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Another World IS still Possible. The old system was never fit for purpose - and now it's collapsing around us. So how do we co-create a Thrutopian future that we'd all be proud to leave as our legacy?
What stories can we weave of possibility? Of transformation? What happens if we commit to a world based on generative values: compassion, courage, integrity?
What happens if we let go of the race for meaningless money and commit instead to the things that really matter: clean air, clean water, clean soil - and clean, clear, courageous connections between all parts of ourselves, between ourselves and each other, between ourselves and the Web of Life - so that we can reclaim our birthright as self-conscious nodes in the web of life?
We can do this. Some of us already are. Every week on Accidental Gods we speak with the people who are living this world into being, courageous pathfinders who are exploring the emergent edge of inter-becoming.
As a species, we have all the answers, we just haven't yet crafted all the new stories and woven them into a future that works. We have the choice now - we can choose to transform…or we can face the chaos of a failing system.
Our Choice. Our Chance. Our Future.
Accidental Gods is a podcast and membership program devoted to exploring the ways we can create a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations yet to come.
Find the membership and the podcast pages here: https://accidentalgods.life
Find Manda's Thrutopian novel, Any Human Power here: https://mandascott.co.uk
Find Manda on BlueSky @mandascott.bsky.social
On LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/mandascottauthor/
On FaceBook https://www.facebook.com/MandaScottAuthor
Manda: Hey people, welcome to Accidental Gods. To the podcast where we do still believe that another world is possible, and that if we all work together there is still time to lay the foundations for a future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I'm Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller as we explore the thrutopian possibilities for how we move from a present that we recognise, towards a future that we would be proud to leave behind. And this week we're exploring the very human need for shelter, autonomy, a sense of safety in our own homes, and how we reconcile this with the wider need for us to collaborate with the animate earth, to become the self conscious nodes in the web of life, so that we can each find what's ours to do, that only we can do, and that we can do best. So our core question here is how do we create more homes in a thrutopian process that shifts us from the dysfunction of our current system to something that actually works for people and planet? And our guest this week has just completed a Masters at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, which for those outside the UK we tend to refer to as SOAS. It's one of the most radically progressive schools in the UK, and its graduates are increasingly aligned with thrutopian thinking.
Manda: So our guest has written his thesis addressing the problem of housing and today he comes to talk to us about his concept of the stewardship freehold Village, which, having read his substacks and some of his thesis, feels like one of those ideas that is so obvious it's amazing that nobody has thought of it before. But nobody has, or at least if they have, the ideas were lost in the toxic chaos of a trust free planning system that rewards the most predatory of predatory capitalists. And while we are addressing this through the lens of the UK planning system, I don't think it's unique to the UK. If anywhere else in the world has developed a genuinely useful planning system, I haven't heard about it. So if you have, please do let me know. But in the meantime, Michael Taite started his professional life working for a huge London developer, now long gone. But towards the end, he was responsible for a portfolio of 13 developments with big residential schemes in Docklands and other sites in London and in Manchester and the north east of England. While he was there, he passed over a dozen professional exams which, amongst other things, gave him insights into the arcane depths of UK planning law. Since 1996, he has been self-employed and has split his time between his business and environmental and local community concerns. So, for instance, he served 19 years as the lead operational trustee for the Environmental Law Foundation, a UK national charity which secures free legal help for communities under threat.
Manda: He also served as a parish councillor and a trustee of his local village hall, and with his wife, Gail, ran their small brand strategy agency, whose signature process was a system for consulting whole organisations to secure genuine, broad stakeholder support, when radical change was scary but necessary. The agency's slogan was 'brave equals safe', which does feel a good through step for our times. Having attained his master's from SOAS, (Congratulations!) Michael is now working on progressing the concepts that emerge from that process, in the hope of contributing to averting some of the worst aspects of the intertwined global catastrophes that we address all this time in the podcast and tend to call the poly crises or the meta crises, or more recently, the earth crisis. So this is one of those practical podcasts, offering us a genuinely practical framework that we could implement now, to step away from the dysfunction of the present towards a future that would actually work. So here we go, people of the podcast, please welcome Michael Taite, creator of the concept of the Stewardship Freehold Village, an idea whose time has definitely come.
Manda: Michael Taite, welcome to the Accidental Gods podcast. How are you and where are you on the first day of September, which is when we're recording. We're in autumn, real autumn now. Where and how are you?
Michael: I'm very well. Very well, thank you, Manda. And I'm speaking to you from my home, which is near Pershore in Worcestershire. So not very far from you.
Manda: Oh, you're not far. I used to go dog training there, bizarrely enough, in the days when one used to drive long distances to train dogs. Yay! So I know exactly where you are. Alrighty. So as we said in the intro, you have just completed a Masters at SOAS, the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, which is well known for being pretty radical. So congratulations. Have you actually got your masters now?
Michael: Yes. I go and pick up my certificate next week.
Manda: Congratulations. And are you going to do a PhD? Because this feels to me like PhD territory.
Michael: No, I need to earn a living.
Manda: Oh, darn.
Michael: I know. So no, I won't be doing that. But I am looking to progress the concepts which I've been working on alongside everything else. Yeah.
Manda: Okay. And just from my own interest, we're already shifting off where I thought we were going; was this a taught masters or was it a master's by dissertation only?
Michael: It's taught. It's online. So a set number of sort of one to ones with your tutor very much follows the conventional course, occasional group Zoom calls. Some of those organised by fellow students, which are brilliant because you've got literally people from around the world and of extremely different perspectives. And which is quite sobering and just great actually. I think I was probably the oldest by a long way, but really, really, really, good. And so you do feel part of something genuinely global, actually, it's great.
Manda: Fantastic. And what's the topic? What's your master's in.
Michael: It's sustainable development. Yeah.
Manda: Sustainable development. Okay. Excellent, excellent. Okay. And just we're already veering well off track. But for me, sustainable means doing a little bit less harm. And I apologise to listeners if you can hear the very large earth moving things outside the window. I'm sorry, but we didn't have another time to record. Sustainable - doing slightly less harm. And we're beyond that now, we need to be actually regenerative, which is what your project is all about. Is SOAS aware that sustainable might not be where it's at anymore?
Michael: It's very open actually. I mean, right at the beginning it says, is this a contradiction in terms? Is this possible? And so it very much starts from that very open position and makes people look at it in a very questioning way. They don't have to say anything, they just give you information and it becomes very, very political very quickly, because you realise that all of the choices come down to who's got the power.
Manda: What is development and why would we be developing in the first place? And is it all just basically capitalism in action?
Michael: Yes. Who's it for?
Manda: Alrighty. So on the basis of that, you've written a number of Substacks and a dissertation, all of which I have had a look at, and they are extraordinary. And you wrote your dissertation on the concept of the Stewardship Freehold Village. And this is one of those things that now I've seen what you've written, I think why has nobody done this before? It's so obviously essential. But nobody has done it before and it got to you to think about doing it. So in a bit you're going to describe to us what this is, but before we get there, I want you to give us a little bit of your track to getting here. Why this topic? Because I know from when I did a master's that right at the beginning, you go, you're going to write a dissertation in a year's time, you have 35,000 words, you have to start thinking about it now. And everybody's like frozen rabbits in the headlights of, oh, what do I do? There's a million things. And eventually nine months later, you're like, this. This is what I'm doing. How did you get to this idea of completely transforming the planning laws to actually make them more fit for purpose.
Michael: It consists of four modules, and each of those you have to do a major essay for, as part of it. And the very first one it says, okay, look at how you would apply circular economy principles to an industry of your choice.
Manda: Oh, interesting.
Michael: And so I'm looking around and thinking, well, what do I know about? And what you learn very, very, very quickly is that an enormous number of the problems that people have overseas in less developed countries; we have remarkably similar problems here. We haven't solved many problems. And in fact, we're arguably further along in creating the problems and giving ourselves the final problems to try to sort out. But our problems are just as deep. There's a lady whose work I read, I think, called Cornwall, who was with SOAS, and is now with King's, something like that. Who works, I think, doing voluntary service overseas, something like that, for quite a while. And she said when she came back to England, she was just shocked by how people who were not in power, people who did not have money, were facing incredibly similar problems. And she thought, what am I doing going abroad and trying to trying to help them?
Manda: When capitalism is doing exactly what it says on the tin at home as well.
Michael: Yes. And again, when you're sort of almost physically, in a virtual thing, sat beside people who are in all these other countries, a lot of which have been so affected by the imperial processes over the last 200 years. It's a little bit awkward. And you think we've just got to put our own house in order, you know? So I thought, well, I do have some background and some understanding of the housing industry in general and the residential property market in particular, and so I thought I'll focus on that because it's a hot topic around where I am, you know, and it's very divisive. And yet we've got loads of land! I mean, this is, I think 91.2% of England is of a non developed use. You know, we're told there's no land, no land, no land. Well, in the broader scale of things there are reasons to say, you know, we haven't got land to be extravagant. But there is lots and lots and lots of land and most of it we're not using at all well. Hardly any of it in fact, are we using well.
Michael: So I thought okay, I'll apply that. How would I apply the circular economy principles to housing? And that led very quickly to sort of the bare bones of the sustainable development of the whole Freehold Village concept. And then you realise that people have objections to housing developments. And I think what are those objections? And so that led to what would an unobjectionable application look like? To satisfy everybody. And so you develop that and come up with that and say, look at that, I've ticked all your boxes. Now will you support this? And you talk to parish councillors and you talk to local people and they say, yeah, that's great, that's great, that's great. No. We won't. Why won't you support that? Because that's not what's going to be built. We've been here before; that's the thin end of the wedge. If we see an application for three houses, we know that in a few years time there'll be five. We see an application for 30 houses, we know in a few years time there will be 50, 60, 70. Here you've got lots and lots of land, lots of opportunity for infill. You say 100 homes, we'll come back in ten years time and there'll be 1000. We don't believe it.
Michael: And so a lot of the dissertation then focuses on that enormous breakdown in trust and how justified that breakdown in trust is. And the way in which the whole system is gamified so much. And in defence of those who gamify the system cynically, it is set up to do that. And this comes back to the problems that capitalism has always had and which has always been acknowledged by capitalists; that there cannot be free market in land which allocates land to the best use and the greatest societal benefit or the most valuable benefit. Because of all the features of land, which are because it was pre-existing, because it grants monopolistic control, because you can't substitute it for anything else. And so every landmark, it is distorted and down the ages, and still today, politicians have struggled to find out how can we compensate for that? How can we balance that out? And Churchill called Land the mother of all other forms of monopoly. And he used this in a speech when he was justifying a slew of new land taxes in 1909. But they were so complicated and so hard to collect that the costs exceeded some years collecting them, the revenues. And so come 1920, they abandoned the whole lot. And almost all the mistakes they made with that were about to repeat with the mansion tax, by the way. Exactly the same thing, with different levels of complexity, saying we want to know what the current value is. And so we're going to value all these things. People are going to dispute it like mad. You have lots and lots of nice old ladies living in terraced houses in Battersea saying Churchill was absolutely right. I didn't add value to this, so why should I now have to move? Because I can't afford to pay this. So it's just the same mistakes all over again. But there is a recognised problem with the capitalist system and Land. And so you have to try to find a way around that. And that's what then leads to the legal structure of the Freehold Village, so that it removes the incentives and possibilities of speculating. But then when you look at the reasons behind the lack of trust. That's what then leads to the concept of saying, well, look, let's scrap this system. Let's have a different system and let's have policy led planning allocation. Sorry, that was a bit of a ramble.
Manda: No, no, it's really good. And my brain fell over at little old ladies in a semi in Battersea who are going to have a mansion tax. But let's park that for a bit, because one of the core premises of this podcast, as you know, is that capitalism is not fit for purpose and is collapsing. So while it collapses, though, it seems to me that we need to find the bridges to a better way of doing things and that.
Michael: Yes.
Manda: So you've identified the absolute lack of trust in the planning process, the fact that the planning process tends to be gamified, particularly by the people with a lot of money. And somewhere in one of the articles of yours that I've read in the last half day, you said that some ridiculous amount of the land that had been bought for development in the the UK, and I'm guessing around the world, isn't developed. That we have a need for a number of homes that you will remember and I don't, (6 million?) and they're not being built because developers don't think, yet, they're going to get a massive enough return on investment. And their return on investment was somewhere in the region of 20 to 30%, which is Musk levels of return on investment. It's insane.
Michael: There's a big difference here between the big house builders, the big 4 or 5, and the little guys. The little guys, the small house builders, used to build 40, 50% of our houses 30 years ago. There were about 12 to 14,000 of them. They're about 2500 left now. And they're making margins of sort of 4 or 5, 6%. The big house builders don't really build houses. They are land speculators. And it's quite important to the quality of their planning application concept, that when they come to buy land they know that they have monopsonistic power. It's an oligarchical system and they can basically dictate things. What they actually do is to promise the world to the landowners, say, oh, you've got ten acres, we're going to buy them. We're going to pay you so much. What do you want? We'll pay that. And they know that it's going to take a long, long time to get planning. And they know that whilst that's going on, the landowner, usually a farmer is going to be sort of living and hoping. To a certain extent spending some of that already.
Michael: And he's probably already 65 and the process has been going on, it's going to go on for another 4 or 5, six, seven, eight, nine years. And all this while they're putting toward their plans, they're arguing with the local authority. And this great thing about viability comes up. So we can't afford to comply with all these things you want us to do, because the conventional way at the moment to try to redress the balance is through what they call section 106 agreements. And these are agreements whereby, as you know, the council and other people say, we'll let you do this, but you've got to build this road, you've got to build this town hall, you've got to build this school garden or whatever it is. And in particular, you need to build more units for affordable housing. And then gradually they say, well, we can't do that. Because as you can see, within the planning framework, we're allowed to push things off if they're not viable. If we can't make enough profit. But they set the profit levels and they don't have to disclose what all those numbers are.
Manda: Oh, really? They're marking their own homework?
Michael: Yeah. Yeah. So they're marking their own homework and they can play one off against the other. And again I will give you some links to these things that you can put in the show notes. Because there's 1 or 2 reports in particular which are very, very thorough academic reports. And they then go back to the farmer. Of course, they don't say we've managed to get loads and loads of concessions here. They're pushing us really hard. I know that six years ago we promised you we'd give you, you know, a million an acre. But honestly, the way it's working out... And by this stage, the farmers been hanging on for ages and ages and ages. He doesn't want to go through the whole process again. He's not going to let them walk away. So he has no choice other than to give in. And that's how you end up with 25-30% margins. It's nothing to do with building the houses, because you build the houses as cheaply as you can, to a set formula, and you've screwed down all the subcontractors. So that's how you make the money on that. So it's a very, very different world there to the smaller guys, many of whom would dearly love to do a much, much better job than they do. But they are completely limited by how much they have to pay for the land. And that's the trouble, is that what you have is a system whereby the competition is to pay the landowner as much as you possibly can. It drives all the value to the landowner. So if you find a way of building more cheaply, if you find some new technology which enables you to do something much better, all of that value goes to the landowner because you're in a race to try to pay the most. And the landowner doesn't care about the community because he's off.
Manda: Gone to the Bahamas.
Michael: So there is no interest there, it's a complete misalignment of interests. And so jumping a bit here, but to the quality of planning allocation, what that does is to say, look, okay, stop competing to give the landowner as much money as possible. Start competing to win over the local community, to win over the parish council, to win over the local planning authority. Find out what the best possible use for that plot of land is, so that they think, well, okay, that's a bit of empty around there, just outside the village. Um, what do you want? And so you win over the community so that when you've got something, and you go through an iterative process; I was inspired here by your interview with Ruth Catlow.
Manda: Oh, excellent! Friend of the podcast.
Michael: And talked about quadratic voting. Yes? And quadratic voting where you show people here are some ideas based on what you've told us is needed. And we've done some investigations, we've spoken to the council. This fits with what they need. This fits with what you need. We think this is great. Which of these things do you like? And they don't just express a preference, there's a strength of preference expressed.
Manda: Yes. There's a weighting to it.
Michael: Yes. And so we've listened to you, we've come back now with these. Which of these ones is good? And so you work out something which has got genuine, genuine support. And the local planning authorities can be very nervous about granting permission if they think they're going to get challenged by powerful people. But there's nobody with a vested interest to challenge it, because they know that the vast majority of people support it and they understand why. And this is a process in a completely other world I've gone through a lot of times. So even the people that don't support it think, well, I can see why that's a good thing. Then they can grant permission. And if they've signed up to the scheme, they can go to the landowner and they can say, right, if you sign up for this scheme, we will give planning permission straight away. It is conditional upon you agreeing and the developer agreeing to transparent accounting. And the developer will make this amount of profit, we've agreed they're entitled to make 12%. Most small builders would snatch your hand off for 12%. But if they had to take a downside, miscalculated, that would be quite reasonable, but they're going to make 12%.
Michael: And if there's an upside and they make more money, then that will be shared with you and with the community. And this wouldn't have been possible until a few years ago. But of course, now we have the wonders of making tax digital, and we have even tiny construction projects now run on project management software. So it's actually very easy for people to show their workings. I spoke to a project manager who actually manages enormous construction projects, mixed use things with tower blocks and shops and marinas and all this sort of stuff. And he looked at this and, and he said, well, to be honest, depending on the size of the project, it would take quite a bit of setting up. He said, one of my projects, it would probably take me three days to set up. But I get all of the invoices, all of the costs, all of the revenues come through me. So I know the complete financial position. Once I've set that up, he said, it's just another row on my spreadsheet. And so I can tell you at any one time then what the projected gross profit will be, what the margin will be. So he said, yeah, we can do that.
Manda: Yeah. And three days of his time in the overall cost of the project, I mean I guess they get paid quite well, but that's not going to cripple anybody. Okay. Let's take a few steps back, because we got into the weeds a bit there and we still haven't described to people what a Stewardship Freehold Village is. But let me just also take a step back, because we are talking to people all around the world. So we are specifically talking about planning in the UK. However, it seems to me that the concepts of getting local people on board, deciding why you are building what you're building, building homes that are viable. Because one of the things that is in your writing and is also obvious if you look around, is that nobody's building homes people would actually want. They're building ghastly brick boxes that are minimally insulated. They're taking the least possible environmentally decent tick boxes. You go into some of these and it seems like builders don't understand that people need storage space. They end up building a shed in the garden to put stuff in, because there's nowhere to put anything in the house, except kitchen cupboards. And the whole thing is designed not to give people a good place to live, but to maximise the profits of the builders.
Michael: It's to minimise the cost and to go as close as possible to those minimum standards, so that you can squeeze as much and get as much revenue as possible.
Manda: Yeah, and even in the UK, when they say they have to produce a certain number of affordable houses, the concept of affordable housing in the UK when I last looked was 80% of market value. That's not affordable to most people. So the whole concept, this is capitalism in action, as we said, and Polanyi is back to the commodification of land, labour and capital. And the whole idea that we could own land is antithetical to us being connected to the web of life. But we can't step from total land ownership to communitarian land ownership in one giant band. We're going to have to do the infill steps. And it feels to me that your concept here is an infill step, because it inherently looks at if the whole village says, you know, what we really want to do with that field is rewild it, then we rewild it and we don't build houses all over it. But if they say we all have kids and grandkids and we want them to be able to live within a certain amount of space of the village, we'd like to put ten houses on there and rewild the bit at the back. Then presumably that's viable. Although I was really interested in your Land going with the village. We'll get to that in a bit, when we get back into the weeds. So this is a very UK focussed podcast for people in the rest of the world, but I think it's transferable. Everybody's going to have problems with their local planning department. It's just the phraseology of the exact notation of whatever the subparagraph is, is going to be slightly different, but it's still going to be there. So tell us about Stewardship Freehold Village, what it is and why it is what it is. Go for it.
Michael: Right. So very often with communities around where I live, across most of England, most of which is semi-rural, frankly, and I know this applies in other parts of certainly the developed world, there is an enormous shortage of good housing, of affordable housing, of attractive housing, of sustainable, remotely sustainable housing. And so if you were to say to a community, what do you need? We've got some land here which actually might be available; what do you need? Then I think in many instances the answer will not be we need a tower block or a car park, it's going to be we need one of these; we need a Sustainable Freehold Village. And the concept of a Sustainable Village frankly is very thrutopian, in that it very much starts where we are. And it is not a commune. It is not even actually, to a great extent, that much of an intentional community. Because the idea is it should be a place which ordinary people, couples, both working, planning a family, people retiring, people in all sorts of walks of life. But people with very ordinary incomes will want to live and can live. And as such, the houses are of a reasonable price. My target is £200,000.
Manda: That's more than reasonable. You'll have your hands bitten off, but anyway.
Michael: And you've got a good home. And I started off by trying to make the maths easy, but actually it keeps working out well on various fronts. I thought, I'll have 100 homes and I'm going to make each of them 100m², and that's a bit bigger than a three bed semi. So you can you can have three beds and two bathrooms at that size. And that's a really, really good usable home, in our society. And what's going to make it more sustainable? Again, degrees of sustainability, it can never be 100%, what's going to make it more sustainable? What's going to give us options? Fritjof Capra, the writer, is a great one for building in optionality in the future, just to allow people some room for creativity. So we want it to be built on circular economy principles. We have homes which are built as far as possible from materials from this country, from recyclable, reusable, recyclable materials. So that really basically means modular housing. And there are all sorts of different approaches to modular housing, some of which are really, really expensive. Some of which are just brilliant, I'm sure some are awful. But you know, it's a really good starting place.
Manda: So this is kit housing, for people who are not familiar with the phraseology. You basically buy it in a kit and you had them on screws, not even on foundations. You don't have to get a builder to lay concrete foundations. You come in and you screw it into the Land. Tell us a little bit about that, because I found that really interesting as an idea.
Michael: You'll see in my Substack, there's a lot of focus on the soil. What quickly emerges when you start to look into everything is that the soil is everything, and without soil, we don't have anything. With it, we have the potential for everything. And if you're granted title over land by the state, again, land is unusual; the state creates your legal right to have it. Owning land depends upon, it is subordinate to sovereignty. So it's an unusual thing to own in that respect as well. And so if you're privileged to own it, a bit of what our country is, we shouldn't let you ruin it. And we shouldn't let you ruin its potential for the future. And so actually, you really should be told you cannot, your duty is to preserve the soil. If you preserve the soil, then you don't pollute neighbours, you don't affect neighbours. The soil networks are able to live. Everything gets a chance to live. So the basis of sustainability is look after the soil as much as you possibly, possibly can.
Michael: And so we're going to have 100 homes. We put them onto helical screws. We put foundations in, which is instead of having a big block of concrete in which you remove all the soil, put lots and lots of rubble in, lots of concrete, kill everything. Bang! Don't do that. Just put these bars in. I've seen them, there was a house being built near here that I've had a look at. And they screw them in. They have what looks like a digger, but it's actually a giant screwdriver and it puts these things on top and screws them down. And they measure all the levels very carefully with their laser things. And then you've got your platform, because you connect those up with some beams and there you are.
Manda: How many, for your 100 square metre house? How many screws go into the ground? It's not just one at each corner, I'm thinking.
Michael: Oh gosh, no, no no no no no. The one I saw, they're about three metres apart.
Manda: Okay. And then, because I want to picture this, is there then a gap underneath for the rats to go and live and thrive? Or is there not much of a gap?
Michael: You can dictate.
Manda: Because you're not destroying the soil. But it depends if you're in a flood zone, you want them a little bit higher up, maybe?
Michael: Exactly. It depends very much on the local climate and local conditions. You know, in a lot of parts of the US, a very traditional thing in hot areas was to build the houses up high, so you let the air circulate underneath to keep it cool. So you can adjust that. But yes, you want it slightly above so that you are allowing the natural soil processes to carry on.
Manda: Okay. Not much is going to grow, because you're sheltering it all. So you're not going to get grass growing under there because your house is effectively blanketing it.
Michael: No. And yes, you've got to allow for, as you say, do you want to make a home for rats under there? Probably not. So there are things you going to have to take into account. But all of the modular stuff is very, very well established. It's not hard.
Manda: And designed in the UK of materials in the UK? Because it seems to me the Strait of Hormuz is basically closed forever, as far as I can tell. But even if it's not, given the world we're heading into where fossil fuel prices are going to go through the roof and then hopefully stop, we want to be doing as much as we can from things within reach. A part of circularity is that you use local and or recycled goods. Are there modular places in the UK that are building with at least UK based materials?
Michael: It's quite fragmented at the moment, but there are an increasing number of modular housing companies in the UK. And they can provide a high degree of natural materials. Sometimes there's a conflict between it being sourced in the UK and it being natural. Some of the most interesting designs I looked at were actually a firm in Sweden and and they said, yeah, all of our products are 75% natural materials. If you want it 95, we can do that. And you can make these things look however you want it to look. They're great. So you have your houses and you think, okay, that's mostly recyclable, reusable, repurposed materials. Where are you going to recycle everything? And actually, if you want this to be a sustainable community, then we want enough land for all of their power and for all of their water sourcing and water treatment, wastewater treatment. And we want enough land for everything which is compostable to be composted on site, got rid of on site.
Manda: And then used to grow things. Because you can.
Michael: Exactly. And anything which can't be composted, which has to go to the local tip, actually, sorry, we've got a concession from the council because we're not using their services for the waste services for the most part. So you do have to pay extra for that. So the community will have to pay extra for that, so there's a big incentive to minimise non-recyclable stuff in particular. Then the natural thing at the moment for supplying all your energy is solar. But some sites will be much better suited to other things. And certainly district ground source will be an option in some places. Solar, again, a past interview of yours with Howard Jones in which he has this vision of all these connected up systems, which is fantastic. Connecting up to the grid looks like it's going to be an increasing problem. And so originally I thought, well, okay, we'll have a system whereby most of the time it's solar and most of the time you're self-sufficient. In the depths of winter, you're going to need to import some energy. But that's fine because a lot of the time we're going to be able to sell it. It wouldn't surprise me at all if, for a lot of communities they said, well, we've been speaking to the National Grid, we've been speaking to the electricity people, there just isn't a slot. You know, we're going to have to wait for years to connect up. So we're going to have to be completely off grid. So you have to find a way around that.
Manda: When I was looking into this, because one of the term papers I wrote was about local microgrids and using AI, way back ten years ago, using AI to distribute the power and using blockchain, not Bitcoin, to collect the funds. And I think it's a really good idea. And at that point, there was only one microgrid and it was at Dartington and it was illegal to have any other microgrid anywhere else in the country, because the government likes 50's style centrally owned electricity and doesn't want you to be producing your own. Which is insane. First of all, my question is, has that changed? And second, one assumes that battery technology is improving a lot. I've seen designs, and this is mostly in Canada, where obviously it's hot in the summer and cold in the winter, where they basically dug an extremely big pit and filled it full of salt and used it as a heat store that produced both power and heating through the winter when it's -40. So it must have been quite impressively effective, for a local build the village around the heat store basically. I've also seen, and this is going to be very controversial, but one of my former Dreaming students in Germany, was taking old silage towers that had been in East Germany and were no longer in use, and designing those to be data centres that we're going to produce the heat for all the local villages because they produce a lot of heat.
Manda: Now I think that would be somewhat controversial, because you're going to be using water to distribute the heat and we know that data centres eat all the water. But to what extent is central government catching up with the need to allow people to do exactly what you said and create local microgrids, where they produce all their own power and distribute it? And and does the software exist yet? And is anybody looking at combining AI and blockchain because if they aren't I have a paper already written ten years ago that I will send to anyone who wants it, that tells you how to do this. It's so obvious. I mean, that is blindingly obvious. And I was surprised even back then when I went to talk to some people and they looked at me like I'd grown horns and said, why would you want to do that?
Michael: Yeah, yeah. I think in terms of electricity, any hostility towards independent systems has subsided a lot. Certainly the people I spoke to, including Howard, have not raised that as a problem. It's been physically just the capacity of the grid to accept the connection has been the problem. And so I think that, again, the idea of the Stewardship Freehold village is that it should be an experiential infrastructure, not the answer. And so depending on where you are, what you want to do, one could look very, very different to another. At the moment, solar is the obvious thing and is the easiest way to do it. But there appears to be a problem if you need to be self-sufficient in the middle of winter. So you have to then say, okay, how purist are we here? Are we prepared to have a week when we have a diesel backup? Because actually a generator, that's going to cost us £120,000, if we want to have the capacity for solar including that week, we've got to spend another million pounds. And maybe you've got better things to spend that on, because our total budget is £20 million. We've got 100 houses at £200,000 each, you know. But some communities will be more purist than others. But I'm going to focus on what is resisted. Where there is a strong resistance from our friends the utility companies, is on independent water systems.
Manda: Oh, surprise! Well, that's just tough. We don't need to take water, surely?
Michael: Well, they have ways of making you comply. But I spoke to one company, OM, who specialises in these water systems and who are fantastically helpful, and the amount of roof space and land you need to supply water is surprisingly little. The amount of land you need to process is also surprisingly little. I was amazed. You know, you have reed beds and a few other things.
Manda: Oh. Willow beds. Yeah. I have a friend who designs willow beds.
Michael: And I was really surprised at how much land was needed to do that.
Manda: Or how little land is needed to do that.
Michael: Yeah. Sorry. Yes, exactly. So the whole village concept says we have 100 homes. We have an inner zone, which is about 20 hectares, 50 acres, and that has to be enough for all of your energy, all of your utilities, for your water and waste, and for all of your recycling and composting. But it's also basically your nature zone, it's where you all live. And that, in conventional house building terms, looks wildly extravagant, to have a hundred homes within 20 hectares. You say, well, I'm afraid it gets worse: there's another 40 hectares beyond that!
Manda: Around the outside.
Michael: Yes. So the inner area has to provide for the direct needs of the houses. The outer area to a certain extent is theoretical. It's there for a few things. It is calculated at being the minimum possible in areas where you have reasonable soils and not incredibly steeply sloping to, in extremis, feed everyone there. Now they're going to have to be happy to adjust their diet, eat quite a few turnips in winter and all that sort of stuff.
Manda: Beetroot.
Michael: Yes. But in theory that fulfils a government sort of macroeconomic thing. You've seen the intelligence report, which came out in December or January, saying we have major national security threats here.
Manda: Heavily redacted. Yes.
Michael: Okay. From the government's point of view, it has to think about feeding ourselves. And so we say, okay, if every time we have more homes, we have an area of land which is sufficient for the energy and water. And another area of land which, if push came to shove, would be sufficient for their food. Then from a national perspective, that's just really sensible. Okay? And so we have this area, which ideally it would be more, but it's enough in extremis to feed everyone. In practice, we want ordinary people to be able to live in these houses. They're not interested in growing their own food because they've got jobs, you know. But regenerative farming is now mainstream in young farmers, absolutely mainstream. And they're crying out for land to rent. And so you will have no problem renting all this land out and saying, here you are. Your requirement is to look after the soil and you know all about that. Yes, there are arguments within what constitutes regenerative. But you know, look after the soil and all will be well, okay. Because the soil is monitored every year and there are penalties if you don't look after it. And so what you then have is this, it's not fully sustainable, you have to replace the solar panels every however many years it is, things break down. Those things need a lot of rare earths and everything else, which is why there's an argument for going for ground source systems as well. But you have something which is as close as we could get today to a fully sustainable community. It's a community where there are no cars beyond the entrance, because if you have roads, roads are enormous to the infrastructure cost. And they kill soil and interrupt soil networks. So you have a car park at the entrance and thereafter there are light tread paths on which you can take golf buddies, bicycles. You can walk on it occasionally when you need a truck to go down and dig something up or something, that's fine.
Manda: Deliver your spare washing machine because your washing machine just died. You have to be able to get your truck there somehow or you put it on a wheelbarrow I suppose.
Michael: I have some quite wealthy friends, I don't know quite how it's happened, but one couple that we know, they have a holiday house on the island of Tresco in the Isles of Scilly. And Tresco, apart from state vehicles, there are no cars.
Manda: Really? Excellent.
Michael: But when you arrive by boat or more glamorously by helicopter, they get you into a little extended golf buggy and they take you off to your holiday house in the golf buggy.
Manda: You're allowed a helicopter, but you can't have a car. That is classic, isn't it?
Michael: So in my costings I've allowed for I can't remember how many, but for quite a lot of these golf buggies. Because you might start all of the houses just inside the entrance, or you might say no, no, no, when we did our survey, the best places to have the houses and this particular village wanted us to be out of sight. They're a bit snooty, they said if you're over there, we don't mind. And actually it's about a five, six, seven minute walk from the entrance to the houses. If we've forgotten something, that's a pain. So actually we've got these golf buggies so we can whizz to and fro. And interestingly, so one of the reasons for this is to provide a buffer zone, to be able to be more distant, amongst the parish councils I spoke to, two of them said, well, 100 homes beside one of the little hamlets in the village would overwhelm it. But beside the main village, no, we don't want them over there, we want them to be part of us. We want them close. You know? So people have very different views. I think I probably explained most of it now.
Manda: You have. There's bits I want to drill into.
Michael: From a government point of view, it's a replicable model which they can say yeah, okay, everything there the more we are advancing our need to increase our water security, increase our food security, increase our energy security. So from a government's point of view, that's a good thing every single time, you know?
Manda: Yes, totally. It's a win all around. And I cannot believe they haven't actually got you into government and started doing these yet. Let's drill into some of the detail, because I'm really curious about this. And then I want to ask, or at least go through your process, of talking to various parish councillors. Alrighty. So you've got 100 houses in 20 hectares, which is quite a lot of space per house. So they're going to have quite big gardens. I noticed in one of your papers that people had done surveys of what was being built now, and people had gardens the size of a trampoline, and they're all designed around cars. And we have to stop doing that. We cannot continue to be a car based culture.
Michael: And they are bad for the people who live there. This is the point of these surveys, is they are horrible places to live.
Manda: Yeah, and they have a Greggs every 4000 houses or something. And no bus stops and no way to get to the train. And they're vile. So we're all agreed they're vile. So I'm quite interested in the water and the sewage. Partly because we're trying to create a wildlife pond here. It's turning into a bit more of a geoengineering project than I'd imagined. But one of the things we really looked at on the farm, because we totally ran out of water this year and next year is going to be worse. And everybody knows that the climate is the most stable now it's ever going to be in our lifetimes. So how do we plan? If we were to gather all the water from the roof, we would need an extremely large hole in the ground to put it into. And then how do we pump it around back? And then do we separate grey water from rainwater off the roof? And my partner then said, how do we get the bird flu out of it if the birds have have deposited faeces on the roof, and then they had bird flu. And it's, oh God, this is all very complicated. And I really, really despise and dislike the water companies and would be very happy at the point when they're taken back into community ownership, please, not government ownership. But in the meantime. In the interim, it would be really good to be off grid.
Manda: And added to that, I remember watching a very interesting film by a very forward thinking archaeologist way back in the 90s, and he was sacked from the American Archaeology Association for a long time, and then they let him back in again because he realised he wasn't an idiot. And he was designing places in Indonesia, I think, where they basically made a mud hut, and under it was the water gathering. So everything ran off the roof down to under the hut, which provided cooling in the summer and a heat sink in the winter and provided all their water. And so I'm interested, did you go into, in our 100 houses, are we having a giant water store that maybe also is somehow a heat store or heat sink? Is there such a thing as water source heat pumps? Is that something we could do? What did you have in mind or did you not go into it in that detail?
Michael: I dipped into it. And looked to see what the options are and the technologies established. And yes, there are people in this country who will set up small district community water supply systems, where they will take water from everybody's roofs. If there's a stream coming through, they're allowed to take water and they'll take that and they will have a storage and distribution centre for that. And those are established systems, which again, are less expensive, frankly, than I thought they might be. You can do these things independently. I'm slightly embarrassed to admit I have another couple of friends, my oldest friend who has, unlike me, paid attention at school and has had a more comfortable life as a result, albeit not the easiest being a GP. But anyway, they have a home in Taxos, just off Greece, just off Corfu in Greece.
Manda: All your friends are going to be very disappointed when flying ceases to be a thing, aren't they?
Michael: I know. And Taxos is a small island, and importing water from the mainland costs a fortune, and so each new house has to be independent in its water supply and treatment. And so their house, all the water they use, they collect from their roof, and they have a filtration system, and they have a tank underneath the house, and they have a system for filtering that. And the drinking water we were using is used for that and disposal. And so the technologies are there.
Manda: And then what happens to the greywater? Because presumably we're having compost toilets of some form, because the technology for that already exists. I talked to somebody recently who had a concept of a tree bog. And you put a clay layer down and instead of having a composting toilet where you have to take the compost away, you just have this clay layer at the bottom of a relatively deep hole. But you let the willow roots grow above the clay layer, and you never need to empty it. And the willow grows very fast, and you coppice it, and you use it for making charcoal and biochar, or you just burn it in your log burner. And he says you never need to empty it. And anything that comes out is drinking water quality, not that you particularly need to drink it, but it's not going to contaminate the land. And you don't have to separate your liquids and solids and all the stuff that goes with composting loos. A tree bog is just the answer. Anyway. But I also watched a program with a tower block in Geneva, where they have composting loos throughout the entire tower block, and they just have one ton ibcs in the basement. And when it's full, you just roll it out of the way, take it off and use it on your allotment and roll the empty one into place. And it's all there. So you still, however, have to somehow process your water from showers and washing machines, washing up and dishwashers.
Michael: Yes.
Manda: What do you do with that?
Michael: I've made sure the technologies are available and it depends very much on what kind of housing you have. I have looked at it sufficiently to notice, and I could see the glint in your eye that when you start talking to people about these systems, people get very, very enthusiastic about them. They relish the ick factor. Just look at this. All this food goes in here, and then this does this and this. And they're off!
Manda: Yes. It's so exciting. And we just chuck it down the drain with actual processed drinking water. It's insane that we do this.
Michael: But it does depend very much upon the kinds of housing. And so some communities will say we've looked at this and this is what the community wants, and this is what people can afford, and what the people who have said they're willing to sign up want. And actually what they all want is independent little houses, and they want to have a little bit of distance around each other. And that's all great. Somewhere else, they might say, no, no, we need things much cheaper than that. We're quite happy to bunch up. We want to have hockerton style terraces and where we're going to be backing into, there's a nice big escarpment there, we'll be backing into that. It's south facing, going to get loads and loads of heat and that's soaking into them. So it's going to be a super passive house, super natural, passive.
Manda: Passive house design and all the rest of it.
Michael: It's whatever everybody wants. Again it's very much responding to local demands. But having looked into it and spoken to specialists, I'm confident that the technologies are there. Again, there's nothing new that has to be done. We don't really need any new laws, you know, or any new planning laws. There are planning routes if the local planning authorities are willing to show a little bit of nerve, and I think if they can see that they've got strong local support and there's nobody with an interest who's got a right to object, who's likely to object, who's got any power. You always get some people just don't want change, but if they can see that the people are with them, then that should give them the courage to go with it, you know?
Manda: And if not, you elect new people. Every four years you could have a chance of electing someone whose primary premise could be, hey guys, I really like this planning idea. Elect me and I will push it through.
Michael: During the research for this, I spoke to a lot of professional people, developers and project managers and barristers, planning Barristers, and I also spoke to a number of parish councillors, of council administrators, people who are clerks and run regions of parish councils and also to local district councillors. And one of the things which is interesting about that was first of all this combination of how open minded they are on the one hand, but then how cynical they then become about the trust aspect. They just say no, no, no, no. And that was universal. But also I spoke to, I think two green councillors, two conservative, one reform. And it's not much difference between. I think that the things which divide people at the national level, the national leaders who are very, very tribal, want to divide people. Locally they're much closer together. And if you show them something which is locally popular and which people want, and they can see the sense in it, they will support it. And of all the people I presented the concepts to, only a couple were remotely sort of hostile. And in both occasions that wasn't because they thought it was a bad idea. They just said, you're wasting your time. And one of them said to me, who was an organic farmer who had sold quite a bit of land recently. And he said I know what local authorities are like, I know what the system's like. He said, you've got political parties who've been in power for decades and decades and decades, and they know all the landowners and the landowners know them.
Michael: And he said, it's not openly corrupt, but they look after their own. And he said, they just won't let you do it. And actually, that's really changed, because there's been such disruption lately when it comes in politics. You know, you've got a lot of green councillors in Malvern near me. I think it's independently led, I'm not sure. They're not in control but a lot of green councillors in Warwickshire, Kenilworth. Again I think that is majority green now as well. There's a lot in this about self-reliance and and our country, which appeals to people who maybe we would put in a reform box. You know, there's a lot there about looking after that which our country is, which appeals a lot to them. So it's quite broad. And yes, it is, frankly, in the way of the legal structure, it is trying to re-establish the commons by the back door. So there is a bit of a slightly lefty agenda there. But in terms of the underlying concept and the finance concept, which I have, there's nothing there which doesn't accept standard classical economic theory. Which says there is a problem with land because it's not a commodity and there can't be a proper free market in land, which gives us the advantages of a free market economy. So we have to try to work this out. And all I'm saying to them is, here's an idea to work it out, because the other ones that haven't worked.
Manda: Exactly. And it's very hard to argue against any of this because it so obviously fulfils a need that is not currently being fulfilled in a way that takes a lot of the national security boxes. And people across the spectrum are concerned now that we're going to starve. If you listen to Microdose with James Meadway, the heads of the main supermarkets in the UK went to the government recently and said it's not if it's when we have a food crisis and we reckon November. And if we could go to them and say, okay, November this year, we're not in the picture, but by next year. We could have people beginning to be in developments where you've got 40 hectares for 100 houses. I would need to go and find the people to do the sums, but I think if you had the right people around, you could feed them most of what they need. You could have a micro dairy, you could be doing a lot of useful stuff there.
Michael: It's at the upper level. There are people who will tell you they can feed unbelievable numbers of people from a single allotment.
Manda: Yes, quite. But that means they're doing it full time.
Michael: Exactly. And so it varies enormously. But certainly to say we want to feed about seven and a half people per hectare is well within the range which is estimated. And it provides a means for people to reconnect with the soil because even if they're not growing it at all, they are responsible for it.
Manda: They can see it.
Michael: Yeah. And they can see it. And the natural thing will be for them to say, oh, you're growing all of this stuff here. Can we buy some of it? So there's a market there, you know.
Manda: I can imagine.
Michael: So that is there. Because as I say, the demand now is for land for regenerative farming. It is mainstream amongst young people now. And so that works. Another objection was very often, oh, well they'll all be flipping hippies and they'll all fall out because they always do. And in fairness, that's quite a reasonable objection. I've done a lot of work with retirement developments, and those are terrible. I mean, just amazing. And these are places where people tend to go when they they feel ready, but they're not decrepit. So they go when they're maybe 75 to 80 and time and time again, you find that somebody moves in, or a couple move in and they're used to being able to boss people around. And they're quite charismatic and they want to be in control. And so they take control. And most people just want a quiet life, so they say well, whatever you want, whatever you want. The next thing they know, things are being changed terribly and everybody falls out. So that happens in retirement developments. There have been numerous communities up and down the years, and one quite near to me where somebody charming starts to influence everyone and the next thing you know, half of them are sleeping with each other and the other half are feeling left out. And it all falls apart again.
Manda: And this isn't necessarily hippie people. This is just people who have no capacity for internal regulation and don't understand how to communicate, which is most of us.
Michael: And then the other thing which tends to happen is that the big green promise emerges. Temptation emerges, of selling up and making a fortune. And so again, you have to remove that.
Manda: So you have to head that off at the pass.
Michael: So you head that off completely with the legal structure. So you have homes which people can buy and they can sell. But just like if you buy into, it's very common in this country and I think others as well, certainly in Australia. For people to buy into an apartment block and they have a share of the freehold. And so when you sell, you sell your share of the freehold. If there's ten flats, you sell your 10th and freehold and you sell your particular right to live in number six. Exactly the same here. When you leave, you sell your share of the community investment company, which owns the whole estate and which gives everyone an interest in the estate as a whole, and the fortunes of the estate of the whole. And your right to live in number six. And it's just the same. If everybody looks after the estate and makes it beautiful and gorgeous, then lots of people want to live there and the value of your home will go up or keep track at least. If everybody trashes it, then okay, you're going to have trouble, just just exactly the same thing. So you can buy and sell it just like a normal home, because it is a normal home.
Michael: What you can't do is to connive with everybody else, to sell up the whole thing to a developer who comes in, flattens everything and builds 6000 houses. So it's going to be a home and that's it. So it removes that trading element from the land itself. And that's very important. And to get over the whole hippies getting off with each other and falling out thing, you have a governance structure. Which again is one of the conditions of granting the Stewardship Freehold is you have to have this broad structure. You can have lots of rules with it, but you have this broad structure where you have an independent chair. So the chair's whole role and rewards and incentives are to be seen to be running a good, active community. And that's a professional person. People who have been parish council administrators or clerks might be a good choice. But these are trained people who run these communities, and that's their job. And their whole incentive is just to run that really, really, really well. And they have a committee.
Manda: Right. That was my question.
Michael: They have a committee which I'm suggesting should be selected through sortition, which is a random selection. So you're just told you're up, will you please be on the committee for this period of time? And then you serve and that's it and you can't serve again for another period of time. So there's no chance of developing little cliques and things. And with proper safeguards, the chair is there for everyone to talk to, including children. And so everyone can talk in confidence to the chair so that they feel represented. Everyone can take part. These days, if there are controversial things or things which are important, you can use electronic systems if you want to consult everybody. Again, quadratic voting if you want.
Manda: Quadratic voting on the blockchain. Yay. Yeah.
Michael: Or I've got a small allowance for a little shelter in the middle for everyone to get together and they all put their hands up.
Manda: Because you would need that.
Michael: However the community wants to do it. But the governance is really important because I've just seen it so often, that ego's take over and it can spoil things terribly. And so you need to have a system in which everyone knows the rules, everyone knows it's fair, and everyone knows that everyone else knows the rules and thinks it's fair. It's very, very Elinor Ostrom based.
Manda: Okay. I've looked a lot at communities, and there are some that work very, very well. There's one in the US that's been going since the 50s and is the longest running Non-denominational community in the US. And it has a sister branch relatively near here. And they run essentially along sociocracy lines, only they didn't call it that. But again, the technologies exist to help people to gain a degree of emotional literacy so that what you were describing doesn't happen. What we end up with, though, you said at the beginning that this isn't going to be an intentional community. In the end, it cannot be a whole group of people who just move in and decide they're never going to talk to the neighbours. There has to be a degree of intentionality to it, because you've got to talk to each other to be communitarian in some degree.
Michael: Yes, they do, certainly. And at different stages in life, people have different levels of ability of bandwidth, if you like to, to commit to the project. And so you have to have some guardrails. Because again, my favourite quote from Elinor Ostrom is that the Commons doesn't run on goodwill. It runs because it's in everyone's interest to do it this way. Particularly when people have got small children, life's hard, you know, and they're not going to be able to maybe contribute as much as they would like. And then later on actually they'll be able to contribute a lot. So it ebbs and flows.
Manda: Yeah. And having read a little bit about the one in the US, there's a lot of people there who don't have kids but are very happy helping with kids. I mean, you end up with much more of a tribal structure than a unified, little isolated two kids and golden retriever nuclear family structure. And also, have you, I suppose it depends again, this is each community would decide, but if it were me, there would be a lot of facility for working from home. We'd make sure we had really, really good broadband. We've got however much money, part of it is going on super good broadband. I'm still quite curious about the electricity supply, because we get 10% out of our solar panels in the winter than we do in the summer, and the winter is when you want the power for the lights and the heat and everything. And I'm thinking a bit of wind might be a good thing somewhere here, but I guess it depends where you are. Anyway, leaving that aside, if I were to design this, if I were to come and live in one of these and it sounds very attractive, they'd be working from home. There would be maybe 10% of the homes would be for people who actively wanted to farm. Come here and we've got 40 hectares. The young people I know who want to do regenerative would bite your arm off for that. And we'll set up a farm shop. And if you want a micro dairy, we'll help create the micro dairy if you want. We'll have a little bit of money for farming infrastructure. And you could be very close to being self-reliant per village. And then you create networks of villages and the things that the village over the hill creates that you can't create, you swap. And where we're heading very fast towards a regenerative overall community that people would really want to live in.
Michael: Yes. And some people really, really want that. But I think that because we need to do it at scale.
Manda: And speed.
Michael: Yeah. My favourite Johan Rockström quote is that the only currency that matters now is scale and speed. Of course we're not doing either. But you need to be able to do this at scale, which means it needs to be very adaptable. And so if you've got a whole bunch of people that say we really want this to be a self-sufficient community, we're all going to add our hands to the till. Then terrific, go for it. But if you're not of that mind, but you'd like to live somewhere that's safe for you and your family and which is convenient, where you can work from home then, yeah, this is the same.
Manda: That has to happen, too. Okay. Alright. We're heading out of time. This is so interesting, Michael. I'm so impressed with what you're doing.
Michael: Can I talk scale a bit? Can I talk numbers and scale?
Manda: Yes. Let's talk about scale. Because that was my next question, is to what extent is government picking up its ears and going, hello, let us do this. And when is it starting? That was really my question. Go for it.
Michael: Okay. I mentioned earlier on that 91.2% of England and the numbers are easier for England, they're more available, and also England is much more densely populated than Scotland or Wales.
Manda: Also, quite a lot of Scotland and Wales are at 45 degree slopes where it would be quite hard to do this.
Michael: Yes, but there's another whole subject about what different kinds of farming, which you'll know much more about than me, but hilly land is not necessarily less productive in food terms.
Manda: I know. I'm doing routes to regeneration where we're talking a lot about this. But anyway, go on. Yes. England. Scale.
Michael: Yes, 91.2% is unused. We use remarkably little of that at the moment to grow food. I ran some numbers just yesterday, just checking how much is used, forget about offsetting and actually let's exclude grains, because most of that's used for beer and for anything other than bread anyway. How much is used to grow food for eating? And going through the different numbers it looks like it's 196,000 hectares. That's out of about 8.5 million hectares across England. 196. About 2% is used to grow food for us to eat.
Manda: Wow.
Michael: You know, around here it's known for its orchards. It's known as a horticultural area. Most of the orchards are gone. And yet we've got loads and loads and loads of fields of maize.
Manda: Monocrops. Yeah.
Michael: But that's not even for cattle feed.
Manda: No, it's for biofuels.
Michael: It's for biofuels. And as a dear friend of mine who's a sort of semi-retired farmer now, he said, you look at the size of the machines which you used to plant those crops, to harvest those crops, to take them off to the bio diesel generator. And he said, I can't believe that that is anything remotely sensible. How is that green? It's obviously not. It's just total greenwash.
Manda: Well, it isn't, and it's not sustainable. And the embodied energy in all those things exceeds the energy you're getting out. And that's not a thing that we can keep doing. So yes.
Michael: Massively. So the amount of land we use to grow food is remarkably small. If we can increase the amount of land we use to grow food, then that's terrific.
Manda: Provided it's done in regenerative ways and not industrial farming that destroys more soil.
Michael: Yes, exactly. Exactly.
Manda: That's taken as read. Okay.
Michael: And there is a problem with cars. There is a problem with congestion. Lots of ways to address that, one of which could actually be to incentivise much smaller cars. You've had Hugo Spowers on the program. I know Hugo and he says, look, all the stuff which kills you in the short term is the particles from your tyres and your brakes. And the big EVs use more of that stuff, because they're incredibly heavy, because they have massive batteries, you know. So actually if you incentivise smaller cars, then hey, they don't just take up as much space on the road, but they're producing less of the crap which kills you. So if we say, OK, we're not going to solve that problem. So we're going to only have Stewardship Freehold Villages within four kilometres of the boundaries of existing small villages and towns. Small and medium sized towns. And all of that zone four kilometres around, some of that's already taken up with other things that you can't build on. So let's say 10% of that land is given over to Stewardship Freehold Villages across England. That gives you 1.6 million homes.
Manda: Which is conveniently close to how many we need.
Michael: It depends who you talk to. I think that as the boomers die off, actually a lot of bigger homes are going to come back into circulation, to some extent and start to sort itself out. But there are inheritance issues stuff in there as well. But we probably do need 3 million homes. But 1.6. Bang! There you are. And you can build those at pace. There's an issue depending on how you finance it, but you can build those at speed and that gives you lots and lots of jobs. If you want to go beyond that, because within that zone, you can make sure you use the bridle paths and footpaths as much as possible to go into the towns. Of which there are lots of semi used ones. And people say, oh, it's a bit far to cycle.
Manda: Electric bikes?
Michael: Electric bikes, Exactly. So electric bikes and electric bikes even out the hills a lot as well. So that's a reasonable thing to say we're going to put them within four kilometres of existing settlements. If you want to go beyond that then actually public transport could be done. And there are extensive studies in the systems in Germany and in Switzerland where they say, oh, well, if you've got a reasonably evenly distributed population, and our population is far more reasonably evenly distributed than theirs, far more. Then you don't even need one company, what you need is one timetable. So that you know that when you go from node to node to node every hour, every half hour, whatever it is, you can change buses and get to where you want to go. And those systems are very, very efficient and people use them. They voluntarily use them. And I mean, here in the village I'm in, Elmley Castle...
Manda: There's a bus once a week.
Michael: Exactly. I mean, it's just impossible. But those are viable systems and they're very, very efficient at getting people around. I don't know how subsidised they are, to what extent they're subsidised, but people use them. So you can go beyond that. If you went beyond that and we used 15% of all the land, then you're over your 3 million.
Manda: And in terms of transport, it has struck me for a while that we're running on an 18th century view of what public transport is. Which is we have one vehicle, and it used to be a horse and cart, and now it's a bus. But basically a lot of people pile on to this one vehicle, which goes on a particular route from A to B. We now have the AI technology where instead of having an Uber with an Uber driver, that's basically being extractivist and capitalist, you could have a community based Uber equivalent, a taxi, and you go I want to go to Ludlow, or you want to go to the nearest town. And it picks you up and the software tells it the six other people who want to go to Ludlow, and it picks them all up and it takes them, and only one of them wants to come back, but somebody else wants to go to Bishop's Castle. And there's a person who is a part of the thriving community who is making the money for this, and that's your public transport. You don't need buses, but you do need a system that isn't an extractive capitalist system.
Michael: Yes, and I did look at this and started to go down this particular rabbit hole. And I did have a chat with a group called something like transport for cities. But basically their big thing is car shares. And you have a pool of cars at the entrance to the development and where there's a little bit of a walk to get to it, so you don't immediately get into your car. And they liked this a lot. But again, it's very, very localised as to what's going to work. But their car share systems have far fewer than 1 or 2 cars per household, and you're down to maybe a quarter of that. And so again, it's a community thing as to what they wanted and I don't think it should be imposed. But certainly there are opportunities to get the number of cars way down, because as you say, you have technological systems which can allow you to make sure that to a great extent, when you need that vehicle, actually it's going to be available. And certainly that's been Uber's great big breakthrough for their drivers, is their drivers hardly ever go anywhere without having a paying customer.
Manda: Without somebody in there.
Michael: Yeah. And obviously if you've got 150 drivers, it's a bit different. But on the other hand, if you're not going very far, usually. So yes, there are horses for courses there are ways to attract that. And there is also an issue with finance. If you want sustainable finance, you can do it. But there is an issue of capacity. I think that a sustainable finance system would be a state system. The big reason that the bond markets go nuts when they think governments are being irresponsible, is they think governments going to just print loads and loads of money.
Manda: Busy printing loads of money.
Michael: If you look at what the banks do, the banks are continually finding ways to print loads and loads of money. I mean, they're constantly trying and they're doing it again now with all this shadow banking and everything else.
Manda: But they are the bond markets so they don't care.
Michael: Constantly trying to find ways to abuse the system. And in particular they're the beneficiaries of, I don't know if you've come across them, it's called the Cantillon effect, which is a guy who predated Adam Smith. And this is like anything else. If you allow people to create these tokens which are going to dilute the overall money supply and so it's going to cause inflation. But if you're first in line, you get that money effectively still at the old value. So it doesn't just drive inflation, it drives inequality. But if you're the banker, so you're the one receiving that then...
Manda: Then you're happy.
Michael: You don't care because you're the one who benefits all the time.
Manda: Yes. This is why we need a new economic system, Michael.
Michael: This is why we keep going around. And we're about to go around this again. It's going to be 2008 all over again shortly. So what the government needs to do is to say, okay, guys, you're clearly very bad at this. You're not showing any discipline yourselves.
Manda: We're going to make all the money.
Michael: We're going to show you a way of doing this which works, okay? And so we will have a state bank and we will issue mortgages for these developments to be built. We will restrict the flow of money to make sure that they are built primarily from British materials. Not entirely, but primarily. So there's very little leakage going out of the country, so most of the money is kept within the economy. Which will boost jobs, will create real wealth, if you're building infrastructure buildings.
Manda: You're sounding terrifyingly like Keynes, Michael.
Michael: The maximum loan will be... We won't lend on the 15% going to the landowner because he's going to go off to Barbados. So we'll lend you 85%. And all of that money has to go in, a very, very Keynesian thing; you will be creating genuine wealth. You're producing energy, producing buildings, all the rest of it.
Manda: And the local velocity will be huge. And that's what matters. Yes.
Michael: Yes. And we will lend as much as anybody wants. A normal credit terms in terms of you'll need to be able to show you can afford to pay the mortgage, but we won't charge you interest. We will charge you fees, because interest just generates the need for growth. But we will charge you fees because the bank has people working for it. But those fees won't go up. So you don't need to be worried about interest rates going up and down, because you're not paying any interest, you're just going to pay this fee.
Manda: You're paying off your loan. Yes.
Michael: And we will do our best to make sure the fees are sufficiently low, so you can actually pay your loan off, not in 30 to 35 years, which is now normal for most poor people having to borrow fortunes. You'll be paid off in 15 to 20 years. And so that money will come back to us and be cancelled relatively quickly, but it will all be going into buying things in this country, building wealth in this country. And we will show you how to do it because unfortunately, we need the money there. That's the thing that might limit the speed, but not the scale. Because you've got to have the resources, you've got to be able to build using British resources, using British people.
Manda: So the rate limiting step is the actual physical materials, not the money which we make up out of nothing, so we can do at any time.
Michael: The money's fine.
Manda: I think also having enough skilled craftspeople who actually know what they're doing might be a bit of a rate limiting step.
Michael: Modular. It's like Lego. It's great. Really easy.
Manda: Yes, but somebody has to have built the modular stuff. Is that not a fairly skilled task or is that all AI? You just press a button and it happens.
Michael: It arrives and you build it like a Lego kit.
Manda: Yes, but the person who made it and sent it to you was quite skilled.
Michael: No, it depends how you do it. So wiki houses. Have you come across wiki houses?
Manda: Yes. Absolutely. Yes.
Michael: Yeah. And so they advocate having a whole network of local sawmills who you just give them their CAD diagrams and stuff.
Manda: You give them a blueprint and they do it. Okay.
Michael: They cut those up for you and they give you all of your plywood sections and you go away and just build it like a Lego kit. It's not hard.
Manda: Okay. It's going to be worth a try though, isn't it?
Michael: Yes, yes. And then other people will say, no, no, I want something much more conventional. But there are ways and means, and certainly a lot of the direction that modular housing is going, is making it easier. So you don't need people who are phenomenally skilled at, frankly, skills which should have gone the way of typesetting. I love typesetting but just...
Manda: It's not quite what we need these days.
Michael: I mean, the fact that we're still brick by brick by brick. Come on.
Manda: Well, they're doing it by 3D printing in Portugal, which looks far more fun. We are definitely running out of time. So the last thing I want to ask is, is this gaining any traction at local district or state governmental level? Because it should be and if it isn't, how can we make it?
Michael: Not yet. I'm really just starting to push it out there. And what I really want is to find a landowner who is willing for his or her land to be used as a pilot project. And so yeah, actually, do you know what? I'm not doing anything with it other than farming it, and I'm renting it out. If you can get me £3 million for that, I'd snatch it off, you know.
Manda: 3 million for 60 hectares.
Michael: Exactly. Double normal agricultural value.
Manda: Can we do this on brownfield sites? Because it hurts my little farming heart to be doing this on greenfield sites. But surely there's enough brownfield sites to be doing that for a while? I mean, we can regenerate the land, can we not?
Michael: I have a concept for more urban and suburban areas.
Manda: Of course you do. That's another podcast. We're definitely running out of time.
Michael: That's what I want, is basically I need 150 acres. And I'm trying to interest 1 or 2 universities in advancing the legal side. The quality led planning allocation, because legally that's the more interesting thing and the more revolutionary thing. Because that is saying here is a problem which capitalism has and acknowledged since the beginning. And technology is now giving us a way to resolve that, so legally that's the more interesting thing. But the exciting thing for anybody who wants a home, anybody who wants to farm regeneratively, anybody who wants to try and give us some hope for how the country can survive the next 40, 50, 60 years.
Manda: You need the royal family behind us, really, don't you? You need Prince William to decide this is the next Earthshot Prize thing. There's lots of Land they could give you. Or one of the Oxbridge colleges, Trinity Oxford or Trinity Cambridge, who you can walk from Oxford to Cambridge on land owned by the colleges. There should be some there. Or the church.
Michael: There are a lot of organisations for whom 150 acres is not much at all. Really isn't much at all. And there are certain people in the genuinely aristocratic circles who I might contact. I was 20 years a trustee and very, very hands on, much more than I wanted to be, frankly, a trustee of the Environmental Law Foundation.
Manda: Oh, okay. This is why you have rich friends.
Michael: And much of that time, our great patron was and is now King Charles. And when he went from being Prince Charles to King Charles, he maintained his patronage of Environmental Law Foundation. And I'm fundamentally not a royalist. It perpetuates a system.
Manda: You don't have to say that.
Michael: But I'm a fan of Prince now, King Charles, and a lot of the work that he's done, and I think he treads a difficult path quite well, actually.
Manda: Give it a go.
Michael: Yeah, I think ultimately I'm quite a fan.
Manda: There's also a friend of mine used to work for something called PLOG, which is a progressive landowners group. We're going to have to stop. We're so far over time, Michael, and we could easily talk for another hour and it would be great. And at some point we're going to have another podcast on the urban.
Michael: And we haven't even got on to Polanyi.
Manda: No, we didn't get to Polanyi, did we? We talked a little bit about Polanyi before we started. He is one of my heroes, but we are going to stop. Thank you so much for having this idea and for putting it forward so clearly. People, I will put a link in the show notes to Michael's Substack. There are four substacks on this. The final one is the Stewardship Villages, but the three leading up to that tells us why we need them, and they're very well worth reading. You write very concisely and very cleanly and very clearly, and for that I am extremely grateful.
Michael: Thank you.
Manda: So congratulations on getting your masters.
Michael: Thank you.
Manda: And, and I look forward to a podcast in about a year where you come and tell us that the first one of these is being built. And we can explore all about it. So thank you very much for coming on to the Accidental Gods podcast.
Michael: Great pleasure. Thank you very much indeed. Bye bye.
Manda: There we go. That's it for another week. Enormous thanks to Michael for everything that he's thought about in such depth. For creating something that we could actually implement now. He knows the planning law. He understands the structures of this from the inside out. And he's talked to a whole group of people who would actually be there on the ground making this happen. Everyone from parish councillors to district councillors to planners to builders to landowners, to the people who might actually want to live in these villages. And I understand that the concept of intentional community can feel woo and hippy. But actually, I think going forward, we need these communities of place and purpose and passion. And a Stewardship Freehold Village could be all three of these. We could bring together in one place the people who have the sense of purpose and passion for creating a thrutopian future. And yes, we could have people who don't have concepts of communities of place, purpose and passion, of thrutopian futures. But it seems to me that anybody living in a space like this is going to become switched on fairly fast, simply by living here. It would be impossible, I think, to remain siloed and isolated and glued into the narratives that tell us that there is no possible way forward. I hope so, and I sincerely hope that some of these begin to happen. If any of you out there know any developers who have the necessary 60 hectares and would be interested in creating something that might actually work, please do let Michael know. We've put his Substack and his LinkedIn and his YouTube all in the show notes, together with a whole lot of references to Elinor Ostrom's rules for Managing the Commons, which you probably know by now if you listen to the podcast much, but also other references to ideas and concepts and research in this area.
Manda: So if this floats your boat, Please head off to the show notes and explore. And if this touches you at all, honestly Michaels four Substacks are coherent, crisp, really well reasoned, and you can read the whole lot in half an hour. You will come away with a different idea of what's possible and what we can do. So there we go. That's your homework for this week.
Manda: And that's it from us. We will be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, enormous thanks to Caro C for the music at the Head and Foot. To Alan Lowles of Airtight Studios for the audio production. To Lou Mayor for the video production, for managing the YouTube channel, for becoming our farm manager, and for project managing the utter chaos that is happening outside. And I apologise if you could hear very large earth moving equipment through any part of the podcast you've just listened to; it was utterly unavoidable. Thanks to Anne Thomas for the transcripts. Huge thanks to Faith Tilleray for managing all of the above and me while I'm trying to write the book. While she is trying to write the thesis for her master's degree. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else anywhere in the world who's interested in how we could structure the steps forward to creating homes that work for people, homes that bring joy and connection and a sense of safety in a world that's falling apart, while we integrate with the web of life, then please do send them this link. And that's it for now. See you next week. Thank you and goodbye.