Our Lives Our Planet Podcast | Global Action Plan (2025)

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Natasha:
We want to explore luxury for all as a solution to the climate and nature crises and inequality that we face. So through this podcast series, we'll be applying the idea to six different areas of everyday life - to challenge our thinking, our preconceptions and our aspirations. In this first episode, we're looking at luxury homes. Is a good house a huge mansion that's expensive to build, buy and heat?

Or can luxury housing make a good home accessible to all and ecologically sustainable? Later on in this episode, we'll hear from Simon Tilly, a director and resident of the Hockerton Housing Project. But first, let's hear from my first guest, Rose Grayston, a housing campaigner and policy expert.

Rose:
I'm campaigning to end the long term decline of good housing in the UK with a focus on England. I used to work in disability rights activism and in a number of other areas and I kept coming back to housing. People kept telling me that housing was a huge issue in their lives, but the organisations I was working for either as an employee or sometimes as a volunteer, as an activist, didn't want to touch housing.

Natasha:
As you say, housing is a huge issue in people's lives. It's such a fundamental building block for so much else in our society. And so what is a good house and does it go beyond just bricks and mortar?

Rose:
So I've always thought about good housing, and good social housing in particular, as having a three part guarantee. It's about affordability, security and quality and all of those things are interrelated because in order for... a home isn't secure if you don't have a secure tenancy or some other kind of arrangement which gives you a reasonable amount of confidence that you're going to be able to stay in your home and not asked to leave at short notice. If you don't have that security, then it's not truly affordable because you need to be thinking one step ahead, it's not truly decent because it's not giving you that firm foundation from which to live your life. Equally, if housing isn't truly affordable, if you have a rent which might change unexpectedly, which might just not be affordable given your income, then your housing isn't secure because you're not going to be able to reliably pay your housing costs and make sure that you stay where you are.

Equally, if we compromise on quality and standards in order to try to make housing more affordable, then we're missing the point because the point is not just to provide a roof over people's heads. The point is to provide a safe space where people can relax, recover, enjoy themselves, play, for children to do homework. There have been various standards over the years introduced to define quality standards in housing.

And interestingly, we have much tighter standards for social housing now than we do for private housing. In a lot of cases. So in social housing, there is a requirement for there to be a space for children to do homework, a space for children to play. That isn't always realised in practice because of overcrowding and lots of other issues.

But it's really interesting to note that social housing at various points has been just as much, if not more, about raising quality standards in the housing sector as it has been about affordability and I think we often forget that these days when because of really high private rents and the huge problems that's causing people on a day to day basis just to afford their lives, we forget often about the security and the quality part of the social housing guarantee.

That's what good housing is. It's not just about being affordable. It's not just about being secure. It's not just about being decent and safe. It's about all of those things.

Natasha:
We're exploring this idea of luxury and what it really means, what it gives people in practice. If you take it away from things, what it actually means to people. And my theory is that there's something there around comfort and security. And I think that ties in with what you're saying around what good housing should deliver for people. It's really interesting to know that aspirations for social housing can be higher, can be better, and why and why shouldn't they be? Why should that be an interesting fact? Why should I be slightly surprised by that? Why shouldn't we kind of want the state to provide really good quality housing for people and want to make people's lives better?

Rose:
Yeah, I mean, it is really interesting, but as it's become harder and harder for local authorities to deliver their own social housing directly to meet need, it's become more common for local authorities to purchase homes from private developers, sometimes as part of planning rules. There have been multiple cases where local authorities have said that they would like to buy private homes from a private developer to convert into social or affordable homes and have ultimately had to say no because the private homes were not large enough to meet minimum standards for accommodating homeless people.

Because, of course, we're talking about a statutory duty towards homeless households here. You're not allowed to cram people into a cupboard in the way that you are allowed to offer a cupboard as a private rental in this country. There are very few limits on what you're allowed to offer as a private landlord in practice or in law. So yeah, it is interesting that private developers themselves have sometimes been handing over homes that they think are perfectly adequate for the purpose.

And local authorities have had to say this No, we can't legally offer this to a homeless household.

Natasha:
There's a market for them. People would pay for them out of their on the commercial market, if you will. But as you say, they're not. The standard for social housing means... is defining them as not fit. That is interesting.

Rose:
And I appreciate this what you're saying this Natasha, but you've just reminded me of an argument that I've often heard from politicians and civil servants over the years that, well, there's a market for these homes, there's a market for these tiny cupboards. Somebody out there is willing to pay £800 a month to live in this space.

We've had over the last ten years, homes built with no windows even, you know, we're really talking bottom of the barrel stuff. And I've been told, well, look, there's a market for these homes. Therefore it's meeting a need. Therefore, it's a good thing. And what I always say is it's not homeless households or low income households that needs these really low standard homes.

It's the people producing these low standard homes that need homeless households. What we've got in this country is a series of captive markets of people who are forced to compromise and accept bad housing, which does not meet that affordability, security, decency guarantee for want of any other options. And they're often steered into bad housing by government policy. The homes that have been purchased using the Government's help to buy scheme have been much, much smaller than homes that have not been subsidised by help to buy and have been lower quality in a range of other ways.

Developers have had no problems selling these homes because they've got a captive market. They know that government has handed out these equity loans on preferential terms and that people will use them to buy the homes that they're allowed to buy with them, which is the homes that these developers are selling. Therefore, there is no reason for developers to try to compete on quality.

Exactly the same dynamic plays out in different ways across the housing market. So if you're a low income household looking for a home to rent, your options are restricted by local housing allowance, by the benefits that you are able to access from government to support you to access homes, and that will limit you, often to choosing between a range of different homes which are all old, cold, poorly insulated, substandard in various ways, often all with category one hazards often or actually unsafe.

And you're choosing between several different bad quality options. And again, you've got captive demand there provided by local housing guidelines. Government policy ensures that there will always be people who will go and rent unsafe, poor quality homes because they have no other choice. So it's a very interesting situation where government policy has created captive markets so you have no choice but to accept housing, which is getting worse and worse and contributing to a race to the bottom in standards.

Natasha:

How often does the term sustainability, or related terms, come into the conversation? How much old When people are thinking about how to solve the housing crisis, how to make sure that people have a decent roof over their head, how much do you think that be it policy makers, be it private developers, be it from the demand side, people are thinking also about the long term environmental impact of the places that we live in?

Rose:

So sustainability is mentioned very, very often by developers of all types, but I think they define it in very diverse ways. And I think developers will often define sustainability in ways which seek to broaden the concept so that it's not only about tackling climate change, it's not only about climate resilience, it's not only about environmental factors, it's also about building mixed, balanced, sustainable communities where people have equitable opportunities.

I think that's interesting the way that the concept of sustainability has kind of been stretched and expanded in the development sector. So it's mentioned very often, but there's a lot of looseness around how it's mentioned. In terms of how far sustainability as we would understand it, as this podcast would understand, it is really thought about, it is thought about, but really was about in terms of a trade off.

So the way that we decide that developers decide how much to pay for land in this country is not about adding up all of your costs and then deciding what a reasonable price would be. The way we decide how much to pay for land is developers work out how much they think they will be able to sell all the homes they're going to build on that land for.

So they look at house prices today. They'll project into the future a bit. They'll normally say, let's let's add on a bit more because house prices are going to keep rising. And then they subtract their profit, which is 20% plus the costs of building and, you know, the costs and the cost of any policies involved. So, the argument that's made from developers and from those representing developers is that the more policy requirements we put on...so if we say we don't only want these homes to be affordable and decent and secure, but we also want them to be sustainable, they'll say, Well, now I'm not going to be able to afford to pay as much for land. In fact, I may be able to pay so little for land that no landowner is going to bother. Therefore, you have to pick. You can have affordability, or you can have a sustainability, but you can't have both. And that is very, very often how it plays out.

Natasha:
But there are real life examples of how things could be done differently. I spoke to Simon Tilly, one of the original residents involved in establishing the Hockerton Housing Project.

Simon:
Our houses didn't cost any more to build, but they're very, very much cheaper to live in.

Natasha:
Could you tell me a little bit about the Hockerto Housing Project? What is it? How did it start?

Simon:
Well, it's a fantastic place to be, actually. It's a group of five houses where five families got together and built some low energy use houses which are as sustainable as we could make them. So we were building back in 1995, but we pushed the boundaries a lot. So we were thinking about how are we going to meet our water needs, our energy needs, create employment on site, travel about.

So all the different aspects that we could think of in terms of sustainability, trying to squeeze into one development, starting from scratch. So starting from grass and going up into houses, community and the whole development.

Natasha:
A critical element at the start of the Hockerton Housing Project was that every family was involved in shaping the concept and design of the homes they would move into.

Simon:
But I think what's really important that allows for feedback into the design. So mostly what's missing, I think in modern housing is people build houses and they have no, they're not like if you live in them, they sell them to other people that have no contact with the people that design or build them. And so there's no feedback route, there's no connection between those three steps and that's part of what enables houses to be built better, is connecting the whole thing together.

Natasha:
And making sure, as you said, that there's a sense of ownership and people have that opportunity to input into what they want. Yeah, it's bizarre, isn't it? It's the biggest purchase that we....

Simon:
It's the biggest purchase we make and yet we often have leased connection with what it is we're going to get. And you know, for an example, the heating bill, or the way the house is kept warm, is decided by some remote person on a drawing board that then gives it to a builder and then you just get what's built.

You don't have any choice really. But we had we knew we were going to be living in the houses and building them and then living in them. And and so we were intimately connected with the idea that we'd be needing to create a house that was kind to our pockets, but still warm. You know, we wanted low energy bills, which is what we've got. And yet a warm house.

Natasha:
And I suppose it's really about bringing to the fore the needs of the people who are going to be living in the house. You're not looking at it as a purely kind of technical architectural exercise or an exercise in, you know, making money as a housing development or whatever it might be. You're saying what is it going to be like to live in a house? What do I want from that experience and putting those needs first?

Simon:
Yes, absolutely. So that total integration, when you start to think about it, that's actually what you want. And then you start creating very clever ways of delivering that, which just doesn't happen in your typical housing development. And it doesn't happen because they're not allowing that creativity of people to sort of feed in and build it. So it is very important to really allow people to control what it is they're going to be living in because they're the people that, you know, they pay the bills, they open the front door, they keep warm in the house and and they going to want to travel from wherever the house is to wherever they work.

And it's so important. And yet often that's just so remote in the whole process.

Natasha:
Definitely. Can you give us a sense then of what it is like to live in a Hockerton house? We've you've mentioned a few things around and considering energy, use water, use. Yeah. What what is it like?

Simon:
It's pretty incredible really. It's very warm. The houses keep warm with passive gains. Most people's reaction when they come into the house is "oh isn't it warm?" And "isn't it light?" But their pre-conception was very different so they are assuming it's probably going to be cold and maybe quite dark. So it's completely opposite often to what people's preconceptions are, which is quite nice when you're showing someone round for the first time.

But it's...in some ways it's very familiar to anybody that's listening, but in other ways it's quite different. So, you know, we have a warm house, but it keeps warm by natural gains, passive gains, so we don't have to pay for them because it's just energy coming in through the windows. We have our own water coming out of the taps. As you have water coming out of the tap. But we collected rainwater off the roof and put it somewhere and then cleaned it and pumped it back.

So it feels the same in a lot of ways. But the bits behind it all are very different and that gives you sort of a lot of sense of ownership and control of

your own resources. So the essence is around that feeling of being involved in the House. And one of my neighbors describes it is a bit like sailing a yacht. You're part of the building, you operate it and you sail along with it.

Natasha:
That's a really great metaphor. I'm really struck by this point around preconceptions and the idea... I will confess that I'm a fan of sort of those TV programs that show great big kind of architectural projects where people throw lots of money at it. And I'm struck by the idea that people have a pre-conception before they come to visit a Hockerton House, that it's not going to be what they...imagine it's going to be some sort of little hidey hole or what? Well, yeah, that, that kind of mismatch of what people expect and how it and how it actually is.

Simon:
Yeah, it is interesting and the... the thing about grand designs and... by their name obviously most people don't live in grand designs, and most of the time we're actually pushing low maintenance, low cost houses, meaning that they're low cost to live in. Our houses didn't cost any more to build, but they're very, very much cheaper to live in.

And I think to be honest, that's what really counts when you're thinking about low cost housing, it's how much they cost to live in. And Grand designs is great. You know, there's always going to be people pushing the boundaries on size, but we push the boundaries on quality and affordability, which is a quite different approach. And it's really tricky when you're trying to get planning through.

So other groups have come to us and often the planners don't see that as innovative. It's easy to see a big fancy house with spirals and turns and twists and great big plate glass windows that cover vast... you know oh that must be innovative, surely. But it is innovative in a visual way out that way. But it's not innovative in our sense, which is thinking about how do you build a house for no more but yet have its, you know, running costs with very low maintenance, with very low impact on the environment.

It's a bit more cerebral, but it's it's really important actually for people and that's the innovation we really push.

Natasha:
And as you say, that comes back to the mechanics. It's not what it looks like, it's how it operates behind the scenes, under the floorboards. Yes. The pipes running through things. That's that sounds like that's where a lot of the innovation is.

Simon:
And of a basic principle to sum that up is, kind of function before form is in if you are an architectural speak. So it's the form comes out of the function. So you get it to operate, right. You sail it correctly, you build it so you can sail it. And then the beauty comes out of how you've done that, rather than going, How do we want this to look? as the first thing you do.

So it's thinking about the operation of the building before the form. So that's kind of how I like to think about that.

Natasha:
Of course, Hockerton isn't the only example that we can look to for inspiration for a new vision of luxury homes.

Rose:
There are some pioneers. I would point your listeners to the excellent example of Goldsmith Street in Norwich. So this was a social housing scheme. 100 homes in Norwich were built by the local authority and in 2019 this scheme at Goldsmith Street received the Royal Institute of British Architects RIBA Stirling Prize for the UK's Best new Buildings. This really was pioneering, these 100 homes at social rents with large windows, really beautifully designed.

Every home has car free access to space to play, and they were also all built to passive house standards, which really limits the amount of fuel that you need to use to heat your home. It really reduces the lifetime carbon cost of the building, and it also means that these homes are healthier and more comfortable for people living in them.

So it does happen and when it does happen, it's often recognised and rewarded, which is which is good. However, the Goldsmith Street case does demonstrate an interesting complexity in applying the idea of public luxury to housing, because there was also quite a lot of backlash from members of the public. So I went on quite a few radio shows at the time that the RIBA prize was given out to this scheme and talked about it and did quite a few phone ins.

And often people would say, you know, they were stuck in their own personal housing crisis in Norwich or elsewhere, and they were saying, well, how come people in Norwich on the social housing waiting list get to live in these incredible homes? And you keep telling me how great they are while I'm stuck living in an old cold, private, rented home paying through the teeth for fire remediation works because I've bought a flat from a shoddy developer, or living with my mum and dad into my thirties to try and get on the housing ladder in some way.

So there's actually quite a lot of resentment attached to the idea of really high quality social housing, especially social housing, because it's a rationed good, because there's so little of it that it's tightly rationed.

It does quickly lead to resentment and that makes it tough, I think, for for social landlords and others to to be ambitious about affordability, decency, security and including sustainability in their understanding of that. Often schemes which try to do this are community led schemes where the community gets together and designs a housing scheme for itself. Often there's really dismissive attitude from policymakers and civil servants towards these schemes as being the preserve of middle class hippies with the luxury to think about sustainability.

And that is definitely how sustainability is being understood in housing development at the moment, as as a luxury.

Natasha:
Yeah, and I think that's one of the things we're trying to unpick here, is that there's this it's fascinating to hear you talk about the reaction to good quality social housing that says a resentment and a sort of a could use the word jealousy. I think there's also I think the implication is that these people don't deserve to have kind of such a high standard of living.

And I think there's that end of the scale where you have to. But yeah, there are other examples of social housing, there's one near me, you know, really high quality. And then I think but when people think sustainable housing in the private sector, I think they have a kind of Grand Designsesque idea of sort of a very, very expensive elite kind of dwelling.

And I wonder there seems to be this sort of no, there's no space in the middle for saying actually all of us would benefit from homes that were, going to pick up on your three, you know, affordable, secure and of good quality. And I think to me, the sustainability actually like it ties into all three of those things potentially.

And yet that seems to be the preserve of extremes rather than actually just the norm of what people expect and aspire to just for an everyday house.

Rose:
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. I mean, it is the social housing sector that has been pioneering in leading decarbonisation, because it's the space where the incentives are best aligned. So in the private rented sector, which has the oldest, coldest homes and it's causing a huge health problems for people and of course, enormous expense for the taxpayer as we subsidise people's energy bills because of rising fuel costs.

So in the private rented sector, if we look at homes, really low energy efficiency ratings, in order to improve those, you would need for private landlords to pay quite a lot of money in some cases to get those homes up to standard. And the beneficiaries will be their tenants who will benefit through lower fuel bills. So it's not going to happen, is it?

It's it is the social sector that's really pioneering this stuff. But you're quite right. That sets up an interesting dynamic where you've got sustainability really polarized. It's being pursued to some extent in the social housing sector, it's being pursued by some private owners who are passionate about sustainability and are able to invest in it and are incentivized to do so because they will themselves benefit from lower fuel costs.

But there's the missing middle. What about private renters? What about mortgage holders? So that the incentives here are really, really tricky. And certainly the idea of normalising sustainability in housing, normalising that expectation is really tough when tenure has such an important role in determining your opportunities to have more energy efficiency in your home.

Simon:
Being so obvious living here that it's a sensible, straightforward, good idea, why hasn't it picked up and kind of why aren't more houses built like this? And I think it's there's a big issue in this country with how we operate the planning system, but also how people can make money selling houses, of any type, because there's such a high demand.

So the quality of the house doesn't actually matter much. If you there's a huge demand for somewhere, you know, people need somewhere to live. You can basically build and sell anything. And because of that, the quality hasn't gone up. So unless you have rules around the performance of a house, then the builders, the system we have don't supply quality housing.

People think it might be quality because it has a nice looking kitchen, but it's not. What I'm meaning by the quality is reduced impact, low energy bills and so on. And it's really interesting that the system doesn't seem to facilitate that supply of eco, green, quality housing. And what hasn't happened sadly, is that...the planners think about what it looks like nearly always.

They hardly ever think about how it performs. They're not really interested in that, it seems. And yet for people living in it, once you're living in it, it's about how it performs. And that isn't covered by the rules. The only rules that are there, the building regs. And they've been so slow to change. The rules have changed so slowly because the building companies, the big building compqanies, they have a very strong lobby and they don't want to change because they can make plenty of money doing what they currently do.

Why change? It's not necessary for them so they try to resist change and so the supply of houses is just the same as it was 25 years ago in terms of their performance and their quality, which is very frustrating, very frustrating.

Natasha:
And what do the policies, so central and I guess local government. I know that there's an interrelation between the two when it comes to housing policy, but what do they tell us about priorities when it comes to housing from a government perspective? Like what are governments prioritizing? And I'm going to say that it's not the right thing because we are in a housing crisis.

So evidence would point... would indicate that it's not the right thing. What should they be prioritizing?

Rose:
What are governments prioritizing? I mean, I think one of the ways to see the problem that we've got is the governments are prioritizing only two things when there are many other priorities that are very important and the two things they're prioritizing are in direct opposition. So the number one thing that politicians tend to prioritize in housing policy is keeping house prices high and growing because the majority of households still do own a home.

Despite the decline of home ownership, about 60%, over 60% of households own their own home. If property prices keep going up, it makes people feel like they're getting richer. It tends to boost consumer confidence and is seen to be good for the economy. It's seen to be a political winner. The second thing the politicians tend to want to prioritize is more first time buyers is revising overall homeownership rates, which have been plummeting. Despite all the recent talk about interest rates and how they're affecting mortgage holders is actually now any 30% of households that have a mortgage in this country.

It's it's really not very many households at all that still have a mortgage. And yet our discussion about the housing market, the housing sector, the economy, is dominated by conversation about mortgage holders when the reality is we don't have enough mortgage holders anymore for negative equity to be a massive problem because we've made housing so unaffordable. So these two goals are really directly contradict one another.

You cannot create more first time buyers while also keeping house prices high and rising. The only way you can do that for a little while is by using taxpayer money to give out cash to first time buyers to boost the amount that they can afford to pay for housing, which keeps house prices growing, which makes house prices less affordable.

Which means the next time you want to create some more new homeowners, you have to hand out even bigger cash prizes to keep that demand growing. And it becomes really expensive, really disruptive. This is the way that we have been doing housing policy for years now, but particularly since the great financial crisis where I would refer to it as a policy of decadence, it was never going to produce long term positive policy outcomes.

That's a big theme I would say that no government in recent years has been willing to invest in long term policy change. We've all been focusing on short term gimmicks that can make things look a little bit better for a couple of years while making the long term problems even worse.

And what are some of the long term things that you think government should be looking at? Why aren't we building enough good quality social housing? What are some of the fixes?

So one thing I would say is clearly we could build more social housing, right? That's the thing that we desperately, desperately need to do. We need more social homes. Everybody knows this. But I would urge us not to be bounded by the current market situation we find ourselves in, because if we try to build the social homes that we need quickly today, we would be paying an awful lot for land because we would be paying for land with prices based on using that land for private development.

And then we would have to use taxpayer money to subsidize that land back down to affordable levels and build it for social housing. So it would be really, really expensive and it would actually represent a significant transfer of wealth from the taxpayer, from the public good to landowners. So what I would urge is we shouldn't see social housing as a way to avoid the problems of the market.

We need to take on the housing market. We need to make the housing market itself capable of delivering affordable, decent, secure homes again. How do we do that? Well ok, we need to stop giving out quite so many sweeties to first time buyers and the people that we do like, the people that we do want to build homes. I think there's a role for that.

There's a role for some demand support. But there's a much bigger role for suppressing down demand from the people buying homes who are not making a positive contribution to the housing system in this country. So the distinction I would draw is between homes for long term occupation and assets, homes which are often taken out of the supply of housing for long term occupation and maximize for their asset value.

So this would include short terms, AirBnBs, everything which takes homes out of the long term private rented sector and moves them into short term lets. There's empty homes. Of course, there're second homes, holiday homes. The numbers of all of these have been growing in recent years. So we have a less efficient use of our housing stock than we used to.

So I think we need to suppress down that investor demand. And actually we have seen some steps in this direction. So in 2016, the government introduced a differential rate for stamp duty. So investors, most types of investor would pay a small surcharge on their stamp duty. That would mean that it would give first time buyers an edge in the market.

So if you're first time buyer, you've got pay a bit less stamp duty than an investor. Therefore it's easy for you to purchase the property, you can afford to pay a bit more for it. I think you need to do much, much, much more of that. I think we need to increase that stamp duty rate, the investor surcharge considerably, and I think our aim should be to create space for owner occupiers and also social landlords, local authorities, housing associations, community led housing groups to purchase those homes instead.

So it's a two pronged approach. We have to suppress the demand that is causing real harm. We really don't need more second homes in this country. We could have a conversation about whether there's a role for second homes, but we don't need, I think, more second homes in this country. And we've seen a massive spike in second homes and holiday homes in this country in recent years in the midst of a housing crisis.

This makes no sense. The very least we can do is tax it. The second thing we need to do is make sure that the individuals and institutions who are well-placed to purchase and manage homes in the public interest, that they're tooled up to do that. So some of that is about government making finance available at very low cost.

Some of this really happens, but there's lots of ways we do more of it. Some of it is about grants. Some of it is about looking at the tax system again, just incentivizing social landlords and community groups as well as individual homeowners to purchase homes rather than investors. The other thing we could consider doing, which is a bit more radical, but it's not that radical, it's done in lots of countries around the world, including New Zealand and Canada, is we could simply ban purchases of homes by investors or certain groups in places where it's clearly causing a problem.

So in much of the UK, coastal communities and scenic rural communities in particular have been completely overwhelmed by second homes, holiday homes and the like in recent years, to the point where you have constituencies now where their are no homes available for long term let because a local person working a local job in Cornwall is just never going to be able to pay as much as somebody from London going on their holidays to Cornwall will be able to.

I think there's a really good case in places like that for simply saying no more second homes here for a, say, two year period. Likewise, in our major cities, there's clear evidence of foreign buyer demand having some really distorting impacts on the market. And I think equally it would be appropriate there to simply ban those purchases for a period of time while the market cools down again.

Natasha:
I mean, I'm really struck by the distinction you spoke about earlier, where you think about homes for long term occupancy and assets. And to me, it's the difference between a house and a home. Like a home is somewhere that you live. It's where you it's where you live, your life and your life with kind of all its dimensions. And a house, it's a little green thing on a monopoly board. It's a thing to be sort of moved around.

Rose:
A unit.

Natasha:
Yes. Yeah.

Rose:
In the language. Often in policy circles, we'll hear about units and dwellings and interestingly, I do think that when the word dwelling in particular is often used when we're talking about really poor quality housing. I think on some subconscious, policymakers know that these spaces don't merit the term home. You could not imagine these spaces as a home.

Natasha:
Yeah, that's fascinating. I feel like dwelling... for some reason I would associate that with like maybe small mammals. I don't know that I would. Yeah, I think that's that's that is fascinating.

Simon:
I was thinking about this when thinking about luxury and what does luxury mean? And actually, if luxury means living in a really good supportive community and having low energy bills so you can do more with what money you earn and luxury means having not so far to travel or if you do travel, it's close enough to cycle and get fit at the same time as you're traveling and eat organic vegetables, which you grow with your neighbours.

If that's a luxury, then it's almost I think what needs to happen is we need to realize what luxury is. We need to define it as something like that, rather than a big empty house that takes a lot of energy to heat. You know, maybe that's just the way we think about luxury that needs to change. It's a sort of a psychological, philosophical change which everybody can do anywhere.

That's the key to getting to where we need to be in terms of the whole environment. It's going to be difficult for us to drop a lot of papers and spread it out in that ripple effect. But if we can get the ripple effect to be everywhere, like it's raining and everybody's changing their philosophy on how they

consider luxury to be then we'll get there much quicker.

Natasha:
That would be a definite luxury to aspire to be something that would make us all very comfortable while at the same time protecting the environment and our planet. And we definitely need to kind of balance both of those things.

Simon:
And it's very familiar luxury. And in terms of comfort and security feels like what we have, but we're not having to pay vast amounts of anything for it, which is interesting, isn't it? So comfort, so keeping warm, comes in through the windows, that's sufficient to keep our household plus two other smaller sources, body heat and appliance heat. And if you have... amazingly just with enough insulation that sufficient energy flow into a house to keep it warm.

And isn't that amazing that this whole energy crisis in houses, this whole increase in death rate in this country through poor housing could be completely eradicated by building houses at no extra cost, which just use the natural flows of energy in a careful, controlled way to deliver a warm, comfortable house. Brilliant. You know, we should have been doing this for a long time.

And security. Absolutely, because that's about neighbourhood, I think. And knowing your neighbours and feeling like you can trust them. And if the kids are playing down the road and they fall over, your neighbour can pick them up and that's okay. And that security comes through good neighbourhoods I think.

Natasha:
I think for me, these conversations really revealed the disconnect between those building the houses and the people who actually live in them, and also the fact that when these two elements are connected, we can create luxury for all, affordable housing that meets people's actual needs in environmentally friendly ways. It is definitely possible, but we need ambition to tackle the real underlying issues in our housing market and to shift our thinking from houses to homes.

We'll be picking up Simon's point about luxury neighbourhoods in our next episode.

I'd like to thank our guests Rose Grayston, housing campaigner and policy expert, and Simon Tilley from the Hockerton Housing Project. I hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please do subscribe to the series wherever you get your podcasts and like, comment and share the program. You can find notes and links for the show on our website at globalactionplan.org.uk/podcast and you can get in touch with us by email at podcast@globalactionplan.org.uk or send us a voice note to 020 4534 3913.

Our Lives. Our Planet. is a Global Action Plan podcast presented by me, Natasha Lockhun, and produced by Clair McCowlen.

Natasha
Imagine a life of luxury with all the trappings of comfort and security. Then imagine a life lived within planetary means. Are these two separate images in your mind? They don't have to be. If we combine them, then everyone would have the opportunity to live better lives in ways that don't damage the planet. Across this series, I'm exploring the idea of Luxury For All.

How can we move the concept of luxury from exclusive and expensive to inclusive and accessible? And could raising our collective ambition for public luxury offer a better quality of life for all of us? I'm Natasha Lokhun. Welcome to this first series of Our Lives Our Planet, a Global Action Plan podcast. Through this podcast series, we're applying the idea of luxury for all to six different areas of everyday life to see how we can reimagine what those look like and shift our aspirations.

In this episode, we're exploring luxury neighbourhoods. If a neighbourhood is more than a geographic location or an array of houses, how could our neighbourhoods make us and the planet healthier and happier? I'll be speaking to two experts on this topic: later, we’ll be joined by Imandeep Kaur, co-founder and director of Civic Square. First, let's hear from my first guest, Hirra Khan Adeogun co-director of campaigns and impact at Possible. I began by asking her about the car free cities programme that she has led.

Hirra
So over the past, sort of two and a half years, we've been working in Birmingham, Bristol, Leeds and London, and we're partners on the ground in Paris and New York to kind of reimagine our cities away from car dominance. We've been working with local communities on the ground to reimagine their neighbourhoods. And what would it be like if we kind of transition away from the private car and kind of give a lot more space back to people and nature?

I think a lot of people almost instinctively go “ahhh!” when they hear car free cities, like, what do you mean, a city without cars? And we kind of need to caveat that and say, you know, when we talk about car free cities, we don't mean a city without any cars at all. What we mean is a city that is free from the dangers and the emissions and the pollution caused by massive private car dominance.

So we're really aware that there are lots of people, including some disabled people, including maybe some tradespeople, who will probably always need to rely on a personal vehicle to get about that improves their mobility, etc.. So this is more about a kind of most people don't need to rely on their cars and then some people will. And we kind of do that because we know that if we say what we actually want is fewer cars, people assume we mean the status quo, but just less.

Whereas what we're trying to do is something really radical. It's like, no, let's actually start from zero cars and then build up to actually here are all the caveats and the exceptions. But I think that's the kind of radical change we're looking for and we want.

Natasha
You mentioned that immediate reaction to the phrase car free, but I guess this is about more than transport and the vehicles themselves.

Hirra
Yeah. So this is why I think I've you know, I love this topic so much because it's about the climate, but it's also not just about the climate, it's about transport, but it's also not just about transport. This is about our health and the impacts that car dominance has not just on air pollution, but also on how mobile we are as people.

You know, how active we are in our day to day lives. You know, most people don't get the recommended 30 minutes a day of daily just, you know, just walking, basically just going out for a daily walk because we've sort of engineered that outside of our our lives now. It's about access to green space and your kind of mental health.

It's sort of particularly in cities where there are all these dense environments that are actually just going to get denser as population increases. We need to ensure that whilst it's getting denser, it's also getting greener and there's a bit of a tension then. So how do you do that? It means you've got to reclaim basically space that is just gray at the moment that isn't really serving most people.

And so saying that, you know, with private cars sat on the street for 95% of the time when they’re parked, that can actually be turned into a really lovely community space for people to sit. For people to, you know, also create new habitats in cities for pollinators and birds. And this is about wildlife as well. So I think a lot of these sort of issues intersect, but it's also about like a sense of community.

So there's lots of research that shows when you have heavy traffic going down a particular road, it severs community between both sides of the road. They don't interact, they don't engage with each other. Whereas if it's a very quiet street with very little traffic, people have more neighbours and more friends on the road. They engage more, they interact more.

So I think, yeah, this is so much more than just about transport. This is I think some people might think I sound like a radical, but genuinely I think this is a key way to completely transform the way we structure our cities and the way we live our lives.

Natasha
And I think what you were just talking about in terms of imagining the street without cars and the sense of community and you say it sounds radical, for me personally, I live in a more residential area, but I saw that during the lockdown. I mean, that happened for reasons that are not positive. But the point being, hardly any if I think no cars and so the road was just turned into it was a social space.

And then as I say, this isn't even a street where we do get passing traffic. But nonetheless, people were sitting out on the pavement. Kids were playing in the street like it was a sense of community that having lived here for six years before then I hadn't actually experienced and that did emerge. So that point about how the radical can suddenly... once you get a glimpse of it, you see how it is possible.

Hirra
Exactly. And I think that was, you know, obviously the pandemic was truly horrific and traumatizing for so many different reasons. But the silver lining there was how the space was taken away from cars and given back to people and nature. Like for once, people were saying, you know, even in my area, which is actually a highly trafficked area, could hear birds, I was... I didn't even know we had birds in this area, because all you can hear is like the din of traffic, which you assume is the norm.

Natasha
So if I think about cities and the challenges they face, you've got kind of climate, air pollution, traffic, that box. And then I think the other big issue is inequality in urban areas. How have you seen those two things intersect in this work? Does having a car free city help address urban inequality?

Hirra
It 100% does. And I wouldn't even put them into separate boxes. So for me, inequality, you know, whenever there's a climate crisis is the poorer people who will be affected more. And whenever you get air pollution is poorer, people are affected more is people of colour who are affected more. So I think inequality cuts across everything because we have built these very inequal societies.

And so all the work that we do needs to take very, very seriously inequalities and kind of, you know, like I was saying, air pollution, poorer people and people of colour are vastly adversely affected compared to white people or those who live in richer areas. It's the same with collisions in fact, if you're poor or if you are a person of colour, you are far more likely to be involved in a collision, a road collision than if you're white.

And that again speaks to the dangers of road traffic and where we're allowing cars to... like heavy traffic to just run through very disinvested areas. These are political choices we can choose differently and policy decisions can create different circumstances. So it doesn't have to be like this. This isn't just the way things are. We've created a system that has made sure that it is like this.

And we yeah, we can just basically choose to do differently.

Natasha
One organisation choosing to do things differently is Civic Square, a community organisation thas has grown out of Impact Hub Birmingham and other locally based initiatives, working with people in Ladywood in Birmingham to imagine and build the neighbourhood of the future. I spoke to co-founder and director Imandeep Kaur, and we started by reflecting on the need for this initiative.

Imandeep
We are going to have to transition everything about how we organize socially, economically, our relationship with the ecologies and the environments that we live in. We're going to have to do so much of that and most of our lifetimes will probably be dedicated to the building of the new and transitioning out of the old. And so we were just very interested at this stage of looking and understanding what is it that we know from when we've transitioned in society before, from one way of being to another?

Carlota Perez, the economist, talks about transition economics and how these transitions take like 30, 40 years when there is a death of the old and a birth of the new, and we're in the middle of that. And how much of that requires institutional and infrastructure responses as well as so much else. And there's lots of examples of this all around the world from many different cultures and backgrounds and times in history.

But if we were to take a British example, the NHS would be a good example of that at a time where, it's a very imperial example, because the reasons we were in this space weren't necessarily, you know, not through no fault of our own and our own actions, but at the end of the war, we were a country that was sick and broke and unproductive.

I'm doing air quotes at the moment for anyone who knows me, you would know that productivity in its current analysis is probably not one I massively agree with. But we understood that there wasn't a single Prime Minister or person who could stand up and say, Could everybody just go and get well, like we need to get back to work, we need to rebuild the country, we need to do all of this like and people weren’t just sitting there going, Great, I'll just grab my trainers and go to Parkrun and, you know, get healthy and start rebuilding society again.

The NHS was an institutional, large scale, national, public good response that 40 or 30 years before that, the what if question of what if everybody had access to free health care at point of need rather than whether they could pay, that would have been a completely bonkers and beyond imaginations of many of those in power. But, you know, over that time and the pioneers of those times, the medical society, the cooperatives that were starting to show other ways of living with nobility and dignity and equity and justice, they were already organizing on the ground.

And so came a time when then the NHS was born and again, it was born at a scale that was national, but it was organized regionally and finally it was organized at the neighbourhood scale. Democratizing access to health at the scale of your neighbourhood meant that everybody could participate in whatever way to having the tools, the spaces, the knowledge, the coming together to begin a journey that we knew would be a long one and ultimately would become a public good.

Natasha
I'm really struck by the point you made about that “What if” question. And the fact, as you say, that part of the transition is almost looking back and saying, you know, at what point you ask those questions, and the answer is is different. What are some of the what if questions that you're asking?

Imandeep

A really grounding question at the heart of our work is what if the climate and ecological transition and the retrofit of our homes, streets and neighbourhoods were designed, owned and governed by the people who live there? And that's there's a lot in that question because designing them, being participating in them, governing them, owning them in a way that builds community and civic and neighbourhood wealth, these are very big shifts.

So what we're asking is what if people 1) have the infrastructure 2) what if the climate and ecological and social transition was designed, owned and governed by the people who live there? And we're trying to share very clearly that the home, the street in the neighborhood, whilst a beautiful, amazing, tangible unit of change that we all connect with because it's where we live the majority of our lives, it's more also that I'm interested in saying, well, I believe communities, people who live in their places are critical or critical to the forefront of this change.

Natasha
So communities and neighbourhoods are at the forefont of change, but what do they want to make happen?

Hirra
And I think there is something in sort of imagining what is possible. So the thing that we've done in car free cities and car free mega-cities is we took local residents. These were people who are not invested in the climate at all. They would just describe themselves as concerned but not active in the climate space. And we got them together in particular areas and said, okay, here are the issues.

You know, this is, you know, we're experiencing a climate crisis, here's the health crisis, here's all the inequality crises. Here's why taking cars away can improve cities. We gave them examples of what other cities are doing, and then we said, okay, so what would you like to happen in your neighborhood? It wasn't prescriptive at all. We kind of let them decide.

And, you know, we worked in places that have traditionally been disinvested in. You know, a lot of people historically, these places have been ignored. So Tooting Broadway as a particular example of so much traffic. So we went to Tooting and we we worked with local residents to completely reimagine Tooting Broadway, the main Tooting high street, as if it was in a future without cars.

It's often those very central spots in the cities that we always see, and we did do a bit of that. So in London we kind of transformed Hyde Park Corner, but you kind of expect that to happen, right? And in New York, really glad to say that we we worked on the Grand Army Plaza and Department of Transport after our workshops are, coincidently, now coming up with plans and consulting on plans to pedestrianize Grand Army Plaza.

But I think what I was really excited about, the focus on communities that have been ignored, I think for quite a long time.

Natasha
Yeah, And I think that's one of the things I'd agree that I think there's a couple of things there where you've got communities that as you say, kind of over a period of time have not had levels of investment that are commensurate with others. But also I think they are underrepresented in conversations around climate as an example, around the environment.

When you're going out and you're talking to groups, are they surprised by some of the ideas? Is there an assumption that perhaps, you know, that could work elsewhere but not here?

Hirra
I think people do need convincing, and that is the job of civil society, you know, like us, but also of political leaders is to build that vision and take people along with you. And that's why it was so important to do the visioning workshops as co-design workshops. This wasn't us coming in as a climate charity going right, This is what needs to happen.

We basically took people on this journey of these are the facts on the ground. Now, what would you like to see happen? Like, this is the problem help solve this problem. How do we do that together and collectively? And actually, the visions, like I said, the visions they came up with are theirs and, you know, they wanted this they've campaigned for this and off the back of this day of they will be campaigning for this in their local areas.

These residents have fully come on board with it. I would say, because cars are so dominant in our culture and in our society, you know, people believe they get a certain status from them. There's also that people think it gives them freedom. It's not immediately obvious why you'd want to get rid of them. And so we have to build that case.

People are afraid of change and it will take radical change, but the glimmers of hope are there. So when we look at Amsterdam in the kind of sixties...Amsterdam we now think of as some kind of cycling paradise, it wasn't a cycling paradise in the sixties. It took political change and policies to come into place for cycling to become the norm.

And we're seeing it in Paris, like Paris has had like a huge cycling revolution. We did a report about this recently, and it wasn't always like that. You know, look at Paris just 20 years ago, less than that. It was not a cycling paradise. It was car heaven. And so what we really need to see is political will to change.

Imandeep
The four day week will be, I think, before before we roll out in some way, basic or citizens income will be a thing before our generation is out, not just because of its socialist ideals and principles, where it came from and what it understands about a functioning society. But because practically things aren't working. Practically we need to reduce consumption.

Practically. People are exhausted. Practically. We have pushed the limits of how this economic model can work. Practically. We know that in more crises, the first things that actually kept people going in where it worked well was things like furlough. And so we kind of really know some of these shifts are coming. And so that's what I mean by these what if questions.

They're not things that are like thousands of years away. They’re what I would say the way we deal with the radical imagination is imagining futures that are bold and maybe hundreds of years away, but understanding the kind of next birth of public goods that will be appropriate, not even visionary. They will just be appropriate. They are only... stories of them being visionary, are only told backwards, and they're only visionary 30 or 40 years before. Most of the time when they become like, What we all need is because everyone's like, Oh shit, that we can't actually.

Natasha
How do you take people along with you on that journey? So we need the radical thinkers. And as you say, the idea of what's visionary changes. How do you engage people who kind of aren't in that headspace all the time, who are just living their lives, doing their thing, who just want the best for themselves, their loved ones?

How do you take people along that journey?

Imandeep
Well, so ultimately, for the last like ten or 12 years, we've always been trying to build the work by also convening publicly. We have been trying to do that as like a principle that we that we hold continually. So there has always been and working in the open public convening. But I have to say that the shift from the city centre to the neighbourhood and to being really based within a neighbourhood has been the most challenging and the most important one.

One of the things that we had as an asset in this time of massive change was we had a green space outside the buildings that we were going to be transforming and we turned that into a public living room. Where for two and a half years, we were open as a café. Like the tagline was the kettle is...the kettle is on. And so, honestly, the absolute start point of this work is creating spaces where people come together that are persistent, consistent, noble, dignified.

And so that's why when people ask me, What do I need to do this work, I think it's more possible for all the thousands of people who run a knitting group, or a coffee morning, or it's much easier to bring in ideas and thoughts and organize when the social fabric that we're weaving is much more in the everyday.

It's not just an intuition of, you know, that coffee morning where everyone really gets on. That's where you can build things from. There is there is some thinking to this. And so for us, being in the place, starting from everyday stories in everyday ways is the absolute start point. So even on the complex work that we are doing with a number of partners around designing, owning and governing and financing your own civic retrofit.

This still starts from a way in which people experience these multiple crises, most practically where they are, and in that case it's energy bills they’re receiving, the vision that they have for their street, for their children. So what I still always starting from that. It isn’t knocking on the door and saying hi like Civic Square and Dark Matter Labs would like to engage you in a conversation about financial instrument design for retrofit, right?

Or like we're trying to shift public policy in this way. It's not the start point.

Natasha
So let's talk about the role of political leaders, because as much as it's about getting the public on board, it's politicians who are the ones who actually have the power to change things. And what have you learned through your work about political attitudes? Are you seeing a shift? What are the barriers? You know, the word radical, which I think I'd imagine is a word that kind of puts off politicians?

Hirra
It's it. Well, it puts off some politicians, it doesn't put off others. So I think it's interesting because for some politicians, they've really gone to bat for this and they've made a brand out of being actually very pioneering and inspirational in this. So I'm quite proud of Sadiq Khan’s record on this. I think he's done fairly well. Silvertown Tunnel I think is a huge mistake and needs to stop, but I think he has shown real leadership. Anne Hidalgo is another one in Paris.

She's shown real leadership, bold leadership, and that's sort of what we need. And I think also just on the local level, there are lots of councillors that are kind of setting the way, Rezina Chowdhury in Lambeth, I think is doing an amazing job. Lambeth have put out this brilliant kerbside strategy that's really setting the vision. So I think the politicians who are there to serve and really take on board the threat that is facing society, I don't think they are put off by that term.

They're sort of very much blazing. I would say that there are people who are put off because the issue has become incredibly hostile. And you do face hostility on social media. And I would say from a very loud and vocal minority who can sometimes get quite nasty and that can be very intimidating and that can put politicians off.

But this is the time for courage. This is why we need political leaders to kind of say, actually, I am here to serve all constituents, and the majority of constituents support me. Despite the very loud vocal minority.

Natasha
I’m just very struck by what you're saying around just, I think, how building a neighbourhood, a functioning neighbourhood, is not an end in and of itself. It's a means to an end. Right. The neighbourhood is a kind of it's a and I don't mean to sound this, to commodify it, but it's a kind of vehicle, it's a channel, it's a mechanism to then get things done that, as you say, are kind of relevant and have meaning for the people who live there.

So bearing that in mind, is the work then of building the neighbourhood, the future, creating a liveable neighbourhood, whatever, whatever phrase you want to use, is it ever done?

Imandeep
No, because that's what I was going to say. Neighbourhoods are living systems. They're both small enough and big enough. They’re small enough to be able to understand them in ways that we can’t understand bigger systems and their big enough to be able to actually show the and actually demonstrate the beginnings of bold change. They are a microcosm of all the viewpoints that would exist and, you know, all the things that we hear about that will be a microcosm of the best of us, of the worst of us.

Imandeep
And therefore, they are real. They're like they live and they breathe and they’re never finished and they have challenges. And we saw in the best parts is a weird sentence to say, but in the best parts of the pandemic, we saw the streets and neighbourhoods become hubs of mutual aid and shared activity. They are places where we can find our resilience, they’re places that we can break that as well by creating a lack or a kind of real... lots of like, you know, division and other things.

So no, they’re never finished. They they are... they just all are. Their living ways of, of of the societies we've built and therefore they are really critical to understand. They are critical for us to also we're all part of some where that we live. So what's interesting about neighbourhoods as well is that there's communities of people who live there, the streets, there’s communities of people who work there, the people who move in and out.

There’s people who are more transient. They’re a kind of reality of what the bigger story is. They often have different identities. And so I think within that it's to kind of, yeah, not to commodify them into something that you build. They are things that change and build. And you know, when sometimes developers say we're building a new neighbourhood, it's kind of like, No, there's already something going on there.

You're coming in to add, build, shift, change. And so no, I don't think they're ever finished. They are a living system that we can engage with in the most tangible ways because we live and we work in them. And therefore that idea of the home streets and neighbourhoods is where we experience larger crises in the most tangible ways.

Even if right now these crises don't look the same as what we think we see when we understand a climate and social crises that many of us in the global north over centuries have contribute to in the global South, even if they don't look like the extremities yet, it's where we experience the impact of the energy crisis, of inflation, of food, of time, poverty, of the social infrastructure, breakdown of what happens if someone's been on the phone trying to get a GP appointment for like half an hour in the morning and is frustrated and exhausted and alone, and then walks out their front door and has an argument with someone like it's where we experience the frustrations. It's also where we nurture the joys and the connectivities and the help that we can, and mutual aid and imagination and where our children experience safety or clean air or or not in the most tangible ways to us. And therefore, this is why I believe it's the unit of most agency for people to act from because it's what they can tangibly see and understand and experience the most.

And it's making that connection between the lives we live and the challenges and the stories and the infrastructure and then the other things that we theorize.

Natasha
Before I started these conversations, I was expecting to learn about how our neighbourhoods could be restructured to offer a high wellbeing, low impact lifestyle. And I did learn this. If we shift our thinking away from the dominant narratives, cars being one of them, the places where we live can also be places where we thrive as individuals and as communities.

But I learned something else too. Our neighbourhoods can be mechanisms to drive change more broadly by making that connection between big macro issues and the impact they have on our everyday lives, which is kind of the theme of this whole series. I'd like to thank our guests: Hirra Khan Adeogun co-director of campaigns and impact at Possible and Imandeep Kaur co-founder and director of Civic Square.

If you like this episode, please do subscribe to the series wherever you get your podcasts and like comment and share the program. You can find notes and links for the show on our website at globalactionplan.org.uk/podcast and you can get in touch with us by email at podcast@globalactionplan.org.uk or send us a voice note to 020 4534 3913. Our Lives Our Planet is a Global Action Plan podcast presented by me, Natasha Lockhun and produced by Clair McCowlen.

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Natasha
Could we all live a life of luxury that offers us comfort and security and looks after the planet? Across this series, I'm exploring the idea of luxury for all. How can we move the concept of luxury from exclusive and expensive to inclusive and accessible? And could raising our collective ambition for public luxury offer a better quality of life for all of us?

I'm Natasha Lokhun. Welcome to this first series of Our Lives, Our Planet - a Global Action Plan podcast. In this podcast series, we're applying the idea of luxury for all to six different areas of everyday life to see if redefining luxury and shifting our aspirations would help solve the climate and inequality crises that we face. In this episode, we're looking at the online world. Virtual luxury.

We are dependent, some might admit to being addicted, to living our lives online, but this doesn't always feel safe, healthy or positive. The online world as we know it is designed by and for adults. Yet one third of its users are children. If the Internet was designed for children first, would it be a safer, better place to engage for all of us?

A more luxurious experience. I'll be joined by two experts to explore this further. Later on, we'll hear from Dr. Elly Hansen, clinical psychologist and researcher, about how and why online engagement can cause harm to children. First, I spoke to my colleague Oliver Hayes. Policy and campaigns lead at Global Action Plan. Oliver’s background is as an environmental campaigner, and he's now focused on the role of big tech in driving consumerism and other human and planetary harms.

I wanted to understand why such an essential part of our everyday lives is also deeply problematic.

Oliver
Everything we do is increasingly reliant on the digital sphere. And that means you've got to look at it from a whole range of angles. You can't just think of it only as a useful tool. But you've got to think about what at what cost, you know? What's this doing? What are its impacts? Are we thinking about the consequences of this digital economy clearly enough?

And one of the things that we we've looked into at GAP is, okay, so the advertising itself is trying to compel us to buy more stuff, and it's doing that in a pretty supercharged way. As you say, we've always had advertising. There have always been billboards, magazine adverts, etcetera, etcetera. But now we've got it combined with data. And that means that if I, during my digital day, leave all sorts of little breadcrumbs, little snippets of data suggesting that these are the sorts of things I might be interested in buying or these are the sorts of websites I like reading, or this is where I am logging on the internet from, or this is the kind

of device I'm using and it might be an expensive device or a cheap device. All of these ultimately build up a picture about who we are, what we're like, and what we're likely to want to engage with in terms of both content and advertising. And so we get served to stuff that is kind of tailored, if you like, for us.

And at this point, it's important to say it's not always perfect. Like lots of us will have experienced recommendations or adverts that you think, Whoa, that's, you know, that's not me. But increasingly it is it pretty, is pretty tailored and it's pretty predicted.

Natasha
And the sort of flipside of that or the counter, if I can be devil's advocate, is people will say, But isn't that a good thing? Don't you want it? Okay. So it's not always perfect, but generally speaking, if, you know, the machines recognize that we have a preference for X or Y or Z and want to serve us more of that, that's a good thing, isn't it?

Oliver
Yes. You've done a very good job of impersonating the Press Office of Meta and TikTok and everyone else who say “our users prefer the personalized experience”, which is a lovely way of saying our users don't mind being spied on and our users don't mind their data, which clearly has an economic value, being sold and profited on to the great benefit of us and our bank balances. Because these platforms are advertising companies. When it comes down to it, that's the business they're in. Something like 97% of the revenue that Meta receive comes from from advertising, because that's the business model. The products we use are by and large free and so Meta get paid by advertisers to advertise to us and they sell advertisers or make the data available to advertisers in such a way that the advertisers feel like they've got a good chance of of selling the right product to the right person.

So it's important that that's how we think about these companies. And then when it starts to get really interesting is like, okay, so if that's the business model, if the business model is try and get as many adverts in front of the right people as possible, then you start to look at everything else they're doing through that prism.

And so the idea of content which is recommended for us, is not because they think we're going to really like watching it, it's because their sole aim and this isn't, you know, this is going to sound sort of slightly conspiratorial or like in a tin hat, but it's just kind of hard business logic, if you like. Their sole aim is that we spend, as users of their product, spend as much time as possible using their products and engaging with their products, because that gives the most opportunities for us to be served adverts, which makes them the most money.

So if we put our phone down after 5 minutes because we were bored, that's terrible for business. Even if actually we had a really positive view of the experience, if we thought, Oh, I really enjoyed that 5 minutes, it was lovely, I'll go and do that again later. That's much less good for them than if we spend 15 minutes, 20 minutes, an hour, 2 hours disappearing down rabbit holes that we had no intention of doing because then we end up just generating a huge stream of data and watching a lot of adverts and making them a lot of money.

Natasha
The idea that we, our identities and thoughts and desires are being commodified on a massive scale is uncomfortable, even more so when you think about that happening to children and young people. Dr. Elly Hanson is a clinical psychologist and researcher specializing in online harms to children. I asked her what we know about the ways in which children engage with the online world.

Elly
It's an excellent question and in a way, it's actually a very difficult question to answer because we don't have a neutral online. So you know, we can look at how young people, children and young people are engaging online, but we can't... it's very difficult to disentangle what of that engagement is kind of authentically them versus what is the product of the manipulative forces that are being trained on their minds effectively?

You know, what we certainly can say is we can look at what young people need and enjoy and want. You know and it’s things like friendships, to enjoy friendships, to learn, to be creative. Also just kind of escapism and fundamentally play, you know, play is a really big thing, isn't it, to child to to all different stages of childhood, in fact, including adolescence.

And so it's, you know, all of those motives children and young people bring to their online experience, to what they're looking for online.

Natasha
If you've got a child and say, you know, they go online and they might go to a website or, you know, whether it's a website or an app and they're interested in play, that's that's what they want. They want some fun. So what happens next? What what do we understand about where what their journey is, what the interactions are, and I suppose what the kind of forces are that they're subjected to along that journey.

Elly
So they'll be entering into that platform. Like you say, they've got a particular desire. They want to play it, maybe want to kind of have some escapism and that platform will already likely have data on them, possibly even from other platforms that they've been on and kind of data sharing and will also... and so will then suggest a variety of content to them and will be measuring, you know, the minutiae of how that child behaves.

So, you know, how long they hover over a video for etcetera. And they're not just being presented with a kind of natural diversity of possible play experiences, they are being presented with things that are “capital productive”, for want of a better phrase. You know, these companies, their core intention obviously is to make money. And so they would like to present they present things to children that are likely to keep that child engaged online for longer.

Now, you might think that that would then naturally map on to the child's core interests and motives. But we know that it really doesn't because there are some things that engage children and indeed adults for longer online that really don't correspond to their core interest, which we might call their kind of autonomy. But it's it's this has been termed a race to the bottom of the brain stem, you know, so let's just use the example of sexual content.

We know that the big tech companies are bombarding children, knowing that they’re children, with sexual content. It's often intermingled with adverts that clearly show that the company knows that they're a child. And, you know, if that child hovers over the sexual image or presses like, they are then bombarded with more and more of the same, which isn't really going to be corresponding to that child's core autonomy, that their core intentions for going online a lot of the time.

And so it's very entrapping. And we know that also that negative emotions keep people on for longer. So there's a bombard of content that will stir up insecurity, that will stir up feelings of, you know, in-group outgroup engendering, you know, suspicion of of people that are not like you, that kind of thing.

Natasha
Hearing you describe that, it feels to me like, you know, we use the word navigate. We say navigate the online world, navigate a website. And that's not really the right word, is it? I mean, we and children in particular, they're not navigating the online world. They're just being led.

Elly
Yes, exactly. So we might just take I mean, I'll take the example of my son who's 13, you know, TikTok and Instagram will know that he's a 13 year old boy. They'll know who his friends are, who are other 13 year old boys. And then he's being served content, for example, content that is these kind of like little video shorts interviewing women about how they use men, you know. So it's actually misogynistic content.

And, you know, this is a boy who I've never heard express that kind of content, you know, those views himself. But coming back to what I was saying about negative emotions keep you on for longer. You know that the algorithm knows that that kind of content may fire up a young adolescent who's figuring out their own gender identity and how they feel about how boys feel about girls.

How girls feel about boys etc. And you know that that's going to rile them. And I think we are seeing that. I think we're seeing a rigidification of gender norms and a divisiveness between the genders that has been amplified is greater than it has been in previous years. So that's just you know, that's just one example.

Natasha
And that's also really interesting to think about that online experience happening at a time when pre the Internet, confess I'm old enough to maybe remember that, as you say, young people, adolescents are going through that period of figuring out that stuff anyway. That's just that's not part of your development in life. You're trying to work out who you are, who these people are, how you want to interact.

So is this about the online world? How much is it about the offline world? Like how often the two like, what do we know about how the two are intersecting or not? I suppose. I guess what I'm asking is, does this sort of stuff that happens online, does that play out in offline interactions as well? Are we seeing that kind of broader impacts on kids’ just social development generally.

Elly
I think we are. It is hard to disentangle. And I'm certainly not here to say that all of our societal ills are because of the online. But I guess what I am saying is that yeah, the human psyche is complex and we have great potential to do good and great potential to do harm. And what's happening, you know, the term “algorithmic amplification” that it's taking, for want of a better word, kind of baser parts of the human psyche and amplifying them.

And then coming to your question about how is what's happening online kind of playing out offline? I think we can see it in lots of different pathways as it were. So just just to give you a couple of examples, we know that young people are being exposed to huge amounts of porn online, both through the big main tube sites but also via social media.

So the most common place for young people to see porn now is Twitter. And I think that's been a kind of interesting and really worrying development, how porn is just inter-spliced with other content. So it's been kind of normalized and legitimized. And again, it's that kind of race to the bottom of the brain stem, you know, where sexual content is a particular hook.

And even if you don't want to be thinking about it, if it's just there, grabs people's attention and then can lead them down a bit of a kind of porn rabbit hole. And we know from research that exposure to porn increases rates of sexual harassment. You know, so for me, it's no coincidence that we had everyone's invited a few years ago which completely corresponded to smartphones and the immersion of porn entering young people's everyday lives in a way that we've never had before.

And then just to give a second example, we've got the really robust research now that we can be very confident in showing how Instagram and similar social media have played a causal role, you know, very likely causal role in young women's distress, particularly around body image. So Instagram has been pushing, again, going back to negative emotions. It's been generating insecurity and social comparison, telling young women that how they look is core to their worth and then giving them a kind of hierarchy of of appearance, you know, So you have to look this way.

And it's no coincidence that how you have to look according to this scheme costs a lot of money. It's not saying that natural is beautiful. And even when it does say natural is beautiful, we're talking about a fake natural that you have to spend lots of money on it. So you've got this kind of fake beauty, heavy inverted commas here, being pushed to girls that they have to spend a lot of money on, that they feel like they're always falling short of and that the direct real world effect of that is higher rates of depression and anxiety in girls and self-harm, suicidality, the rest. You know, it's this is a this is a real scandal in my opinion.

Oliver
There won't be, you know, a parent in the land who hasn't, certainly if their children are you know over sort of infant age, who hasn't at some point thought, oh, my kid’s spending too much time on their phone or on their tablet. And the really sort of easy response to that is to either blame yourself or as a parent.

And this isn't just frustrated parents. It might be educators in my, you know, anybody.

Natasha
I think even adults, I think adults like yourself, you kind of just sometimes I'm confess I'm conscious of just spending too much time on it. I'm wondering why is it frittering away hours looking at nonsense?

Oliver
Yeah, of course this happens to all of us, but but that is by design. And I think what we at GAP are really trying hard to to try and communicate at the moment is that it's not our fault. It's not your fault as a parent. It's not your fault as a kid. It's not your fault as an adult, as a as a sentient being that you are spending or your kid is spending more time on more websites or on random bits of content than than you meant to.

It's the design of the product. That's what it's meant to do. And they're brilliant at it. And they have this unprecedented power that comes from extraordinary amounts of data about all of us. You know, we have all been volunteering all of this behavioural data to these websites for decades now, 20 years since Facebook got going. And they combine that with extraordinary computing power harnessed by AI and machine learning, and they point all of that at a single, completely fallible human brain.

So it's not a fair fight. And it's it's kind of almost equivalent to blaming an addict for wanting more of an addictive substance. It's like, well, the substance is addictive and you're now hooked. Like you don't have a huge amount of control in that situation. So I think it's a very, very unhealthy kind of discourse that you still hear.

And, you know, you hear this and politicians say it, you hear it on the radio phone-ins and stuff that you know that, oh, back in my day, parenting was parenting. And people just told kids how much time they could spend watching telly. And that was that. It's it doesn't work like that anymore. And this, I think, is among the most addictive of substances, if you like.

You probably can't call it a substance, but you know what I mean, that we've ever we've ever seen.

Natasha
So this podcast, we're looking at reimagining areas of everyday life. So the idea of virtual luxury, what would that be? I think for a long time, you mentioned it's been 20 years since Facebook came out, for a long time the idea that was pushed was that these platforms were agnostic. You know, the tech is agnostic, the tech is the tech. It’s a tool, it’s a platform and how people use it, what content they put up there, that's just you know, that's human beings. But the idea that the tech is agnostic, aside from whether that was true or not, is that what we want?

Like what would an online world that was supportive and offered us comfort and security and was less... I mean is it just about advertising, is it about selling us less stuff? What is it we should be aiming for?

Oliver
I think it's important to stress that no one is seriously suggesting that you try and sort of put the genie back in the bottle that you say social media is completely irreparably bad. We shouldn't have it at all. The Internet should kind of be turned off. Even if you wanted that to happen. It can't happen. So it's a much more interesting question to say how could it be different? And I don't know whether it ever was neutral or agnostic, as you put it, but certainly it was different. You know, when I first had a Facebook account, my feed was chronological. So if I logged on and recently my friend A had posted something about what they were doing this evening, but Friend B hadn't posted anything for a couple of days, even though what they posted two days ago was like really, you know, heartfelt and interesting or maybe inflammatory or something.

I wouldn't see what Friend B said. I would see what Friend A said because it had happened most recently. And then I remember the stage where you they sort of switched it to the algorithmic feed. So presenting what they think is most likely to engage you, but you still had the option to switch back to chronological so you could just see most, you know, the most recent posts.

And then that went all together. And it's the same with Twitter, which obviously now in the last six months or so has changed enormously in a number of ways. But originally with Twitter, you got to the bottom of your Twitter feed. It said you're all caught up. So if you'd read all the things that the people you follow had posted recently, you got to the end.

And that's like finishing a glass of water. It's called a stopping cue. Like you get to the bottom of the glass, you see the bottom and you stop. You don't just keep pouring. And the same is true of our kind of digital lives. You know, it's important to have a have something that tells you now is the time to stop.

And then they realized, well, we can make more money if we just get rid of that stopping cue, if we just keep that endless scroll. So I think chronological is not necessarily just the answer to everything, because it can also be really boring. Like we do want the Internet to provide entertainment and stimulation. And if it's just pictures of your boring family posting and what they, you know, what they've eaten or your slightly problematic uncle saying something slightly problematic again like that's not necessarily what you want to use the Internet for, but there is something better, inherently better about the kind of the intentional and less deliberately provocative set up the chronological feed rather than the the engagement based news feed, which we have now.

Natasha
And what are your thoughts on what that kind of what would virtual luxury look like? What could it look like? What would what would an online world that seeks to meet the needs of children in particular that you spoke about earlier? What would that what could that look like?

Elly
One reference point for me with that discussion with what that looks like is a big theory within psychology called self-determination theory, which has got a huge amount of research behind it. And to completely summarize it and not do justice to it at all, it finds that there are really three core things that are core to human flourishing and having a good life in the deepest sense of the word.

And they are our autonomy, our relationships and our competency. So being in the driving seat of our lives, having close authentic relationships and feeling a sense of kind of competence, you know, that we're doing well in what we're doing and being creative. So for me, an online world would look at those deepest aspirations and seek to support young people in meeting them.

Now, I could talk about how we do that in terms of deep design. Fundamentally, let's start with getting rid of surveillance capitalism and the attention economy. I think it's just a fundamentally parasitic business model that we just need to call time on now. We wouldn't expose our children to other forms of parasites or other forms of deep manipulation.

And so why are we doing that here? And then in terms of just some kind of quick, easy things that would make the online world a much better place, Obviously, the online safety bill has a whole host of things which I think are very positive. And I think also just building in more intentionality is the word I would use.

So moments where children can make choices about what they want to see and what they don't want to see, and inviting them to reflect on on their deeper aspirations rather than just going with the flow. And indeed, you know, I ran some focus groups with young people looking at, you know, what what does a good Internet look like for them?

And this was something that they were saying, you know, it's actually social media, etc.. where they can say what they want to see, where they can choose their interests rather than having them you know, their interests kind of decided for them and being turned to certain interests above others.

Natasha
So what can be done? Like big tech, you know, it’s the first word, big, these companies are huge. They're massive in terms of revenue, in terms of power. And we've spoken about wanting to be for us as users to be intentional. What can be done to kind of rein in the power of the big tech companies and, you know, give the power back to the people.

Oliver
Regulate is I think, the first answer. Like, you know, these companies have proven themselves now unwilling to self regulate in a meaningful way. And it kind of makes sense. You know, what they want to do is make as much money as possible so they're not going to alter their business model because it's proved wildly effective. These are among the richest companies that have ever existed, and many of them have taken, you know, a handful of years to go from nothing to mega corporation status.

So I think governments have to step up. There is clearly a vital and important role for the state to play in saying what is and isn't acceptable in how these platforms operate. And the good news is that is happening more than it's been ever happening before. I think for a long time national governments and the EU, and other institutions, were in awe of these kind of brilliant tech engineers.

You know, the kind of Silicon Valley bro's sitting around in their t shirts on beanbags, inventing these incredible products and often products, which helps them get elected as well. So, you know, that was another interest of theirs. But I think there was a slight kind of detachment and an awe and a sense that like, let's just leave these guys to, you know, they're the frontiers of this new technology, let’s just leave them to get on with it.

And now the impacts of their products are so clearly documented, we know what happens in terms of the increase in hate, the increase in online to offline violence, the extent to which elections are being manipulated. You know, democracy is very demonstrably under threat thanks to the power of these products and the ease with which they're harnessed by bad actors.

So I think momentum has shifted and the lawmakers are now much more up for the idea of trying to rein in big tech. The good news is that regulation is starting to appear in some really key places. So in California, where all of the tech companies are headquartered and in Europe, where the kind of appetite for reining in big tech is seems greatest.

A recent a recent law there called the Digital Services Act is a lot more exciting than it seems and puts meaningful restrictions on tech companies and how they operate. And just recently here in the UK, after a very, very long time, a very long, slow, tortuous process, there is a kind of equivalent piece of legislation called the online Safety Bill, which will very soon become the Online Safety Act.

And thanks to some really impressive efforts by some parliamentarians and lots of campaigners that Bill, which for a long, long time was looking at trying to regulate the content that people, particularly children, came into contact with, which is a bit like playing Whac-A-Mole, really. If you're just you know, there are billions of posts every day and you're trying to sort of desperately try and stop the worst ones of popping up.

It's a thankless task. And now that bill, that piece of legislation is much more, not sufficiently, but much more focused on the systems that promote that content in the first place and trying to say to the platforms, you have a responsibility to work out how much harm those systems themselves are causing and what the risk of encountering that harm is for children in particular.

And you have an obligation to mitigate those risks and mitigate those harms. And the next period of time here in the UK... the next kind of 12, 18 months will be really, really key because the regulator of this new legislation, Ofcom, who regulate communications industry, they are going to have to work out the real granular detail of how this is all going to work in practice.

And I think our role as campaigners and as advocates for a safer online world is to really demonstrate to them the drip drip the attritional harm that comes from a business model which says ever more of whatever it is you want or whatever it is might be irresistible to you. So I think the more we can do that, the more we can present those harms to Ofcom and the more that it just becomes part of the public consciousness, the better the chances of that regulation being strong here in the UK.

Natasha
And how can people get involved in that?

Oliver
Well, in the short term you can sign a petition. And that sounds, you know, potentially not the most world changing thing in the world, but it is important 75,000 people at the time of recording have signed a petition that Global Action Plan coordinated as part of our work with Dove, that major sellers of soap and other cosmetics who have been campaigning on toxic beauty content online.

And we are going to deliver that petition to Ofcom on the day that they receive their powers. And we're going to say to them, look, here are tens of thousands, potentially 100,000 people by the time we hand it in, who are concerned that social media is really harming, in this case, the mental wellbeing of women and young girls through the perpetuation of of toxic beauty content.

And that is, of course, completely linked to the business model of the platform. So sign that petition, you can find it on the Global Action Plan website and hopefully over the next period of time you might be able to help us by sharing any stories you have, because I think facts and figures and statistics are necessary and important, but they are never enough to compel decision makers or people regulating laws to go as far as they can.

They need stories they need to hear about, you know, where you're happy to share this, to hear about the harms that you or young people you know are suffering as a result of of social media shoving all of this stuff down, down our feeds. So look out for opportunities to share those stories via Global Action Plan channels. I don't think any of us really want the Internet to be a place of, you know, hate and division. Just like we don't want the real world to be like that, that there's no reason the social media needs to be a cesspool.

It can be fun and it can do all of the things that we know it probably originally was designed to do. It can connect people. It can provide safe havens of, you know, niche, but important communities where you might struggle to find other people who are part of that community in a real world like it can be a great place to find news that isn't covered in the mainstream press.

It can be all of the good fun, enriching, safe, educating things that we want it to be.

Elly
Wouldn't it be wonderful if the tech companies were all sitting around a table saying, let's start with that. Let's start with children's best interests. And, you know, we can say a lot about what those are and then design a technology that is going to support those interests, support those children growing into adults across their life course to flourish.

Natasha
The idea of virtual luxury might feel a bit nebulous, but if we can visualize luxury for all in other areas of our everyday lives, then why not in the online world? And there are parallels to some of the other conversations I've had. Both my guests spoke about the importance of autonomy and intentionality and that it's the way these systems are designed, not just how we use them, that causes negative impacts. By putting children's wellbeing at the heart of these platforms, we could all benefit from better, richer, more fulfilling, safer online experiences that aren't centred on consumerism, which I think is a pretty neat vision of virtual luxury. I'd like to thank our guests. Oliver Hayes Policy and campaigns lead at Global Action Plan, and Dr. Elly Hanson, clinical psychologist and researcher.

If you like this episode, please do subscribe to the series wherever you get your podcasts and like comment and share the program. You can find notes and links for the show on our website at globalactionplan.org.uk/podcast. And you can get in touch with us by email at podcast@globalactionplan.org.uk or send us a voice note to 020 4534 3913.

Our Lives, Our Planet is a Global Action Plan podcast presented by me Natasha Lokhun, and produced by Clair McCowlen.

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• The Peckham Experiment - Pioneer Health Foundation
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Natasha
If you picture a life of luxury and a life lived within planetary means, are these two separate images in your mind? What if they don't have to be? Can we all enjoy comfort and security in ways that don't harm the environment? Across this series, I'm exploring the idea of Luxury For All. How can we move the concept of luxury from exclusive and expensive to inclusive and accessible?

And could raising our collective ambition for public luxury offer a better quality of life for all of us? I'm Natasha Lokhun. Welcome to this first series of Our Lives, Our Planet - a Global Action Plan podcast. This podcast series is exploring the idea of Luxury For All through six different areas of everyday life to see how we can reimagine the notion of luxury and shift our aspirations.

In this episode, we're looking at luxury wellness. Should looking after your mental and physical wellbeing be a privilege, dependent on time and money? Or can we change how we live to actively support everyone's health and happiness - a new definition of luxury wellness?

I'll be speaking to three experts to find out more. Later, we'll hear from Becca Kirkpatrick, personal trainer and co-founder of training co-operative We Got to Move, on the link between fitness and collective wellbeing. I'll also be speaking to Katherine Trebeck, political economist and advocate for economic system change.

First, I spoke to Sarabajaya Kumar, a disability and climate scholar activist and director of Impatience. I wanted to understand how changing the structure of our society to improve the lives of people with disabilities would benefit us all. As a blind motorized wheelchair user, Sarabajaya faces significant challenges in getting out and about without support.

Sarabajaya
I'm very fortunate to live near a beautiful part of North London, near Alexandra Palace and actually I can't go on my own to take...to wheel around. I was going say to walk, but, you know, to wheel around with my dog because so much of the routes are not wheelchair friendly. I, I went to meet a friend of mine and went through the palace with a friend of mine and the other friend said she had to go.

And I said, that's fine. I can go back, no problem. And I followed the same route, but because of my sight loss, I couldn't see there was a pothole. Actually, it was very well covered by greenery, but I couldn't see it, you know, a hole in the ground. And I wheeled on it and fell over and the wheelchair fell on top of me.

And I was lucky enough that there was a couple of people who came to my rescue. But, you know, that, that... and they helped me, and that was great. And that was fabulous. But that meant therefore, I did not go again on my own to the local park, to the local public space. I cannot walk, even though I've got a lead attachment to my wheelchair for my for the lead, for my dog.

I can't walk him, I can't wheel him without somebody else, which I would be able to if the routes were wheelchair friendly, wheelchair accessible. The built environment doesn't accommodate me, you know, even just, for example, leaving my home, going to the top of my road, there's a drop kerb. Brilliant. But then on the other side, there's no drop kerb.

So I have to sort of almost wheel the gauntlet across the road to find the next available drop kerb and it's just that seemingly little things like this but they're not little because they then exclude people like me who require just some planning, thinking, okay, a wheelchair user or even somebody with a pushchair is going to need to come up and down from the kerb.

So there's one on this side. There should be a matching one on the other.

Natasha
And it's really powerful to hear you talk about not just the immediate barrier that these obstacles put in your way, but also the fact that they put you off. You know, if you if you have a bad experience that puts you off. And that's got me thinking about the emotional toll of some of this stuff. So it feels like.. it is, to venture somewhere new is an act of bravery and presumably comes with some feelings of trepidation and concern and anxiety around what you'll find.

As you say, the level of planning that's needed and all of those, I guess, emotional obstacles, as well as the very kind of tangible physical ones and how that's that's a very different again, thinking about wellness or wellbeing, that's quite a toll, that's quite a burden I suppose to be...to have placed upon you.

Sarabajaya
Yes, I think so. I mean I again, before I was in the wheelchair and before I lost my sight, I was a traveller. I used to love travelling and going to new cultures and experiencing them. And now the last time I travelled was, I think, 2021 to see my son in Italy. We were coming out of lockdown and November time and again the planning it took was fine.

I actually enjoy part of the planning. It's part of the enjoyment of the whole process. But it... now I'm disabled and, you know, with my impairments, I get very anxious. And the reason for that is, you know, I was travelling from Heathrow and I booked my assistance well in advance. I arrived 3 hours before the flight, etc. and it was November and I pressed... as soon as the taxi dropped me off, I pressed for help and they said, Oh, yes, we'll be down in a minute.

You've booked. Yes, we'll be down in a minute. And they left me in the cold for nearly 2 hours. And in the end a member of the public said “are you alright?”, because I sort of almost had icicles growing, it was so cold. And I said, “Not really. I've asked for help. And I you know, my flight is going to be in an hour and a half and I, you know”. “Oh, I'll help you.”

And the help I needed was just somebody to help wheel my suitcase because I couldn't manage my wheelchair and my suitcase. And it was literally a three minute walk from where I was to the desk to check in. And so, I then became anxious, you know, then the whole whole thing was was, oh, well, I'm going to make flight on time, etc., etc..

Then I worried about will they break my wheelchair. And of course we've got, you know, a great campaign led by great disability activist on that. But will they break my wheelchair? Then will the people in Italy, will the assistance that I booked already in Italy, will it turn up?

Natasha
And this is about your independence, It's about your dignity. It's about your sense of identity as well in terms of who you are and how you see yourself in the world and your place in the world and what you are, how you are able to interact with the world. I'm really just reflecting on the examples that you've shared with us.

It feels like the onus for the solutions is always on the individual and or the kind of individuals who happen to be around. So the example on the plane, where you've fallen over in the street, or when you're anticipating doing something, it's on you to really have to have thought through all the different elements and and come up with a plan.

Obviously, I don't want to minimize the challenges that people with disabilities face in navigating our society. But just thinking more broadly, I think that is perhaps true of society generally. We put the onus for wellness on individuals and it becomes a kind of commodified thing that is about what you can secure access to, often using money, you know, rather than thinking of it as a as a societal issue and something that needs a collective and often quite a community centred approach.

And could you envisage that? Like what would a more collective approach like that would actually support your physical mental wellbeing? What would that look like?

Sarabajaya
Well, I think there's some sort of what I would say are really obvious things like, you know, fully accessible transport system and the built environment that accommodates all of us, you know, whether and when I say all of us, I think this goes beyond disabled people too. And actually, Natasha, you're talking about people with disabilities, but I, I talk about disabled people and what I mean by that is the social model.

So it is that we are disabled by our environmental, by society. It is not our impairments that disable us. So then you are more inclusive in terms of the model if you like. So it could be older people who might not be wheelchair users, but they might be slower, you know, they might have mobility challenges, it might be parents and carers who have buggies or pushchairs or whatever.

Like they're not disabled, but they are needing kind of accommodation in terms of getting on and off pavements, on and off public transport, all that sort of thing. So so that's the first kind of point I wanted to make. But what would it look like? So many, many years ago I worked as a community public health development worker, in the eighties, and came across this experiment called the Peckham Experiment, which was kind of done in the sort of thirties.

It was absolutely brilliant. I haven't seen any global or national solutions, but there are some of these local initiatives and it was, you know, it took absolutely the health and wellbeing of of Peckham of the of the population that were there and took this very proactive and preventive health approach. So there was a wonderful swimming pool which was affordable and accessible for everybody in that community, that kind of thing.

So the swimming pools and gyms and things were not exclusive, it was community based. So I think if we as a society, as a community, we start with: what are the community based solutions for our local community, whether that's our street, whether that's our borough, whether that's think ward, whether that, you know, whatever level that is region, then we would make the right decisions for luxury for all, right?

I mean, luxury should be there for all. Luxury doesn't...to me, it does not mean unaffordability, actually, but at the moment, that is what it appears to be. Luxury is only for some and it's unaffordable for most.

Natasha
Someone who is continuing the spirit of the Peckham experiment is Becca Kirkpatrick, a former union organizer, she's now a personal trainer and, inspired by grassroots organizing and training centres in the US, has co-founded a training co-operative: We Got To Move. I was keen to understand the rationale behind her approach to making fitness more accessible.

Becca
Funnily enough, it was when I first got in to being active with unions was what led me into fitness. Because of these big campaigns we were doing at the blood service. I took up some boxing and martial arts for the kind of mental health and emotional benefits of it more than the fitness side. I'd never been interested in fitness before, but then to my great surprise, I found that, you know, I really enjoyed it and also was quite good at it.

So I've just continued that. And it's it's supported me mentally through all my activism, but also personal life difficulties that have come along. And for that reason, I'm a huge advocate of wanting to be able to, you know, share those benefits with with other people from all walks of life. Yeah.

And so I just came to a point of thinking, you know, how can I blend these two passions together? Because the people who most usually access personal training or say, you know, a beautiful, luxurious wellness retreat are people that are already very highly resourced, but the people who probably need it the most are Union activists, care workers, you know, people who perhaps are refugees or escaping some sort of domestic abuse situation. And those are people who lack the resources. So we, we're all about thinking how can we bring that luxury experience to to everyone, to people that don't have it and need it so that our struggles can be sustainable for the long haul? Because we see lots of activists, due to the stressful nature of campaigns plus working to live, experiencing burnout that's really common.

So we want to look after our people and make sure we can keep going and feel good as we go along. We don't want to just always be striving for some future, but feeling terrible and making ourselves ill in the here and now. So we want to feel good as we go along.

Natasha
What are the key differences between the kind of luxury experience that you offer to people who need it, as you say, need it the most and can stand to benefit the most? And what might be typically thought of as a kind of luxury fitness session or regime.

Becca
I think probably a couple of things. We...we're very upfront about our focus on the collective. We want our audience, our service user base to be unions, community groups, etc. You know, to a certain degree, ethically minded businesses that are in line with our values, but we're not about the individual and just taking care of the individual. It's about the individual in their ecosystem and in their context and in their community. So if people are wary or suspicious or think, Oh, this is frivolous, you know, I don't have time to pamper myself when there's so much to do. We're very clear that this this benefits us all. This helps us be sustainable, helps our campaigns to succeed without us being casualties of the process, or that we have a right to like fun and beauty and joy, all of us in the present.

And, you know, a lot of some of the most inspiring community campaigns and movements from around the world see the benefit of singing and dancing together, eating food together, celebration, that kind of thing must be part of our movements. It can't just be a joyless slog. And then the other difference is that we're very much trying to break away from the capitalistic kind of urgency culture and that just pushing, driving mindset, which, you know, I've certainly experienced it myself, still do at times.

I mean, it's like the hustle culture, you know, and it creeps into our political movements and groups as well, inevitably, because we're swimming in it, but it makes us really mentally unwell and treat each other badly. And so as a counterbalance to that, we advocate just taking the lessons from nature where things unfold at a much steadier pace, continuously progressing and growing but just at the natural pace that that should, you know, just allowing for things.

And because a lot of people involved in the co-op perhaps have long term conditions or just difficult life circumstances, as is inevitable in working class life, we just have to have a huge amount of patience.

And just have that as one of our... ways we work. That's how we want to work and and we want to offer that as a sustainable way to bring social change about as well.

Natasha
And this idea of a collective approach to well being at a community level - however you define community - seeps in the everyday too.

Sarabajaya
During the pandemic, during lockdown, I was shielding and there was a mutual aid organization that popped up and said, We're here. Do you need help? And I, I wrote to them through their web page and said, Yes, actually I'm shielding, but so are my family and I can't now get online shopping, even though I've done online shopping with Ocado for donkey's years.

Suddenly I was thrown off. So I said if at least initially somebody could assist us, that would be really good. And from everywhere these angels appeared really. I mean, they just, you know, helped us. But but one of the things that I even put on my street WhatsApp group was that I have a dog and, you know, he requires more walking.

And we couldn't leave the house because of shielding. Was anybody interested? You know, multiple people were interested. You know, they took turns and walked Soren for a couple of years and they all told me how much that helped their mental wellbeing during the pandemic. And for me, wellbeing is about the every day small acts of kindness, you know, of the everyday passing of the time, you know, good morning.

Seeing the same people in the local shop. We always try to support our local shop as much as we can. Local businesses, seeing other dog walkers, you know, whatever. I mean, it's really sweet. Like I've got beautiful golden Labrador called Soren and he sometimes sits in the on the chair and looks out of the window. And there are various people say hello to him as they’re passing by.

And one a little girl the other day was shouting “I love you Soren! Hello Soren!” you know and all this. And that, even that, helps not only, well, presumably his well-being, but certainly mine. It makes me joyous that that little girl and he have they've been enjoying each other just for even that moment. So for me, luxury wellbeing is all about those moments.

And some of them don't cost anything like the examples I've just given you. Some of them take a little bit more thought, like how can I, as a disabled person, be enabled to independently go to my park, for example, my local park? Again, I don't think it's insurmountable or actually very, very costly. These are just almost it's almost like a mindset.

And we think somehow that luxury is about something big or something expensive, but actually it's often not costly at all. It's literally kindness, compassion. Being a member of our community, whatever that is.

Natasha
So far, we've spoken a lot about ways to support our wellbeing at a local community level, but could we structure our entire economy to support our wellbeing? I spoke to Katherine Trebeck, political economist and co-founder of the Wellbeing Economy Alliance, to find out.

Katherine
So at the most basic, the way to for me to describe a wellbeing economy is essentially an economic system. And when I say that, I mean things like production and consumption sort of business models, taxes, transport systems, all those sort of different layers of the economy, different sorts of jobs. It's an economy with all those pieces add up to deliver social justice on a healthy planet.

And it's about moving beyond seeing the economy as on a par with society and the environment as and if you think back to the sort of 1990s image of sustainable development, they had the three pillars or together. In a way this is about saying this is it moving beyond that and embracing what ecological economists have been saying for decades, what feminist economists have been saying for decades, and what First Nations communities around the world have been living for millennia.

And that's this understanding that the economy is not equivalent or the same as, you know, the society and environment. Actually, it's nested within the two and to embrace that really means thinking about how can the economy be in service of those higher order goals rather than hoping: you grow the economy and that will fix everything. And I guess another aspect about the wellbeing economies, it's also trying to attend to the extent to which this current economic system does so much damage to people and planet.

And then what happens is that requires a shed load of spending by various layers of government to try to put Band-Aids on that damage. And once you start looking at political announcements and news headlines around what government's doing, you see these every day, whether it's spending after a flood through a village because of extreme weather or all the deaths related to the current heat wave in Europe and the hospital treatment of that or treatment for asthma because of pollution or top up wages, because people's wages that they were earning through work are not paying them enough to put food on the table or rent assistance or, you know, a lot of anti-anxiety treatments that GP's are prescribing because people are stressed and anxious about their... feeling their lives are out of control. And so everyone will have examples that they'll be able to think of. They all show how this system is failing on its own terms. And so the idea of the wellbeing economy is also about saying surely we can do better than just patching and repairing.

Surely we can create an economic system that helps people live good lives first time around and doesn't push Mother Nature beyond what she can handle. It's about getting things right from the beginning, rather than doing all this damage, growing the economy, and then having to patch and repair.

Natasha
Yeah, I think that's such a such a really clear explanation. And for me, the kind of parallels are with and this is where it kind of this would sit under the idea of preventative health care, which again it has been gaining more and more traction in years. But you're just taking that broader, right, You're saying so one, why do that just from a specific kind of health like human health model and just take that more broadly, like how could we prevent all of the issues that we have?

Katherine
Exactly. Yeah. And there's lots to learn from that. That what our colleagues in the sort of public health space particularly are doing about really to me it's as simple as taking the time to be like, you know, if you've got a little child or nephew or niece or something you know, these little...when they're about three, they start asking why all the time?

Why? But why? But why? And it's about taking the time to to channel our inner three year olds and look at well why are people being prescribed anti anxiety treatments in record levels? Why are more people sleeping rough in doorways in our cities? Why are we seeing these unprecedented levels of heat and floods in Bangladesh and so on and say, let's not just patch the symptoms and run from crisis to crisis playing Whac-A-Mole, Let's look at the machine that connects it all and take action there, because we can't afford to keep patching, let alone all the damage that's happening being inflicted on people and planet.

Natasha
Yeah, And I think why? Why is one of my favourite questions. But asking that at that systems level where rather than just accepting, I think we... it feels, and obviously it will feel to lots of people who work in the environment sector, in the international development sector in kind of these sectors where where as you say, we're trying to fix problems.

It feels like kind of we need to be asking those bigger system questions of why? Why is it like this and why does it have to be like this as well? Could it be different? Which is where the new economic models come in.

Katherine
It's about daring to hope that we and it's not it's not to denigrate that help that that action, whether that's in international development or, you know, emergency health provision or, you know, support for folks who are sleeping rough, get a house or shelter today and tomorrow because that's absolutely necessary, surviving and coping and it's a humanitarian response to an inhumane system.

We need to do that. But we can't just keep doing that alone. So it's about also raising our gaze upstream to those root causes where you find yourself, a hell of a lot of time, facing the economic system.

Natasha
So this episode, we've kind of called it wellness, partly because I think that is a term that has traction. And it's funny, which about economics, that has traction in a sort of commercial sense. There’s a wellness industry that is burgeoning. It's not a new thing, obviously, but it does feel like it's growing and it's kind of growing arms.

And it also feels as a result that taking care of your of your health, that can feel like an exclusive thing, that can feel like a luxury. It feels like it's out of reach for a lot of people because it's about time and it's about money. It's about buying things or access to things that will then give you that feeling of wellness.

And I'm interested in your thoughts on why that might be.

Katherine
Yeah, so. So I have to confess, I struggle with the term wellness, and partly it's because it's so often conflated, as you said there with this, a very individualized frame of thinking. And I used to...actually it was years ago, I wrote a blog and it was titled something like “focusing very narrowly on individual subjective well-being is like turning up the volume on your headphones while a riot rages around you”. So very much that it was too individual and not looking at the context in which people are... and the need to the collective approach and collective perspective as well.

And then actually, one of the car companies, Audi, has an ad that almost depicts that very scene, where this guy is seeing this sort of ninja dystopian fight, and he sort of gets into his Audi and get... Have you seen it?

Natasha
I have seen it, yeah. Yeah. No, I know exactly what you mean.

Katherine
It's extraordinary. And so even a glass of champagne and his seat warmers go on while his friends are outside getting smashed up by whoever is smashing them up. And and so I think almost this idea that we can just focus inwardly and cocoon ourselves off. And sometimes, I mean, I'll hold my hand up, I’m so tempted to do that.

But it's such a privilege to be even able to think like that because so many communities on the front line. And so the idea of being able to check out and cocoon away is an incredible sign of of extraordinary privilege. I think one of the other aspects to sort of answer your question is that so often folks have internalized that hierarchy subconsciously that we were talking about earlier, this idea that the economy matters most.

So we have to sacrifice our weekends, our family time, to being part of the productive economic system. And that comes with exhaustion. And then there's this lovely term that Serge Latouche uses called ‘consolation goods’. What happens when people are stressed out because their work or they're being paid to talk about, Oh, I need a spa retreat to recover, or I know folks who go on retreats and then they come back and do three or four months of insane intense work, and then they wait again to recover.

So that in this we're in this rhythm of having to repair ourselves, not just the way we were talking earlier about, you know, repairing the damage that the system does collectively. And that, of course, there's an industry around this, the wellness industry that makes a lot of money, the consolation goods industry that Serge Latouche would describe. So that's all part of this same system that, you know, people push themselves beyond what they can handle and then have to spend money if they're able to, and that's a big if, they're able to know through the consolation, whether it’s a spa retreats or you know, what I'm more guilty of is a bottle of wine on a Friday night. And then I guess the other the other piece is that the sort of work that a lot of folks are doing, if they're having to... people having to work three jobs on minimum wage just to put food on the table and probably having to travel a couple of hours to get to that job, they don't have much time, let alone spare finances.

They don't have the sort of marginal buffer to be able to stop and recharge or play, you know, spend time with their families. There's a magazine at my local shops, a few years ago noticing it, called ‘Happiness’. And I looked, what are all the recipes for happiness? And so it’s “Have your friends around for wine. Go for a walk with your dog, go for a spa retreat in Thailand, do some yoga and meditation.”

Now, they might all be fairly reasonable, but if you are working three jobs or if you've just been evacuated from your home because it's flooded or you don't you don't have time to have your friends around and buy the wine to have friends round for on an evening then. So the point is, I guess, that this is very real material basis to wellbeing and the current economic system is depriving so many people of that material basis to take care of their individual wellbeing, let alone be part of the collective wellbeing.

So, so long answer to a really meaty question.

Natasha
Exactly, because as you say, us as individual actors, we can only go so far. But also and this is one of the things we're kind of talking about is a more collective approach to these things. Not seeing it as the onus is on me. It's my fault if I'm not doing X, Y, Z, it's, you know, I need to find the time or the money, but actually understanding how collectively, if we're able to support everyone and lift everyone's quality of life, then I mean, that's the idea of Luxury For All.

Then we could all live a life of luxury. But we're changing our aspirations for what we think of as luxury. And part of that is fairness. And also the other part is making sure that it doesn't damage people or planet. And you talk about the economic system kind of having that key role to play and being, you know, deliberately designed and actively engaged in supporting wellbeing.

Are you able to kind of share some ideas of what that might look like in practice? So what what what would change?

Katherine
So, I mean, I think it's is is almost as straightforward as just pausing to think about what would a good life look like and what's going on in that scenario. So wherever you are in the world, when you give people a chance to reflect and stop and talk about what most matters to them, actually people come up with amazingly familiar things because this is what makes us innately human.

It's things like relationships, of course, having all sorts of mental and physical health, shelter, having enough money, sufficiency of income, security of income is really, really important. Purpose, sense of dignity, time with family and friends, time in nature and that's, of course, married by, you know, even neuroscience. When you see the scans of what lights up in people's brains when they're stressed or they're anxious and and also, you know, our cortisol levels, you know, they go down when we're cooperating or when we're in nature and so on.

So there's all sorts of physiological aspects to not just when you have that deliberative conversations with folk, but I think, you know, both really important. So if you then pause and think about, well, okay, what's the scenario, what's going on in when those sorts of goals are being fulfilled? Well people probably have jobs if they are of working age and wanting to work, but probably jobs that don't treat them like just in time inventory, probably jobs that give them sense of purpose and meaning.

They're probably use circular economy business. So they're maybe they're not extractive PLCs taking money up to shareholders, but maybe they're worker cooperatives or community owned social enterprises. Maybe there’s good public transport and they're not having to sit in traffic for an hour and a half on the day getting to work. And maybe they're not working 5 hours from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. When they come home, maybe they're not living in huge, huge McMansions cut off from each other, but maybe it's maybe some sort of form of co-housing, maybe shared allotments, or maybe shared vegetable patches and maybe in your street, maybe there's a tool library so you don't have to have your own individual drills and hammers and maybe even you could share some certain white goods or sporting equipment.

And the good thing is that all these sorts of examples are already in play in communities around the world. And, you know, other levels there'd be how does the tax system operate? Is it taxing wealth and extraction from the environment? Is it lighter taxes on things like worker cooperatives or repair, as we see in places like that in Sweden?

So we're encouraged to reuse our goods and services and repair, for example, our vacuums or our blenders or our printers, rather than throwing them away. So all those sorts of things. And so it's I don't think it's hard to imagine at all. What we need is the enabling conditions. And to me that's about seeing these pioneers that are in existence all over the world that prove it's eminently possible, they prove not just that this is a cool way of doing things and people will be probably happier and healthier.

But also it's absolutely possible. And there's no excuse not to have more of this. But it's not just about pioneers, because often they're islands in isolation and they were faced pretty fierce headwinds. So we also need to look at the policies so the rules of the game, and that's about redesigning policy instruments to encourage what we need more of and also to power down what we need less of because it's an activity that's not aligned with what people and planet need.

And then it's also about perspective. So you got pioneers, policies and perspectives and so this is sort of mindsets. What questions do we ask of the economic system? And it almost goes back to what we were talking about at the very beginning of this conversation around Do we see the economy as a goal in its own right and people and planet to be subservient and in service of that?

Or are we thinking that maybe, just maybe in the 21st century we can see the economy as being designed to deliver what people and planet really need? And that's that's quite easy for me to say chatting to you now, but that actually, if that's taken seriously, that's quite a fundamental reorientation of how, say, our politicians would think about how to design the economy.

And also similarly in business is is profit a goal in its own right or is profit a vehicle? And we've there's so many businesses out there that are doing incredible things, whether it's re-using bread to make beer, whether it's using old coffee granules to make facial serum, whether it's worker cooperatives where they're in business to support their members, whether it's community land trusts and bringing together communities to take care of that local area and build the sort of assets that locals want.

They all have to be financially viable. So they need to make a surplus to keep going. But profit is not the goal, profit’s a vehicle. And so that's the micro version of that very essence of the wellbeing economy, that essentially the economy needs to serve people and planet rather than the other way around.

Natasha
So what are the public policies that we need that would support a wellbeing economy?

Katherine
I think it comes back to some pretty basic questions about the design of the policy and what the policy is for and not just assuming trickle down, because in a way that has been how policy makers in the 20th century or the latter part, the few decades of the 20th century really tried best faith reading of it to deliver for people was to grow the economy, let enterprises run loose and assume and hope that that will trickle down and benefit others.

And yet we've got decades of evidence that that hasn't happened to the extent it needed to. And so what you're seeing now around the world is governments start to grapple with putting a wider suite of goals in. So you see things like multidimensional wellbeing frameworks. In fact, over half the OECD countries have these things. They're basically wider dashboard of measures.

The key thing is it's relatively easy to build these dashboards and put some statistics behind them. The trick is to start rolling them into the machinery of government and changing the hard and soft wiring of government so that people inside the corridors of power, when they're deciding whether to undertake an action, whether they're looking upstream, understanding root causes, where they're seeing interconnections, how they're evaluating policies, all these you want to do with having a wider suite of goals in mind rather than just narrow things like GDP or inflation or profits or so on.

So that's the hard bit actually, is rolling this into government. There are some governments that are really grappling with this, and it's hard to look beyond Wales with its initiative around the Office of the Future Generations Commissioner, whose job it is to look at how all public agencies in Wales are acting to support the wellbeing of current and future generations.

And that office has the capacity to call out when agencies or government budget drafts are not aligned with the Wales we want, which is on the back of a big survey that Wales, Welsh folks undertook about eight years or so ago. So this sort of initiatives, New Zealand, for example, has changed its budget, its Public Finance Act to start reporting on a wider suite of measures as part of its budget cycle, and then to deliver spending accordingly to deficiencies or inadequate attainment in some of those measures.

So there's lots of ways to do it. I also though think it's about the mindsets of governments as well and people within them and are they really prioritizing socioeconomic goals rather than just the economy as a goal in its own right? And here we see things like socioeconomic duties being brought about sustainable procurement measures in places like Scotland. So there's lots of examples, but I think we shouldn't pretend it's easy.

This is about changing machinery of government that has built up over many decades with lots of path dependencies, lots of ways of working and even just simple inertia that operate and act against this. That's why we need a whole movement to keep pushing and saying this really matters. This is the sort of economy we need for our future.

Natasha
My conversations about luxury wellness deepened and reinforced so much of what I've learned elsewhere in the series. First, there is a real need for solutions to be informed and driven at the community level. That way, people have the opportunity to prioritize what matters to them in terms of building a fair, healthy and sustainable lifestyle. Second, we need political courage at all levels within our system, and we've heard some really inspiring examples in this episode and across the series.

And finally, the role of public support. If we want a life of luxury for all and we've learned from this series that luxury can be inclusive, accessible and sustainable, we need to call on decision makers to make public luxury a reality. I'd like to thank our guests Sarabajaya Kumar, disability and climate scholar. activist and director of Impatients; Becca Kirkpatrick, personal trainer and co-founder of training co-operative

We Got To Move; and Katherine Trebeck, political economist and advocate for economic system change. If you like this episode, please do subscribe to the series wherever you get your podcasts and like comment and share the program.

You can find notes and links for the show on our website at globalactionplan.org.uk/podcast. And you can get in touch with us by email at podcast@globalactionplan.org.uk or send us a voice note to 020 4534 3913.

Our Lives, Our Planet is a Global Action Plan podcast presented by me Natasha Lokhun and produced by Clair McCowlen.

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