On the subject of home ownership, I've just come across this, reminding me that far from being obsessed by home ownershiop, Britain is looking distinctly mid-table in Europe:
Otoh the economic powerhouse of Europe, Germany, has very low ownership rates. Maybe that is worth consideration.
Norway is wealthier per head than Germany and has 80% home ownership, very high home ownership rates now in Eastern Europe too. Italy, Spain and Ireland and the Netherlands also have a higher home ownership rate than the UK
All true but as I just said, Europe's economic and industrial powerhouse, viz Germany, has very low ownership rates. Maybe we should examine whether this is central to Germany's prosperity or just a mildly interesting quirk.
Not sure what it is like now but years ago a German guy explained how they got tax relief for renting out so he rented his brother's house and his brother rented his house so both get tax relief.
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
OK It is the cheapest good size apartment available but I doubt you'd get a space under the stairs a la Harry Potter for that price in London.
Wow, thats an amazing price with bills included.
In London, I've seen one bed flats, nice but not luxury, with service charges of that level even if you own it "outright".
Berlin is great on this. How they manage it is probably worth a look.
We discussed this yesterday, Berlin manages it because for every one of the past 50 years deaths have exceeded births in Germany, and they have higher emigration too, meaning their population is remarkably stable.
The UK has births exceeding deaths and lower emigration.
We need different policies to Germany. Without slashing immigration we either need to increase our death rate, slash our birth rate, and/or have surging emigration. Not by tiny numbers either to make up the difference.
Or we can just get on with building, since none of the above are really desirable. Indeed even if we had net migration drop to zero, we would still have higher population growth than Germany as we have natural population growth from births exceeding deaths anyway.
Biden says US wont block any transfers from European countries
Positive if you're right but has any country said they will do transfers?
We don't have F16s to give, the US isn't giving any. Which countries have an abundance of F16s they're planning on giving? I'd love it if were true, but I'm not holding my breath.
Norway have almost 60 retired F16's sitting in hangers in perfect nick.
I wouldn't even say Henley is safe now either given the LDs won a landslide there in the local elections.
If Boris really wanted a safe seat he would try Dudley, Reigate, Dartford, Basildon or Walsall or Braintree or a seat in Lincolnshire or rural Cambridgeshire or the New Forest based on the local election results
He can be King of Walsall, I agree. MP for as long as he wants it.
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
OK It is the cheapest good size apartment available but I doubt you'd get a space under the stairs a la Harry Potter for that price in London.
Wow, thats an amazing price with bills included.
In London, I've seen one bed flats, nice but not luxury, with service charges of that level even if you own it "outright".
Berlin is great on this. How they manage it is probably worth a look.
We discussed this yesterday, Berlin manages it because for every one of the past 50 years deaths have exceeded births in Germany, and they have higher emigration too, meaning their population is remarkably stable.
The UK has births exceeding deaths and lower emigration.
We need different policies to Germany. Without slashing immigration we either need to increase our death rate, slash our birth rate, or have surging emigration.
Or we can just get on with building, since none of the above are really desirable. Indeed even if we had net migration drop to zero, we would still have higher population growth than Germany as we have natural population growth from births exceeding deaths anyway.
Looking forward to that on a manifesto.
WE'VE ALL GOT TO DIE SOMETIME, IT'S YOUR PATRIOTIC DUTY TO DO IT ASAP
On the subject of home ownership, I've just come across this, reminding me that far from being obsessed by home ownershiop, Britain is looking distinctly mid-table in Europe:
Otoh the economic powerhouse of Europe, Germany, has very low ownership rates. Maybe that is worth consideration.
Norway is wealthier per head than Germany and has 80% home ownership, very high home ownership rates now in Eastern Europe too. Italy, Spain and Ireland and the Netherlands also have a higher home ownership rate than the UK
All true but as I just said, Europe's economic and industrial powerhouse, viz Germany, has very low ownership rates. Maybe we should examine whether this is central to Germany's prosperity or just a mildly interesting quirk.
Probably partly explains why the right tends to be weaker in Germany than most of the rest of Europe and the West. As most Germans rent, even the main centre right party the CDU are not much different to the LDs ideologically here and now the SPD are in government with the Greens and FDP.
In terms of wealth per head Germany as a result though has amongst the lowest wealth in the western world (even if higher personal incomes than some western rivals). We, the US, France, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Nordic nations and the Netherlands, Japan and Singapore, Ireland even Italy and Spain have higher wealth per head than Germany
The Green Belt was created due to the absolutely massive expansion of London into the surrounding Shires from c.1900 to c.1939 - without it people feared London would simply continue to grow exponentially and swallow everything else up, hence the 1947 Town and Country Act and the checks local authorities put in the 1950s.
Unfortunately, whilst this has successfully constrained the size of London, it has increased the cost of land as a % of new housing cost from 25% to c.70%
The green belt is a good idea but it is important to remember it was set in an arbitrary manner at a particular point in time.
A review every 50 years or so, with a maximum change in size of +/- 3% sounds sensible to me.
The green belt around south Birmingham is an abrupt contrast. Gritty urban dystopia right up to the Worcestershire/Warwickshire borders then, suddenly, Arden greensward like a set for Mid Summer Night's Dream. It's carefully contrived to make Brummies feel lost and insecure. Long may it continue.
“recognises the importance of immigration” meaning what? Oversees very high rates of immigration, while appointing a Home Secretary who constantly rails against the government’s own policies?
Rishi Sunak tells @ChrisMasonBBC says he REALLY wants to bring down legal immigration, but won't say by how much.
"It will depend on how the economy is doing at any particular time and the circumstances that we're facing."
That's what take back control actually means. Rather than hundreds of thousands of EU citizens coming here on their choice from freedom of movement we get to choose who comes and ensure that their skills meet our shortages. The position of Rumanian street beggar is definitely filled.
Right now, as we slowly try to adapt away from a low wage, low skill economy which developed under FoM, we have a lot of shortages so we need a lot of immigrants. Which is fine. One day we won't have such shortages at which point the number of permissions granted will fall very sharply.
Genuine question: in what sense do you think we are adapting away from 'a low wage, low skill* economy'?
Are we going to do away with, say, care workers, building labourers, fruit pickers, hospitality staff, farm workers, cleaners, delivery drivers, etc., etc.
(*Low wage ≠ low skill btw. Some of those jobs I have listed require quite a lot of skill, just not the sort of skill valued by society.)
All of those jobs saw massive increases in productivity during the 20th century via investment in new technology and training in new skills.
Yet for the last two decades that process has changed to 'get some migrants to keep the wages down' instead of investment and training.
The most visible instance of this regressive mentality is car washing where the taxpayer now subsidises migrants to wash cars whereas a generation ago machines did it.
Didn't most people simply wash their own cars by hand a generation ago? 1980s man out on the driveway on a Sunday, buffing up the Ford Sierra. I still clean my own car, owing to concerns about trafficking with respect to hand car wash places. I can't say that it gets cleaned very often, though.
Indeed.
I washed my own car a few months back, it was a strangely satisfying experience producing a visible improvement and likely good exercise as well.
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
OK It is the cheapest good size apartment available but I doubt you'd get a space under the stairs a la Harry Potter for that price in London.
Wow, thats an amazing price with bills included.
In London, I've seen one bed flats, nice but not luxury, with service charges of that level even if you own it "outright".
Berlin is great on this. How they manage it is probably worth a look.
We discussed this yesterday, Berlin manages it because for every one of the past 50 years deaths have exceeded births in Germany, and they have higher emigration too, meaning their population is remarkably stable.
The UK has births exceeding deaths and lower emigration.
We need different policies to Germany. Without slashing immigration we either need to increase our death rate, slash our birth rate, and/or have surging emigration. Not by tiny numbers either to make up the difference.
Or we can just get on with building, since none of the above are really desirable. Indeed even if we had net migration drop to zero, we would still have higher population growth than Germany as we have natural population growth from births exceeding deaths anyway.
Yesterday's debate is a for a different day, but we also established that Germany's population has risen by around 6 million since 1990.
It's not as stable as all that, and immigration is similar.
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
This is a map of the Green Belt in St Albans District. As can be seen the whole of the district is Green Belt apart from the built up areas of St Albans, Harpenden, Wheathampstead, Redbourne, London Colney, Park Street, Chiswell Green, How Wood, Bricket Wood and Colney Street.
To build additional houses in the district requires building on the Green Belt. Offices have been converted to flats and other buildings squeezed into existing sites, but any housing growth effectively requires new sites/villages in the Green Belt.
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
Biden says US wont block any transfers from European countries
Positive if you're right but has any country said they will do transfers?
We don't have F16s to give, the US isn't giving any. Which countries have an abundance of F16s they're planning on giving? I'd love it if were true, but I'm not holding my breath.
Norway have almost 60 retired F16's sitting in hangers in perfect nick.
For som reason (age?!) I initially read that as "No way, I have almost 60 retired F16's sitting in hangers in perfect nick." I thought you were even richer* than I'd realised or wondered whether the post was in fact from Dura Ace.
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
OK It is the cheapest good size apartment available but I doubt you'd get a space under the stairs a la Harry Potter for that price in London.
Wow, thats an amazing price with bills included.
In London, I've seen one bed flats, nice but not luxury, with service charges of that level even if you own it "outright".
Berlin is great on this. How they manage it is probably worth a look.
We discussed this yesterday, Berlin manages it because for every one of the past 50 years deaths have exceeded births in Germany, and they have higher emigration too, meaning their population is remarkably stable.
The UK has births exceeding deaths and lower emigration.
We need different policies to Germany. Without slashing immigration we either need to increase our death rate, slash our birth rate, or have surging emigration.
Or we can just get on with building, since none of the above are really desirable. Indeed even if we had net migration drop to zero, we would still have higher population growth than Germany as we have natural population growth from births exceeding deaths anyway.
Population is a big factor but it's not only about that. Eg Germany has a different attitude to 'renting vs ownership' and more appetite for regulation to protect tenants on conditions and rents.
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
OK It is the cheapest good size apartment available but I doubt you'd get a space under the stairs a la Harry Potter for that price in London.
Wow, thats an amazing price with bills included.
In London, I've seen one bed flats, nice but not luxury, with service charges of that level even if you own it "outright".
Berlin is great on this. How they manage it is probably worth a look.
We discussed this yesterday, Berlin manages it because for every one of the past 50 years deaths have exceeded births in Germany, and they have higher emigration too, meaning their population is remarkably stable.
The UK has births exceeding deaths and lower emigration.
We need different policies to Germany. Without slashing immigration we either need to increase our death rate, slash our birth rate, and/or have surging emigration. Not by tiny numbers either to make up the difference.
Or we can just get on with building, since none of the above are really desirable. Indeed even if we had net migration drop to zero, we would still have higher population growth than Germany as we have natural population growth from births exceeding deaths anyway.
I think yesterday's debate is a for a different day, but we also found that Germany's population has risen by about 6 million in the last 30 years.
It's not as stable as all that, and immigration is similar.
You're not still pretending its population is growing are you? You could have dropped it after forgetting about East and West reunification.
Immigration being similar is completely and utterly irrelevant since as I said emigration is not similar, nor are birth/death rates.
This century, their population has completely flatlined. As much as you try to move the goalposts by looking at last century, which they've had plenty of time to construct for people who were born last century.
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
OK It is the cheapest good size apartment available but I doubt you'd get a space under the stairs a la Harry Potter for that price in London.
Wow, thats an amazing price with bills included.
In London, I've seen one bed flats, nice but not luxury, with service charges of that level even if you own it "outright".
Berlin is great on this. How they manage it is probably worth a look.
We discussed this yesterday, Berlin manages it because for every one of the past 50 years deaths have exceeded births in Germany, and they have higher emigration too, meaning their population is remarkably stable.
The UK has births exceeding deaths and lower emigration.
We need different policies to Germany. Without slashing immigration we either need to increase our death rate, slash our birth rate, or have surging emigration.
Or we can just get on with building, since none of the above are really desirable. Indeed even if we had net migration drop to zero, we would still have higher population growth than Germany as we have natural population growth from births exceeding deaths anyway.
Population is a big factor but it's not only about that. Eg Germany has a different attitude to 'renting vs ownership' and more appetite for regulation to protect tenants on conditions and rents.
And wages and water regulation and industrial investment, and..
The Rest is Politics has a half hour extract from Alastair Campbell's new book, But What Can I Do? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d3tFF1QzVc or the podcast platform of your choice.
Biden says US wont block any transfers from European countries
Positive if you're right but has any country said they will do transfers?
We don't have F16s to give, the US isn't giving any. Which countries have an abundance of F16s they're planning on giving? I'd love it if were true, but I'm not holding my breath.
One thing that might happen is that the UK might swap some of our Typhoons for another country's F-16s and send the latter to Ukraine. Something a bit like that has been happening with Norway and the M270.
It would also mean that whatever third country is involved doesn't have to take the limelight if they don't want to. A few countries have preferred to keep the extent of the military support they've provided a bit quiet.
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
OK It is the cheapest good size apartment available but I doubt you'd get a space under the stairs a la Harry Potter for that price in London.
Wow, thats an amazing price with bills included.
In London, I've seen one bed flats, nice but not luxury, with service charges of that level even if you own it "outright".
Berlin is great on this. How they manage it is probably worth a look.
I believe that there's been quite a lot of efforts to regulate/control the rental market in Berlin, both historically and more recently, but I'm told interfering in this area is very bad so it can't be that.
“recognises the importance of immigration” meaning what? Oversees very high rates of immigration, while appointing a Home Secretary who constantly rails against the government’s own policies?
Rishi Sunak tells @ChrisMasonBBC says he REALLY wants to bring down legal immigration, but won't say by how much.
"It will depend on how the economy is doing at any particular time and the circumstances that we're facing."
That's what take back control actually means. Rather than hundreds of thousands of EU citizens coming here on their choice from freedom of movement we get to choose who comes and ensure that their skills meet our shortages. The position of Rumanian street beggar is definitely filled.
Right now, as we slowly try to adapt away from a low wage, low skill economy which developed under FoM, we have a lot of shortages so we need a lot of immigrants. Which is fine. One day we won't have such shortages at which point the number of permissions granted will fall very sharply.
Genuine question: in what sense do you think we are adapting away from 'a low wage, low skill* economy'?
Are we going to do away with, say, care workers, building labourers, fruit pickers, hospitality staff, farm workers, cleaners, delivery drivers, etc., etc.
(*Low wage ≠ low skill btw. Some of those jobs I have listed require quite a lot of skill, just not the sort of skill valued by society.)
Your last point is very true. Hearing jobs called "low skilled" just because they don't require a PPE degree and don't pay well is one of the things that really pisses me off. It just speaks to the ignorance of the middle class people who throw the term around, and is part of the ideological discourse by which these jobs are undervalued and the people who do them underpaid.
There are also highly paid low skill jobs, of course. Met police chief for example (at least, they always seem to recruit low skill people, so I assume it must be a low skill job). Some cabinet posts, too, apparently.
The idea that such jobs can be filled by any clown and that there is no training for it is peculiar.
I have long argued that politicians need a career path, with professional development, training etc.
PPE -> Spad -> Running the country? Is that not good enough for you?
They dont need a career path, they need better orientation around the various roles of an MP - eg reviewing legislation, representing constituents etc - and then some of incentivising them to see it as in their professional interest to do those things well, rather than rise in their careers pterty much entirely by how well they can throw out a scripted soundbite.
Some kind of actual pre-job training would be good, wouldn't it?
I'm not entirely a fan of the US president stay in the job for a couple of months after losing the election thing, but something like that would give time for some intensive training on basics, how the commons works, access to resources etc. You could do it with e.g. a few weeks recess after a GE.
Or, you could do it for all candidates for election - slightly less efficient, but could use e.g. the £500 deposit (or whatever it is now) to cover that, at least for new candidates who have not completed the course.
Sunak isn’t very good at winning elections so far.
There is only one that matters
However, Johnson and Truss legacy means he is unlikely to win in 24
It’s his legacy too. He was chancellor for much of it.
He resigned as Johnson’s COE and opposed Truss idiotic ideas
He was Boris right hand man. He took a good long while to resign. Sunak was also fined by the police for partying in lockdown.
He opposed Truss and lost.
Harsh to describe him as “partying in lockdown”. I genuinely believe he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Boris and many others were happily “partying in lockdown” to be clear
Agree. He really was ambushed by a cake and there is no evidence he did any partying. He really was unlucky, but here is a man also told off for not wearing a seat belt and walking a dog without a lead. He seems to be attempting a Guinness Book a Records entry for the most trivial offences while politician around him take the piss and get away with. I hope he doesn't walk on the cracks in the pavement or wear a loud shirt in a built up area.
It’s almost as if he’s a normal bloke doing what normal people do!
Just got a couple of WhatsApp messages from my wife (doing household jobs downstairs, youngest child asleep, other two at play group and school).
Message: "Getting breasts out"
Follow-up message "*chicken* breasts, from freezer - two enough?"
There's your obesity crisis right there: using Whatsapp to send messages inside your house. In the old days she'd have had to pick up her mobile and phone you, burning untold calories.
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
OK It is the cheapest good size apartment available but I doubt you'd get a space under the stairs a la Harry Potter for that price in London.
Wow, thats an amazing price with bills included.
In London, I've seen one bed flats, nice but not luxury, with service charges of that level even if you own it "outright".
Berlin is great on this. How they manage it is probably worth a look.
We discussed this yesterday, Berlin manages it because for every one of the past 50 years deaths have exceeded births in Germany, and they have higher emigration too, meaning their population is remarkably stable.
The UK has births exceeding deaths and lower emigration.
We need different policies to Germany. Without slashing immigration we either need to increase our death rate, slash our birth rate, or have surging emigration.
Or we can just get on with building, since none of the above are really desirable. Indeed even if we had net migration drop to zero, we would still have higher population growth than Germany as we have natural population growth from births exceeding deaths anyway.
Population is a big factor but it's not only about that. Eg Germany has a different attitude to 'renting vs ownership' and more appetite for regulation to protect tenants on conditions and rents.
Regulations work differently when supply and demand are stable, than when they're out of sync.
You can improve regulations, I've said Section 21 should be abolished for instance and don't think the Government has gone far enough, but if there aren't enough homes to go around then regulations can make rental worse not better. It keeps those in a home secure, but means that those who want a home are royally f***ed.
Not an issue if supply and demand are stable, like in Germany, since anyone who wants a home has plenty available, but where there's more demand than supply like in this country, no amount of regulations will fix that.
The only solution is to build, build, build. Or rapidly kill or deport millions of people to resolve the imbalance. I'd prefer the building personally.
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
OK It is the cheapest good size apartment available but I doubt you'd get a space under the stairs a la Harry Potter for that price in London.
Wow, thats an amazing price with bills included.
In London, I've seen one bed flats, nice but not luxury, with service charges of that level even if you own it "outright".
Berlin is great on this. How they manage it is probably worth a look.
Likely many reasons.
One factor will be that there's not the political/financial/economic/cultural concentration in Berlin that London has.
Yes few countries have capitals as dominant as London is. But still, Berlin is a big throbbing iconic city and it comes as a surprise to see how cheap it is to live there.
I just bought two 100% genuine Siwan witches’ poppets for black magic purposes. Black magic is serious business here
Anyone who mentions my embarrassing opinions of the past (Liz Truss, “upside”, etc) - you are hereby warned
I have this fantastic idea for an app, that can make us billions as it goes global, if someone would like to help develop it.
Needle Doll.
For five pence the customer buys an in app doll; and for 0.0xX pence each they can buy in app needles. And the app allows them to push the needles through the doll. That’s it, nothing else, no naming mechanism for the doll or anything. We just supply this to the purchasers world.
Interesting how NIMBY vs YIMBY completely cuts across all political affiliations: economically right vs left, authoritarian vs libertarian, Young vs old. Some very interesting stats on public opinion on this yesterday. By which we can only conclude it's based on a distinct set of emotional reflexes from those that drive other political views.
When a new planning application comes up on our street I am instinctively all for it, almost regardless of the actual details (unless it's really ugly). It's a subjective not objective reaction. Many of my neighbours, whose political affiliations cross the spectrum from Corbynite to Tory, are reflexively against.
Same with new skyscrapers. I love them but some people think they're the devil incarnate. Doesn't mean I want to concrete over the greenbelt - we all have heads as well as hearts of course - but I think it's hard to overcome the innate prejudice one way or other.
For that reason I'm not sure how politicians deal with this. I'd guess a solid majority of people are NIMBYs at heart. It probably means, like in some other areas of life such as hospital rationalisation or traffic calming measures, the best approach is to build lots but pretend it's not happening.
Sunak isn’t very good at winning elections so far.
There is only one that matters
However, Johnson and Truss legacy means he is unlikely to win in 24
It’s his legacy too. He was chancellor for much of it.
He resigned as Johnson’s COE and opposed Truss idiotic ideas
He was Boris right hand man. He took a good long while to resign. Sunak was also fined by the police for partying in lockdown.
He opposed Truss and lost.
Harsh to describe him as “partying in lockdown”. I genuinely believe he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Boris and many others were happily “partying in lockdown” to be clear
So the Abba Party just organically or magically manifested itself in his own apartment during a day and night of intense hard work?
About that Garden Bridge. Hand over the £63m and it's yours.
That one must have passed me by!
I knew about the Cake (which was what I thought he was fined for) and the garden party (he wasn’t at) but Abba?
Edit: think you are confused. According to the guardian it was in the #11 flat which was Boris Johnson’s flat
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
OK It is the cheapest good size apartment available but I doubt you'd get a space under the stairs a la Harry Potter for that price in London.
Wow, thats an amazing price with bills included.
In London, I've seen one bed flats, nice but not luxury, with service charges of that level even if you own it "outright".
Berlin is great on this. How they manage it is probably worth a look.
Likely many reasons.
One factor will be that there's not the political/financial/economic/cultural concentration in Berlin that London has.
Yes few countries have capitals as dominant as London is. But still, Berlin is a big throbbing iconic city and it comes as a surprise to see how cheap it is to live there.
In the past 2 decades Berlin's population has barely changed. London's has grown by 2 million.
Yet you think regulations are the difference? 🤔
Supply and demand isn't a surprise to anyone who understands the slightest thing about economics.
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
OK It is the cheapest good size apartment available but I doubt you'd get a space under the stairs a la Harry Potter for that price in London.
Wow, thats an amazing price with bills included.
In London, I've seen one bed flats, nice but not luxury, with service charges of that level even if you own it "outright".
Berlin is great on this. How they manage it is probably worth a look.
We discussed this yesterday, Berlin manages it because for every one of the past 50 years deaths have exceeded births in Germany, and they have higher emigration too, meaning their population is remarkably stable.
The UK has births exceeding deaths and lower emigration.
We need different policies to Germany. Without slashing immigration we either need to increase our death rate, slash our birth rate, or have surging emigration.
Or we can just get on with building, since none of the above are really desirable. Indeed even if we had net migration drop to zero, we would still have higher population growth than Germany as we have natural population growth from births exceeding deaths anyway.
Population is a big factor but it's not only about that. Eg Germany has a different attitude to 'renting vs ownership' and more appetite for regulation to protect tenants on conditions and rents.
Regulations work differently when supply and demand are stable, than when they're out of sync.
You can improve regulations, I've said Section 21 should be abolished for instance and don't think the Government has gone far enough, but if there aren't enough homes to go around then regulations can make rental worse not better. It keeps those in a home secure, but means that those who want a home are royally f***ed.
Not an issue if supply and demand are stable, like in Germany, since anyone who wants a home has plenty available, but where there's more demand than supply like in this country, no amount of regulations will fix that.
The only solution is to build, build, build. Or rapidly kill or deport millions of people to resolve the imbalance. I'd prefer the building personally.
Yes we do need to build more homes. No argument there.
On Topic. I 🩷 this header. I agree with all of it, best of all love how it is so politely and infinitely subtly trolling.
“I am coming to a view that Sunak isn’t very good perhaps because he has only been an MP for a relatively short period. He does have the backing of the Daily Express though not punters .”
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
OK It is the cheapest good size apartment available but I doubt you'd get a space under the stairs a la Harry Potter for that price in London.
Wow, thats an amazing price with bills included.
In London, I've seen one bed flats, nice but not luxury, with service charges of that level even if you own it "outright".
Berlin is great on this. How they manage it is probably worth a look.
I believe that there's been quite a lot of efforts to regulate/control the rental market in Berlin, both historically and more recently, but I'm told interfering in this area is very bad so it can't be that.
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
OK It is the cheapest good size apartment available but I doubt you'd get a space under the stairs a la Harry Potter for that price in London.
Wow, thats an amazing price with bills included.
In London, I've seen one bed flats, nice but not luxury, with service charges of that level even if you own it "outright".
Berlin is great on this. How they manage it is probably worth a look.
Likely many reasons.
One factor will be that there's not the political/financial/economic/cultural concentration in Berlin that London has.
Yes few countries have capitals as dominant as London is. But still, Berlin is a big throbbing iconic city and it comes as a surprise to see how cheap it is to live there.
In the past 2 decades Berlin's population has barely changed. London's has grown by 2 million.
Yet you think regulations are the difference? 🤔
Supply and demand isn't a surprise to anyone who understands the slightest thing about economics.
Well, all these people moving around, from both abroad and within from East Germany must be going somewhere, but maybe it's not Berlin.
6 million more overall since 1990, and 3 million dispersed rural Easterners apparently moving internally to more resource-intensive cities in the West, must be putting strains somewhere.
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
OK It is the cheapest good size apartment available but I doubt you'd get a space under the stairs a la Harry Potter for that price in London.
Wow, thats an amazing price with bills included.
In London, I've seen one bed flats, nice but not luxury, with service charges of that level even if you own it "outright".
Berlin is great on this. How they manage it is probably worth a look.
I believe that there's been quite a lot of efforts to regulate/control the rental market in Berlin, both historically and more recently, but I'm told interfering in this area is very bad so it can't be that.
Thats a shame about Dial of Destiny. That would officially mean more than half the films are not great.
The Last Crusade - brilliant Raiders - fantastic Temple of Doom - ok Crystal Skull - not as awful as people make out, but not good at all Dial - ??
In my head canon the series ends on horseback after failing to recover the Holy Grail. although I thought in Crystal Skull the intention was to refresh the series with a new lead.
Sunak isn’t very good at winning elections so far.
There is only one that matters
However, Johnson and Truss legacy means he is unlikely to win in 24
It’s his legacy too. He was chancellor for much of it.
He resigned as Johnson’s COE and opposed Truss idiotic ideas
He was Boris right hand man. He took a good long while to resign. Sunak was also fined by the police for partying in lockdown.
He opposed Truss and lost.
Harsh to describe him as “partying in lockdown”. I genuinely believe he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. Boris and many others were happily “partying in lockdown” to be clear
Agree. He really was ambushed by a cake and there is no evidence he did any partying. He really was unlucky, but here is a man also told off for not wearing a seat belt and walking a dog without a lead. He seems to be attempting a Guinness Book a Records entry for the most trivial offences while politician around him take the piss and get away with. I hope he doesn't walk on the cracks in the pavement or wear a loud shirt in a built up area.
It’s almost as if he’s a normal bloke doing what normal people do!
Normal folks don't wear seat belts? I've always worn mine.
Though he deserves to lose because his politics are badly flawed and he's badly misleading the country. Not because of any of the trivial nonsense.
The Tories should be the party of aspiration. Sunak just doesn't get that, and is playing to pensioners and NIMBYs and screw everyone else. That's bad governance, bad politics ultimately and he deserves to lose the next election.
Even if Labour don't deserve to win it, Sunak is almost guaranteeing they will.
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
OK It is the cheapest good size apartment available but I doubt you'd get a space under the stairs a la Harry Potter for that price in London.
Wow, thats an amazing price with bills included.
In London, I've seen one bed flats, nice but not luxury, with service charges of that level even if you own it "outright".
Berlin is great on this. How they manage it is probably worth a look.
I believe that there's been quite a lot of efforts to regulate/control the rental market in Berlin, both historically and more recently, but I'm told interfering in this area is very bad so it can't be that.
No, that is always and everywhere 'disastrous'.
Rent controls “work” where there is a stable balance between supply and demand.
On topic, Rishi isn’t going to be PM for years even if he wins the next GE. He isn’t in step with the loony Trussite/Boris wing and they’ll defenestrate him as soon as they see an opportunity, as revenge for bringing down Big Dog.
It is the best result for the country to give the Tory Party some time in the wilderness to help purge the crazy.
This is a map of the Green Belt in St Albans District. As can be seen the whole of the district is Green Belt apart from the built up areas of St Albans, Harpenden, Wheathampstead, Redbourne, London Colney, Park Street, Chiswell Green, How Wood, Bricket Wood and Colney Street.
To build additional houses in the district requires building on the Green Belt. Offices have been converted to flats and other buildings squeezed into existing sites, but any housing growth effectively requires new sites/villages in the Green Belt.
But thats already one of the most densely populated pockets around the m25. Between the M11 and A12 looks like a sensible place where we could build a new town or two not that far away.
On topic, Rishi isn’t going to be PM for years even if he wins the next GE. He isn’t in step with the loony Trussite/Boris wing and they’ll defenestrate him as soon as they see an opportunity, as revenge for bringing down Big Dog.
It is the best result for the country to give the Tory Party some time in the wilderness to help purge the crazy.
Not sure. Success begets success. If by some miracle he pulled off a 1992, I think he’d be safe for a few years. Same reason Starmer looks invincible within Labour currently despite half the party hating him.
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
OK It is the cheapest good size apartment available but I doubt you'd get a space under the stairs a la Harry Potter for that price in London.
Wow, thats an amazing price with bills included.
In London, I've seen one bed flats, nice but not luxury, with service charges of that level even if you own it "outright".
Berlin is great on this. How they manage it is probably worth a look.
Likely many reasons.
One factor will be that there's not the political/financial/economic/cultural concentration in Berlin that London has.
Yes few countries have capitals as dominant as London is. But still, Berlin is a big throbbing iconic city and it comes as a surprise to see how cheap it is to live there.
In the past 2 decades Berlin's population has barely changed. London's has grown by 2 million.
Yet you think regulations are the difference? 🤔
Supply and demand isn't a surprise to anyone who understands the slightest thing about economics.
Well, all these people from both rural East Germany and abroad must be going somewhere, but maybe it's not Berlin.
6 million more overall since 1990, and about 3 million dispersed rural Easterners moving internally , to more resource-intensive cities in the West, must be putting strains somewhere.
Germany's population stopped rising in 1995. The country has had 28 years to build for any population growth that occurred in 1990, yet you keep harping on about 20th century figures to pretend the two situations are comparable. They're not.
If you can find a city in Germany whose population has rapidly grown in recent years then maybe it might be more expensive, but you haven't found any hence trying to change the discussion to early 90s, the fall of the Soviet Union and reunification.
Its not Berlin though if so, so comparisons between Berlin and London, or Germany and Britain in general are completely apples and oranges.
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
OK It is the cheapest good size apartment available but I doubt you'd get a space under the stairs a la Harry Potter for that price in London.
Wow, thats an amazing price with bills included.
In London, I've seen one bed flats, nice but not luxury, with service charges of that level even if you own it "outright".
Berlin is great on this. How they manage it is probably worth a look.
Likely many reasons.
One factor will be that there's not the political/financial/economic/cultural concentration in Berlin that London has.
Yes few countries have capitals as dominant as London is. But still, Berlin is a big throbbing iconic city and it comes as a surprise to see how cheap it is to live there.
In the past 2 decades Berlin's population has barely changed. London's has grown by 2 million.
Yet you think regulations are the difference? 🤔
Supply and demand isn't a surprise to anyone who understands the slightest thing about economics.
But anyone who understands a little more than the slightest thing about economics knows that supply & demand doesn't explain the whole of every problem in this world.
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
OK It is the cheapest good size apartment available but I doubt you'd get a space under the stairs a la Harry Potter for that price in London.
Wow, thats an amazing price with bills included.
In London, I've seen one bed flats, nice but not luxury, with service charges of that level even if you own it "outright".
Berlin is great on this. How they manage it is probably worth a look.
Likely many reasons.
One factor will be that there's not the political/financial/economic/cultural concentration in Berlin that London has.
Yes few countries have capitals as dominant as London is. But still, Berlin is a big throbbing iconic city and it comes as a surprise to see how cheap it is to live there.
In the past 2 decades Berlin's population has barely changed. London's has grown by 2 million.
Yet you think regulations are the difference? 🤔
Supply and demand isn't a surprise to anyone who understands the slightest thing about economics.
But anyone who understands a little more than the slightest thing about economics knows that supply & demand doesn't explain the whole of every problem in this world.
Of course it doesn't explain every problem.
It is the cause of this problem, though.
Germany has enough supply of houses, so they're affordable. Britain does not, so they're not.
You can't regulate that away, unless the regulations you're proposing are to allow mass construction - in which case, I'll vote for that.
On Topic. I 🩷 this header. I agree with all of it, best of all love how it is so politely and infinitely subtly trolling.
“I am coming to a view that Sunak isn’t very good perhaps because he has only been an MP for a relatively short period. He does have the backing of the Daily Express though not punters .”
Sunak is a tad disappointing but basically fine. It is his party who are the far bigger problem. Toddler fantasists and disloyal and corrupt to boot.
When you disembark the plane at Nice airport and mass with your 150 fellow passengers and think you've left Brexity Britain for whatever part of your 90 days you have left you're given one final reminder across the tannoy ........
"Could all those with EUROPEAN PASSPORTS come to the front of the queue"
You then step to one side breathe in and allow these EUROPEANS to walk past and into the sunlight. I wonder how many of the 60,000,000 UK travelers to the EU had the same thought. 'Before Rishi and his mob came along we too were 'EUROPEANS'
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
OK It is the cheapest good size apartment available but I doubt you'd get a space under the stairs a la Harry Potter for that price in London.
Wow, thats an amazing price with bills included.
In London, I've seen one bed flats, nice but not luxury, with service charges of that level even if you own it "outright".
Berlin is great on this. How they manage it is probably worth a look.
I believe that there's been quite a lot of efforts to regulate/control the rental market in Berlin, both historically and more recently, but I'm told interfering in this area is very bad so it can't be that.
No, that is always and everywhere 'disastrous'.
Like the minimum wage, right?
Yep, another impertinent interference with the workings of the Invisible Hand. Let it slap and punch or stroke and caress as it sees fit!
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
OK It is the cheapest good size apartment available but I doubt you'd get a space under the stairs a la Harry Potter for that price in London.
Wow, thats an amazing price with bills included.
In London, I've seen one bed flats, nice but not luxury, with service charges of that level even if you own it "outright".
Berlin is great on this. How they manage it is probably worth a look.
Likely many reasons.
One factor will be that there's not the political/financial/economic/cultural concentration in Berlin that London has.
Yes few countries have capitals as dominant as London is. But still, Berlin is a big throbbing iconic city and it comes as a surprise to see how cheap it is to live there.
Berlin is not particularly wealthy by German standards, placing well behind Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Dusseldorf. Also the hinterland to Berlin is not wealthy either. but still, London is the only UK city that matches the German cities for wealth, and away from Rest of SE England and Scotland, the UK regional average is well below the German comparable and not much above the EU average.
It is not just that most German cities are rich. Most UK cities, away from London, are poor.
On cash, this can cut both ways. A small businesswoman my mother knows doesn't ban card transactions but does hide the machine to perform them unless customers specifically ask to pay by card. She prefers cash because the processing fees are lower.
Because she is a saint, there is absolutely no possibility that she runs her daily expenses out of the cash before it hits the bank, and taxes.
Gemany's 1990 population seems to be variously quoted at something around 78 or 79 million, and the figure for 2023 is given at 84.5 million.
1990 was 33 years ago. Its completely irrelevant. Yes, Germany's population rose between 1990 and 1995. That affected prices then. Britain's population didn't between 1990 and 1995. That affected prices then too.
What happened in 1990 isn't affecting prices today. Why do you want to bring 33 years ago into it, just to pretend that Germany's population has been growing in recent years? 33 years ago is not recent.
Two decades ago both Germany and Britain had affordable housing. In the past 2 decades, Germany's population has not grown - Britain's has soared but construction has not kept up. That is it.
That is the full story, as much as you want to drag the fall of the Soviet Union, or migration many decades ago into it.
The Green Belt was created due to the absolutely massive expansion of London into the surrounding Shires from c.1900 to c.1939 - without it people feared London would simply continue to grow exponentially and swallow everything else up, hence the 1947 Town and Country Act and the checks local authorities put in the 1950s.
Unfortunately, whilst this has successfully constrained the size of London, it has increased the cost of land as a % of new housing cost from 25% to c.70%
In rational economic world, perhaps what should have happened is that the finite land within the green belt was used more frugally and efficiently. More four storey terraces (see the nice bits of Hackney and Islington) rather than two storey semis.
Looking around, that hasn't really happened. Whether that's a question of regulation or that the distribution of incentives makes it sensible for people in Zone 6 to say "don't touch my gaff", I don't know.
There are specific panning laws that make turning a 2 storey property into a 4 storey virtually impossible. Going higher than your neighbours is seen as a particular evil.
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
OK It is the cheapest good size apartment available but I doubt you'd get a space under the stairs a la Harry Potter for that price in London.
Wow, thats an amazing price with bills included.
In London, I've seen one bed flats, nice but not luxury, with service charges of that level even if you own it "outright".
Berlin is great on this. How they manage it is probably worth a look.
Likely many reasons.
One factor will be that there's not the political/financial/economic/cultural concentration in Berlin that London has.
Yes few countries have capitals as dominant as London is. But still, Berlin is a big throbbing iconic city and it comes as a surprise to see how cheap it is to live there.
In the past 2 decades Berlin's population has barely changed. London's has grown by 2 million.
Yet you think regulations are the difference? 🤔
Supply and demand isn't a surprise to anyone who understands the slightest thing about economics.
But anyone who understands a little more than the slightest thing about economics knows that supply & demand doesn't explain the whole of every problem in this world.
Of course it doesn't explain every problem.
It is the cause of this problem, though.
Germany has enough supply of houses, so they're affordable. Britain does not, so they're not.
You can't regulate that away, unless the regulations you're proposing are to allow mass construction - in which case, I'll vote for that.
The only sustainable way to decouple housing costs from supply-demand would be to socialise most housing. Ie far more of the housing stock being social housing, which if we weren’t building new, would need to be bought by government from private owners, at market value.
That would be a huge undertaking, and vastly expensive. I can’t see it ever happening. There are examples of very successful social housing in otherwise cripplingly expensive cities like Singapore, but always built new by government not repurchased from the private sector.
So we’re back to supply. We need to build more homes. Where and how is up for debate. I would say build dense, high and massively in our under-densified urban centres.
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
OK It is the cheapest good size apartment available but I doubt you'd get a space under the stairs a la Harry Potter for that price in London.
Wow, thats an amazing price with bills included.
In London, I've seen one bed flats, nice but not luxury, with service charges of that level even if you own it "outright".
Berlin is great on this. How they manage it is probably worth a look.
Likely many reasons.
One factor will be that there's not the political/financial/economic/cultural concentration in Berlin that London has.
Yes few countries have capitals as dominant as London is. But still, Berlin is a big throbbing iconic city and it comes as a surprise to see how cheap it is to live there.
Berlin is not particularly wealthy by German standards, placing well behind Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Dusseldorf. Also the hinterland to Berlin is not wealthy either. London is the only UK city that matches the German cities for wealth, and away from Rest of SE England and Scotland the UK regional average is well below the German comparable and not much above the EU average.
It is not just that most German cities are rich. Most UK cities, away from London, are poor.
Which is why new towns need to be built away from London to attract people and jobs to less prosperous regions, rather than mindlessly build over the greenbelt in an already overheated London and the South East. We could call it levelling up.
On cash, this can cut both ways. A small businesswoman my mother knows doesn't ban card transactions but does hide the machine to perform them unless customers specifically ask to pay by card. She prefers cash because the processing fees are lower.
If by "processing fees" you mean VAT, yes its much lower when you don't report cash transactions.
Especially if you use that cash to pay people cash in hand, so you dodge Employer NIC too.
The Green Belt was created due to the absolutely massive expansion of London into the surrounding Shires from c.1900 to c.1939 - without it people feared London would simply continue to grow exponentially and swallow everything else up, hence the 1947 Town and Country Act and the checks local authorities put in the 1950s.
Unfortunately, whilst this has successfully constrained the size of London, it has increased the cost of land as a % of new housing cost from 25% to c.70%
In rational economic world, perhaps what should have happened is that the finite land within the green belt was used more frugally and efficiently. More four storey terraces (see the nice bits of Hackney and Islington) rather than two storey semis.
Looking around, that hasn't really happened. Whether that's a question of regulation or that the distribution of incentives makes it sensible for people in Zone 6 to say "don't touch my gaff", I don't know.
There are specific panning laws that make turning a 2 storey property into a 4 storey virtually impossible. Going higher than your neighbours is seen as a particular evil.
Indeed. “Shading” and being overlooked, in streets where there’s already tonnes of shade and everyone overlooks everyone else and never minded before. It’s just innate and knee jerk though. The planning laws are there because people seem to feel some sort of fight or flight reaction whenever the little yellow planning notice appears on a front door.
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
OK It is the cheapest good size apartment available but I doubt you'd get a space under the stairs a la Harry Potter for that price in London.
Wow, thats an amazing price with bills included.
In London, I've seen one bed flats, nice but not luxury, with service charges of that level even if you own it "outright".
Berlin is great on this. How they manage it is probably worth a look.
I believe that there's been quite a lot of efforts to regulate/control the rental market in Berlin, both historically and more recently, but I'm told interfering in this area is very bad so it can't be that.
No, that is always and everywhere 'disastrous'.
Rent controls “work” where there is a stable balance between supply and demand.
Those inverted commas are telling me you're against them. I'd like to see them at least considered as part of the solution to what I think is emerging as one of our very biggest problems - that so many people are unable to find a secure and comfortable home to live in.
On topic, Rishi isn’t going to be PM for years even if he wins the next GE. He isn’t in step with the loony Trussite/Boris wing and they’ll defenestrate him as soon as they see an opportunity, as revenge for bringing down Big Dog.
It is the best result for the country to give the Tory Party some time in the wilderness to help purge the crazy.
Not sure. Success begets success. If by some miracle he pulled off a 1992, I think he’d be safe for a few years. Same reason Starmer looks invincible within Labour currently despite half the party hating him.
I would normally agree but the Tory Party is seriously broken at the moment. A surprise GE victory might paper over the cracks for a year or so, but I think they are so fundamentally at odds with themselves and the direction of the party that it won’t be long before they tear themselves apart.
On cash, this can cut both ways. A small businesswoman my mother knows doesn't ban card transactions but does hide the machine to perform them unless customers specifically ask to pay by card. She prefers cash because the processing fees are lower.
If by "processing fees" you mean VAT, yes its much lower when you don't report cash transactions.
Especially if you use that cash to pay people cash in hand, so you dodge Employer NIC too.
A lot of companies signed up for really expensive card processing companies many years ago and are either trapped in those contracts or do not know / care enough to move to a cheaper provider.
So I wouldn't be going cash in hand = tax evasion.
Interesting how NIMBY vs YIMBY completely cuts across all political affiliations: economically right vs left, authoritarian vs libertarian, Young vs old. Some very interesting stats on public opinion on this yesterday. By which we can only conclude it's based on a distinct set of emotional reflexes from those that drive other political views.
When a new planning application comes up on our street I am instinctively all for it, almost regardless of the actual details (unless it's really ugly). It's a subjective not objective reaction. Many of my neighbours, whose political affiliations cross the spectrum from Corbynite to Tory, are reflexively against.
Same with new skyscrapers. I love them but some people think they're the devil incarnate. Doesn't mean I want to concrete over the greenbelt - we all have heads as well as hearts of course - but I think it's hard to overcome the innate prejudice one way or other.
For that reason I'm not sure how politicians deal with this. I'd guess a solid majority of people are NIMBYs at heart. It probably means, like in some other areas of life such as hospital rationalisation or traffic calming measures, the best approach is to build lots but pretend it's not happening.
Indeed, the polling on the Greenbelt is one of the few areas most 18-24s, over 65s, Labour and Tory voters, Remainers and Leavers all agree on. Don't build on it! We are a nation of NIMBYs on the whole
On cash, this can cut both ways. A small businesswoman my mother knows doesn't ban card transactions but does hide the machine to perform them unless customers specifically ask to pay by card. She prefers cash because the processing fees are lower.
If by "processing fees" you mean VAT, yes its much lower when you don't report cash transactions.
Especially if you use that cash to pay people cash in hand, so you dodge Employer NIC too.
Very true!
Although recently even cab drivers seem to prefer card payments, which probably reduce tips as well as the opportunity for under-declaration. It might be that as card processing fees have fallen, it is just a simpler life (or maybe my small sample of drivers is misleading).
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
OK It is the cheapest good size apartment available but I doubt you'd get a space under the stairs a la Harry Potter for that price in London.
Wow, thats an amazing price with bills included.
In London, I've seen one bed flats, nice but not luxury, with service charges of that level even if you own it "outright".
Berlin is great on this. How they manage it is probably worth a look.
Likely many reasons.
One factor will be that there's not the political/financial/economic/cultural concentration in Berlin that London has.
Yes few countries have capitals as dominant as London is. But still, Berlin is a big throbbing iconic city and it comes as a surprise to see how cheap it is to live there.
In the past 2 decades Berlin's population has barely changed. London's has grown by 2 million.
Yet you think regulations are the difference? 🤔
Supply and demand isn't a surprise to anyone who understands the slightest thing about economics.
But anyone who understands a little more than the slightest thing about economics knows that supply & demand doesn't explain the whole of every problem in this world.
Of course it doesn't explain every problem.
It is the cause of this problem, though.
Germany has enough supply of houses, so they're affordable. Britain does not, so they're not.
You can't regulate that away, unless the regulations you're proposing are to allow mass construction - in which case, I'll vote for that.
The only sustainable way to decouple housing costs from supply-demand would be to socialise most housing. Ie far more of the housing stock being social housing, which if we weren’t building new, would need to be bought by government from private owners, at market value.
That would be a huge undertaking, and vastly expensive. I can’t see it ever happening. There are examples of very successful social housing in otherwise cripplingly expensive cities like Singapore, but always built new by government not repurchased from the private sector.
So we’re back to supply. We need to build more homes. Where and how is up for debate. I would say build dense, high and massively in our under-densified urban centres.
Socialising the housing stock could reduce the price. It would result in people on the waiting list. There is a genuine shortage of housing.
We are trying building tower blocks of tiny flats in London. It will be interesting to see how they fare when the heat comes out of the housing market.
Just down the road from me, they are building such blocks wedged between the A4 (very major road, a railway line and another busy road. Bloody horrible location, all in all.
On the subject of home ownership, I've just come across this, reminding me that far from being obsessed by home ownershiop, Britain is looking distinctly mid-table in Europe:
Otoh the economic powerhouse of Europe, Germany, has very low ownership rates. Maybe that is worth consideration.
Norway is wealthier per head than Germany and has 80% home ownership, very high home ownership rates now in Eastern Europe too. Italy, Spain and Ireland and the Netherlands also have a higher home ownership rate than the UK
All true but as I just said, Europe's economic and industrial powerhouse, viz Germany, has very low ownership rates. Maybe we should examine whether this is central to Germany's prosperity or just a mildly interesting quirk.
Probably partly explains why the right tends to be weaker in Germany than most of the rest of Europe and the West. As most Germans rent, even the main centre right party the CDU are not much different to the LDs ideologically here and now the SPD are in government with the Greens and FDP.
In terms of wealth per head Germany as a result though has amongst the lowest wealth in the western world (even if higher personal incomes than some western rivals). We, the US, France, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Nordic nations and the Netherlands, Japan and Singapore, Ireland even Italy and Spain have higher wealth per head than Germany
Gemany's 1990 population seems to be variously quoted at something around 78 or 79 million, and the figure for 2023 is given at 84.5 million.
1990 was 33 years ago. Its completely irrelevant. Yes, Germany's population rose between 1990 and 1995. That affected prices then. Britain's population didn't between 1990 and 1995. That affected prices then too.
What happened in 1990 isn't affecting prices today. Why do you want to bring 33 years ago into it, just to pretend that Germany's population has been growing in recent years? 33 years ago is not recent.
Two decades ago both Germany and Britain had affordable housing. In the past 2 decades, Germany's population has not grown - Britain's has soared but construction has not kept up. That is it.
That is the full story, as much as you want to drag the fall of the Soviet Union, or migration many decades ago into it.
You could also just suggest looking at parts of Germany such as Munich where rental prices rose significantly from 2010 as the population increased but housing supply didn't. - I know that because the people I used to meet there had all moved out because their jobs were mainly home based with odd days in the office when all the appropriate people were in the office (Microsoft offices were often fully on a Friday when no-one was doing client visits).
On cash, this can cut both ways. A small businesswoman my mother knows doesn't ban card transactions but does hide the machine to perform them unless customers specifically ask to pay by card. She prefers cash because the processing fees are lower.
If by "processing fees" you mean VAT, yes its much lower when you don't report cash transactions.
Especially if you use that cash to pay people cash in hand, so you dodge Employer NIC too.
A lot of companies signed up for really expensive card processing companies many years ago and are either trapped in those contracts or do know / care enough to move to a cheaper provider.
So I wouldn't be going cash in hand = tax evasion.
Card processing fees dropped to the same rate as cash processing fees about a decade ago. You'd have to be on an absurdly old contract to not have caught up on that now.
I absolutely would go cash in hand = tax evasion. Especially when someone is trying to direct people into doing cash.
Biden says US wont block any transfers from European countries
Positive if you're right but has any country said they will do transfers?
We don't have F16s to give, the US isn't giving any. Which countries have an abundance of F16s they're planning on giving? I'd love it if were true, but I'm not holding my breath.
Norway have almost 60 retired F16's sitting in hangers in perfect nick.
For som reason (age?!) I initially read that as "No way, I have almost 60 retired F16's sitting in hangers in perfect nick." I thought you were even richer* than I'd realised or wondered whether the post was in fact from Dura Ace.
I wouldn't even say Henley is safe now either given the LDs won a landslide there in the local elections.
If Boris really wanted a safe seat he would try Dudley, Reigate, Dartford, Basildon or Walsall or Braintree or a seat in Lincolnshire or rural Cambridgeshire or the New Forest based on the local election results
He can be King of Walsall, I agree. MP for as long as he wants it.
Not sure if Carrie signed up to be 'Queen of Walsall' though, Queen of Westminster maybe unfortunately for her the former is now Boris heartland not the latter
Gemany's 1990 population seems to be variously quoted at something around 78 or 79 million, and the figure for 2023 is given at 84.5 million.
1990 was 33 years ago. Its completely irrelevant. Yes, Germany's population rose between 1990 and 1995. That affected prices then. Britain's population didn't between 1990 and 1995. That affected prices then too.
What happened in 1990 isn't affecting prices today. Why do you want to bring 33 years ago into it, just to pretend that Germany's population has been growing in recent years? 33 years ago is not recent.
Two decades ago both Germany and Britain had affordable housing. In the past 2 decades, Germany's population has not grown - Britain's has soared but construction has not kept up. That is it.
That is the full story, as much as you want to drag the fall of the Soviet Union, or migration many decades ago into it.
From what I can see online, Germany's population was forecast to drop or stay stable, but hasn't.
I think that could be because of the combined effect of the 2015 refugee crisis, the Ukrainian war, and Germany still accepting a lot of Russian and Central Asia Jewish populations.
So that could be the reason why it's been actually repeatedly forecast to fall, or stay stable, but instead seems to have risen from about 81 or 82 million 20 years ago, to approaching 85 million now.
Even the population predictions from various world websites from last year seem to be wrong, so I wonder whether perhaps the Ukrainian war, in that it might also have actually accelerated Gemany's long-standing policy of accepting post-Soviet Jews, as well as non-Jewish ukrainians, might have been key, there.
You then step to one side breathe in and allow these EUROPEANS to walk past and into the sunlight. I wonder how many of the 60,000,000 UK travelers to the EU had the same thought. 'Before Rishi and his mob came along we too were 'EUROPEANS'
Yes Rog, out of a population of 68 million, 60 million of us go to europe each year.
The Green Belt was created due to the absolutely massive expansion of London into the surrounding Shires from c.1900 to c.1939 - without it people feared London would simply continue to grow exponentially and swallow everything else up, hence the 1947 Town and Country Act and the checks local authorities put in the 1950s.
Unfortunately, whilst this has successfully constrained the size of London, it has increased the cost of land as a % of new housing cost from 25% to c.70%
In rational economic world, perhaps what should have happened is that the finite land within the green belt was used more frugally and efficiently. More four storey terraces (see the nice bits of Hackney and Islington) rather than two storey semis.
Looking around, that hasn't really happened. Whether that's a question of regulation or that the distribution of incentives makes it sensible for people in Zone 6 to say "don't touch my gaff", I don't know.
AIUI the Victorian terrace isn't bad in terms of efficient usage of land and provides the kind of housing that people like. Relatively energy efficient too compared to detached houses I'd assume, and there must be cost savings from sharing party walls. If we learned from the Victorians' mistakes and built them with decent foundations and sound insulation I reckon they'd be the perfect home. Why don't we build more new developments like this instead of those horrible boxlike 'executive homes' that blight the landscape? I should state an interest here, I live in a 3-4 storey Victorian terraced house and it is a really fantastic family home. I reckon we sit on something like 175m2 of land (5m x 35m approximately) with 6 people living in 9 large habitable rooms, translating into almost 60 units per hectare and over 500 habitable rooms per hectare - the latter would render it high density housing, yet we own our own plot of land and can sit in the garden surrounded by greenery and birdsong. Can someone with expertise in this field explain why tall terraced houses aren't the model for new homes?
On topic, Rishi isn’t going to be PM for years even if he wins the next GE. He isn’t in step with the loony Trussite/Boris wing and they’ll defenestrate him as soon as they see an opportunity, as revenge for bringing down Big Dog.
It is the best result for the country to give the Tory Party some time in the wilderness to help purge the crazy.
Not sure. Success begets success. If by some miracle he pulled off a 1992, I think he’d be safe for a few years. Same reason Starmer looks invincible within Labour currently despite half the party hating him.
I would normally agree but the Tory Party is seriously broken at the moment. A surprise GE victory might paper over the cracks for a year or so, but I think they are so fundamentally at odds with themselves and the direction of the party that it won’t be long before they tear themselves apart.
Yeah, if Con unexpectedly win Election 24 they'll be heading for a 1997 type defeat in 2029.
It's in their own interests to lose and sort themselves out in Opposition for a few years.
On cash, this can cut both ways. A small businesswoman my mother knows doesn't ban card transactions but does hide the machine to perform them unless customers specifically ask to pay by card. She prefers cash because the processing fees are lower.
If by "processing fees" you mean VAT, yes its much lower when you don't report cash transactions.
Especially if you use that cash to pay people cash in hand, so you dodge Employer NIC too.
A lot of companies signed up for really expensive card processing companies many years ago and are either trapped in those contracts or do know / care enough to move to a cheaper provider.
So I wouldn't be going cash in hand = tax evasion.
Card processing fees dropped to the same rate as cash processing fees about a decade ago. You'd have to be on an absurdly old contract to not have caught up on that now.
I absolutely would go cash in hand = tax evasion. Especially when someone is trying to direct people into doing cash.
On a less acrimonious note.
One piece of automation that should really be tried is a proper integration of a business account with an accounts generating and PAYE system.
A few years back, I did a demo for an alt-bank of such a system. If you ran a small shop, it would do your accounts from the bank transactions, learning to allocate incoming and outgoing as you use it. You could easily do the PAYE stuff as well, in a similar manner.
Generating nice graphs from the data was quite easy, as well.
Given that many small business fail over tax and accounting issues....
Anyone who recommends Sage at this point will be put on The List.
Gemany's 1990 population seems to be variously quoted at something around 78 or 79 million, and the figure for 2023 is given at 84.5 million.
1990 was 33 years ago. Its completely irrelevant. Yes, Germany's population rose between 1990 and 1995. That affected prices then. Britain's population didn't between 1990 and 1995. That affected prices then too.
What happened in 1990 isn't affecting prices today. Why do you want to bring 33 years ago into it, just to pretend that Germany's population has been growing in recent years? 33 years ago is not recent.
Two decades ago both Germany and Britain had affordable housing. In the past 2 decades, Germany's population has not grown - Britain's has soared but construction has not kept up. That is it.
That is the full story, as much as you want to drag the fall of the Soviet Union, or migration many decades ago into it.
From what I can see online, Germany's population was forecast to drop or stay stable, but hasn't.
I wonder if that's because of the Ukrainian war, and Germany still accepting a lot of Russian and Central Asia Jewish populations. So that maybe could be the reason why it's been actually repeatedly forecast to fall, or stay stable, but instead seems to have risen from about 81 or 82 million 20 years ago, to approaching 85 million now. Even the population predictions from various world websites from last year seem to be wrong, so I wonder whether perhaps the Ukrainian war, and the way in which that might have accelerated Gemany's long-standing policy of accepting post-Soviet Jews, might have been two key factors, there.
Why are you so pig-headed over this? What would you call this if not stable? 🤦♂️ Apart from a brief fall in 2010, subsequently reversed, their population has barely changed all century.
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
OK It is the cheapest good size apartment available but I doubt you'd get a space under the stairs a la Harry Potter for that price in London.
Wow, thats an amazing price with bills included.
In London, I've seen one bed flats, nice but not luxury, with service charges of that level even if you own it "outright".
Berlin is great on this. How they manage it is probably worth a look.
Likely many reasons.
One factor will be that there's not the political/financial/economic/cultural concentration in Berlin that London has.
Yes few countries have capitals as dominant as London is. But still, Berlin is a big throbbing iconic city and it comes as a surprise to see how cheap it is to live there.
In the past 2 decades Berlin's population has barely changed. London's has grown by 2 million.
Yet you think regulations are the difference? 🤔
Supply and demand isn't a surprise to anyone who understands the slightest thing about economics.
But anyone who understands a little more than the slightest thing about economics knows that supply & demand doesn't explain the whole of every problem in this world.
Of course it doesn't explain every problem.
It is the cause of this problem, though.
Germany has enough supply of houses, so they're affordable. Britain does not, so they're not.
You can't regulate that away, unless the regulations you're proposing are to allow mass construction - in which case, I'll vote for that.
The only sustainable way to decouple housing costs from supply-demand would be to socialise most housing. Ie far more of the housing stock being social housing, which if we weren’t building new, would need to be bought by government from private owners, at market value.
That would be a huge undertaking, and vastly expensive. I can’t see it ever happening. There are examples of very successful social housing in otherwise cripplingly expensive cities like Singapore, but always built new by government not repurchased from the private sector.
So we’re back to supply. We need to build more homes. Where and how is up for debate. I would say build dense, high and massively in our under-densified urban centres.
Socialising the housing stock could reduce the price. It would result in people on the waiting list. There is a genuine shortage of housing.
We are trying building tower blocks of tiny flats in London. It will be interesting to see how they fare when the heat comes out of the housing market.
Just down the road from me, they are building such blocks wedged between the A4 (very major road, a railway line and another busy road. Bloody horrible location, all in all.
At least we’re building them. But this is what we need anyway - the heat to come out of the market, and for there to be some latency, some spare capacity. That in turn forces developers to build properties people want to live in. At the moment they can erect any old shit and the market will fill it up.
As we were discussing a couple of days ago most European countries have far more long term empty housing than us. That’s sometimes unhealthy, in areas of rural depopulation, but it does mean the market is kept in check.
I bought my French house in 2007 just before the financial crisis, when a typical village house with garden was about 120-130k. The market then tumbled in value by at least 20% and stayed there for a decade. Covid led to a mini boom until houses were at or slightly above the 2007 level. Now they’re back down a bit. Compare that with UK prices in the period. The single difference is that there are more than enough properties to go round in rural France.
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
OK It is the cheapest good size apartment available but I doubt you'd get a space under the stairs a la Harry Potter for that price in London.
Wow, thats an amazing price with bills included.
In London, I've seen one bed flats, nice but not luxury, with service charges of that level even if you own it "outright".
Berlin is great on this. How they manage it is probably worth a look.
Likely many reasons.
One factor will be that there's not the political/financial/economic/cultural concentration in Berlin that London has.
Yes few countries have capitals as dominant as London is. But still, Berlin is a big throbbing iconic city and it comes as a surprise to see how cheap it is to live there.
Berlin is not particularly wealthy by German standards, placing well behind Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Dusseldorf. Also the hinterland to Berlin is not wealthy either. London is the only UK city that matches the German cities for wealth, and away from Rest of SE England and Scotland the UK regional average is well below the German comparable and not much above the EU average.
It is not just that most German cities are rich. Most UK cities, away from London, are poor.
Which is why new towns need to be built away from London to attract people and jobs to less prosperous regions, rather than mindlessly build over the greenbelt in an already overheated London and the South East. We could call it levelling up.
That is a back to front process though. The jobs and economic prosperity need to come first, then the demand to live there will increase, and so will the housing supply. You can't just build a load of houses in Scunthorpe and expect everyone to live there.
Biden says US wont block any transfers from European countries
Positive if you're right but has any country said they will do transfers?
We don't have F16s to give, the US isn't giving any. Which countries have an abundance of F16s they're planning on giving? I'd love it if were true, but I'm not holding my breath.
Norway have almost 60 retired F16's sitting in hangers in perfect nick.
For som reason (age?!) I initially read that as "No way, I have almost 60 retired F16's sitting in hangers in perfect nick." I thought you were even richer* than I'd realised or wondered whether the post was in fact from Dura Ace.
*you know, being a pensioner and all
I wish
If Malc owned 60 F16s I can think of at least one poster on here who we might not have heard from again.
Who says the church is out of date - everyone in most of those pictures is wearing a dress.
I'd love a purple cloak like that. I have a shocking pink dress that would go very well with it. An open topped carriage and horse to pootle around the Lakes would be pretty nice too.
The Green Belt was created due to the absolutely massive expansion of London into the surrounding Shires from c.1900 to c.1939 - without it people feared London would simply continue to grow exponentially and swallow everything else up, hence the 1947 Town and Country Act and the checks local authorities put in the 1950s.
Unfortunately, whilst this has successfully constrained the size of London, it has increased the cost of land as a % of new housing cost from 25% to c.70%
In rational economic world, perhaps what should have happened is that the finite land within the green belt was used more frugally and efficiently. More four storey terraces (see the nice bits of Hackney and Islington) rather than two storey semis.
Looking around, that hasn't really happened. Whether that's a question of regulation or that the distribution of incentives makes it sensible for people in Zone 6 to say "don't touch my gaff", I don't know.
AIUI the Victorian terrace isn't bad in terms of efficient usage of land and provides the kind of housing that people like. Relatively energy efficient too compared to detached houses I'd assume, and there must be cost savings from sharing party walls. If we learned from the Victorians' mistakes and built them with decent foundations and sound insulation I reckon they'd be the perfect home. Why don't we build more new developments like this instead of those horrible boxlike 'executive homes' that blight the landscape? I should state an interest here, I live in a 3-4 storey Victorian terraced house and it is a really fantastic family home. I reckon we sit on something like 175m2 of land (5m x 35m approximately) with 6 people living in 9 large habitable rooms, translating into almost 60 units per hectare and over 500 habitable rooms per hectare - the latter would render it high density housing, yet we own our own plot of land and can sit in the garden surrounded by greenery and birdsong. Can someone with expertise in this field explain why tall terraced houses aren't the model for new homes?
It would be pastiche. Which is the ultimate sin in architecture.
This is why a man who has an employee who puts the toothpaste on his toothbrush is more is tune with the population as to what housing they want, than the architects building most new housing.
Gemany's 1990 population seems to be variously quoted at something around 78 or 79 million, and the figure for 2023 is given at 84.5 million.
1990 was 33 years ago. Its completely irrelevant. Yes, Germany's population rose between 1990 and 1995. That affected prices then. Britain's population didn't between 1990 and 1995. That affected prices then too.
What happened in 1990 isn't affecting prices today. Why do you want to bring 33 years ago into it, just to pretend that Germany's population has been growing in recent years? 33 years ago is not recent.
Two decades ago both Germany and Britain had affordable housing. In the past 2 decades, Germany's population has not grown - Britain's has soared but construction has not kept up. That is it.
That is the full story, as much as you want to drag the fall of the Soviet Union, or migration many decades ago into it.
From what I can see online, Germany's population was forecast to drop or stay stable, but hasn't.
I wonder if that's because of the Ukrainian war, and Germany still accepting a lot of Russian and Central Asia Jewish populations. So that maybe could be the reason why it's been actually repeatedly forecast to fall, or stay stable, but instead seems to have risen from about 81 or 82 million 20 years ago, to approaching 85 million now. Even the population predictions from various world websites from last year seem to be wrong, so I wonder whether perhaps the Ukrainian war, and the way in which that might have accelerated Gemany's long-standing policy of accepting post-Soviet Jews, might have been two key factors, there.
Why are you so pig-headed over this? What would you call this if not stable? 🤦♂️ Apart from a brief fall in 2010, subsequently reversed, their population has barely changed all century.
Germany is not Britain!
And correlation != causation
But I do accept that it may be waggling it's eyebrows suggestively while furtively mouthing 'look over here' in this case.
On cash, this can cut both ways. A small businesswoman my mother knows doesn't ban card transactions but does hide the machine to perform them unless customers specifically ask to pay by card. She prefers cash because the processing fees are lower.
If by "processing fees" you mean VAT, yes its much lower when you don't report cash transactions.
Especially if you use that cash to pay people cash in hand, so you dodge Employer NIC too.
A lot of companies signed up for really expensive card processing companies many years ago and are either trapped in those contracts or do know / care enough to move to a cheaper provider.
So I wouldn't be going cash in hand = tax evasion.
Card processing fees dropped to the same rate as cash processing fees about a decade ago. You'd have to be on an absurdly old contract to not have caught up on that now.
I absolutely would go cash in hand = tax evasion. Especially when someone is trying to direct people into doing cash.
On a less acrimonious note.
One piece of automation that should really be tried is a proper integration of a business account with an accounts generating and PAYE system.
A few years back, I did a demo for an alt-bank of such a system. If you ran a small shop, it would do your accounts from the bank transactions, learning to allocate incoming and outgoing as you use it. You could easily do the PAYE stuff as well, in a similar manner.
Generating nice graphs from the data was quite easy, as well.
Given that many small business fail over tax and accounting issues....
Anyone who recommends Sage at this point will be put on The List.
As far as I know most accounting software can do that now, with all banks both major and alt.
On topic, I've just watched all of Sunak's 10-minute interview with Beth Rigby. It is painful. He's obviously been advised (or decided himself) that the route to success is to repeat, and itemise, his government's five priorities as often as possible, regardless of the question being asked. So he does, so much so that one loses the will to live. So, for example, even legitimate questions about the level of legal migration are responded to by 'yes, we'll cut the numbers - but stopping the boats is my priority'... It's really tedious.
It strengthens my view that Sunak is significantly over-rated by many people.
The Green Belt was created due to the absolutely massive expansion of London into the surrounding Shires from c.1900 to c.1939 - without it people feared London would simply continue to grow exponentially and swallow everything else up, hence the 1947 Town and Country Act and the checks local authorities put in the 1950s.
Unfortunately, whilst this has successfully constrained the size of London, it has increased the cost of land as a % of new housing cost from 25% to c.70%
In rational economic world, perhaps what should have happened is that the finite land within the green belt was used more frugally and efficiently. More four storey terraces (see the nice bits of Hackney and Islington) rather than two storey semis.
Looking around, that hasn't really happened. Whether that's a question of regulation or that the distribution of incentives makes it sensible for people in Zone 6 to say "don't touch my gaff", I don't know.
There are specific panning laws that make turning a 2 storey property into a 4 storey virtually impossible. Going higher than your neighbours is seen as a particular evil.
Mr. JohnL, been a long time since I learned about it and things may've changed since but I think renting was seen as both normal and had better laws in Germany compared to here.
OK It is the cheapest good size apartment available but I doubt you'd get a space under the stairs a la Harry Potter for that price in London.
Wow, thats an amazing price with bills included.
In London, I've seen one bed flats, nice but not luxury, with service charges of that level even if you own it "outright".
Berlin is great on this. How they manage it is probably worth a look.
Likely many reasons.
One factor will be that there's not the political/financial/economic/cultural concentration in Berlin that London has.
Yes few countries have capitals as dominant as London is. But still, Berlin is a big throbbing iconic city and it comes as a surprise to see how cheap it is to live there.
Berlin is not particularly wealthy by German standards, placing well behind Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt, Stuttgart, and Dusseldorf. Also the hinterland to Berlin is not wealthy either. but still, London is the only UK city that matches the German cities for wealth, and away from Rest of SE England and Scotland, the UK regional average is well below the German comparable and not much above the EU average.
It is not just that most German cities are rich. Most UK cities, away from London, are poor.
The challenge for the Midlands Engine is that despite its cities playing a crucial role within it, they underperform. Centre for Cities’ estimates suggest the Midlands Engine economy is £18 billion per year smaller than it should be, and 89 per cent of this gap is the result of the underperformance of its urban economies. The Birmingham conurbation alone accounts for £11 billion (58 per cent). This underperformance reduces the prosperity of the residents that live in and around the cities of the Midlands Engine and means that the national economy as a whole is smaller than it should be.
This mainly results from the underperformance of its service exporting sector. Productivity in manufacturing export industries in the Midlands Engine, a sector in which this region performs relatively strongly, is close to the UK average. But output per worker in service exporting industries such as finance and communications, which have a particular preference for an urban location due to the inherent benefits that such a location offers to these activities, trails well behind the national average. This suggests that the cities are not offering the ‘agglomeration’ benefits that they should be to such businesses.
The main solutions proposed were
1. Improving the skills of residents. The Midlands Engine has a higher share of residents without qualifications, and a lower share of graduates, compared to the UK as a whole. Policy interventions in the region should focus on getting those who currently don’t have the equivalent of five good GCSEs up to this level by targeting skills money in the area’s allocation from the Shared Prosperity Fund to support these people.
2. Making city centres more attractive places to do business. Midlands Engine city centres have below average shares of office space. New high-quality city centre office space that meets the needs of occupiers, in particular service exporters, should remain a priority, even in a world of hybrid working. Policy should focus on helping to bring forward appropriate office space in these centres through planning policy and the use of central government funds designated for this purpose. For example, placing the region’s investment zones, which were announced in the Spring Budget 2023, in Birmingham, Nottingham and Leicester city centres would be one way to do this.
3. Improving public transport infrastructure and density within the big cities. The Birmingham and Nottingham conurbations have the poorest transport accessibility in the region, shrinking their labour market and damaging their economic performance. Policy makers should look to align brownfield regeneration funds available from central government together with the current City Region Sustainable Transport Settlement for Birmingham and any future settlement for Nottingham to develop transport and housing in tandem, increasing the number of people who live around public transport stops.
Biden says US wont block any transfers from European countries
Positive if you're right but has any country said they will do transfers?
We don't have F16s to give, the US isn't giving any. Which countries have an abundance of F16s they're planning on giving? I'd love it if were true, but I'm not holding my breath.
Norway have almost 60 retired F16's sitting in hangers in perfect nick.
For som reason (age?!) I initially read that as "No way, I have almost 60 retired F16's sitting in hangers in perfect nick." I thought you were even richer* than I'd realised or wondered whether the post was in fact from Dura Ace.
*you know, being a pensioner and all
I wish
If Malc owned 60 F16s I can think of at least one poster on here who we might not have heard from again.
Ah, but maybe that person has 60 of those '5th generation fighters' from Top Gun, so Malc has to keep his F16s safe in their hangar
The Green Belt was created due to the absolutely massive expansion of London into the surrounding Shires from c.1900 to c.1939 - without it people feared London would simply continue to grow exponentially and swallow everything else up, hence the 1947 Town and Country Act and the checks local authorities put in the 1950s.
Unfortunately, whilst this has successfully constrained the size of London, it has increased the cost of land as a % of new housing cost from 25% to c.70%
In rational economic world, perhaps what should have happened is that the finite land within the green belt was used more frugally and efficiently. More four storey terraces (see the nice bits of Hackney and Islington) rather than two storey semis.
Looking around, that hasn't really happened. Whether that's a question of regulation or that the distribution of incentives makes it sensible for people in Zone 6 to say "don't touch my gaff", I don't know.
AIUI the Victorian terrace isn't bad in terms of efficient usage of land and provides the kind of housing that people like. Relatively energy efficient too compared to detached houses I'd assume, and there must be cost savings from sharing party walls. If we learned from the Victorians' mistakes and built them with decent foundations and sound insulation I reckon they'd be the perfect home. Why don't we build more new developments like this instead of those horrible boxlike 'executive homes' that blight the landscape? I should state an interest here, I live in a 3-4 storey Victorian terraced house and it is a really fantastic family home. I reckon we sit on something like 175m2 of land (5m x 35m approximately) with 6 people living in 9 large habitable rooms, translating into almost 60 units per hectare and over 500 habitable rooms per hectare - the latter would render it high density housing, yet we own our own plot of land and can sit in the garden surrounded by greenery and birdsong. Can someone with expertise in this field explain why tall terraced houses aren't the model for new homes?
It would be pastiche. Which is the ultimate sin in architecture.
This is why a man who has an employee who puts the toothpaste on his toothbrush is more is tune with the population as to what housing they want, than the architects building most new housing.
I'm not sure that that is the explanation as most new builds aren't exactly Le Corbusier. In fact they're usually a bit pastiche themselves.
The Green Belt was created due to the absolutely massive expansion of London into the surrounding Shires from c.1900 to c.1939 - without it people feared London would simply continue to grow exponentially and swallow everything else up, hence the 1947 Town and Country Act and the checks local authorities put in the 1950s.
Unfortunately, whilst this has successfully constrained the size of London, it has increased the cost of land as a % of new housing cost from 25% to c.70%
In rational economic world, perhaps what should have happened is that the finite land within the green belt was used more frugally and efficiently. More four storey terraces (see the nice bits of Hackney and Islington) rather than two storey semis.
Looking around, that hasn't really happened. Whether that's a question of regulation or that the distribution of incentives makes it sensible for people in Zone 6 to say "don't touch my gaff", I don't know.
AIUI the Victorian terrace isn't bad in terms of efficient usage of land and provides the kind of housing that people like. Relatively energy efficient too compared to detached houses I'd assume, and there must be cost savings from sharing party walls. If we learned from the Victorians' mistakes and built them with decent foundations and sound insulation I reckon they'd be the perfect home. Why don't we build more new developments like this instead of those horrible boxlike 'executive homes' that blight the landscape? I should state an interest here, I live in a 3-4 storey Victorian terraced house and it is a really fantastic family home. I reckon we sit on something like 175m2 of land (5m x 35m approximately) with 6 people living in 9 large habitable rooms, translating into almost 60 units per hectare and over 500 habitable rooms per hectare - the latter would render it high density housing, yet we own our own plot of land and can sit in the garden surrounded by greenery and birdsong. Can someone with expertise in this field explain why tall terraced houses aren't the model for new homes?
Because they aren't as popular as detached houses so detached houses are preferred to maximise return.
I think if you go back and look at history many terraces (including the famous ones in Bath) were originally built on a build to rent basis.
On topic, I've just watched all of Sunak's 10-minute interview with Beth Rigby. It is painful. He's obviously been advised (or decided himself) that the route to success is to repeat, and itemise, his government's five priorities as often as possible, regardless of the question being asked. So he does, so much so that one loses the will to live. So, for example, even legitimate questions about the level of legal migration are responded to by 'yes, we'll cut the numbers - but stopping the boats is my priority'... It's really tedious.
It strengthens my view that Sunak is significantly over-rated by many people.
Sunak is simply not very good.
The only thing that he has going for him is that he is Not Truss, or Not Johnson so some Tories who disliked them seem to have embraced him and think he is good by default.
It takes more than lacking someone else's flaws to be good.
You need to actually be competent at running the country, and being a weak pushover who is misrunning the country and puts his Councillors ahead of the country is not someone who is worthy of being Prime Minister.
Gemany's 1990 population seems to be variously quoted at something around 78 or 79 million, and the figure for 2023 is given at 84.5 million.
1990 was 33 years ago. Its completely irrelevant. Yes, Germany's population rose between 1990 and 1995. That affected prices then. Britain's population didn't between 1990 and 1995. That affected prices then too.
What happened in 1990 isn't affecting prices today. Why do you want to bring 33 years ago into it, just to pretend that Germany's population has been growing in recent years? 33 years ago is not recent.
Two decades ago both Germany and Britain had affordable housing. In the past 2 decades, Germany's population has not grown - Britain's has soared but construction has not kept up. That is it.
That is the full story, as much as you want to drag the fall of the Soviet Union, or migration many decades ago into it.
From what I can see online, Germany's population was forecast to drop or stay stable, but hasn't.
I wonder if that's because of the Ukrainian war, and Germany still accepting a lot of Russian and Central Asia Jewish populations. So that maybe could be the reason why it's been actually repeatedly forecast to fall, or stay stable, but instead seems to have risen from about 81 or 82 million 20 years ago, to approaching 85 million now. Even the population predictions from various world websites from last year seem to be wrong, so I wonder whether perhaps the Ukrainian war, and the way in which that might have accelerated Gemany's long-standing policy of accepting post-Soviet Jews, might have been two key factors, there.
Why are you so pig-headed over this? What would you call this if not stable? 🤦♂️ Apart from a brief fall in 2010, subsequently reversed, their population has barely changed all century.
Germany is not Britain!
And correlation != causation
But I do accept that it may be waggling it's eyebrows suggestively while furtively mouthing 'look over here' in this case.
Not sure what the debate here is really - Germany has had a surprisingly stable overall population, using immigration to fill the gap caused by a low birth rate.
The UK has a combination of higher birth rate and higher relative immigration, leading to a rapidly expanding population.
Gemany's 1990 population seems to be variously quoted at something around 78 or 79 million, and the figure for 2023 is given at 84.5 million.
1990 was 33 years ago. Its completely irrelevant. Yes, Germany's population rose between 1990 and 1995. That affected prices then. Britain's population didn't between 1990 and 1995. That affected prices then too.
What happened in 1990 isn't affecting prices today. Why do you want to bring 33 years ago into it, just to pretend that Germany's population has been growing in recent years? 33 years ago is not recent.
Two decades ago both Germany and Britain had affordable housing. In the past 2 decades, Germany's population has not grown - Britain's has soared but construction has not kept up. That is it.
That is the full story, as much as you want to drag the fall of the Soviet Union, or migration many decades ago into it.
From what I can see online, Germany's population was forecast to drop or stay stable, but hasn't.
I wonder if that's because of the Ukrainian war, and Germany still accepting a lot of Russian and Central Asia Jewish populations. So that maybe could be the reason why it's been actually repeatedly forecast to fall, or stay stable, but instead seems to have risen from about 81 or 82 million 20 years ago, to approaching 85 million now. Even the population predictions from various world websites from last year seem to be wrong, so I wonder whether perhaps the Ukrainian war, and the way in which that might have accelerated Gemany's long-standing policy of accepting post-Soviet Jews, might have been two key factors, there.
Why are you so pig-headed over this? What would you call this if not stable? 🤦♂️ Apart from a brief fall in 2010, subsequently reversed, their population has barely changed all century.
Germany is not Britain!
But again, this information seems to stop in about 2019-21, because the current figures are moving towards 85 mill.
Germany seems to have already added another couple of million since then, which doesn't sound like an unchanging population, to me. It might be easier to see what's actually going on there in a couple of years, after the Ukraine War, I think.
Comments
The UK has births exceeding deaths and lower emigration.
We need different policies to Germany. Without slashing immigration we either need to increase our death rate, slash our birth rate, and/or have surging emigration. Not by tiny numbers either to make up the difference.
Or we can just get on with building, since none of the above are really desirable. Indeed even if we had net migration drop to zero, we would still have higher population growth than Germany as we have natural population growth from births exceeding deaths anyway.
Just got a couple of WhatsApp messages from my wife (doing household jobs downstairs, youngest child asleep, other two at play group and school).
Message: "Getting breasts out"
Follow-up message "*chicken* breasts, from freezer - two enough?"
WE'VE ALL GOT TO DIE SOMETIME, IT'S YOUR PATRIOTIC DUTY TO DO IT ASAP
I washed my own car a few months back, it was a strangely satisfying experience producing a visible improvement and likely good exercise as well.
It's not as stable as all that, and immigration is similar.
Anyone who mentions my embarrassing opinions of the past (Liz Truss, “upside”, etc) - you are hereby warned
One factor will be that there's not the political/financial/economic/cultural concentration in Berlin that London has.
This is a map of the Green Belt in St Albans District. As can be seen the whole of the district is Green Belt apart from the built up areas of St Albans, Harpenden, Wheathampstead, Redbourne, London Colney, Park Street, Chiswell Green, How Wood, Bricket Wood and Colney Street.
To build additional houses in the district requires building on the Green Belt. Offices have been converted to flats and other buildings squeezed into existing sites, but any housing growth effectively requires new sites/villages in the Green Belt.
Service charge & Ground rent = £200pm
Council tax = £150pm
Water bill = £30pm
Electric and gas = £120pm
Broadband & Phone = £20pm
TV licence = £12pm
Total bills = around £532pm = 612 euros
Before anything for rent even getting to the landlord!
*you know, being a pensioner and all
Immigration being similar is completely and utterly irrelevant since as I said emigration is not similar, nor are birth/death rates.
This century, their population has completely flatlined. As much as you try to move the goalposts by looking at last century, which they've had plenty of time to construct for people who were born last century.
https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL?end=2021&locations=DE-GB&start=1998
EDIT: I meant to select 2000 as start of this century but it doesn't change anything. You are simply categorically incorrect, drop it already.
;.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3d3tFF1QzVc or the podcast platform of your choice.
It would also mean that whatever third country is involved doesn't have to take the limelight if they don't want to. A few countries have preferred to keep the extent of the military support they've provided a bit quiet.
I'm not entirely a fan of the US president stay in the job for a couple of months after losing the election thing, but something like that would give time for some intensive training on basics, how the commons works, access to resources etc. You could do it with e.g. a few weeks recess after a GE.
Or, you could do it for all candidates for election - slightly less efficient, but could use e.g. the £500 deposit (or whatever it is now) to cover that, at least for new candidates who have not completed the course.
Slightly sad to see him go down the Rendlesham forest route. I much prefer the stories from people who have never told their story before.
You can improve regulations, I've said Section 21 should be abolished for instance and don't think the Government has gone far enough, but if there aren't enough homes to go around then regulations can make rental worse not better. It keeps those in a home secure, but means that those who want a home are royally f***ed.
Not an issue if supply and demand are stable, like in Germany, since anyone who wants a home has plenty available, but where there's more demand than supply like in this country, no amount of regulations will fix that.
The only solution is to build, build, build. Or rapidly kill or deport millions of people to resolve the imbalance. I'd prefer the building personally.
Needle Doll.
For five pence the customer buys an in app doll; and for 0.0xX pence each they can buy in app needles. And the app allows them to push the needles through the doll. That’s it, nothing else, no naming mechanism for the doll or anything. We just supply this to the purchasers world.
When a new planning application comes up on our street I am instinctively all for it, almost regardless of the actual details (unless it's really ugly). It's a subjective not objective reaction. Many of my neighbours, whose political affiliations cross the spectrum from Corbynite to Tory, are reflexively against.
Same with new skyscrapers. I love them but some people think they're the devil incarnate. Doesn't mean I want to concrete over the greenbelt - we all have heads as well as hearts of course - but I think it's hard to overcome the innate prejudice one way or other.
For that reason I'm not sure how politicians deal with this. I'd guess a solid majority of people are NIMBYs at heart. It probably means, like in some other areas of life such as hospital rationalisation or traffic calming measures, the best approach is to build lots but pretend it's not happening.
I knew about the Cake (which was what I thought he was fined for) and the garden party (he wasn’t at) but Abba?
Edit: think you are confused. According to the guardian it was in the #11 flat which was Boris Johnson’s flat
https://amp.theguardian.com/politics/2022/may/25/sue-gray-failure-to-investigate-alleged-abba-party-in-pm-flat-irks-mps
Yet you think regulations are the difference? 🤔
Supply and demand isn't a surprise to anyone who understands the slightest thing about economics.
“I am coming to a view that Sunak isn’t very good perhaps because he has only been an MP for a relatively short period. He does have the backing of the Daily Express though not punters .”
6 million more overall since 1990, and 3 million dispersed rural Easterners apparently moving internally to more resource-intensive cities in the West, must be putting strains somewhere.
Though he deserves to lose because his politics are badly flawed and he's badly misleading the country. Not because of any of the trivial nonsense.
The Tories should be the party of aspiration. Sunak just doesn't get that, and is playing to pensioners and NIMBYs and screw everyone else. That's bad governance, bad politics ultimately and he deserves to lose the next election.
Even if Labour don't deserve to win it, Sunak is almost guaranteeing they will.
It is the best result for the country to give the Tory Party some time in the wilderness to help purge the crazy.
If you can find a city in Germany whose population has rapidly grown in recent years then maybe it might be more expensive, but you haven't found any hence trying to change the discussion to early 90s, the fall of the Soviet Union and reunification.
Its not Berlin though if so, so comparisons between Berlin and London, or Germany and Britain in general are completely apples and oranges.
It is the cause of this problem, though.
Germany has enough supply of houses, so they're affordable. Britain does not, so they're not.
You can't regulate that away, unless the regulations you're proposing are to allow mass construction - in which case, I'll vote for that.
Gemany's 1990 population seems to be variously quoted at something around 78 or 79 million, and the figure for 2023 is given at 84.5 million.
"Could all those with EUROPEAN PASSPORTS come to the front of the queue"
You then step to one side breathe in and allow these EUROPEANS to walk past and into the sunlight. I wonder how many of the 60,000,000 UK travelers to the EU had the same thought. 'Before Rishi and his mob came along we too were 'EUROPEANS'
It is not just that most German cities are rich. Most UK cities, away from London, are poor.
What happened in 1990 isn't affecting prices today. Why do you want to bring 33 years ago into it, just to pretend that Germany's population has been growing in recent years? 33 years ago is not recent.
Two decades ago both Germany and Britain had affordable housing. In the past 2 decades, Germany's population has not grown - Britain's has soared but construction has not kept up. That is it.
That is the full story, as much as you want to drag the fall of the Soviet Union, or migration many decades ago into it.
That would be a huge undertaking, and vastly expensive. I can’t see it ever happening. There are examples of very successful social housing in otherwise cripplingly expensive cities like Singapore, but always built new by government not repurchased from the private
sector.
So we’re back to supply. We need to build
more homes. Where and how is up for debate. I would say build dense, high and massively in our under-densified urban centres.
Especially if you use that cash to pay people cash in hand, so you dodge Employer NIC too.
So I wouldn't be going cash in hand = tax evasion.
Although recently even cab drivers seem to prefer card payments, which probably reduce tips as well as the opportunity for under-declaration. It might be that as card processing fees have fallen, it is just a simpler life (or maybe my small sample of drivers is misleading).
We are trying building tower blocks of tiny flats in London. It will be interesting to see how they fare when the heat comes out of the housing market.
Just down the road from me, they are building such blocks wedged between the A4 (very major road, a railway line and another busy road. Bloody horrible location, all in all.
Most Brits still own property, most Germans don't. Hence on average wealth wise Germans are poorer than Brits
I absolutely would go cash in hand = tax evasion. Especially when someone is trying to direct people into doing cash.
I think that could be because of the combined effect of the 2015 refugee crisis, the Ukrainian war, and Germany still accepting a lot of Russian and Central Asia Jewish populations.
So that could be the reason why it's been actually repeatedly forecast to fall, or stay stable, but instead seems to have risen from about 81 or 82 million 20 years ago, to approaching 85 million now.
Even the population predictions from various world websites from last year seem to be wrong, so I wonder whether perhaps the Ukrainian war, in that it might also have actually accelerated Gemany's long-standing policy of accepting post-Soviet Jews, as well as non-Jewish ukrainians, might have been key, there.
Yes Rog, out of a population of 68 million, 60 million of us go to europe each year.
I should state an interest here, I live in a 3-4 storey Victorian terraced house and it is a really fantastic family home. I reckon we sit on something like 175m2 of land (5m x 35m approximately) with 6 people living in 9 large habitable rooms, translating into almost 60 units per hectare and over 500 habitable rooms per hectare - the latter would render it high density housing, yet we own our own plot of land and can sit in the garden surrounded by greenery and birdsong. Can someone with expertise in this field explain why tall terraced houses aren't the model for new homes?
It's in their own interests to lose and sort themselves out in Opposition for a few years.
One piece of automation that should really be tried is a proper integration of a business account with an accounts generating and PAYE system.
A few years back, I did a demo for an alt-bank of such a system. If you ran a small shop, it would do your accounts from the bank transactions, learning to allocate incoming and outgoing as you use it. You could easily do the PAYE stuff as well, in a similar manner.
Generating nice graphs from the data was quite easy, as well.
Given that many small business fail over tax and accounting issues....
Anyone who recommends Sage at this point will be put on The List.
Germany is not Britain!
As we were discussing a couple of days ago most European countries have far more long term empty housing than us. That’s sometimes unhealthy, in areas of rural depopulation, but it does mean the market is kept in check.
I bought my French house in 2007 just before the financial crisis, when a typical village house with garden was about 120-130k. The market then tumbled in value by at least 20% and stayed there for a decade. Covid led to a mini boom until houses were at or slightly above the 2007 level. Now they’re back down a bit. Compare that with UK prices in the period. The single difference is that there are more than enough properties to go round in rural France.
This is why a man who has an employee who puts the toothpaste on his toothbrush is more is tune with the population as to what housing they want, than the architects building most new housing.
But I do accept that it may be waggling it's eyebrows suggestively while furtively mouthing 'look over here' in this case.
Xero does it for me, very easy to use.
It strengthens my view that Sunak is significantly over-rated by many people.
This mainly results from the underperformance of its service exporting sector. Productivity in manufacturing export industries in the Midlands Engine, a sector in which this region performs relatively strongly, is close to the UK average. But output per worker in service exporting industries such as finance and communications, which have a particular preference for an urban location due to the inherent benefits that such a location offers to these activities, trails well behind the national average. This suggests that the cities are not offering the ‘agglomeration’ benefits that they should be to such businesses.
The main solutions proposed were
1. Improving the skills of residents. The Midlands Engine has a higher share of residents without qualifications, and a lower share of graduates, compared to the UK as a whole. Policy interventions in the region should focus on getting those who currently don’t have the equivalent of five good GCSEs up to this level by targeting skills money in the area’s allocation from the Shared Prosperity Fund to support these people.
2. Making city centres more attractive places to do business. Midlands Engine city centres have below average shares of office space. New high-quality city centre office space that meets the needs of occupiers, in particular service exporters, should remain a priority, even in a world of hybrid working. Policy should focus on helping to bring forward appropriate office space in these centres through planning policy and the use of central government funds designated for this purpose. For example, placing the region’s investment zones, which were announced in the Spring Budget 2023, in Birmingham, Nottingham and Leicester city centres would be one way to do this.
3. Improving public transport infrastructure and density within the big cities. The Birmingham and Nottingham conurbations have the poorest transport accessibility in the region, shrinking their labour market and damaging their economic performance. Policy makers should look to align brownfield regeneration funds available from central government together with the current City Region Sustainable Transport Settlement for Birmingham and any future settlement for Nottingham to develop transport and housing in tandem, increasing the number of people who live around public transport stops.
I think if you go back and look at history many terraces (including the famous ones in Bath) were originally built on a build to rent basis.
The only thing that he has going for him is that he is Not Truss, or Not Johnson so some Tories who disliked them seem to have embraced him and think he is good by default.
It takes more than lacking someone else's flaws to be good.
You need to actually be competent at running the country, and being a weak pushover who is misrunning the country and puts his Councillors ahead of the country is not someone who is worthy of being Prime Minister.
The UK has a combination of higher birth rate and higher relative immigration, leading to a rapidly expanding population.
Germany seems to have already added another couple of million since then, which doesn't sound like an unchanging population, to me. It might be easier to see what's actually going on there in a couple of years, after the Ukraine War, I think.