I am pretty sure that a lot of companies are jacking up prices and using general reports of inflation to hide behind. The New Statesman had a very fine article on it last week and termed the phenomenon Greedflation.
That reminds me of US lefties claiming that inflation under the Biden Presidency wasn’t “real” inflation and companies didn’t have to put up prices. While celebrating pay increases.
There is an element of “reset” - in recent years, suppliers to supermarkets were often squeezed to breaking point. They are now simply refusing to supply some items at hyper low prices.
That doesn’t explain the supermarkets’ improved margins. At a time of rocketing inflation, corporate profitability, EBITDA, margins etc should generally be lower, not higher as so many are currently.
Common occurrence. We're investing so much/higher costs...but also profits are up.
Mrs Stodge is still seething after last night's visit to Sainsbury's. Almost all the traditional tills have gone - replaced by self-service for both baskets and trolleys. Only one till open at 8.30pm (all the staff watching the football?).
To be fair, Sainsbury's are perhaps doing the technological investment instead of simply trying to hire more staff and chasing wages upward. It would help if their staff had a scintilla of awareness of the customer experience but Sainsbury's don't see it in those terms - let the customer do the work.
We put the goods in a trolley and then we take them out for scanning and put them back in. It may be productive for Sainsbury's but not for the customer but then of course how many are still going to the supermarket? The advent of home delivery and click/collect means all that traditional walk down the aisles is history.
The next thing is Sainsbury's will dragoon customers foolish enough to visit the store to stack the shelves for them.
No, the next thing will be a Sainsbury's corporate estate of small town centre stores such as the "locals" and large warehouses to service the home delivery market - everything else will go, to be replaced with flats full of young couples who will sit there complaining their Sainsbury's delivery is late...
Interesting thing is, broadly, no-one likes them but they are being universally implemented because it's the future.
Customers mostly prefer humans, although some like machines better. Staff loathe the automated tills, not just because these tills put of them out of a job but because they get all the aggravation from customers when the machines don't work properly. Automated tills are probably a net cost to supermarkets when you factor in high maintenance cost and higher levels of theft. But supermarkets persevere with them because they hope they will improve later.
I am pretty sure that a lot of companies are jacking up prices and using general reports of inflation to hide behind. The New Statesman had a very fine article on it last week and termed the phenomenon Greedflation.
That reminds me of US lefties claiming that inflation under the Biden Presidency wasn’t “real” inflation and companies didn’t have to put up prices. While celebrating pay increases.
There is an element of “reset” - in recent years, suppliers to supermarkets were often squeezed to breaking point. They are now simply refusing to supply some items at hyper low prices.
That doesn’t explain the supermarkets’ improved margins. At a time of rocketing inflation, corporate profitability, EBITDA, margins etc should generally be lower, not higher as so many are currently.
Common occurrence. We're investing so much/higher costs...but also profits are up.
Mrs Stodge is still seething after last night's visit to Sainsbury's. Almost all the traditional tills have gone - replaced by self-service for both baskets and trolleys. Only one till open at 8.30pm (all the staff watching the football?).
To be fair, Sainsbury's are perhaps doing the technological investment instead of simply trying to hire more staff and chasing wages upward. It would help if their staff had a scintilla of awareness of the customer experience but Sainsbury's don't see it in those terms - let the customer do the work.
We put the goods in a trolley and then we take them out for scanning and put them back in. It may be productive for Sainsbury's but not for the customer but then of course how many are still going to the supermarket? The advent of home delivery and click/collect means all that traditional walk down the aisles is history.
The next thing is Sainsbury's will dragoon customers foolish enough to visit the store to stack the shelves for them.
No, the next thing will be a Sainsbury's corporate estate of small town centre stores such as the "locals" and large warehouses to service the home delivery market - everything else will go, to be replaced with flats full of young couples who will sit there complaining their Sainsbury's delivery is late...
Interesting thing is, broadly, no-one likes them but they are being universally implemented because it's the future.
Customers mostly prefer humans, although some like machines better. Staff loathe the automated tills, not just because these tills put of them out of a job but because they get all the aggravation from customers when the machines don't work properly. Automated tills are probably a net cost to supermarkets when you factor in high maintenance cost and higher levels of theft. But supermarkets persevere with them because they hope they will improve later.
Have you any evidence for any of that?
I absolutely prefer the machines and the anecdotal evidence from whenever I go to the supermarket is the overwhelming majority of customers do too as far more voluntarily choose to go to the machines than to queue at the staffed tills.
More than a third of buy-to-let landlords who have mortgages on their properties are at risk of being pushed into the red amid soaring borrowing costs and stricter tax rules.
The average buy-to-let mortgage rate is now just over 6 per cent — if it hits 6.5 per cent, 44 per cent of mortgaged landlords will not be making enough from rent to cover their costs, according to the estate agency Hamptons. This would rise to 54 per cent if the average rate were to reach 7 per cent.
...
Landlords have benefited from years of cheap debt and low interest rates but higher borrowing costs now could wipe out their profits.
David Fell from Hamptons said: “With average interest rates so high the number of landlords entering loss-making territory increases fairly quickly. Given that higher-rate taxpayers cannot offset all their mortgage interest for tax, some will not be making any money at all.”
Good, take the houses back and people that actually need to live in them can have them instead
Doesn't work like that though - especially round here.
The days of the BtL landlord just owning a property (it's my wife's old flat) and making a little off renting that are indeed over. The private rental market, certainly in Newham, is becoming the preserve of a very few landlords with large portfolios (say 80-100 properties) who buy up houses, split them into flats and then rent the flats.
They can afford to do this because the demand for rental property in this part of London remains unrelenting.
So done properties get sold. This temporarily slacked a tiny party of the demand for properties to buy.
Meanwhile prices rocket in the rental sector because of the scarcity of rental properties.
Half agree.
Rental prices haven't rocketed and they don't (that claim is a myth) - except in the deluded heads of thick story-hunting journos wanting to drive the outrage bus who only look at the advertised prices of the 1-2% (my estimate) of properties shown today on Zoopla or Rightmove or a sample from some other estate agent.
Look at the ONS index of a wider survey of rental prices, and the PRS rental increase for the current 12 months to April 2023 is under 5% - which is well short of inflation. Here are the numbers for the last several years.
AIUI, Mr Osborne admitted some time ago that his deliberate targeting of the PRS was a mistake.
Anecdote: I am selling my father's house following his death. 3 bed semi in Surrey. Needs some serious updating, but otherwise in good order.
Put it on the market at the recommended price for a quick sale. No viewings at all. Not even time wasters. Slashed the price and got just 2 viewings. One made a silly offer and as we want to shift it and things don't look good we have accepted. The estate agent recommended we let it out but that would have involved quite a bit of expense updating it. They are recommending to all their sellers to let. They told me they had whole weekends without a single inquiry on any house purchase. Our buyers are buying because their rent is being hiked.
According to the estate agent the selling market is dead and the renting market is rampant.
More than a third of buy-to-let landlords who have mortgages on their properties are at risk of being pushed into the red amid soaring borrowing costs and stricter tax rules.
The average buy-to-let mortgage rate is now just over 6 per cent — if it hits 6.5 per cent, 44 per cent of mortgaged landlords will not be making enough from rent to cover their costs, according to the estate agency Hamptons. This would rise to 54 per cent if the average rate were to reach 7 per cent.
...
Landlords have benefited from years of cheap debt and low interest rates but higher borrowing costs now could wipe out their profits.
David Fell from Hamptons said: “With average interest rates so high the number of landlords entering loss-making territory increases fairly quickly. Given that higher-rate taxpayers cannot offset all their mortgage interest for tax, some will not be making any money at all.”
Good, take the houses back and people that actually need to live in them can have them instead
Doesn't work like that though - especially round here.
The days of the BtL landlord just owning a property (it's my wife's old flat) and making a little off renting that are indeed over. The private rental market, certainly in Newham, is becoming the preserve of a very few landlords with large portfolios (say 80-100 properties) who buy up houses, split them into flats and then rent the flats.
They can afford to do this because the demand for rental property in this part of London remains unrelenting.
So done properties get sold. This temporarily slacked a tiny party of the demand for properties to buy.
Meanwhile prices rocket in the rental sector because of the scarcity of rental properties.
Half agree.
Rental prices haven't rocketed and they don't (that claim is a myth) - except in the deluded heads of thick story-hunting journos wanting to drive the outrage bus who only look at the advertised prices of the 1-2% (my estimate) of properties shown today on Zoopla or Rightmove or a sample from some other estate agent.
Look at the ONS index of a wider survey of rental prices, and the PRS rental increase for the current 12 months to April 2023 is under 5% - which is well short of inflation. Here are the numbers for the last several years.
AIUI, Mr Osborne admitted some time ago that his deliberate targeting of the PRS was a mistake.
Anecdote: I am selling my father's house following his death. 3 bed semi in Surrey. Needs some serious updating, but otherwise in good order.
Put it on the market at the recommended price for a quick sale. No viewings at all. Not even time wasters. Slashed the price and got just 2 viewings. One made a silly offer and as we want to shift it and things don't look good so we have accepted. The estate agent recommended we let it out but that would have involved quite a bit of expense updating it. They are recommending to all their sellers to let. They told me they had whole weekends without a single inquiry on any house purchase. Our buyers are buying because their rent is being hiked.
According to the estate agent the selling market is dead and the renting market is rampant.
So from your anecdote the people buying are former tenants who are now going to be owning their own home instead? And are doing so at a more reasonable offer for them too?
No offence, but that sounds really positive news. 👍
I am pretty sure that a lot of companies are jacking up prices and using general reports of inflation to hide behind. The New Statesman had a very fine article on it last week and termed the phenomenon Greedflation.
That reminds me of US lefties claiming that inflation under the Biden Presidency wasn’t “real” inflation and companies didn’t have to put up prices. While celebrating pay increases.
There is an element of “reset” - in recent years, suppliers to supermarkets were often squeezed to breaking point. They are now simply refusing to supply some items at hyper low prices.
That doesn’t explain the supermarkets’ improved margins. At a time of rocketing inflation, corporate profitability, EBITDA, margins etc should generally be lower, not higher as so many are currently.
Common occurrence. We're investing so much/higher costs...but also profits are up.
Mrs Stodge is still seething after last night's visit to Sainsbury's. Almost all the traditional tills have gone - replaced by self-service for both baskets and trolleys. Only one till open at 8.30pm (all the staff watching the football?).
To be fair, Sainsbury's are perhaps doing the technological investment instead of simply trying to hire more staff and chasing wages upward. It would help if their staff had a scintilla of awareness of the customer experience but Sainsbury's don't see it in those terms - let the customer do the work.
We put the goods in a trolley and then we take them out for scanning and put them back in. It may be productive for Sainsbury's but not for the customer but then of course how many are still going to the supermarket? The advent of home delivery and click/collect means all that traditional walk down the aisles is history.
The next thing is Sainsbury's will dragoon customers foolish enough to visit the store to stack the shelves for them.
No, the next thing will be a Sainsbury's corporate estate of small town centre stores such as the "locals" and large warehouses to service the home delivery market - everything else will go, to be replaced with flats full of young couples who will sit there complaining their Sainsbury's delivery is late...
But encouraging firms to use more technology, often at the force of gunpoint, so they didn't need so many staff...
... That was meant to be a Brexit Bonus, wasn't it?
I'm not sure Brexit has much to do with it - I think the pandemic has revolutionised shopping habits - the notion of going to the supermarket to buy your food is for many like something from the Stupid Ages.
The ability to do it all online works for so many - the supermarkets have responded accordingly - the cafes have gone, the hot chicken and sandwich outlets have gone (sushi is in though). The tills are gone - the residual staff have to manage the technology (not always reliable) which is mainly adding new till rolls.
The very local shop will survive for now (though under threat from the likes of Gorillaz). The notion if you want food from anywhere you can get it from Deliveroo, Just Eat or whoever is so simple and the mark up on the prices for the delivery has been lost in the tsunami of inflation.
I am pretty sure that a lot of companies are jacking up prices and using general reports of inflation to hide behind. The New Statesman had a very fine article on it last week and termed the phenomenon Greedflation.
That reminds me of US lefties claiming that inflation under the Biden Presidency wasn’t “real” inflation and companies didn’t have to put up prices. While celebrating pay increases.
There is an element of “reset” - in recent years, suppliers to supermarkets were often squeezed to breaking point. They are now simply refusing to supply some items at hyper low prices.
That doesn’t explain the supermarkets’ improved margins. At a time of rocketing inflation, corporate profitability, EBITDA, margins etc should generally be lower, not higher as so many are currently.
Common occurrence. We're investing so much/higher costs...but also profits are up.
Mrs Stodge is still seething after last night's visit to Sainsbury's. Almost all the traditional tills have gone - replaced by self-service for both baskets and trolleys. Only one till open at 8.30pm (all the staff watching the football?).
To be fair, Sainsbury's are perhaps doing the technological investment instead of simply trying to hire more staff and chasing wages upward. It would help if their staff had a scintilla of awareness of the customer experience but Sainsbury's don't see it in those terms - let the customer do the work.
We put the goods in a trolley and then we take them out for scanning and put them back in. It may be productive for Sainsbury's but not for the customer but then of course how many are still going to the supermarket? The advent of home delivery and click/collect means all that traditional walk down the aisles is history.
The next thing is Sainsbury's will dragoon customers foolish enough to visit the store to stack the shelves for them.
No, the next thing will be a Sainsbury's corporate estate of small town centre stores such as the "locals" and large warehouses to service the home delivery market - everything else will go, to be replaced with flats full of young couples who will sit there complaining their Sainsbury's delivery is late...
Interesting thing is, broadly, no-one likes them but they are being universally implemented because it's the future.
Customers mostly prefer humans, although some like machines better. Staff loathe the automated tills, not just because these tills put of them out of a job but because they get all the aggravation from customers when the machines don't work properly. Automated tills are probably a net cost to supermarkets when you factor in high maintenance cost and higher levels of theft. But supermarkets persevere with them because they hope they will improve later.
Have you any evidence for any of that?
I absolutely prefer the machines and the anecdotal evidence from whenever I go to the supermarket is the overwhelming majority of customers do too as far more voluntarily choose to go to the machines than to queue at the staffed tills.
I think it is another old/young split. The younger generation see things like the Amazon Fresh no till stores as simpler. The older people generally want things as they were.
If there is a shortage of homes, where are the millions living in tents?
Of course renters want to pay lower rent and buyers want to pay less to buy. But the homes exist. Indeed, with the number of second homes out there, you could argue that there is an excess.
More than a third of buy-to-let landlords who have mortgages on their properties are at risk of being pushed into the red amid soaring borrowing costs and stricter tax rules.
The average buy-to-let mortgage rate is now just over 6 per cent — if it hits 6.5 per cent, 44 per cent of mortgaged landlords will not be making enough from rent to cover their costs, according to the estate agency Hamptons. This would rise to 54 per cent if the average rate were to reach 7 per cent.
...
Landlords have benefited from years of cheap debt and low interest rates but higher borrowing costs now could wipe out their profits.
David Fell from Hamptons said: “With average interest rates so high the number of landlords entering loss-making territory increases fairly quickly. Given that higher-rate taxpayers cannot offset all their mortgage interest for tax, some will not be making any money at all.”
Good, take the houses back and people that actually need to live in them can have them instead
Doesn't work like that though - especially round here.
The days of the BtL landlord just owning a property (it's my wife's old flat) and making a little off renting that are indeed over. The private rental market, certainly in Newham, is becoming the preserve of a very few landlords with large portfolios (say 80-100 properties) who buy up houses, split them into flats and then rent the flats.
They can afford to do this because the demand for rental property in this part of London remains unrelenting.
So done properties get sold. This temporarily slacked a tiny party of the demand for properties to buy.
Meanwhile prices rocket in the rental sector because of the scarcity of rental properties.
Half agree.
Rental prices haven't rocketed and they don't (that claim is a myth) - except in the deluded heads of thick story-hunting journos wanting to drive the outrage bus who only look at the advertised prices of the 1-2% (my estimate) of properties shown today on Zoopla or Rightmove or a sample from some other estate agent.
Look at the ONS index of a wider survey of rental prices, and the PRS rental increase for the current 12 months to April 2023 is under 5% - which is well short of inflation. Here are the numbers for the last several years.
AIUI, Mr Osborne admitted some time ago that his deliberate targeting of the PRS was a mistake.
Anecdote: I am selling my father's house following his death. 3 bed semi in Surrey. Needs some serious updating, but otherwise in good order.
Put it on the market at the recommended price for a quick sale. No viewings at all. Not even time wasters. Slashed the price and got just 2 viewings. One made a silly offer and as we want to shift it and things don't look good so we have accepted. The estate agent recommended we let it out but that would have involved quite a bit of expense updating it. They are recommending to all their sellers to let. They told me they had whole weekends without a single inquiry on any house purchase. Our buyers are buying because their rent is being hiked.
According to the estate agent the selling market is dead and the renting market is rampant.
So from your anecdote the people buying are former tenants who are now going to be owning their own home instead? And are doing so at a more reasonable offer for them too?
No offence, but that sounds really positive news. 👍
Hi Bart. I wasn't commenting on whether it was positive or negative just giving the anecdote, but yes for them, if it all goes well, definitely positive news. They tried to find another rented house and all were just as expensive so bit the bullet to buy.
And I am happy with what we will get for it. We think they will be getting a real bargain, because we don't want to hold onto it. We just have our fingers crossed their mortgage doesn't fall through, because I think they are right on the limit.
I am pretty sure that a lot of companies are jacking up prices and using general reports of inflation to hide behind. The New Statesman had a very fine article on it last week and termed the phenomenon Greedflation.
That reminds me of US lefties claiming that inflation under the Biden Presidency wasn’t “real” inflation and companies didn’t have to put up prices. While celebrating pay increases.
There is an element of “reset” - in recent years, suppliers to supermarkets were often squeezed to breaking point. They are now simply refusing to supply some items at hyper low prices.
That doesn’t explain the supermarkets’ improved margins. At a time of rocketing inflation, corporate profitability, EBITDA, margins etc should generally be lower, not higher as so many are currently.
Common occurrence. We're investing so much/higher costs...but also profits are up.
Mrs Stodge is still seething after last night's visit to Sainsbury's. Almost all the traditional tills have gone - replaced by self-service for both baskets and trolleys. Only one till open at 8.30pm (all the staff watching the football?).
To be fair, Sainsbury's are perhaps doing the technological investment instead of simply trying to hire more staff and chasing wages upward. It would help if their staff had a scintilla of awareness of the customer experience but Sainsbury's don't see it in those terms - let the customer do the work.
We put the goods in a trolley and then we take them out for scanning and put them back in. It may be productive for Sainsbury's but not for the customer but then of course how many are still going to the supermarket? The advent of home delivery and click/collect means all that traditional walk down the aisles is history.
The next thing is Sainsbury's will dragoon customers foolish enough to visit the store to stack the shelves for them.
No, the next thing will be a Sainsbury's corporate estate of small town centre stores such as the "locals" and large warehouses to service the home delivery market - everything else will go, to be replaced with flats full of young couples who will sit there complaining their Sainsbury's delivery is late...
Interesting thing is, broadly, no-one likes them but they are being universally implemented because it's the future.
Customers mostly prefer humans, although some like machines better. Staff loathe the automated tills, not just because these tills put of them out of a job but because they get all the aggravation from customers when the machines don't work properly. Automated tills are probably a net cost to supermarkets when you factor in high maintenance cost and higher levels of theft. But supermarkets persevere with them because they hope they will improve later.
Have you any evidence for any of that?
I absolutely prefer the machines and the anecdotal evidence from whenever I go to the supermarket is the overwhelming majority of customers do too as far more voluntarily choose to go to the machines than to queue at the staffed tills.
I'm going to meet you halfway on this - I've no issue with self service tills and in future I will advise Mrs Stodge to pick up a scanner before we start the big shop.
There are undoubtedly those who would prefer to have their shopping scanned by a third party - there are a susprisingly large number of elderly people who are scared of or don't trust the technology and prefer the traditional checkout.
I find that more the case at the smaller local shops where people go in every day for a few things rather than do a concentrated weekly or monthly shop.
If there is a shortage of homes, where are the millions living in tents?
Of course renters want to pay lower rent and buyers want to pay less to buy. But the homes exist. Indeed, with the number of second homes out there, you could argue that there is an excess.
There is a shortage of homes because there are few empty homes, 99% of homes are occupied, meaning that anyone looking to rent or buy has an extremely limited choice.
Any system operating at 99% capacity is at high risk of failing, especially when demand is escalating.
The European average is for 10% of homes to be empty, which is far healthier than 99% being occupied. It allows people to choose not to go into homes that are too expensive, or neglected etc
We need about 3 million extra homes in this country to have enough empty homes to return to a healthy ratio.
If there is a shortage of homes, where are the millions living in tents?
Of course renters want to pay lower rent and buyers want to pay less to buy. But the homes exist. Indeed, with the number of second homes out there, you could argue that there is an excess.
Homes in Multiple occupation - or perhaps you think that 3/4 adults per room is efficiency.
Not to mention many in substandard “hotels” waiting for a council flat/house.
We have 8 million fewer properties than France and a similar population.
Limiting housing is institutionally racist, by the way.
He's a very odd man. Why spend so much time fiddling about with a social media app and trolling the libs on it, when he could be presenting as a visionary futurist working on rockets, electric cars and silly hyperloops?
My theory of Elon is that you can achieve great things in America if you're
* rich * energetic * audacious * charismatic * sociopathic * have no sense of shame * easily led * getting advice from smart people
The problem is that that last one is kind of random, and if you end up surrounded by aging, increasingly reactionary rich people who did too much cocaine in the 90s you end up believing their bullshit, but also acting on it.
He's a very odd man. Why spend so much time fiddling about with a social media app and trolling the libs on it, when he could be presenting as a visionary futurist working on rockets, electric cars and silly hyperloops?
He carelessly made an offer he thought he could withdraw, but signed a legally binding commitment (presumably out of ignorance and arrogance). Having borrowed billions to do so, he’s desperately trying to generate cash to pay the billion a year interest bill.
I was thinking more why he spends so much personal time on there than the purchase itself, which as you note undermines his claims to business genius - either he did want to pull out of the deal, in which case his pretending to care that much about it is phony, or he was faking wanting to pull out of the deal in order to get a better deal, and he failed.
Because, like it or not, he drives traffic to the site - though I agree, it’s a complete waste of the talents as he has, which lie elsewhere. And Twitter, of course, is one of the things that enabled him to grow Tesla without spending a cent on advertising. Also throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks has been the essence of his management style from the start.
More than a third of buy-to-let landlords who have mortgages on their properties are at risk of being pushed into the red amid soaring borrowing costs and stricter tax rules.
The average buy-to-let mortgage rate is now just over 6 per cent — if it hits 6.5 per cent, 44 per cent of mortgaged landlords will not be making enough from rent to cover their costs, according to the estate agency Hamptons. This would rise to 54 per cent if the average rate were to reach 7 per cent.
...
Landlords have benefited from years of cheap debt and low interest rates but higher borrowing costs now could wipe out their profits.
David Fell from Hamptons said: “With average interest rates so high the number of landlords entering loss-making territory increases fairly quickly. Given that higher-rate taxpayers cannot offset all their mortgage interest for tax, some will not be making any money at all.”
Good, take the houses back and people that actually need to live in them can have them instead
That's pretty bigoted, CHB. You think people who are tenants don't need anywhere to live?
Are you seriously arguing that the 5-10m in this country who can't qualify for a mortgage should all be living with their children in cardboard boxes under Vauxhall Bridge?
So instead of people living the properties, we now have… people living in the properties.
This will alter the housing crisis how, exactly?
As I pointed out, millions cannot qualify for a mortgage to access such a property as Owner Occupiers. Where will they live?
There is also the issue I have pointed out repeatedly that .. as per the English Housing Survey .. the PRS is occupied far more densely than the Owner Occupied segment, so you will be making more people homeless, and will make the housing crisis far worse.
I refer you to the figures for households with 2 or more spare bedrooms in the recent versions of the English Housing Survey, and how they are overwhelmingly concentrated in the OO sector.
Perhaps we need to be forcing such people to take a lodger.
In reality we need a larger PRS in this country, not a smaller one, as we have one of the smallest availabilities of rental property in Western Europe.
One phenomenon that I have seen in this policy area is that some people have fixed ideas, where they exhibit religious levels of certainty, and no amount of evidence, reasoning or real world experience will ever persuade them to change course, to the point where there is no point in even trying.
One such idea is that 'buy to let landlords are the cause of high rents' and another is 'the planning system is the cause of the housing crisis'.
These ideas are largely wrong, but they frequently end up forming the basis of government policy, because they are so prevalent.
I am pretty sure that a lot of companies are jacking up prices and using general reports of inflation to hide behind. The New Statesman had a very fine article on it last week and termed the phenomenon Greedflation.
That reminds me of US lefties claiming that inflation under the Biden Presidency wasn’t “real” inflation and companies didn’t have to put up prices. While celebrating pay increases.
There is an element of “reset” - in recent years, suppliers to supermarkets were often squeezed to breaking point. They are now simply refusing to supply some items at hyper low prices.
That doesn’t explain the supermarkets’ improved margins. At a time of rocketing inflation, corporate profitability, EBITDA, margins etc should generally be lower, not higher as so many are currently.
Common occurrence. We're investing so much/higher costs...but also profits are up.
Mrs Stodge is still seething after last night's visit to Sainsbury's. Almost all the traditional tills have gone - replaced by self-service for both baskets and trolleys. Only one till open at 8.30pm (all the staff watching the football?).
To be fair, Sainsbury's are perhaps doing the technological investment instead of simply trying to hire more staff and chasing wages upward. It would help if their staff had a scintilla of awareness of the customer experience but Sainsbury's don't see it in those terms - let the customer do the work.
We put the goods in a trolley and then we take them out for scanning and put them back in. It may be productive for Sainsbury's but not for the customer but then of course how many are still going to the supermarket? The advent of home delivery and click/collect means all that traditional walk down the aisles is history.
The next thing is Sainsbury's will dragoon customers foolish enough to visit the store to stack the shelves for them.
No, the next thing will be a Sainsbury's corporate estate of small town centre stores such as the "locals" and large warehouses to service the home delivery market - everything else will go, to be replaced with flats full of young couples who will sit there complaining their Sainsbury's delivery is late...
Went to asda yesterday to stock up on bread mix.
Half the packets were out of date, some by several months. I’m pretty sure last time I stocked up, many were also out of date. It did occur to me that I might be the only customer who buys them, every couple of months. Obviously, I buy the ones with the longest dates.
I pointed out the stale stock to the checkout lady and she placed to burden back onto me to tell customer services on my way out.
There was a big queue, so I just left.
I don’t want to have to check sell by dates on every item I buy, like you expect to have to do in a run down corner shop.
If only Aldi stocked decent seeded/malted bread mix…
Something used to cost £100. It now costs £110 due to inflation. Rishi Rich says that he will halve inflation. We are meant to feel grateful when the price increases to £115.50.
Get the price down to £105 if you want public gratitude, PM.
I see your point, but actually deflation is generally seen as an economically even worse problem than inflation as people defer spending if prices are expected to fall.
In general, price stability not dropping prices is the appropriate macroeconomic aim.
This is a point I have made about falling house prices and its impact on housebuilding. People like the idea that falling house prices and an increase in housebuilding could go together, but the reality is that when house prices are falling people are less likely to borrow large sums of money to buy premium new build houses, so there would be less demand for this type of housing, so the most probable outcome is that housebuilding also falls.
I think you've got it backwards.
We don't want a fall in prices to lead to an increase in construction.
We want an increase in construction to lead to a fall in prices.
Increased competition absolutely can lead to prices stabilising or falling. And if competition increases, then prices stabilise or fall, then housebuilding falls back, then it will be because the shortage of houses in the system has resolved. Although unless population growth stops entirely, there will always be a need for construction.
There was no let up in the production of various goods that have fallen in price, massively, over the decades.
Half the cost of building work is directly wages. That is half is bricks and roof tiles, half labour. Approximately. But the material themselves have labour inputs. And the materials for the materials.
Some guesses put the ultimate labour portion of a house at 70-80%.
Labour cost is a direct function, these days, of housing costs. The biggest cost for workers is their own housing!
So when house prices actually fall, for a period, labour costs will begin to trend down (assuming a competitive labour market). This in turn will make it cheaper to build houses.
In addition, the U.K. building industry is low productivity, compared to many other countries. Investment in non-exotic machinery - mini cranes and small diggers, say - could halve the work force on a house.
Its worth noting that half the building work cost of houses may be labour but that's not half the cost of the house.
An incredibly significant portion of the cost of housing is the cost of land, and almost all of the cost of land is planning permission.
An acre of farmland can cost £12-25k while an acre of land with planning permission for a house can be worth hundreds of thousands.
Eliminate that discrepancy and the cost of housing would collapse, without affecting labour costs. And as you say, if its cheaper to house people, then everything including labour becomes cheaper.
That is, ostensibly, Starmer’s headline policy. Whether he can deliver will be interesting to watch.
People were entitled to make the investment decisions they made into the private rented sector. I do not like the politics of suggesting those people should be forced to give up their interests.
I could get on board with the concept of requiring a private landlord who sells their property to first offer it to buyers who will be using it as their principal residence, and if some time passes without an offer to then be able to widen the net. No idea how you police that sort of system though.
More than a third of buy-to-let landlords who have mortgages on their properties are at risk of being pushed into the red amid soaring borrowing costs and stricter tax rules.
The average buy-to-let mortgage rate is now just over 6 per cent — if it hits 6.5 per cent, 44 per cent of mortgaged landlords will not be making enough from rent to cover their costs, according to the estate agency Hamptons. This would rise to 54 per cent if the average rate were to reach 7 per cent.
...
Landlords have benefited from years of cheap debt and low interest rates but higher borrowing costs now could wipe out their profits.
David Fell from Hamptons said: “With average interest rates so high the number of landlords entering loss-making territory increases fairly quickly. Given that higher-rate taxpayers cannot offset all their mortgage interest for tax, some will not be making any money at all.”
Good, take the houses back and people that actually need to live in them can have them instead
That's pretty bigoted, CHB. You think people who are tenants don't need anywhere to live?
Are you seriously arguing that the 5-10m in this country who can't qualify for a mortgage should all be living with their children in cardboard boxes under Vauxhall Bridge?
So instead of people living the properties, we now have… people living in the properties.
This will alter the housing crisis how, exactly?
As I pointed out, millions cannot qualify for a mortgage to access such a property as Owner Occupiers. Where will they live?
There is also the issue I have pointed out repeatedly that .. as per the English Housing Survey .. the PRS is occupied far more densely than the Owner Occupied segment, so you will be making more people homeless, and will make the housing crisis far worse.
I refer you to the figures for households with 2 or more spare bedrooms in the recent versions of the English Housing Survey, and how they are overwhelmingly concentrated in the OO sector.
Perhaps we need to be forcing such people to take a lodger.
In reality we need a larger PRS in this country, not a smaller one, as we have one of the smallest availabilities of rental property in Western Europe.
One phenomenon that I have seen in this policy area is that some people have fixed ideas, where they exhibit religious levels of certainty, and no amount of evidence, reasoning or real world experience will ever persuade them to change course, to the point where there is no point in even trying.
One such idea is that 'buy to let landlords are the cause of high rents' and another is 'the planning system is the cause of the housing crisis'.
These ideas are largely wrong, but they frequently end up forming the basis of government policy, because they are so prevalent.
The planning system 100% is the cause of the housing crisis.
Land with planning permission can be worth 650x land without it.
If planning permission is is 99.84% of the cost of land, and the cost of land is the largest cost of housing, then the planning system is by far the largest cost of housing.
Something used to cost £100. It now costs £110 due to inflation. Rishi Rich says that he will halve inflation. We are meant to feel grateful when the price increases to £115.50.
Get the price down to £105 if you want public gratitude, PM.
I see your point, but actually deflation is generally seen as an economically even worse problem than inflation as people defer spending if prices are expected to fall.
In general, price stability not dropping prices is the appropriate macroeconomic aim.
This is a point I have made about falling house prices and its impact on housebuilding. People like the idea that falling house prices and an increase in housebuilding could go together, but the reality is that when house prices are falling people are less likely to borrow large sums of money to buy premium new build houses, so there would be less demand for this type of housing, so the most probable outcome is that housebuilding also falls.
I think you've got it backwards.
We don't want a fall in prices to lead to an increase in construction.
We want an increase in construction to lead to a fall in prices.
Increased competition absolutely can lead to prices stabilising or falling. And if competition increases, then prices stabilise or fall, then housebuilding falls back, then it will be because the shortage of houses in the system has resolved. Although unless population growth stops entirely, there will always be a need for construction.
There was no let up in the production of various goods that have fallen in price, massively, over the decades.
Half the cost of building work is directly wages. That is half is bricks and roof tiles, half labour. Approximately. But the material themselves have labour inputs. And the materials for the materials.
Some guesses put the ultimate labour portion of a house at 70-80%.
Labour cost is a direct function, these days, of housing costs. The biggest cost for workers is their own housing!
So when house prices actually fall, for a period, labour costs will begin to trend down (assuming a competitive labour market). This in turn will make it cheaper to build houses.
In addition, the U.K. building industry is low productivity, compared to many other countries. Investment in non-exotic machinery - mini cranes and small diggers, say - could halve the work force on a house.
Its worth noting that half the building work cost of houses may be labour but that's not half the cost of the house.
An incredibly significant portion of the cost of housing is the cost of land, and almost all of the cost of land is planning permission.
An acre of farmland can cost £12-25k while an acre of land with planning permission for a house can be worth hundreds of thousands.
Eliminate that discrepancy and the cost of housing would collapse, without affecting labour costs. And as you say, if its cheaper to house people, then everything including labour becomes cheaper.
That is, ostensibly, Starmer’s headline policy. Whether he can deliver will be interesting to watch.
If he comes up with serious policies on this issue, I will hold my nose and vote Labour at the next election.
If a tenant can afford rent, they can afford a mortgage.
Yes but that discounts deposits.
Indeed - back in the 90s and 00s, it was perfectly possible to buy a property with a 1% deposit and as long as you could afford the mortgage, that was fine.
With the GFC, all that changed - I don't know now what level of deposit you would require to put down (10%?) so for one of @HYUFD's flats, that would be £55k to £60k. That's a lot of money - yes, I know your City type can afford it but culturally they can move more quickly into a rental property than "saving up" for a few months or a year to put a deposit down.
The levels of deposits are so high renting is for many younger people the only option.
I suppose the Government could become a mortgage lender and offer 0% deposits on house purchases - might be one way to re-inflate the sagging Conservative vote.
Something used to cost £100. It now costs £110 due to inflation. Rishi Rich says that he will halve inflation. We are meant to feel grateful when the price increases to £115.50.
Get the price down to £105 if you want public gratitude, PM.
I see your point, but actually deflation is generally seen as an economically even worse problem than inflation as people defer spending if prices are expected to fall.
In general, price stability not dropping prices is the appropriate macroeconomic aim.
This is a point I have made about falling house prices and its impact on housebuilding. People like the idea that falling house prices and an increase in housebuilding could go together, but the reality is that when house prices are falling people are less likely to borrow large sums of money to buy premium new build houses, so there would be less demand for this type of housing, so the most probable outcome is that housebuilding also falls.
I think you've got it backwards.
We don't want a fall in prices to lead to an increase in construction.
We want an increase in construction to lead to a fall in prices.
Increased competition absolutely can lead to prices stabilising or falling. And if competition increases, then prices stabilise or fall, then housebuilding falls back, then it will be because the shortage of houses in the system has resolved. Although unless population growth stops entirely, there will always be a need for construction.
There was no let up in the production of various goods that have fallen in price, massively, over the decades.
Half the cost of building work is directly wages. That is half is bricks and roof tiles, half labour. Approximately. But the material themselves have labour inputs. And the materials for the materials.
Some guesses put the ultimate labour portion of a house at 70-80%.
Labour cost is a direct function, these days, of housing costs. The biggest cost for workers is their own housing!
So when house prices actually fall, for a period, labour costs will begin to trend down (assuming a competitive labour market). This in turn will make it cheaper to build houses.
In addition, the U.K. building industry is low productivity, compared to many other countries. Investment in non-exotic machinery - mini cranes and small diggers, say - could halve the work force on a house.
Its worth noting that half the building work cost of houses may be labour but that's not half the cost of the house.
An incredibly significant portion of the cost of housing is the cost of land, and almost all of the cost of land is planning permission.
An acre of farmland can cost £12-25k while an acre of land with planning permission for a house can be worth hundreds of thousands.
Eliminate that discrepancy and the cost of housing would collapse, without affecting labour costs. And as you say, if its cheaper to house people, then everything including labour becomes cheaper.
That is, ostensibly, Starmer’s headline policy. Whether he can deliver will be interesting to watch.
If he comes up with serious policies on this issue, I will hold my nose and vote Labour at the next election.
He's a very odd man. Why spend so much time fiddling about with a social media app and trolling the libs on it, when he could be presenting as a visionary futurist working on rockets, electric cars and silly hyperloops?
My theory of Elon is that you can achieve great things in America if you're
* rich * energetic * audacious * charismatic * sociopathic * have no sense of shame * easily led * getting advice from smart people
The problem is that that last one is kind of random, and if you end up surrounded by aging, increasingly reactionary rich people who did too much cocaine in the 90s you end up believing their bullshit, but also acting on it.
At both Tesla and SpaceX, he was able to hire the best in the sector, relatively cheaply (in the first because no one else was in it, and the second thanks to NASA layoffs, and sclerotic commercial competitors).
Who is the sector would see Twitter as the most exciting place to work ?
Something used to cost £100. It now costs £110 due to inflation. Rishi Rich says that he will halve inflation. We are meant to feel grateful when the price increases to £115.50.
Get the price down to £105 if you want public gratitude, PM.
I see your point, but actually deflation is generally seen as an economically even worse problem than inflation as people defer spending if prices are expected to fall.
In general, price stability not dropping prices is the appropriate macroeconomic aim.
This is a point I have made about falling house prices and its impact on housebuilding. People like the idea that falling house prices and an increase in housebuilding could go together, but the reality is that when house prices are falling people are less likely to borrow large sums of money to buy premium new build houses, so there would be less demand for this type of housing, so the most probable outcome is that housebuilding also falls.
I think you've got it backwards.
We don't want a fall in prices to lead to an increase in construction.
We want an increase in construction to lead to a fall in prices.
Increased competition absolutely can lead to prices stabilising or falling. And if competition increases, then prices stabilise or fall, then housebuilding falls back, then it will be because the shortage of houses in the system has resolved. Although unless population growth stops entirely, there will always be a need for construction.
There was no let up in the production of various goods that have fallen in price, massively, over the decades.
Half the cost of building work is directly wages. That is half is bricks and roof tiles, half labour. Approximately. But the material themselves have labour inputs. And the materials for the materials.
Some guesses put the ultimate labour portion of a house at 70-80%.
Labour cost is a direct function, these days, of housing costs. The biggest cost for workers is their own housing!
So when house prices actually fall, for a period, labour costs will begin to trend down (assuming a competitive labour market). This in turn will make it cheaper to build houses.
In addition, the U.K. building industry is low productivity, compared to many other countries. Investment in non-exotic machinery - mini cranes and small diggers, say - could halve the work force on a house.
Its worth noting that half the building work cost of houses may be labour but that's not half the cost of the house.
An incredibly significant portion of the cost of housing is the cost of land, and almost all of the cost of land is planning permission.
An acre of farmland can cost £12-25k while an acre of land with planning permission for a house can be worth hundreds of thousands.
Eliminate that discrepancy and the cost of housing would collapse, without affecting labour costs. And as you say, if its cheaper to house people, then everything including labour becomes cheaper.
That is, ostensibly, Starmer’s headline policy. Whether he can deliver will be interesting to watch.
If he comes up with serious policies on this issue, I will hold my nose and vote Labour at the next election.
Careful. HYUFD might say you’re not a real Tory.
LOL.
One thing HYUFD is right about is that. I'm certainly a liberal who normally votes Tory. If I vote Labour at the next election it will only be the second time in my life, after voting Labour in 2001 in my first election.
The Tories should be the party of aspiration for people to have their own home.
If Starmer can get the importance of that but Sunak can't, what does it say about the state of today's Tory party?
The *very reason* the Presidential Records Act was passed post-Nixon was to establish that presidential records belong to the government (the public) and not an ex-president.
It should hardly need stating, but here it is, in the Act: The United States shall reserve and retain complete ownership, possession, and control of Presidential records; and such records shall be administered in accordance with the provisions of this chapter.
I am pretty sure that a lot of companies are jacking up prices and using general reports of inflation to hide behind. The New Statesman had a very fine article on it last week and termed the phenomenon Greedflation.
That reminds me of US lefties claiming that inflation under the Biden Presidency wasn’t “real” inflation and companies didn’t have to put up prices. While celebrating pay increases.
There is an element of “reset” - in recent years, suppliers to supermarkets were often squeezed to breaking point. They are now simply refusing to supply some items at hyper low prices.
That doesn’t explain the supermarkets’ improved margins. At a time of rocketing inflation, corporate profitability, EBITDA, margins etc should generally be lower, not higher as so many are currently.
Common occurrence. We're investing so much/higher costs...but also profits are up.
Mrs Stodge is still seething after last night's visit to Sainsbury's. Almost all the traditional tills have gone - replaced by self-service for both baskets and trolleys. Only one till open at 8.30pm (all the staff watching the football?).
To be fair, Sainsbury's are perhaps doing the technological investment instead of simply trying to hire more staff and chasing wages upward. It would help if their staff had a scintilla of awareness of the customer experience but Sainsbury's don't see it in those terms - let the customer do the work.
We put the goods in a trolley and then we take them out for scanning and put them back in. It may be productive for Sainsbury's but not for the customer but then of course how many are still going to the supermarket? The advent of home delivery and click/collect means all that traditional walk down the aisles is history.
The next thing is Sainsbury's will dragoon customers foolish enough to visit the store to stack the shelves for them.
No, the next thing will be a Sainsbury's corporate estate of small town centre stores such as the "locals" and large warehouses to service the home delivery market - everything else will go, to be replaced with flats full of young couples who will sit there complaining their Sainsbury's delivery is late...
Interesting thing is, broadly, no-one likes them but they are being universally implemented because it's the future.
Customers mostly prefer humans, although some like machines better. Staff loathe the automated tills, not just because these tills put of them out of a job but because they get all the aggravation from customers when the machines don't work properly. Automated tills are probably a net cost to supermarkets when you factor in high maintenance cost and higher levels of theft. But supermarkets persevere with them because they hope they will improve later.
Time was when you would go into a grocery store with your list, and someone in the shop would go and get everything for you from the shelves. Actually wandering around the supermarket and putting things into trolleys was once a novelty. I'm sure there were plenty of people who complained about that change too.
The reduction in staff numbers that a supermarket can achieve with automated tills, with the staff remaining concentrating on keeping the shelves stocked, surely pays for the machines and increased theft by a wide margin. Often a supermarket will have one staff member (or half a staff member) covering over a dozen automated tills. The saving in staff costs must be immense.
Perhaps, he says controversially, this is one of the overlooked benefits of Employer's National Insurance, in that it increases staff costs and so encourages investment in automation.
Personally I much prefer automated tills.. I feel under less pressure to rush because there isn't a queue directly behind me. The automated till doesn't judge me if I've felt the need to buy several bars of chocolate. And checkout scanning is a bullshit job, as the opening to Shaun of the Dead so brilliantly captures.
Something used to cost £100. It now costs £110 due to inflation. Rishi Rich says that he will halve inflation. We are meant to feel grateful when the price increases to £115.50.
Get the price down to £105 if you want public gratitude, PM.
I see your point, but actually deflation is generally seen as an economically even worse problem than inflation as people defer spending if prices are expected to fall.
In general, price stability not dropping prices is the appropriate macroeconomic aim.
This is a point I have made about falling house prices and its impact on housebuilding. People like the idea that falling house prices and an increase in housebuilding could go together, but the reality is that when house prices are falling people are less likely to borrow large sums of money to buy premium new build houses, so there would be less demand for this type of housing, so the most probable outcome is that housebuilding also falls.
I think you've got it backwards.
We don't want a fall in prices to lead to an increase in construction.
We want an increase in construction to lead to a fall in prices.
Increased competition absolutely can lead to prices stabilising or falling. And if competition increases, then prices stabilise or fall, then housebuilding falls back, then it will be because the shortage of houses in the system has resolved. Although unless population growth stops entirely, there will always be a need for construction.
There was no let up in the production of various goods that have fallen in price, massively, over the decades.
Half the cost of building work is directly wages. That is half is bricks and roof tiles, half labour. Approximately. But the material themselves have labour inputs. And the materials for the materials.
Some guesses put the ultimate labour portion of a house at 70-80%.
Labour cost is a direct function, these days, of housing costs. The biggest cost for workers is their own housing!
So when house prices actually fall, for a period, labour costs will begin to trend down (assuming a competitive labour market). This in turn will make it cheaper to build houses.
In addition, the U.K. building industry is low productivity, compared to many other countries. Investment in non-exotic machinery - mini cranes and small diggers, say - could halve the work force on a house.
Its worth noting that half the building work cost of houses may be labour but that's not half the cost of the house.
An incredibly significant portion of the cost of housing is the cost of land, and almost all of the cost of land is planning permission.
An acre of farmland can cost £12-25k while an acre of land with planning permission for a house can be worth hundreds of thousands.
Eliminate that discrepancy and the cost of housing would collapse, without affecting labour costs. And as you say, if its cheaper to house people, then everything including labour becomes cheaper.
That is, ostensibly, Starmer’s headline policy. Whether he can deliver will be interesting to watch.
If he comes up with serious policies on this issue, I will hold my nose and vote Labour at the next election.
Careful. HYUFD might say you’re not a real Tory.
LOL.
One thing HYUFD is right about is that. I'm certainly a liberal who normally votes Tory. If I vote Labour at the next election it will only be the second time in my life, after voting Labour in 2001 in my first election.
The Tories should be the party of aspiration for people to have their own home.
If Starmer can get the importance of that but Sunak can't, what does it say about the state of today's Tory party?
Todays Tory Party is a hollow shell which seems to largely exist to maintain a status quo of slow decline, while hoping it has been able to fool enough of the people some of the time to keep it in power.
Encouraging to see the liberation videos start to emerge from Ukraine's advance towards the Sea of Azov coast.
"The Kyiv Independent @KyivIndependent ⚡️Ukrainian military reports liberating Blahodatne village in Donetsk Oblast.
Ukraine's Armed Forces' 68th separate brigade reported liberating Blahodatne and posted a video showing the Ukrainian flag being raised in the village."
All 50 states, the District of Columbia, Guam, and Puerto Rico have allowed right turns on red since 1980, except where prohibited by a sign or where right turns are controlled by dedicated traffic lights.
I think that's reasonable enough to summarise as what I said.
Besides I was mostly joking. Except that I seriously think we should have that in this country for left hand turns (again except for where prohibited), that I'm completely serious about.
Something used to cost £100. It now costs £110 due to inflation. Rishi Rich says that he will halve inflation. We are meant to feel grateful when the price increases to £115.50.
Get the price down to £105 if you want public gratitude, PM.
I see your point, but actually deflation is generally seen as an economically even worse problem than inflation as people defer spending if prices are expected to fall.
In general, price stability not dropping prices is the appropriate macroeconomic aim.
This is a point I have made about falling house prices and its impact on housebuilding. People like the idea that falling house prices and an increase in housebuilding could go together, but the reality is that when house prices are falling people are less likely to borrow large sums of money to buy premium new build houses, so there would be less demand for this type of housing, so the most probable outcome is that housebuilding also falls.
I think you've got it backwards.
We don't want a fall in prices to lead to an increase in construction.
We want an increase in construction to lead to a fall in prices.
Increased competition absolutely can lead to prices stabilising or falling. And if competition increases, then prices stabilise or fall, then housebuilding falls back, then it will be because the shortage of houses in the system has resolved. Although unless population growth stops entirely, there will always be a need for construction.
There was no let up in the production of various goods that have fallen in price, massively, over the decades.
Half the cost of building work is directly wages. That is half is bricks and roof tiles, half labour. Approximately. But the material themselves have labour inputs. And the materials for the materials.
Some guesses put the ultimate labour portion of a house at 70-80%.
Labour cost is a direct function, these days, of housing costs. The biggest cost for workers is their own housing!
So when house prices actually fall, for a period, labour costs will begin to trend down (assuming a competitive labour market). This in turn will make it cheaper to build houses.
In addition, the U.K. building industry is low productivity, compared to many other countries. Investment in non-exotic machinery - mini cranes and small diggers, say - could halve the work force on a house.
Its worth noting that half the building work cost of houses may be labour but that's not half the cost of the house.
An incredibly significant portion of the cost of housing is the cost of land, and almost all of the cost of land is planning permission.
An acre of farmland can cost £12-25k while an acre of land with planning permission for a house can be worth hundreds of thousands.
Eliminate that discrepancy and the cost of housing would collapse, without affecting labour costs. And as you say, if its cheaper to house people, then everything including labour becomes cheaper.
That is, ostensibly, Starmer’s headline policy. Whether he can deliver will be interesting to watch.
If he comes up with serious policies on this issue, I will hold my nose and vote Labour at the next election.
Careful. HYUFD might say you’re not a real Tory.
LOL.
One thing HYUFD is right about is that. I'm certainly a liberal who normally votes Tory. If I vote Labour at the next election it will only be the second time in my life, after voting Labour in 2001 in my first election.
The Tories should be the party of aspiration for people to have their own home.
If Starmer can get the importance of that but Sunak can't, what does it say about the state of today's Tory party?
I was going to offer Land Value Taxation as a policy here (good old Liberal idea).
The problem Sunak has is he has to balance the requirement of his core vote to maintain the status quo - his core of middle age and elderly northern and midlands home owners rather like the value of their asset continuing to rise which they can pass on (without IHT hopefully) to the children and grandchildren to provide the deposit for the next generation of home owners).
On the other side, he knows the longer term interests of the country and his Party are served by creating a new generation of home owners but he can't make houses affordable without causing existing values to drop which alienates his core.
Encouraging to see the liberation videos start to emerge from Ukraine's advance towards the Sea of Azov coast.
"The Kyiv Independent @KyivIndependent ⚡️Ukrainian military reports liberating Blahodatne village in Donetsk Oblast.
Ukraine's Armed Forces' 68th separate brigade reported liberating Blahodatne and posted a video showing the Ukrainian flag being raised in the village."
Something used to cost £100. It now costs £110 due to inflation. Rishi Rich says that he will halve inflation. We are meant to feel grateful when the price increases to £115.50.
Get the price down to £105 if you want public gratitude, PM.
I see your point, but actually deflation is generally seen as an economically even worse problem than inflation as people defer spending if prices are expected to fall.
In general, price stability not dropping prices is the appropriate macroeconomic aim.
This is a point I have made about falling house prices and its impact on housebuilding. People like the idea that falling house prices and an increase in housebuilding could go together, but the reality is that when house prices are falling people are less likely to borrow large sums of money to buy premium new build houses, so there would be less demand for this type of housing, so the most probable outcome is that housebuilding also falls.
I think you've got it backwards.
We don't want a fall in prices to lead to an increase in construction.
We want an increase in construction to lead to a fall in prices.
Increased competition absolutely can lead to prices stabilising or falling. And if competition increases, then prices stabilise or fall, then housebuilding falls back, then it will be because the shortage of houses in the system has resolved. Although unless population growth stops entirely, there will always be a need for construction.
There was no let up in the production of various goods that have fallen in price, massively, over the decades.
Half the cost of building work is directly wages. That is half is bricks and roof tiles, half labour. Approximately. But the material themselves have labour inputs. And the materials for the materials.
Some guesses put the ultimate labour portion of a house at 70-80%.
Labour cost is a direct function, these days, of housing costs. The biggest cost for workers is their own housing!
So when house prices actually fall, for a period, labour costs will begin to trend down (assuming a competitive labour market). This in turn will make it cheaper to build houses.
In addition, the U.K. building industry is low productivity, compared to many other countries. Investment in non-exotic machinery - mini cranes and small diggers, say - could halve the work force on a house.
Its worth noting that half the building work cost of houses may be labour but that's not half the cost of the house.
An incredibly significant portion of the cost of housing is the cost of land, and almost all of the cost of land is planning permission.
An acre of farmland can cost £12-25k while an acre of land with planning permission for a house can be worth hundreds of thousands.
Eliminate that discrepancy and the cost of housing would collapse, without affecting labour costs. And as you say, if its cheaper to house people, then everything including labour becomes cheaper.
That is, ostensibly, Starmer’s headline policy. Whether he can deliver will be interesting to watch.
If he comes up with serious policies on this issue, I will hold my nose and vote Labour at the next election.
Careful. HYUFD might say you’re not a real Tory.
LOL.
One thing HYUFD is right about is that. I'm certainly a liberal who normally votes Tory. If I vote Labour at the next election it will only be the second time in my life, after voting Labour in 2001 in my first election.
The Tories should be the party of aspiration for people to have their own home.
If Starmer can get the importance of that but Sunak can't, what does it say about the state of today's Tory party?
That it is a lobby group for the already wealthy, and nothing more.
"Some of those individuals appear to have spoken in detail with author and political commentator Michael Shellenberger.
As Shellenberger writes, numerous current and former officials confirmed the outlines of Grusch’s explosive allegations."
A lot of adjectives in that piece, and precious little substance.
Well, there is the fact that there are current-serving intelligence officials who are prepared to back up his claims, and also that until recently Grausch was head of a US agency monitoring this area.
All this is different from a few decades ago, when it would be one old man living near Area 51.
Some of these Tories batting for Boris are just fucking bonkers. Cant they not read the runes?
In an essay for The Oxford Myth (1988), a book edited by his sister Rachel, Johnson advised aspiring student politicians to assemble “a disciplined and deluded collection of stooges” to get out the vote. “Lonely girls from the women’s colleges” who “back their largely male candidates with a porky decisiveness” were particularly useful, he wrote. “For these young women, machine politics offers human friction and warmth.” Reading this, you realise why almost all Union presidents who become Tory politicians are men. (Thatcher’s domain was OUCA, where she was president in 1946.)
Johnson added: “The tragedy of the stooge is that . . . he wants so much to believe that his relationship with the candidate is special that he shuts out the truth. The terrible art of the candidate is to coddle the self-deception of the stooge.”
I am pretty sure that a lot of companies are jacking up prices and using general reports of inflation to hide behind. The New Statesman had a very fine article on it last week and termed the phenomenon Greedflation.
That reminds me of US lefties claiming that inflation under the Biden Presidency wasn’t “real” inflation and companies didn’t have to put up prices. While celebrating pay increases.
There is an element of “reset” - in recent years, suppliers to supermarkets were often squeezed to breaking point. They are now simply refusing to supply some items at hyper low prices.
That doesn’t explain the supermarkets’ improved margins. At a time of rocketing inflation, corporate profitability, EBITDA, margins etc should generally be lower, not higher as so many are currently.
Common occurrence. We're investing so much/higher costs...but also profits are up.
Mrs Stodge is still seething after last night's visit to Sainsbury's. Almost all the traditional tills have gone - replaced by self-service for both baskets and trolleys. Only one till open at 8.30pm (all the staff watching the football?).
To be fair, Sainsbury's are perhaps doing the technological investment instead of simply trying to hire more staff and chasing wages upward. It would help if their staff had a scintilla of awareness of the customer experience but Sainsbury's don't see it in those terms - let the customer do the work.
We put the goods in a trolley and then we take them out for scanning and put them back in. It may be productive for Sainsbury's but not for the customer but then of course how many are still going to the supermarket? The advent of home delivery and click/collect means all that traditional walk down the aisles is history.
The next thing is Sainsbury's will dragoon customers foolish enough to visit the store to stack the shelves for them.
No, the next thing will be a Sainsbury's corporate estate of small town centre stores such as the "locals" and large warehouses to service the home delivery market - everything else will go, to be replaced with flats full of young couples who will sit there complaining their Sainsbury's delivery is late...
Interesting thing is, broadly, no-one likes them but they are being universally implemented because it's the future.
Customers mostly prefer humans, although some like machines better. Staff loathe the automated tills, not just because these tills put of them out of a job but because they get all the aggravation from customers when the machines don't work properly. Automated tills are probably a net cost to supermarkets when you factor in high maintenance cost and higher levels of theft. But supermarkets persevere with them because they hope they will improve later.
Have you any evidence for any of that?
I absolutely prefer the machines and the anecdotal evidence from whenever I go to the supermarket is the overwhelming majority of customers do too as far more voluntarily choose to go to the machines than to queue at the staffed tills.
I think it is another old/young split. The younger generation see things like the Amazon Fresh no till stores as simpler. The older people generally want things as they were.
More to do with quantity sfaict. If I have a basketful of shopping, I use self-service but a trolley load goes through the staffed tills because it looks too hard to balance a trolleyful in "the bagging area". I don't think it is much more complicated than that. What is interesting, now it has been mentioned, is that they seem to have stopped pressing the hand-held self-scanning gizmos on customers.
Second poll in Spain today showing a slight narrowing compared to their previous one. Looks like the initial PP bounce is receding. Still early days but my instinct is for a close election which could easily end up with a stalemate between left and right and a grand coalition the only viable option! Glad I don't bet!
Surely a PP minority government with confidence & supply from Vox is far more likely? I'll be amazed if it's a PP/PSOE grand coalition.
On balance iof the polls stay where they are of course you are correct. However, on the most recent poll, the PP/Vox combo would net 177 seats - a majority of 1 seat. If the polls tighten much more we are right ointo the territory where the only majority comes from a 'grand coalition'.
Something used to cost £100. It now costs £110 due to inflation. Rishi Rich says that he will halve inflation. We are meant to feel grateful when the price increases to £115.50.
Get the price down to £105 if you want public gratitude, PM.
I see your point, but actually deflation is generally seen as an economically even worse problem than inflation as people defer spending if prices are expected to fall.
In general, price stability not dropping prices is the appropriate macroeconomic aim.
This is a point I have made about falling house prices and its impact on housebuilding. People like the idea that falling house prices and an increase in housebuilding could go together, but the reality is that when house prices are falling people are less likely to borrow large sums of money to buy premium new build houses, so there would be less demand for this type of housing, so the most probable outcome is that housebuilding also falls.
I think you've got it backwards.
We don't want a fall in prices to lead to an increase in construction.
We want an increase in construction to lead to a fall in prices.
Increased competition absolutely can lead to prices stabilising or falling. And if competition increases, then prices stabilise or fall, then housebuilding falls back, then it will be because the shortage of houses in the system has resolved. Although unless population growth stops entirely, there will always be a need for construction.
There was no let up in the production of various goods that have fallen in price, massively, over the decades.
Half the cost of building work is directly wages. That is half is bricks and roof tiles, half labour. Approximately. But the material themselves have labour inputs. And the materials for the materials.
Some guesses put the ultimate labour portion of a house at 70-80%.
Labour cost is a direct function, these days, of housing costs. The biggest cost for workers is their own housing!
So when house prices actually fall, for a period, labour costs will begin to trend down (assuming a competitive labour market). This in turn will make it cheaper to build houses.
In addition, the U.K. building industry is low productivity, compared to many other countries. Investment in non-exotic machinery - mini cranes and small diggers, say - could halve the work force on a house.
Its worth noting that half the building work cost of houses may be labour but that's not half the cost of the house.
An incredibly significant portion of the cost of housing is the cost of land, and almost all of the cost of land is planning permission.
An acre of farmland can cost £12-25k while an acre of land with planning permission for a house can be worth hundreds of thousands.
Eliminate that discrepancy and the cost of housing would collapse, without affecting labour costs. And as you say, if its cheaper to house people, then everything including labour becomes cheaper.
That is, ostensibly, Starmer’s headline policy. Whether he can deliver will be interesting to watch.
If he comes up with serious policies on this issue, I will hold my nose and vote Labour at the next election.
Careful. HYUFD might say you’re not a real Tory.
LOL.
One thing HYUFD is right about is that. I'm certainly a liberal who normally votes Tory. If I vote Labour at the next election it will only be the second time in my life, after voting Labour in 2001 in my first election.
The Tories should be the party of aspiration for people to have their own home.
If Starmer can get the importance of that but Sunak can't, what does it say about the state of today's Tory party?
You are yes not a Tory and not a conservative, you are a libertarian who sometimes votes Conservative, as you have since 2005 but sometimes votes Labour as you did for Blair and likely will do for Starmer.
The Tories should be and are the party of aspiration but they also should be the party of conservatism and conservation of our beautiful countryside which you and Starmer want to concrete all over
Something used to cost £100. It now costs £110 due to inflation. Rishi Rich says that he will halve inflation. We are meant to feel grateful when the price increases to £115.50.
Get the price down to £105 if you want public gratitude, PM.
I see your point, but actually deflation is generally seen as an economically even worse problem than inflation as people defer spending if prices are expected to fall.
In general, price stability not dropping prices is the appropriate macroeconomic aim.
This is a point I have made about falling house prices and its impact on housebuilding. People like the idea that falling house prices and an increase in housebuilding could go together, but the reality is that when house prices are falling people are less likely to borrow large sums of money to buy premium new build houses, so there would be less demand for this type of housing, so the most probable outcome is that housebuilding also falls.
I think you've got it backwards.
We don't want a fall in prices to lead to an increase in construction.
We want an increase in construction to lead to a fall in prices.
Increased competition absolutely can lead to prices stabilising or falling. And if competition increases, then prices stabilise or fall, then housebuilding falls back, then it will be because the shortage of houses in the system has resolved. Although unless population growth stops entirely, there will always be a need for construction.
There was no let up in the production of various goods that have fallen in price, massively, over the decades.
Half the cost of building work is directly wages. That is half is bricks and roof tiles, half labour. Approximately. But the material themselves have labour inputs. And the materials for the materials.
Some guesses put the ultimate labour portion of a house at 70-80%.
Labour cost is a direct function, these days, of housing costs. The biggest cost for workers is their own housing!
So when house prices actually fall, for a period, labour costs will begin to trend down (assuming a competitive labour market). This in turn will make it cheaper to build houses.
In addition, the U.K. building industry is low productivity, compared to many other countries. Investment in non-exotic machinery - mini cranes and small diggers, say - could halve the work force on a house.
Its worth noting that half the building work cost of houses may be labour but that's not half the cost of the house.
An incredibly significant portion of the cost of housing is the cost of land, and almost all of the cost of land is planning permission.
An acre of farmland can cost £12-25k while an acre of land with planning permission for a house can be worth hundreds of thousands.
Eliminate that discrepancy and the cost of housing would collapse, without affecting labour costs. And as you say, if its cheaper to house people, then everything including labour becomes cheaper.
That is, ostensibly, Starmer’s headline policy. Whether he can deliver will be interesting to watch.
If he comes up with serious policies on this issue, I will hold my nose and vote Labour at the next election.
Careful. HYUFD might say you’re not a real Tory.
LOL.
One thing HYUFD is right about is that. I'm certainly a liberal who normally votes Tory. If I vote Labour at the next election it will only be the second time in my life, after voting Labour in 2001 in my first election.
The Tories should be the party of aspiration for people to have their own home.
If Starmer can get the importance of that but Sunak can't, what does it say about the state of today's Tory party?
I was going to offer Land Value Taxation as a policy here (good old Liberal idea).
The problem Sunak has is he has to balance the requirement of his core vote to maintain the status quo - his core of middle age and elderly northern and midlands home owners rather like the value of their asset continuing to rise which they can pass on (without IHT hopefully) to the children and grandchildren to provide the deposit for the next generation of home owners).
On the other side, he knows the longer term interests of the country and his Party are served by creating a new generation of home owners but he can't make houses affordable without causing existing values to drop which alienates his core.
That's not an easy circle to square.
It's impossible, which is why the Conservative Party will always cave to the interests of the already wealthy in the end. It's why the rumours of the abolition of IHT and revival of Help to Buy continue to swirl, and it also explains why they've already caved to their Southern Nimbies by junking housing targets for local authorities.
Today's Tories will always default to the elderly homeowner interest, trusting that they can return to power if they bring enough of them on side. What happens when the housing shortage means there aren't enough elderly homeowners left to outvote pissed-off renters is a problem for tomorrow's Tories to solve.
I am pretty sure that a lot of companies are jacking up prices and using general reports of inflation to hide behind. The New Statesman had a very fine article on it last week and termed the phenomenon Greedflation.
That reminds me of US lefties claiming that inflation under the Biden Presidency wasn’t “real” inflation and companies didn’t have to put up prices. While celebrating pay increases.
There is an element of “reset” - in recent years, suppliers to supermarkets were often squeezed to breaking point. They are now simply refusing to supply some items at hyper low prices.
That doesn’t explain the supermarkets’ improved margins. At a time of rocketing inflation, corporate profitability, EBITDA, margins etc should generally be lower, not higher as so many are currently.
Common occurrence. We're investing so much/higher costs...but also profits are up.
Mrs Stodge is still seething after last night's visit to Sainsbury's. Almost all the traditional tills have gone - replaced by self-service for both baskets and trolleys. Only one till open at 8.30pm (all the staff watching the football?).
To be fair, Sainsbury's are perhaps doing the technological investment instead of simply trying to hire more staff and chasing wages upward. It would help if their staff had a scintilla of awareness of the customer experience but Sainsbury's don't see it in those terms - let the customer do the work.
We put the goods in a trolley and then we take them out for scanning and put them back in. It may be productive for Sainsbury's but not for the customer but then of course how many are still going to the supermarket? The advent of home delivery and click/collect means all that traditional walk down the aisles is history.
The next thing is Sainsbury's will dragoon customers foolish enough to visit the store to stack the shelves for them.
No, the next thing will be a Sainsbury's corporate estate of small town centre stores such as the "locals" and large warehouses to service the home delivery market - everything else will go, to be replaced with flats full of young couples who will sit there complaining their Sainsbury's delivery is late...
Interesting thing is, broadly, no-one likes them but they are being universally implemented because it's the future.
Customers mostly prefer humans, although some like machines better. Staff loathe the automated tills, not just because these tills put of them out of a job but because they get all the aggravation from customers when the machines don't work properly. Automated tills are probably a net cost to supermarkets when you factor in high maintenance cost and higher levels of theft. But supermarkets persevere with them because they hope they will improve later.
Time was when you would go into a grocery store with your list, and someone in the shop would go and get everything for you from the shelves. Actually wandering around the supermarket and putting things into trolleys was once a novelty. I'm sure there were plenty of people who complained about that change too.
The reduction in staff numbers that a supermarket can achieve with automated tills, with the staff remaining concentrating on keeping the shelves stocked, surely pays for the machines and increased theft by a wide margin. Often a supermarket will have one staff member (or half a staff member) covering over a dozen automated tills. The saving in staff costs must be immense.
Perhaps, he says controversially, this is one of the overlooked benefits of Employer's National Insurance, in that it increases staff costs and so encourages investment in automation.
Personally I much prefer automated tills.. I feel under less pressure to rush because there isn't a queue directly behind me. The automated till doesn't judge me if I've felt the need to buy several bars of chocolate. And checkout scanning is a bullshit job, as the opening to Shaun of the Dead so brilliantly captures.
A pain though when buying items like alcohol or items security tagged. There is never anyone around.
Second poll in Spain today showing a slight narrowing compared to their previous one. Looks like the initial PP bounce is receding. Still early days but my instinct is for a close election which could easily end up with a stalemate between left and right and a grand coalition the only viable option! Glad I don't bet!
Surely a PP minority government with confidence & supply from Vox is far more likely? I'll be amazed if it's a PP/PSOE grand coalition.
The question is whether we will see a pattern of populist parties supporting but not actively joining forces with more traditional centre-right parties to prevent the formation of such "grand" coalitions.
We have the Sweden Democrats who support the centre-right Moderate Government - we could see the CDU/CSU form a minority with AfD support after the next Bundestag election and in Spain PP could form a minority with VOX providing confidence and supply.
Indeed that remains the likeliest result but the polls may tighten to the point where that also fails to hit the 176 target.
Something used to cost £100. It now costs £110 due to inflation. Rishi Rich says that he will halve inflation. We are meant to feel grateful when the price increases to £115.50.
Get the price down to £105 if you want public gratitude, PM.
I see your point, but actually deflation is generally seen as an economically even worse problem than inflation as people defer spending if prices are expected to fall.
In general, price stability not dropping prices is the appropriate macroeconomic aim.
This is a point I have made about falling house prices and its impact on housebuilding. People like the idea that falling house prices and an increase in housebuilding could go together, but the reality is that when house prices are falling people are less likely to borrow large sums of money to buy premium new build houses, so there would be less demand for this type of housing, so the most probable outcome is that housebuilding also falls.
I think you've got it backwards.
We don't want a fall in prices to lead to an increase in construction.
We want an increase in construction to lead to a fall in prices.
Increased competition absolutely can lead to prices stabilising or falling. And if competition increases, then prices stabilise or fall, then housebuilding falls back, then it will be because the shortage of houses in the system has resolved. Although unless population growth stops entirely, there will always be a need for construction.
There was no let up in the production of various goods that have fallen in price, massively, over the decades.
Half the cost of building work is directly wages. That is half is bricks and roof tiles, half labour. Approximately. But the material themselves have labour inputs. And the materials for the materials.
Some guesses put the ultimate labour portion of a house at 70-80%.
Labour cost is a direct function, these days, of housing costs. The biggest cost for workers is their own housing!
So when house prices actually fall, for a period, labour costs will begin to trend down (assuming a competitive labour market). This in turn will make it cheaper to build houses.
In addition, the U.K. building industry is low productivity, compared to many other countries. Investment in non-exotic machinery - mini cranes and small diggers, say - could halve the work force on a house.
Its worth noting that half the building work cost of houses may be labour but that's not half the cost of the house.
An incredibly significant portion of the cost of housing is the cost of land, and almost all of the cost of land is planning permission.
An acre of farmland can cost £12-25k while an acre of land with planning permission for a house can be worth hundreds of thousands.
Eliminate that discrepancy and the cost of housing would collapse, without affecting labour costs. And as you say, if its cheaper to house people, then everything including labour becomes cheaper.
That is, ostensibly, Starmer’s headline policy. Whether he can deliver will be interesting to watch.
If he comes up with serious policies on this issue, I will hold my nose and vote Labour at the next election.
Careful. HYUFD might say you’re not a real Tory.
LOL.
One thing HYUFD is right about is that. I'm certainly a liberal who normally votes Tory. If I vote Labour at the next election it will only be the second time in my life, after voting Labour in 2001 in my first election.
The Tories should be the party of aspiration for people to have their own home.
If Starmer can get the importance of that but Sunak can't, what does it say about the state of today's Tory party?
I was going to offer Land Value Taxation as a policy here (good old Liberal idea).
The problem Sunak has is he has to balance the requirement of his core vote to maintain the status quo - his core of middle age and elderly northern and midlands home owners rather like the value of their asset continuing to rise which they can pass on (without IHT hopefully) to the children and grandchildren to provide the deposit for the next generation of home owners).
On the other side, he knows the longer term interests of the country and his Party are served by creating a new generation of home owners but he can't make houses affordable without causing existing values to drop which alienates his core.
That's not an easy circle to square.
It's impossible, which is why the Conservative Party will always cave to the interests of the already wealthy in the end. It's why the rumours of the abolition of IHT and revival of Help to Buy continue to swirl, and it also explains why they've already caved to their Southern Nimbies by junking housing targets for local authorities.
Today's Tories will always default to the elderly homeowner interest, trusting that they can return to power if they bring enough of them on side. What happens when the housing shortage means there aren't enough elderly homeowners left to outvote pissed-off renters is a problem for tomorrow's Tories to solve.
By then their children will have inherited of course (and even today by 39 most own property with a mortgage)
Second poll in Spain today showing a slight narrowing compared to their previous one. Looks like the initial PP bounce is receding. Still early days but my instinct is for a close election which could easily end up with a stalemate between left and right and a grand coalition the only viable option! Glad I don't bet!
Surely a PP minority government with confidence & supply from Vox is far more likely? I'll be amazed if it's a PP/PSOE grand coalition.
PP and Vox still on 47% combined compared to PSOE and Sumar on 41% combined in the latest poll
Something used to cost £100. It now costs £110 due to inflation. Rishi Rich says that he will halve inflation. We are meant to feel grateful when the price increases to £115.50.
Get the price down to £105 if you want public gratitude, PM.
I see your point, but actually deflation is generally seen as an economically even worse problem than inflation as people defer spending if prices are expected to fall.
In general, price stability not dropping prices is the appropriate macroeconomic aim.
This is a point I have made about falling house prices and its impact on housebuilding. People like the idea that falling house prices and an increase in housebuilding could go together, but the reality is that when house prices are falling people are less likely to borrow large sums of money to buy premium new build houses, so there would be less demand for this type of housing, so the most probable outcome is that housebuilding also falls.
I think you've got it backwards.
We don't want a fall in prices to lead to an increase in construction.
We want an increase in construction to lead to a fall in prices.
Increased competition absolutely can lead to prices stabilising or falling. And if competition increases, then prices stabilise or fall, then housebuilding falls back, then it will be because the shortage of houses in the system has resolved. Although unless population growth stops entirely, there will always be a need for construction.
There was no let up in the production of various goods that have fallen in price, massively, over the decades.
Half the cost of building work is directly wages. That is half is bricks and roof tiles, half labour. Approximately. But the material themselves have labour inputs. And the materials for the materials.
Some guesses put the ultimate labour portion of a house at 70-80%.
Labour cost is a direct function, these days, of housing costs. The biggest cost for workers is their own housing!
So when house prices actually fall, for a period, labour costs will begin to trend down (assuming a competitive labour market). This in turn will make it cheaper to build houses.
In addition, the U.K. building industry is low productivity, compared to many other countries. Investment in non-exotic machinery - mini cranes and small diggers, say - could halve the work force on a house.
Its worth noting that half the building work cost of houses may be labour but that's not half the cost of the house.
An incredibly significant portion of the cost of housing is the cost of land, and almost all of the cost of land is planning permission.
An acre of farmland can cost £12-25k while an acre of land with planning permission for a house can be worth hundreds of thousands.
Eliminate that discrepancy and the cost of housing would collapse, without affecting labour costs. And as you say, if its cheaper to house people, then everything including labour becomes cheaper.
That is, ostensibly, Starmer’s headline policy. Whether he can deliver will be interesting to watch.
If he comes up with serious policies on this issue, I will hold my nose and vote Labour at the next election.
Careful. HYUFD might say you’re not a real Tory.
LOL.
One thing HYUFD is right about is that. I'm certainly a liberal who normally votes Tory. If I vote Labour at the next election it will only be the second time in my life, after voting Labour in 2001 in my first election.
The Tories should be the party of aspiration for people to have their own home.
If Starmer can get the importance of that but Sunak can't, what does it say about the state of today's Tory party?
You are yes not a Tory and not a conservative, you are a libertarian who sometimes votes Conservative, as you have since 2005 but sometimes votes Labour as you did for Blair and likely will do for Starmer.
The Tories should be and are the party of aspiration but they also should be the party of conservatism and conservation of our beautiful countryside which you and Starmer want to concrete all over
The population is growing relentlessly. They all have to live somewhere. Where are all the extra homes meant to go?
I am pretty sure that a lot of companies are jacking up prices and using general reports of inflation to hide behind. The New Statesman had a very fine article on it last week and termed the phenomenon Greedflation.
That reminds me of US lefties claiming that inflation under the Biden Presidency wasn’t “real” inflation and companies didn’t have to put up prices. While celebrating pay increases.
There is an element of “reset” - in recent years, suppliers to supermarkets were often squeezed to breaking point. They are now simply refusing to supply some items at hyper low prices.
That doesn’t explain the supermarkets’ improved margins. At a time of rocketing inflation, corporate profitability, EBITDA, margins etc should generally be lower, not higher as so many are currently.
Common occurrence. We're investing so much/higher costs...but also profits are up.
Mrs Stodge is still seething after last night's visit to Sainsbury's. Almost all the traditional tills have gone - replaced by self-service for both baskets and trolleys. Only one till open at 8.30pm (all the staff watching the football?).
To be fair, Sainsbury's are perhaps doing the technological investment instead of simply trying to hire more staff and chasing wages upward. It would help if their staff had a scintilla of awareness of the customer experience but Sainsbury's don't see it in those terms - let the customer do the work.
We put the goods in a trolley and then we take them out for scanning and put them back in. It may be productive for Sainsbury's but not for the customer but then of course how many are still going to the supermarket? The advent of home delivery and click/collect means all that traditional walk down the aisles is history.
The next thing is Sainsbury's will dragoon customers foolish enough to visit the store to stack the shelves for them.
No, the next thing will be a Sainsbury's corporate estate of small town centre stores such as the "locals" and large warehouses to service the home delivery market - everything else will go, to be replaced with flats full of young couples who will sit there complaining their Sainsbury's delivery is late...
Interesting thing is, broadly, no-one likes them but they are being universally implemented because it's the future.
Customers mostly prefer humans, although some like machines better. Staff loathe the automated tills, not just because these tills put of them out of a job but because they get all the aggravation from customers when the machines don't work properly. Automated tills are probably a net cost to supermarkets when you factor in high maintenance cost and higher levels of theft. But supermarkets persevere with them because they hope they will improve later.
Have you any evidence for any of that?
I absolutely prefer the machines and the anecdotal evidence from whenever I go to the supermarket is the overwhelming majority of customers do too as far more voluntarily choose to go to the machines than to queue at the staffed tills.
I think it is another old/young split. The younger generation see things like the Amazon Fresh no till stores as simpler. The older people generally want things as they were.
More to do with quantity sfaict. If I have a basketful of shopping, I use self-service but a trolley load goes through the staffed tills because it looks too hard to balance a trolleyful in "the bagging area". I don't think it is much more complicated than that. What is interesting, now it has been mentioned, is that they seem to have stopped pressing the hand-held self-scanning gizmos on customers.
My local Lidl (v good and popular) has no self service facility. A nuisance if buying a few things, so I don't. Very good generally for queues etc for bigger shopping.
Self service is awful for big loads, and a greater chance of going wrong, and needing non existent help.
Self service only outlets (none here in stone age north) sound awful.
There's so many named, recent official sources, which is new.
Take that article, for instance.
"Jim Shell, a former Chief Scientist of the Space Innovation and Development Center at Air Force Space Command, wrote on LinkedIn Monday in support of his former colleague Grusch.
'I will vouch for the integrity of Dave Grusch! Getting to the bottom of this is elusive and problematic, to say the least,' Shell wrote. 'I will assert no matter the conclusion of extraterrestrial materials or not, the DoD and IC security apparatus is in trouble and unwitting accomplices are fostering an abusive system."
Something used to cost £100. It now costs £110 due to inflation. Rishi Rich says that he will halve inflation. We are meant to feel grateful when the price increases to £115.50.
Get the price down to £105 if you want public gratitude, PM.
I see your point, but actually deflation is generally seen as an economically even worse problem than inflation as people defer spending if prices are expected to fall.
In general, price stability not dropping prices is the appropriate macroeconomic aim.
This is a point I have made about falling house prices and its impact on housebuilding. People like the idea that falling house prices and an increase in housebuilding could go together, but the reality is that when house prices are falling people are less likely to borrow large sums of money to buy premium new build houses, so there would be less demand for this type of housing, so the most probable outcome is that housebuilding also falls.
I think you've got it backwards.
We don't want a fall in prices to lead to an increase in construction.
We want an increase in construction to lead to a fall in prices.
Increased competition absolutely can lead to prices stabilising or falling. And if competition increases, then prices stabilise or fall, then housebuilding falls back, then it will be because the shortage of houses in the system has resolved. Although unless population growth stops entirely, there will always be a need for construction.
There was no let up in the production of various goods that have fallen in price, massively, over the decades.
Half the cost of building work is directly wages. That is half is bricks and roof tiles, half labour. Approximately. But the material themselves have labour inputs. And the materials for the materials.
Some guesses put the ultimate labour portion of a house at 70-80%.
Labour cost is a direct function, these days, of housing costs. The biggest cost for workers is their own housing!
So when house prices actually fall, for a period, labour costs will begin to trend down (assuming a competitive labour market). This in turn will make it cheaper to build houses.
In addition, the U.K. building industry is low productivity, compared to many other countries. Investment in non-exotic machinery - mini cranes and small diggers, say - could halve the work force on a house.
Its worth noting that half the building work cost of houses may be labour but that's not half the cost of the house.
An incredibly significant portion of the cost of housing is the cost of land, and almost all of the cost of land is planning permission.
An acre of farmland can cost £12-25k while an acre of land with planning permission for a house can be worth hundreds of thousands.
Eliminate that discrepancy and the cost of housing would collapse, without affecting labour costs. And as you say, if its cheaper to house people, then everything including labour becomes cheaper.
That is, ostensibly, Starmer’s headline policy. Whether he can deliver will be interesting to watch.
If he comes up with serious policies on this issue, I will hold my nose and vote Labour at the next election.
Careful. HYUFD might say you’re not a real Tory.
LOL.
One thing HYUFD is right about is that. I'm certainly a liberal who normally votes Tory. If I vote Labour at the next election it will only be the second time in my life, after voting Labour in 2001 in my first election.
The Tories should be the party of aspiration for people to have their own home.
If Starmer can get the importance of that but Sunak can't, what does it say about the state of today's Tory party?
You are yes not a Tory and not a conservative, you are a libertarian who sometimes votes Conservative, as you have since 2005 but sometimes votes Labour as you did for Blair and likely will do for Starmer.
The Tories should be and are the party of aspiration but they also should be the party of conservatism and conservation of our beautiful countryside which you and Starmer want to concrete all over
The population is growing relentlessly. They all have to live somewhere. Where are all the extra homes meant to go?
Well we could start by cutting immigration. Our birthrate is below replacement level, if we significantly cut immigration our population would actually decline and we would have more than enough homes already
More than a third of buy-to-let landlords who have mortgages on their properties are at risk of being pushed into the red amid soaring borrowing costs and stricter tax rules.
The average buy-to-let mortgage rate is now just over 6 per cent — if it hits 6.5 per cent, 44 per cent of mortgaged landlords will not be making enough from rent to cover their costs, according to the estate agency Hamptons. This would rise to 54 per cent if the average rate were to reach 7 per cent.
...
Landlords have benefited from years of cheap debt and low interest rates but higher borrowing costs now could wipe out their profits.
David Fell from Hamptons said: “With average interest rates so high the number of landlords entering loss-making territory increases fairly quickly. Given that higher-rate taxpayers cannot offset all their mortgage interest for tax, some will not be making any money at all.”
Good, take the houses back and people that actually need to live in them can have them instead
That's pretty bigoted, CHB. You think people who are tenants don't need anywhere to live?
Are you seriously arguing that the 5-10m in this country who can't qualify for a mortgage should all be living with their children in cardboard boxes under Vauxhall Bridge?
So instead of people living the properties, we now have… people living in the properties.
This will alter the housing crisis how, exactly?
As I pointed out, millions cannot qualify for a mortgage to access such a property as Owner Occupiers. Where will they live?
There is also the issue I have pointed out repeatedly that .. as per the English Housing Survey .. the PRS is occupied far more densely than the Owner Occupied segment, so you will be making more people homeless, and will make the housing crisis far worse.
I refer you to the figures for households with 2 or more spare bedrooms in the recent versions of the English Housing Survey, and how they are overwhelmingly concentrated in the OO sector.
Perhaps we need to be forcing such people to take a lodger.
In reality we need a larger PRS in this country, not a smaller one, as we have one of the smallest availabilities of rental property in Western Europe.
One phenomenon that I have seen in this policy area is that some people have fixed ideas, where they exhibit religious levels of certainty, and no amount of evidence, reasoning or real world experience will ever persuade them to change course, to the point where there is no point in even trying.
One such idea is that 'buy to let landlords are the cause of high rents' and another is 'the planning system is the cause of the housing crisis'.
These ideas are largely wrong, but they frequently end up forming the basis of government policy, because they are so prevalent.
The planning system 100% is the cause of the housing crisis.
Land with planning permission can be worth 650x land without it.
If planning permission is is 99.84% of the cost of land, and the cost of land is the largest cost of housing, then the planning system is by far the largest cost of housing.
Your response is just evidence of the point I am making.
Since 2014 there were planning permissions issued for around 300,000 houses per year, a significant increase from the previous years. But the amount of houses actually built by the private housebuilding industry has remained constant at around 150,000 per year since the mid 1970s. The problem is that the market for new builds is ultimately quite limited and there are other limitations that come in to play, IE capacity in the construction industry. I think it is unlikely that the planning system is even a significant cause of the housing crisis - the fundamental cause is over reliance on the private housebuilding industry to deliver new housing, which is an ideological legacy of Thatcherism that is only now being properly contemplated and understood.
Second poll in Spain today showing a slight narrowing compared to their previous one. Looks like the initial PP bounce is receding. Still early days but my instinct is for a close election which could easily end up with a stalemate between left and right and a grand coalition the only viable option! Glad I don't bet!
Surely a PP minority government with confidence & supply from Vox is far more likely? I'll be amazed if it's a PP/PSOE grand coalition.
PP and Vox still on 47% combined compared to PSOE and Sumar on 41% combined in the latest poll
Something used to cost £100. It now costs £110 due to inflation. Rishi Rich says that he will halve inflation. We are meant to feel grateful when the price increases to £115.50.
Get the price down to £105 if you want public gratitude, PM.
I see your point, but actually deflation is generally seen as an economically even worse problem than inflation as people defer spending if prices are expected to fall.
In general, price stability not dropping prices is the appropriate macroeconomic aim.
This is a point I have made about falling house prices and its impact on housebuilding. People like the idea that falling house prices and an increase in housebuilding could go together, but the reality is that when house prices are falling people are less likely to borrow large sums of money to buy premium new build houses, so there would be less demand for this type of housing, so the most probable outcome is that housebuilding also falls.
I think you've got it backwards.
We don't want a fall in prices to lead to an increase in construction.
We want an increase in construction to lead to a fall in prices.
Increased competition absolutely can lead to prices stabilising or falling. And if competition increases, then prices stabilise or fall, then housebuilding falls back, then it will be because the shortage of houses in the system has resolved. Although unless population growth stops entirely, there will always be a need for construction.
There was no let up in the production of various goods that have fallen in price, massively, over the decades.
Half the cost of building work is directly wages. That is half is bricks and roof tiles, half labour. Approximately. But the material themselves have labour inputs. And the materials for the materials.
Some guesses put the ultimate labour portion of a house at 70-80%.
Labour cost is a direct function, these days, of housing costs. The biggest cost for workers is their own housing!
So when house prices actually fall, for a period, labour costs will begin to trend down (assuming a competitive labour market). This in turn will make it cheaper to build houses.
In addition, the U.K. building industry is low productivity, compared to many other countries. Investment in non-exotic machinery - mini cranes and small diggers, say - could halve the work force on a house.
Its worth noting that half the building work cost of houses may be labour but that's not half the cost of the house.
An incredibly significant portion of the cost of housing is the cost of land, and almost all of the cost of land is planning permission.
An acre of farmland can cost £12-25k while an acre of land with planning permission for a house can be worth hundreds of thousands.
Eliminate that discrepancy and the cost of housing would collapse, without affecting labour costs. And as you say, if its cheaper to house people, then everything including labour becomes cheaper.
That is, ostensibly, Starmer’s headline policy. Whether he can deliver will be interesting to watch.
If he comes up with serious policies on this issue, I will hold my nose and vote Labour at the next election.
Careful. HYUFD might say you’re not a real Tory.
LOL.
One thing HYUFD is right about is that. I'm certainly a liberal who normally votes Tory. If I vote Labour at the next election it will only be the second time in my life, after voting Labour in 2001 in my first election.
The Tories should be the party of aspiration for people to have their own home.
If Starmer can get the importance of that but Sunak can't, what does it say about the state of today's Tory party?
I was going to offer Land Value Taxation as a policy here (good old Liberal idea).
The problem Sunak has is he has to balance the requirement of his core vote to maintain the status quo - his core of middle age and elderly northern and midlands home owners rather like the value of their asset continuing to rise which they can pass on (without IHT hopefully) to the children and grandchildren to provide the deposit for the next generation of home owners).
On the other side, he knows the longer term interests of the country and his Party are served by creating a new generation of home owners but he can't make houses affordable without causing existing values to drop which alienates his core.
That's not an easy circle to square.
It's impossible, which is why the Conservative Party will always cave to the interests of the already wealthy in the end. It's why the rumours of the abolition of IHT and revival of Help to Buy continue to swirl, and it also explains why they've already caved to their Southern Nimbies by junking housing targets for local authorities.
Today's Tories will always default to the elderly homeowner interest, trusting that they can return to power if they bring enough of them on side. What happens when the housing shortage means there aren't enough elderly homeowners left to outvote pissed-off renters is a problem for tomorrow's Tories to solve.
By then their children will have inherited of course (and even today by 39 most own property with a mortgage)
There aren't enough houses, therefore those that exist are too expensive. Inheritances will eventually bail some people out, but the numbers staggering under crippling rents into middle age will continue to increase. Eventually this will also undermine your party's support with the grey vote, as more of them end up having to work until they drop down dead to service rents.
No use bellyaching about the concreting of the countryside I'm afraid. If the Conservatives won't do it, eventually things will get so bad that voters will turn to somebody else who will.
Something used to cost £100. It now costs £110 due to inflation. Rishi Rich says that he will halve inflation. We are meant to feel grateful when the price increases to £115.50.
Get the price down to £105 if you want public gratitude, PM.
I see your point, but actually deflation is generally seen as an economically even worse problem than inflation as people defer spending if prices are expected to fall.
In general, price stability not dropping prices is the appropriate macroeconomic aim.
This is a point I have made about falling house prices and its impact on housebuilding. People like the idea that falling house prices and an increase in housebuilding could go together, but the reality is that when house prices are falling people are less likely to borrow large sums of money to buy premium new build houses, so there would be less demand for this type of housing, so the most probable outcome is that housebuilding also falls.
I think you've got it backwards.
We don't want a fall in prices to lead to an increase in construction.
We want an increase in construction to lead to a fall in prices.
Increased competition absolutely can lead to prices stabilising or falling. And if competition increases, then prices stabilise or fall, then housebuilding falls back, then it will be because the shortage of houses in the system has resolved. Although unless population growth stops entirely, there will always be a need for construction.
There was no let up in the production of various goods that have fallen in price, massively, over the decades.
Half the cost of building work is directly wages. That is half is bricks and roof tiles, half labour. Approximately. But the material themselves have labour inputs. And the materials for the materials.
Some guesses put the ultimate labour portion of a house at 70-80%.
Labour cost is a direct function, these days, of housing costs. The biggest cost for workers is their own housing!
So when house prices actually fall, for a period, labour costs will begin to trend down (assuming a competitive labour market). This in turn will make it cheaper to build houses.
In addition, the U.K. building industry is low productivity, compared to many other countries. Investment in non-exotic machinery - mini cranes and small diggers, say - could halve the work force on a house.
Its worth noting that half the building work cost of houses may be labour but that's not half the cost of the house.
An incredibly significant portion of the cost of housing is the cost of land, and almost all of the cost of land is planning permission.
An acre of farmland can cost £12-25k while an acre of land with planning permission for a house can be worth hundreds of thousands.
Eliminate that discrepancy and the cost of housing would collapse, without affecting labour costs. And as you say, if its cheaper to house people, then everything including labour becomes cheaper.
That is, ostensibly, Starmer’s headline policy. Whether he can deliver will be interesting to watch.
If he comes up with serious policies on this issue, I will hold my nose and vote Labour at the next election.
Careful. HYUFD might say you’re not a real Tory.
LOL.
One thing HYUFD is right about is that. I'm certainly a liberal who normally votes Tory. If I vote Labour at the next election it will only be the second time in my life, after voting Labour in 2001 in my first election.
The Tories should be the party of aspiration for people to have their own home.
If Starmer can get the importance of that but Sunak can't, what does it say about the state of today's Tory party?
You are yes not a Tory and not a conservative, you are a libertarian who sometimes votes Conservative, as you have since 2005 but sometimes votes Labour as you did for Blair and likely will do for Starmer.
The Tories should be and are the party of aspiration but they also should be the party of conservatism and conservation of our beautiful countryside which you and Starmer want to concrete all over
Most of your final sentence is what I believe the Labour Party should be about. Giving young people from working class backgrounds the confidence and opportunity to get on in life and make the most of their talents. Protecting the environment and respecting all species, not just our own.
Something used to cost £100. It now costs £110 due to inflation. Rishi Rich says that he will halve inflation. We are meant to feel grateful when the price increases to £115.50.
Get the price down to £105 if you want public gratitude, PM.
I see your point, but actually deflation is generally seen as an economically even worse problem than inflation as people defer spending if prices are expected to fall.
In general, price stability not dropping prices is the appropriate macroeconomic aim.
This is a point I have made about falling house prices and its impact on housebuilding. People like the idea that falling house prices and an increase in housebuilding could go together, but the reality is that when house prices are falling people are less likely to borrow large sums of money to buy premium new build houses, so there would be less demand for this type of housing, so the most probable outcome is that housebuilding also falls.
I think you've got it backwards.
We don't want a fall in prices to lead to an increase in construction.
We want an increase in construction to lead to a fall in prices.
Increased competition absolutely can lead to prices stabilising or falling. And if competition increases, then prices stabilise or fall, then housebuilding falls back, then it will be because the shortage of houses in the system has resolved. Although unless population growth stops entirely, there will always be a need for construction.
There was no let up in the production of various goods that have fallen in price, massively, over the decades.
Half the cost of building work is directly wages. That is half is bricks and roof tiles, half labour. Approximately. But the material themselves have labour inputs. And the materials for the materials.
Some guesses put the ultimate labour portion of a house at 70-80%.
Labour cost is a direct function, these days, of housing costs. The biggest cost for workers is their own housing!
So when house prices actually fall, for a period, labour costs will begin to trend down (assuming a competitive labour market). This in turn will make it cheaper to build houses.
In addition, the U.K. building industry is low productivity, compared to many other countries. Investment in non-exotic machinery - mini cranes and small diggers, say - could halve the work force on a house.
Its worth noting that half the building work cost of houses may be labour but that's not half the cost of the house.
An incredibly significant portion of the cost of housing is the cost of land, and almost all of the cost of land is planning permission.
An acre of farmland can cost £12-25k while an acre of land with planning permission for a house can be worth hundreds of thousands.
Eliminate that discrepancy and the cost of housing would collapse, without affecting labour costs. And as you say, if its cheaper to house people, then everything including labour becomes cheaper.
That is, ostensibly, Starmer’s headline policy. Whether he can deliver will be interesting to watch.
If he comes up with serious policies on this issue, I will hold my nose and vote Labour at the next election.
Careful. HYUFD might say you’re not a real Tory.
LOL.
One thing HYUFD is right about is that. I'm certainly a liberal who normally votes Tory. If I vote Labour at the next election it will only be the second time in my life, after voting Labour in 2001 in my first election.
The Tories should be the party of aspiration for people to have their own home.
If Starmer can get the importance of that but Sunak can't, what does it say about the state of today's Tory party?
Todays Tory Party is a hollow shell which seems to largely exist to maintain a status quo of slow decline, while hoping it has been able to fool enough of the people some of the time to keep it in power.
It needs to be put out of its misery.
That may well be true, but the Labour Party has been a hollow shell for decades, which exists to maintain a status quo of slow decline for the benefit of its public sector and benefit-claiming supporters.
Neither party even pretends to have solutions to the main problems of slow growth and inter-generational unfairness that the country faces.
There's so many named recent official sources, which is new.
What counts is evidence which can be expertly examined and re-examined and reported on according to peer reviewed science standards. Adjectives and hearsay don't count. That which is merely unexplained visual phenomena doesn't count either. We can't explain lots of things - consciousness, the origin of the universe, the reason why the law of gravity is how it is and not different, why we see yellow as yellow and not green, how life began and so on - but we don't attribute it to aliens.
As and when there is a real story it isn't going to be confined to websites no-one has heard of. There is a fortune out there for real scientists and accurate journalists, and they will get it if they can.
Some of these Tories batting for Boris are just fucking bonkers. Cant they not read the runes?
I'm not surprised many would do so, since it's tied up with party factions, dislike of being held accountable by a standards regime, misplaced association with Brexit (since everything must be about that). What puzzles me is why ones liek Rees-Mogg seem so personally loyal to Boris. It's far beyond backing his position and his bizarre rantings, they are still trying to portray a man who is cutting and running as a future leader.
I mean, let's ignore everything else we know about Boris and the Tory party for a moment. The Rees-Moggian position is that the party is in a dreadful mess right now, and going in the wrong direction, right? They need someone to help them win and to put them in the right direction.
Why would you select a person who is quitting Parliament, unnecessarily to boot, as being the person who you want as leader? Wouldn't you want someone strong enough to stand and fight?
Something used to cost £100. It now costs £110 due to inflation. Rishi Rich says that he will halve inflation. We are meant to feel grateful when the price increases to £115.50.
Get the price down to £105 if you want public gratitude, PM.
I see your point, but actually deflation is generally seen as an economically even worse problem than inflation as people defer spending if prices are expected to fall.
In general, price stability not dropping prices is the appropriate macroeconomic aim.
This is a point I have made about falling house prices and its impact on housebuilding. People like the idea that falling house prices and an increase in housebuilding could go together, but the reality is that when house prices are falling people are less likely to borrow large sums of money to buy premium new build houses, so there would be less demand for this type of housing, so the most probable outcome is that housebuilding also falls.
I think you've got it backwards.
We don't want a fall in prices to lead to an increase in construction.
We want an increase in construction to lead to a fall in prices.
Increased competition absolutely can lead to prices stabilising or falling. And if competition increases, then prices stabilise or fall, then housebuilding falls back, then it will be because the shortage of houses in the system has resolved. Although unless population growth stops entirely, there will always be a need for construction.
There was no let up in the production of various goods that have fallen in price, massively, over the decades.
Half the cost of building work is directly wages. That is half is bricks and roof tiles, half labour. Approximately. But the material themselves have labour inputs. And the materials for the materials.
Some guesses put the ultimate labour portion of a house at 70-80%.
Labour cost is a direct function, these days, of housing costs. The biggest cost for workers is their own housing!
So when house prices actually fall, for a period, labour costs will begin to trend down (assuming a competitive labour market). This in turn will make it cheaper to build houses.
In addition, the U.K. building industry is low productivity, compared to many other countries. Investment in non-exotic machinery - mini cranes and small diggers, say - could halve the work force on a house.
Its worth noting that half the building work cost of houses may be labour but that's not half the cost of the house.
An incredibly significant portion of the cost of housing is the cost of land, and almost all of the cost of land is planning permission.
An acre of farmland can cost £12-25k while an acre of land with planning permission for a house can be worth hundreds of thousands.
Eliminate that discrepancy and the cost of housing would collapse, without affecting labour costs. And as you say, if its cheaper to house people, then everything including labour becomes cheaper.
That is, ostensibly, Starmer’s headline policy. Whether he can deliver will be interesting to watch.
If he comes up with serious policies on this issue, I will hold my nose and vote Labour at the next election.
Careful. HYUFD might say you’re not a real Tory.
LOL.
One thing HYUFD is right about is that. I'm certainly a liberal who normally votes Tory. If I vote Labour at the next election it will only be the second time in my life, after voting Labour in 2001 in my first election.
The Tories should be the party of aspiration for people to have their own home.
If Starmer can get the importance of that but Sunak can't, what does it say about the state of today's Tory party?
I was going to offer Land Value Taxation as a policy here (good old Liberal idea).
The problem Sunak has is he has to balance the requirement of his core vote to maintain the status quo - his core of middle age and elderly northern and midlands home owners rather like the value of their asset continuing to rise which they can pass on (without IHT hopefully) to the children and grandchildren to provide the deposit for the next generation of home owners).
On the other side, he knows the longer term interests of the country and his Party are served by creating a new generation of home owners but he can't make houses affordable without causing existing values to drop which alienates his core.
That's not an easy circle to square.
It's impossible, which is why the Conservative Party will always cave to the interests of the already wealthy in the end. It's why the rumours of the abolition of IHT and revival of Help to Buy continue to swirl, and it also explains why they've already caved to their Southern Nimbies by junking housing targets for local authorities.
Today's Tories will always default to the elderly homeowner interest, trusting that they can return to power if they bring enough of them on side. What happens when the housing shortage means there aren't enough elderly homeowners left to outvote pissed-off renters is a problem for tomorrow's Tories to solve.
By then their children will have inherited of course (and even today by 39 most own property with a mortgage)
There aren't enough houses, therefore those that exist are too expensive. Inheritances will eventually bail some people out, but the numbers staggering under crippling rents into middle age will continue to increase. Eventually this will also undermine your party's support with the grey vote, as more of them end up having to work until they drop down dead to service rents.
No use bellyaching about the concreting of the countryside I'm afraid. If the Conservatives won't do it, eventually things will get so bad that voters will turn to somebody else who will.
There are if we cut immigration.
Most will have inherited by 60-65, so certainly wouldn't need to work beyond normal retirement age (having pensions already saved for too).
Voters across the South are already voting for NIMBY LDs and Greens and Independents because even the modest housebuilding proposed by former Tory controlled councils was too much. If Starmer tried to concrete all over the greenbelt there would be a revolution in the South
Something used to cost £100. It now costs £110 due to inflation. Rishi Rich says that he will halve inflation. We are meant to feel grateful when the price increases to £115.50.
Get the price down to £105 if you want public gratitude, PM.
I see your point, but actually deflation is generally seen as an economically even worse problem than inflation as people defer spending if prices are expected to fall.
In general, price stability not dropping prices is the appropriate macroeconomic aim.
This is a point I have made about falling house prices and its impact on housebuilding. People like the idea that falling house prices and an increase in housebuilding could go together, but the reality is that when house prices are falling people are less likely to borrow large sums of money to buy premium new build houses, so there would be less demand for this type of housing, so the most probable outcome is that housebuilding also falls.
I think you've got it backwards.
We don't want a fall in prices to lead to an increase in construction.
We want an increase in construction to lead to a fall in prices.
Increased competition absolutely can lead to prices stabilising or falling. And if competition increases, then prices stabilise or fall, then housebuilding falls back, then it will be because the shortage of houses in the system has resolved. Although unless population growth stops entirely, there will always be a need for construction.
There was no let up in the production of various goods that have fallen in price, massively, over the decades.
Half the cost of building work is directly wages. That is half is bricks and roof tiles, half labour. Approximately. But the material themselves have labour inputs. And the materials for the materials.
Some guesses put the ultimate labour portion of a house at 70-80%.
Labour cost is a direct function, these days, of housing costs. The biggest cost for workers is their own housing!
So when house prices actually fall, for a period, labour costs will begin to trend down (assuming a competitive labour market). This in turn will make it cheaper to build houses.
In addition, the U.K. building industry is low productivity, compared to many other countries. Investment in non-exotic machinery - mini cranes and small diggers, say - could halve the work force on a house.
Its worth noting that half the building work cost of houses may be labour but that's not half the cost of the house.
An incredibly significant portion of the cost of housing is the cost of land, and almost all of the cost of land is planning permission.
An acre of farmland can cost £12-25k while an acre of land with planning permission for a house can be worth hundreds of thousands.
Eliminate that discrepancy and the cost of housing would collapse, without affecting labour costs. And as you say, if its cheaper to house people, then everything including labour becomes cheaper.
That is, ostensibly, Starmer’s headline policy. Whether he can deliver will be interesting to watch.
If he comes up with serious policies on this issue, I will hold my nose and vote Labour at the next election.
Careful. HYUFD might say you’re not a real Tory.
LOL.
One thing HYUFD is right about is that. I'm certainly a liberal who normally votes Tory. If I vote Labour at the next election it will only be the second time in my life, after voting Labour in 2001 in my first election.
The Tories should be the party of aspiration for people to have their own home.
If Starmer can get the importance of that but Sunak can't, what does it say about the state of today's Tory party?
You are yes not a Tory and not a conservative, you are a libertarian who sometimes votes Conservative, as you have since 2005 but sometimes votes Labour as you did for Blair and likely will do for Starmer.
The Tories should be and are the party of aspiration but they also should be the party of conservatism and conservation of our beautiful countryside which you and Starmer want to concrete all over
Nobody wants to concrete all over the countryside.
Concreting over maybe an additional 1% of it is a different matter.
If we concreted over only the farmland in this country [not parks or wildlife etc] at the same density as housing in this country is, we'd have enough houses for more than one billion people.
We do not and will not have one billion people in this country. There is a need for some extra houses, but it'll be a tiny fraction of countryside not "all" of it.
More than a third of buy-to-let landlords who have mortgages on their properties are at risk of being pushed into the red amid soaring borrowing costs and stricter tax rules.
The average buy-to-let mortgage rate is now just over 6 per cent — if it hits 6.5 per cent, 44 per cent of mortgaged landlords will not be making enough from rent to cover their costs, according to the estate agency Hamptons. This would rise to 54 per cent if the average rate were to reach 7 per cent.
...
Landlords have benefited from years of cheap debt and low interest rates but higher borrowing costs now could wipe out their profits.
David Fell from Hamptons said: “With average interest rates so high the number of landlords entering loss-making territory increases fairly quickly. Given that higher-rate taxpayers cannot offset all their mortgage interest for tax, some will not be making any money at all.”
Good, take the houses back and people that actually need to live in them can have them instead
That's pretty bigoted, CHB. You think people who are tenants don't need anywhere to live?
Are you seriously arguing that the 5-10m in this country who can't qualify for a mortgage should all be living with their children in cardboard boxes under Vauxhall Bridge?
So instead of people living the properties, we now have… people living in the properties.
This will alter the housing crisis how, exactly?
As I pointed out, millions cannot qualify for a mortgage to access such a property as Owner Occupiers. Where will they live?
There is also the issue I have pointed out repeatedly that .. as per the English Housing Survey .. the PRS is occupied far more densely than the Owner Occupied segment, so you will be making more people homeless, and will make the housing crisis far worse.
I refer you to the figures for households with 2 or more spare bedrooms in the recent versions of the English Housing Survey, and how they are overwhelmingly concentrated in the OO sector.
Perhaps we need to be forcing such people to take a lodger.
In reality we need a larger PRS in this country, not a smaller one, as we have one of the smallest availabilities of rental property in Western Europe.
One phenomenon that I have seen in this policy area is that some people have fixed ideas, where they exhibit religious levels of certainty, and no amount of evidence, reasoning or real world experience will ever persuade them to change course, to the point where there is no point in even trying.
One such idea is that 'buy to let landlords are the cause of high rents' and another is 'the planning system is the cause of the housing crisis'.
These ideas are largely wrong, but they frequently end up forming the basis of government policy, because they are so prevalent.
The planning system 100% is the cause of the housing crisis.
Land with planning permission can be worth 650x land without it.
If planning permission is is 99.84% of the cost of land, and the cost of land is the largest cost of housing, then the planning system is by far the largest cost of housing.
You are completely deluded. And incidently utterly ignorant oif hat planning law is for and how it works.
Thankfully you are so far off the wall on this that no one will take you seriously.
There's so many named, recent official sources, which is new.
Take that article, for instance.
"Jim Shell, a former Chief Scientist of the Space Innovation and Development Center at Air Force Space Command, wrote on LinkedIn Monday in support of his former colleague Grusch.
'I will vouch for the integrity of Dave Grusch! Getting to the bottom of this is elusive and problematic, to say the least,' Shell wrote. 'I will assert no matter the conclusion of extraterrestrial materials or not, the DoD and IC security apparatus is in trouble and unwitting accomplices are fostering an abusive system."
I posted a very different take yesterday, cannot find it now. When you look deeper the guy behind the Skinwalker ranch nonsense is heavily implicated. Lots of nuts who believe in UAPs are now in congress and giving it an air off ‘official’ approval. There is nothing. No evidence. Just whistleblowers out to make a name and then money. That’s the grift here. Same as Luis Elizondo and others before him. It’s just about conceivable that China created Covid in a lab. It’s conceivable that the CIA were involved in the JFK assassination. But covering up all these supposed alien craft and bodies for all this time? Nope.
More than a third of buy-to-let landlords who have mortgages on their properties are at risk of being pushed into the red amid soaring borrowing costs and stricter tax rules.
The average buy-to-let mortgage rate is now just over 6 per cent — if it hits 6.5 per cent, 44 per cent of mortgaged landlords will not be making enough from rent to cover their costs, according to the estate agency Hamptons. This would rise to 54 per cent if the average rate were to reach 7 per cent.
...
Landlords have benefited from years of cheap debt and low interest rates but higher borrowing costs now could wipe out their profits.
David Fell from Hamptons said: “With average interest rates so high the number of landlords entering loss-making territory increases fairly quickly. Given that higher-rate taxpayers cannot offset all their mortgage interest for tax, some will not be making any money at all.”
Good, take the houses back and people that actually need to live in them can have them instead
That's pretty bigoted, CHB. You think people who are tenants don't need anywhere to live?
Are you seriously arguing that the 5-10m in this country who can't qualify for a mortgage should all be living with their children in cardboard boxes under Vauxhall Bridge?
So instead of people living the properties, we now have… people living in the properties.
This will alter the housing crisis how, exactly?
As I pointed out, millions cannot qualify for a mortgage to access such a property as Owner Occupiers. Where will they live?
There is also the issue I have pointed out repeatedly that .. as per the English Housing Survey .. the PRS is occupied far more densely than the Owner Occupied segment, so you will be making more people homeless, and will make the housing crisis far worse.
I refer you to the figures for households with 2 or more spare bedrooms in the recent versions of the English Housing Survey, and how they are overwhelmingly concentrated in the OO sector.
Perhaps we need to be forcing such people to take a lodger.
In reality we need a larger PRS in this country, not a smaller one, as we have one of the smallest availabilities of rental property in Western Europe.
Where will they live? What about in social housing? A big contributor to the housing crisis is the loss of social housing. Build more of that: it helps the housing crisis and cuts councils bills for housing benefit.
Some of these Tories batting for Boris are just fucking bonkers. Cant they not read the runes?
You'll be led behind the stadium with all the rest of us wokerati tofu eating liberal Remainer traitors when Bozzi re-places that World King crown on his outrageous blonde bonce, I reckon sometime in late 2024.
Comments
Customers mostly prefer humans, although some like machines better. Staff loathe the automated tills, not just because these tills put of them out of a job but because they get all the aggravation from customers when the machines don't work properly. Automated tills are probably a net cost to supermarkets when you factor in high maintenance cost and higher levels of theft. But supermarkets persevere with them because they hope they will improve later.
Do you agree that its thoroughly inappropriate that a renter can pay more in rent than an owner occupier pays for a mortgage for the same property?
Indeed how can it ever be right that a tenants rent pays for a landlord's buy to let mortgage?
If a tenant can afford rent, they can afford a mortgage.
The private rented sector should exist, but in a healthy economy rent should be less than a mortgage with capital repayments, not more than it.
I absolutely prefer the machines and the anecdotal evidence from whenever I go to the supermarket is the overwhelming majority of customers do too as far more voluntarily choose to go to the machines than to queue at the staffed tills.
Put it on the market at the recommended price for a quick sale. No viewings at all. Not even time wasters. Slashed the price and got just 2 viewings. One made a silly offer and as we want to shift it and things don't look good we have accepted. The estate agent recommended we let it out but that would have involved quite a bit of expense updating it. They are recommending to all their sellers to let. They told me they had whole weekends without a single inquiry on any house purchase. Our buyers are buying because their rent is being hiked.
According to the estate agent the selling market is dead and the renting market is rampant.
No offence, but that sounds really positive news. 👍
The ability to do it all online works for so many - the supermarkets have responded accordingly - the cafes have gone, the hot chicken and sandwich outlets have gone (sushi is in though). The tills are gone - the residual staff have to manage the technology (not always reliable) which is mainly adding new till rolls.
The very local shop will survive for now (though under threat from the likes of Gorillaz). The notion if you want food from anywhere you can get it from Deliveroo, Just Eat or whoever is so simple and the mark up on the prices for the delivery has been lost in the tsunami of inflation.
Hence the old saw - “Pay your own mortgage or someone else’s”
The differential has increased massively, due to major disfunction in the housing market.
Of course renters want to pay lower rent and buyers want to pay less to buy. But the homes exist. Indeed, with the number of second homes out there, you could argue that there is an excess.
In many countries or cities around the world its cheaper to rent than buy.
That someone's rent can pay for someone else's mortgage is a function of a broken economy.
And I am happy with what we will get for it. We think they will be getting a real bargain, because we don't want to hold onto it. We just have our fingers crossed their mortgage doesn't fall through, because I think they are right on the limit.
https://thehill.com/opinion/4038159-stunning-ufo-crash-retrieval-allegations-deemed-credible-urgent/
"Some of those individuals appear to have spoken in detail with author and political commentator Michael Shellenberger.
As Shellenberger writes, numerous current and former officials confirmed the outlines of Grusch’s explosive allegations."
There are undoubtedly those who would prefer to have their shopping scanned by a third party - there are a susprisingly large number of elderly people who are scared of or don't trust the technology and prefer the traditional checkout.
I find that more the case at the smaller local shops where people go in every day for a few things rather than do a concentrated weekly or monthly shop.
Any system operating at 99% capacity is at high risk of failing, especially when demand is escalating.
The European average is for 10% of homes to be empty, which is far healthier than 99% being occupied. It allows people to choose not to go into homes that are too expensive, or neglected etc
We need about 3 million extra homes in this country to have enough empty homes to return to a healthy ratio.
Not to mention many in substandard “hotels” waiting for a council flat/house.
We have 8 million fewer properties than France and a similar population.
Limiting housing is institutionally racist, by the way.
* rich
* energetic
* audacious
* charismatic
* sociopathic
* have no sense of shame
* easily led
* getting advice from smart people
The problem is that that last one is kind of random, and if you end up surrounded by aging, increasingly reactionary rich people who did too much cocaine in the 90s you end up believing their bullshit, but also acting on it.
Also throwing shit at the wall and seeing what sticks has been the essence of his management style from the start.
One such idea is that 'buy to let landlords are the cause of high rents' and another is 'the planning system is the cause of the housing crisis'.
These ideas are largely wrong, but they frequently end up forming the basis of government policy, because they are so prevalent.
Half the packets were out of date, some by several months. I’m pretty sure last time I stocked up, many were also out of date. It did occur to me that I might be the only customer who buys them, every couple of months. Obviously, I buy the ones with the longest dates.
I pointed out the stale stock to the checkout lady and she placed to burden back onto me to tell customer services on my way out.
There was a big queue, so I just left.
I don’t want to have to check sell by dates on every item I buy, like you expect to have to do in a run down corner shop.
If only Aldi stocked decent seeded/malted bread mix…
Whether he can deliver will be interesting to watch.
I could get on board with the concept of requiring a private landlord who sells their property to first offer it to buyers who will be using it as their principal residence, and if some time passes without an offer to then be able to widen the net. No idea how you police that sort of system though.
Land with planning permission can be worth 650x land without it.
If planning permission is is 99.84% of the cost of land, and the cost of land is the largest cost of housing, then the planning system is by far the largest cost of housing.
With the GFC, all that changed - I don't know now what level of deposit you would require to put down (10%?) so for one of @HYUFD's flats, that would be £55k to £60k. That's a lot of money - yes, I know your City type can afford it but culturally they can move more quickly into a rental property than "saving up" for a few months or a year to put a deposit down.
The levels of deposits are so high renting is for many younger people the only option.
I suppose the Government could become a mortgage lender and offer 0% deposits on house purchases - might be one way to re-inflate the sagging Conservative vote.
Who is the sector would see Twitter as the most exciting place to work ?
One thing HYUFD is right about is that. I'm certainly a liberal who normally votes Tory. If I vote Labour at the next election it will only be the second time in my life, after voting Labour in 2001 in my first election.
The Tories should be the party of aspiration for people to have their own home.
If Starmer can get the importance of that but Sunak can't, what does it say about the state of today's Tory party?
Some absolutely bananas descriptions of the Presidential Records Act are spreading on pro-Trump Twitter.
This is the PRA equivalent of someone casually explaining that a red light means you are allowed to drive through the intersection.
https://twitter.com/ddale8/status/1667721813890146304
We should have that in this country for left-hand turns.
Claiming the PRA says presidential records belong to an ex-president is a complete reversal of reality.
https://twitter.com/ddale8/status/1667725180712435713
It should hardly need stating, but here it is, in the Act:
The United States shall reserve and retain complete ownership, possession, and control of Presidential records; and such records shall be administered in accordance with the provisions of this chapter.
The reduction in staff numbers that a supermarket can achieve with automated tills, with the staff remaining concentrating on keeping the shelves stocked, surely pays for the machines and increased theft by a wide margin. Often a supermarket will have one staff member (or half a staff member) covering over a dozen automated tills. The saving in staff costs must be immense.
Perhaps, he says controversially, this is one of the overlooked benefits of Employer's National Insurance, in that it increases staff costs and so encourages investment in automation.
Personally I much prefer automated tills.. I feel under less pressure to rush because there isn't a queue directly behind me. The automated till doesn't judge me if I've felt the need to buy several bars of chocolate. And checkout scanning is a bullshit job, as the opening to Shaun of the Dead so brilliantly captures.
Looks pretty damning for the wet market hypothesis
It needs to be put out of its misery.
Right turn on red rules depend where you are in the States -
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turn_on_red#:~:text=All 50 states, the District,controlled by dedicated traffic lights.
"The Kyiv Independent
@KyivIndependent
⚡️Ukrainian military reports liberating Blahodatne village in Donetsk Oblast.
Ukraine's Armed Forces' 68th separate brigade reported liberating Blahodatne and posted a video showing the Ukrainian flag being raised in the village."
https://twitter.com/KyivIndependent/status/1667860108296986625
Old fashioned broadcasters and publishers have to think about this all the time. New style media, being an unregulated wild west, don't.
I think that's reasonable enough to summarise as what I said.
Besides I was mostly joking. Except that I seriously think we should have that in this country for left hand turns (again except for where prohibited), that I'm completely serious about.
The problem Sunak has is he has to balance the requirement of his core vote to maintain the status quo - his core of middle age and elderly northern and midlands home owners rather like the value of their asset continuing to rise which they can pass on (without IHT hopefully) to the children and grandchildren to provide the deposit for the next generation of home owners).
On the other side, he knows the longer term interests of the country and his Party are served by creating a new generation of home owners but he can't make houses affordable without causing existing values to drop which alienates his core.
That's not an easy circle to square.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Kamehameha_I_Day
All this is different from a few decades ago, when it would be one old man living near Area 51.
In an essay for The Oxford Myth (1988), a book edited by his sister Rachel, Johnson advised aspiring student politicians to assemble “a disciplined and deluded collection of stooges” to get out the vote. “Lonely girls from the women’s colleges” who “back their largely male candidates with a porky decisiveness” were particularly useful, he wrote. “For these young women, machine politics offers human friction and warmth.” Reading this, you realise why almost all Union presidents who become Tory politicians are men. (Thatcher’s domain was OUCA, where she was president in 1946.)
Johnson added: “The tragedy of the stooge is that . . . he wants so much to believe that his relationship with the candidate is special that he shuts out the truth. The terrible art of the candidate is to coddle the self-deception of the stooge.”
https://www.ft.com/content/85fc694c-9222-11e9-b7ea-60e35ef678d2
None of this should be unexpected.
The Tories should be and are the party of aspiration but they also should be the party of conservatism and conservation of our beautiful countryside which you and Starmer want to concrete all over
Today's Tories will always default to the elderly homeowner interest, trusting that they can return to power if they bring enough of them on side. What happens when the housing shortage means there aren't enough elderly homeowners left to outvote pissed-off renters is a problem for tomorrow's Tories to solve.
Germans beat Tesla to autonomous L3 driving in the Golden State
Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz, my friends all have Teslas...
https://www.theregister.com/2023/06/09/mercedes_california_tesla/
Elon Musk fans, please explain.
Self service is awful for big loads, and a greater chance of going wrong, and needing non existent help.
Self service only outlets (none here in stone age north) sound awful.
There's so many named, recent official sources, which is new.
Take that article, for instance.
"Jim Shell, a former Chief Scientist of the Space Innovation and Development Center at Air Force Space Command, wrote on LinkedIn Monday in support of his former colleague Grusch.
'I will vouch for the integrity of Dave Grusch! Getting to the bottom of this is elusive and problematic, to say the least,' Shell wrote. 'I will assert no matter the conclusion of extraterrestrial materials or not, the DoD and IC security apparatus is in trouble and unwitting accomplices are fostering an abusive system."
PERUN 20230611: The race for long-range fires, Is the US army outranged? - missiles, cannons & Long-range precision. Duration: 67mins
Since 2014 there were planning permissions issued for around 300,000 houses per year, a significant increase from the previous years. But the amount of houses actually built by the private housebuilding industry has remained constant at around 150,000 per year since the mid 1970s. The problem is that the market for new builds is ultimately quite limited and there are other limitations that come in to play, IE capacity in the construction industry. I think it is unlikely that the planning system is even a significant cause of the housing crisis - the fundamental cause is over reliance on the private housebuilding industry to deliver new housing, which is an ideological legacy of Thatcherism that is only now being properly contemplated and understood.
No use bellyaching about the concreting of the countryside I'm afraid. If the Conservatives won't do it, eventually things will get so bad that voters will turn to somebody else who will.
NEW THREAD
Eco-socialism.
Neither party even pretends to have solutions to the main problems of slow growth and inter-generational unfairness that the country faces.
And Nichola Sturgeons been nicked!! It's all kicking off!
As and when there is a real story it isn't going to be confined to websites no-one has heard of. There is a fortune out there for real scientists and accurate journalists, and they will get it if they can.
The rest is noise.
I mean, let's ignore everything else we know about Boris and the Tory party for a moment. The Rees-Moggian position is that the party is in a dreadful mess right now, and going in the wrong direction, right? They need someone to help them win and to put them in the right direction.
Why would you select a person who is quitting Parliament, unnecessarily to boot, as being the person who you want as leader? Wouldn't you want someone strong enough to stand and fight?
NEW THREAD
Most will have inherited by 60-65, so certainly wouldn't need to work beyond normal retirement age (having pensions already saved for too).
Voters across the South are already voting for NIMBY LDs and Greens and Independents because even the modest housebuilding proposed by former Tory controlled councils was too much. If Starmer tried to concrete all over the greenbelt there would be a revolution in the South
Concreting over maybe an additional 1% of it is a different matter.
If we concreted over only the farmland in this country [not parks or wildlife etc] at the same density as housing in this country is, we'd have enough houses for more than one billion people.
We do not and will not have one billion people in this country. There is a need for some extra houses, but it'll be a tiny fraction of countryside not "all" of it.
Thankfully you are so far off the wall on this that no one will take you seriously.
There is nothing. No evidence. Just whistleblowers out to make a name and then money. That’s the grift here. Same as Luis Elizondo and others before him.
It’s just about conceivable that China created Covid in a lab. It’s conceivable that the CIA were involved in the JFK assassination. But covering up all these supposed alien craft and bodies for all this time?
Nope.