I spoke to a woman yesterday who is at her wits end: Her husband works full-time in a low-pay job, she has been does not work but looks after their four children, all under 10.
They privately rent a 3-bed house and have just been told by the letting agent that their rent is going up by 41% (!) in March. Reason? - BTL "owner's mortgage has gone up". There's nothing else locally they can move to for any less rent (there are hardly any 3-bed homes for rent locally). They are on the council housing register but would need to become actually homeless to stand any chance of getting anything, then it could be B&B for a long-stretch.
They receive UC support which was covering their rent but that's capped by the Local Housing Allowance at about 75% of their new rent. They were already struggling on the old rent and regularly borrowing from family mid-month, paying back when they got paid... and repeat. Rent, Council Tax, Electricity, Gas, Food, Transport - this is where all their money goes.
What kind of messed-up country have we become where:
1) Taxpayers have to subsidise a traditional working family to live? 2) Those subsidies are set based on 'local rent levels' which are way below any actual comparable local rents?
We are seeing this every week now: working families, both tenants and mortgaged homeowners, who have hit the point where they just cannot make sums add up.
Anyone who thinks we're about to hit a feel-good period is a bit deluded imo.
We need a huge increase in housebuilding and a big hike in the minimum wage - why the f*ck are taxpayers subsidising low-pay employers and BTL landlords?
Ultimately, no social model will turn one low salary into a comfortable standard of living for six humans.
That's kinda what I was thinking. Basically is someone on minimum wage with a non working wife really expecting to have enough money for 4 kids? What they are unhappy about is that we are not subsidising them sufficiently to give them the standard of living they think they are entitled to. Well, actually, they aren't.
"the standard of living they think they are entitled to" = "housed, warm and fed", in this case.
Maybe you're right though. Why did they have four children, how selfish of them. And yet, don't we have a demographic crisis? Don't we need more children?
The couple I week or two ago, contemplating selling house and trying to rent because they can't afford the mortgage now - both working, both on minimum wage - they only had two children.
That's the problem with meritocracy. People deserve a decent life even if the system decides them to have little merit.
Define 'decent'.
How much should people be protected from their own decisions? If I go out and waste money; become penniless through drink, drugs or gambling, do I personally deserve the same lifestyle as someone who has been careful and made better decisions? Sure, the welfare system should ensure I can *live*, but the same lifestyle?
On the other hand, a friend of mine was the first in her family to go to uni, yet soon afterwards was struck down by a life-limiting illness. She made no decisions that contributed to her illness. Does she deserve the same lifestyle as someone who continuously makes bad decisions?
If you say 'yes' to both of these, then I reckon the general public would disagree.
And this opens a hornet's nest...
I would suggest that a rented 3 bedroom property between 6 is not unreasonable.
When only one of them works? People's poor decisions should not be rewarded. I ensured I was earning more than 40k (in today's money) and had my own home before we had our first.
FFS just listen to yourself.
Next time I see the woman I'll suggest she gets her husband to earn £40k+. I doubt they had considered that idea.
(Btw In this instance the woman is not currently able to work; she had been medically assessed as such by the DWP and is receiving treatment.)
So why did they have four kids? How many kids did they already have when they started having other people subsidize their lives?
Perhaps they had 4 kids before their circumstances changed. There but for the grace of God go any of us.
You can be pretty sure if that was the case, the journalist would have mentioned that in the sob story.
What journalist?
I mean... I written a couple of thread headers, does that qualify me?
Even in a deep crisis- with voters turning away from them- it’s the Conservative party and the media that remain mighty while a Labour leadership- miles ahead in polls- ‘caves in’ again:
Why, oh why, do Labour do this? If they're going to drop it, do it quietly. Terrible message management.
Labour (and for that matter the Tories too) know how skint the Treasury is and how run down public services are. Councils, Schools, Universities, NHS, Home Office, Criminal Justice system, Armed Forces, etc are all knackered.
Whoever wins the election knows that they will have to sort it out. The Tories talk about tax cuts because they know they won't have to deal with the consequences. Starmer and Reeves don't want to promise spending that they cannot deliver.
Labour need to make the case for public *investment*. Every reputable economist on earth knows that British lack of capital investment is a major impediment to growth.
This particular policy was popular with Labour voters. It’s not obvious - apart from cowardice - why Labour have junked it.
The irony is that there's an increasing consensus, even on the right, that low investment is costing Britain's economy. It was also popular amongst many at the CBI.
A lot of businessmen and economists are very worried about Britain's future, without either greater private and public investment or return to Europe.
Guardian are confirming the 28 billion pledge is being ditched . Together with Reeves pathetic defence of not bringing back the bankers bonus cap it’s been a woeful day for Labour .
At the moment the biggest danger to a Labour GE win is Labour!
They’re dropping a hugely popular policy because they’re terrified of Tory attacks . Utterly pathetic.
Even in a deep crisis- with voters turning away from them- it’s the Conservative party and the media that remain mighty while a Labour leadership- miles ahead in polls- ‘caves in’ again:
Why, oh why, do Labour do this? If they're going to drop it, do it quietly. Terrible message management.
Is Ed Miliband going to resign in protest
Nah. He's put in the hard yards and stuck it out through the long years of opposition, and may return to the Cabinet after a 14 year gap, no sense throwing that away now.
I do wonder how many of the current Cabinet, still young and with only a year or so of Cabinet under their belt, feeling aggrieved that they are approaching their prime just as they enter opposition, will stick it out for 5-10 years to try to get another go at a top job.
Far better to stay and fight his corner (which reportedly he is doing) before the election.
I spoke to a woman yesterday who is at her wits end: Her husband works full-time in a low-pay job, she has been does not work but looks after their four children, all under 10.
They privately rent a 3-bed house and have just been told by the letting agent that their rent is going up by 41% (!) in March. Reason? - BTL "owner's mortgage has gone up". There's nothing else locally they can move to for any less rent (there are hardly any 3-bed homes for rent locally). They are on the council housing register but would need to become actually homeless to stand any chance of getting anything, then it could be B&B for a long-stretch.
They receive UC support which was covering their rent but that's capped by the Local Housing Allowance at about 75% of their new rent. They were already struggling on the old rent and regularly borrowing from family mid-month, paying back when they got paid... and repeat. Rent, Council Tax, Electricity, Gas, Food, Transport - this is where all their money goes.
What kind of messed-up country have we become where:
1) Taxpayers have to subsidise a traditional working family to live? 2) Those subsidies are set based on 'local rent levels' which are way below any actual comparable local rents?
We are seeing this every week now: working families, both tenants and mortgaged homeowners, who have hit the point where they just cannot make sums add up.
Anyone who thinks we're about to hit a feel-good period is a bit deluded imo.
We need a huge increase in housebuilding and a big hike in the minimum wage - why the f*ck are taxpayers subsidising low-pay employers and BTL landlords?
Ultimately, no social model will turn one low salary into a comfortable standard of living for six humans.
That's kinda what I was thinking. Basically is someone on minimum wage with a non working wife really expecting to have enough money for 4 kids? What they are unhappy about is that we are not subsidising them sufficiently to give them the standard of living they think they are entitled to. Well, actually, they aren't.
"the standard of living they think they are entitled to" = "housed, warm and fed", in this case.
Maybe you're right though. Why did they have four children, how selfish of them. And yet, don't we have a demographic crisis? Don't we need more children?
The couple I week or two ago, contemplating selling house and trying to rent because they can't afford the mortgage now - both working, both on minimum wage - they only had two children.
That's the problem with meritocracy. People deserve a decent life even if the system decides them to have little merit.
Define 'decent'.
How much should people be protected from their own decisions? If I go out and waste money; become penniless through drink, drugs or gambling, do I personally deserve the same lifestyle as someone who has been careful and made better decisions? Sure, the welfare system should ensure I can *live*, but the same lifestyle?
On the other hand, a friend of mine was the first in her family to go to uni, yet soon afterwards was struck down by a life-limiting illness. She made no decisions that contributed to her illness. Does she deserve the same lifestyle as someone who continuously makes bad decisions?
If you say 'yes' to both of these, then I reckon the general public would disagree.
And this opens a hornet's nest...
I would suggest that a rented 3 bedroom property between 6 is not unreasonable.
When only one of them works? People's poor decisions should not be rewarded. I ensured I was earning more than 40k (in today's money) and had my own home before we had our first.
FFS just listen to yourself.
Next time I see the woman I'll suggest she gets her husband to earn £40k+. I doubt they had considered that idea.
(Btw In this instance the woman is not currently able to work; she had been medically assessed as such by the DWP and is receiving treatment.)
So why did they have four kids? How many kids did they already have when they started having other people subsidize their lives?
Perhaps they had 4 kids before their circumstances changed. There but for the grace of God go any of us.
You can be pretty sure if that was the case, the journalist would have mentioned that in the sob story.
What journalist?
I mean... I written a couple of thread headers, does that qualify me?
Even in a deep crisis- with voters turning away from them- it’s the Conservative party and the media that remain mighty while a Labour leadership- miles ahead in polls- ‘caves in’ again:
Why, oh why, do Labour do this? If they're going to drop it, do it quietly. Terrible message management.
Labour (and for that matter the Tories too) know how skint the Treasury is and how run down public services are. Councils, Schools, Universities, NHS, Home Office, Criminal Justice system, Armed Forces, etc are all knackered.
Whoever wins the election knows that they will have to sort it out. The Tories talk about tax cuts because they know they won't have to deal with the consequences. Starmer and Reeves don't want to promise spending that they cannot deliver.
Labour need to make the case for public *investment*. Every reputable economist on earth knows that British lack of capital investment is a major impediment to growth.
This particular policy was popular with Labour voters. It’s not obvious - apart from cowardice - why Labour have junked it.
Yes but as I pointed out there are many other areas crying out for public sector investment.
This year we will see Councils, Universities, Social Care, etc etc at risk of collapse.
Starmer and Reeves are right not to make hostages to fortune, and I am definitely in favour of Green policies.
Guardian are confirming the 28 billion pledge is being ditched . Together with Reeves pathetic defence of not bringing back the bankers bonus cap it’s been a woeful day for Labour .
At the moment the biggest danger to a Labour GE win is Labour!
They’re dropping a hugely popular policy because they’re terrified of Tory attacks . Utterly pathetic.
I think this is wrong economically as well as from a climate change perspective. Well targeted* investment would very likely see a positive return.
(*OK, that’s seriously begging the question.)
Pathetic by Keir.
This is his most egregious climb-down to date, and it comes because he simply doesn’t have the political cojones to defend public investment.
Contrast with Biden.
Yes indeed. There’s a popular, patriotic case to be made - to be contrasted with what looks like the grotesque running down of public services by the Tories - but Keir is simply too frit.
The “strategy” here is to avoid going into an election offering tax rises, even as the Tories pursue a scorched earth strategy.
My hard work out here in the east is making me money. I have sums to invest
But where? My sense is that the AI/tech boom has a long way to go yet, and that it’s hard to go wrong with the Magnificent Seven - Google, Amazon, Nvidia, MS, etc
Even if there’s a war the tech companies will be crucial, if Trump wins I can’t see that harming US tech either. I know these shares have already risen a lot but I see them rising further for quite a while
Am i wrong?
Frequently.
Look where the FAANGS were last year. Then the year before that. They are up and down faster than a bookers drawers.
Buy a diversified portfolio and hold it for the long term. You are closer to retirement than you like to believe.
Or, better still, try to outwit the market and dispose of all your extra cash that way. Saves spending it.
Seriously, Stillwaters is right.
Invest in OhNotNowCoin now! Market goes wild! Everyone ditches Doge coin despite Musk! One OhNotNowCoin is worth 1/10000000th of a ZoidCoin. Which is x8 furloughs of a JrmCoin. Which is easily convertible to shillings at only 95% rates via OhNotNowCoinExchange.com...
I spoke to a woman yesterday who is at her wits end: Her husband works full-time in a low-pay job, she has been does not work but looks after their four children, all under 10.
They privately rent a 3-bed house and have just been told by the letting agent that their rent is going up by 41% (!) in March. Reason? - BTL "owner's mortgage has gone up". There's nothing else locally they can move to for any less rent (there are hardly any 3-bed homes for rent locally). They are on the council housing register but would need to become actually homeless to stand any chance of getting anything, then it could be B&B for a long-stretch.
They receive UC support which was covering their rent but that's capped by the Local Housing Allowance at about 75% of their new rent. They were already struggling on the old rent and regularly borrowing from family mid-month, paying back when they got paid... and repeat. Rent, Council Tax, Electricity, Gas, Food, Transport - this is where all their money goes.
What kind of messed-up country have we become where:
1) Taxpayers have to subsidise a traditional working family to live? 2) Those subsidies are set based on 'local rent levels' which are way below any actual comparable local rents?
We are seeing this every week now: working families, both tenants and mortgaged homeowners, who have hit the point where they just cannot make sums add up.
Anyone who thinks we're about to hit a feel-good period is a bit deluded imo.
We need a huge increase in housebuilding and a big hike in the minimum wage - why the f*ck are taxpayers subsidising low-pay employers and BTL landlords?
Ultimately, no social model will turn one low salary into a comfortable standard of living for six humans.
That's kinda what I was thinking. Basically is someone on minimum wage with a non working wife really expecting to have enough money for 4 kids? What they are unhappy about is that we are not subsidising them sufficiently to give them the standard of living they think they are entitled to. Well, actually, they aren't.
"the standard of living they think they are entitled to" = "housed, warm and fed", in this case.
Maybe you're right though. Why did they have four children, how selfish of them. And yet, don't we have a demographic crisis? Don't we need more children?
The couple I week or two ago, contemplating selling house and trying to rent because they can't afford the mortgage now - both working, both on minimum wage - they only had two children.
That's the problem with meritocracy. People deserve a decent life even if the system decides them to have little merit.
Define 'decent'.
How much should people be protected from their own decisions? If I go out and waste money; become penniless through drink, drugs or gambling, do I personally deserve the same lifestyle as someone who has been careful and made better decisions? Sure, the welfare system should ensure I can *live*, but the same lifestyle?
On the other hand, a friend of mine was the first in her family to go to uni, yet soon afterwards was struck down by a life-limiting illness. She made no decisions that contributed to her illness. Does she deserve the same lifestyle as someone who continuously makes bad decisions?
If you say 'yes' to both of these, then I reckon the general public would disagree.
And this opens a hornet's nest...
I would suggest that a rented 3 bedroom property between 6 is not unreasonable.
When only one of them works? People's poor decisions should not be rewarded. I ensured I was earning more than 40k (in today's money) and had my own home before we had our first.
FFS just listen to yourself.
Next time I see the woman I'll suggest she gets her husband to earn £40k+. I doubt they had considered that idea.
(Btw In this instance the woman is not currently able to work; she had been medically assessed as such by the DWP and is receiving treatment.)
So why did they have four kids? How many kids did they already have when they started having other people subsidize their lives?
Perhaps they had 4 kids before their circumstances changed. There but for the grace of God go any of us.
You can be pretty sure if that was the case, the journalist would have mentioned that in the sob story.
What journalist?
I mean... I written a couple of thread headers, does that qualify me?
Even in a deep crisis- with voters turning away from them- it’s the Conservative party and the media that remain mighty while a Labour leadership- miles ahead in polls- ‘caves in’ again:
Why, oh why, do Labour do this? If they're going to drop it, do it quietly. Terrible message management.
Labour (and for that matter the Tories too) know how skint the Treasury is and how run down public services are. Councils, Schools, Universities, NHS, Home Office, Criminal Justice system, Armed Forces, etc are all knackered.
Whoever wins the election knows that they will have to sort it out. The Tories talk about tax cuts because they know they won't have to deal with the consequences. Starmer and Reeves don't want to promise spending that they cannot deliver.
If only Labour had opposed lockdown, the Treasury wouldn't be so skint , nor would public services be so knackered, and sure some more people would have died of natural causes but they now wouldn't be on waiting lists or demanding a pension, dead people don't wait for anything or have any demands.
Our civil liberties would have prevailed and education wouldn't have been trashed on the altar of halting a natural disease.
I like a lot of what you post Barty, but you do often fail to keep a sense of proportion about these things.
The Tories have been trashing education for nearly 14 years, they'd have managed to trash it perfectly well with or without lockdowns.
Actually interestingly if you look at the GCSE grades gap for disadvantaged pupils, that has now widened to the worst its been in a decade following the pandemic, which is quite frankly unsurprising. Well off pupils with resources and parents at home who care about their kids education could better cope with home learning and catch up with what they missed at school. Disadvantaged pupils for whom their parents may not know the materials the schools teach themselves and many of whom sadly their teacher is the only adult they may ever come across who values education could much more easily slip through the cracks.
However what that data implies is that a decade ago the situation was worse. Indeed it was. Indeed the narrowest the gap had got in recent years was the year . . . 2019/20.
I would what could have happened in 2020 that took us from the narrowest gap in recent memory, to the worst in a decade.
I spoke to a woman yesterday who is at her wits end: Her husband works full-time in a low-pay job, she has been does not work but looks after their four children, all under 10.
They privately rent a 3-bed house and have just been told by the letting agent that their rent is going up by 41% (!) in March. Reason? - BTL "owner's mortgage has gone up". There's nothing else locally they can move to for any less rent (there are hardly any 3-bed homes for rent locally). They are on the council housing register but would need to become actually homeless to stand any chance of getting anything, then it could be B&B for a long-stretch.
They receive UC support which was covering their rent but that's capped by the Local Housing Allowance at about 75% of their new rent. They were already struggling on the old rent and regularly borrowing from family mid-month, paying back when they got paid... and repeat. Rent, Council Tax, Electricity, Gas, Food, Transport - this is where all their money goes.
What kind of messed-up country have we become where:
1) Taxpayers have to subsidise a traditional working family to live? 2) Those subsidies are set based on 'local rent levels' which are way below any actual comparable local rents?
We are seeing this every week now: working families, both tenants and mortgaged homeowners, who have hit the point where they just cannot make sums add up.
Anyone who thinks we're about to hit a feel-good period is a bit deluded imo.
We need a huge increase in housebuilding and a big hike in the minimum wage - why the f*ck are taxpayers subsidising low-pay employers and BTL landlords?
Ultimately, no social model will turn one low salary into a comfortable standard of living for six humans.
That's kinda what I was thinking. Basically is someone on minimum wage with a non working wife really expecting to have enough money for 4 kids? What they are unhappy about is that we are not subsidising them sufficiently to give them the standard of living they think they are entitled to. Well, actually, they aren't.
"the standard of living they think they are entitled to" = "housed, warm and fed", in this case.
Maybe you're right though. Why did they have four children, how selfish of them. And yet, don't we have a demographic crisis? Don't we need more children?
The couple I week or two ago, contemplating selling house and trying to rent because they can't afford the mortgage now - both working, both on minimum wage - they only had two children.
That's the problem with meritocracy. People deserve a decent life even if the system decides them to have little merit.
Define 'decent'.
How much should people be protected from their own decisions? If I go out and waste money; become penniless through drink, drugs or gambling, do I personally deserve the same lifestyle as someone who has been careful and made better decisions? Sure, the welfare system should ensure I can *live*, but the same lifestyle?
On the other hand, a friend of mine was the first in her family to go to uni, yet soon afterwards was struck down by a life-limiting illness. She made no decisions that contributed to her illness. Does she deserve the same lifestyle as someone who continuously makes bad decisions?
If you say 'yes' to both of these, then I reckon the general public would disagree.
And this opens a hornet's nest...
I would suggest that a rented 3 bedroom property between 6 is not unreasonable.
When only one of them works? People's poor decisions should not be rewarded. I ensured I was earning more than 40k (in today's money) and had my own home before we had our first.
FFS just listen to yourself.
Next time I see the woman I'll suggest she gets her husband to earn £40k+. I doubt they had considered that idea.
(Btw In this instance the woman is not currently able to work; she had been medically assessed as such by the DWP and is receiving treatment.)
So why did they have four kids? How many kids did they already have when they started having other people subsidize their lives?
Perhaps they had 4 kids before their circumstances changed. There but for the grace of God go any of us.
You can be pretty sure if that was the case, the journalist would have mentioned that in the sob story.
What journalist?
I mean... I written a couple of thread headers, does that qualify me?
Even in a deep crisis- with voters turning away from them- it’s the Conservative party and the media that remain mighty while a Labour leadership- miles ahead in polls- ‘caves in’ again:
Why, oh why, do Labour do this? If they're going to drop it, do it quietly. Terrible message management.
Labour (and for that matter the Tories too) know how skint the Treasury is and how run down public services are. Councils, Schools, Universities, NHS, Home Office, Criminal Justice system, Armed Forces, etc are all knackered.
Whoever wins the election knows that they will have to sort it out. The Tories talk about tax cuts because they know they won't have to deal with the consequences. Starmer and Reeves don't want to promise spending that they cannot deliver.
Labour need to make the case for public *investment*. Every reputable economist on earth knows that British lack of capital investment is a major impediment to growth.
This particular policy was popular with Labour voters. It’s not obvious - apart from cowardice - why Labour have junked it.
Yes but as I pointed out there are many other areas crying out for public sector investment.
This year we will see Councils, Universities, Social Care, etc etc at risk of collapse.
Starmer and Reeves are right not to make hostages to fortune, and I am definitely in favour of Green policies.
No, they are wrong.
As pointed out earlier, the above are not capital investment (by and large). Indeed, many of those services cannot currently be afforded anymore, such is the parlous state of the economy.
Guardian are confirming the 28 billion pledge is being ditched . Together with Reeves pathetic defence of not bringing back the bankers bonus cap it’s been a woeful day for Labour .
At the moment the biggest danger to a Labour GE win is Labour!
They’re dropping a hugely popular policy because they’re terrified of Tory attacks . Utterly pathetic.
I think this is wrong economically as well as from a climate change perspective. Well targeted* investment would very likely see a positive return.
(*OK, that’s seriously begging the question.)
Pathetic by Keir.
This is his most egregious climb-down to date, and it comes because he simply doesn’t have the political cojones to defend public investment.
Contrast with Biden.
Yes indeed. There’s a popular, patriotic case to be made - to be contrasted with what looks like the grotesque running down of public services by the Tories - but Keir is simply too frit.
The “strategy” here is to avoid going into an election offering tax rises, even as the Tories pursue a scorched earth strategy.
Though, TBF, the credit of the US allows rather more leeway than that of the UK.
Guardian are confirming the 28 billion pledge is being ditched . Together with Reeves pathetic defence of not bringing back the bankers bonus cap it’s been a woeful day for Labour .
At the moment the biggest danger to a Labour GE win is Labour!
They’re dropping a hugely popular policy because they’re terrified of Tory attacks . Utterly pathetic.
I think this is wrong economically as well as from a climate change perspective. Well targeted* investment would very likely see a positive return.
(*OK, that’s seriously begging the question.)
Pathetic by Keir.
This is his most egregious climb-down to date, and it comes because he simply doesn’t have the political cojones to defend public investment.
Contrast with Biden.
Yes indeed. There’s a popular, patriotic case to be made - to be contrasted with what looks like the grotesque running down of public services by the Tories - but Keir is simply too frit.
The “strategy” here is to avoid going into an election offering tax rises, even as the Tories pursue a scorched earth strategy.
Though, TBF, the credit of the US allows rather more leeway than that of the UK.
I’m not entirely convinced by that. Or rather, that investors have no tolerance at all for additional UK debt.
What they have no tolerance for is crazy, unfunded stunts a la Truss.
I spoke to a woman yesterday who is at her wits end: Her husband works full-time in a low-pay job, she has been does not work but looks after their four children, all under 10.
They privately rent a 3-bed house and have just been told by the letting agent that their rent is going up by 41% (!) in March. Reason? - BTL "owner's mortgage has gone up". There's nothing else locally they can move to for any less rent (there are hardly any 3-bed homes for rent locally). They are on the council housing register but would need to become actually homeless to stand any chance of getting anything, then it could be B&B for a long-stretch.
They receive UC support which was covering their rent but that's capped by the Local Housing Allowance at about 75% of their new rent. They were already struggling on the old rent and regularly borrowing from family mid-month, paying back when they got paid... and repeat. Rent, Council Tax, Electricity, Gas, Food, Transport - this is where all their money goes.
What kind of messed-up country have we become where:
1) Taxpayers have to subsidise a traditional working family to live? 2) Those subsidies are set based on 'local rent levels' which are way below any actual comparable local rents?
We are seeing this every week now: working families, both tenants and mortgaged homeowners, who have hit the point where they just cannot make sums add up.
Anyone who thinks we're about to hit a feel-good period is a bit deluded imo.
We need a huge increase in housebuilding and a big hike in the minimum wage - why the f*ck are taxpayers subsidising low-pay employers and BTL landlords?
Ultimately, no social model will turn one low salary into a comfortable standard of living for six humans.
That's kinda what I was thinking. Basically is someone on minimum wage with a non working wife really expecting to have enough money for 4 kids? What they are unhappy about is that we are not subsidising them sufficiently to give them the standard of living they think they are entitled to. Well, actually, they aren't.
Partially yes, but partially no.
If housing cost the same as it used to in the past, then household budgets would be a lot more relieved without giving them any further subsidies.
It is the draconian cost of housing that eats up too much of too many people's budgets.
Sure, if you want housing to be the same as it was in the past. Outside privies. Two families in a house, No gardens. Garage? You're having a laugh. The heating is the downstairs fireplace.
If you want 'better' housing, it'll cost more. every regulation we add onto housing legislation improves housing, but increases cost.
I don't know what the answer is.
That's absurd and illogical thinking.
Quality improves over time without increasing cost. TVs, computers and much more cost a tiny fraction (in real terms) of what they did, while being much better quality. Its not just technology, food nowadays costs a quarter of what it did in the seventies, while improving tremendously in the availability of variety and quality (even if some people choose crap).
Housing isn't expensive due to build costs, housing is expensive due to the artificially high cost of land and the lack of competition due to the planning system. Prior to the introduction of the requirement of planning consent, land was just 2% of the cost of a house - go back to that, and the cost of housing would plummet and people would be able to afford a better standard of living without any extra income.
It is those trying to sweat the value of land to earn an income who are causing misery. That unearned income has to come from somewhere.
I think you're wrong. The things you mention improved performance and simultaneously decreased cost due to the *quantity* being sold. Back in the early 1980s, the government started a scheme that said we would have a computer in every school. That is *one computer in every school of a few hundred pupils. That made the fortunes (temporarily) of a computer company. Now most people carry one or two computers around with them all the time (in my case, phone and watch).
We are talking orders of magnitude increases in production. 230 billion ARM chips have been made in the last forty years, and that sort of volume increases quality/performance and reduces cost. Housing is in no way scalable in the same manner.
Housing absolutely is scalable, indeed its been done around the globe.
Contrast the value of land with planning consent with the value without it. That delta is purely artificial and entirely due to the planning system, abolish it and you abolish that delta, you abolish that cost altogether.
Housing is not scalable in the same way, and it's ridiculous to say it is. As I said, *billions* of ARM chips alone have been sold. 25 billion in 2020 alone. Comparing housing to that is... odd, for obvious reasons.
I never said scalable in the same way, nor does it need to be, it just needs to be scalable and it is.
As I gave as an initial example, food has come down by 75% in cost since the 70s, that's not scaled like ARM has.
Housing costs never used to be this expensive either, land never used to be this expensive, they are expensive solely because its scaled less than population has. If it scaled more than population does, then prices would collapse in real terms, which would be great news for all except those trying to sweat land for unearned wealth and income.
It's nowhere near scalable enough, especially as the *quality* of what we rightly want increases. we want *better* housing, and that invariably costs more. Better insulation? it costs. Electric car chargers outside every new house? They cost.
Usable land is finite; we rightly want better quality housing on the land. The 'quality' of the food has not increased massively since the 1970s; the places we are buying it from worldwide may have.
I agree that planning is an issue; I just see that there are many other barriers to 'affordable' housing. Changing demographics, immigration, desires, legislation... they are all factors. And good luck in changing most of them. There's no way I'd touch a timber-framed mass-produced house, for instance, after the disasters in the 1980s.
It is scalable. How do you provide more housing and services with less land, fewer building materials, more efficient transport options and lower running costs?
Flats.
Yes slums are scalable cheaply, but deal with the way the planning system warps competition and inflates the value of land and real actual homes can be built for cheaper instead.
Stop this obsession of cramming people into slum flats instead of actual houses.
But, as a sharp thinker here has pointed out, that has naff all to to with the cost of those flats, it's pure supply and demand.
Copy and paste the street plans of desirable old suburbs. The places that price signals show that people want to live in.
Make the exteriors appealing (which probably means Georgian Pastiche), give the innards modern standards of insulation and utilities. Then denser living is popular and it's easy for private enterprise to provide all the other stuff that makes life pleasant.
The inability to construct more is precisely the supply problem, yes.
Nationwide the price signals that people prefer detached homes, then semi-detached homes, with terraces being the least preferable houses of all. And flats even less popular than terraces.
The idea that denser living is popular is not remotely based on any facts or evidence. Inner-city living may be popular for some, but in like-for-like areas people will prefer more space for themselves without others.
Barry and Josias are both half right here. My parents have had a house built over the last couple of years (moved in last Summer). It's the sort of thing most people reasonably aspire to own; 4 bed, detached, but not a grand designs wonder. Very much in keeping with the Welsh hamlet in which it built - roof that looks like slate, stone facing to the front, windows that look like period timber frames.
All in, it cost about £500k, including a site with planning. Barry is right - planning permission, even somewhere fairly undesirable in the wilds of Wales puts a massive uplift on the value of land. The plot, with planning was £85k. Without planning (and no prospect of getting planning) it would have been worth perhaps £5k. So about 16% of the cost of it is artificial from the planning system. In other places it is higher - earlier this year I was the underbidder to a burnt out 3 bed farmhouse (needed complete demolition and reinstament), plus 15 acres of useless but pretty moor/scrub land. I dropped out of the running at £225k, and that didn't even have a guarantee one would get planning to rebuild. It was a stunning location, but I was offering about £150k over the normal likely value of the land for the prospect of getting planning in a pretty location.
Josias is also right. My parents house cost the wrong side of £400k to build. Lots of factors behind that, but at least a third of it is driven by recent building regs on energy efficiency and insulation (and some other things - e.g. because it's in Wales, it has to have a full fire sprinkler system despite only being two stories). The drive for thermal efficiency is all well and good, but the costs are phenomenal and the laws of diminishing returns have well and truly kicked in. My house, whilst a little smaller than my parents (3 bed semi) has only basic insulation (cheap double glazing, a bit of stuff in the loft), but I could heat it for around 50 years even at the current high gas prices for the amount my parents have had to spend on insulation, triple glazing etc.
The fix is at least bit of both - take building regs back about 15 years, make planning about twice as easy to get, and you probably can knock £100-150k off the cost of a typical new home.
However, all this is looking at the wrong end of the problem. The main driver of high house prices? Half a million people extra a year. The main driver of low wages? Half a million extra (mostly low paid) people a year. The only possible long term solution? Net Zero migration. When should this happen? The best time was 20 years ago, the next best time is now.
Looks like there are not going to be any/many tax cuts in the Budget after all. Not a good idea to allow expectations to arise if nothing is to ultimately happen.
Guardian are confirming the 28 billion pledge is being ditched . Together with Reeves pathetic defence of not bringing back the bankers bonus cap it’s been a woeful day for Labour .
At the moment the biggest danger to a Labour GE win is Labour!
They’re dropping a hugely popular policy because they’re terrified of Tory attacks . Utterly pathetic.
I think this is wrong economically as well as from a climate change perspective. Well targeted* investment would very likely see a positive return.
(*OK, that’s seriously begging the question.)
Pathetic by Keir.
This is his most egregious climb-down to date, and it comes because he simply doesn’t have the political cojones to defend public investment.
Contrast with Biden.
Yes indeed. There’s a popular, patriotic case to be made - to be contrasted with what looks like the grotesque running down of public services by the Tories - but Keir is simply too frit.
The “strategy” here is to avoid going into an election offering tax rises, even as the Tories pursue a scorched earth strategy.
Though, TBF, the credit of the US allows rather more leeway than that of the UK.
I’m not entirely convinced by that. Or rather, that investors have no tolerance at all for additional UK debt.
What they have no tolerance for is crazy, unfunded stunts a la Truss.
Both are true. The markets will react differently to good investment plans from the UK than they did Trussonomics and the US benefits on credit markets from the dollar, making investment easier.
What's stopping Starmer doing the 28bn once he gets into office? If he gets a large majority, who's going to whinge it wasn't in the manifesto? Get elected first.
I spoke to a woman yesterday who is at her wits end: Her husband works full-time in a low-pay job, she has been does not work but looks after their four children, all under 10.
They privately rent a 3-bed house and have just been told by the letting agent that their rent is going up by 41% (!) in March. Reason? - BTL "owner's mortgage has gone up". There's nothing else locally they can move to for any less rent (there are hardly any 3-bed homes for rent locally). They are on the council housing register but would need to become actually homeless to stand any chance of getting anything, then it could be B&B for a long-stretch.
They receive UC support which was covering their rent but that's capped by the Local Housing Allowance at about 75% of their new rent. They were already struggling on the old rent and regularly borrowing from family mid-month, paying back when they got paid... and repeat. Rent, Council Tax, Electricity, Gas, Food, Transport - this is where all their money goes.
What kind of messed-up country have we become where:
1) Taxpayers have to subsidise a traditional working family to live? 2) Those subsidies are set based on 'local rent levels' which are way below any actual comparable local rents?
We are seeing this every week now: working families, both tenants and mortgaged homeowners, who have hit the point where they just cannot make sums add up.
Anyone who thinks we're about to hit a feel-good period is a bit deluded imo.
We need a huge increase in housebuilding and a big hike in the minimum wage - why the f*ck are taxpayers subsidising low-pay employers and BTL landlords?
Ultimately, no social model will turn one low salary into a comfortable standard of living for six humans.
That's kinda what I was thinking. Basically is someone on minimum wage with a non working wife really expecting to have enough money for 4 kids? What they are unhappy about is that we are not subsidising them sufficiently to give them the standard of living they think they are entitled to. Well, actually, they aren't.
Partially yes, but partially no.
If housing cost the same as it used to in the past, then household budgets would be a lot more relieved without giving them any further subsidies.
It is the draconian cost of housing that eats up too much of too many people's budgets.
Sure, if you want housing to be the same as it was in the past. Outside privies. Two families in a house, No gardens. Garage? You're having a laugh. The heating is the downstairs fireplace.
If you want 'better' housing, it'll cost more. every regulation we add onto housing legislation improves housing, but increases cost.
I don't know what the answer is.
That's absurd and illogical thinking.
Quality improves over time without increasing cost. TVs, computers and much more cost a tiny fraction (in real terms) of what they did, while being much better quality. Its not just technology, food nowadays costs a quarter of what it did in the seventies, while improving tremendously in the availability of variety and quality (even if some people choose crap).
Housing isn't expensive due to build costs, housing is expensive due to the artificially high cost of land and the lack of competition due to the planning system. Prior to the introduction of the requirement of planning consent, land was just 2% of the cost of a house - go back to that, and the cost of housing would plummet and people would be able to afford a better standard of living without any extra income.
It is those trying to sweat the value of land to earn an income who are causing misery. That unearned income has to come from somewhere.
I think you're wrong. The things you mention improved performance and simultaneously decreased cost due to the *quantity* being sold. Back in the early 1980s, the government started a scheme that said we would have a computer in every school. That is *one computer in every school of a few hundred pupils. That made the fortunes (temporarily) of a computer company. Now most people carry one or two computers around with them all the time (in my case, phone and watch).
We are talking orders of magnitude increases in production. 230 billion ARM chips have been made in the last forty years, and that sort of volume increases quality/performance and reduces cost. Housing is in no way scalable in the same manner.
Housing absolutely is scalable, indeed its been done around the globe.
Contrast the value of land with planning consent with the value without it. That delta is purely artificial and entirely due to the planning system, abolish it and you abolish that delta, you abolish that cost altogether.
Housing is not scalable in the same way, and it's ridiculous to say it is. As I said, *billions* of ARM chips alone have been sold. 25 billion in 2020 alone. Comparing housing to that is... odd, for obvious reasons.
I never said scalable in the same way, nor does it need to be, it just needs to be scalable and it is.
As I gave as an initial example, food has come down by 75% in cost since the 70s, that's not scaled like ARM has.
Housing costs never used to be this expensive either, land never used to be this expensive, they are expensive solely because its scaled less than population has. If it scaled more than population does, then prices would collapse in real terms, which would be great news for all except those trying to sweat land for unearned wealth and income.
It's nowhere near scalable enough, especially as the *quality* of what we rightly want increases. we want *better* housing, and that invariably costs more. Better insulation? it costs. Electric car chargers outside every new house? They cost.
Usable land is finite; we rightly want better quality housing on the land. The 'quality' of the food has not increased massively since the 1970s; the places we are buying it from worldwide may have.
I agree that planning is an issue; I just see that there are many other barriers to 'affordable' housing. Changing demographics, immigration, desires, legislation... they are all factors. And good luck in changing most of them. There's no way I'd touch a timber-framed mass-produced house, for instance, after the disasters in the 1980s.
It is scalable. How do you provide more housing and services with less land, fewer building materials, more efficient transport options and lower running costs?
Flats.
I agree to a certain extent, and I believe that's @NickPalmer 's view. But we in Britain are culturally against flats, for good and bad reasons. The tragedies of the 60s and 70s politically-led tower-block designs cast a long shadow.
for us in Britain, the 'ideal' is a detached house with sizable garden and garage, not a small flat in Nelson Mandela House. And how do you change that ideal, given the history?
If you're serious about reducing housing pressure in our cities you have no choice.
I do have one doubt - there is a snowball effect of economic growth and housing costs in our cities which is stimulated by population growth. We are always going to have this problem as cities become relatively more attractive. This is more obvious in Scotland, where our population has flatlined yet prices in Lothian have rocketed.
Another way to reduce housing pressure would be to encourage growth in provincial towns and rural areas, spreading demand around more evenly. Then you might have more chance of "the ideal", particularly with lots of industrial waste ground in places like Greenock/Middlesbrough etc
Abolish planning restraints and you can do both, easily.
Have people able to raze their own land in cities and rebuild it as flats if they want.
Have people able to raze whatever they want in Middlesbrough and build a decent home if they want.
Or any combination inbetween.
The key is to get the "everything we haven't permitted is forbidden" attitude flipped on its head and then let people decide.
Mrs Flatlander had to survey some land in Middlesbrough for a planning application at least 10 years ago. It had indeed been razed and had previously been terraced housing. Next door the undemolished terraces were still there, with CCTV on tall poles with cages at the end of the street. The Dorman tower loomed in the distance.
We did the job early on a Sunday morning for obvious reasons.
Permission was granted for mixed development but to this day no houses have been built. Only a Tesco, Lidl, and various low-rent shops.
There is still plenty of room for any number of decent houses there but it wouldn't solve the basic problem. No-one wants to live there. Abolishing planning restraints would make no difference to that.
I'm not sure a totally free market would do much other than make land even more expensive in favoured locations.
We do need more houses but where they should go needs at least some thought behind it.
Looks like there are not going to be any/many tax cuts in the Budget after all. Not a good idea to allow expectations to arise if nothing is to ultimately happen.
I spoke to a woman yesterday who is at her wits end: Her husband works full-time in a low-pay job, she has been does not work but looks after their four children, all under 10.
They privately rent a 3-bed house and have just been told by the letting agent that their rent is going up by 41% (!) in March. Reason? - BTL "owner's mortgage has gone up". There's nothing else locally they can move to for any less rent (there are hardly any 3-bed homes for rent locally). They are on the council housing register but would need to become actually homeless to stand any chance of getting anything, then it could be B&B for a long-stretch.
They receive UC support which was covering their rent but that's capped by the Local Housing Allowance at about 75% of their new rent. They were already struggling on the old rent and regularly borrowing from family mid-month, paying back when they got paid... and repeat. Rent, Council Tax, Electricity, Gas, Food, Transport - this is where all their money goes.
What kind of messed-up country have we become where:
1) Taxpayers have to subsidise a traditional working family to live? 2) Those subsidies are set based on 'local rent levels' which are way below any actual comparable local rents?
We are seeing this every week now: working families, both tenants and mortgaged homeowners, who have hit the point where they just cannot make sums add up.
Anyone who thinks we're about to hit a feel-good period is a bit deluded imo.
We need a huge increase in housebuilding and a big hike in the minimum wage - why the f*ck are taxpayers subsidising low-pay employers and BTL landlords?
Ultimately, no social model will turn one low salary into a comfortable standard of living for six humans.
That's kinda what I was thinking. Basically is someone on minimum wage with a non working wife really expecting to have enough money for 4 kids? What they are unhappy about is that we are not subsidising them sufficiently to give them the standard of living they think they are entitled to. Well, actually, they aren't.
Partially yes, but partially no.
If housing cost the same as it used to in the past, then household budgets would be a lot more relieved without giving them any further subsidies.
It is the draconian cost of housing that eats up too much of too many people's budgets.
Sure, if you want housing to be the same as it was in the past. Outside privies. Two families in a house, No gardens. Garage? You're having a laugh. The heating is the downstairs fireplace.
If you want 'better' housing, it'll cost more. every regulation we add onto housing legislation improves housing, but increases cost.
I don't know what the answer is.
That's absurd and illogical thinking.
Quality improves over time without increasing cost. TVs, computers and much more cost a tiny fraction (in real terms) of what they did, while being much better quality. Its not just technology, food nowadays costs a quarter of what it did in the seventies, while improving tremendously in the availability of variety and quality (even if some people choose crap).
Housing isn't expensive due to build costs, housing is expensive due to the artificially high cost of land and the lack of competition due to the planning system. Prior to the introduction of the requirement of planning consent, land was just 2% of the cost of a house - go back to that, and the cost of housing would plummet and people would be able to afford a better standard of living without any extra income.
It is those trying to sweat the value of land to earn an income who are causing misery. That unearned income has to come from somewhere.
I think you're wrong. The things you mention improved performance and simultaneously decreased cost due to the *quantity* being sold. Back in the early 1980s, the government started a scheme that said we would have a computer in every school. That is *one computer in every school of a few hundred pupils. That made the fortunes (temporarily) of a computer company. Now most people carry one or two computers around with them all the time (in my case, phone and watch).
We are talking orders of magnitude increases in production. 230 billion ARM chips have been made in the last forty years, and that sort of volume increases quality/performance and reduces cost. Housing is in no way scalable in the same manner.
Housing absolutely is scalable, indeed its been done around the globe.
Contrast the value of land with planning consent with the value without it. That delta is purely artificial and entirely due to the planning system, abolish it and you abolish that delta, you abolish that cost altogether.
Housing is not scalable in the same way, and it's ridiculous to say it is. As I said, *billions* of ARM chips alone have been sold. 25 billion in 2020 alone. Comparing housing to that is... odd, for obvious reasons.
I never said scalable in the same way, nor does it need to be, it just needs to be scalable and it is.
As I gave as an initial example, food has come down by 75% in cost since the 70s, that's not scaled like ARM has.
Housing costs never used to be this expensive either, land never used to be this expensive, they are expensive solely because its scaled less than population has. If it scaled more than population does, then prices would collapse in real terms, which would be great news for all except those trying to sweat land for unearned wealth and income.
It's nowhere near scalable enough, especially as the *quality* of what we rightly want increases. we want *better* housing, and that invariably costs more. Better insulation? it costs. Electric car chargers outside every new house? They cost.
Usable land is finite; we rightly want better quality housing on the land. The 'quality' of the food has not increased massively since the 1970s; the places we are buying it from worldwide may have.
I agree that planning is an issue; I just see that there are many other barriers to 'affordable' housing. Changing demographics, immigration, desires, legislation... they are all factors. And good luck in changing most of them. There's no way I'd touch a timber-framed mass-produced house, for instance, after the disasters in the 1980s.
It is scalable. How do you provide more housing and services with less land, fewer building materials, more efficient transport options and lower running costs?
Flats.
Yes slums are scalable cheaply, but deal with the way the planning system warps competition and inflates the value of land and real actual homes can be built for cheaper instead.
Stop this obsession of cramming people into slum flats instead of actual houses.
But, as a sharp thinker here has pointed out, that has naff all to to with the cost of those flats, it's pure supply and demand.
Copy and paste the street plans of desirable old suburbs. The places that price signals show that people want to live in.
Make the exteriors appealing (which probably means Georgian Pastiche), give the innards modern standards of insulation and utilities. Then denser living is popular and it's easy for private enterprise to provide all the other stuff that makes life pleasant.
The inability to construct more is precisely the supply problem, yes.
Nationwide the price signals that people prefer detached homes, then semi-detached homes, with terraces being the least preferable houses of all. And flats even less popular than terraces.
The idea that denser living is popular is not remotely based on any facts or evidence. Inner-city living may be popular for some, but in like-for-like areas people will prefer more space for themselves without others.
Barry and Josias are both half right here. My parents have had a house built over the last couple of years (moved in last Summer). It's the sort of thing most people reasonably aspire to own; 4 bed, detached, but not a grand designs wonder. Very much in keeping with the Welsh hamlet in which it built - roof that looks like slate, stone facing to the front, windows that look like period timber frames.
All in, it cost about £500k, including a site with planning. Barry is right - planning permission, even somewhere fairly undesirable in the wilds of Wales puts a massive uplift on the value of land. The plot, with planning was £85k. Without planning (and no prospect of getting planning) it would have been worth perhaps £5k. So about 16% of the cost of it is artificial from the planning system. In other places it is higher - earlier this year I was the underbidder to a burnt out 3 bed farmhouse (needed complete demolition and reinstament), plus 15 acres of useless but pretty moor/scrub land. I dropped out of the running at £225k, and that didn't even have a guarantee one would get planning to rebuild. It was a stunning location, but I was offering about £150k over the normal likely value of the land for the prospect of getting planning in a pretty location.
Josias is also right. My parents house cost the wrong side of £400k to build. Lots of factors behind that, but at least a third of it is driven by recent building regs on energy efficiency and insulation (and some other things - e.g. because it's in Wales, it has to have a full fire sprinkler system despite only being two stories). The drive for thermal efficiency is all well and good, but the costs are phenomenal and the laws of diminishing returns have well and truly kicked in. My house, whilst a little smaller than my parents (3 bed semi) has only basic insulation (cheap double glazing, a bit of stuff in the loft), but I could heat it for around 50 years even at the current high gas prices for the amount my parents have had to spend on insulation, triple glazing etc.
The fix is at least bit of both - take building regs back about 15 years, make planning about twice as easy to get, and you probably can knock £100-150k off the cost of a typical new home.
However, all this is looking at the wrong end of the problem. The main driver of high house prices? Half a million people extra a year. The main driver of low wages? Half a million extra (mostly low paid) people a year. The only possible long term solution? Net Zero migration. When should this happen? The best time was 20 years ago, the next best time is now.
The biggest move in affordability - when house prices moved from 4x income to 8x happened between 1990 and 2005. Since then it's gotten worse (9.0x), but if immigration was the biggest driver, then you would have expected only small moves in house prices relative to incomes in the period to 2005, followed by them leaping up prior to Brexit, followed by them falling in the period between 2015 and 2020.
Guardian are confirming the 28 billion pledge is being ditched . Together with Reeves pathetic defence of not bringing back the bankers bonus cap it’s been a woeful day for Labour .
At the moment the biggest danger to a Labour GE win is Labour!
They’re dropping a hugely popular policy because they’re terrified of Tory attacks . Utterly pathetic.
I think this is wrong economically as well as from a climate change perspective. Well targeted* investment would very likely see a positive return.
(*OK, that’s seriously begging the question.)
Pathetic by Keir.
This is his most egregious climb-down to date, and it comes because he simply doesn’t have the political cojones to defend public investment.
Contrast with Biden.
Yes indeed. There’s a popular, patriotic case to be made - to be contrasted with what looks like the grotesque running down of public services by the Tories - but Keir is simply too frit.
The “strategy” here is to avoid going into an election offering tax rises, even as the Tories pursue a scorched earth strategy.
Though, TBF, the credit of the US allows rather more leeway than that of the UK.
I’m not entirely convinced by that. Or rather, that investors have no tolerance at all for additional UK debt.
What they have no tolerance for is crazy, unfunded stunts a la Truss.
And Starmer pledging to spend money for the sake of spending money would be a crazy, unfunded stunt. He is right not to do that.
If there is good, sensible, long-term investments in infrastructure that is viable then that should be done - we don't invest enough in this country and capital investment is completely different to current expenditure.
But it should be done because it is a good, sensible, long-term investment. Whether that be £28bn, £20bn, £36bn or any other reasonable sum.
Spending to hit a target, spending for the sake of spending, rather than because it is appropriate - that is just a stunt and a foolhardy one at that.
What's stopping Starmer doing the 28bn once he gets into office? If he gets a large majority, who's going to whinge it wasn't in the manifesto? Get elected first.
Does this mean he is going to have to come up with something else now?
Either he will ignore the idea that they have now dropped this.
Or he will fall back on his accusation that Starmer flip-flops and has no plan.
Which to be honest is starting to look like the truth.
Why do Labour want to win?
To lift child poverty? No sign of that.
To invest in green tech: Just ditched.
To redistribute from wealthy to poorest: Ruled out by Reeves repeatedly.
To reform local government and its finance: We leave that to the welsh labour party.
To sort out social care: No plan.
To reform education: Plan is VAT for private education and tooth brush lessons.
To reform the constitution: Get rid of 96 hereditary peers and then...erm.. that's it until second term.
Help crisis-ridden NHS: Oh, wait, seems there might be a plan. Wes has one. Poly clinics and stuff. Sounds good but Reeves may well rule it out if it costs money.
Europe: no change except maybe some tinkering with students being able to do placements in eu.
I spoke to a woman yesterday who is at her wits end: Her husband works full-time in a low-pay job, she has been does not work but looks after their four children, all under 10.
They privately rent a 3-bed house and have just been told by the letting agent that their rent is going up by 41% (!) in March. Reason? - BTL "owner's mortgage has gone up". There's nothing else locally they can move to for any less rent (there are hardly any 3-bed homes for rent locally). They are on the council housing register but would need to become actually homeless to stand any chance of getting anything, then it could be B&B for a long-stretch.
They receive UC support which was covering their rent but that's capped by the Local Housing Allowance at about 75% of their new rent. They were already struggling on the old rent and regularly borrowing from family mid-month, paying back when they got paid... and repeat. Rent, Council Tax, Electricity, Gas, Food, Transport - this is where all their money goes.
What kind of messed-up country have we become where:
1) Taxpayers have to subsidise a traditional working family to live? 2) Those subsidies are set based on 'local rent levels' which are way below any actual comparable local rents?
We are seeing this every week now: working families, both tenants and mortgaged homeowners, who have hit the point where they just cannot make sums add up.
Anyone who thinks we're about to hit a feel-good period is a bit deluded imo.
We need a huge increase in housebuilding and a big hike in the minimum wage - why the f*ck are taxpayers subsidising low-pay employers and BTL landlords?
Ultimately, no social model will turn one low salary into a comfortable standard of living for six humans.
That's kinda what I was thinking. Basically is someone on minimum wage with a non working wife really expecting to have enough money for 4 kids? What they are unhappy about is that we are not subsidising them sufficiently to give them the standard of living they think they are entitled to. Well, actually, they aren't.
Partially yes, but partially no.
If housing cost the same as it used to in the past, then household budgets would be a lot more relieved without giving them any further subsidies.
It is the draconian cost of housing that eats up too much of too many people's budgets.
Sure, if you want housing to be the same as it was in the past. Outside privies. Two families in a house, No gardens. Garage? You're having a laugh. The heating is the downstairs fireplace.
If you want 'better' housing, it'll cost more. every regulation we add onto housing legislation improves housing, but increases cost.
I don't know what the answer is.
That's absurd and illogical thinking.
Quality improves over time without increasing cost. TVs, computers and much more cost a tiny fraction (in real terms) of what they did, while being much better quality. Its not just technology, food nowadays costs a quarter of what it did in the seventies, while improving tremendously in the availability of variety and quality (even if some people choose crap).
Housing isn't expensive due to build costs, housing is expensive due to the artificially high cost of land and the lack of competition due to the planning system. Prior to the introduction of the requirement of planning consent, land was just 2% of the cost of a house - go back to that, and the cost of housing would plummet and people would be able to afford a better standard of living without any extra income.
It is those trying to sweat the value of land to earn an income who are causing misery. That unearned income has to come from somewhere.
I think you're wrong. The things you mention improved performance and simultaneously decreased cost due to the *quantity* being sold. Back in the early 1980s, the government started a scheme that said we would have a computer in every school. That is *one computer in every school of a few hundred pupils. That made the fortunes (temporarily) of a computer company. Now most people carry one or two computers around with them all the time (in my case, phone and watch).
We are talking orders of magnitude increases in production. 230 billion ARM chips have been made in the last forty years, and that sort of volume increases quality/performance and reduces cost. Housing is in no way scalable in the same manner.
Housing absolutely is scalable, indeed its been done around the globe.
Contrast the value of land with planning consent with the value without it. That delta is purely artificial and entirely due to the planning system, abolish it and you abolish that delta, you abolish that cost altogether.
Housing is not scalable in the same way, and it's ridiculous to say it is. As I said, *billions* of ARM chips alone have been sold. 25 billion in 2020 alone. Comparing housing to that is... odd, for obvious reasons.
I never said scalable in the same way, nor does it need to be, it just needs to be scalable and it is.
As I gave as an initial example, food has come down by 75% in cost since the 70s, that's not scaled like ARM has.
Housing costs never used to be this expensive either, land never used to be this expensive, they are expensive solely because its scaled less than population has. If it scaled more than population does, then prices would collapse in real terms, which would be great news for all except those trying to sweat land for unearned wealth and income.
It's nowhere near scalable enough, especially as the *quality* of what we rightly want increases. we want *better* housing, and that invariably costs more. Better insulation? it costs. Electric car chargers outside every new house? They cost.
Usable land is finite; we rightly want better quality housing on the land. The 'quality' of the food has not increased massively since the 1970s; the places we are buying it from worldwide may have.
I agree that planning is an issue; I just see that there are many other barriers to 'affordable' housing. Changing demographics, immigration, desires, legislation... they are all factors. And good luck in changing most of them. There's no way I'd touch a timber-framed mass-produced house, for instance, after the disasters in the 1980s.
It is scalable. How do you provide more housing and services with less land, fewer building materials, more efficient transport options and lower running costs?
Flats.
Yes slums are scalable cheaply, but deal with the way the planning system warps competition and inflates the value of land and real actual homes can be built for cheaper instead.
Stop this obsession of cramming people into slum flats instead of actual houses.
But, as a sharp thinker here has pointed out, that has naff all to to with the cost of those flats, it's pure supply and demand.
Copy and paste the street plans of desirable old suburbs. The places that price signals show that people want to live in.
Make the exteriors appealing (which probably means Georgian Pastiche), give the innards modern standards of insulation and utilities. Then denser living is popular and it's easy for private enterprise to provide all the other stuff that makes life pleasant.
The inability to construct more is precisely the supply problem, yes.
Nationwide the price signals that people prefer detached homes, then semi-detached homes, with terraces being the least preferable houses of all. And flats even less popular than terraces.
The idea that denser living is popular is not remotely based on any facts or evidence. Inner-city living may be popular for some, but in like-for-like areas people will prefer more space for themselves without others.
Barry and Josias are both half right here. My parents have had a house built over the last couple of years (moved in last Summer). It's the sort of thing most people reasonably aspire to own; 4 bed, detached, but not a grand designs wonder. Very much in keeping with the Welsh hamlet in which it built - roof that looks like slate, stone facing to the front, windows that look like period timber frames.
All in, it cost about £500k, including a site with planning. Barry is right - planning permission, even somewhere fairly undesirable in the wilds of Wales puts a massive uplift on the value of land. The plot, with planning was £85k. Without planning (and no prospect of getting planning) it would have been worth perhaps £5k. So about 16% of the cost of it is artificial from the planning system. In other places it is higher - earlier this year I was the underbidder to a burnt out 3 bed farmhouse (needed complete demolition and reinstament), plus 15 acres of useless but pretty moor/scrub land. I dropped out of the running at £225k, and that didn't even have a guarantee one would get planning to rebuild. It was a stunning location, but I was offering about £150k over the normal likely value of the land for the prospect of getting planning in a pretty location.
Josias is also right. My parents house cost the wrong side of £400k to build. Lots of factors behind that, but at least a third of it is driven by recent building regs on energy efficiency and insulation (and some other things - e.g. because it's in Wales, it has to have a full fire sprinkler system despite only being two stories). The drive for thermal efficiency is all well and good, but the costs are phenomenal and the laws of diminishing returns have well and truly kicked in. My house, whilst a little smaller than my parents (3 bed semi) has only basic insulation (cheap double glazing, a bit of stuff in the loft), but I could heat it for around 50 years even at the current high gas prices for the amount my parents have had to spend on insulation, triple glazing etc.
The fix is at least bit of both - take building regs back about 15 years, make planning about twice as easy to get, and you probably can knock £100-150k off the cost of a typical new home.
However, all this is looking at the wrong end of the problem. The main driver of high house prices? Half a million people extra a year. The main driver of low wages? Half a million extra (mostly low paid) people a year. The only possible long term solution? Net Zero migration. When should this happen? The best time was 20 years ago, the next best time is now.
The biggest move in affordability - when house prices moved from 4x income to 8x happened between 1990 and 2005. Since then it's gotten worse (9.0x), but if immigration was the biggest driver, then you would have expected only small moves in house prices relative to incomes in the period to 2005, followed by them leaping up prior to Brexit, followed by them falling in the period between 2015 and 2020.
What does the prevalence of dual income households (where dual income is both full time) look like during that period?
Looks like there are not going to be any/many tax cuts in the Budget after all. Not a good idea to allow expectations to arise if nothing is to ultimately happen.
Aren't we now in the 'manage expectations down really low' stage?
We have a month or so now of 'I have no money', 'there's nothing much I can do', 'might just might be able to change the threshold for higher tax by 50p' etc etc.
And then kaboom!! Look at what I have done come 6th March.
But do most of EU's leaders and defence ministers? That is the question.
No sign they understand what is about to happen unless enough indie voters in swing states save europe.
Why should Europe's security be the responsibility (and financial burden) of Americans?
I can see what Europe gets out of the current arrangement, though they pay for it with subservience, but what's in it for the USA?
A Europe that had to stand on its own two feet might kick out American corporations.
Stopping us all fighting like we have for the last god knows how many centuries saves the US from having to come and do a 'masters of the air' thing all over again.
What's stopping Starmer doing the 28bn once he gets into office? If he gets a large majority, who's going to whinge it wasn't in the manifesto? Get elected first.
You mean doing a Liz Truss?
The markets may see tax cuts and spending as fiscal equivalents, but the media don't. All vibes.
I spoke to a woman yesterday who is at her wits end: Her husband works full-time in a low-pay job, she has been does not work but looks after their four children, all under 10.
They privately rent a 3-bed house and have just been told by the letting agent that their rent is going up by 41% (!) in March. Reason? - BTL "owner's mortgage has gone up". There's nothing else locally they can move to for any less rent (there are hardly any 3-bed homes for rent locally). They are on the council housing register but would need to become actually homeless to stand any chance of getting anything, then it could be B&B for a long-stretch.
They receive UC support which was covering their rent but that's capped by the Local Housing Allowance at about 75% of their new rent. They were already struggling on the old rent and regularly borrowing from family mid-month, paying back when they got paid... and repeat. Rent, Council Tax, Electricity, Gas, Food, Transport - this is where all their money goes.
What kind of messed-up country have we become where:
1) Taxpayers have to subsidise a traditional working family to live? 2) Those subsidies are set based on 'local rent levels' which are way below any actual comparable local rents?
We are seeing this every week now: working families, both tenants and mortgaged homeowners, who have hit the point where they just cannot make sums add up.
Anyone who thinks we're about to hit a feel-good period is a bit deluded imo.
We need a huge increase in housebuilding and a big hike in the minimum wage - why the f*ck are taxpayers subsidising low-pay employers and BTL landlords?
Ultimately, no social model will turn one low salary into a comfortable standard of living for six humans.
That's kinda what I was thinking. Basically is someone on minimum wage with a non working wife really expecting to have enough money for 4 kids? What they are unhappy about is that we are not subsidising them sufficiently to give them the standard of living they think they are entitled to. Well, actually, they aren't.
Partially yes, but partially no.
If housing cost the same as it used to in the past, then household budgets would be a lot more relieved without giving them any further subsidies.
It is the draconian cost of housing that eats up too much of too many people's budgets.
Sure, if you want housing to be the same as it was in the past. Outside privies. Two families in a house, No gardens. Garage? You're having a laugh. The heating is the downstairs fireplace.
If you want 'better' housing, it'll cost more. every regulation we add onto housing legislation improves housing, but increases cost.
I don't know what the answer is.
That's absurd and illogical thinking.
Quality improves over time without increasing cost. TVs, computers and much more cost a tiny fraction (in real terms) of what they did, while being much better quality. Its not just technology, food nowadays costs a quarter of what it did in the seventies, while improving tremendously in the availability of variety and quality (even if some people choose crap).
Housing isn't expensive due to build costs, housing is expensive due to the artificially high cost of land and the lack of competition due to the planning system. Prior to the introduction of the requirement of planning consent, land was just 2% of the cost of a house - go back to that, and the cost of housing would plummet and people would be able to afford a better standard of living without any extra income.
It is those trying to sweat the value of land to earn an income who are causing misery. That unearned income has to come from somewhere.
I think you're wrong. The things you mention improved performance and simultaneously decreased cost due to the *quantity* being sold. Back in the early 1980s, the government started a scheme that said we would have a computer in every school. That is *one computer in every school of a few hundred pupils. That made the fortunes (temporarily) of a computer company. Now most people carry one or two computers around with them all the time (in my case, phone and watch).
We are talking orders of magnitude increases in production. 230 billion ARM chips have been made in the last forty years, and that sort of volume increases quality/performance and reduces cost. Housing is in no way scalable in the same manner.
Housing absolutely is scalable, indeed its been done around the globe.
Contrast the value of land with planning consent with the value without it. That delta is purely artificial and entirely due to the planning system, abolish it and you abolish that delta, you abolish that cost altogether.
Housing is not scalable in the same way, and it's ridiculous to say it is. As I said, *billions* of ARM chips alone have been sold. 25 billion in 2020 alone. Comparing housing to that is... odd, for obvious reasons.
I never said scalable in the same way, nor does it need to be, it just needs to be scalable and it is.
As I gave as an initial example, food has come down by 75% in cost since the 70s, that's not scaled like ARM has.
Housing costs never used to be this expensive either, land never used to be this expensive, they are expensive solely because its scaled less than population has. If it scaled more than population does, then prices would collapse in real terms, which would be great news for all except those trying to sweat land for unearned wealth and income.
It's nowhere near scalable enough, especially as the *quality* of what we rightly want increases. we want *better* housing, and that invariably costs more. Better insulation? it costs. Electric car chargers outside every new house? They cost.
Usable land is finite; we rightly want better quality housing on the land. The 'quality' of the food has not increased massively since the 1970s; the places we are buying it from worldwide may have.
I agree that planning is an issue; I just see that there are many other barriers to 'affordable' housing. Changing demographics, immigration, desires, legislation... they are all factors. And good luck in changing most of them. There's no way I'd touch a timber-framed mass-produced house, for instance, after the disasters in the 1980s.
It is scalable. How do you provide more housing and services with less land, fewer building materials, more efficient transport options and lower running costs?
Flats.
Yes slums are scalable cheaply, but deal with the way the planning system warps competition and inflates the value of land and real actual homes can be built for cheaper instead.
Stop this obsession of cramming people into slum flats instead of actual houses.
But, as a sharp thinker here has pointed out, that has naff all to to with the cost of those flats, it's pure supply and demand.
Copy and paste the street plans of desirable old suburbs. The places that price signals show that people want to live in.
Make the exteriors appealing (which probably means Georgian Pastiche), give the innards modern standards of insulation and utilities. Then denser living is popular and it's easy for private enterprise to provide all the other stuff that makes life pleasant.
The inability to construct more is precisely the supply problem, yes.
Nationwide the price signals that people prefer detached homes, then semi-detached homes, with terraces being the least preferable houses of all. And flats even less popular than terraces.
The idea that denser living is popular is not remotely based on any facts or evidence. Inner-city living may be popular for some, but in like-for-like areas people will prefer more space for themselves without others.
Barry and Josias are both half right here. My parents have had a house built over the last couple of years (moved in last Summer). It's the sort of thing most people reasonably aspire to own; 4 bed, detached, but not a grand designs wonder. Very much in keeping with the Welsh hamlet in which it built - roof that looks like slate, stone facing to the front, windows that look like period timber frames.
All in, it cost about £500k, including a site with planning. Barry is right - planning permission, even somewhere fairly undesirable in the wilds of Wales puts a massive uplift on the value of land. The plot, with planning was £85k. Without planning (and no prospect of getting planning) it would have been worth perhaps £5k. So about 16% of the cost of it is artificial from the planning system. In other places it is higher - earlier this year I was the underbidder to a burnt out 3 bed farmhouse (needed complete demolition and reinstament), plus 15 acres of useless but pretty moor/scrub land. I dropped out of the running at £225k, and that didn't even have a guarantee one would get planning to rebuild. It was a stunning location, but I was offering about £150k over the normal likely value of the land for the prospect of getting planning in a pretty location.
Josias is also right. My parents house cost the wrong side of £400k to build. Lots of factors behind that, but at least a third of it is driven by recent building regs on energy efficiency and insulation (and some other things - e.g. because it's in Wales, it has to have a full fire sprinkler system despite only being two stories). The drive for thermal efficiency is all well and good, but the costs are phenomenal and the laws of diminishing returns have well and truly kicked in. My house, whilst a little smaller than my parents (3 bed semi) has only basic insulation (cheap double glazing, a bit of stuff in the loft), but I could heat it for around 50 years even at the current high gas prices for the amount my parents have had to spend on insulation, triple glazing etc.
The fix is at least bit of both - take building regs back about 15 years, make planning about twice as easy to get, and you probably can knock £100-150k off the cost of a typical new home.
However, all this is looking at the wrong end of the problem. The main driver of high house prices? Half a million people extra a year. The main driver of low wages? Half a million extra (mostly low paid) people a year. The only possible long term solution? Net Zero migration. When should this happen? The best time was 20 years ago, the next best time is now.
The biggest move in affordability - when house prices moved from 4x income to 8x happened between 1990 and 2005. Since then it's gotten worse (9.0x), but if immigration was the biggest driver, then you would have expected only small moves in house prices relative to incomes in the period to 2005, followed by them leaping up prior to Brexit, followed by them falling in the period between 2015 and 2020.
What does the prevalence of dual income households (where dual income is both full time) look like during that period?
Oh, there are many many factors.
Look at Japan from 1970 to 1991: house prices relative to incomes went up more than 5x, despite net emigration and no change in the working status of Japanese women.
Basically, we all want simple "this is the cause", but (like real life) it's pretty complex.
Had an excellent Churchill centenary dinner this evening in Epping Forest to commemorate 100 years since Winston Churchill was elected as MP for Epping. Good speeches too from both his grandson, Lord Soames and great grandson, Randolph Churchill
I spoke to a woman yesterday who is at her wits end: Her husband works full-time in a low-pay job, she has been does not work but looks after their four children, all under 10.
They privately rent a 3-bed house and have just been told by the letting agent that their rent is going up by 41% (!) in March. Reason? - BTL "owner's mortgage has gone up". There's nothing else locally they can move to for any less rent (there are hardly any 3-bed homes for rent locally). They are on the council housing register but would need to become actually homeless to stand any chance of getting anything, then it could be B&B for a long-stretch.
They receive UC support which was covering their rent but that's capped by the Local Housing Allowance at about 75% of their new rent. They were already struggling on the old rent and regularly borrowing from family mid-month, paying back when they got paid... and repeat. Rent, Council Tax, Electricity, Gas, Food, Transport - this is where all their money goes.
What kind of messed-up country have we become where:
1) Taxpayers have to subsidise a traditional working family to live? 2) Those subsidies are set based on 'local rent levels' which are way below any actual comparable local rents?
We are seeing this every week now: working families, both tenants and mortgaged homeowners, who have hit the point where they just cannot make sums add up.
Anyone who thinks we're about to hit a feel-good period is a bit deluded imo.
We need a huge increase in housebuilding and a big hike in the minimum wage - why the f*ck are taxpayers subsidising low-pay employers and BTL landlords?
Ultimately, no social model will turn one low salary into a comfortable standard of living for six humans.
That's kinda what I was thinking. Basically is someone on minimum wage with a non working wife really expecting to have enough money for 4 kids? What they are unhappy about is that we are not subsidising them sufficiently to give them the standard of living they think they are entitled to. Well, actually, they aren't.
Partially yes, but partially no.
If housing cost the same as it used to in the past, then household budgets would be a lot more relieved without giving them any further subsidies.
It is the draconian cost of housing that eats up too much of too many people's budgets.
Sure, if you want housing to be the same as it was in the past. Outside privies. Two families in a house, No gardens. Garage? You're having a laugh. The heating is the downstairs fireplace.
If you want 'better' housing, it'll cost more. every regulation we add onto housing legislation improves housing, but increases cost.
I don't know what the answer is.
That's absurd and illogical thinking.
Quality improves over time without increasing cost. TVs, computers and much more cost a tiny fraction (in real terms) of what they did, while being much better quality. Its not just technology, food nowadays costs a quarter of what it did in the seventies, while improving tremendously in the availability of variety and quality (even if some people choose crap).
Housing isn't expensive due to build costs, housing is expensive due to the artificially high cost of land and the lack of competition due to the planning system. Prior to the introduction of the requirement of planning consent, land was just 2% of the cost of a house - go back to that, and the cost of housing would plummet and people would be able to afford a better standard of living without any extra income.
It is those trying to sweat the value of land to earn an income who are causing misery. That unearned income has to come from somewhere.
I think you're wrong. The things you mention improved performance and simultaneously decreased cost due to the *quantity* being sold. Back in the early 1980s, the government started a scheme that said we would have a computer in every school. That is *one computer in every school of a few hundred pupils. That made the fortunes (temporarily) of a computer company. Now most people carry one or two computers around with them all the time (in my case, phone and watch).
We are talking orders of magnitude increases in production. 230 billion ARM chips have been made in the last forty years, and that sort of volume increases quality/performance and reduces cost. Housing is in no way scalable in the same manner.
Housing absolutely is scalable, indeed its been done around the globe.
Contrast the value of land with planning consent with the value without it. That delta is purely artificial and entirely due to the planning system, abolish it and you abolish that delta, you abolish that cost altogether.
Housing is not scalable in the same way, and it's ridiculous to say it is. As I said, *billions* of ARM chips alone have been sold. 25 billion in 2020 alone. Comparing housing to that is... odd, for obvious reasons.
I never said scalable in the same way, nor does it need to be, it just needs to be scalable and it is.
As I gave as an initial example, food has come down by 75% in cost since the 70s, that's not scaled like ARM has.
Housing costs never used to be this expensive either, land never used to be this expensive, they are expensive solely because its scaled less than population has. If it scaled more than population does, then prices would collapse in real terms, which would be great news for all except those trying to sweat land for unearned wealth and income.
It's nowhere near scalable enough, especially as the *quality* of what we rightly want increases. we want *better* housing, and that invariably costs more. Better insulation? it costs. Electric car chargers outside every new house? They cost.
Usable land is finite; we rightly want better quality housing on the land. The 'quality' of the food has not increased massively since the 1970s; the places we are buying it from worldwide may have.
I agree that planning is an issue; I just see that there are many other barriers to 'affordable' housing. Changing demographics, immigration, desires, legislation... they are all factors. And good luck in changing most of them. There's no way I'd touch a timber-framed mass-produced house, for instance, after the disasters in the 1980s.
It is scalable. How do you provide more housing and services with less land, fewer building materials, more efficient transport options and lower running costs?
Flats.
Yes slums are scalable cheaply, but deal with the way the planning system warps competition and inflates the value of land and real actual homes can be built for cheaper instead.
Stop this obsession of cramming people into slum flats instead of actual houses.
But, as a sharp thinker here has pointed out, that has naff all to to with the cost of those flats, it's pure supply and demand.
Copy and paste the street plans of desirable old suburbs. The places that price signals show that people want to live in.
Make the exteriors appealing (which probably means Georgian Pastiche), give the innards modern standards of insulation and utilities. Then denser living is popular and it's easy for private enterprise to provide all the other stuff that makes life pleasant.
The inability to construct more is precisely the supply problem, yes.
Nationwide the price signals that people prefer detached homes, then semi-detached homes, with terraces being the least preferable houses of all. And flats even less popular than terraces.
The idea that denser living is popular is not remotely based on any facts or evidence. Inner-city living may be popular for some, but in like-for-like areas people will prefer more space for themselves without others.
Barry and Josias are both half right here. My parents have had a house built over the last couple of years (moved in last Summer). It's the sort of thing most people reasonably aspire to own; 4 bed, detached, but not a grand designs wonder. Very much in keeping with the Welsh hamlet in which it built - roof that looks like slate, stone facing to the front, windows that look like period timber frames.
All in, it cost about £500k, including a site with planning. Barry is right - planning permission, even somewhere fairly undesirable in the wilds of Wales puts a massive uplift on the value of land. The plot, with planning was £85k. Without planning (and no prospect of getting planning) it would have been worth perhaps £5k. So about 16% of the cost of it is artificial from the planning system. In other places it is higher - earlier this year I was the underbidder to a burnt out 3 bed farmhouse (needed complete demolition and reinstament), plus 15 acres of useless but pretty moor/scrub land. I dropped out of the running at £225k, and that didn't even have a guarantee one would get planning to rebuild. It was a stunning location, but I was offering about £150k over the normal likely value of the land for the prospect of getting planning in a pretty location.
Josias is also right. My parents house cost the wrong side of £400k to build. Lots of factors behind that, but at least a third of it is driven by recent building regs on energy efficiency and insulation (and some other things - e.g. because it's in Wales, it has to have a full fire sprinkler system despite only being two stories). The drive for thermal efficiency is all well and good, but the costs are phenomenal and the laws of diminishing returns have well and truly kicked in. My house, whilst a little smaller than my parents (3 bed semi) has only basic insulation (cheap double glazing, a bit of stuff in the loft), but I could heat it for around 50 years even at the current high gas prices for the amount my parents have had to spend on insulation, triple glazing etc.
The fix is at least bit of both - take building regs back about 15 years, make planning about twice as easy to get, and you probably can knock £100-150k off the cost of a typical new home.
However, all this is looking at the wrong end of the problem. The main driver of high house prices? Half a million people extra a year. The main driver of low wages? Half a million extra (mostly low paid) people a year. The only possible long term solution? Net Zero migration. When should this happen? The best time was 20 years ago, the next best time is now.
The biggest move in affordability - when house prices moved from 4x income to 8x happened between 1990 and 2005. Since then it's gotten worse (9.0x), but if immigration was the biggest driver, then you would have expected only small moves in house prices relative to incomes in the period to 2005, followed by them leaping up prior to Brexit, followed by them falling in the period between 2015 and 2020.
What does the prevalence of dual income households (where dual income is both full time) look like during that period?
I think that 4.6x - 8.2x move (and that's a bit apples to oranges, given the points in the boom/bust cycle these represent - the 7.0x from 2010 is more a fair measurement of trough to trough) is driven mostly by relaxations in mortgage rules, particularly allowing a second income to be taken into account, rather than just a primary income. Laws of supply and demand being what they are, if you almost double the availabile resources chasing a tightly constrained market, prices will go up a lot (probably almost double in fact!)
But - that effect would have stalled out had once the effects of that relaxation had worked themselves through. Instead, from the 2010 7x to the 2022 9x is another substantial increase, only plausibly driven by migration.
I spoke to a woman yesterday who is at her wits end: Her husband works full-time in a low-pay job, she has been does not work but looks after their four children, all under 10.
They privately rent a 3-bed house and have just been told by the letting agent that their rent is going up by 41% (!) in March. Reason? - BTL "owner's mortgage has gone up". There's nothing else locally they can move to for any less rent (there are hardly any 3-bed homes for rent locally). They are on the council housing register but would need to become actually homeless to stand any chance of getting anything, then it could be B&B for a long-stretch.
They receive UC support which was covering their rent but that's capped by the Local Housing Allowance at about 75% of their new rent. They were already struggling on the old rent and regularly borrowing from family mid-month, paying back when they got paid... and repeat. Rent, Council Tax, Electricity, Gas, Food, Transport - this is where all their money goes.
What kind of messed-up country have we become where:
1) Taxpayers have to subsidise a traditional working family to live? 2) Those subsidies are set based on 'local rent levels' which are way below any actual comparable local rents?
We are seeing this every week now: working families, both tenants and mortgaged homeowners, who have hit the point where they just cannot make sums add up.
Anyone who thinks we're about to hit a feel-good period is a bit deluded imo.
We need a huge increase in housebuilding and a big hike in the minimum wage - why the f*ck are taxpayers subsidising low-pay employers and BTL landlords?
Ultimately, no social model will turn one low salary into a comfortable standard of living for six humans.
That's kinda what I was thinking. Basically is someone on minimum wage with a non working wife really expecting to have enough money for 4 kids? What they are unhappy about is that we are not subsidising them sufficiently to give them the standard of living they think they are entitled to. Well, actually, they aren't.
Partially yes, but partially no.
If housing cost the same as it used to in the past, then household budgets would be a lot more relieved without giving them any further subsidies.
It is the draconian cost of housing that eats up too much of too many people's budgets.
Sure, if you want housing to be the same as it was in the past. Outside privies. Two families in a house, No gardens. Garage? You're having a laugh. The heating is the downstairs fireplace.
If you want 'better' housing, it'll cost more. every regulation we add onto housing legislation improves housing, but increases cost.
I don't know what the answer is.
That's absurd and illogical thinking.
Quality improves over time without increasing cost. TVs, computers and much more cost a tiny fraction (in real terms) of what they did, while being much better quality. Its not just technology, food nowadays costs a quarter of what it did in the seventies, while improving tremendously in the availability of variety and quality (even if some people choose crap).
Housing isn't expensive due to build costs, housing is expensive due to the artificially high cost of land and the lack of competition due to the planning system. Prior to the introduction of the requirement of planning consent, land was just 2% of the cost of a house - go back to that, and the cost of housing would plummet and people would be able to afford a better standard of living without any extra income.
It is those trying to sweat the value of land to earn an income who are causing misery. That unearned income has to come from somewhere.
I think you're wrong. The things you mention improved performance and simultaneously decreased cost due to the *quantity* being sold. Back in the early 1980s, the government started a scheme that said we would have a computer in every school. That is *one computer in every school of a few hundred pupils. That made the fortunes (temporarily) of a computer company. Now most people carry one or two computers around with them all the time (in my case, phone and watch).
We are talking orders of magnitude increases in production. 230 billion ARM chips have been made in the last forty years, and that sort of volume increases quality/performance and reduces cost. Housing is in no way scalable in the same manner.
Housing absolutely is scalable, indeed its been done around the globe.
Contrast the value of land with planning consent with the value without it. That delta is purely artificial and entirely due to the planning system, abolish it and you abolish that delta, you abolish that cost altogether.
Housing is not scalable in the same way, and it's ridiculous to say it is. As I said, *billions* of ARM chips alone have been sold. 25 billion in 2020 alone. Comparing housing to that is... odd, for obvious reasons.
I never said scalable in the same way, nor does it need to be, it just needs to be scalable and it is.
As I gave as an initial example, food has come down by 75% in cost since the 70s, that's not scaled like ARM has.
Housing costs never used to be this expensive either, land never used to be this expensive, they are expensive solely because its scaled less than population has. If it scaled more than population does, then prices would collapse in real terms, which would be great news for all except those trying to sweat land for unearned wealth and income.
It's nowhere near scalable enough, especially as the *quality* of what we rightly want increases. we want *better* housing, and that invariably costs more. Better insulation? it costs. Electric car chargers outside every new house? They cost.
Usable land is finite; we rightly want better quality housing on the land. The 'quality' of the food has not increased massively since the 1970s; the places we are buying it from worldwide may have.
I agree that planning is an issue; I just see that there are many other barriers to 'affordable' housing. Changing demographics, immigration, desires, legislation... they are all factors. And good luck in changing most of them. There's no way I'd touch a timber-framed mass-produced house, for instance, after the disasters in the 1980s.
It is scalable. How do you provide more housing and services with less land, fewer building materials, more efficient transport options and lower running costs?
Flats.
Yes slums are scalable cheaply, but deal with the way the planning system warps competition and inflates the value of land and real actual homes can be built for cheaper instead.
Stop this obsession of cramming people into slum flats instead of actual houses.
But, as a sharp thinker here has pointed out, that has naff all to to with the cost of those flats, it's pure supply and demand.
Copy and paste the street plans of desirable old suburbs. The places that price signals show that people want to live in.
Make the exteriors appealing (which probably means Georgian Pastiche), give the innards modern standards of insulation and utilities. Then denser living is popular and it's easy for private enterprise to provide all the other stuff that makes life pleasant.
The inability to construct more is precisely the supply problem, yes.
Nationwide the price signals that people prefer detached homes, then semi-detached homes, with terraces being the least preferable houses of all. And flats even less popular than terraces.
The idea that denser living is popular is not remotely based on any facts or evidence. Inner-city living may be popular for some, but in like-for-like areas people will prefer more space for themselves without others.
Barry and Josias are both half right here. My parents have had a house built over the last couple of years (moved in last Summer). It's the sort of thing most people reasonably aspire to own; 4 bed, detached, but not a grand designs wonder. Very much in keeping with the Welsh hamlet in which it built - roof that looks like slate, stone facing to the front, windows that look like period timber frames.
All in, it cost about £500k, including a site with planning. Barry is right - planning permission, even somewhere fairly undesirable in the wilds of Wales puts a massive uplift on the value of land. The plot, with planning was £85k. Without planning (and no prospect of getting planning) it would have been worth perhaps £5k. So about 16% of the cost of it is artificial from the planning system. In other places it is higher - earlier this year I was the underbidder to a burnt out 3 bed farmhouse (needed complete demolition and reinstament), plus 15 acres of useless but pretty moor/scrub land. I dropped out of the running at £225k, and that didn't even have a guarantee one would get planning to rebuild. It was a stunning location, but I was offering about £150k over the normal likely value of the land for the prospect of getting planning in a pretty location.
Josias is also right. My parents house cost the wrong side of £400k to build. Lots of factors behind that, but at least a third of it is driven by recent building regs on energy efficiency and insulation (and some other things - e.g. because it's in Wales, it has to have a full fire sprinkler system despite only being two stories). The drive for thermal efficiency is all well and good, but the costs are phenomenal and the laws of diminishing returns have well and truly kicked in. My house, whilst a little smaller than my parents (3 bed semi) has only basic insulation (cheap double glazing, a bit of stuff in the loft), but I could heat it for around 50 years even at the current high gas prices for the amount my parents have had to spend on insulation, triple glazing etc.
The fix is at least bit of both - take building regs back about 15 years, make planning about twice as easy to get, and you probably can knock £100-150k off the cost of a typical new home.
However, all this is looking at the wrong end of the problem. The main driver of high house prices? Half a million people extra a year. The main driver of low wages? Half a million extra (mostly low paid) people a year. The only possible long term solution? Net Zero migration. When should this happen? The best time was 20 years ago, the next best time is now.
The biggest move in affordability - when house prices moved from 4x income to 8x happened between 1990 and 2005. Since then it's gotten worse (9.0x), but if immigration was the biggest driver, then you would have expected only small moves in house prices relative to incomes in the period to 2005, followed by them leaping up prior to Brexit, followed by them falling in the period between 2015 and 2020.
What does the prevalence of dual income households (where dual income is both full time) look like during that period?
Oh, there are many many factors.
Look at Japan from 1970 to 1991: house prices relative to incomes went up more than 5x, despite net emigration and no change in the working status of Japanese women.
Basically, we all want simple "this is the cause", but (like real life) it's pretty complex.
I'm sure there are! I suppose you have to look at the actual costs first, anyway.
I mean, 5.4x in 1990 would have been a lot more expensive than 8.1x in 2015.
But there must be some effect of the change in rules to effectively double the money chasing the same thing.
The £28bn mini furore is a bit daft. Labour doesn’t know what budget it is going to be starting from until at least after the Budget and in all likelihood not until the autumn.
Another example of how stupid Americans can be is this: if you're going to have a death penalty, it's pretty much a no-brainer that the rope is the least-worst way of doing it. But they insist on using all sorts of other uncivilised methods instead. (Not a supporter myself).
I spoke to a woman yesterday who is at her wits end: Her husband works full-time in a low-pay job, she has been does not work but looks after their four children, all under 10.
They privately rent a 3-bed house and have just been told by the letting agent that their rent is going up by 41% (!) in March. Reason? - BTL "owner's mortgage has gone up". There's nothing else locally they can move to for any less rent (there are hardly any 3-bed homes for rent locally). They are on the council housing register but would need to become actually homeless to stand any chance of getting anything, then it could be B&B for a long-stretch.
They receive UC support which was covering their rent but that's capped by the Local Housing Allowance at about 75% of their new rent. They were already struggling on the old rent and regularly borrowing from family mid-month, paying back when they got paid... and repeat. Rent, Council Tax, Electricity, Gas, Food, Transport - this is where all their money goes.
What kind of messed-up country have we become where:
1) Taxpayers have to subsidise a traditional working family to live? 2) Those subsidies are set based on 'local rent levels' which are way below any actual comparable local rents?
We are seeing this every week now: working families, both tenants and mortgaged homeowners, who have hit the point where they just cannot make sums add up.
Anyone who thinks we're about to hit a feel-good period is a bit deluded imo.
We need a huge increase in housebuilding and a big hike in the minimum wage - why the f*ck are taxpayers subsidising low-pay employers and BTL landlords?
Ultimately, no social model will turn one low salary into a comfortable standard of living for six humans.
That's kinda what I was thinking. Basically is someone on minimum wage with a non working wife really expecting to have enough money for 4 kids? What they are unhappy about is that we are not subsidising them sufficiently to give them the standard of living they think they are entitled to. Well, actually, they aren't.
Partially yes, but partially no.
If housing cost the same as it used to in the past, then household budgets would be a lot more relieved without giving them any further subsidies.
It is the draconian cost of housing that eats up too much of too many people's budgets.
Sure, if you want housing to be the same as it was in the past. Outside privies. Two families in a house, No gardens. Garage? You're having a laugh. The heating is the downstairs fireplace.
If you want 'better' housing, it'll cost more. every regulation we add onto housing legislation improves housing, but increases cost.
I don't know what the answer is.
That's absurd and illogical thinking.
Quality improves over time without increasing cost. TVs, computers and much more cost a tiny fraction (in real terms) of what they did, while being much better quality. Its not just technology, food nowadays costs a quarter of what it did in the seventies, while improving tremendously in the availability of variety and quality (even if some people choose crap).
Housing isn't expensive due to build costs, housing is expensive due to the artificially high cost of land and the lack of competition due to the planning system. Prior to the introduction of the requirement of planning consent, land was just 2% of the cost of a house - go back to that, and the cost of housing would plummet and people would be able to afford a better standard of living without any extra income.
It is those trying to sweat the value of land to earn an income who are causing misery. That unearned income has to come from somewhere.
I think you're wrong. The things you mention improved performance and simultaneously decreased cost due to the *quantity* being sold. Back in the early 1980s, the government started a scheme that said we would have a computer in every school. That is *one computer in every school of a few hundred pupils. That made the fortunes (temporarily) of a computer company. Now most people carry one or two computers around with them all the time (in my case, phone and watch).
We are talking orders of magnitude increases in production. 230 billion ARM chips have been made in the last forty years, and that sort of volume increases quality/performance and reduces cost. Housing is in no way scalable in the same manner.
Housing absolutely is scalable, indeed its been done around the globe.
Contrast the value of land with planning consent with the value without it. That delta is purely artificial and entirely due to the planning system, abolish it and you abolish that delta, you abolish that cost altogether.
Housing is not scalable in the same way, and it's ridiculous to say it is. As I said, *billions* of ARM chips alone have been sold. 25 billion in 2020 alone. Comparing housing to that is... odd, for obvious reasons.
I never said scalable in the same way, nor does it need to be, it just needs to be scalable and it is.
As I gave as an initial example, food has come down by 75% in cost since the 70s, that's not scaled like ARM has.
Housing costs never used to be this expensive either, land never used to be this expensive, they are expensive solely because its scaled less than population has. If it scaled more than population does, then prices would collapse in real terms, which would be great news for all except those trying to sweat land for unearned wealth and income.
It's nowhere near scalable enough, especially as the *quality* of what we rightly want increases. we want *better* housing, and that invariably costs more. Better insulation? it costs. Electric car chargers outside every new house? They cost.
Usable land is finite; we rightly want better quality housing on the land. The 'quality' of the food has not increased massively since the 1970s; the places we are buying it from worldwide may have.
I agree that planning is an issue; I just see that there are many other barriers to 'affordable' housing. Changing demographics, immigration, desires, legislation... they are all factors. And good luck in changing most of them. There's no way I'd touch a timber-framed mass-produced house, for instance, after the disasters in the 1980s.
It is scalable. How do you provide more housing and services with less land, fewer building materials, more efficient transport options and lower running costs?
Flats.
Yes slums are scalable cheaply, but deal with the way the planning system warps competition and inflates the value of land and real actual homes can be built for cheaper instead.
Stop this obsession of cramming people into slum flats instead of actual houses.
But, as a sharp thinker here has pointed out, that has naff all to to with the cost of those flats, it's pure supply and demand.
Copy and paste the street plans of desirable old suburbs. The places that price signals show that people want to live in.
Make the exteriors appealing (which probably means Georgian Pastiche), give the innards modern standards of insulation and utilities. Then denser living is popular and it's easy for private enterprise to provide all the other stuff that makes life pleasant.
The inability to construct more is precisely the supply problem, yes.
Nationwide the price signals that people prefer detached homes, then semi-detached homes, with terraces being the least preferable houses of all. And flats even less popular than terraces.
The idea that denser living is popular is not remotely based on any facts or evidence. Inner-city living may be popular for some, but in like-for-like areas people will prefer more space for themselves without others.
Barry and Josias are both half right here. My parents have had a house built over the last couple of years (moved in last Summer). It's the sort of thing most people reasonably aspire to own; 4 bed, detached, but not a grand designs wonder. Very much in keeping with the Welsh hamlet in which it built - roof that looks like slate, stone facing to the front, windows that look like period timber frames.
All in, it cost about £500k, including a site with planning. Barry is right - planning permission, even somewhere fairly undesirable in the wilds of Wales puts a massive uplift on the value of land. The plot, with planning was £85k. Without planning (and no prospect of getting planning) it would have been worth perhaps £5k. So about 16% of the cost of it is artificial from the planning system. In other places it is higher - earlier this year I was the underbidder to a burnt out 3 bed farmhouse (needed complete demolition and reinstament), plus 15 acres of useless but pretty moor/scrub land. I dropped out of the running at £225k, and that didn't even have a guarantee one would get planning to rebuild. It was a stunning location, but I was offering about £150k over the normal likely value of the land for the prospect of getting planning in a pretty location.
Josias is also right. My parents house cost the wrong side of £400k to build. Lots of factors behind that, but at least a third of it is driven by recent building regs on energy efficiency and insulation (and some other things - e.g. because it's in Wales, it has to have a full fire sprinkler system despite only being two stories). The drive for thermal efficiency is all well and good, but the costs are phenomenal and the laws of diminishing returns have well and truly kicked in. My house, whilst a little smaller than my parents (3 bed semi) has only basic insulation (cheap double glazing, a bit of stuff in the loft), but I could heat it for around 50 years even at the current high gas prices for the amount my parents have had to spend on insulation, triple glazing etc.
The fix is at least bit of both - take building regs back about 15 years, make planning about twice as easy to get, and you probably can knock £100-150k off the cost of a typical new home.
However, all this is looking at the wrong end of the problem. The main driver of high house prices? Half a million people extra a year. The main driver of low wages? Half a million extra (mostly low paid) people a year. The only possible long term solution? Net Zero migration. When should this happen? The best time was 20 years ago, the next best time is now.
The biggest move in affordability - when house prices moved from 4x income to 8x happened between 1990 and 2005. Since then it's gotten worse (9.0x), but if immigration was the biggest driver, then you would have expected only small moves in house prices relative to incomes in the period to 2005, followed by them leaping up prior to Brexit, followed by them falling in the period between 2015 and 2020.
What does the prevalence of dual income households (where dual income is both full time) look like during that period?
I think that 4.6x - 8.2x move (and that's a bit apples to oranges, given the points in the boom/bust cycle these represent - the 7.0x from 2010 is more a fair measurement of trough to trough) is driven mostly by relaxations in mortgage rules, particularly allowing a second income to be taken into account, rather than just a primary income. Laws of supply and demand being what they are, if you almost double the availabile resources chasing a tightly constrained market, prices will go up a lot (probably almost double in fact!)
But - that effect would have stalled out had once the effects of that relaxation had worked themselves through. Instead, from the 2010 7x to the 2022 9x is another substantial increase, only plausibly driven by migration.
Come on, that's cherry picking too: 2010 was the post GFC low in house prices.
Another example of how stupid Americans can be is this: is you're going to have a death penalty, it's pretty much a no-brainer that the rope is the least-worst way of doing it. But they insist on using all sorts of other uncivilised methods.
Why is it any better than the gas chamber or lethal injection? All are horrific ways of state killing. Is there any evidence that hanging is somehow more ‘humane’?
I spoke to a woman yesterday who is at her wits end: Her husband works full-time in a low-pay job, she has been does not work but looks after their four children, all under 10.
They privately rent a 3-bed house and have just been told by the letting agent that their rent is going up by 41% (!) in March. Reason? - BTL "owner's mortgage has gone up". There's nothing else locally they can move to for any less rent (there are hardly any 3-bed homes for rent locally). They are on the council housing register but would need to become actually homeless to stand any chance of getting anything, then it could be B&B for a long-stretch.
They receive UC support which was covering their rent but that's capped by the Local Housing Allowance at about 75% of their new rent. They were already struggling on the old rent and regularly borrowing from family mid-month, paying back when they got paid... and repeat. Rent, Council Tax, Electricity, Gas, Food, Transport - this is where all their money goes.
What kind of messed-up country have we become where:
1) Taxpayers have to subsidise a traditional working family to live? 2) Those subsidies are set based on 'local rent levels' which are way below any actual comparable local rents?
We are seeing this every week now: working families, both tenants and mortgaged homeowners, who have hit the point where they just cannot make sums add up.
Anyone who thinks we're about to hit a feel-good period is a bit deluded imo.
We need a huge increase in housebuilding and a big hike in the minimum wage - why the f*ck are taxpayers subsidising low-pay employers and BTL landlords?
Ultimately, no social model will turn one low salary into a comfortable standard of living for six humans.
That's kinda what I was thinking. Basically is someone on minimum wage with a non working wife really expecting to have enough money for 4 kids? What they are unhappy about is that we are not subsidising them sufficiently to give them the standard of living they think they are entitled to. Well, actually, they aren't.
Partially yes, but partially no.
If housing cost the same as it used to in the past, then household budgets would be a lot more relieved without giving them any further subsidies.
It is the draconian cost of housing that eats up too much of too many people's budgets.
Sure, if you want housing to be the same as it was in the past. Outside privies. Two families in a house, No gardens. Garage? You're having a laugh. The heating is the downstairs fireplace.
If you want 'better' housing, it'll cost more. every regulation we add onto housing legislation improves housing, but increases cost.
I don't know what the answer is.
That's absurd and illogical thinking.
Quality improves over time without increasing cost. TVs, computers and much more cost a tiny fraction (in real terms) of what they did, while being much better quality. Its not just technology, food nowadays costs a quarter of what it did in the seventies, while improving tremendously in the availability of variety and quality (even if some people choose crap).
Housing isn't expensive due to build costs, housing is expensive due to the artificially high cost of land and the lack of competition due to the planning system. Prior to the introduction of the requirement of planning consent, land was just 2% of the cost of a house - go back to that, and the cost of housing would plummet and people would be able to afford a better standard of living without any extra income.
It is those trying to sweat the value of land to earn an income who are causing misery. That unearned income has to come from somewhere.
I think you're wrong. The things you mention improved performance and simultaneously decreased cost due to the *quantity* being sold. Back in the early 1980s, the government started a scheme that said we would have a computer in every school. That is *one computer in every school of a few hundred pupils. That made the fortunes (temporarily) of a computer company. Now most people carry one or two computers around with them all the time (in my case, phone and watch).
We are talking orders of magnitude increases in production. 230 billion ARM chips have been made in the last forty years, and that sort of volume increases quality/performance and reduces cost. Housing is in no way scalable in the same manner.
Housing absolutely is scalable, indeed its been done around the globe.
Contrast the value of land with planning consent with the value without it. That delta is purely artificial and entirely due to the planning system, abolish it and you abolish that delta, you abolish that cost altogether.
Housing is not scalable in the same way, and it's ridiculous to say it is. As I said, *billions* of ARM chips alone have been sold. 25 billion in 2020 alone. Comparing housing to that is... odd, for obvious reasons.
I never said scalable in the same way, nor does it need to be, it just needs to be scalable and it is.
As I gave as an initial example, food has come down by 75% in cost since the 70s, that's not scaled like ARM has.
Housing costs never used to be this expensive either, land never used to be this expensive, they are expensive solely because its scaled less than population has. If it scaled more than population does, then prices would collapse in real terms, which would be great news for all except those trying to sweat land for unearned wealth and income.
It's nowhere near scalable enough, especially as the *quality* of what we rightly want increases. we want *better* housing, and that invariably costs more. Better insulation? it costs. Electric car chargers outside every new house? They cost.
Usable land is finite; we rightly want better quality housing on the land. The 'quality' of the food has not increased massively since the 1970s; the places we are buying it from worldwide may have.
I agree that planning is an issue; I just see that there are many other barriers to 'affordable' housing. Changing demographics, immigration, desires, legislation... they are all factors. And good luck in changing most of them. There's no way I'd touch a timber-framed mass-produced house, for instance, after the disasters in the 1980s.
It is scalable. How do you provide more housing and services with less land, fewer building materials, more efficient transport options and lower running costs?
Flats.
Yes slums are scalable cheaply, but deal with the way the planning system warps competition and inflates the value of land and real actual homes can be built for cheaper instead.
Stop this obsession of cramming people into slum flats instead of actual houses.
But, as a sharp thinker here has pointed out, that has naff all to to with the cost of those flats, it's pure supply and demand.
Copy and paste the street plans of desirable old suburbs. The places that price signals show that people want to live in.
Make the exteriors appealing (which probably means Georgian Pastiche), give the innards modern standards of insulation and utilities. Then denser living is popular and it's easy for private enterprise to provide all the other stuff that makes life pleasant.
The inability to construct more is precisely the supply problem, yes.
Nationwide the price signals that people prefer detached homes, then semi-detached homes, with terraces being the least preferable houses of all. And flats even less popular than terraces.
The idea that denser living is popular is not remotely based on any facts or evidence. Inner-city living may be popular for some, but in like-for-like areas people will prefer more space for themselves without others.
Barry and Josias are both half right here. My parents have had a house built over the last couple of years (moved in last Summer). It's the sort of thing most people reasonably aspire to own; 4 bed, detached, but not a grand designs wonder. Very much in keeping with the Welsh hamlet in which it built - roof that looks like slate, stone facing to the front, windows that look like period timber frames.
All in, it cost about £500k, including a site with planning. Barry is right - planning permission, even somewhere fairly undesirable in the wilds of Wales puts a massive uplift on the value of land. The plot, with planning was £85k. Without planning (and no prospect of getting planning) it would have been worth perhaps £5k. So about 16% of the cost of it is artificial from the planning system. In other places it is higher - earlier this year I was the underbidder to a burnt out 3 bed farmhouse (needed complete demolition and reinstament), plus 15 acres of useless but pretty moor/scrub land. I dropped out of the running at £225k, and that didn't even have a guarantee one would get planning to rebuild. It was a stunning location, but I was offering about £150k over the normal likely value of the land for the prospect of getting planning in a pretty location.
Josias is also right. My parents house cost the wrong side of £400k to build. Lots of factors behind that, but at least a third of it is driven by recent building regs on energy efficiency and insulation (and some other things - e.g. because it's in Wales, it has to have a full fire sprinkler system despite only being two stories). The drive for thermal efficiency is all well and good, but the costs are phenomenal and the laws of diminishing returns have well and truly kicked in. My house, whilst a little smaller than my parents (3 bed semi) has only basic insulation (cheap double glazing, a bit of stuff in the loft), but I could heat it for around 50 years even at the current high gas prices for the amount my parents have had to spend on insulation, triple glazing etc.
The fix is at least bit of both - take building regs back about 15 years, make planning about twice as easy to get, and you probably can knock £100-150k off the cost of a typical new home.
However, all this is looking at the wrong end of the problem. The main driver of high house prices? Half a million people extra a year. The main driver of low wages? Half a million extra (mostly low paid) people a year. The only possible long term solution? Net Zero migration. When should this happen? The best time was 20 years ago, the next best time is now.
The biggest move in affordability - when house prices moved from 4x income to 8x happened between 1990 and 2005. Since then it's gotten worse (9.0x), but if immigration was the biggest driver, then you would have expected only small moves in house prices relative to incomes in the period to 2005, followed by them leaping up prior to Brexit, followed by them falling in the period between 2015 and 2020.
What does the prevalence of dual income households (where dual income is both full time) look like during that period?
Oh, there are many many factors.
Look at Japan from 1970 to 1991: house prices relative to incomes went up more than 5x, despite net emigration and no change in the working status of Japanese women.
Basically, we all want simple "this is the cause", but (like real life) it's pretty complex.
Isn't the Japanese market fundamentally different (and a bit weird) because they tend to knock them down and start again at much shorter intervals than us, as well as having little planning control? So the cost of housing is mostly a function of the cost of building houses, unlike the UK where the supply of land with planning is a big factor driving prices.
Guardian are confirming the 28 billion pledge is being ditched . Together with Reeves pathetic defence of not bringing back the bankers bonus cap it’s been a woeful day for Labour .
At the moment the biggest danger to a Labour GE win is Labour!
They’re dropping a hugely popular policy because they’re terrified of Tory attacks . Utterly pathetic.
Another example of how stupid Americans can be is this: if you're going to have a death penalty, it's pretty much a no-brainer that the rope is the least-worst way of doing it. But they insist on using all sorts of other uncivilised methods instead. (Not a supporter myself).
Well they have largely ended the electric chair at least now, it is mainly lethal injection in those 27 US states still with the death penalty.
Another example of how stupid Americans can be is this: if you're going to have a death penalty, it's pretty much a no-brainer that the rope is the least-worst way of doing it. But they insist on using all sorts of other uncivilised methods instead. (Not a supporter myself).
Well they have largely ended the electric chair at least now, it is mainly lethal injection in those 27 US states still with the death penalty.
Guardian are confirming the 28 billion pledge is being ditched . Together with Reeves pathetic defence of not bringing back the bankers bonus cap it’s been a woeful day for Labour .
At the moment the biggest danger to a Labour GE win is Labour!
They’re dropping a hugely popular policy because they’re terrified of Tory attacks . Utterly pathetic.
I think this is wrong economically as well as from a climate change perspective. Well targeted* investment would very likely see a positive return.
(*OK, that’s seriously begging the question.)
Pathetic by Keir.
This is his most egregious climb-down to date, and it comes because he simply doesn’t have the political cojones to defend public investment.
Yes it’s utterly spineless. Labour seem obsessed with avoiding Tory attacks when they’re going to be attacked regardless .
The policy was very popular with Labour voters . They seem to be chasing votes of people who would never vote for them.
As for Reeves she seems to have forgotten which party she’s in !
“seem obsessed with avoiding Tory attacks when they’re going to be attacked regardless”
Is that all there is to it? So you are saying it is perfectly affordable?
The point is they have no idea whether it is affordable or otherwise. The Tories keep faffing around with gimmicky tax cuts and no-one has the detail on where growth will be come the autumn.
I spoke to a woman yesterday who is at her wits end: Her husband works full-time in a low-pay job, she has been does not work but looks after their four children, all under 10.
They privately rent a 3-bed house and have just been told by the letting agent that their rent is going up by 41% (!) in March. Reason? - BTL "owner's mortgage has gone up". There's nothing else locally they can move to for any less rent (there are hardly any 3-bed homes for rent locally). They are on the council housing register but would need to become actually homeless to stand any chance of getting anything, then it could be B&B for a long-stretch.
They receive UC support which was covering their rent but that's capped by the Local Housing Allowance at about 75% of their new rent. They were already struggling on the old rent and regularly borrowing from family mid-month, paying back when they got paid... and repeat. Rent, Council Tax, Electricity, Gas, Food, Transport - this is where all their money goes.
What kind of messed-up country have we become where:
1) Taxpayers have to subsidise a traditional working family to live? 2) Those subsidies are set based on 'local rent levels' which are way below any actual comparable local rents?
We are seeing this every week now: working families, both tenants and mortgaged homeowners, who have hit the point where they just cannot make sums add up.
Anyone who thinks we're about to hit a feel-good period is a bit deluded imo.
We need a huge increase in housebuilding and a big hike in the minimum wage - why the f*ck are taxpayers subsidising low-pay employers and BTL landlords?
Ultimately, no social model will turn one low salary into a comfortable standard of living for six humans.
That's kinda what I was thinking. Basically is someone on minimum wage with a non working wife really expecting to have enough money for 4 kids? What they are unhappy about is that we are not subsidising them sufficiently to give them the standard of living they think they are entitled to. Well, actually, they aren't.
Partially yes, but partially no.
If housing cost the same as it used to in the past, then household budgets would be a lot more relieved without giving them any further subsidies.
It is the draconian cost of housing that eats up too much of too many people's budgets.
Sure, if you want housing to be the same as it was in the past. Outside privies. Two families in a house, No gardens. Garage? You're having a laugh. The heating is the downstairs fireplace.
If you want 'better' housing, it'll cost more. every regulation we add onto housing legislation improves housing, but increases cost.
I don't know what the answer is.
That's absurd and illogical thinking.
Quality improves over time without increasing cost. TVs, computers and much more cost a tiny fraction (in real terms) of what they did, while being much better quality. Its not just technology, food nowadays costs a quarter of what it did in the seventies, while improving tremendously in the availability of variety and quality (even if some people choose crap).
Housing isn't expensive due to build costs, housing is expensive due to the artificially high cost of land and the lack of competition due to the planning system. Prior to the introduction of the requirement of planning consent, land was just 2% of the cost of a house - go back to that, and the cost of housing would plummet and people would be able to afford a better standard of living without any extra income.
It is those trying to sweat the value of land to earn an income who are causing misery. That unearned income has to come from somewhere.
I think you're wrong. The things you mention improved performance and simultaneously decreased cost due to the *quantity* being sold. Back in the early 1980s, the government started a scheme that said we would have a computer in every school. That is *one computer in every school of a few hundred pupils. That made the fortunes (temporarily) of a computer company. Now most people carry one or two computers around with them all the time (in my case, phone and watch).
We are talking orders of magnitude increases in production. 230 billion ARM chips have been made in the last forty years, and that sort of volume increases quality/performance and reduces cost. Housing is in no way scalable in the same manner.
Housing absolutely is scalable, indeed its been done around the globe.
Contrast the value of land with planning consent with the value without it. That delta is purely artificial and entirely due to the planning system, abolish it and you abolish that delta, you abolish that cost altogether.
Housing is not scalable in the same way, and it's ridiculous to say it is. As I said, *billions* of ARM chips alone have been sold. 25 billion in 2020 alone. Comparing housing to that is... odd, for obvious reasons.
I never said scalable in the same way, nor does it need to be, it just needs to be scalable and it is.
As I gave as an initial example, food has come down by 75% in cost since the 70s, that's not scaled like ARM has.
Housing costs never used to be this expensive either, land never used to be this expensive, they are expensive solely because its scaled less than population has. If it scaled more than population does, then prices would collapse in real terms, which would be great news for all except those trying to sweat land for unearned wealth and income.
It's nowhere near scalable enough, especially as the *quality* of what we rightly want increases. we want *better* housing, and that invariably costs more. Better insulation? it costs. Electric car chargers outside every new house? They cost.
Usable land is finite; we rightly want better quality housing on the land. The 'quality' of the food has not increased massively since the 1970s; the places we are buying it from worldwide may have.
I agree that planning is an issue; I just see that there are many other barriers to 'affordable' housing. Changing demographics, immigration, desires, legislation... they are all factors. And good luck in changing most of them. There's no way I'd touch a timber-framed mass-produced house, for instance, after the disasters in the 1980s.
It is scalable. How do you provide more housing and services with less land, fewer building materials, more efficient transport options and lower running costs?
Flats.
Yes slums are scalable cheaply, but deal with the way the planning system warps competition and inflates the value of land and real actual homes can be built for cheaper instead.
Stop this obsession of cramming people into slum flats instead of actual houses.
But, as a sharp thinker here has pointed out, that has naff all to to with the cost of those flats, it's pure supply and demand.
Copy and paste the street plans of desirable old suburbs. The places that price signals show that people want to live in.
Make the exteriors appealing (which probably means Georgian Pastiche), give the innards modern standards of insulation and utilities. Then denser living is popular and it's easy for private enterprise to provide all the other stuff that makes life pleasant.
The inability to construct more is precisely the supply problem, yes.
Nationwide the price signals that people prefer detached homes, then semi-detached homes, with terraces being the least preferable houses of all. And flats even less popular than terraces.
The idea that denser living is popular is not remotely based on any facts or evidence. Inner-city living may be popular for some, but in like-for-like areas people will prefer more space for themselves without others.
Barry and Josias are both half right here. My parents have had a house built over the last couple of years (moved in last Summer). It's the sort of thing most people reasonably aspire to own; 4 bed, detached, but not a grand designs wonder. Very much in keeping with the Welsh hamlet in which it built - roof that looks like slate, stone facing to the front, windows that look like period timber frames.
All in, it cost about £500k, including a site with planning. Barry is right - planning permission, even somewhere fairly undesirable in the wilds of Wales puts a massive uplift on the value of land. The plot, with planning was £85k. Without planning (and no prospect of getting planning) it would have been worth perhaps £5k. So about 16% of the cost of it is artificial from the planning system. In other places it is higher - earlier this year I was the underbidder to a burnt out 3 bed farmhouse (needed complete demolition and reinstament), plus 15 acres of useless but pretty moor/scrub land. I dropped out of the running at £225k, and that didn't even have a guarantee one would get planning to rebuild. It was a stunning location, but I was offering about £150k over the normal likely value of the land for the prospect of getting planning in a pretty location.
Josias is also right. My parents house cost the wrong side of £400k to build. Lots of factors behind that, but at least a third of it is driven by recent building regs on energy efficiency and insulation (and some other things - e.g. because it's in Wales, it has to have a full fire sprinkler system despite only being two stories). The drive for thermal efficiency is all well and good, but the costs are phenomenal and the laws of diminishing returns have well and truly kicked in. My house, whilst a little smaller than my parents (3 bed semi) has only basic insulation (cheap double glazing, a bit of stuff in the loft), but I could heat it for around 50 years even at the current high gas prices for the amount my parents have had to spend on insulation, triple glazing etc.
The fix is at least bit of both - take building regs back about 15 years, make planning about twice as easy to get, and you probably can knock £100-150k off the cost of a typical new home.
However, all this is looking at the wrong end of the problem. The main driver of high house prices? Half a million people extra a year. The main driver of low wages? Half a million extra (mostly low paid) people a year. The only possible long term solution? Net Zero migration. When should this happen? The best time was 20 years ago, the next best time is now.
The biggest move in affordability - when house prices moved from 4x income to 8x happened between 1990 and 2005. Since then it's gotten worse (9.0x), but if immigration was the biggest driver, then you would have expected only small moves in house prices relative to incomes in the period to 2005, followed by them leaping up prior to Brexit, followed by them falling in the period between 2015 and 2020.
What does the prevalence of dual income households (where dual income is both full time) look like during that period?
Oh, there are many many factors.
Look at Japan from 1970 to 1991: house prices relative to incomes went up more than 5x, despite net emigration and no change in the working status of Japanese women.
Basically, we all want simple "this is the cause", but (like real life) it's pretty complex.
Isn't the Japanese market fundamentally different (and a bit weird) because they tend to knock them down and start again at much shorter intervals than us, as well as having little planning control? So the cost of housing is mostly a function of the cost of building houses, unlike the UK where the supply of land with planning is a big factor driving prices.
I would guess some of this change was urbanization, ie people are buying places in the cities where despite the liberal zoning laws land is at a premium instead of the countryside where it's cheap.
Also the quality is different: All Japanese houses built between 1945 and 1990 are complete garbage (with the exception of mine). The newer ones are pretty good and will last a long time.
Since @rcs1000 is here what do you think about this? Does the US really now have the lowest per capita climate emissions in the history of the country? I guess as a country it's not very old and they did a lot of deforestation early on.
Another example of how stupid Americans can be is this: is you're going to have a death penalty, it's pretty much a no-brainer that the rope is the least-worst way of doing it. But they insist on using all sorts of other uncivilised methods.
Why is it any better than the gas chamber or lethal injection? All are horrific ways of state killing. Is there any evidence that hanging is somehow more ‘humane’?
Why are you even debating with such insanity?
You would be better off beating me up over my Tories 20 seat majority. By the way I haven't posted since teatime and we have learned over the course of the evening that LOTO Starmer was responsible for COVID lockdowns (thank you Barty) and for granting the vile Clapham alkali attacker asylum a couple of years ago (several earnest and one or two ironic posters).
Starmer-Labour cannot sustain such an onslaught between now and January 23rd next year. Lay, lay!
I spoke to a woman yesterday who is at her wits end: Her husband works full-time in a low-pay job, she has been does not work but looks after their four children, all under 10.
They privately rent a 3-bed house and have just been told by the letting agent that their rent is going up by 41% (!) in March. Reason? - BTL "owner's mortgage has gone up". There's nothing else locally they can move to for any less rent (there are hardly any 3-bed homes for rent locally). They are on the council housing register but would need to become actually homeless to stand any chance of getting anything, then it could be B&B for a long-stretch.
They receive UC support which was covering their rent but that's capped by the Local Housing Allowance at about 75% of their new rent. They were already struggling on the old rent and regularly borrowing from family mid-month, paying back when they got paid... and repeat. Rent, Council Tax, Electricity, Gas, Food, Transport - this is where all their money goes.
What kind of messed-up country have we become where:
1) Taxpayers have to subsidise a traditional working family to live? 2) Those subsidies are set based on 'local rent levels' which are way below any actual comparable local rents?
We are seeing this every week now: working families, both tenants and mortgaged homeowners, who have hit the point where they just cannot make sums add up.
Anyone who thinks we're about to hit a feel-good period is a bit deluded imo.
We need a huge increase in housebuilding and a big hike in the minimum wage - why the f*ck are taxpayers subsidising low-pay employers and BTL landlords?
Ultimately, no social model will turn one low salary into a comfortable standard of living for six humans.
That's kinda what I was thinking. Basically is someone on minimum wage with a non working wife really expecting to have enough money for 4 kids? What they are unhappy about is that we are not subsidising them sufficiently to give them the standard of living they think they are entitled to. Well, actually, they aren't.
Partially yes, but partially no.
If housing cost the same as it used to in the past, then household budgets would be a lot more relieved without giving them any further subsidies.
It is the draconian cost of housing that eats up too much of too many people's budgets.
Sure, if you want housing to be the same as it was in the past. Outside privies. Two families in a house, No gardens. Garage? You're having a laugh. The heating is the downstairs fireplace.
If you want 'better' housing, it'll cost more. every regulation we add onto housing legislation improves housing, but increases cost.
I don't know what the answer is.
That's absurd and illogical thinking.
Quality improves over time without increasing cost. TVs, computers and much more cost a tiny fraction (in real terms) of what they did, while being much better quality. Its not just technology, food nowadays costs a quarter of what it did in the seventies, while improving tremendously in the availability of variety and quality (even if some people choose crap).
Housing isn't expensive due to build costs, housing is expensive due to the artificially high cost of land and the lack of competition due to the planning system. Prior to the introduction of the requirement of planning consent, land was just 2% of the cost of a house - go back to that, and the cost of housing would plummet and people would be able to afford a better standard of living without any extra income.
It is those trying to sweat the value of land to earn an income who are causing misery. That unearned income has to come from somewhere.
I think you're wrong. The things you mention improved performance and simultaneously decreased cost due to the *quantity* being sold. Back in the early 1980s, the government started a scheme that said we would have a computer in every school. That is *one computer in every school of a few hundred pupils. That made the fortunes (temporarily) of a computer company. Now most people carry one or two computers around with them all the time (in my case, phone and watch).
We are talking orders of magnitude increases in production. 230 billion ARM chips have been made in the last forty years, and that sort of volume increases quality/performance and reduces cost. Housing is in no way scalable in the same manner.
Housing absolutely is scalable, indeed its been done around the globe.
Contrast the value of land with planning consent with the value without it. That delta is purely artificial and entirely due to the planning system, abolish it and you abolish that delta, you abolish that cost altogether.
Housing is not scalable in the same way, and it's ridiculous to say it is. As I said, *billions* of ARM chips alone have been sold. 25 billion in 2020 alone. Comparing housing to that is... odd, for obvious reasons.
I never said scalable in the same way, nor does it need to be, it just needs to be scalable and it is.
As I gave as an initial example, food has come down by 75% in cost since the 70s, that's not scaled like ARM has.
Housing costs never used to be this expensive either, land never used to be this expensive, they are expensive solely because its scaled less than population has. If it scaled more than population does, then prices would collapse in real terms, which would be great news for all except those trying to sweat land for unearned wealth and income.
It's nowhere near scalable enough, especially as the *quality* of what we rightly want increases. we want *better* housing, and that invariably costs more. Better insulation? it costs. Electric car chargers outside every new house? They cost.
Usable land is finite; we rightly want better quality housing on the land. The 'quality' of the food has not increased massively since the 1970s; the places we are buying it from worldwide may have.
I agree that planning is an issue; I just see that there are many other barriers to 'affordable' housing. Changing demographics, immigration, desires, legislation... they are all factors. And good luck in changing most of them. There's no way I'd touch a timber-framed mass-produced house, for instance, after the disasters in the 1980s.
It is scalable. How do you provide more housing and services with less land, fewer building materials, more efficient transport options and lower running costs?
Flats.
I agree to a certain extent, and I believe that's @NickPalmer 's view. But we in Britain are culturally against flats, for good and bad reasons. The tragedies of the 60s and 70s politically-led tower-block designs cast a long shadow.
for us in Britain, the 'ideal' is a detached house with sizable garden and garage, not a small flat in Nelson Mandela House. And how do you change that ideal, given the history?
If you're serious about reducing housing pressure in our cities you have no choice.
I do have one doubt - there is a snowball effect of economic growth and housing costs in our cities which is stimulated by population growth. We are always going to have this problem as cities become relatively more attractive. This is more obvious in Scotland, where our population has flatlined yet prices in Lothian have rocketed.
Another way to reduce housing pressure would be to encourage growth in provincial towns and rural areas, spreading demand around more evenly. Then you might have more chance of "the ideal", particularly with lots of industrial waste ground in places like Greenock/Middlesbrough etc
Abolish planning restraints and you can do both, easily.
Have people able to raze their own land in cities and rebuild it as flats if they want.
Have people able to raze whatever they want in Middlesbrough and build a decent home if they want.
Or any combination inbetween.
The key is to get the "everything we haven't permitted is forbidden" attitude flipped on its head and then let people decide.
Mrs Flatlander had to survey some land in Middlesbrough for a planning application at least 10 years ago. It had indeed been razed and had previously been terraced housing. Next door the undemolished terraces were still there, with CCTV on tall poles with cages at the end of the street. The Dorman tower loomed in the distance.
We did the job early on a Sunday morning for obvious reasons.
Permission was granted for mixed development but to this day no houses have been built. Only a Tesco, Lidl, and various low-rent shops.
There is still plenty of room for any number of decent houses there but it wouldn't solve the basic problem. No-one wants to live there. Abolishing planning restraints would make no difference to that.
I'm not sure a totally free market would do much other than make land even more expensive in favoured locations.
We do need more houses but where they should go needs at least some thought behind it.
Allowing you to build houses where people actually want to live is exactly what a free market does. A bureaucrat putting thought into it is the last thing you need.
Another example of how stupid Americans can be is this: if you're going to have a death penalty, it's pretty much a no-brainer that the rope is the least-worst way of doing it. But they insist on using all sorts of other uncivilised methods instead. (Not a supporter myself).
Well they have largely ended the electric chair at least now, it is mainly lethal injection in those 27 US states still with the death penalty.
I spoke to a woman yesterday who is at her wits end: Her husband works full-time in a low-pay job, she has been does not work but looks after their four children, all under 10.
They privately rent a 3-bed house and have just been told by the letting agent that their rent is going up by 41% (!) in March. Reason? - BTL "owner's mortgage has gone up". There's nothing else locally they can move to for any less rent (there are hardly any 3-bed homes for rent locally). They are on the council housing register but would need to become actually homeless to stand any chance of getting anything, then it could be B&B for a long-stretch.
They receive UC support which was covering their rent but that's capped by the Local Housing Allowance at about 75% of their new rent. They were already struggling on the old rent and regularly borrowing from family mid-month, paying back when they got paid... and repeat. Rent, Council Tax, Electricity, Gas, Food, Transport - this is where all their money goes.
What kind of messed-up country have we become where:
1) Taxpayers have to subsidise a traditional working family to live? 2) Those subsidies are set based on 'local rent levels' which are way below any actual comparable local rents?
We are seeing this every week now: working families, both tenants and mortgaged homeowners, who have hit the point where they just cannot make sums add up.
Anyone who thinks we're about to hit a feel-good period is a bit deluded imo.
We need a huge increase in housebuilding and a big hike in the minimum wage - why the f*ck are taxpayers subsidising low-pay employers and BTL landlords?
Ultimately, no social model will turn one low salary into a comfortable standard of living for six humans.
That's kinda what I was thinking. Basically is someone on minimum wage with a non working wife really expecting to have enough money for 4 kids? What they are unhappy about is that we are not subsidising them sufficiently to give them the standard of living they think they are entitled to. Well, actually, they aren't.
Partially yes, but partially no.
If housing cost the same as it used to in the past, then household budgets would be a lot more relieved without giving them any further subsidies.
It is the draconian cost of housing that eats up too much of too many people's budgets.
Sure, if you want housing to be the same as it was in the past. Outside privies. Two families in a house, No gardens. Garage? You're having a laugh. The heating is the downstairs fireplace.
If you want 'better' housing, it'll cost more. every regulation we add onto housing legislation improves housing, but increases cost.
I don't know what the answer is.
That's absurd and illogical thinking.
Quality improves over time without increasing cost. TVs, computers and much more cost a tiny fraction (in real terms) of what they did, while being much better quality. Its not just technology, food nowadays costs a quarter of what it did in the seventies, while improving tremendously in the availability of variety and quality (even if some people choose crap).
Housing isn't expensive due to build costs, housing is expensive due to the artificially high cost of land and the lack of competition due to the planning system. Prior to the introduction of the requirement of planning consent, land was just 2% of the cost of a house - go back to that, and the cost of housing would plummet and people would be able to afford a better standard of living without any extra income.
It is those trying to sweat the value of land to earn an income who are causing misery. That unearned income has to come from somewhere.
I think you're wrong. The things you mention improved performance and simultaneously decreased cost due to the *quantity* being sold. Back in the early 1980s, the government started a scheme that said we would have a computer in every school. That is *one computer in every school of a few hundred pupils. That made the fortunes (temporarily) of a computer company. Now most people carry one or two computers around with them all the time (in my case, phone and watch).
We are talking orders of magnitude increases in production. 230 billion ARM chips have been made in the last forty years, and that sort of volume increases quality/performance and reduces cost. Housing is in no way scalable in the same manner.
Housing absolutely is scalable, indeed its been done around the globe.
Contrast the value of land with planning consent with the value without it. That delta is purely artificial and entirely due to the planning system, abolish it and you abolish that delta, you abolish that cost altogether.
Housing is not scalable in the same way, and it's ridiculous to say it is. As I said, *billions* of ARM chips alone have been sold. 25 billion in 2020 alone. Comparing housing to that is... odd, for obvious reasons.
I never said scalable in the same way, nor does it need to be, it just needs to be scalable and it is.
As I gave as an initial example, food has come down by 75% in cost since the 70s, that's not scaled like ARM has.
Housing costs never used to be this expensive either, land never used to be this expensive, they are expensive solely because its scaled less than population has. If it scaled more than population does, then prices would collapse in real terms, which would be great news for all except those trying to sweat land for unearned wealth and income.
It's nowhere near scalable enough, especially as the *quality* of what we rightly want increases. we want *better* housing, and that invariably costs more. Better insulation? it costs. Electric car chargers outside every new house? They cost.
Usable land is finite; we rightly want better quality housing on the land. The 'quality' of the food has not increased massively since the 1970s; the places we are buying it from worldwide may have.
I agree that planning is an issue; I just see that there are many other barriers to 'affordable' housing. Changing demographics, immigration, desires, legislation... they are all factors. And good luck in changing most of them. There's no way I'd touch a timber-framed mass-produced house, for instance, after the disasters in the 1980s.
It is scalable. How do you provide more housing and services with less land, fewer building materials, more efficient transport options and lower running costs?
Flats.
I agree to a certain extent, and I believe that's @NickPalmer 's view. But we in Britain are culturally against flats, for good and bad reasons. The tragedies of the 60s and 70s politically-led tower-block designs cast a long shadow.
for us in Britain, the 'ideal' is a detached house with sizable garden and garage, not a small flat in Nelson Mandela House. And how do you change that ideal, given the history?
If you're serious about reducing housing pressure in our cities you have no choice.
I do have one doubt - there is a snowball effect of economic growth and housing costs in our cities which is stimulated by population growth. We are always going to have this problem as cities become relatively more attractive. This is more obvious in Scotland, where our population has flatlined yet prices in Lothian have rocketed.
Another way to reduce housing pressure would be to encourage growth in provincial towns and rural areas, spreading demand around more evenly. Then you might have more chance of "the ideal", particularly with lots of industrial waste ground in places like Greenock/Middlesbrough etc
Abolish planning restraints and you can do both, easily.
Have people able to raze their own land in cities and rebuild it as flats if they want.
Have people able to raze whatever they want in Middlesbrough and build a decent home if they want.
Or any combination inbetween.
The key is to get the "everything we haven't permitted is forbidden" attitude flipped on its head and then let people decide.
Mrs Flatlander had to survey some land in Middlesbrough for a planning application at least 10 years ago. It had indeed been razed and had previously been terraced housing. Next door the undemolished terraces were still there, with CCTV on tall poles with cages at the end of the street. The Dorman tower loomed in the distance.
We did the job early on a Sunday morning for obvious reasons.
Permission was granted for mixed development but to this day no houses have been built. Only a Tesco, Lidl, and various low-rent shops.
There is still plenty of room for any number of decent houses there but it wouldn't solve the basic problem. No-one wants to live there. Abolishing planning restraints would make no difference to that.
I'm not sure a totally free market would do much other than make land even more expensive in favoured locations.
We do need more houses but where they should go needs at least some thought behind it.
Allowing you to build houses where people actually want to live is exactly what a free market does. A bureaucrat putting thought into it is the last thing you need.
If you can build anywhere, surely that's just going to encourage even more migration to the South East? It might not actually lower house prices that much except in the left behind areas.
Maybe just razing the whole of Middlesbrough to the ground and moving everyone to a newly built Commuter World in the London Green Belt would be sensible economically but is that what we want?
I spoke to a woman yesterday who is at her wits end: Her husband works full-time in a low-pay job, she has been does not work but looks after their four children, all under 10.
They privately rent a 3-bed house and have just been told by the letting agent that their rent is going up by 41% (!) in March. Reason? - BTL "owner's mortgage has gone up". There's nothing else locally they can move to for any less rent (there are hardly any 3-bed homes for rent locally). They are on the council housing register but would need to become actually homeless to stand any chance of getting anything, then it could be B&B for a long-stretch.
They receive UC support which was covering their rent but that's capped by the Local Housing Allowance at about 75% of their new rent. They were already struggling on the old rent and regularly borrowing from family mid-month, paying back when they got paid... and repeat. Rent, Council Tax, Electricity, Gas, Food, Transport - this is where all their money goes.
What kind of messed-up country have we become where:
1) Taxpayers have to subsidise a traditional working family to live? 2) Those subsidies are set based on 'local rent levels' which are way below any actual comparable local rents?
We are seeing this every week now: working families, both tenants and mortgaged homeowners, who have hit the point where they just cannot make sums add up.
Anyone who thinks we're about to hit a feel-good period is a bit deluded imo.
We need a huge increase in housebuilding and a big hike in the minimum wage - why the f*ck are taxpayers subsidising low-pay employers and BTL landlords?
Ultimately, no social model will turn one low salary into a comfortable standard of living for six humans.
That's kinda what I was thinking. Basically is someone on minimum wage with a non working wife really expecting to have enough money for 4 kids? What they are unhappy about is that we are not subsidising them sufficiently to give them the standard of living they think they are entitled to. Well, actually, they aren't.
Partially yes, but partially no.
If housing cost the same as it used to in the past, then household budgets would be a lot more relieved without giving them any further subsidies.
It is the draconian cost of housing that eats up too much of too many people's budgets.
Sure, if you want housing to be the same as it was in the past. Outside privies. Two families in a house, No gardens. Garage? You're having a laugh. The heating is the downstairs fireplace.
If you want 'better' housing, it'll cost more. every regulation we add onto housing legislation improves housing, but increases cost.
I don't know what the answer is.
That's absurd and illogical thinking.
Quality improves over time without increasing cost. TVs, computers and much more cost a tiny fraction (in real terms) of what they did, while being much better quality. Its not just technology, food nowadays costs a quarter of what it did in the seventies, while improving tremendously in the availability of variety and quality (even if some people choose crap).
Housing isn't expensive due to build costs, housing is expensive due to the artificially high cost of land and the lack of competition due to the planning system. Prior to the introduction of the requirement of planning consent, land was just 2% of the cost of a house - go back to that, and the cost of housing would plummet and people would be able to afford a better standard of living without any extra income.
It is those trying to sweat the value of land to earn an income who are causing misery. That unearned income has to come from somewhere.
I think you're wrong. The things you mention improved performance and simultaneously decreased cost due to the *quantity* being sold. Back in the early 1980s, the government started a scheme that said we would have a computer in every school. That is *one computer in every school of a few hundred pupils. That made the fortunes (temporarily) of a computer company. Now most people carry one or two computers around with them all the time (in my case, phone and watch).
We are talking orders of magnitude increases in production. 230 billion ARM chips have been made in the last forty years, and that sort of volume increases quality/performance and reduces cost. Housing is in no way scalable in the same manner.
Housing absolutely is scalable, indeed its been done around the globe.
Contrast the value of land with planning consent with the value without it. That delta is purely artificial and entirely due to the planning system, abolish it and you abolish that delta, you abolish that cost altogether.
Housing is not scalable in the same way, and it's ridiculous to say it is. As I said, *billions* of ARM chips alone have been sold. 25 billion in 2020 alone. Comparing housing to that is... odd, for obvious reasons.
I never said scalable in the same way, nor does it need to be, it just needs to be scalable and it is.
As I gave as an initial example, food has come down by 75% in cost since the 70s, that's not scaled like ARM has.
Housing costs never used to be this expensive either, land never used to be this expensive, they are expensive solely because its scaled less than population has. If it scaled more than population does, then prices would collapse in real terms, which would be great news for all except those trying to sweat land for unearned wealth and income.
It's nowhere near scalable enough, especially as the *quality* of what we rightly want increases. we want *better* housing, and that invariably costs more. Better insulation? it costs. Electric car chargers outside every new house? They cost.
Usable land is finite; we rightly want better quality housing on the land. The 'quality' of the food has not increased massively since the 1970s; the places we are buying it from worldwide may have.
I agree that planning is an issue; I just see that there are many other barriers to 'affordable' housing. Changing demographics, immigration, desires, legislation... they are all factors. And good luck in changing most of them. There's no way I'd touch a timber-framed mass-produced house, for instance, after the disasters in the 1980s.
It is scalable. How do you provide more housing and services with less land, fewer building materials, more efficient transport options and lower running costs?
Flats.
I agree to a certain extent, and I believe that's @NickPalmer 's view. But we in Britain are culturally against flats, for good and bad reasons. The tragedies of the 60s and 70s politically-led tower-block designs cast a long shadow.
for us in Britain, the 'ideal' is a detached house with sizable garden and garage, not a small flat in Nelson Mandela House. And how do you change that ideal, given the history?
If you're serious about reducing housing pressure in our cities you have no choice.
I do have one doubt - there is a snowball effect of economic growth and housing costs in our cities which is stimulated by population growth. We are always going to have this problem as cities become relatively more attractive. This is more obvious in Scotland, where our population has flatlined yet prices in Lothian have rocketed.
Another way to reduce housing pressure would be to encourage growth in provincial towns and rural areas, spreading demand around more evenly. Then you might have more chance of "the ideal", particularly with lots of industrial waste ground in places like Greenock/Middlesbrough etc
Abolish planning restraints and you can do both, easily.
Have people able to raze their own land in cities and rebuild it as flats if they want.
Have people able to raze whatever they want in Middlesbrough and build a decent home if they want.
Or any combination inbetween.
The key is to get the "everything we haven't permitted is forbidden" attitude flipped on its head and then let people decide.
Mrs Flatlander had to survey some land in Middlesbrough for a planning application at least 10 years ago. It had indeed been razed and had previously been terraced housing. Next door the undemolished terraces were still there, with CCTV on tall poles with cages at the end of the street. The Dorman tower loomed in the distance.
We did the job early on a Sunday morning for obvious reasons.
Permission was granted for mixed development but to this day no houses have been built. Only a Tesco, Lidl, and various low-rent shops.
There is still plenty of room for any number of decent houses there but it wouldn't solve the basic problem. No-one wants to live there. Abolishing planning restraints would make no difference to that.
I'm not sure a totally free market would do much other than make land even more expensive in favoured locations.
We do need more houses but where they should go needs at least some thought behind it.
Allowing you to build houses where people actually want to live is exactly what a free market does. A bureaucrat putting thought into it is the last thing you need.
If you can build anywhere, surely that's just going to encourage even more migration to the South East? It might not actually lower house prices that much except in the left behind areas.
Maybe just razing the whole of Middlesbrough to the ground and moving everyone to a newly built Commuter World in the London Green Belt would be sensible economically but is that what we want?
There has to be some limit somewhere.
It won't encourage or discourage anything, people will move where they want. I doubt they all want to live in a London suburb but if they did then yes, that would literally be what "we" (the people of the nation) wanted.
The practical limit is that not everyone wants that. Different people want different things.
Another example of how stupid Americans can be is this: if you're going to have a death penalty, it's pretty much a no-brainer that the rope is the least-worst way of doing it. But they insist on using all sorts of other uncivilised methods instead. (Not a supporter myself).
Guillotine. One moving part. Can be used with minimum training. Time to death is measured in seconds, time to unconsciousness even less.
But do most of EU's leaders and defence ministers? That is the question.
No sign they understand what is about to happen unless enough indie voters in swing states save europe.
Why should Europe's security be the responsibility (and financial burden) of Americans?
I can see what Europe gets out of the current arrangement, though they pay for it with subservience, but what's in it for the USA?
A place to sell their goods and a buffer against the Russians. A peaceful, mercantile world where people can travel for trade, enter tainment and enlightenment.
Well that's the theory at least. ☹️
The sad thing is that (albeit for very good reasons) they are turning their back on the world and gradually disengaging, which is why things like piracy are more common as the USN retreats/repositions.
I spoke to a woman yesterday who is at her wits end: Her husband works full-time in a low-pay job, she has been does not work but looks after their four children, all under 10.
They privately rent a 3-bed house and have just been told by the letting agent that their rent is going up by 41% (!) in March. Reason? - BTL "owner's mortgage has gone up". There's nothing else locally they can move to for any less rent (there are hardly any 3-bed homes for rent locally). They are on the council housing register but would need to become actually homeless to stand any chance of getting anything, then it could be B&B for a long-stretch.
They receive UC support which was covering their rent but that's capped by the Local Housing Allowance at about 75% of their new rent. They were already struggling on the old rent and regularly borrowing from family mid-month, paying back when they got paid... and repeat. Rent, Council Tax, Electricity, Gas, Food, Transport - this is where all their money goes.
What kind of messed-up country have we become where:
1) Taxpayers have to subsidise a traditional working family to live? 2) Those subsidies are set based on 'local rent levels' which are way below any actual comparable local rents?
We are seeing this every week now: working families, both tenants and mortgaged homeowners, who have hit the point where they just cannot make sums add up.
Anyone who thinks we're about to hit a feel-good period is a bit deluded imo.
We need a huge increase in housebuilding and a big hike in the minimum wage - why the f*ck are taxpayers subsidising low-pay employers and BTL landlords?
Ultimately, no social model will turn one low salary into a comfortable standard of living for six humans.
That's kinda what I was thinking. Basically is someone on minimum wage with a non working wife really expecting to have enough money for 4 kids? What they are unhappy about is that we are not subsidising them sufficiently to give them the standard of living they think they are entitled to. Well, actually, they aren't.
Partially yes, but partially no.
If housing cost the same as it used to in the past, then household budgets would be a lot more relieved without giving them any further subsidies.
It is the draconian cost of housing that eats up too much of too many people's budgets.
Sure, if you want housing to be the same as it was in the past. Outside privies. Two families in a house, No gardens. Garage? You're having a laugh. The heating is the downstairs fireplace.
If you want 'better' housing, it'll cost more. every regulation we add onto housing legislation improves housing, but increases cost.
I don't know what the answer is.
That's absurd and illogical thinking.
Quality improves over time without increasing cost. TVs, computers and much more cost a tiny fraction (in real terms) of what they did, while being much better quality. Its not just technology, food nowadays costs a quarter of what it did in the seventies, while improving tremendously in the availability of variety and quality (even if some people choose crap).
Housing isn't expensive due to build costs, housing is expensive due to the artificially high cost of land and the lack of competition due to the planning system. Prior to the introduction of the requirement of planning consent, land was just 2% of the cost of a house - go back to that, and the cost of housing would plummet and people would be able to afford a better standard of living without any extra income.
It is those trying to sweat the value of land to earn an income who are causing misery. That unearned income has to come from somewhere.
I think you're wrong. The things you mention improved performance and simultaneously decreased cost due to the *quantity* being sold. Back in the early 1980s, the government started a scheme that said we would have a computer in every school. That is *one computer in every school of a few hundred pupils. That made the fortunes (temporarily) of a computer company. Now most people carry one or two computers around with them all the time (in my case, phone and watch).
We are talking orders of magnitude increases in production. 230 billion ARM chips have been made in the last forty years, and that sort of volume increases quality/performance and reduces cost. Housing is in no way scalable in the same manner.
Housing absolutely is scalable, indeed its been done around the globe.
Contrast the value of land with planning consent with the value without it. That delta is purely artificial and entirely due to the planning system, abolish it and you abolish that delta, you abolish that cost altogether.
Housing is not scalable in the same way, and it's ridiculous to say it is. As I said, *billions* of ARM chips alone have been sold. 25 billion in 2020 alone. Comparing housing to that is... odd, for obvious reasons.
I never said scalable in the same way, nor does it need to be, it just needs to be scalable and it is.
As I gave as an initial example, food has come down by 75% in cost since the 70s, that's not scaled like ARM has.
Housing costs never used to be this expensive either, land never used to be this expensive, they are expensive solely because its scaled less than population has. If it scaled more than population does, then prices would collapse in real terms, which would be great news for all except those trying to sweat land for unearned wealth and income.
It's nowhere near scalable enough, especially as the *quality* of what we rightly want increases. we want *better* housing, and that invariably costs more. Better insulation? it costs. Electric car chargers outside every new house? They cost.
Usable land is finite; we rightly want better quality housing on the land. The 'quality' of the food has not increased massively since the 1970s; the places we are buying it from worldwide may have.
I agree that planning is an issue; I just see that there are many other barriers to 'affordable' housing. Changing demographics, immigration, desires, legislation... they are all factors. And good luck in changing most of them. There's no way I'd touch a timber-framed mass-produced house, for instance, after the disasters in the 1980s.
It is scalable. How do you provide more housing and services with less land, fewer building materials, more efficient transport options and lower running costs?
Flats.
I agree to a certain extent, and I believe that's @NickPalmer 's view. But we in Britain are culturally against flats, for good and bad reasons. The tragedies of the 60s and 70s politically-led tower-block designs cast a long shadow.
for us in Britain, the 'ideal' is a detached house with sizable garden and garage, not a small flat in Nelson Mandela House. And how do you change that ideal, given the history?
If you're serious about reducing housing pressure in our cities you have no choice.
I do have one doubt - there is a snowball effect of economic growth and housing costs in our cities which is stimulated by population growth. We are always going to have this problem as cities become relatively more attractive. This is more obvious in Scotland, where our population has flatlined yet prices in Lothian have rocketed.
Another way to reduce housing pressure would be to encourage growth in provincial towns and rural areas, spreading demand around more evenly. Then you might have more chance of "the ideal", particularly with lots of industrial waste ground in places like Greenock/Middlesbrough etc
Abolish planning restraints and you can do both, easily.
Have people able to raze their own land in cities and rebuild it as flats if they want.
Have people able to raze whatever they want in Middlesbrough and build a decent home if they want.
Or any combination inbetween.
The key is to get the "everything we haven't permitted is forbidden" attitude flipped on its head and then let people decide.
Mrs Flatlander had to survey some land in Middlesbrough for a planning application at least 10 years ago. It had indeed been razed and had previously been terraced housing. Next door the undemolished terraces were still there, with CCTV on tall poles with cages at the end of the street. The Dorman tower loomed in the distance.
We did the job early on a Sunday morning for obvious reasons.
Permission was granted for mixed development but to this day no houses have been built. Only a Tesco, Lidl, and various low-rent shops.
There is still plenty of room for any number of decent houses there but it wouldn't solve the basic problem. No-one wants to live there. Abolishing planning restraints would make no difference to that.
I'm not sure a totally free market would do much other than make land even more expensive in favoured locations.
We do need more houses but where they should go needs at least some thought behind it.
Allowing you to build houses where people actually want to live is exactly what a free market does. A bureaucrat putting thought into it is the last thing you need.
If you can build anywhere, surely that's just going to encourage even more migration to the South East? It might not actually lower house prices that much except in the left behind areas.
Maybe just razing the whole of Middlesbrough to the ground and moving everyone to a newly built Commuter World in the London Green Belt would be sensible economically but is that what we want?
There has to be some limit somewhere.
I've been to Middlesbrough. Razing it flat is only the beginning.👿
There is some serious misunderstandings in earlier posts about how house pices are determined - with the naive thought that reducing building costs will make houses cheaper. It wont - it will make builders richer.
House prices are determined by the laws of supply and demand. If you can reduce demand or increase supply then prices will fall.
Yes you can reduce demand by limiting immigration but that is unlikley for political reasons - but smaller measures such as increasing council tax on second homes or empty properties works - as is becoming apparent in Wales - but that will only have local impact.
Increasing supply can be done by two measures - firstly opening planning restrictions to allow say more brownfield development , and encouraging higher densities around public transport; and secondly by penalising 'land banks' - any land that has successfuly gained planning permission must start paying council tax on it after say two years - developed or not. In other words build on it or sell it to allow others to do the same.
But of course the positivity about improving affordability will be countered by the negativity of falling house prices. I can imagine the Daily Mail headlines....
There is some serious misunderstandings in earlier posts about how house pices are determined - with the naive thought that reducing building costs will make houses cheaper. It wont - it will make builders richer.
House prices are determined by the laws of supply and demand. If you can reduce demand or increase supply then prices will fall.
Yes you can reduce demand by limiting immigration but that is unlikley for political reasons - but smaller measures such as increasing council tax on second homes or empty properties works - as is becoming apparent in Wales - but that will only have local impact.
Increasing supply can be done by two measures - firstly opening planning restrictions to allow say more brownfield development , and encouraging higher densities around public transport; and secondly by penalising 'land banks' - any land that has successfuly gained planning permission must start paying council tax on it after say two years - developed or not. In other words build on it or sell it to allow others to do the same.
But of course the positivity about improving affordability will be countered by the negativity of falling house prices. I can imagine the Daily Mail headlines....
I don't think that's quite right: reducing building costs moves the supply curve to the right. So, yes, it will reduce prices somewhat, but not as much as the reduction in building costs.
Walt Nauta, the valet at the center of the Mar-a-Lago documents case, was only hired by Trump after the Navy pulled him from the White House amid sexual misconduct allegations from multiple wome https://twitter.com/SollenbergerRC/status/1753255371697803534
There is some serious misunderstandings in earlier posts about how house pices are determined - with the naive thought that reducing building costs will make houses cheaper. It wont - it will make builders richer.
House prices are determined by the laws of supply and demand. If you can reduce demand or increase supply then prices will fall.
Yes you can reduce demand by limiting immigration but that is unlikley for political reasons - but smaller measures such as increasing council tax on second homes or empty properties works - as is becoming apparent in Wales - but that will only have local impact.
Increasing supply can be done by two measures - firstly opening planning restrictions to allow say more brownfield development , and encouraging higher densities around public transport; and secondly by penalising 'land banks' - any land that has successfuly gained planning permission must start paying council tax on it after say two years - developed or not. In other words build on it or sell it to allow others to do the same.
But of course the positivity about improving affordability will be countered by the negativity of falling house prices. I can imagine the Daily Mail headlines....
As someone who works in urban planning, I can say that there are many different and conflicting views about how house prices are determined and it is far from being an exact science.
I would suggest that the main constraint at the moment on supply is build cost and closely linked to this is regulation. Also the government could hardly be doing more to increase brownfield, high density development but the preference of developers is generally to go for green field development, cheaper and lower risk.
There is some serious misunderstandings in earlier posts about how house pices are determined - with the naive thought that reducing building costs will make houses cheaper. It wont - it will make builders richer.
House prices are determined by the laws of supply and demand. If you can reduce demand or increase supply then prices will fall.
Yes you can reduce demand by limiting immigration but that is unlikley for political reasons - but smaller measures such as increasing council tax on second homes or empty properties works - as is becoming apparent in Wales - but that will only have local impact.
Increasing supply can be done by two measures - firstly opening planning restrictions to allow say more brownfield development , and encouraging higher densities around public transport; and secondly by penalising 'land banks' - any land that has successfuly gained planning permission must start paying council tax on it after say two years - developed or not. In other words build on it or sell it to allow others to do the same.
But of course the positivity about improving affordability will be countered by the negativity of falling house prices. I can imagine the Daily Mail headlines....
As someone who works in urban planning, I can say that there are many different and conflicting views about how house prices are determined and it is far from being an exact science.
I would suggest that the main constraint at the moment on supply is build cost and closely linked to this is regulation. Also the government could hardly be doing more to increase brownfield, high density development but the preference of developers is generally to go for green field development, cheaper and lower risk.
Housing is also weird, in that rising house prices can simulate demand, because higher prices means that the value of equity people have in their existing property rises (proportionally) faster than house prices.
The converse of this is that falling house prices can depress demand, as people have less, or no, equity, and therefore moving up becomes impossible.
This gorgeous new BBC chart shows how the coldest days on Earth now are warmer than the hottest days before the 1980s.
You know who predicted this would happen with near-perfect precision? Exxon Mobil scientists, in an internal report in 1982.
Here’s another from @exxonmobil 1982. It predicted that in 2023, our atmospheric CO2 would reach roughly 415 parts per million, raising the global average surface temperature ~1.1 degrees C.
While Wales is rightly trying to reduce number of second homes and empty homes - it got things very wrong with fire sprinklers. It adds £500-1000 to cost of new builds and I believe there is not a single example of them being used succesfully - because house fires usually occur in old homes.... This is a stupid piece of legislation that should be scrapped.
This gorgeous new BBC chart shows how the coldest days on Earth now are warmer than the hottest days before the 1980s.
You know who predicted this would happen with near-perfect precision? Exxon Mobil scientists, in an internal report in 1982.
Here’s another from @exxonmobil 1982. It predicted that in 2023, our atmospheric CO2 would reach roughly 415 parts per million, raising the global average surface temperature ~1.1 degrees C.
The latest BBC push notification is disastrous for the government:
"The suspect in an alkali attack in south London was convicted of a sex offence in 2018 and was later granted asylum"
Starmer could make a major move here: announce a Labour government will split the Home Office, taking away any role with border security, asylum processing, deportations etc etc and putting all that in a new Cabinet-level department.
Not fit for purpose.
There’s probably a ton of case law that requires us to grant asylum to serious criminals.
Like so many, he “converted to Christianity.” Pretending to be a Christian is even more popular than pretending to be gay, among those who game the system.
Another example of how stupid Americans can be is this: if you're going to have a death penalty, it's pretty much a no-brainer that the rope is the least-worst way of doing it. But they insist on using all sorts of other uncivilised methods instead. (Not a supporter myself).
Guillotine. One moving part. Can be used with minimum training. Time to death is measured in seconds, time to unconsciousness even less.
If I had to be executed, I’d opt for the firing squad.
While Wales is rightly trying to reduce number of second homes and empty homes - it got things very wrong with fire sprinklers. It adds £500-1000 to cost of new builds and I believe there is not a single example of them being used succesfully - because house fires usually occur in old homes.... This is a stupid piece of legislation that should be scrapped.
I can understand in flats but surely they're not required in houses ?
Another example of how stupid Americans can be is this: if you're going to have a death penalty, it's pretty much a no-brainer that the rope is the least-worst way of doing it. But they insist on using all sorts of other uncivilised methods instead. (Not a supporter myself).
Guillotine. One moving part. Can be used with minimum training. Time to death is measured in seconds, time to unconsciousness even less.
If I had to be executed, I’d opt for the firing squad.
There is some serious misunderstandings in earlier posts about how house pices are determined - with the naive thought that reducing building costs will make houses cheaper. It wont - it will make builders richer.
House prices are determined by the laws of supply and demand. If you can reduce demand or increase supply then prices will fall.
Yes you can reduce demand by limiting immigration but that is unlikley for political reasons - but smaller measures such as increasing council tax on second homes or empty properties works - as is becoming apparent in Wales - but that will only have local impact.
Increasing supply can be done by two measures - firstly opening planning restrictions to allow say more brownfield development , and encouraging higher densities around public transport; and secondly by penalising 'land banks' - any land that has successfuly gained planning permission must start paying council tax on it after say two years - developed or not. In other words build on it or sell it to allow others to do the same.
But of course the positivity about improving affordability will be countered by the negativity of falling house prices. I can imagine the Daily Mail headlines....
As someone who works in urban planning, I can say that there are many different and conflicting views about how house prices are determined and it is far from being an exact science.
I would suggest that the main constraint at the moment on supply is build cost and closely linked to this is regulation. Also the government could hardly be doing more to increase brownfield, high density development but the preference of developers is generally to go for green field development, cheaper and lower risk.
Isn't that also because building low density housing restricts supply (relative to high density), therefore boosting their profits?
My hard work out here in the east is making me money. I have sums to invest
But where? My sense is that the AI/tech boom has a long way to go yet, and that it’s hard to go wrong with the Magnificent Seven - Google, Amazon, Nvidia, MS, etc
Even if there’s a war the tech companies will be crucial, if Trump wins I can’t see that harming US tech either. I know these shares have already risen a lot but I see them rising further for quite a while
Am i wrong?
I would not be putting all my money on such a small subset unless you don't care if you might lose a wedge. Far better to go for a Global Index which will include them anyway but have many more to lower the risk.
Another example of how stupid Americans can be is this: if you're going to have a death penalty, it's pretty much a no-brainer that the rope is the least-worst way of doing it. But they insist on using all sorts of other uncivilised methods instead. (Not a supporter myself).
The latest BBC push notification is disastrous for the government:
"The suspect in an alkali attack in south London was convicted of a sex offence in 2018 and was later granted asylum"
That’s appalling. How on earth can you be granted asylum if you’ve been convicted of an offence.
Where in the law does it say the right to asylum doesn't apply to criminals?
The arsehole should have been on the next flight out. We have enough of our own criminals without importing more. Any immigrant/ supposed asylum seeker committing crimes shoudl be deported immediately. It is wishy washy liberal cry babies like you that have allowed the country to go down the drain.
My hard work out here in the east is making me money. I have sums to invest
But where? My sense is that the AI/tech boom has a long way to go yet, and that it’s hard to go wrong with the Magnificent Seven - Google, Amazon, Nvidia, MS, etc
Even if there’s a war the tech companies will be crucial, if Trump wins I can’t see that harming US tech either. I know these shares have already risen a lot but I see them rising further for quite a while
Am i wrong?
I would not be putting all my money on such a small subset unless you don't care if you might lose a wedge. Far better to go for a Global Index which will include them anyway but have many more to lower the risk.
Ta
Yes, that is basically what I'm doing. Diverse, global, but with a definite emphasis on American tech giants
Another example of how stupid Americans can be is this: if you're going to have a death penalty, it's pretty much a no-brainer that the rope is the least-worst way of doing it. But they insist on using all sorts of other uncivilised methods instead. (Not a supporter myself).
Well they have largely ended the electric chair at least now, it is mainly lethal injection in those 27 US states still with the death penalty.
Another example of how stupid Americans can be is this: if you're going to have a death penalty, it's pretty much a no-brainer that the rope is the least-worst way of doing it. But they insist on using all sorts of other uncivilised methods instead. (Not a supporter myself).
The rope is very tough on the spectators
The most humane way is a depressurisation chamber. You’re unconscious in under a minute, you feel high as the pressure drops, and it looks to outsiders like you just fell asleep.
I spoke to a woman yesterday who is at her wits end: Her husband works full-time in a low-pay job, she has been does not work but looks after their four children, all under 10.
They privately rent a 3-bed house and have just been told by the letting agent that their rent is going up by 41% (!) in March. Reason? - BTL "owner's mortgage has gone up". There's nothing else locally they can move to for any less rent (there are hardly any 3-bed homes for rent locally). They are on the council housing register but would need to become actually homeless to stand any chance of getting anything, then it could be B&B for a long-stretch.
They receive UC support which was covering their rent but that's capped by the Local Housing Allowance at about 75% of their new rent. They were already struggling on the old rent and regularly borrowing from family mid-month, paying back when they got paid... and repeat. Rent, Council Tax, Electricity, Gas, Food, Transport - this is where all their money goes.
What kind of messed-up country have we become where:
1) Taxpayers have to subsidise a traditional working family to live? 2) Those subsidies are set based on 'local rent levels' which are way below any actual comparable local rents?
We are seeing this every week now: working families, both tenants and mortgaged homeowners, who have hit the point where they just cannot make sums add up.
Anyone who thinks we're about to hit a feel-good period is a bit deluded imo.
We need a huge increase in housebuilding and a big hike in the minimum wage - why the f*ck are taxpayers subsidising low-pay employers and BTL landlords?
Ultimately, no social model will turn one low salary into a comfortable standard of living for six humans.
That's kinda what I was thinking. Basically is someone on minimum wage with a non working wife really expecting to have enough money for 4 kids? What they are unhappy about is that we are not subsidising them sufficiently to give them the standard of living they think they are entitled to. Well, actually, they aren't.
"the standard of living they think they are entitled to" = "housed, warm and fed", in this case.
Maybe you're right though. Why did they have four children, how selfish of them. And yet, don't we have a demographic crisis? Don't we need more children?
The couple I week or two ago, contemplating selling house and trying to rent because they can't afford the mortgage now - both working, both on minimum wage - they only had two children.
That's the problem with meritocracy. People deserve a decent life even if the system decides them to have little merit.
Define 'decent'.
How much should people be protected from their own decisions? If I go out and waste money; become penniless through drink, drugs or gambling, do I personally deserve the same lifestyle as someone who has been careful and made better decisions? Sure, the welfare system should ensure I can *live*, but the same lifestyle?
On the other hand, a friend of mine was the first in her family to go to uni, yet soon afterwards was struck down by a life-limiting illness. She made no decisions that contributed to her illness. Does she deserve the same lifestyle as someone who continuously makes bad decisions?
If you say 'yes' to both of these, then I reckon the general public would disagree.
And this opens a hornet's nest...
I would suggest that a rented 3 bedroom property between 6 is not unreasonable.
Easy when someone else is paying it for you. Time people started having to look after themselves unless real illness/disability/child etc. Too many peopel think it is their right to get everything on a plate from the government. Some tough love needed and people made to look after themselves. Why make an effort when you get a nice 3 bedroom house paid for , a pile of cash on top , no council tax to pay , and on and on.
This is why politicians should never insult 25% of voters. You end up with horrible situations like this.
Its perfectly fine to insult 25% of voters, if you can appeal to 75%.
Trump is offensive to more than 25% of voters too.
It is not “perfectly fine” to insult anyone, let alone 25% of voters
There is a difference between “could” and “should” which you fail to understand
Calling half of the electorate Deplorables didn’t end well for Mrs Clinton.
You have a go at your opponent, you don’t, ever, have a go at the people who might vote for them.
No, failing to campaign properly and flying over the "flyover states" to spend most of her time on the coasts which weren't even in play didn't work well for Clinton.
Trump has insulted far more voters, far more regularly, than Clinton ever did. In rather deranged BLOCK CAPS RANTS about LIBERALS and others most of the time.
There is some serious misunderstandings in earlier posts about how house pices are determined - with the naive thought that reducing building costs will make houses cheaper. It wont - it will make builders richer.
House prices are determined by the laws of supply and demand. If you can reduce demand or increase supply then prices will fall.
Yes you can reduce demand by limiting immigration but that is unlikley for political reasons - but smaller measures such as increasing council tax on second homes or empty properties works - as is becoming apparent in Wales - but that will only have local impact.
Increasing supply can be done by two measures - firstly opening planning restrictions to allow say more brownfield development , and encouraging higher densities around public transport; and secondly by penalising 'land banks' - any land that has successfuly gained planning permission must start paying council tax on it after say two years - developed or not. In other words build on it or sell it to allow others to do the same.
But of course the positivity about improving affordability will be countered by the negativity of falling house prices. I can imagine the Daily Mail headlines....
You’re forgotten the supply of money as the key driver of house price increases
Capping the mortgage salary multiples would do more to lower prices (and increase the stability of the UK financial system) than anything else. Who knows, it might even encourage banks to lend some money to productive businesses
I spoke to a woman yesterday who is at her wits end: Her husband works full-time in a low-pay job, she has been does not work but looks after their four children, all under 10.
They privately rent a 3-bed house and have just been told by the letting agent that their rent is going up by 41% (!) in March. Reason? - BTL "owner's mortgage has gone up". There's nothing else locally they can move to for any less rent (there are hardly any 3-bed homes for rent locally). They are on the council housing register but would need to become actually homeless to stand any chance of getting anything, then it could be B&B for a long-stretch.
They receive UC support which was covering their rent but that's capped by the Local Housing Allowance at about 75% of their new rent. They were already struggling on the old rent and regularly borrowing from family mid-month, paying back when they got paid... and repeat. Rent, Council Tax, Electricity, Gas, Food, Transport - this is where all their money goes.
What kind of messed-up country have we become where:
1) Taxpayers have to subsidise a traditional working family to live? 2) Those subsidies are set based on 'local rent levels' which are way below any actual comparable local rents?
We are seeing this every week now: working families, both tenants and mortgaged homeowners, who have hit the point where they just cannot make sums add up.
Anyone who thinks we're about to hit a feel-good period is a bit deluded imo.
We need a huge increase in housebuilding and a big hike in the minimum wage - why the f*ck are taxpayers subsidising low-pay employers and BTL landlords?
Ultimately, no social model will turn one low salary into a comfortable standard of living for six humans.
That's kinda what I was thinking. Basically is someone on minimum wage with a non working wife really expecting to have enough money for 4 kids? What they are unhappy about is that we are not subsidising them sufficiently to give them the standard of living they think they are entitled to. Well, actually, they aren't.
Partially yes, but partially no.
If housing cost the same as it used to in the past, then household budgets would be a lot more relieved without giving them any further subsidies.
It is the draconian cost of housing that eats up too much of too many people's budgets.
Sure, if you want housing to be the same as it was in the past. Outside privies. Two families in a house, No gardens. Garage? You're having a laugh. The heating is the downstairs fireplace.
If you want 'better' housing, it'll cost more. every regulation we add onto housing legislation improves housing, but increases cost.
I don't know what the answer is.
That's absurd and illogical thinking.
Quality improves over time without increasing cost. TVs, computers and much more cost a tiny fraction (in real terms) of what they did, while being much better quality. Its not just technology, food nowadays costs a quarter of what it did in the seventies, while improving tremendously in the availability of variety and quality (even if some people choose crap).
Housing isn't expensive due to build costs, housing is expensive due to the artificially high cost of land and the lack of competition due to the planning system. Prior to the introduction of the requirement of planning consent, land was just 2% of the cost of a house - go back to that, and the cost of housing would plummet and people would be able to afford a better standard of living without any extra income.
It is those trying to sweat the value of land to earn an income who are causing misery. That unearned income has to come from somewhere.
I think you're wrong. The things you mention improved performance and simultaneously decreased cost due to the *quantity* being sold. Back in the early 1980s, the government started a scheme that said we would have a computer in every school. That is *one computer in every school of a few hundred pupils. That made the fortunes (temporarily) of a computer company. Now most people carry one or two computers around with them all the time (in my case, phone and watch).
We are talking orders of magnitude increases in production. 230 billion ARM chips have been made in the last forty years, and that sort of volume increases quality/performance and reduces cost. Housing is in no way scalable in the same manner.
Housing absolutely is scalable, indeed its been done around the globe.
Contrast the value of land with planning consent with the value without it. That delta is purely artificial and entirely due to the planning system, abolish it and you abolish that delta, you abolish that cost altogether.
Housing is not scalable in the same way, and it's ridiculous to say it is. As I said, *billions* of ARM chips alone have been sold. 25 billion in 2020 alone. Comparing housing to that is... odd, for obvious reasons.
I never said scalable in the same way, nor does it need to be, it just needs to be scalable and it is.
As I gave as an initial example, food has come down by 75% in cost since the 70s, that's not scaled like ARM has.
Housing costs never used to be this expensive either, land never used to be this expensive, they are expensive solely because its scaled less than population has. If it scaled more than population does, then prices would collapse in real terms, which would be great news for all except those trying to sweat land for unearned wealth and income.
It's nowhere near scalable enough, especially as the *quality* of what we rightly want increases. we want *better* housing, and that invariably costs more. Better insulation? it costs. Electric car chargers outside every new house? They cost.
Usable land is finite; we rightly want better quality housing on the land. The 'quality' of the food has not increased massively since the 1970s; the places we are buying it from worldwide may have.
I agree that planning is an issue; I just see that there are many other barriers to 'affordable' housing. Changing demographics, immigration, desires, legislation... they are all factors. And good luck in changing most of them. There's no way I'd touch a timber-framed mass-produced house, for instance, after the disasters in the 1980s.
It is scalable. How do you provide more housing and services with less land, fewer building materials, more efficient transport options and lower running costs?
Flats.
Yes slums are scalable cheaply, but deal with the way the planning system warps competition and inflates the value of land and real actual homes can be built for cheaper instead.
Stop this obsession of cramming people into slum flats instead of actual houses.
But, as a sharp thinker here has pointed out, that has naff all to to with the cost of those flats, it's pure supply and demand.
Copy and paste the street plans of desirable old suburbs. The places that price signals show that people want to live in.
Make the exteriors appealing (which probably means Georgian Pastiche), give the innards modern standards of insulation and utilities. Then denser living is popular and it's easy for private enterprise to provide all the other stuff that makes life pleasant.
The inability to construct more is precisely the supply problem, yes.
Nationwide the price signals that people prefer detached homes, then semi-detached homes, with terraces being the least preferable houses of all. And flats even less popular than terraces.
The idea that denser living is popular is not remotely based on any facts or evidence. Inner-city living may be popular for some, but in like-for-like areas people will prefer more space for themselves without others.
I spoke to a woman yesterday who is at her wits end: Her husband works full-time in a low-pay job, she has been does not work but looks after their four children, all under 10.
They privately rent a 3-bed house and have just been told by the letting agent that their rent is going up by 41% (!) in March. Reason? - BTL "owner's mortgage has gone up". There's nothing else locally they can move to for any less rent (there are hardly any 3-bed homes for rent locally). They are on the council housing register but would need to become actually homeless to stand any chance of getting anything, then it could be B&B for a long-stretch.
They receive UC support which was covering their rent but that's capped by the Local Housing Allowance at about 75% of their new rent. They were already struggling on the old rent and regularly borrowing from family mid-month, paying back when they got paid... and repeat. Rent, Council Tax, Electricity, Gas, Food, Transport - this is where all their money goes.
What kind of messed-up country have we become where:
1) Taxpayers have to subsidise a traditional working family to live? 2) Those subsidies are set based on 'local rent levels' which are way below any actual comparable local rents?
We are seeing this every week now: working families, both tenants and mortgaged homeowners, who have hit the point where they just cannot make sums add up.
Anyone who thinks we're about to hit a feel-good period is a bit deluded imo.
We need a huge increase in housebuilding and a big hike in the minimum wage - why the f*ck are taxpayers subsidising low-pay employers and BTL landlords?
Ultimately, no social model will turn one low salary into a comfortable standard of living for six humans.
That's kinda what I was thinking. Basically is someone on minimum wage with a non working wife really expecting to have enough money for 4 kids? What they are unhappy about is that we are not subsidising them sufficiently to give them the standard of living they think they are entitled to. Well, actually, they aren't.
"the standard of living they think they are entitled to" = "housed, warm and fed", in this case.
Maybe you're right though. Why did they have four children, how selfish of them. And yet, don't we have a demographic crisis? Don't we need more children?
The couple I week or two ago, contemplating selling house and trying to rent because they can't afford the mortgage now - both working, both on minimum wage - they only had two children.
That's the problem with meritocracy. People deserve a decent life even if the system decides them to have little merit.
Define 'decent'.
How much should people be protected from their own decisions? If I go out and waste money; become penniless through drink, drugs or gambling, do I personally deserve the same lifestyle as someone who has been careful and made better decisions? Sure, the welfare system should ensure I can *live*, but the same lifestyle?
On the other hand, a friend of mine was the first in her family to go to uni, yet soon afterwards was struck down by a life-limiting illness. She made no decisions that contributed to her illness. Does she deserve the same lifestyle as someone who continuously makes bad decisions?
If you say 'yes' to both of these, then I reckon the general public would disagree.
And this opens a hornet's nest...
I would suggest that a rented 3 bedroom property between 6 is not unreasonable.
When only one of them works? People's poor decisions should not be rewarded. I ensured I was earning more than 40k (in today's money) and had my own home before we had our first.
FFS just listen to yourself.
Next time I see the woman I'll suggest she gets her husband to earn £40k+. I doubt they had considered that idea.
(Btw In this instance the woman is not currently able to work; she had been medically assessed as such by the DWP and is receiving treatment.)
So why did they have four kids? How many kids did they already have when they started having other people subsidize their lives?
Perhaps they had 4 kids before their circumstances changed. There but for the grace of God go any of us.
You can be pretty sure if that was the case, the journalist would have mentioned that in the sob story.
What journalist?
I mean... I written a couple of thread headers, does that qualify me?
Even in a deep crisis- with voters turning away from them- it’s the Conservative party and the media that remain mighty while a Labour leadership- miles ahead in polls- ‘caves in’ again:
Why, oh why, do Labour do this? If they're going to drop it, do it quietly. Terrible message management.
Labour (and for that matter the Tories too) know how skint the Treasury is and how run down public services are. Councils, Schools, Universities, NHS, Home Office, Criminal Justice system, Armed Forces, etc are all knackered.
Whoever wins the election knows that they will have to sort it out. The Tories talk about tax cuts because they know they won't have to deal with the consequences. Starmer and Reeves don't want to promise spending that they cannot deliver.
Labour need to make the case for public *investment*. Every reputable economist on earth knows that British lack of capital investment is a major impediment to growth.
This particular policy was popular with Labour voters. It’s not obvious - apart from cowardice - why Labour have junked it.
Yes but as I pointed out there are many other areas crying out for public sector investment.
This year we will see Councils, Universities, Social Care, etc etc at risk of collapse.
Starmer and Reeves are right not to make hostages to fortune, and I am definitely in favour of Green policies.
Universities are money pits for no users to fill their pockets and need sorting out , councils , social care etc are full of people that don't do what it says on the tin, either all woke / diversity crap and little on the services supposed to be their remit and full of grifters at the top. Public services are full of useless grifters.
This is why politicians should never insult 25% of voters. You end up with horrible situations like this.
Its perfectly fine to insult 25% of voters, if you can appeal to 75%.
Trump is offensive to more than 25% of voters too.
It is not “perfectly fine” to insult anyone, let alone 25% of voters
There is a difference between “could” and “should” which you fail to understand
It is "perfectly fine" to insult people. People don't have a right not to be insulted.
There's a time and a place for it.
The original comment "This is why politicians should never insult 25% of voters." doesn't have a great dark to do with Trump deciding to leave NATO. Bit of a non sequitur.
Comments
A lot of businessmen and economists are very worried about Britain's future, without either greater private and public investment or return to Europe.
https://twitter.com/New_Narrative/status/1753185378494779559
This year we will see Councils, Universities, Social Care, etc etc at risk of collapse.
Starmer and Reeves are right not to make hostages to fortune, and I am definitely in favour of Green policies.
There’s a popular, patriotic case to be made - to be contrasted with what looks like the grotesque running down of public services by the Tories - but Keir is simply too frit.
The “strategy” here is to avoid going into an election offering tax rises, even as the Tories pursue a scorched earth strategy.
However what that data implies is that a decade ago the situation was worse. Indeed it was. Indeed the narrowest the gap had got in recent years was the year . . . 2019/20.
I would what could have happened in 2020 that took us from the narrowest gap in recent memory, to the worst in a decade.
Republicans smeared Ilhan Omar over a faulty translation. Here’s what she really said.
https://minnesotareformer.com/2024/02/01/republicans-smeared-ilhan-omar-over-a-faulty-translation-heres-what-she-really-said/
As pointed out earlier, the above are not capital investment (by and large). Indeed, many of those services cannot currently be afforded anymore, such is the parlous state of the economy.
We must invest for growth.
Or rather, that investors have no tolerance at all for additional UK debt.
What they have no tolerance for is crazy, unfunded stunts a la Truss.
Trump is offensive to more than 25% of voters too.
My parents have had a house built over the last couple of years (moved in last Summer). It's the sort of thing most people reasonably aspire to own; 4 bed, detached, but not a grand designs wonder. Very much in keeping with the Welsh hamlet in which it built - roof that looks like slate, stone facing to the front, windows that look like period timber frames.
All in, it cost about £500k, including a site with planning.
Barry is right - planning permission, even somewhere fairly undesirable in the wilds of Wales puts a massive uplift on the value of land. The plot, with planning was £85k. Without planning (and no prospect of getting planning) it would have been worth perhaps £5k. So about 16% of the cost of it is artificial from the planning system. In other places it is higher - earlier this year I was the underbidder to a burnt out 3 bed farmhouse (needed complete demolition and reinstament), plus 15 acres of useless but pretty moor/scrub land. I dropped out of the running at £225k, and that didn't even have a guarantee one would get planning to rebuild. It was a stunning location, but I was offering about £150k over the normal likely value of the land for the prospect of getting planning in a pretty location.
Josias is also right. My parents house cost the wrong side of £400k to build. Lots of factors behind that, but at least a third of it is driven by recent building regs on energy efficiency and insulation (and some other things - e.g. because it's in Wales, it has to have a full fire sprinkler system despite only being two stories). The drive for thermal efficiency is all well and good, but the costs are phenomenal and the laws of diminishing returns have well and truly kicked in. My house, whilst a little smaller than my parents (3 bed semi) has only basic insulation (cheap double glazing, a bit of stuff in the loft), but I could heat it for around 50 years even at the current high gas prices for the amount my parents have had to spend on insulation, triple glazing etc.
The fix is at least bit of both - take building regs back about 15 years, make planning about twice as easy to get, and you probably can knock £100-150k off the cost of a typical new home.
However, all this is looking at the wrong end of the problem. The main driver of high house prices? Half a million people extra a year. The main driver of low wages? Half a million extra (mostly low paid) people a year.
The only possible long term solution? Net Zero migration.
When should this happen? The best time was 20 years ago, the next best time is now.
But do most of EU's leaders and defence ministers? That is the question.
No sign they understand what is about to happen unless enough indie voters in swing states save europe.
Does this mean he is going to have to come up with something else now?
We did the job early on a Sunday morning for obvious reasons.
Permission was granted for mixed development but to this day no houses have been built. Only a Tesco, Lidl, and various low-rent shops.
There is still plenty of room for any number of decent houses there but it wouldn't solve the basic problem. No-one wants to live there. Abolishing planning restraints would make no difference to that.
I'm not sure a totally free market would do much other than make land even more expensive in favoured locations.
We do need more houses but where they should go needs at least some thought behind it.
1980: 4.1x
1985: 4.2x
1990: 5.4x
1995: 4.6x
2000: 6.1x
2005: 8.2x
2010: 7.0x
2015: 8.1x
2020: 8.3x
(and 2022: 9.0x)
The biggest move in affordability - when house prices moved from 4x income to 8x happened between 1990 and 2005. Since then it's gotten worse (9.0x), but if immigration was the biggest driver, then you would have expected only small moves in house prices relative to incomes in the period to 2005, followed by them leaping up prior to Brexit, followed by them falling in the period between 2015 and 2020.
If there is good, sensible, long-term investments in infrastructure that is viable then that should be done - we don't invest enough in this country and capital investment is completely different to current expenditure.
But it should be done because it is a good, sensible, long-term investment. Whether that be £28bn, £20bn, £36bn or any other reasonable sum.
Spending to hit a target, spending for the sake of spending, rather than because it is appropriate - that is just a stunt and a foolhardy one at that.
Or he will fall back on his accusation that Starmer flip-flops and has no plan.
Which to be honest is starting to look like the truth.
Why do Labour want to win?
To lift child poverty? No sign of that.
To invest in green tech: Just ditched.
To redistribute from wealthy to poorest: Ruled out by Reeves repeatedly.
To reform local government and its finance: We leave that to the welsh labour party.
To sort out social care: No plan.
To reform education: Plan is VAT for private education and tooth brush lessons.
To reform the constitution: Get rid of 96 hereditary peers and then...erm.. that's it until second term.
Help crisis-ridden NHS: Oh, wait, seems there might be a plan. Wes has one. Poly clinics and stuff. Sounds good but Reeves may well rule it out if it costs money.
Europe: no change except maybe some tinkering with students being able to do placements in eu.
I can see what Europe gets out of the current arrangement, though they pay for it with subservience, but what's in it for the USA?
We have a month or so now of 'I have no money', 'there's nothing much I can do', 'might just might be able to change the threshold for higher tax by 50p' etc etc.
And then kaboom!! Look at what I have done come 6th March.
Owen Jones
@OwenJones84
·
9h
One reason I fear Starmer’s Labour will be worse than New Labour is policies on poverty.
Gordon Brown doesn’t have my politics but clearly cared about poverty: hence the minimum wage and tax credits.
This lot back a Tory benefit cap driving hundreds of thousands into poverty.
https://x.com/timmyvoe240886/status/1753155837508366385?s=46&t=CW4pL-mMpTqsJXCdjW0Z6Q
Look at Japan from 1970 to 1991: house prices relative to incomes went up more than 5x, despite net emigration and no change in the working status of Japanese women.
Basically, we all want simple "this is the cause", but (like real life) it's pretty complex.
Trump on the Quinnipiac numbers still turns off Independents as much as he did in 2020 even if his base remains enthused
But - that effect would have stalled out had once the effects of that relaxation had worked themselves through. Instead, from the 2010 7x to the 2022 9x is another substantial increase, only plausibly driven by migration.
I mean, 5.4x in 1990 would have been a lot more expensive than 8.1x in 2015.
But there must be some effect of the change in rules to effectively double the money chasing the same thing.
Is that all there is to it? So you are saying it is perfectly affordable?
The last hanging was in Delaware in 1996, the last gas chamber execution was in 1999 in Arizona, the last firing squad execution was 2010 in Utah and the last electrocution death was 2020 in Tennessee
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capital_punishment_in_the_United_States
Also the quality is different: All Japanese houses built between 1945 and 1990 are complete garbage (with the exception of mine). The newer ones are pretty good and will last a long time.
https://bsky.app/profile/johnbrownstan.bsky.social/post/3kkf3hsmryz2c
You would be better off beating me up over my Tories 20 seat majority. By the way I haven't posted since teatime and we have learned over the course of the evening that LOTO Starmer was responsible for COVID lockdowns (thank you Barty) and for granting the vile Clapham alkali attacker asylum a couple of years ago (several earnest and one or two ironic posters).
Starmer-Labour cannot sustain such an onslaught between now and January 23rd next year. Lay, lay!
Maybe just razing the whole of Middlesbrough to the ground and moving everyone to a newly built Commuter World in the London Green Belt would be sensible economically but is that what we want?
There has to be some limit somewhere.
The practical limit is that not everyone wants that. Different people want different things.
Well that's the theory at least. ☹️
The sad thing is that (albeit for very good reasons) they are turning their back on the world and gradually disengaging, which is why things like piracy are more common as the USN retreats/repositions.
House prices are determined by the laws of supply and demand. If you can reduce demand or increase supply then prices will fall.
Yes you can reduce demand by limiting immigration but that is unlikley for political reasons - but smaller measures such as increasing council tax on second homes or empty properties works - as is becoming apparent in Wales - but that will only have local impact.
Increasing supply can be done by two measures - firstly opening planning restrictions to allow say more brownfield development , and encouraging higher densities around public transport; and secondly by penalising 'land banks' - any land that has successfuly gained planning permission must start paying council tax on it after say two years - developed or not. In other words build on it or sell it to allow others to do the same.
But of course the positivity about improving affordability will be countered by the negativity of falling house prices. I can imagine the Daily Mail headlines....
https://twitter.com/SollenbergerRC/status/1753255371697803534
I would suggest that the main constraint at the moment on supply is build cost and closely linked to this is regulation. Also the government could hardly be doing more to increase brownfield, high density development but the preference of developers is generally to go for green field development, cheaper and lower risk.
The converse of this is that falling house prices can depress demand, as people have less, or no, equity, and therefore moving up becomes impossible.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/feb/01/trump-victim-political-strategy-manipulation
You know who predicted this would happen with near-perfect precision? Exxon Mobil scientists, in an internal report in 1982.
Here’s another from @exxonmobil 1982. It predicted that in 2023, our atmospheric CO2 would reach roughly 415 parts per million, raising the global average surface temperature ~1.1 degrees C.
Update: Average CO2 in 2023 was just over 420 PPM and the average temp anomaly 1.18C 2/
https://twitter.com/tsrandall/status/1753117424101061030
Great nickname, though.
Like so many, he “converted to Christianity.” Pretending to be a Christian is even more popular than pretending to be gay, among those who game the system.
F1: well, that went from rumour to fact rather quickly.
Some interesting conversation about a potential replacement. Could be Alonso.
There is a difference between “could” and “should” which you fail to understand
There is a difference between “could” and “should” which you fail to understand
You have a go at your opponent, you don’t, ever, have a go at the people who might vote for them.
It is wishy washy liberal cry babies like you that have allowed the country to go down the drain.
Yes, that is basically what I'm doing. Diverse, global, but with a definite emphasis on American tech giants
There's a time and a place for it.
Trump has insulted far more voters, far more regularly, than Clinton ever did. In rather deranged BLOCK CAPS RANTS about LIBERALS and others most of the time.
Capping the mortgage salary multiples would do more to lower prices (and increase the stability of the UK financial system) than anything else. Who knows, it might even encourage banks to lend some money to productive businesses
Public services are full of useless grifters.
Bit of a non sequitur.