Reeves in the papers this morning promising not to repeat the many mistakes of new labour.
She’s a smart operator.
She confirms what so many in Labour have denied for years.
As Cyclefree so often reminds us, you can address a problem until you acknowledge it exists.
If I thought that Reeves was seriously going to address our biggest key weakness, namely our trade deficit, which Brown persuaded himself did not matter in a world of floating currencies, I would be tempted to vote for her myself. It would involve serious pain to do it in terms of reduced consumption and much reduced borrowing so I will believe it when I see it.
Blaming New Labour for importing cheap Chinese consumer products doesn't reveal the source of the problem.
De-industrialisation and the sale of UK assets overseas in the 1980s started the ball rolling. Resolving the industrial manufacturing strife of the 1970s by eradicating industrial manufacturing for domestic consumption was a crap idea in the first place, but it turns out one wholly incompatible with Brexit.
Good luck to Reeves if she ever becomes CoE, but I don't see how this genie is ever returned to the bottle.
Domestic manufacturing damaged itself. Not continuing to subsidise corpses was simply non-insane.
U.K. manufacturing is alive and doing quite well. The meme that it doesn’t exist seems embedded in parts of the Left.
You can not deny a decline. Here's a pretty comprehensive explanation, and it is happy to shower the blame on everyone.
The decline happened because of a blank refusal, especially in heavy industry, to invest in the future and change methods. By the management, government and unions.
Going round some of the old industrial sites - they had machinery from before WWII. In places that closed in the 70s and 80s.
Let's take the motor industry. In the early 1970s British Leyland was the fourth largest automotive group behind General Motors, Ford, and I think Toyota.
British Leyland, Volkswagen and Renault were in trouble. Volkswagen were baled out by the West German Government and a growth plan was set in place including modernising model lines and manufacturing techniques. Renault was nationalised and did likewise. What remains of British Leyland is owned by the Germans, the Indians and the Chinese.
MG Rover was doing fine, especially when partnered with Honda, did well all through the nineties.
Reeves in the papers this morning promising not to repeat the many mistakes of new labour.
She’s a smart operator.
She confirms what so many in Labour have denied for years.
As Cyclefree so often reminds us, you can address a problem until you acknowledge it exists.
If I thought that Reeves was seriously going to address our biggest key weakness, namely our trade deficit, which Brown persuaded himself did not matter in a world of floating currencies, I would be tempted to vote for her myself. It would involve serious pain to do it in terms of reduced consumption and much reduced borrowing so I will believe it when I see it.
Blaming New Labour for importing cheap Chinese consumer products doesn't reveal the source of the problem.
De-industrialisation and the sale of UK assets overseas in the 1980s started the ball rolling. Resolving the industrial manufacturing strife of the 1970s by eradicating industrial manufacturing for domestic consumption was a crap idea in the first place, but it turns out one wholly incompatible with Brexit.
Good luck to Reeves if she ever becomes CoE, but I don't see how this genie is ever returned to the bottle.
I think that is over simplifying her argument. But what we need to do is encourage domestic investment and production so that we get import substitution, try to build productivity so that we are more competitive and incentivise training and capital whilst addressing infrastructure problems.
We also need to reduce consumption to what we are actually earning which means we cannot have demand boosted by £100bn+ of government borrowing. So more taxes and less public spending. Not an easy sell by any means which is why politicians of all stripes have ducked it.
We need to drop the "less public spending" rhetoric. This country is crying out for investment. That is spending. We absolutely shouldn't borrow to spend on day to day stuff, but absolutely should borrow to invest in capex which delivers a return on investment.
Part of why this country is broken is the Tory whine about "who will pay for that" in response to spending on anything. Borrowing to invest and delivering a return on investment used to be what the Tories stood for - capitalism. Whatever happened to the Tories...?
We need to increase investment within the spending envelope, not by expanding it. We are simply far too over borrowed to do the alternative and that debt is inhibiting growth. That means less current spending and more investment spending. Once again, not an easy sell.
Borrowing to increase economic output increases the amount of tax revenues we receive.
It is called investment. Business is often highly leveraged with debt, but does so because it will grow its revenues.
Only if the rate of return is positive.
There's no shortage of 'investment' which has had a negative rate of return.
Especially when governments are involved.
And it also depends on whether alternative investment options are available.
Property investment has likely shown a higher rate of return than business investment in recent decades.
Its also more likely to be bailed out by the government if things go wrong.
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
I lived in an apartment in the US, and vastly preferred it to the house I lived in back in the UK. Someone else looked after the garden (which was actually used by very few residents), there was a gym and a pool etc. So when I came back to the UK I found a similar property and haven't looked back. Cheaper to heat, better facilities, well soundproofed from the neighbours. Poorly insulated buildings from the 1910s (or worse, the 1980s) with a scratchy bit of grass in the back where you hear every fart from next door's dog are not as great as the popular myth of home ownership makes out.
In some ways not as a great as my business partner's pile in the Winchester countryside that his parents bought in the 1950s for pennies. But that's because of the land around it, not the property itself.
There must be a Labour mole deep inside Jeremy Hunt's brain if he thinks this will not add to the Broken Britain narrative. In addition, now, let's think, is it natural Labour or Conservative supporters who are more likely to try and phone HMRC with self-assessed tax problems?
That's one of the worst ideas I've seen.
HMRC regularly screw up or alter tax codes (sometimes by their auto bots) and I need to phone them 2-3 times a year to sort it out.
Only humans can understand an individual's own circumstances.
Not to mention that some people cannot use HMRC's website because (and this brings us back to the thread header) even if online, they do not have the right ID needed to open a digital tax account.
HMRC are muppets. I'm on a payment plan to clear tax owed at the end of January (having apparently missed a deadline to get it into my tax code despite doing it at the same time of year as I always do. Direct debits going out as agreed.
So I receive a shouty letter. Self Assessment Statement. Money owed. Pay now or else. Ancient giro form thing on the bottom. So I call them. Navigating my way past the AI door guard I join a 75 minute hold queue. Person answers who clearly hates her job. She has a look, and says "we're sending you statements because you owe us money". Yes. I know. Payment plan. "That is the debt management department, we're self assessment"
"OK, so I can ignore the shouty letter?" "No, you need to pay the money owed." "I am, the payment plan." "Transpires that HMRC will continue to send demands for payment every month. As they take the payments as agreed. Because the "Debt Management" part and the "Self Assessment" part do not speak to each other. £ spent on pointless admin.
Ah, process.
It's almost like somebody wrote an article about it
Reeves in the papers this morning promising not to repeat the many mistakes of new labour.
She’s a smart operator.
She confirms what so many in Labour have denied for years.
As Cyclefree so often reminds us, you can address a problem until you acknowledge it exists.
If I thought that Reeves was seriously going to address our biggest key weakness, namely our trade deficit, which Brown persuaded himself did not matter in a world of floating currencies, I would be tempted to vote for her myself. It would involve serious pain to do it in terms of reduced consumption and much reduced borrowing so I will believe it when I see it.
Blaming New Labour for importing cheap Chinese consumer products doesn't reveal the source of the problem.
De-industrialisation and the sale of UK assets overseas in the 1980s started the ball rolling. Resolving the industrial manufacturing strife of the 1970s by eradicating industrial manufacturing for domestic consumption was a crap idea in the first place, but it turns out one wholly incompatible with Brexit.
Good luck to Reeves if she ever becomes CoE, but I don't see how this genie is ever returned to the bottle.
I think that is over simplifying her argument. But what we need to do is encourage domestic investment and production so that we get import substitution, try to build productivity so that we are more competitive and incentivise training and capital whilst addressing infrastructure problems.
We also need to reduce consumption to what we are actually earning which means we cannot have demand boosted by £100bn+ of government borrowing. So more taxes and less public spending. Not an easy sell by any means which is why politicians of all stripes have ducked it.
We need to drop the "less public spending" rhetoric. This country is crying out for investment. That is spending. We absolutely shouldn't borrow to spend on day to day stuff, but absolutely should borrow to invest in capex which delivers a return on investment.
Part of why this country is broken is the Tory whine about "who will pay for that" in response to spending on anything. Borrowing to invest and delivering a return on investment used to be what the Tories stood for - capitalism. Whatever happened to the Tories...?
We need to increase investment within the spending envelope, not by expanding it. We are simply far too over borrowed to do the alternative and that debt is inhibiting growth. That means less current spending and more investment spending. Once again, not an easy sell.
Good morning
Reeves said yesterday we are presently paying £82 billion in debt interest and she is clearly not going to risk a Truss disaster so you are very much right to identify the solution but sadly our political class just cannot bring themselves round to following your solution
Sadly yes. @RochdalePioneers is right in theory about investment producing more taxes but the ability to borrow for a government or a business is determined by the state of their balance sheet. And, post Covid and Ukraine/gas subsidies ours is truly terrible hovering around 100% of GDP. If our debt were below 60% of GDP I would be more than happy for us to borrow to invest- our infrastructure certainly needs it. But we are where we are and it is not a good place.
But what is the alternative David? Infrastructure is crumbling around us. Roads, railways, schools, hospitals. Councils heading into bankruptcy cutting essential services which many parents need to be able to work.
If we invest to fix the roof then we get more economic output and the expectation of more tax revenues. If we don't then things continue to crumble and we can expect a future of economic decline and with it tax revenues.
We can't afford not to invest. Why can Tories not see this?
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
London is building blocks of flats everywhere. Even sandwiched between railway lines and roads....
The strange belief that we don’t build flats…
The reason that Vienna works is that the supply of housing is large enough, compared to the population, that the market is clearing.
The market clears in the UK/London. It just clears a price that most people aren't happy with.
No - there are people who are homeless. Not vagrants, but in all kinds of horrible accommodation. Because they can't get a vaguely decent place.
What we need is a situation where there is a non trivial number of properties empty. Because they are the bottom of the market. Currently, *anything* sells or rents. The vacant properties are a tiny percentage, mostly to with rebuild or personal/legal circumstances.
There are lots of empty properties in the UK.
There are not lots of empty properties in London.
But I suspect that is true of essentially every prosperous city in the world. If there are lots of jobs and lots of opportunity (and gazillions of students), then people will have no problems in renting out properties.
That said, I take your point about homelessness. There are - I'm sure - people in London who live in cars and the like because they cannot afford housing.
This graph suggests we have even over the UK as a whole fewer vacant properties than many other countries: (hope I got that embed syntax right: this url anyway: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GJD1mhkW0AA3S5g.jpg )
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
London is building blocks of flats everywhere. Even sandwiched between railway lines and roads....
The strange belief that we don’t build flats…
The reason that Vienna works is that the supply of housing is large enough, compared to the population, that the market is clearing.
The market clears in the UK/London. It just clears a price that most people aren't happy with.
Reposting this (I think it was @Benpointer from yesterday?)
Over the last 25 years, there has not just been a constant surplus of homes per household, but the ratio has been modestly growing
A major flaw in that is the definition of household - which is anyone living together. So if you have an (unofficial) HMO with people living in every room, that is a single household.
The reason that such articles are written is the combination of the belief that (1) Something must be done and (2) We mustn't build because Greenery.
Hence the comedy last year over "the number of rooms" in properties. Hurrah - no need for more properties, zillions of rooms!
Due to the fashion, in rebuilding and new construction, for ensuite bathrooms and utility rooms, the number of "rooms" has rocketed.
A neighbour has just rebuilt a 3 bedroom house in this fashion. It previously had 1 bathroom and 1 toilet. Downstairs, open plan front to back.
He has restored a private living room, added a utility room, and upstairs, now has 4 bedrooms, 3 with ensuite. Some of the bedrooms are ridiculously tiny...
So the house went from having 8 rooms, to having 13. While having 1 extra bedroom.
There must be a Labour mole deep inside Jeremy Hunt's brain if he thinks this will not add to the Broken Britain narrative. In addition, now, let's think, is it natural Labour or Conservative supporters who are more likely to try and phone HMRC with self-assessed tax problems?
That's one of the worst ideas I've seen.
HMRC regularly screw up or alter tax codes (sometimes by their auto bots) and I need to phone them 2-3 times a year to sort it out.
Only humans can understand an individual's own circumstances.
Not to mention that some people cannot use HMRC's website because (and this brings us back to the thread header) even if online, they do not have the right ID needed to open a digital tax account.
HMRC are muppets. I'm on a payment plan to clear tax owed at the end of January (having apparently missed a deadline to get it into my tax code despite doing it at the same time of year as I always do. Direct debits going out as agreed.
So I receive a shouty letter. Self Assessment Statement. Money owed. Pay now or else. Ancient giro form thing on the bottom. So I call them. Navigating my way past the AI door guard I join a 75 minute hold queue. Person answers who clearly hates her job. She has a look, and says "we're sending you statements because you owe us money". Yes. I know. Payment plan. "That is the debt management department, we're self assessment"
"OK, so I can ignore the shouty letter?" "No, you need to pay the money owed." "I am, the payment plan." "Transpires that HMRC will continue to send demands for payment every month. As they take the payments as agreed. Because the "Debt Management" part and the "Self Assessment" part do not speak to each other. £ spent on pointless admin.
Ah, process.
It's almost like somebody wrote an article about it
If someone is excluded from society why should they have a say in the formation of the government?
Because it has the power relationship the wrong way round. A person should not need permission to vote from the government, they have it by right of existence. The right should only be removed by due process (ie the judge should append "...and the franchise denied you " to the sentence), not by bureaucracy or the Malmesbury process.
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
London is building blocks of flats everywhere. Even sandwiched between railway lines and roads....
The strange belief that we don’t build flats…
The reason that Vienna works is that the supply of housing is large enough, compared to the population, that the market is clearing.
The market clears in the UK/London. It just clears a price that most people aren't happy with.
No - there are people who are homeless. Not vagrants, but in all kinds of horrible accommodation. Because they can't get a vaguely decent place.
What we need is a situation where there is a non trivial number of properties empty. Because they are the bottom of the market. Currently, *anything* sells or rents. The vacant properties are a tiny percentage, mostly to with rebuild or personal/legal circumstances.
There are lots of empty properties in the UK.
There are not lots of empty properties in London.
But I suspect that is true of essentially every prosperous city in the world. If there are lots of jobs and lots of opportunity (and gazillions of students), then people will have no problems in renting out properties.
That said, I take your point about homelessness. There are - I'm sure - people in London who live in cars and the like because they cannot afford housing.
This graph suggests we have even over the UK as a whole fewer vacant properties than many other countries: (hope I got that embed syntax right: this url anyway: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GJD1mhkW0AA3S5g.jpg )
I'm sure that's true.
At the same time, remember the US also had a massive housing boom, despite lots of empty properties.
If someone is excluded from society why should they have a say in the formation of the government?
Because it has the power relationship the wrong way round. A person should not need permission to vote from the government, they have it by right of existence. The right should only be removed by due process (ie the judge should append "...and the franchise denied you " to the sentence), not by bureaucracy or the Malmesbury process.
Are you saying that removing voters by Trebuchet is *not* a good idea?
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
I lived in an apartment in the US, and vastly preferred it to the house I lived in back in the UK. Someone else looked after the garden (which was actually used by very few residents), there was a gym and a pool etc. So when I came back to the UK I found a similar property and haven't looked back. Cheaper to heat, better facilities, well soundproofed from the neighbours. Poorly insulated buildings from the 1910s (or worse, the 1980s) with a scratchy bit of grass in the back where you hear every fart from next door's dog are not as great as the popular myth of home ownership makes out.
In some ways not as a great as my business partner's pile in the Winchester countryside that his parents bought in the 1950s for pennies. But that's because of the land around it, not the property itself.
The other problem you will find with Flats in the UK is that the service charges can remove all the equity value.
Was looking at some properties last week and there was a difference in sale price of over £300,000 which made zero sense until you saw that one had a service charge £12,000 a year more than the neighbouring flat in a different block..
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
That is a really interesting article. I have just ordered his book.
We now have inflation below savings rates. For the first time in 15 years it seems that savers will get a real return on their savings rather than erosion.
The end of cheap money is a good thing for house prices (less so for affordability criteria) and for reducing the consumerism that @DavidL so deplores for its effect on trade balance, and I for its other pernicious effects on society and the environment.
Ummm: that's pre-tax
As interest income is taxable, then for the vast majority of savers, then they will still be seeing real terms erosion of their savings.
The personal savings allowance and ISAs mean that for the clear majority of savers they are getting their interest mostly if not all tax free.
Is that going to be the clear majority? Most people earn more than the personal allowance, and I doubt that more than 20% of total savings are in ISAs,
But I get your point that a significant number of people will recieve interest on their savings largely tax free.
Personal savings allowance is £1,000 of savings income for basic rate taxpayers, so a basic rate taxpayer with £20k savings outside an ISA @ 5% is tax free.
Additionally impacting pensioners in particular (not exclusively) there is a starting rate of savings if other income < £17,570 then you have a £5k tax free savings allowance. For them if they have £100k of savings outside an ISA at 5% then that £5k it is still tax free.
I wonder if a future government will row back voter ID? Probably not an issue anyone will have much enthusiasm for.
Enfranchisement is (obviously, you’d think) a fundamental feature of democracy. Incidentally, it must be a decade or so since Cameron came out with his ‘physically sick’ remarks around prisoners voting. Another area where tbh I accept I am I probably pretty firmly in the minority, but I don’t agree with taking the vote away from convicts.
It’s an interesting philosophical question
If you take the view that government is a construct of the people to deliver community services then the ultimate punishment that the government can impose is to exclude people from the benefits of society either by exile or by imprisonment.
If someone is excluded from society why should they have a say in the formation of the government?
Now clearly this means that anyone with a prison term of less than 5 years should keep their vote without question. But anyone who is expected to be in prison for the entire term of the next parliament? I’m not so sure.
On the other hand, I'd argue that Labour shouldn't abolish voter ID, but instruct the boundary commission to base seats on census data, not on registered voters. That's a technical change that would make a huge difference, because city constituencies are underrated because of so many people moving around, especially the young. It just isn't a priority for most people to register instntly when they move, but at any given moment that means lots of people are underrepresented.
Agree. And with reference to the header, turnout at GEs is obviously a measure of those who are registered to vote - it doesn't include those not on the electoral register who would be eligible to vote if they were. I suspect that's quite a high, and increasing, number, which would depress further the actual % turnout if we could measure it. Which of course we can't.
All political parties should put more effort into ensuring that all eligible voters are actually registered so that they can participate.
The current plan is that the 2021 census was the last one - it's believed the data can be collected more efficiently by other means,
It will however be a great loss to future historians...
Although I don't like Mogg at all, I do give him credit for being the only one who was honest about voter ID.
It was very helpful he said it out loud. Far too many on here swallowed the idea that this was about voter fraud.
Amazing when there was so little actual evidence of it.
Since when has evidence played any part in the decision making of Sunak and Braverman?
Yes, it was a classic example of a cure for which there was no known disease.
Actually there was a known disease, let's be honest.
The recommendation for voter ID came from the Electoral Commission itself in 2012 not from any Party and was in response to a spate of voter fraud cases and fear of more in the future.
However, the way it's been implemented, targeting in person voting and not postal, is utterly hamfisted.
It's been done in many places which are definitely democratic, so the idea it was inherently some moral outrage was overblown and distracted from the specifics being badly done and the glaring omissions.
I'd go so far as to say the focus on generic criticism as if requiring ID would always be an outrage helped the government present it as not a big deal and avoid some more significant points.
Not that no-one will have raised specifics, but by and large it was an example of poor tactics in holding them to account by going overbroad in criticism.
I’m trying to think of counties which don’t use ID for voting. Does anyone have a list?
Countries presumably!
Though most countries do have mandatory ID cards, something that we as a country irrationally oppose.
For the 12,556,445th time
Opposing the U.K. ID card was rational. This is because the problem with every proposal and the attempted implementation was the insane database nonsense that came with it.
The attempt to link everything to everything else, with terrible security would have made the NHS big IT projects look good. And provided one stop shopping for data thieves. And been utterly incompatible with GDPR….
I would suggest that an ID project could work. The high level requirements -
1) photo id card, credit card format 2) id code unique per person, with checksums etc 3) privacy secured method of verifying id - free to anyone. So anyone can verify an id shown to them. 4) anyone suggesting any Minority Report shit, get nail gunned. To the ceiling. With rusty nails.
Nearly every country with a requirement for voter ID has national ID cards. Are we uniquely incompetent that we cannot manage a system that nearly all other European countries do?
Often countries with stronger democracies than ours too.
Because, each time it is proposed, a whole raft of crap is attached.
An actual ID card would work. But without the crap, it wouldn't fill enough rice bowls in the system of government or something.
So you are saying that we are uniquely incompetent!
Perhaps we could outsource our national ID card to the French...
The reason is not so much nationality as the time in which we are implementing it. Welcome to the age of Big Process.
When ID was brought in, in most counties, a unique ID on a card was just about all that could be done and that was an effort.
As a senior civil servant (Cabinet Office) told me - "That's too simple for a proper, modern project". A database and ID card for just the purpose of ID would be a small project. It would be implemented by a few hundred people. To run it, you might need more. Mostly for enrolment processing. But you'd design the system to scale easily as it built out.
You can't have a government policy that doesn't require a shiny new Richard Rogers style building? Without its own logo? What's the point, if no-one gets to run an empire?
That emphasises everything that is wrong with Government - for most people a quick win would be brilliant yet our Government (in multiple ways) only wants massive projects...
In general London is a net migrator to the rest of the country (to mainly South East and Eastern regions). London's population has grown because of international migration.
Net migration to London from the rest of the UK is only positive for those aged 20-27.
Inner London was a net absorber of people; net out-migration from London was entirely a result of a net loss from Outer London.
The breaking of this pattern was the most exceptional thing that happened during 2020-21. While 81 per cent of net out-migration was still from Outer London, Inner London also became a net loser of population to outside of London. Inner London saw little change in its post-university age influx, but older ages left at higher than usual rates, contributing to a net loss of 36,700 people to outside London. This was mostly driven by a spike in the number of 30–45-year-olds leaving – 25,700 (68 per cent) more than in a normal year.
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
I lived in an apartment in the US, and vastly preferred it to the house I lived in back in the UK. Someone else looked after the garden (which was actually used by very few residents), there was a gym and a pool etc. So when I came back to the UK I found a similar property and haven't looked back. Cheaper to heat, better facilities, well soundproofed from the neighbours. Poorly insulated buildings from the 1910s (or worse, the 1980s) with a scratchy bit of grass in the back where you hear every fart from next door's dog are not as great as the popular myth of home ownership makes out.
In some ways not as a great as my business partner's pile in the Winchester countryside that his parents bought in the 1950s for pennies. But that's because of the land around it, not the property itself.
The other problem you will find with Flats in the UK is that the service charges can remove all the equity value.
Was looking at some properties last week and there was a difference in sale price of over £300,000 which made zero sense until you saw that one had a service charge £12,000 a year more than the neighbouring flat in a different block..
£12k difference in service charges?
Either the more expensive one was a very fancy hotel-branded building with a private pool and conscierge service, or it was a serviced retirement flat with nursing included.
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
London is building blocks of flats everywhere. Even sandwiched between railway lines and roads....
The strange belief that we don’t build flats…
The reason that Vienna works is that the supply of housing is large enough, compared to the population, that the market is clearing.
The market clears in the UK/London. It just clears a price that most people aren't happy with.
No - there are people who are homeless. Not vagrants, but in all kinds of horrible accommodation. Because they can't get a vaguely decent place.
What we need is a situation where there is a non trivial number of properties empty. Because they are the bottom of the market. Currently, *anything* sells or rents. The vacant properties are a tiny percentage, mostly to with rebuild or personal/legal circumstances.
There are lots of empty properties in the UK.
There are not lots of empty properties in London.
But I suspect that is true of essentially every prosperous city in the world. If there are lots of jobs and lots of opportunity (and gazillions of students), then people will have no problems in renting out properties.
That said, I take your point about homelessness. There are - I'm sure - people in London who live in cars and the like because they cannot afford housing.
This graph suggests we have even over the UK as a whole fewer vacant properties than many other countries: (hope I got that embed syntax right: this url anyway: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GJD1mhkW0AA3S5g.jpg )
What we have in Britain is a lot of under occupancy rather than a lot of empty houses. Second homes, but also of people like me and Mrs Foxy having a 4 bed house where the spare room has been used for one weekend since Christmas.
Partly it is lifestyle, partly savings in residential form, but largely that the running costs of a big house in utilities and property tax is quite low, so little incentive to downsize.
Reeves in the papers this morning promising not to repeat the many mistakes of new labour.
She’s a smart operator.
Sure is. Her speech last night was good. Lots of interesting ideas in there. A future PM IMO.
The thing that counts against Reeves in the leader after Starmer stakes is that she is the one who will get the flack for continuing parsimony for Public Services. That is tolerable for a year or two, but not a whole Parliament.
Reeves in the papers this morning promising not to repeat the many mistakes of new labour.
She’s a smart operator.
She confirms what so many in Labour have denied for years.
As Cyclefree so often reminds us, you can address a problem until you acknowledge it exists.
If I thought that Reeves was seriously going to address our biggest key weakness, namely our trade deficit, which Brown persuaded himself did not matter in a world of floating currencies, I would be tempted to vote for her myself. It would involve serious pain to do it in terms of reduced consumption and much reduced borrowing so I will believe it when I see it.
Blaming New Labour for importing cheap Chinese consumer products doesn't reveal the source of the problem.
De-industrialisation and the sale of UK assets overseas in the 1980s started the ball rolling. Resolving the industrial manufacturing strife of the 1970s by eradicating industrial manufacturing for domestic consumption was a crap idea in the first place, but it turns out one wholly incompatible with Brexit.
Good luck to Reeves if she ever becomes CoE, but I don't see how this genie is ever returned to the bottle.
Domestic manufacturing damaged itself. Not continuing to subsidise corpses was simply non-insane.
U.K. manufacturing is alive and doing quite well. The meme that it doesn’t exist seems embedded in parts of the Left.
You can not deny a decline. Here's a pretty comprehensive explanation, and it is happy to shower the blame on everyone.
The decline happened because of a blank refusal, especially in heavy industry, to invest in the future and change methods. By the management, government and unions.
Going round some of the old industrial sites - they had machinery from before WWII. In places that closed in the 70s and 80s.
Let's take the motor industry. In the early 1970s British Leyland was the fourth largest automotive group behind General Motors, Ford, and I think Toyota.
British Leyland, Volkswagen and Renault were in trouble. Volkswagen were baled out by the West German Government and a growth plan was set in place including modernising model lines and manufacturing techniques. Renault was nationalised and did likewise. What remains of British Leyland is owned by the Germans, the Indians and the Chinese.
The motor industry is instructive - as BL staggered on, other car companies setup efficient, productive factories in the U.K.
The same people very often. In one factory they miserably produced expensive, not very good cars. In another they produced modern cars to high quality, at a good price.
BL was plagued by strikes. Paradoxically, the strike leader, Red Robbo, was precisely right that the government needed to massively increase investment as BL's overseas competitors were doing but this argument was lost on the Thatcher government of the time.
I wonder if a future government will row back voter ID? Probably not an issue anyone will have much enthusiasm for.
Enfranchisement is (obviously, you’d think) a fundamental feature of democracy. Incidentally, it must be a decade or so since Cameron came out with his ‘physically sick’ remarks around prisoners voting. Another area where tbh I accept I am I probably pretty firmly in the minority, but I don’t agree with taking the vote away from convicts.
It’s an interesting philosophical question
If you take the view that government is a construct of the people to deliver community services then the ultimate punishment that the government can impose is to exclude people from the benefits of society either by exile or by imprisonment.
If someone is excluded from society why should they have a say in the formation of the government?
Now clearly this means that anyone with a prison term of less than 5 years should keep their vote without question. But anyone who is expected to be in prison for the entire term of the next parliament? I’m not so sure.
On the other hand, I'd argue that Labour shouldn't abolish voter ID, but instruct the boundary commission to base seats on census data, not on registered voters. That's a technical change that would make a huge difference, because city constituencies are underrated because of so many people moving around, especially the young. It just isn't a priority for most people to register instntly when they move, but at any given moment that means lots of people are underrepresented.
Ummm.
But surely that means that people who have just left a constituency are still counted? So net, net the effect is probably close to zero.
No, because mobile populations (think students) move frequently, and they then don't register at all. If you moved every few months, are you sure you'd bother?
The other underrepresented city people are recently-naturalised immigrants. Yes, they should say hooray, at last I can vote for Joe Bloggs for Borough Councillor, I must register tomorrow. But often they don't. (I do agree that foreign national shouldn't get the vote in national elections deciding defence policy, though I don't see why not in local ones dealing with roads and schools and rubbish collection, as the Irish and EU citizens still do.)
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
I lived in an apartment in the US, and vastly preferred it to the house I lived in back in the UK. Someone else looked after the garden (which was actually used by very few residents), there was a gym and a pool etc. So when I came back to the UK I found a similar property and haven't looked back. Cheaper to heat, better facilities, well soundproofed from the neighbours. Poorly insulated buildings from the 1910s (or worse, the 1980s) with a scratchy bit of grass in the back where you hear every fart from next door's dog are not as great as the popular myth of home ownership makes out.
In some ways not as a great as my business partner's pile in the Winchester countryside that his parents bought in the 1950s for pennies. But that's because of the land around it, not the property itself.
The other problem you will find with Flats in the UK is that the service charges can remove all the equity value.
Was looking at some properties last week and there was a difference in sale price of over £300,000 which made zero sense until you saw that one had a service charge £12,000 a year more than the neighbouring flat in a different block..
Yes - the board/residents meetings on that topic are highly entertaining.
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
I lived in an apartment in the US, and vastly preferred it to the house I lived in back in the UK. Someone else looked after the garden (which was actually used by very few residents), there was a gym and a pool etc. So when I came back to the UK I found a similar property and haven't looked back. Cheaper to heat, better facilities, well soundproofed from the neighbours. Poorly insulated buildings from the 1910s (or worse, the 1980s) with a scratchy bit of grass in the back where you hear every fart from next door's dog are not as great as the popular myth of home ownership makes out.
In some ways not as a great as my business partner's pile in the Winchester countryside that his parents bought in the 1950s for pennies. But that's because of the land around it, not the property itself.
The other problem you will find with Flats in the UK is that the service charges can remove all the equity value.
Was looking at some properties last week and there was a difference in sale price of over £300,000 which made zero sense until you saw that one had a service charge £12,000 a year more than the neighbouring flat in a different block..
(That said, part of the problem is people seeing their primary residence as "an asset" rather than "a place to live" because everyone has been trained to borrow heavily against it for all sorts of consumer spending.)
Reeves in the papers this morning promising not to repeat the many mistakes of new labour.
She’s a smart operator.
She confirms what so many in Labour have denied for years.
As Cyclefree so often reminds us, you can address a problem until you acknowledge it exists.
If I thought that Reeves was seriously going to address our biggest key weakness, namely our trade deficit, which Brown persuaded himself did not matter in a world of floating currencies, I would be tempted to vote for her myself. It would involve serious pain to do it in terms of reduced consumption and much reduced borrowing so I will believe it when I see it.
Blaming New Labour for importing cheap Chinese consumer products doesn't reveal the source of the problem.
De-industrialisation and the sale of UK assets overseas in the 1980s started the ball rolling. Resolving the industrial manufacturing strife of the 1970s by eradicating industrial manufacturing for domestic consumption was a crap idea in the first place, but it turns out one wholly incompatible with Brexit.
Good luck to Reeves if she ever becomes CoE, but I don't see how this genie is ever returned to the bottle.
I think that is over simplifying her argument. But what we need to do is encourage domestic investment and production so that we get import substitution, try to build productivity so that we are more competitive and incentivise training and capital whilst addressing infrastructure problems.
We also need to reduce consumption to what we are actually earning which means we cannot have demand boosted by £100bn+ of government borrowing. So more taxes and less public spending. Not an easy sell by any means which is why politicians of all stripes have ducked it.
We need to drop the "less public spending" rhetoric. This country is crying out for investment. That is spending. We absolutely shouldn't borrow to spend on day to day stuff, but absolutely should borrow to invest in capex which delivers a return on investment.
Part of why this country is broken is the Tory whine about "who will pay for that" in response to spending on anything. Borrowing to invest and delivering a return on investment used to be what the Tories stood for - capitalism. Whatever happened to the Tories...?
We need to increase investment within the spending envelope, not by expanding it. We are simply far too over borrowed to do the alternative and that debt is inhibiting growth. That means less current spending and more investment spending. Once again, not an easy sell.
Good morning
Reeves said yesterday we are presently paying £82 billion in debt interest and she is clearly not going to risk a Truss disaster so you are very much right to identify the solution but sadly our political class just cannot bring themselves round to following your solution
Sadly yes. @RochdalePioneers is right in theory about investment producing more taxes but the ability to borrow for a government or a business is determined by the state of their balance sheet. And, post Covid and Ukraine/gas subsidies ours is truly terrible hovering around 100% of GDP. If our debt were below 60% of GDP I would be more than happy for us to borrow to invest- our infrastructure certainly needs it. But we are where we are and it is not a good place.
But what is the alternative David? Infrastructure is crumbling around us. Roads, railways, schools, hospitals. Councils heading into bankruptcy cutting essential services which many parents need to be able to work.
If we invest to fix the roof then we get more economic output and the expectation of more tax revenues. If we don't then things continue to crumble and we can expect a future of economic decline and with it tax revenues.
We can't afford not to invest. Why can Tories not see this?
I think we have to tax to invest, or redirect spending. With £82bn in debt interest already I don't think Britain can simply spend more.
If you tax housing a bit more, and that also puts more household savings into more productive private investments, then an increase in tax could have a double benefit in paying for public investment and in optimising private investment.
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
London is building blocks of flats everywhere. Even sandwiched between railway lines and roads....
The strange belief that we don’t build flats…
The reason that Vienna works is that the supply of housing is large enough, compared to the population, that the market is clearing.
The market clears in the UK/London. It just clears a price that most people aren't happy with.
No - there are people who are homeless. Not vagrants, but in all kinds of horrible accommodation. Because they can't get a vaguely decent place.
What we need is a situation where there is a non trivial number of properties empty. Because they are the bottom of the market. Currently, *anything* sells or rents. The vacant properties are a tiny percentage, mostly to with rebuild or personal/legal circumstances.
There are lots of empty properties in the UK.
There are not lots of empty properties in London.
But I suspect that is true of essentially every prosperous city in the world. If there are lots of jobs and lots of opportunity (and gazillions of students), then people will have no problems in renting out properties.
That said, I take your point about homelessness. There are - I'm sure - people in London who live in cars and the like because they cannot afford housing.
This graph suggests we have even over the UK as a whole fewer vacant properties than many other countries: (hope I got that embed syntax right: this url anyway: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GJD1mhkW0AA3S5g.jpg )
What we have in Britain is a lot of under occupancy rather than a lot of empty houses. Second homes, but also of people like me and Mrs Foxy having a 4 bed house where the spare room has been used for one weekend since Christmas.
Partly it is lifestyle, partly savings in residential form, but largely that the running costs of a big house in utilities and property tax is quite low, so little incentive to downsize.
Plus, of course, stamp duty discourages downsizing.
Greggs says it is "experiencing issues accepting payments" amid reports shops have been forced to shut across the country.
In a statement, the bakery chain added: "We are working to resolve this as soon as possible."
Users on X around the country reported that their local branches were shut or heavily affected.
"Greggs in Westminster closed. Problem with tills," one person wrote, while another added: "Greggs this morning cash only ! Sitting here with my coffee watching almost everyone have to walk out."
It comes after "technical issues" affected Sainsbury's in store contactless payments and online delivery services at the weekend, causing chaos for shoppers.
Reeves in the papers this morning promising not to repeat the many mistakes of new labour.
She’s a smart operator.
She confirms what so many in Labour have denied for years.
As Cyclefree so often reminds us, you can address a problem until you acknowledge it exists.
If I thought that Reeves was seriously going to address our biggest key weakness, namely our trade deficit, which Brown persuaded himself did not matter in a world of floating currencies, I would be tempted to vote for her myself. It would involve serious pain to do it in terms of reduced consumption and much reduced borrowing so I will believe it when I see it.
Blaming New Labour for importing cheap Chinese consumer products doesn't reveal the source of the problem.
De-industrialisation and the sale of UK assets overseas in the 1980s started the ball rolling. Resolving the industrial manufacturing strife of the 1970s by eradicating industrial manufacturing for domestic consumption was a crap idea in the first place, but it turns out one wholly incompatible with Brexit.
Good luck to Reeves if she ever becomes CoE, but I don't see how this genie is ever returned to the bottle.
Domestic manufacturing damaged itself. Not continuing to subsidise corpses was simply non-insane.
U.K. manufacturing is alive and doing quite well. The meme that it doesn’t exist seems embedded in parts of the Left.
You can not deny a decline. Here's a pretty comprehensive explanation, and it is happy to shower the blame on everyone.
The decline happened because of a blank refusal, especially in heavy industry, to invest in the future and change methods. By the management, government and unions.
Going round some of the old industrial sites - they had machinery from before WWII. In places that closed in the 70s and 80s.
Let's take the motor industry. In the early 1970s British Leyland was the fourth largest automotive group behind General Motors, Ford, and I think Toyota.
British Leyland, Volkswagen and Renault were in trouble. Volkswagen were baled out by the West German Government and a growth plan was set in place including modernising model lines and manufacturing techniques. Renault was nationalised and did likewise. What remains of British Leyland is owned by the Germans, the Indians and the Chinese.
The motor industry is instructive - as BL staggered on, other car companies setup efficient, productive factories in the U.K.
The same people very often. In one factory they miserably produced expensive, not very good cars. In another they produced modern cars to high quality, at a good price.
BL was plagued by strikes. Paradoxically, the strike leader, Red Robbo, was precisely right that the government needed to massively increase investment as BL's overseas competitors were doing but this argument was lost on the Thatcher government of the time.
He didn't appear to understand that confrontation isn't a long term strategy. Mind you, neither dd the managers.
Who was it who said "The union leaders are the most stupid men I have ever met, except for the owners" ?
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
London is building blocks of flats everywhere. Even sandwiched between railway lines and roads....
The strange belief that we don’t build flats…
The reason that Vienna works is that the supply of housing is large enough, compared to the population, that the market is clearing.
The market clears in the UK/London. It just clears a price that most people aren't happy with.
No - there are people who are homeless. Not vagrants, but in all kinds of horrible accommodation. Because they can't get a vaguely decent place.
What we need is a situation where there is a non trivial number of properties empty. Because they are the bottom of the market. Currently, *anything* sells or rents. The vacant properties are a tiny percentage, mostly to with rebuild or personal/legal circumstances.
There are lots of empty properties in the UK.
There are not lots of empty properties in London.
But I suspect that is true of essentially every prosperous city in the world. If there are lots of jobs and lots of opportunity (and gazillions of students), then people will have no problems in renting out properties.
That said, I take your point about homelessness. There are - I'm sure - people in London who live in cars and the like because they cannot afford housing.
This graph suggests we have even over the UK as a whole fewer vacant properties than many other countries: (hope I got that embed syntax right: this url anyway: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GJD1mhkW0AA3S5g.jpg )
What we have in Britain is a lot of under occupancy rather than a lot of empty houses. Second homes, but also of people like me and Mrs Foxy having a 4 bed house where the spare room has been used for one weekend since Christmas.
Partly it is lifestyle, partly savings in residential form, but largely that the running costs of a big house in utilities and property tax is quite low, so little incentive to downsize.
This is kind of the argument that the paper linked to by the Guardian was making -- that we could avoid the need to build more houses and thus keep our total carbon footprint down if we made more efficient use of the houses we had, by reducing that underoccupancy. And I guess if you are approaching the problem from the angle of "minimising climate change is the top priority and we should subordinate people's desires for nice houses to that" then it's a line of argument, but I don't in practice think we're ever going to use the housing stock in that kind of economically ideally efficient way; and it kind of becomes ammunition for the idea that we don't actually have a not-building-enough-houses problem.
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
I lived in an apartment in the US, and vastly preferred it to the house I lived in back in the UK. Someone else looked after the garden (which was actually used by very few residents), there was a gym and a pool etc. So when I came back to the UK I found a similar property and haven't looked back. Cheaper to heat, better facilities, well soundproofed from the neighbours. Poorly insulated buildings from the 1910s (or worse, the 1980s) with a scratchy bit of grass in the back where you hear every fart from next door's dog are not as great as the popular myth of home ownership makes out.
In some ways not as a great as my business partner's pile in the Winchester countryside that his parents bought in the 1950s for pennies. But that's because of the land around it, not the property itself.
The other problem you will find with Flats in the UK is that the service charges can remove all the equity value.
Was looking at some properties last week and there was a difference in sale price of over £300,000 which made zero sense until you saw that one had a service charge £12,000 a year more than the neighbouring flat in a different block..
£12k difference in service charges?
Either the more expensive one was a very fancy hotel-branded building with a private pool and conscierge service, or it was a serviced retirement flat with nursing included.
I'm talking central Manchester and there really wasn't that much obviously different between the blocks except the original builder. I think 1 had a conceirge service but that shouldn't be £1,000 a month when there are 100 flats in the block...
I wonder if a future government will row back voter ID? Probably not an issue anyone will have much enthusiasm for.
Enfranchisement is (obviously, you’d think) a fundamental feature of democracy. Incidentally, it must be a decade or so since Cameron came out with his ‘physically sick’ remarks around prisoners voting. Another area where tbh I accept I am I probably pretty firmly in the minority, but I don’t agree with taking the vote away from convicts.
It’s an interesting philosophical question
If you take the view that government is a construct of the people to deliver community services then the ultimate punishment that the government can impose is to exclude people from the benefits of society either by exile or by imprisonment.
If someone is excluded from society why should they have a say in the formation of the government?
Now clearly this means that anyone with a prison term of less than 5 years should keep their vote without question. But anyone who is expected to be in prison for the entire term of the next parliament? I’m not so sure.
On the other hand, I'd argue that Labour shouldn't abolish voter ID, but instruct the boundary commission to base seats on census data, not on registered voters. That's a technical change that would make a huge difference, because city constituencies are underrated because of so many people moving around, especially the young. It just isn't a priority for most people to register instntly when they move, but at any given moment that means lots of people are underrepresented.
That was a Cameron-era gerrymander so ingenious that it was adopted by the US Republican Party. A rare British export success story!
At some point the housing market gets so messed up, that a govt could promise and crucially deliver on that promise to *lower* rental costs.
A combination of lots of building, switching stamp duty for an annual property taxation, updating council tax - might just do it...
if you switch stamp duty you will be double taxing people who have paid it so that won't happen.
Updating council tax is essential but how do you do that without revealing to people up North that anyone down South won the property lottery between 1995 and now. A band B property down South is often £300,000+ up north you can still find them for £160,000...
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
Reform of the rented sector is possibly part of the solution, but it's silly to suggest that it can deal with the entire problem. Apart form anything else, local authorities simply don't have the resources either to acquire properties, or bring poor ones up to a decent standard.
The suggestion of planning legislation to allow them to acquire land whiteout paying for planning gain (in certain circumstances) is probably a more significant one in terms of their obtaining financing for increased social housing. And would increase housing supply.
Reeves in the papers this morning promising not to repeat the many mistakes of new labour.
She’s a smart operator.
She confirms what so many in Labour have denied for years.
As Cyclefree so often reminds us, you can address a problem until you acknowledge it exists.
If I thought that Reeves was seriously going to address our biggest key weakness, namely our trade deficit, which Brown persuaded himself did not matter in a world of floating currencies, I would be tempted to vote for her myself. It would involve serious pain to do it in terms of reduced consumption and much reduced borrowing so I will believe it when I see it.
Blaming New Labour for importing cheap Chinese consumer products doesn't reveal the source of the problem.
De-industrialisation and the sale of UK assets overseas in the 1980s started the ball rolling. Resolving the industrial manufacturing strife of the 1970s by eradicating industrial manufacturing for domestic consumption was a crap idea in the first place, but it turns out one wholly incompatible with Brexit.
Good luck to Reeves if she ever becomes CoE, but I don't see how this genie is ever returned to the bottle.
Domestic manufacturing damaged itself. Not continuing to subsidise corpses was simply non-insane.
U.K. manufacturing is alive and doing quite well. The meme that it doesn’t exist seems embedded in parts of the Left.
You can not deny a decline. Here's a pretty comprehensive explanation, and it is happy to shower the blame on everyone.
The decline happened because of a blank refusal, especially in heavy industry, to invest in the future and change methods. By the management, government and unions.
Going round some of the old industrial sites - they had machinery from before WWII. In places that closed in the 70s and 80s.
Let's take the motor industry. In the early 1970s British Leyland was the fourth largest automotive group behind General Motors, Ford, and I think Toyota.
British Leyland, Volkswagen and Renault were in trouble. Volkswagen were baled out by the West German Government and a growth plan was set in place including modernising model lines and manufacturing techniques. Renault was nationalised and did likewise. What remains of British Leyland is owned by the Germans, the Indians and the Chinese.
MG Rover was doing fine, especially when partnered with Honda, did well all through the nineties...
No it wasn't. The business was still poorly managed and underinvested, and their products fell behind the rest of the market.
It would have taken a great deal more resources to make it a sustainable business.
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
Reform of the rented sector is possibly part of the solution, but it's silly to suggest that it can deal with the entire problem. Apart form anything else, local authorities simply don't have the resources either to acquire properties, or bring poor ones up to a decent standard.
The suggestion of planning legislation to allow them to acquire land whiteout paying for planning gain (in certain circumstances) is probably a more significant one in terms of their obtaining financing for increased social housing. And would increase housing supply.
In the problem areas, we have people living in every room of properties (unofficial HMO) and tiny amounts of unoccupied housing.
Prices in the rental sector are a factor of this. Not the cause.
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
Reform of the rented sector is possibly part of the solution, but it's silly to suggest that it can deal with the entire problem. Apart form anything else, local authorities simply don't have the resources either to acquire properties, or bring poor ones up to a decent standard.
The suggestion of planning legislation to allow them to acquire land whiteout paying for planning gain (in certain circumstances) is probably a more significant one in terms of their obtaining financing for increased social housing. And would increase housing supply.
In the problem areas, we have people living in every room of properties (unofficial HMO) and tiny amounts of unoccupied housing.
Prices in the rental sector are a factor of this. Not the cause.
I don't disagree. The Guardian article isn't complete rubbish but its central thesis is.
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
I lived in an apartment in the US, and vastly preferred it to the house I lived in back in the UK. Someone else looked after the garden (which was actually used by very few residents), there was a gym and a pool etc. So when I came back to the UK I found a similar property and haven't looked back. Cheaper to heat, better facilities, well soundproofed from the neighbours. Poorly insulated buildings from the 1910s (or worse, the 1980s) with a scratchy bit of grass in the back where you hear every fart from next door's dog are not as great as the popular myth of home ownership makes out.
In some ways not as a great as my business partner's pile in the Winchester countryside that his parents bought in the 1950s for pennies. But that's because of the land around it, not the property itself.
The other problem you will find with Flats in the UK is that the service charges can remove all the equity value.
Was looking at some properties last week and there was a difference in sale price of over £300,000 which made zero sense until you saw that one had a service charge £12,000 a year more than the neighbouring flat in a different block..
£12k difference in service charges?
Either the more expensive one was a very fancy hotel-branded building with a private pool and conscierge service, or it was a serviced retirement flat with nursing included.
I'm talking central Manchester and there really wasn't that much obviously different between the blocks except the original builder. I think 1 had a conceirge service but that shouldn't be £1,000 a month when there are 100 flats in the block...
The simple solution, which works, is that each flat has a share in the company that runs the shared services. So the owners of the flats get to control the service charges.
Mostly this consists of contracting to a managing agent, but the crucial bit is that if the managing agent tries to increase the price for LOLs, he/she gets fired at the next meeting of the home owners.
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
I lived in an apartment in the US, and vastly preferred it to the house I lived in back in the UK. Someone else looked after the garden (which was actually used by very few residents), there was a gym and a pool etc. So when I came back to the UK I found a similar property and haven't looked back. Cheaper to heat, better facilities, well soundproofed from the neighbours. Poorly insulated buildings from the 1910s (or worse, the 1980s) with a scratchy bit of grass in the back where you hear every fart from next door's dog are not as great as the popular myth of home ownership makes out.
In some ways not as a great as my business partner's pile in the Winchester countryside that his parents bought in the 1950s for pennies. But that's because of the land around it, not the property itself.
The other problem you will find with Flats in the UK is that the service charges can remove all the equity value.
Was looking at some properties last week and there was a difference in sale price of over £300,000 which made zero sense until you saw that one had a service charge £12,000 a year more than the neighbouring flat in a different block..
£12k difference in service charges?
Either the more expensive one was a very fancy hotel-branded building with a private pool and conscierge service, or it was a serviced retirement flat with nursing included.
I'm talking central Manchester and there really wasn't that much obviously different between the blocks except the original builder. I think 1 had a conceirge service but that shouldn't be £1,000 a month when there are 100 flats in the block...
The simple solution, which works, is that each flat has a share in the company that runs the shared services. So the owners of the flats get to control the service charges.
Mostly this consists of contracting to a managing agent, but the crucial bit is that if the managing agent tries to increase the price for LOLs, he/she gets fired at the next meeting of the home owners.
That's how it worked in the first block of flats I lived in, and it worked pretty well.
Reeves in the papers this morning promising not to repeat the many mistakes of new labour.
She’s a smart operator.
Sure is. Her speech last night was good. Lots of interesting ideas in there. A future PM IMO.
I am not sure I see ideas. Her critique of where we are is reasonably sound. She is extremely cautious about new spending commitments, and rightly so. She is right in saying additional public expenditure has to come from growth which generates the new taxes.
So we need more growth: how? We need new investment: from where and incentivised how? We need to keep borrowing under control: agreed. How do we achieve these desirable objectives? That is the bit that is missing for me. Given that she will be Chancellor in a few months I would like a clearer idea of what she plans to do.
Although I don't like Mogg at all, I do give him credit for being the only one who was honest about voter ID.
It was very helpful he said it out loud. Far too many on here swallowed the idea that this was about voter fraud.
Amazing when there was so little actual evidence of it.
Since when has evidence played any part in the decision making of Sunak and Braverman?
Yes, it was a classic example of a cure for which there was no known disease.
Actually there was a known disease, let's be honest.
The recommendation for voter ID came from the Electoral Commission itself in 2012 not from any Party and was in response to a spate of voter fraud cases and fear of more in the future.
However, the way it's been implemented, targeting in person voting and not postal, is utterly hamfisted.
It's been done in many places which are definitely democratic, so the idea it was inherently some moral outrage was overblown and distracted from the specifics being badly done and the glaring omissions.
I'd go so far as to say the focus on generic criticism as if requiring ID would always be an outrage helped the government present it as not a big deal and avoid some more significant points.
Not that no-one will have raised specifics, but by and large it was an example of poor tactics in holding them to account by going overbroad in criticism.
I’m trying to think of counties which don’t use ID for voting. Does anyone have a list?
Countries presumably!
Though most countries do have mandatory ID cards, something that we as a country irrationally oppose.
For the 12,556,445th time
Opposing the U.K. ID card was rational. This is because the problem with every proposal and the attempted implementation was the insane database nonsense that came with it.
The attempt to link everything to everything else, with terrible security would have made the NHS big IT projects look good. And provided one stop shopping for data thieves. And been utterly incompatible with GDPR….
I would suggest that an ID project could work. The high level requirements -
1) photo id card, credit card format 2) id code unique per person, with checksums etc 3) privacy secured method of verifying id - free to anyone. So anyone can verify an id shown to them. 4) anyone suggesting any Minority Report shit, get nail gunned. To the ceiling. With rusty nails.
Nearly every country with a requirement for voter ID has national ID cards. Are we uniquely incompetent that we cannot manage a system that nearly all other European countries do?
Often countries with stronger democracies than ours too.
Because, each time it is proposed, a whole raft of crap is attached.
An actual ID card would work. But without the crap, it wouldn't fill enough rice bowls in the system of government or something.
So you are saying that we are uniquely incompetent!
Perhaps we could outsource our national ID card to the French...
The reason is not so much nationality as the time in which we are implementing it. Welcome to the age of Big Process.
When ID was brought in, in most counties, a unique ID on a card was just about all that could be done and that was an effort.
As a senior civil servant (Cabinet Office) told me - "That's too simple for a proper, modern project". A database and ID card for just the purpose of ID would be a small project. It would be implemented by a few hundred people. To run it, you might need more. Mostly for enrolment processing. But you'd design the system to scale easily as it built out.
You can't have a government policy that doesn't require a shiny new Richard Rogers style building? Without its own logo? What's the point, if no-one gets to run an empire?
That emphasises everything that is wrong with Government - for most people a quick win would be brilliant yet our Government (in multiple ways) only wants massive projects...
Oh, it is the same in the private sector. When I worked in private sector IT, the aim was always to spend more on projects and less on maintenance. But the projects never delivered what they were supposed to, resulting in more maintenance.
A lot of NIMBYism is really residents asking who will provide the necessary additional schools, doctors, dentists and, as in this case, railway stations.
Reeves in the papers this morning promising not to repeat the many mistakes of new labour.
She’s a smart operator.
Sure is. Her speech last night was good. Lots of interesting ideas in there. A future PM IMO.
I am not sure I see ideas. Her critique of where we are is reasonably sound. She is extremely cautious about new spending commitments, and rightly so. She is right in saying additional public expenditure has to come from growth which generates the new taxes.
So we need more growth: how? We need new investment: from where and incentivised how? We need to keep borrowing under control: agreed. How do we achieve these desirable objectives? That is the bit that is missing for me. Given that she will be Chancellor in a few months I would like a clearer idea of what she plans to do.
The part towards the end where she talks about skills, labour security and the link with labour mobility is interesting. Not sure it was widely reported in the media.
(As an aside, the Sky coverage last night was bizarre: we had Beth Rigby and A.N. Other journalist telling viewers what Rachel was saying while she was speaking live. Thankful her speech was live on YouTube, so I switched over. The YouTube stream was a bit crappy but better than the Sky News dynamic duo)
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
I lived in an apartment in the US, and vastly preferred it to the house I lived in back in the UK. Someone else looked after the garden (which was actually used by very few residents), there was a gym and a pool etc. So when I came back to the UK I found a similar property and haven't looked back. Cheaper to heat, better facilities, well soundproofed from the neighbours. Poorly insulated buildings from the 1910s (or worse, the 1980s) with a scratchy bit of grass in the back where you hear every fart from next door's dog are not as great as the popular myth of home ownership makes out.
In some ways not as a great as my business partner's pile in the Winchester countryside that his parents bought in the 1950s for pennies. But that's because of the land around it, not the property itself.
The other problem you will find with Flats in the UK is that the service charges can remove all the equity value.
Was looking at some properties last week and there was a difference in sale price of over £300,000 which made zero sense until you saw that one had a service charge £12,000 a year more than the neighbouring flat in a different block..
£12k difference in service charges?
Either the more expensive one was a very fancy hotel-branded building with a private pool and conscierge service, or it was a serviced retirement flat with nursing included.
I'm talking central Manchester and there really wasn't that much obviously different between the blocks except the original builder. I think 1 had a conceirge service but that shouldn't be £1,000 a month when there are 100 flats in the block...
The simple solution, which works, is that each flat has a share in the company that runs the shared services. So the owners of the flats get to control the service charges.
Mostly this consists of contracting to a managing agent, but the crucial bit is that if the managing agent tries to increase the price for LOLs, he/she gets fired at the next meeting of the home owners.
That's how it worked in the first block of flats I lived in, and it worked pretty well.
It is probably better than the alternatives which include factors who have a licence to squeeze but I have come across many title and neighbour issues where the deed of conditions provides a complicated and complete structure for resident associations etc which simply don't exist because no one could be bothered making enforcement of common repairs very difficult and a major issue for those most directly affected.
Since 2010, Britain’s GDP performance has hovered in the bottom third among the 38 OECD countries. To put into perspective, if the UK economy had grown at the OECD average over the past decade, it would be £140bn larger today, equivalent to £5,000 per household, an additional £50 billion in tax revenues.
At some point the housing market gets so messed up, that a govt could promise and crucially deliver on that promise to *lower* rental costs.
A combination of lots of building, switching stamp duty for an annual property taxation, updating council tax - might just do it...
if you switch stamp duty you will be double taxing people who have paid it so that won't happen.
Updating council tax is essential but how do you do that without revealing to people up North that anyone down South won the property lottery between 1995 and now. A band B property down South is often £300,000+ up north you can still find them for £160,000...
The national thresholds based off Q4 2023 in comparison to Q2 1991 are
A £187054 & below B £243171 C £317992 D £411520 E £561163 F £748217 G £1496435 H £1496435+
(Nationwide)
Mine would drop from an E to a D, but the numbers of band As in my area would also increase so whether I'd be better off I'm not sure - northern councils would have to up each band considerably if the present system was kept with updated values (Though I can't see southern councils lowering theirs even though ceteris paribus they should be able to for the same revenue )
A lot of NIMBYism is really residents asking who will provide the necessary additional schools, doctors, dentists and, as in this case, railway stations.
Build the infrastructure first. Layout the roads and the plots. Sell blocks of plots to different developers. That way first to complete wins, not last.
Reeves in the papers this morning promising not to repeat the many mistakes of new labour.
She’s a smart operator.
She confirms what so many in Labour have denied for years.
As Cyclefree so often reminds us, you can address a problem until you acknowledge it exists.
If I thought that Reeves was seriously going to address our biggest key weakness, namely our trade deficit, which Brown persuaded himself did not matter in a world of floating currencies, I would be tempted to vote for her myself. It would involve serious pain to do it in terms of reduced consumption and much reduced borrowing so I will believe it when I see it.
Blaming New Labour for importing cheap Chinese consumer products doesn't reveal the source of the problem.
De-industrialisation and the sale of UK assets overseas in the 1980s started the ball rolling. Resolving the industrial manufacturing strife of the 1970s by eradicating industrial manufacturing for domestic consumption was a crap idea in the first place, but it turns out one wholly incompatible with Brexit.
Good luck to Reeves if she ever becomes CoE, but I don't see how this genie is ever returned to the bottle.
Domestic manufacturing damaged itself. Not continuing to subsidise corpses was simply non-insane.
U.K. manufacturing is alive and doing quite well. The meme that it doesn’t exist seems embedded in parts of the Left.
You can not deny a decline. Here's a pretty comprehensive explanation, and it is happy to shower the blame on everyone.
The decline happened because of a blank refusal, especially in heavy industry, to invest in the future and change methods. By the management, government and unions.
Going round some of the old industrial sites - they had machinery from before WWII. In places that closed in the 70s and 80s.
Let's take the motor industry. In the early 1970s British Leyland was the fourth largest automotive group behind General Motors, Ford, and I think Toyota.
British Leyland, Volkswagen and Renault were in trouble. Volkswagen were baled out by the West German Government and a growth plan was set in place including modernising model lines and manufacturing techniques. Renault was nationalised and did likewise. What remains of British Leyland is owned by the Germans, the Indians and the Chinese.
The motor industry is instructive - as BL staggered on, other car companies setup efficient, productive factories in the U.K.
The same people very often. In one factory they miserably produced expensive, not very good cars. In another they produced modern cars to high quality, at a good price.
BL was plagued by strikes. Paradoxically, the strike leader, Red Robbo, was precisely right that the government needed to massively increase investment as BL's overseas competitors were doing but this argument was lost on the Thatcher government of the time.
He didn't appear to understand that confrontation isn't a long term strategy. Mind you, neither dd the managers.
Who was it who said "The union leaders are the most stupid men I have ever met, except for the owners" ?
I seem to recall this dates back to the turn of the previous century when the coal mines were in private hands. The original said something along the lines of 'I should believe the Union Leaders the most stupid men on earth were it not that I am also acquainted with the mine owners.'
Sounds like it came from a Parliamentarian of the period, but can't remember who.
The one thing that always confuses me with new flats (at least in Edinburgh) is the 1:1 bathroom:bedroom ratio. I'd much rather storage/office than an ensuite, at much lower cost.
Currently live in a studio and, with a clever layout, it's the best flat I've ever lived in. Loads of in built storage and even more downstairs (we all have a secure cycle locker, for example).
Since 2010, Britain’s GDP performance has hovered in the bottom third among the 38 OECD countries. To put into perspective, if the UK economy had grown at the OECD average over the past decade, it would be £140bn larger today, equivalent to £5,000 per household, an additional £50 billion in tax revenues.
Liz Truss was right. We do need economic growth.
Borrowing to cut taxes is an extremely inefficient way of government using its financial capacity to incentivise it, though.
That we need growth is no great insight. And Truss didn't see anything useful beyond that.
Reeves in the papers this morning promising not to repeat the many mistakes of new labour.
She’s a smart operator.
Sure is. Her speech last night was good. Lots of interesting ideas in there. A future PM IMO.
I am not sure I see ideas. Her critique of where we are is reasonably sound. She is extremely cautious about new spending commitments, and rightly so. She is right in saying additional public expenditure has to come from growth which generates the new taxes.
So we need more growth: how? We need new investment: from where and incentivised how? We need to keep borrowing under control: agreed. How do we achieve these desirable objectives? That is the bit that is missing for me. Given that she will be Chancellor in a few months I would like a clearer idea of what she plans to do.
Here's something a Labour government might promise -
For every Wh of mobile energy storage for vehicles (i.e. batteries for electric cars, though technology agnostic), delivered in an actual car, the government will offer a subsidy of £X. £X scaled to the amount of UK content/work.
Repeat for other things you want more of.
So the government has to provide zero cash up front. Given that a factory takes years to build, the subsidy payments would probably start *after* the next election.
On topic - I am pretty certain that turnout will be down at the next GE but by how much? There doesn't seem a huge amount of value there.
I wouldn't blame ID rules for more than a marginal amount of missing voters. That was a method of depressing younger turnout imported wholesale from the US Republicans but it is far less effective here.
Instead it will be the disillusoned folk who turned out for the Brexit sunlit uplands and Levelling Up that will be missing at the polls. Some centrist elements turned off by Corbyn may return to voting but not enough to make up for the abstentions on the right-and-centre. The point has been made about the Con vote dropping by 4 millions in 1997. Something similar seems quite possible at the next GE.
Since 2010, Britain’s GDP performance has hovered in the bottom third among the 38 OECD countries. To put into perspective, if the UK economy had grown at the OECD average over the past decade, it would be £140bn larger today, equivalent to £5,000 per household, an additional £50 billion in tax revenues.
Liz Truss was right. We do need economic growth.
Of course she was right *on that specific point*. Where she was wrong was her diagnosis why we had low growth - workshy Britons - and the solution to get growth - tax cuts for the rich.
Since 2010, Britain’s GDP performance has hovered in the bottom third among the 38 OECD countries. To put into perspective, if the UK economy had grown at the OECD average over the past decade, it would be £140bn larger today, equivalent to £5,000 per household, an additional £50 billion in tax revenues.
Liz Truss was right. We do need economic growth.
Everybody knows we need more growth. The easiest bit is identifying the problem. Fixing it is the tricky bit in NIMBY/BANANA Britain. Almost all MPs are in favour of building things apart from in their constituency.
You can't build a damn thing in this country without a campaign against it.
The one thing that always confuses me with new flats (at least in Edinburgh) is the 1:1 bathroom:bedroom ratio. I'd much rather storage/office than an ensuite, at much lower cost.
Currently live in a studio and, with a clever layout, it's the best flat I've ever lived in. Loads of in built storage and even more downstairs (we all have a secure cycle locker, for example).
It's not just flats - every Persimmon redbrick development has at least 3 bogs.
The one thing that always confuses me with new flats (at least in Edinburgh) is the 1:1 bathroom:bedroom ratio. I'd much rather storage/office than an ensuite, at much lower cost.
Currently live in a studio and, with a clever layout, it's the best flat I've ever lived in. Loads of in built storage and even more downstairs (we all have a secure cycle locker, for example).
If you assume that most people in the house are working/going to school, then at rush hour, each morning...
People move from older properties, where 1 bathroom for 3 bedrooms is not uncommon. So they find the idea of a bathroom each luxurious. No more morning rota, banging on doors to get X from the bathroom etc etc...
The one thing that always confuses me with new flats (at least in Edinburgh) is the 1:1 bathroom:bedroom ratio. I'd much rather storage/office than an ensuite, at much lower cost.
Currently live in a studio and, with a clever layout, it's the best flat I've ever lived in. Loads of in built storage and even more downstairs (we all have a secure cycle locker, for example).
It's not just flats - every Persimmon redbrick development has at least 3 bogs.
Weird. Must be a cultural thing - I'm used to 4 bed houses and flats with just one.
I shall do some research on European/UK flat layouts and report back.
Reeves in the papers this morning promising not to repeat the many mistakes of new labour.
She’s a smart operator.
She confirms what so many in Labour have denied for years.
As Cyclefree so often reminds us, you can address a problem until you acknowledge it exists.
If I thought that Reeves was seriously going to address our biggest key weakness, namely our trade deficit, which Brown persuaded himself did not matter in a world of floating currencies, I would be tempted to vote for her myself. It would involve serious pain to do it in terms of reduced consumption and much reduced borrowing so I will believe it when I see it.
Blaming New Labour for importing cheap Chinese consumer products doesn't reveal the source of the problem.
De-industrialisation and the sale of UK assets overseas in the 1980s started the ball rolling. Resolving the industrial manufacturing strife of the 1970s by eradicating industrial manufacturing for domestic consumption was a crap idea in the first place, but it turns out one wholly incompatible with Brexit.
Good luck to Reeves if she ever becomes CoE, but I don't see how this genie is ever returned to the bottle.
Domestic manufacturing damaged itself. Not continuing to subsidise corpses was simply non-insane.
U.K. manufacturing is alive and doing quite well. The meme that it doesn’t exist seems embedded in parts of the Left.
You can not deny a decline. Here's a pretty comprehensive explanation, and it is happy to shower the blame on everyone.
The decline happened because of a blank refusal, especially in heavy industry, to invest in the future and change methods. By the management, government and unions.
Going round some of the old industrial sites - they had machinery from before WWII. In places that closed in the 70s and 80s.
Let's take the motor industry. In the early 1970s British Leyland was the fourth largest automotive group behind General Motors, Ford, and I think Toyota.
British Leyland, Volkswagen and Renault were in trouble. Volkswagen were baled out by the West German Government and a growth plan was set in place including modernising model lines and manufacturing techniques. Renault was nationalised and did likewise. What remains of British Leyland is owned by the Germans, the Indians and the Chinese.
The motor industry is instructive - as BL staggered on, other car companies setup efficient, productive factories in the U.K.
The same people very often. In one factory they miserably produced expensive, not very good cars. In another they produced modern cars to high quality, at a good price.
BL was plagued by strikes. Paradoxically, the strike leader, Red Robbo, was precisely right that the government needed to massively increase investment as BL's overseas competitors were doing but this argument was lost on the Thatcher government of the time.
He didn't appear to understand that confrontation isn't a long term strategy. Mind you, neither dd the managers.
Who was it who said "The union leaders are the most stupid men I have ever met, except for the owners" ?
I seem to recall this dates back to the turn of the previous century when the coal mines were in private hands. The original said something along the lines of 'I should believe the Union Leaders the most stupid men on earth were it not that I am also acquainted with the mine owners.'
Sounds like it came from a Parliamentarian of the period, but can't remember who.
"It would be possible to say without exaggeration that the miners' leaders were the stupidest men in England if we had not frequent occasion to meet the owners."
The one thing that always confuses me with new flats (at least in Edinburgh) is the 1:1 bathroom:bedroom ratio. I'd much rather storage/office than an ensuite, at much lower cost.
Currently live in a studio and, with a clever layout, it's the best flat I've ever lived in. Loads of in built storage and even more downstairs (we all have a secure cycle locker, for example).
It's not just flats - every Persimmon redbrick development has at least 3 bogs.
Weird. Must be a cultural thing - I'm used to 4 bed houses and flats with just one.
I shall do some research on European/UK flat layouts and report back.
The trend for two en suite bathrooms in new 3 bed and up houses mystifies me. So now you not only choose your favourite/eldest child to get the second biggest bedroom after yours, you also give said favourite an en suite bathroom?
The one thing that always confuses me with new flats (at least in Edinburgh) is the 1:1 bathroom:bedroom ratio. I'd much rather storage/office than an ensuite, at much lower cost.
Currently live in a studio and, with a clever layout, it's the best flat I've ever lived in. Loads of in built storage and even more downstairs (we all have a secure cycle locker, for example).
It's not just flats - every Persimmon redbrick development has at least 3 bogs.
Weird. Must be a cultural thing - I'm used to 4 bed houses and flats with just one.
I shall do some research on European/UK flat layouts and report back.
The trend for two en suite bathrooms in new 3 bed and up houses mystifies me. So now you not only choose your favourite/eldest child to get the second biggest bedroom after yours, you also give said favourite an en suite bathroom?
The one thing that always confuses me with new flats (at least in Edinburgh) is the 1:1 bathroom:bedroom ratio. I'd much rather storage/office than an ensuite, at much lower cost.
Currently live in a studio and, with a clever layout, it's the best flat I've ever lived in. Loads of in built storage and even more downstairs (we all have a secure cycle locker, for example).
It's not just flats - every Persimmon redbrick development has at least 3 bogs.
Weird. Must be a cultural thing - I'm used to 4 bed houses and flats with just one.
I shall do some research on European/UK flat layouts and report back.
And one of us pointed out recently the ground floor one is for the case where someone can't get up the stairs, either permanently or temporarily.
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
I lived in an apartment in the US, and vastly preferred it to the house I lived in back in the UK. Someone else looked after the garden (which was actually used by very few residents), there was a gym and a pool etc. So when I came back to the UK I found a similar property and haven't looked back. Cheaper to heat, better facilities, well soundproofed from the neighbours. Poorly insulated buildings from the 1910s (or worse, the 1980s) with a scratchy bit of grass in the back where you hear every fart from next door's dog are not as great as the popular myth of home ownership makes out.
In some ways not as a great as my business partner's pile in the Winchester countryside that his parents bought in the 1950s for pennies. But that's because of the land around it, not the property itself.
The other problem you will find with Flats in the UK is that the service charges can remove all the equity value.
Was looking at some properties last week and there was a difference in sale price of over £300,000 which made zero sense until you saw that one had a service charge £12,000 a year more than the neighbouring flat in a different block..
(That said, part of the problem is people seeing their primary residence as "an asset" rather than "a place to live" because everyone has been trained to borrow heavily against it for all sorts of consumer spending.)
I can't see how it won't always be both.
It's your place to live and also your primary asset, because it's the most likely way you'll build up significant and accessible equity.
Since 2010, Britain’s GDP performance has hovered in the bottom third among the 38 OECD countries. To put into perspective, if the UK economy had grown at the OECD average over the past decade, it would be £140bn larger today, equivalent to £5,000 per household, an additional £50 billion in tax revenues.
Liz Truss was right. We do need economic growth.
Everybody knows we need more growth. The easiest bit is identifying the problem. Fixing it is the tricky bit in NIMBY/BANANA Britain. Almost all MPs are in favour of building things apart from in their constituency.
You can't build a damn thing in this country without a campaign against it.
We do need more growth, and we need policies that foster economic growth.
But we also have specific challenges that make improving our economic growth challenging.
Firstly, and most importantly, the UK is hooked on consumption. We need, as a nation, to save more. But going from a low-saving, high-consumption country to a more balanced one will inevitably involve a painful rebalancing. (It reminds me of something said during the Global Financial Crisis: we know what we need to do solve the crisis, we just don't know how to do it and get re-elected afterwards.)
Secondly, and linked to this, is the UK's dependence on housing wealth as savings. This has an enormous number of negative consequences: from discouraging saving, to making it politically difficult to implement measures to reduce housing shortages (and therefore prices and stored wealth).
Thirdly, the UK (like pretty much every developed country) has an ageing population, and low birth rates. This means that - absent significant immigration (which has its own problems) - the dependency ratio will continue to rise, and that inevitably means that the government will be taking more money from workers to give (and to support) retirees.
To get Britain fit and growing needs a government that is honest with people about the challenge ahead, and is willing to put the country through a painful rebalancing. That is not an election winning manifesto.
A lot of NIMBYism is really residents asking who will provide the necessary additional schools, doctors, dentists and, as in this case, railway stations.
Developers pay up front for the capital cost of realising their land banking investment - fine.
Existing inhabitants pay up directly or indirectly (including externalities such as backed-up sewage, reduced water pressure, overcrowding) - not fine.
The one thing that always confuses me with new flats (at least in Edinburgh) is the 1:1 bathroom:bedroom ratio. I'd much rather storage/office than an ensuite, at much lower cost.
Currently live in a studio and, with a clever layout, it's the best flat I've ever lived in. Loads of in built storage and even more downstairs (we all have a secure cycle locker, for example).
It's not just flats - every Persimmon redbrick development has at least 3 bogs.
Weird. Must be a cultural thing - I'm used to 4 bed houses and flats with just one.
I shall do some research on European/UK flat layouts and report back.
The trend for two en suite bathrooms in new 3 bed and up houses mystifies me. So now you not only choose your favourite/eldest child to get the second biggest bedroom after yours, you also give said favourite an en suite bathroom?
And what child has not grown up yearning for a bed next to the bog?
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
I lived in an apartment in the US, and vastly preferred it to the house I lived in back in the UK. Someone else looked after the garden (which was actually used by very few residents), there was a gym and a pool etc. So when I came back to the UK I found a similar property and haven't looked back. Cheaper to heat, better facilities, well soundproofed from the neighbours. Poorly insulated buildings from the 1910s (or worse, the 1980s) with a scratchy bit of grass in the back where you hear every fart from next door's dog are not as great as the popular myth of home ownership makes out.
In some ways not as a great as my business partner's pile in the Winchester countryside that his parents bought in the 1950s for pennies. But that's because of the land around it, not the property itself.
The other problem you will find with Flats in the UK is that the service charges can remove all the equity value.
Was looking at some properties last week and there was a difference in sale price of over £300,000 which made zero sense until you saw that one had a service charge £12,000 a year more than the neighbouring flat in a different block..
(That said, part of the problem is people seeing their primary residence as "an asset" rather than "a place to live" because everyone has been trained to borrow heavily against it for all sorts of consumer spending.)
I can't see how it won't always be both.
It's your place to live and also your primary asset, because it's the most likely way you'll build up significant and accessible equity.
The problem is, though, that that means that the quickest way to make people feel richer is for home prices to rise relative to incomes. That will make lots of older voters happy and rich, while screwing those who are younger.
The one thing that always confuses me with new flats (at least in Edinburgh) is the 1:1 bathroom:bedroom ratio. I'd much rather storage/office than an ensuite, at much lower cost.
Currently live in a studio and, with a clever layout, it's the best flat I've ever lived in. Loads of in built storage and even more downstairs (we all have a secure cycle locker, for example).
It's not just flats - every Persimmon redbrick development has at least 3 bogs.
Weird. Must be a cultural thing - I'm used to 4 bed houses and flats with just one.
I shall do some research on European/UK flat layouts and report back.
The trend for two en suite bathrooms in new 3 bed and up houses mystifies me. So now you not only choose your favourite/eldest child to get the second biggest bedroom after yours, you also give said favourite an en suite bathroom?
Teenagers and bathrooms and mornings.
There are en-suites and en-suites. I remember house hunting and asking the owner where the en-suite to the master (a very ordinary sized) bedroom was. She opened the louvre door to what I assumed to be a cupboard to reveal a toilet of the size I last saw in primary school and a similarly tiny wash basin. She wasn't pleased when I laughed but you might as well have stuck a bucket in the wardrobe.
Reeves in the papers this morning promising not to repeat the many mistakes of new labour.
She’s a smart operator.
She confirms what so many in Labour have denied for years.
As Cyclefree so often reminds us, you can address a problem until you acknowledge it exists.
If I thought that Reeves was seriously going to address our biggest key weakness, namely our trade deficit, which Brown persuaded himself did not matter in a world of floating currencies, I would be tempted to vote for her myself. It would involve serious pain to do it in terms of reduced consumption and much reduced borrowing so I will believe it when I see it.
Blaming New Labour for importing cheap Chinese consumer products doesn't reveal the source of the problem.
De-industrialisation and the sale of UK assets overseas in the 1980s started the ball rolling. Resolving the industrial manufacturing strife of the 1970s by eradicating industrial manufacturing for domestic consumption was a crap idea in the first place, but it turns out one wholly incompatible with Brexit.
Good luck to Reeves if she ever becomes CoE, but I don't see how this genie is ever returned to the bottle.
Domestic manufacturing damaged itself. Not continuing to subsidise corpses was simply non-insane.
U.K. manufacturing is alive and doing quite well. The meme that it doesn’t exist seems embedded in parts of the Left.
You can not deny a decline. Here's a pretty comprehensive explanation, and it is happy to shower the blame on everyone.
The decline happened because of a blank refusal, especially in heavy industry, to invest in the future and change methods. By the management, government and unions.
Going round some of the old industrial sites - they had machinery from before WWII. In places that closed in the 70s and 80s.
Let's take the motor industry. In the early 1970s British Leyland was the fourth largest automotive group behind General Motors, Ford, and I think Toyota.
British Leyland, Volkswagen and Renault were in trouble. Volkswagen were baled out by the West German Government and a growth plan was set in place including modernising model lines and manufacturing techniques. Renault was nationalised and did likewise. What remains of British Leyland is owned by the Germans, the Indians and the Chinese.
The motor industry is instructive - as BL staggered on, other car companies setup efficient, productive factories in the U.K.
The same people very often. In one factory they miserably produced expensive, not very good cars. In another they produced modern cars to high quality, at a good price.
BL was plagued by strikes. Paradoxically, the strike leader, Red Robbo, was precisely right that the government needed to massively increase investment as BL's overseas competitors were doing but this argument was lost on the Thatcher government of the time.
He didn't appear to understand that confrontation isn't a long term strategy. Mind you, neither dd the managers.
Who was it who said "The union leaders are the most stupid men I have ever met, except for the owners" ?
I seem to recall this dates back to the turn of the previous century when the coal mines were in private hands. The original said something along the lines of 'I should believe the Union Leaders the most stupid men on earth were it not that I am also acquainted with the mine owners.'
Sounds like it came from a Parliamentarian of the period, but can't remember who.
"It would be possible to say without exaggeration that the miners' leaders were the stupidest men in England if we had not frequent occasion to meet the owners."
Orwell recounts that while European pits were installing showers as a matter of course in the 20s & 30s, British mine owners left it to miners to pay for it themselves by public subscription, and that during WWII patriotic owners closed down the more profitable seams with the quality coal for the duration.
To get Britain fit and growing needs a government that is honest with people about the challenge ahead, and is willing to put the country through a painful rebalancing. That is not an election winning manifesto.
Which is why Labour will very likely win the general election, but also very likely fail to effect the change that they say is required.
The one thing that always confuses me with new flats (at least in Edinburgh) is the 1:1 bathroom:bedroom ratio. I'd much rather storage/office than an ensuite, at much lower cost.
Currently live in a studio and, with a clever layout, it's the best flat I've ever lived in. Loads of in built storage and even more downstairs (we all have a secure cycle locker, for example).
It's not just flats - every Persimmon redbrick development has at least 3 bogs.
Weird. Must be a cultural thing - I'm used to 4 bed houses and flats with just one.
I shall do some research on European/UK flat layouts and report back.
The trend for two en suite bathrooms in new 3 bed and up houses mystifies me. So now you not only choose your favourite/eldest child to get the second biggest bedroom after yours, you also give said favourite an en suite bathroom?
Maybe it's not for families?
Could be that the second ensuite is intended to be a guest/airbnb room. Or it could be to satisfy planning rules. In Ireland newbuilds now have to have a downstairs bedroom and bathroom to accommodate future infirmity. So a downstairs ensuite as well as an ensuite in the master bedroom upstairs, sort of makes sense. Though I generally don't like ensuites at all.
Since 2010, Britain’s GDP performance has hovered in the bottom third among the 38 OECD countries. To put into perspective, if the UK economy had grown at the OECD average over the past decade, it would be £140bn larger today, equivalent to £5,000 per household, an additional £50 billion in tax revenues.
Liz Truss was right. We do need economic growth.
Everybody knows we need more growth. The easiest bit is identifying the problem. Fixing it is the tricky bit in NIMBY/BANANA Britain. Almost all MPs are in favour of building things apart from in their constituency.
You can't build a damn thing in this country without a campaign against it.
Yes - this is a key issue which Labour has to tackle. Virtually every planning decision is opposed by a vocal (but usually small) lobby which bends the ears of MPs and Councillors and persuades them to oppose development. But the impact of all this on election outcomes is pretty much non-existent - I cannot recall ever hearing that the loss of even a council ward (let alone control of a council or a parliamentary seat) was down to voter opposition to a planning decision. So, to coin a phrase, Labour has nothing to fear but fear itself when it comes to planning reform.
They should set out minimum standards for residential developments (habitable rooms per acre, room sizes etc) and then change the law so that any residential development in an urban area which meets the criteria will automatically be granted permission. They should also stop the absurd proliferation of conservation areas - buildings which are genuinely of historical/other interest should be listed and maybe the listing regime could be expanded to include urban features which might be considered worthy of preservation but we should not be protecting whole swathes of undistinguished, inefficient pre-WW2 property.
Prediction: RFK Jr will sink without a trace come November (1-2% of vote compared to average of around 12% in current 5-way polling). He's probably artificially high in the polls because people see 'Jr' and think he must be the candidate who is below retirement age.
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
I lived in an apartment in the US, and vastly preferred it to the house I lived in back in the UK. Someone else looked after the garden (which was actually used by very few residents), there was a gym and a pool etc. So when I came back to the UK I found a similar property and haven't looked back. Cheaper to heat, better facilities, well soundproofed from the neighbours. Poorly insulated buildings from the 1910s (or worse, the 1980s) with a scratchy bit of grass in the back where you hear every fart from next door's dog are not as great as the popular myth of home ownership makes out.
In some ways not as a great as my business partner's pile in the Winchester countryside that his parents bought in the 1950s for pennies. But that's because of the land around it, not the property itself.
The other problem you will find with Flats in the UK is that the service charges can remove all the equity value.
Was looking at some properties last week and there was a difference in sale price of over £300,000 which made zero sense until you saw that one had a service charge £12,000 a year more than the neighbouring flat in a different block..
(That said, part of the problem is people seeing their primary residence as "an asset" rather than "a place to live" because everyone has been trained to borrow heavily against it for all sorts of consumer spending.)
I can't see how it won't always be both.
It's your place to live and also your primary asset, because it's the most likely way you'll build up significant and accessible equity.
The problem is, though, that that means that the quickest way to make people feel richer is for home prices to rise relative to incomes. That will make lots of older voters happy and rich, while screwing those who are younger.
I'm not arguing for that. I'm simply observing that as you pay down a mortgage, and inflation erodes the real cost of the debt, any homeowner will build up equity in their property.
Now, obviously that shouldn't really be used to fund a holiday or a new car, unless you're selling up or downsizing, because you're not really investing. But it might be to help start a new business, or fund further education that's crucial to your future, or even an extension to your property, as those are all economic investments.
The one thing that always confuses me with new flats (at least in Edinburgh) is the 1:1 bathroom:bedroom ratio. I'd much rather storage/office than an ensuite, at much lower cost.
Currently live in a studio and, with a clever layout, it's the best flat I've ever lived in. Loads of in built storage and even more downstairs (we all have a secure cycle locker, for example).
It's not just flats - every Persimmon redbrick development has at least 3 bogs.
Weird. Must be a cultural thing - I'm used to 4 bed houses and flats with just one.
I shall do some research on European/UK flat layouts and report back.
The trend for two en suite bathrooms in new 3 bed and up houses mystifies me. So now you not only choose your favourite/eldest child to get the second biggest bedroom after yours, you also give said favourite an en suite bathroom?
Teenagers and bathrooms and mornings.
There are en-suites and en-suites. I remember house hunting and asking the owner where the en-suite to the master (a very ordinary sized) bedroom was. She opened the louvre door to what I assumed to be a cupboard to reveal a toilet of the size I last saw in primary school and a similarly tiny wash basin. She wasn't pleased when I laughed but you might as well have stuck a bucket in the wardrobe.
Back in my drinking days, with some of the blokes I knew you'd have been wise to stick a bucket in the wardrobe as a precaution.
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
I lived in an apartment in the US, and vastly preferred it to the house I lived in back in the UK. Someone else looked after the garden (which was actually used by very few residents), there was a gym and a pool etc. So when I came back to the UK I found a similar property and haven't looked back. Cheaper to heat, better facilities, well soundproofed from the neighbours. Poorly insulated buildings from the 1910s (or worse, the 1980s) with a scratchy bit of grass in the back where you hear every fart from next door's dog are not as great as the popular myth of home ownership makes out.
In some ways not as a great as my business partner's pile in the Winchester countryside that his parents bought in the 1950s for pennies. But that's because of the land around it, not the property itself.
The other problem you will find with Flats in the UK is that the service charges can remove all the equity value.
Was looking at some properties last week and there was a difference in sale price of over £300,000 which made zero sense until you saw that one had a service charge £12,000 a year more than the neighbouring flat in a different block..
(That said, part of the problem is people seeing their primary residence as "an asset" rather than "a place to live" because everyone has been trained to borrow heavily against it for all sorts of consumer spending.)
I can't see how it won't always be both.
It's your place to live and also your primary asset, because it's the most likely way you'll build up significant and accessible equity.
The problem is, though, that that means that the quickest way to make people feel richer is for home prices to rise relative to incomes. That will make lots of older voters happy and rich, while screwing those who are younger.
Yes but an expensive house might make oldies feel rich but they can't spend it. (OK, a few will act on the equity release adverts.) The intergenerational trickle-down aspect is not very useful either, if you die in your 80s and leave money to your children who by now are in their 60s. High house prices are a blight on the economy.
Yes but an expensive house might make oldies feel rich but they can't spend it. (OK, a few will act on the equity release adverts.) The intergenerational trickle-down aspect is not very useful either, if you die in your 80s and leave money to your children who by now are in their 60s. High house prices are a blight on the economy.
Houses are the only good or service where the media present a price rise as good news. I can't think of another thing where it becoming more expensive to buy is considered good news, when it is like any other price rise bad news.
Reeves in the papers this morning promising not to repeat the many mistakes of new labour.
She’s a smart operator.
Sure is. Her speech last night was good. Lots of interesting ideas in there. A future PM IMO.
I am not sure I see ideas. Her critique of where we are is reasonably sound. She is extremely cautious about new spending commitments, and rightly so. She is right in saying additional public expenditure has to come from growth which generates the new taxes.
So we need more growth: how? We need new investment: from where and incentivised how? We need to keep borrowing under control: agreed. How do we achieve these desirable objectives? That is the bit that is missing for me. Given that she will be Chancellor in a few months I would like a clearer idea of what she plans to do.
The part towards the end where she talks about skills, labour security and the link with labour mobility is interesting. Not sure it was widely reported in the media.
(As an aside, the Sky coverage last night was bizarre: we had Beth Rigby and A.N. Other journalist telling viewers what Rachel was saying while she was speaking live. Thankful her speech was live on YouTube, so I switched over. The YouTube stream was a bit crappy but better than the Sky News dynamic duo)
What I saw was a list of new institutions which are supposed to come up with the ideas. Her employment changes seemed to be to remove the 1 year qualifying period for UD claims and additional rights for those on zero hour contracts. I certainly agree with the latter but the risk is that churn is increased even more to prevent the acquisition of those right.
She then got distracted into both green objectives and perceived discrimination against female entrepreneurs. No doubt both worthy in themselves but somewhat unlikely to be game changers on investment or productivity or growth. She also seemed to note but then rather reject the evidence of additional growth being generated by clusters on the basis that all parts of the country must share in this growth.
I don't have a problem with a more dynamic state looking to facilitate growth. I would like to see specific proposals about how this is to be achieved. The article by Hamish McRae downthread showed how reversing Brown's pension grab might help increase investment in UK business. The extent to which are own savings are not being directed to our own businesses is a disgrace and a punch to our own gut.
I have suggested that both capital investment and training investment should be further incentivised by the tax system with more than 100% write offs.
I don't see anything in her proposals that contains this sort of specific. She may be scared of Hunt pinching them again.
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
I lived in an apartment in the US, and vastly preferred it to the house I lived in back in the UK. Someone else looked after the garden (which was actually used by very few residents), there was a gym and a pool etc. So when I came back to the UK I found a similar property and haven't looked back. Cheaper to heat, better facilities, well soundproofed from the neighbours. Poorly insulated buildings from the 1910s (or worse, the 1980s) with a scratchy bit of grass in the back where you hear every fart from next door's dog are not as great as the popular myth of home ownership makes out.
In some ways not as a great as my business partner's pile in the Winchester countryside that his parents bought in the 1950s for pennies. But that's because of the land around it, not the property itself.
The other problem you will find with Flats in the UK is that the service charges can remove all the equity value.
Was looking at some properties last week and there was a difference in sale price of over £300,000 which made zero sense until you saw that one had a service charge £12,000 a year more than the neighbouring flat in a different block..
(That said, part of the problem is people seeing their primary residence as "an asset" rather than "a place to live" because everyone has been trained to borrow heavily against it for all sorts of consumer spending.)
I can't see how it won't always be both.
It's your place to live and also your primary asset, because it's the most likely way you'll build up significant and accessible equity.
The problem is, though, that that means that the quickest way to make people feel richer is for home prices to rise relative to incomes. That will make lots of older voters happy and rich, while screwing those who are younger.
Yes but an expensive house might make oldies feel rich but they can't spend it. (OK, a few will act on the equity release adverts.) The intergenerational trickle-down aspect is not very useful either, if you die in your 80s and leave money to your children who by now are in their 60s. High house prices are a blight on the economy.
Perhaps all this focus on new homes in general is wrong. There should be a laser focus on retirement apartments/high quality supported accommodation, and a cultural shift to moving out of your family home when you retire.
Would make the provision of social care much more efficient too. Two birds.
The one thing that always confuses me with new flats (at least in Edinburgh) is the 1:1 bathroom:bedroom ratio. I'd much rather storage/office than an ensuite, at much lower cost.
Currently live in a studio and, with a clever layout, it's the best flat I've ever lived in. Loads of in built storage and even more downstairs (we all have a secure cycle locker, for example).
It's not just flats - every Persimmon redbrick development has at least 3 bogs.
Weird. Must be a cultural thing - I'm used to 4 bed houses and flats with just one.
I shall do some research on European/UK flat layouts and report back.
The trend for two en suite bathrooms in new 3 bed and up houses mystifies me. So now you not only choose your favourite/eldest child to get the second biggest bedroom after yours, you also give said favourite an en suite bathroom?
Maybe it's not for families?
Could be that the second ensuite is intended to be a guest/airbnb room. Or it could be to satisfy planning rules. In Ireland newbuilds now have to have a downstairs bedroom and bathroom to accommodate future infirmity. So a downstairs ensuite as well as an ensuite in the master bedroom upstairs, sort of makes sense. Though I generally don't like ensuites at all.
The trend is to reflect a lot of people will have a tenant to help pay the bill. That ensuite is probably worth £50-100 on the rent..
O/T With apologies, I am going to post this again because the more I think about it the more intriguing it seems.
A different take on the housing crisis: "Mass-scale housebuilding isn’t necessary – there is already enough housing stock. But we need to learn the wisdom of the last century when it comes to landlordism"
And:
"In terms of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, the UK has roughly the average number of homes per capita: 468 per 1,000 people in 2019. We have a comparable amount of housing to the Netherlands, Hungary or Canada, and our housing stock far exceeds many more affordable places such as Poland, Slovenia and the Czech Republic."
Maybe we don't need to increase housebuilding massively. If this is true it's a much easier problem for Labour to solve - still tricky, but not as hard as building over the greenbelt. I hope Angela Rayner is reading this (the Guardian article, not my post).
I wasn't very convinced by that article personally. A debunking by somebody on twitter is in this thread: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1770175108939681937.html (in particular the graph referenced there about changes to planning policy in Croydon and effects on house prrices is new to me).
The study linked to by the Guardian article is less tendentious and more interesting but also ultimately unconvincing to me. I remain of the opinion that we need to build more and make it easier to build more.
That's very interesting, and I sympathise with the critic. The original article cites Vienna as a good example, and I agree that Vienna, whose housing policies I know quite well, is very pro-tenant: among other things, landlords need to get official permission to raise rents more than inflation. But the really striking thing about Vienna is the vastly greater supply of rental accommodation in high/medium-rise blocks (cf. the response's Croydon graph). Our focus on individual houses and gardens is IMO the core issue.
I lived in an apartment in the US, and vastly preferred it to the house I lived in back in the UK. Someone else looked after the garden (which was actually used by very few residents), there was a gym and a pool etc. So when I came back to the UK I found a similar property and haven't looked back. Cheaper to heat, better facilities, well soundproofed from the neighbours. Poorly insulated buildings from the 1910s (or worse, the 1980s) with a scratchy bit of grass in the back where you hear every fart from next door's dog are not as great as the popular myth of home ownership makes out.
In some ways not as a great as my business partner's pile in the Winchester countryside that his parents bought in the 1950s for pennies. But that's because of the land around it, not the property itself.
The other problem you will find with Flats in the UK is that the service charges can remove all the equity value.
Was looking at some properties last week and there was a difference in sale price of over £300,000 which made zero sense until you saw that one had a service charge £12,000 a year more than the neighbouring flat in a different block..
(That said, part of the problem is people seeing their primary residence as "an asset" rather than "a place to live" because everyone has been trained to borrow heavily against it for all sorts of consumer spending.)
I can't see how it won't always be both.
It's your place to live and also your primary asset, because it's the most likely way you'll build up significant and accessible equity.
The problem is, though, that that means that the quickest way to make people feel richer is for home prices to rise relative to incomes. That will make lots of older voters happy and rich, while screwing those who are younger.
Yes but an expensive house might make oldies feel rich but they can't spend it. (OK, a few will act on the equity release adverts.) The intergenerational trickle-down aspect is not very useful either, if you die in your 80s and leave money to your children who by now are in their 60s. High house prices are a blight on the economy.
Perhaps all this focus on new homes in general is wrong. There should be a laser focus on retirement apartments/high quality supported accommodation, and a cultural shift to moving out of your family home when you retire.
Would make the provision of social care much more efficient too. Two birds.
Although I don't like Mogg at all, I do give him credit for being the only one who was honest about voter ID.
It was very helpful he said it out loud. Far too many on here swallowed the idea that this was about voter fraud.
Amazing when there was so little actual evidence of it.
Since when has evidence played any part in the decision making of Sunak and Braverman?
Yes, it was a classic example of a cure for which there was no known disease.
Actually there was a known disease, let's be honest.
The recommendation for voter ID came from the Electoral Commission itself in 2012 not from any Party and was in response to a spate of voter fraud cases and fear of more in the future.
However, the way it's been implemented, targeting in person voting and not postal, is utterly hamfisted.
It's been done in many places which are definitely democratic, so the idea it was inherently some moral outrage was overblown and distracted from the specifics being badly done and the glaring omissions.
I'd go so far as to say the focus on generic criticism as if requiring ID would always be an outrage helped the government present it as not a big deal and avoid some more significant points.
Not that no-one will have raised specifics, but by and large it was an example of poor tactics in holding them to account by going overbroad in criticism.
I’m trying to think of counties which don’t use ID for voting. Does anyone have a list?
Countries presumably!
Though most countries do have mandatory ID cards, something that we as a country irrationally oppose.
For the 12,556,445th time
Opposing the U.K. ID card was rational. This is because the problem with every proposal and the attempted implementation was the insane database nonsense that came with it.
The attempt to link everything to everything else, with terrible security would have made the NHS big IT projects look good. And provided one stop shopping for data thieves. And been utterly incompatible with GDPR….
I would suggest that an ID project could work. The high level requirements -
1) photo id card, credit card format 2) id code unique per person, with checksums etc 3) privacy secured method of verifying id - free to anyone. So anyone can verify an id shown to them. 4) anyone suggesting any Minority Report shit, get nail gunned. To the ceiling. With rusty nails.
Good thought. But how can this work in a culture in which process trumps things working properly and trust in civil competence is low. Perhaps this is an idea to implement once some state management basics work well, like answering the phone, replying to emails, being accessible to the general public, the NHS runs coordinated systems that heal people, and IT setups work well enough that you can buy a sausage roll in Greggs without system collapse.
The one thing that always confuses me with new flats (at least in Edinburgh) is the 1:1 bathroom:bedroom ratio. I'd much rather storage/office than an ensuite, at much lower cost.
Currently live in a studio and, with a clever layout, it's the best flat I've ever lived in. Loads of in built storage and even more downstairs (we all have a secure cycle locker, for example).
It's not just flats - every Persimmon redbrick development has at least 3 bogs.
Weird. Must be a cultural thing - I'm used to 4 bed houses and flats with just one.
I shall do some research on European/UK flat layouts and report back.
The trend for two en suite bathrooms in new 3 bed and up houses mystifies me. So now you not only choose your favourite/eldest child to get the second biggest bedroom after yours, you also give said favourite an en suite bathroom?
Maybe it's not for families?
Could be that the second ensuite is intended to be a guest/airbnb room. Or it could be to satisfy planning rules. In Ireland newbuilds now have to have a downstairs bedroom and bathroom to accommodate future infirmity. So a downstairs ensuite as well as an ensuite in the master bedroom upstairs, sort of makes sense. Though I generally don't like ensuites at all.
The trend is to reflect a lot of people will have a tenant to help pay the bill. That ensuite is probably worth £50-100 on the rent..
The trend for x-1 ensuites, where x is the number of bedrooms is based on the fact that with the main bathroom, that's one per bedroom.
The usual distribution of who-gets-what is that the person who wants the bathroom with a bath gets the one without the ensuite.
More recently, and in the more crowded areas, the impromptu HMOs has meant that ensuites end up as one bathroom per tenant.
Although I don't like Mogg at all, I do give him credit for being the only one who was honest about voter ID.
It was very helpful he said it out loud. Far too many on here swallowed the idea that this was about voter fraud.
Amazing when there was so little actual evidence of it.
Since when has evidence played any part in the decision making of Sunak and Braverman?
Yes, it was a classic example of a cure for which there was no known disease.
Actually there was a known disease, let's be honest.
The recommendation for voter ID came from the Electoral Commission itself in 2012 not from any Party and was in response to a spate of voter fraud cases and fear of more in the future.
However, the way it's been implemented, targeting in person voting and not postal, is utterly hamfisted.
It's been done in many places which are definitely democratic, so the idea it was inherently some moral outrage was overblown and distracted from the specifics being badly done and the glaring omissions.
I'd go so far as to say the focus on generic criticism as if requiring ID would always be an outrage helped the government present it as not a big deal and avoid some more significant points.
Not that no-one will have raised specifics, but by and large it was an example of poor tactics in holding them to account by going overbroad in criticism.
I’m trying to think of counties which don’t use ID for voting. Does anyone have a list?
Countries presumably!
Though most countries do have mandatory ID cards, something that we as a country irrationally oppose.
For the 12,556,445th time
Opposing the U.K. ID card was rational. This is because the problem with every proposal and the attempted implementation was the insane database nonsense that came with it.
The attempt to link everything to everything else, with terrible security would have made the NHS big IT projects look good. And provided one stop shopping for data thieves. And been utterly incompatible with GDPR….
I would suggest that an ID project could work. The high level requirements -
1) photo id card, credit card format 2) id code unique per person, with checksums etc 3) privacy secured method of verifying id - free to anyone. So anyone can verify an id shown to them. 4) anyone suggesting any Minority Report shit, get nail gunned. To the ceiling. With rusty nails.
Good thought. But how can this work in a culture in which process trumps things working properly and trust in civil competence is low. Perhaps this is an idea to implement once some state management basics work well, like answering the phone, replying to emails, being accessible to the general public, the NHS runs coordinated systems that heal people, and IT setups work well enough that you can buy a sausage roll in Greggs without system collapse.
So I should pencil in ID cards for the second Thursday after Never, then?
I must get started on my plans for reforming the country.
A lot of NIMBYism is really residents asking who will provide the necessary additional schools, doctors, dentists and, as in this case, railway stations.
Build the infrastructure first. Layout the roads and the plots. Sell blocks of plots to different developers. That way first to complete wins, not last.
No. Use the @BartholomewRoberts approach. Lay down some broad codes, let the farmers sell the land and get rich, then let the developers develop to those codes and they get rich.
Prediction: RFK Jr will sink without a trace come November (1-2% of vote compared to average of around 12% in current 5-way polling). He's probably artificially high in the polls because people see 'Jr' and think he must be the candidate who is below retirement age.
Comments
The business died under which govt ?
There's no shortage of 'investment' which has had a negative rate of return.
Especially when governments are involved.
And it also depends on whether alternative investment options are available.
Property investment has likely shown a higher rate of return than business investment in recent decades.
Its also more likely to be bailed out by the government if things go wrong.
In some ways not as a great as my business partner's pile in the Winchester countryside that his parents bought in the 1950s for pennies. But that's because of the land around it, not the property itself.
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2024/02/04/the-state-of-process-the-process-state/
https://www1.politicalbetting.com/index.php/archives/2024/03/08/we-need-more-bureaucracy/
If we invest to fix the roof then we get more economic output and the expectation of more tax revenues. If we don't then things continue to crumble and we can expect a future of economic decline and with it tax revenues.
We can't afford not to invest. Why can Tories not see this?
(hope I got that embed syntax right: this url anyway: https://pbs.twimg.com/media/GJD1mhkW0AA3S5g.jpg )
The reason that such articles are written is the combination of the belief that (1) Something must be done and (2) We mustn't build because Greenery.
Hence the comedy last year over "the number of rooms" in properties. Hurrah - no need for more properties, zillions of rooms!
Due to the fashion, in rebuilding and new construction, for ensuite bathrooms and utility rooms, the number of "rooms" has rocketed.
A neighbour has just rebuilt a 3 bedroom house in this fashion. It previously had 1 bathroom and 1 toilet. Downstairs, open plan front to back.
He has restored a private living room, added a utility room, and upstairs, now has 4 bedrooms, 3 with ensuite. Some of the bedrooms are ridiculously tiny...
So the house went from having 8 rooms, to having 13. While having 1 extra bedroom.
At the same time, remember the US also had a massive housing boom, despite lots of empty properties.
Was looking at some properties last week and there was a difference in sale price of over £300,000 which made zero sense until you saw that one had a service charge £12,000 a year more than the neighbouring flat in a different block..
Additionally impacting pensioners in particular (not exclusively) there is a starting rate of savings if other income < £17,570 then you have a £5k tax free savings allowance. For them if they have £100k of savings outside an ISA at 5% then that £5k it is still tax free.
So yes a clear majority.
It will however be a great loss to future historians...
https://www.centreforcities.org/reader/escape-to-the-country/so-what-happened-in-london/
In general London is a net migrator to the rest of the country (to mainly South East and Eastern regions). London's population has grown because of international migration.
Net migration to London from the rest of the UK is only positive for those aged 20-27.
Inner London was a net absorber of people; net out-migration from London was entirely a result of a net loss from Outer London.
The breaking of this pattern was the most exceptional thing that happened during 2020-21. While 81 per cent of net out-migration was still from Outer London, Inner London also became a net loser of population to outside of London. Inner London saw little change in its post-university age influx, but older ages left at higher than usual rates, contributing to a net loss of 36,700 people to outside London. This was mostly driven by a spike in the number of 30–45-year-olds leaving – 25,700 (68 per cent) more than in a normal year.
Either the more expensive one was a very fancy hotel-branded building with a private pool and conscierge service, or it was a serviced retirement flat with nursing included.
Partly it is lifestyle, partly savings in residential form, but largely that the running costs of a big house in utilities and property tax is quite low, so little incentive to downsize.
The other underrepresented city people are recently-naturalised immigrants. Yes, they should say hooray, at last I can vote for Joe Bloggs for Borough Councillor, I must register tomorrow. But often they don't. (I do agree that foreign national shouldn't get the vote in national elections deciding defence policy, though I don't see why not in local ones dealing with roads and schools and rubbish collection, as the Irish and EU citizens still do.)
If you tax housing a bit more, and that also puts more household savings into more productive private investments, then an increase in tax could have a double benefit in paying for public investment and in optimising private investment.
Who was it who said "The union leaders are the most stupid men I have ever met, except for the owners" ?
A combination of lots of building, switching stamp duty for an annual property taxation, updating council tax - might just do it...
Updating council tax is essential but how do you do that without revealing to people up North that anyone down South won the property lottery between 1995 and now. A band B property down South is often £300,000+ up north you can still find them for £160,000...
Apart form anything else, local authorities simply don't have the resources either to acquire properties, or bring poor ones up to a decent standard.
The suggestion of planning legislation to allow them to acquire land whiteout paying for planning gain (in certain circumstances) is probably a more significant one in terms of their obtaining financing for increased social housing.
And would increase housing supply.
This afternoon we'll be discussing general election turnout
The business was still poorly managed and underinvested, and their products fell behind the rest of the market.
It would have taken a great deal more resources to make it a sustainable business.
If the thread is about housing I can safely say the discussion topics will be on everything but housing..
Prices in the rental sector are a factor of this. Not the cause.
Mostly this consists of contracting to a managing agent, but the crucial bit is that if the managing agent tries to increase the price for LOLs, he/she gets fired at the next meeting of the home owners.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NqL_Qgj9iR8
KASIE HUNT: Over the summer you said, “There’s no vaccine that’s safe and effective”. Do you still believe that?
RFK JR: I never said that.
KASIE HUNT: Play the clip.
RFK JR (clip): There’s no vaccine that is safe and effective.
https://twitter.com/cwebbonline/status/1770188599096639573
https://www.ianvisits.co.uk/articles/more-delays-for-beam-park-station-no-decision-until-later-this-year-71037/
So we need more growth: how? We need new investment: from where and incentivised how? We need to keep borrowing under control: agreed. How do we achieve these desirable objectives? That is the bit that is missing for me. Given that she will be Chancellor in a few months I would like a clearer idea of what she plans to do.
When I worked in private sector IT, the aim was always to spend more on projects and less on maintenance.
But the projects never delivered what they were supposed to, resulting in more maintenance.
https://labour.org.uk/updates/press-releases/rachel-reeves-mais-lecture/
(As an aside, the Sky coverage last night was bizarre: we had Beth Rigby and A.N. Other journalist telling viewers what Rachel was saying while she was speaking live. Thankful her speech was live on YouTube, so I switched over. The YouTube stream was a bit crappy but better than the Sky News dynamic duo)
Liz Truss was right. We do need economic growth.
A £187054 & below
B £243171
C £317992
D £411520
E £561163
F £748217
G £1496435
H £1496435+
(Nationwide)
Mine would drop from an E to a D, but the numbers of band As in my area would also increase so whether I'd be better off I'm not sure - northern councils would have to up each band considerably if the present system was kept with updated values (Though I can't see southern councils lowering theirs even though ceteris paribus they should be able to for the same revenue
Sounds like it came from a Parliamentarian of the period, but can't remember who.
Currently live in a studio and, with a clever layout, it's the best flat I've ever lived in. Loads of in built storage and even more downstairs (we all have a secure cycle locker, for example).
That we need growth is no great insight. And Truss didn't see anything useful beyond that.
For every Wh of mobile energy storage for vehicles (i.e. batteries for electric cars, though technology agnostic), delivered in an actual car, the government will offer a subsidy of £X. £X scaled to the amount of UK content/work.
Repeat for other things you want more of.
So the government has to provide zero cash up front. Given that a factory takes years to build, the subsidy payments would probably start *after* the next election.
I wouldn't blame ID rules for more than a marginal amount of missing voters. That was a method of depressing younger turnout imported wholesale from the US Republicans but it is far less effective here.
Instead it will be the disillusoned folk who turned out for the Brexit sunlit uplands and Levelling Up that will be missing at the polls. Some centrist elements turned off by Corbyn may return to voting but not enough to make up for the abstentions on the right-and-centre. The point has been made about the Con vote dropping by 4 millions in 1997. Something similar seems quite possible at the next GE.
You can't build a damn thing in this country without a campaign against it.
People move from older properties, where 1 bathroom for 3 bedrooms is not uncommon. So they find the idea of a bathroom each luxurious. No more morning rota, banging on doors to get X from the bathroom etc etc...
Can't wait for my decade of national renewal.
I shall do some research on European/UK flat layouts and report back.
https://libquotes.com/f-e-smith/quote/lbg2l8x
"It would be possible to say without exaggeration that the miners' leaders were the stupidest men in England if we had not frequent occasion to meet the owners."
https://www.rte.ie/news/2024/0320/1438854-world-happiness-report/
It's your place to live and also your primary asset, because it's the most likely way you'll build up significant and accessible equity.
But we also have specific challenges that make improving our economic growth challenging.
Firstly, and most importantly, the UK is hooked on consumption. We need, as a nation, to save more. But going from a low-saving, high-consumption country to a more balanced one will inevitably involve a painful rebalancing. (It reminds me of something said during the Global Financial Crisis: we know what we need to do solve the crisis, we just don't know how to do it and get re-elected afterwards.)
Secondly, and linked to this, is the UK's dependence on housing wealth as savings. This has an enormous number of negative consequences: from discouraging saving, to making it politically difficult to implement measures to reduce housing shortages (and therefore prices and stored wealth).
Thirdly, the UK (like pretty much every developed country) has an ageing population, and low birth rates. This means that - absent significant immigration (which has its own problems) - the dependency ratio will continue to rise, and that inevitably means that the government will be taking more money from workers to give (and to support) retirees.
To get Britain fit and growing needs a government that is honest with people about the challenge ahead, and is willing to put the country through a painful rebalancing. That is not an election winning manifesto.
Existing inhabitants pay up directly or indirectly (including externalities such as backed-up sewage, reduced water pressure, overcrowding) - not fine.
Could be that the second ensuite is intended to be a guest/airbnb room. Or it could be to satisfy planning rules. In Ireland newbuilds now have to have a downstairs bedroom and bathroom to accommodate future infirmity. So a downstairs ensuite as well as an ensuite in the master bedroom upstairs, sort of makes sense. Though I generally don't like ensuites at all.
They should set out minimum standards for residential developments (habitable rooms per acre, room sizes etc) and then change the law so that any residential development in an urban area which meets the criteria will automatically be granted permission. They should also stop the absurd proliferation of conservation areas - buildings which are genuinely of historical/other interest should be listed and maybe the listing regime could be expanded to include urban features which might be considered worthy of preservation but we should not be protecting whole swathes of undistinguished, inefficient pre-WW2 property.
He's probably artificially high in the polls because people see 'Jr' and think he must be the candidate who is below retirement age.
https://twitter.com/OfSymbols/status/1770349871939125491
Now, obviously that shouldn't really be used to fund a holiday or a new car, unless you're selling up or downsizing, because you're not really investing. But it might be to help start a new business, or fund further education that's crucial to your future, or even an extension to your property, as those are all economic investments.
https://x.com/BelTel/status/1770415800391725416?s=20
Her employment changes seemed to be to remove the 1 year qualifying period for UD claims and additional rights for those on zero hour contracts. I certainly agree with the latter but the risk is that churn is increased even more to prevent the acquisition of those right.
She then got distracted into both green objectives and perceived discrimination against female entrepreneurs. No doubt both worthy in themselves but somewhat unlikely to be game changers on investment or productivity or growth. She also seemed to note but then rather reject the evidence of additional growth being generated by clusters on the basis that all parts of the country must share in this growth.
I don't have a problem with a more dynamic state looking to facilitate growth. I would like to see specific proposals about how this is to be achieved. The article by Hamish McRae downthread showed how reversing Brown's pension grab might help increase investment in UK business. The extent to which are own savings are not being directed to our own businesses is a disgrace and a punch to our own gut.
I have suggested that both capital investment and training investment should be further incentivised by the tax system with more than 100% write offs.
I don't see anything in her proposals that contains this sort of specific. She may be scared of Hunt pinching them again.
Would make the provision of social care much more efficient too. Two birds.
The usual distribution of who-gets-what is that the person who wants the bathroom with a bath gets the one without the ensuite.
More recently, and in the more crowded areas, the impromptu HMOs has meant that ensuites end up as one bathroom per tenant.
I must get started on my plans for reforming the country.