiv, that when you were first getting excited about Forest City and first decided to make this kind of your life's work as it is now, you thought to yourself, I wonder about the percentage of building control offices that are retiring in the next few years. I did actually worry about it. Yeah, you've got to have a head for the detail, right? And you've got to understand what the fine-grained problems are. You can't just be wishy-washy about this, right? Because you're going to get holed up instantly. So on that note, the question is, do you have the right attitude to solve problems?

46:54So people say, oh, where are you going to find the doctors and the nurses, right? For all these hospitals you want to build? Well, OK, look, there's another set of problems. We'll solve them. On this specifically, I had a conversation with one of the big four kind of skills providers for the construction industry. What do they want? They want to expand. Great. So they rang me up. They go, here you're building a city. We could train 3000 people each year. That's what we can definitely do. And you can solve these problems. They are eminently solvable, but you've got to have the will to want to do it.

47:23Amol Rajan:And in a spirit, again, of fairness, Jeff Wilkinson went on. However, there are ways Shiv can succeed, but it will come at a cost to projects elsewhere. He'll need a consortium of three large contractors. He goes on to say, however, given the massive people and skill shortages in construction, it would mean similar but smaller projects like Ebb's fleet, Garden City will grind to a halt. I mean, by the way, Ebb's fleet is already kind of basically ground to a halt. It's had 15 years and it hasn't built anything near what it was supposed to. And again, you have to think out of the box. So you have to do, I think, three things.

47:54You need to go in with the requisite kind of right attitude, right? To go, I'm going to solve all these problems because they're eminently solvable at the end of the day. We built cities. We live in cities. We know how to do this. It must be possible. Right. It can't prima facie. It must be possible. And then you've got also realized you've got to have an eye for that detail because there are a multitude of things you need to resolve.

48:14Amol Rajan:We're building a city. Right. Yeah. It incorporates everything. And you've got to want to also then horse trade with people. Right. Lots of people. This is politics in the kind of way that in my mind, it goes back to kind of when you read those kind of long journalistic tomes of kind of 1960s, 70s America and mayors. right they're all horse trading and trying to bargain stuff or on the senate floor right so it feels like that we don't have a british example of it in a sense because we're all you know it's public procurement it's going to take a long time but actually just need to get stuck in horse trade right and and that's what my job has mainly been between trying to realize actually there are huge interests at play here they all actually want some of the same things they don't know it yet my job is to communicate that to them and actually you can unlock a huge thing from this idea by doing this because it's a city.

49:01It contains lots of things.

49:02Amol Rajan:Can I put to you an email completely out of the blue to me from Andrew Colley in Suffolk? I don't know if you know the name. I do. I know Andrew, yeah. You do? Okay, so Andrew, I'd like to say I'm really, so Andrew obviously alerted to the fact you're coming on this podcast because we punted for questions and you're kind of going to stick around and answer some listener questions. Andrew got in touch with me. I don't know Mr. Colley. I'm going to call you Andrew and I want to say thank you very much indeed for being in touch with me. Sent me a message saying I understand you might be making a podcast about Forest City 1.

49:27Amol Rajan:If so, I hope you'll reflect the feelings of the overwhelming majority of the 170 ,000 residents of West Suffolk who oppose this project and that you and your research team will make every effort to explain the reasons why this project is not feasible, needed or wanted. That's the sort of spirit of Andrew Coyle. I'm not going to do his whole email because it's relatively long for a podcast of this length. It goes on to say, at a meeting in Haverhill, which you mentioned, on March 2nd, we were told by Shiv Malik that our homes, land and businesses would be compulsorily purchased if this project went ahead.

49:56Amol Rajan:This was, as you can imagine, deeply troubling. There is a sense in the area that the current residents are being treated as disposable by Shiv and his team as ageing, retired, middle-class NIMBYs. This is not the case. The area in question is home to many thousands of people who by necessity or choice are building their lives here. NHS staff from Addenbrookes and West Suffolk Hospital, teachers and other key staff from many schools. Now he goes on to say, again, in the spirit of fairness, Shiv Malik is someone who has very valid concerns about the economy, about the housing crisis, about the prospects for young people in the UK.

50:25Amol Rajan:But Forest City, Forest City 1, in and of itself, is not going to solve these. I trust you'll interrogate Mr Malik and his project forensically. I want to put to you as a final form of opposition the fact that a lot of people are really cheesed off, not about the impact you might have on the future, but about the impact you're having now. And there are lots of people from Nick Timothy to the people probably on your Facebook page right now, because you said as you walked into the studio that you'd seen another thing on Facebook. But a lot of people that actually say that even just your talk of this project is making their lives harder right now.

50:57Amol Rajan:Selling houses, stress, thoughts of planning for the future. What do you say to them? So maybe a couple of things, but just particularly on that. Look, it is. You're right. I acknowledge that it's causing people anxiety.

51:13And my retort is, well, look, how are you solving the problems of my generation? right because i've watched huge amounts of anxiety distress depression just a complete lack of prospects right these things are trade-offs unfortunately and and we don't want to be living in a zero-sum game which is again that lack of trust people think if you're getting something i must be losing that's not the case it doesn't need to be the case and more than that we're all depressed about the state of the country and the economy right what can we do that to make it better and everyone has to engage the inverse of people saying i get a right to say no because i live here and by the way andrew's wrong 170 000 people in west suffolk lots of them actually support this for a variety of reasons and he's right they don't live in that particular area but as soon as you step outside they realize what the benefits are for homes for jobs for affordable housing for the prospects of for their children for the transport for the just the general i mean for just making an interesting place that they can actually realise they've got a future in, right?

52:19For all those reasons, that we have plenty of supporters. But you're right. It's hard at the end of the day to deal with people's emotions. And it's on me and the other hundreds of people who support Forest City and actually have worked on this pro bono in many ways.

52:36Amol Rajan:Some of them big names, people like Paul Johnson, formerly from the IFS, people like Stephen McAdam, the architect who built King's Cross and the Olympics. Yeah, we've got some amazing, amazing supporters. So Tim Smith, who did the Eden Project. We've got cross party support from lords and baronesses, etc, etc. So, you know, we've got lots of supporters for sure. But look, all of this is difficult. It's not, as I said earlier, it's not easy. If it was easy, you know, we'd maybe be doing it all the time, because it makes economic and rational sense. But it is difficult. And Andrew's not wrong. There is It's a trade-off And as I said It's not an easy one to make But that doesn't mean It shouldn't be made Is it called Forest City One Because you intend to build others?

53:19I think other people Could use it as a model Yeah To again Hopefully to emulate Around the country Around the world Why not? Would you live there? Yeah 100 % I absolutely want to live there I need I want a place to live Where my If you want In a really selfish way My friends and family Can also live there And we don't have to be stressed About having to move or whether we've got enough space for kids or whether we can afford the mortgage or the rent in a community which can just be stable. It's actually many of the things which people who object to other housing have already and they feel that they would lose it, right?

53:51Amol Rajan:We're talking not long after Elon Musk became a nominal trillionaire and SpaceX went public as a company. SpaceX is a very complicated company. It's not really mostly about space exploration. I had the privilege of chatting to his kind of probably best mate, a guy called Adeo Resi on the Today programme. And Adeo Ressi talked about this moment more than 25 years ago now, when the two of them, him and Elon Musk, were sat on a kind of, I think, the long express highway somewhere, looking at stars and thinking about what to do next. They'd already had a billion dollar exit, I think, from PayPal. And Musk goes, well, what about space?

54:23Amol Rajan:Should we do space? And Adeo Ressi's like, no, let's not do that. And Adeo Ressi is Musk's close friend who organized this kind of intervention where he got all these space scientists to say, you're completely nutty mad. And Musk has done it. And the rest is, I would say it's history. But actually what he's planning is only just starting. Elon Musk had to answer back then a question that I'm going to ask you now. And I put it in the context of Elon Musk to try and be nice to you because it feels like a rude question. And the question is, who the hell are you? Who the hell are you? This Guardian journalist, ex-Guardian journalist who left about a decade ago, author of The Jilted Generation from East London to turn up in West Suffolk.

55:02Amol Rajan:and say to thousands of people, we're going to build over your home? I'm just someone who is desperate to solve the problems of my generation. And I have been for 15 years and I'm tired of talking about it. I'm tired of being some Cassandra-like figure, you know, kind of right. But then ultimately kind of, you know, the problems that we talk about just aren't getting resolved. This can't go on any longer. It can't. It just, we have to repair the social contract in this country. We have to get this country back on its feet. So that's the guy that I am. That's the guy who, by the way, my, you know, there are, again, hundreds of supporters on this, but also a co-founder who has his own backstory and doing exactly the same thing.

55:45So that's who ultimately we are. And we're going to get it done. Look, I think this will happen. And that will cause anxiety. will continue to do so but there are going to be necessary trade-offs but also ways in which you do the politics on the ground and we we haven't always succeeded at this but we will continue to do so and try and do it as properly as possible i just want to put two final thoughts to you the

56:11Amol Rajan:final one's going to be about what happens next and how this is going to turn into reality but just the penultimate one is we had a remarkable human being called matt clifford on this podcast a few episodes ago. Mac Clifford is a huge figure in modern Britain because he's really at the forefront of British AI. He wrote the AI strategy for Keir Starmer, which has been adopted in full. He said something which lots and lots of other people who've contacted me were very persuaded by and picked up on, which is the idea that we've got a vitocracy. And the reason we've got a vitocracy in this country, and he said that on the basis of his time in number 10, he said it on this podcast, is that you hear from the people who object to something, for instance, the residents of part of East Anglia who don't want Forest City to happen, but you tend not to hear from the people who are going to lose out.

56:54Amol Rajan:What would you say, in the spirit of a podcast called Radical, addressing the problems of today and keen on big ideas and ambition, about the need to be radical to get over the tendencies of democracies to slide into veto-cracies? I would almost wholesale agree with Matt and his analysis. And I think the politics then becomes saying, you know what? We know we need to do this and we're just going to push through. And it's the right thing to do ultimately for the sake of a million young adults in Britain. Right. Again, the people who like to veto stuff don't have to take on the personal responsibility or any responsibility for the next generation.

57:36Right. They don't have to sit there going, how are we going to solve housing? It's not their problem. Right. They just don't want the thing in their area. So that's how, and it's not wrong of them to think like that, but it's the boundary of their, in a sense, political engagement. It's not good enough, right? It's just not good enough. If we're actually, I'm not an elected official, right? And yet, so in a sense, the weirdness of what I'm doing is, why am I taking this on in my way? Because I just need it to be solved and the country needs it to be solved at large. That's really my retort. When I sit in people's homes and they give me tea and they tell me how hideous this scheme is, I tell them, well, what's your solution, right?

58:16Because if you're simply saying, I just don't want it in my area, you're not engaging really with politics at large. What happens next?

58:23Amol Rajan:I'm looking at a lovely document saying, Let's Build a City by Shiv Malik and Joseph Reeve. You've got beautiful pictures of this future world. I've seen articles in the FT a couple of weekends ago. What's actually happening? How do you turn this into reality now? I mean, we're moving at a real pace. So this isn't pie in the sky. No. This is happening. This is real people employed to make this happen. No, the next thing I think that people actually see is this demonstrator house. So it's a four-bedroom terraced house, 160 square metres. It's big. Hopefully, it'll be situated then in Cambridge.

58:54We're already talking to the landowners in the area. And people will be able to go visit it. And it should be beautiful. If it's not, we'll fail, right? And then we want to sign up hundreds of thousands of people to say, OK, come and live in Forest City. Now, you know what this house might look like. It won't be the only house. Sure. But, you know, you get an impression of what it will be like. And then I think that's how you also get the people in the room who will be affected engaged. Right. So that is basically, in a sense, one of the big next steps. Of course, behind all of that requires lots of, as I mentioned, horse trading, but talking to the regional powers that be and obviously MHCLG, the Ministry for Housing.

59:32And then ultimately, whoever the next prime minister is, or if it remains Gia Stelmer, getting them involved, because this is such a big project that it needs prime ministerial backing. So all those discussions are continuing right now and they're progressing. People get it. People get it, right? something needs to change how long would it take to build it will take but well overall it will take probably 25 to 30 years that's pretty quick by british standards certainly or even by chinese standards until you can get to a population of kind of 1 million ultimately um but it could start within within five years or three or four years from now we should have a ceremonial spade in the ground the first people might be moving in by 2034 2035 i'm all you could you can come and live there

1:00:19Amol Rajan:uh why not tell you i'm just thinking about you love cambridge great i do well i tell you what it'd be interesting to come back and interview you you know even sooner than that in a couple of years and see how progress works or hasn't worked let me add one last thing and again as i said i come off as kind of i am very optimistic and and kind of push through but some things um My other elements of that motivation is this sort of well of sadness. But then sometimes it's also just sort of a bit of anger. So one of the very first conversations we had about this was one of the most senior people in infrastructure in the civil service, right at the top of government.

1:00:57And that person had a CV, as long as your arm, in terms of actually getting things built. And he said, look, it's a fabulous idea. And of course, from an engineering perspective, you could totally do this. The problem is, is that this isn't the kind of thing, and I'm quoting, this isn't the kind of thing that 21st century Britain can do anymore. And I thought, that can't stand. That just can't stand. I can't live in a country where that is true. It has to change.

1:01:24Amol Rajan:Well, I'll tell you what, Shiv, you are nothing if not radical. Thank you so much for joining us on this podcast. It's been a real privilege and honour. So thank you, Amo.

1:01:38Amol Rajan:I don't think that you're going to hear on this podcast a better illustration of the trade-offs and the realities involved in trying to address some of the problems of modern Britain. We've talked a lot on this podcast in previous episodes about young people, about housing, about planning reform. And we've also talked, and I mentioned it there, we've also talked about this idea that in Britain, if you want to do hard things, there are trade-offs. and the people who object are often heard loudly, but the people who stand to gain from doing those hard things aren't always heard as loudly. This was Matt Clifford's idea that democracy slips into a veto-ocracy.

1:02:13Amol Rajan:Well, Forest City, whether you think it's a great idea or completely balmy, just crystallises all of those issues. It is a massively ambitious antidote to some of the prevailing feelings and forces that are dominant in Britain today, and it involves really annoying a lot of people. And I hope if you are one of those people, particularly perhaps a local resident, you feel that we did convey your sentiment and we did fairly interrogate Shiv Malik. But by the same token, if you want Britain to be one of those places that is ambitious and builds new cities, well, I hope you feel that Shiv got a fair hearing and a chance to lay out his vision.

1:02:47Amol Rajan:In the end, if you want to be radical, you're going to have to annoy lots and lots of people. And I thought it was admirable that Shiv Malik came on this podcast and really did engage with his critics. and he thinks that his idea has real momentum. And who knows, maybe if I were to speak to him in 15 years' time, it would be from Britain's first city in decades.

1:03:11Amol Rajan:That is it for this episode. To make sure you don't miss future conversations, please do subscribe to Radical with the Mole Rajan on BBC Sounds. We will be back at the same time next week. Thank you so much for listening and goodbye.

1:03:51Amol Rajan:We'll see you next time. details. Chevy Drive Chicago. What do Beatles member Sir Paul McCartney, YouTube megastar Mr. Beast and former Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg all have in common? They're all being discussed in the new season of Good Bad Billionaire, the podcast which explores the lives and fortunes of the world's super rich. That's Good Bad Billionaire from the BBC World Service. Listen now, search for Good Bad Billionaire wherever you get your BBC podcasts.