'One slight problem with PB is how limited its posters are in terms of experiences of the modern world. Renting in London is one of them.'
It's really not that complicated it's called demand & supply,unless the supply of accommodation increases rents will remain high & increases will be front loaded instead of being spread across the proposed 3 years.
Yeah this is exactly driven by supply and demand. The question is whether as a society we protect housing - we do with mortgages and banks ability to take your house. So there is no doubt in my mind that we should find a way of stopping the wild west situation that occurs in London all the time.
One slight problem with PB is how limited its posters are in terms of experiences of the modern world. Renting in London is one of them.
Fact is the argument that people will put the rent up at the start of a 3 year period is not a good one. The people for whom this is aimed at won't be bothered. The fact is they have a fixed rent for 3 years.
What people really want to avoid is being evicted with a months notice.
Every. Single. Year.
A good tenant is a good thing for a landlord. When my wife (then girlfriend) and I moved in together we got a six-month tenancy as that's what suited us. 18 months later we moved out into our property that we'd bought.
We would not have wanted to sign a three year agreement. Or to have to pay more for our six/18 months because the landlord had set a rate suitable for three years from now.
Whats wrong with this solution? Seems like a good one to me.
Strike your rent and fix it for 3 years.
It looks like a recipe for increased rents at the front end to me.
Any sensible landlord is going to do this and it could actually make rents higher. There is so much demand and so little supply, it isn't like other landlords are going to undercut them.
If there was enough supply and demand, people wouldn't be able to do that, as the prospective tenant would be able to shop around. However, if that was the case, we wouldn't need rent control in the first place.
All this is really just dancing around the big problems here, that neither Tory nor Labour have really managed to address.
#1) Not enough new homes being built + prohibitive planning + not enough high density / skyscrapers in places like London where space is at a premium
#2) Our country is far too London / SE centric, driving more and more people to a small area of the country.
"Mr. Roger, landlords don't know what inflation (or their personal financial circumstances) will be over a three year period, so they'll make rents as high as they possibly can to mitigate risk, I'd guess."
There are many ways to rebalance the housing market. People buying up properties to let them more is more damaging to the housing market than people who have empty second homes.
It's a market that needs regulating. Its got completely out of hand. In the past when there was social housing it was regulated by supply and demand.
Now that the only controlled priced housing is housing association property which is about to be discontinued we're at the beginning of a crisis even bigger than the one we already have.
We've created a nation of Rachmans
As Private Eye reported, some councils have discovered a legal loophole allowing them to build council housing which is immune from the right to buy. The local government minister (MP for Gt. Yarmouth) hates this, er, localism.
Another aspect of the crisis will be a huge future surge in housing benefit claims. As things stand, many new pensioners in 2035-40 will have rented their home all their life, unlike today's 60-70 year olds. So, in retirement, they'll need help with their housing costs.
Whats wrong with this solution? Seems like a good one to me.
Strike your rent and fix it for 3 years.
It looks like a recipe for increased rents at the front end to me.
Any sensible landlord is going to do this and it could actually make rents higher. There is so much demand and so little supply, it isn't like other landlords are going to undercut them.
If there was enough supply and demand, people wouldn't be able to do that, as the prospect tenant would be able to shop around. However, if that was the case, we wouldn't need rent control in the first place.
All this is really just dancing around the big problems here, that neither Tory nor Labour have really managed to address.
#1) Not enough new homes being built + prohitivie planning + not enough high density / skyscrapers in places like London where space is at a premium
#2) Our country is far too London / SE centric.
#3) Immigration
The UK's housing problems are:
1) The green belt 2) The green belt 3) The green belt
2.27% of the England is built on. If we could make that just 2.5% then that would increase our supply by 10%
Whats wrong with this solution? Seems like a good one to me.
Strike your rent and fix it for 3 years.
It looks like a recipe for increased rents at the front end to me. I could be wrong though. This is not my area at all, as I have not rented for nearly 30 years and don't rent anything out. But it strikes me that if you limit a sellers' on-going opportunities to make money, it will seek to mitigate that by making its product more expensive at the start - especially if its product is in demand.
Rents are going to be as high as the market allows anyway, so rents can't be higher at the outset.
Since there are large costs to moving - deposit, fees, hassle in general, etc - a landlord is able to ratchet up rents for a tenant above the market rate. The proposed reform protects tenants from being exploited in an unequal negotiation.
Whats wrong with this solution? Seems like a good one to me.
Strike your rent and fix it for 3 years.
It looks like a recipe for increased rents at the front end to me.
Any sensible landlord is going to do this and it could actually make rents higher. There is so much demand and so little supply, it isn't like other landlords are going to undercut them.
If there was enough supply and demand, people wouldn't be able to do that, as the prospect tenant would be able to shop around. However, if that was the case, we wouldn't need rent control in the first place.
All this is really just dancing around the big problems here, that neither Tory nor Labour have really managed to address.
#1) Not enough new homes being built + prohitivie planning + not enough high density / skyscrapers in places like London where space is at a premium
#2) Our country is far too London / SE centric.
#3) Immigration
The UK's housing problems are:
1) The green belt 2) The green belt 3) The green belt
2.27% of the England is built on. If we could make that just 2.5% then that would increase our supply by 10%
Yup - it will increase rents at the front end. That isn't the point. it is a way of giving someone security for 3 years.
Say a rent is £1200 a month but the Landlord goes for £1400 for 3 years. Vast vast majority of people will take that as it means they won't get bullied out by a landlord looking for £1500 after 11 months.
People who think its trying to lower the prices have no idea why this is going to be so popular amongst London renters.
Whats wrong with this solution? Seems like a good one to me.
Strike your rent and fix it for 3 years.
It looks like a recipe for increased rents at the front end to me.
Any sensible landlord is going to do this and it could actually make rents higher. There is so much demand and so little supply, it isn't like other landlords are going to undercut them.
If there was enough supply and demand, people wouldn't be able to do that, as the prospect tenant would be able to shop around. However, if that was the case, we wouldn't need rent control in the first place.
All this is really just dancing around the big problems here, that neither Tory nor Labour have really managed to address.
#1) Not enough new homes being built + prohitivie planning + not enough high density / skyscrapers in places like London where space is at a premium
#2) Our country is far too London / SE centric.
#3) Immigration
The UK's housing problems are:
1) The green belt 2) The green belt 3) The green belt
2.27% of the England is built on. If we could make that just 2.5% then that would increase our supply by 10%
4) The half a million homes currently sitting in the landbank or in unbuilt permissions.
I am very torn about Milliband's rent control proposals.
My parents' flat was subject to rent controls, something for which we were eternally grateful when the new landlord (a total bastard) tried to force us out through neglect so bad that at one point the local council declared the property unfit for human habitation and ordered him to do the necessary repairs. And my very first professional legal experience was working for the North Kensington Law Centre helping tenants in some pretty scummy properties in Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove before they became chi chi. (Google the Claneicarde Gardens fire to get an idea of the sort of stuff that happened.)
So I have little love for poor landlords.
Milliband has rightly identified a key issue - housing.
One issue though is that rent controls are great for those tenants who benefit from them but not so great if the supply of good quality rental property dries up.
What we are going to do about increasing housing supply is the big unanswered question.
Rent controls restrict the supply of property onto the rental market.
Their long-term effect is to make the problem worse.
@rcs: I understand the economic argument very well.
But the human argument is not so easy. Rent controls helped my parents. The bad landlord had acquired a property on the cheap, hoped to evict us, tart up and sell on and make a profit. But it was our home - what had been our home for over 20 years by then - he wanted to throw us out of and at a time when my father was dying of cancer and it was only because we had security of tenure that this did not happen.
When you're talking about families and their homes, it can't simply all be reduced to pounds, shilling and pence on a balance sheet. It's one reason why I have sympathy for old ladies who have lived in their houses for a long time and fear new taxes which might force them out. The sentimental attraction to a place where you've raised your family, where you have your memories is very strong and not to be underestimated.
We should be thinking IMO of houses as homes not just as investments.
Those politicians who know the price of everything but the value of nothing are missing a very important point.
Whats wrong with this solution? Seems like a good one to me.
Strike your rent and fix it for 3 years.
It looks like a recipe for increased rents at the front end to me.
Any sensible landlord is going to do this and it could actually make rents higher. There is so much demand and so little supply, it isn't like other landlords are going to undercut them.
If there was enough supply and demand, people wouldn't be able to do that, as the prospect tenant would be able to shop around. However, if that was the case, we wouldn't need rent control in the first place.
All this is really just dancing around the big problems here, that neither Tory nor Labour have really managed to address.
#1) Not enough new homes being built + prohitivie planning + not enough high density / skyscrapers in places like London where space is at a premium
#2) Our country is far too London / SE centric.
#3) Immigration
The UK's housing problems are:
1) The green belt 2) The green belt 3) The green belt
2.27% of the England is built on. If we could make that just 2.5% then that would increase our supply by 10%
It would certainly help if we could fan out jobs / demand across the country more.
Whats wrong with this solution? Seems like a good one to me.
Strike your rent and fix it for 3 years.
It looks like a recipe for increased rents at the front end to me.
Any sensible landlord is going to do this and it could actually make rents higher. There is so much demand and so little supply, it isn't like other landlords are going to undercut them.
If there was enough supply and demand, people wouldn't be able to do that, as the prospect tenant would be able to shop around. However, if that was the case, we wouldn't need rent control in the first place.
All this is really just dancing around the big problems here, that neither Tory nor Labour have really managed to address.
#1) Not enough new homes being built + prohitivie planning + not enough high density / skyscrapers in places like London where space is at a premium
#2) Our country is far too London / SE centric.
#3) Immigration
The UK's housing problems are:
1) The green belt 2) The green belt 3) The green belt
2.27% of the England is built on. If we could make that just 2.5% then that would increase our supply by 10%
And huge numbers of people moving to live here.
When 97.73% of our land isn't built on, no the people moving here isn't the issue. If we loosened the green belt even slightly we could solve our housing issues immediately.
Yeah good tenants are important - but the reality is that the London market prices out bad tenants. Ship out one good tenant for another and an extra £3600 a year.
Whats wrong with this solution? Seems like a good one to me.
Strike your rent and fix it for 3 years.
It looks like a recipe for increased rents at the front end to me.
Any sensible landlord is going to do this and it could actually make rents higher. There is so much demand and so little supply, it isn't like other landlords are going to undercut them.
If there was enough supply and demand, people wouldn't be able to do that, as the prospect tenant would be able to shop around. However, if that was the case, we wouldn't need rent control in the first place.
All this is really just dancing around the big problems here, that neither Tory nor Labour have really managed to address.
#1) Not enough new homes being built + prohitivie planning + not enough high density / skyscrapers in places like London where space is at a premium
#2) Our country is far too London / SE centric.
#3) Immigration
The UK's housing problems are:
1) The green belt 2) The green belt 3) The green belt
2.27% of the England is built on. If we could make that just 2.5% then that would increase our supply by 10%
It would certainly help if we could fan out jobs / demand across the country more.
Smart young English people don't want to live north of where they went to uni. They can seek a husband or wife among their peers in London, or they can chance their arm in Bradford or Hull. No contest.
'Yeah this is exactly driven by supply and demand. The question is whether as a society we protect housing - we do with mortgages and banks ability to take your house. So there is no doubt in my mind that we should find a way of stopping the wild west situation that occurs in London all the time.'
Don't know how old you are , but Ed's policy is a rehash of the 70's rent controls which resulted in a reduction in the availability of rented accommodation.
Just like his energy price freeze this will result in higher rental costs.
We aren't proposing full rent control though. Just the constant pay this for f%ck off attitude.
As I said, a security of tenure bill would handle the "f**k off" part far more effectively than a rent control provision handles the "pay this" part. A tenant that either knows up front and is protected for three years (say) or otherwise whose rent goes up with the market, but can stay for three years is better protected than now.
Whats wrong with this solution? Seems like a good one to me.
Strike your rent and fix it for 3 years.
It looks like a recipe for increased rents at the front end to me.
Any sensible landlord is going to do this and it could actually make rents higher. There is so much demand and so little supply, it isn't like other landlords are going to undercut them.
If there was enough supply and demand, people wouldn't be able to do that, as the prospect tenant would be able to shop around. However, if that was the case, we wouldn't need rent control in the first place.
All this is really just dancing around the big problems here, that neither Tory nor Labour have really managed to address.
#1) Not enough new homes being built + prohitivie planning + not enough high density / skyscrapers in places like London where space is at a premium
#2) Our country is far too London / SE centric.
#3) Immigration
The UK's housing problems are:
1) The green belt 2) The green belt 3) The green belt
2.27% of the England is built on. If we could make that just 2.5% then that would increase our supply by 10%
It would certainly help if we could fan out jobs / demand across the country more.
Smart young English people don't want to live north of where they went to uni. They can seek a husband or wife among their peers in London, or they can chance their arm in Bradford or Hull. No contest.
That is a huge problem. Every graudates first choice is London job and if they don't get it they somehow feel they have failed.
I somehow doubt that is the case in Germany, where you have Berlin, Frankfuhrt, etc each famed for different industries.
Just my two penn'orth, but I think the Tories missed a trick by not committing to scrap the buy-to-let tax break. As long as the % of private renters continues to rise, the party is doomed to decline in London, and elsewhere in time.
What buy to let tax break? I guess you are talking about interest on loans which is a perfectly acceptable business expense in all other sectors...
And the rest.
Most other sectors to which the comparison could be made are based on producing or discovering more of something of value, not on running at a small loss (if not now, certainly with interest rates at 'normal' levels) which is recouped at some future date thanks to the rising capital value of plant.
If I walked into a bank and said I was planning to buy a widget factory, and sell the widgets at a small loss, but that it would be OK in the long run because the value of the factory itself would go up, I'd get laughed out of town.
Do you really think that were interest rates to return to normal levels house prices would not fall back to sensible income ratios? The entire point house prices are so high is that interest rates are 4% lower than they would normally (should) be...
I sold up my BTLs in 2007. I'm surprised how long the market can stay utterly irrational but eventually some sanity will return unless interest rates never increase..
To be honest the only immediate solution is 300,000 houses or so somewhere near London. Nothing else is going to solve the problem...
"A speech given by Parry in 2006 at the Royal United Services Institute was reported by The Times after he said the migratory patterns that would emerge in the coming decade would resemble “the 5th century Roman empire facing the Goths and the Vandals”, as European nations experienced a process of “reverse colonisation”."
Have my S K Tremayne Antennae detected a new geopolitical meme?
@SeanT: this speech was reported in the press a few days ago. You are not the only one here who has raised concerns about the spread of uncivilised ideas and people who refuse to belong to the country in which they live on this forum. There was a debate about it quite recently following the Tower Hamlets forum and on numerous occasions before then.
I would also not be surprised if in the last few days of the election Lord Ashcroft published a final batch of constituency polling. Especially in Hallam and South Thanet
TSE- are Ashcroft constituency polls worth much if he fails to name a candidate? I thought the whole point of providing a constituency poll was to get an depth local input- without naming a candidate Ashcroft's constituency polls are erratic at best, much like his national polls.
To be honest, I find Ashcroft's self publicising narcissism through bigging up his private polling one of the distractions of the campaign.
This close to the election the candidates should be named.
That said. I've got a hunch that Lord Ashcroft's Q1 might turn out to be the most accurate poll.
Thanks TSE- I have meant to say before that you have been very good at coming back to my queries.
But, to ask another one, what is Ashcroft's Q1?
Have a look at the recent Lord A Con/LD polling, page 3, of this report to see the differences between Q1 and Q2.
Casino Royale: For once, I more or less agree with you completely. Because of the narrowness of the results in many constituencies, it will be very difficult to extrapolate. However, broadly, I think your analysis is a good one.
I still think your Model 3 has been too sympathetic to the Yellows. I believe they are heading for around 20 or even slightly less. Bradford East will go. I am not too sure about the Scottish gain to the Tories. What is surprising is that the "nailed on" Tory gains are only 7.
BTW...anybody who thinks Ed's policy of no rent increases for 3 years, means security and fixed cost, no ifs, no buts.
Go and find out about what has happened with rent control in NYC....there are many ways to increases costs directly and indirectly and lower service, if you really want to, especially in appartment complexs.
One thing I do agree with Ed on, is the way estate agents whack on a load of fees. I remember 10 years or so ago, I was renting, and I moved with the same estate agent. They charged me for a background check when I moved into the first place, and then had the cheek to claim they had to check me again when I relocated through them to the second place.
I proceeded to have a very very long ding dong with them as I stated how can I be suitable for property A, but now not possibly be suitable for property B, given previous background check and landlord of A can tell you about how I treated their property.
Whats wrong with this solution? Seems like a good one to me.
Strike your rent and fix it for 3 years.
It looks like a recipe for increased rents at the front end to me.
Any sensible landlord is going to do this and it could actually make rents higher. There is so much demand and so little supply, it isn't like other landlords are going to undercut them.
If there was enough supply and demand, people wouldn't be able to do that, as the prospect tenant would be able to shop around. However, if that was the case, we wouldn't need rent control in the first place.
All this is really just dancing around the big problems here, that neither Tory nor Labour have really managed to address.
#1) Not enough new homes being built + prohitivie planning + not enough high density / skyscrapers in places like London where space is at a premium
#2) Our country is far too London / SE centric.
#3) Immigration
The UK's housing problems are:
1) The green belt 2) The green belt 3) The green belt
2.27% of the England is built on. If we could make that just 2.5% then that would increase our supply by 10%
The UKs current housing problems are largely caused by uncontrolled immigration, rather than the Green Belt.
Whats wrong with this solution? Seems like a good one to me.
Strike your rent and fix it for 3 years.
It looks like a recipe for increased rents at the front end to me.
Any sensible landlord is going to do this and it could actually make rents higher. There is so much demand and so little supply, it isn't like other landlords are going to undercut them.
If there was enough supply and demand, people wouldn't be able to do that, as the prospect tenant would be able to shop around. However, if that was the case, we wouldn't need rent control in the first place.
All this is really just dancing around the big problems here, that neither Tory nor Labour have really managed to address.
#1) Not enough new homes being built + prohitivie planning + not enough high density / skyscrapers in places like London where space is at a premium
#2) Our country is far too London / SE centric.
#3) Immigration
The UK's housing problems are:
1) The green belt 2) The green belt 3) The green belt
2.27% of the England is built on. If we could make that just 2.5% then that would increase our supply by 10%
And huge numbers of people moving to live here.
When 97.73% of our land isn't built on, no the people moving here isn't the issue. If we loosened the green belt even slightly we could solve our housing issues immediately.
But, we can't and we won't. The voters love the Green Belt. So, people moving here does drive up prices.
Whats wrong with this solution? Seems like a good one to me.
Strike your rent and fix it for 3 years.
It looks like a recipe for increased rents at the front end to me.
Any sensible landlord is going to do this and it could actually make rents higher. There is so much demand and so little supply, it isn't like other landlords are going to undercut them.
If there was enough supply and demand, people wouldn't be able to do that, as the prospect tenant would be able to shop around. However, if that was the case, we wouldn't need rent control in the first place.
All this is really just dancing around the big problems here, that neither Tory nor Labour have really managed to address.
#1) Not enough new homes being built + prohitivie planning + not enough high density / skyscrapers in places like London where space is at a premium
#2) Our country is far too London / SE centric.
#3) Immigration
The UK's housing problems are:
1) The green belt 2) The green belt 3) The green belt
2.27% of the England is built on. If we could make that just 2.5% then that would increase our supply by 10%
It would certainly help if we could fan out jobs / demand across the country more.
Smart young English people don't want to live north of where they went to uni. They can seek a husband or wife among their peers in London, or they can chance their arm in Bradford or Hull. No contest.
That is a huge problem. Every graudates first choice is London job and if they don't get it they somehow feel they have failed.
I somehow doubt that is the case in Germany, where you have Berlin, Frankfuhrt, etc each famed for different industries.
Sure. And in the USA, too. But that's the problem with having one of the world's most successful cities - affluenza, if you will. London and Paris have a global sway that the likes of Berlin just can't match.
"One issue though is that rent controls are great for those tenants who benefit from them but not so great if the supply of good quality rental property dries up."
I agree. There are more obvious ways to solve the crisis and I don't believe Miliband's is the best but it's a start and probably the most politically acceptable.
The rampant buy to-let-market must be controlled. Apart from the lack of social housing it's the biggest single reason for the housing inflation that has made home ownership so out of reach particularly in London.
It's equivalent to allowing spivs to buy cup final tickets and then get rid of them on the black market. Something that has been outlawed for years yet housing which is a necessity is without regulation.
The real crime though is that the only affordable and regulated housing is now through housing associations. Cameron's decision to sell off these properties at up to a 70% discount will only benefit new buy-to-letters
At least Miliband shows some understanding of the problem. Which is not as Cameron seems to think to make a few tenants rich
My parents' flat was subject to rent controls, something for which we were eternally grateful when the new landlord (a total bastard) tried to force us out through neglect so bad that at one point the local council declared the property unfit for human habitation and ordered him to do the necessary repairs.
Well, quite. That is what happens when you have rent controls. Respectable, law-abiding landlords are driven out of the market and crooks, prepared to use intimidation, take their place.
Isn' the answer to intimidation not to give into it, rather than the opposite?
I have always felt uneasy with the idea that because landlords fail to comply with their legal obligations and try and threaten / bully their tenants, the answer is to allow them to charge more which has the effect - long term as we are now seeing - of a lot of people (who are not the poor West Indian immigrants at the time of Rachman) unable to find anywhere to rent or, if they did, with no security which allows them to plan their lives in any sort of meaningful way.
Mr. T, if you decide to write your own book on the Decline and Fall of the West and want someone to help with the classical comparisons, do give me a bell
Whats wrong with this solution? Seems like a good one to me.
Strike your rent and fix it for 3 years.
It looks like a recipe for increased rents at the front end to me.
Any sensible landlord is going to do this and it could actually make rents higher. There is so much demand and so little supply, it isn't like other landlords are going to undercut them.
If there was enough supply and demand, people wouldn't be able to do that, as the prospect tenant would be able to shop around. However, if that was the case, we wouldn't need rent control in the first place.
All this is really just dancing around the big problems here, that neither Tory nor Labour have really managed to address.
#1) Not enough new homes being built + prohitivie planning + not enough high density / skyscrapers in places like London where space is at a premium
#2) Our country is far too London / SE centric.
#3) Immigration
The UK's housing problems are:
1) The green belt 2) The green belt 3) The green belt
2.27% of the England is built on. If we could make that just 2.5% then that would increase our supply by 10%
It would certainly help if we could fan out jobs / demand across the country more.
Governments have been trying for the last 80 years. The only way we could do it would be give the North of England a massive dose of infrastructure investment. The problem is neither party is willing to prioritise capital over current spending in the public sector.
One slight problem with PB is how limited its posters are in terms of experiences of the modern world. Renting in London is one of them.
Fact is the argument that people will put the rent up at the start of a 3 year period is not a good one. The people for whom this is aimed at won't be bothered. The fact is they have a fixed rent for 3 years.
What people really want to avoid is being evicted with a months notice.
Every. Single. Year.
It is something that the coalition failed to cotton onto. Its all very well promoting home ownership, but there will always be people who want to, or are only in a position to rent. With less social housing to rent, it makes more people privately renting.
There is a massive distinction between renting a council house and private rental, and that isnt of course just the size of the rent.
The security of tenure is pretty awful. Unlike a council/ha tenant, you can be evicted on a months basis as many people drop to the rolling tenancy.
When you think about putting roots. A job, school for the kids etc. It can all be uprooted very quickly.
It's no point saying leave it to the market, tenancies are regulated already. A new long term tenancy which gives a tenant longer security, but the upside, the eviction process becomes substantially quicker for non payment of rent, deterioration of property or failure to comply with the tenancy agreement.
Longer more secure tenancies (three years) + fast track eviction process for non payment = better deal for both landlord and tenant
I am very torn about Milliband's rent control proposals.
My parents' flat was subject to rent controls, something for which we were eternally grateful when the new landlord (a total bastard) tried to force us out through neglect so bad that at one point the local council declared the property unfit for human habitation and ordered him to do the necessary repairs. And my very first professional legal experience was working for the North Kensington Law Centre helping tenants in some pretty scummy properties in Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove before they became chi chi. (Google the Claneicarde Gardens fire to get an idea of the sort of stuff that happened.)
So I have little love for poor landlords.
Milliband has rightly identified a key issue - housing.
One issue though is that rent controls are great for those tenants who benefit from them but not so great if the supply of good quality rental property dries up.
What we are going to do about increasing housing supply is the big unanswered question.
Rent controls restrict the supply of property onto the rental market.
Their long-term effect is to make the problem worse.
The other thing is that they provide no incentive for the landlord to keep the property in good condition.
.
It is normally a condition of any lease / tenancy agreement that the landlord has to keep the property in good condition. He should not have to be bribed to do what he is legally obliged to do anyway.
I am very torn about Milliband's rent control proposals.
My parents' flat was subject to rent controls, something for which we were eternally grateful when the new landlord (a total bastard) tried to force us out through neglect so bad that at one point the local council declared the property unfit for human habitation and ordered him to do the necessary repairs. And my very first professional legal experience was working for the North Kensington Law Centre helping tenants in some pretty scummy properties in Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove before they became chi chi. (Google the Claneicarde Gardens fire to get an idea of the sort of stuff that happened.)
So I have little love for poor landlords.
Milliband has rightly identified a key issue - housing.
One issue though is that rent controls are great for those tenants who benefit from them but not so great if the supply of good quality rental property dries up.
What we are going to do about increasing housing supply is the big unanswered question.
Rent controls restrict the supply of property onto the rental market.
Their long-term effect is to make the problem worse.
The other thing is that they provide no incentive for the landlord to keep the property in good condition.
You might have missed the other bid of Miliband's proposal. Keep the property in a fit state, or lose the generous tax breaks we provide to landlords.
Whats wrong with this solution? Seems like a good one to me.
Strike your rent and fix it for 3 years.
It looks like a recipe for increased rents at the front end to me.
Any sensible landlord is going to do this and it could actually make rents higher. There is so much demand and so little supply, it isn't like other landlords are going to undercut them.
If there was enough supply and demand, people wouldn't be able to do that, as the prospect tenant would be able to shop around. However, if that was the case, we wouldn't need rent control in the first place.
All this is really just dancing around the big problems here, that neither Tory nor Labour have really managed to address.
#1) Not enough new homes being built + prohitivie planning + not enough high density / skyscrapers in places like London where space is at a premium
#2) Our country is far too London / SE centric.
#3) Immigration
The UK's housing problems are:
1) The green belt 2) The green belt 3) The green belt
2.27% of the England is built on. If we could make that just 2.5% then that would increase our supply by 10%
And huge numbers of people moving to live here.
When 97.73% of our land isn't built on, no the people moving here isn't the issue. If we loosened the green belt even slightly we could solve our housing issues immediately.
But, we can't and we won't. The voters love the Green Belt. So, people moving here does drive up prices.
We can, but its a difficult decision. So is every other answer though. It's easier to talk about cutting migration than to actually cut it - a closed door policy would have devastating economic impact which would equally make it harder to pay for rents if people are unemployed.
We aren't proposing full rent control though. Just the constant pay this for f%ck off attitude.
As I said, a security of tenure bill would handle the "f**k off" part far more effectively than a rent control provision handles the "pay this" part. A tenant that either knows up front and is protected for three years (say) or otherwise whose rent goes up with the market, but can stay for three years is better protected than now.
I've both rented property, and let out property. My experience has been that very many tenants are not looking to live there on a permanent basis, but are rather students, people who are travelling to new places to take up employment, or people who are moving house.
Whats wrong with this solution? Seems like a good one to me.
Strike your rent and fix it for 3 years.
It looks like a recipe for increased rents at the front end to me.
Any sensible landlord is going to do this and it could actually make rents higher. There is so much demand and so little supply, it isn't like other landlords are going to undercut them.
If there was enough supply and demand, people wouldn't be able to do that, as the prospect tenant would be able to shop around. However, if that was the case, we wouldn't need rent control in the first place.
All this is really just dancing around the big problems here, that neither Tory nor Labour have really managed to address.
#1) Not enough new homes being built + prohitivie planning + not enough high density / skyscrapers in places like London where space is at a premium
#2) Our country is far too London / SE centric.
#3) Immigration
The UK's housing problems are:
1) The green belt 2) The green belt 3) The green belt
2.27% of the England is built on. If we could make that just 2.5% then that would increase our supply by 10%
It would certainly help if we could fan out jobs / demand across the country more.
Governments have been trying for the last 80 years. The only way we could do it would be give the North of England a massive dose of infrastructure investment. The problem is neither party is willing to prioritise capital over current spending in the public sector.
I know they have, and I know it isn't a simple fix. But the current state of affairs is unsustainable. As people have posted, London is now not just the captial of the UK, it has massive global reach.
We really have to do something to get jobs out of that SE region elsewhere. It isn't easy or a quick fix, but it needs to happen. Given the internet, so many jobs really don't need to be within 50 miles of London in the way they used to.
Just relocating public sector jobs hasn't really worked either. It was shown that in Newcastle, basically very few private sector jobs were created.
Cornwall is really struggling for jobs (and has done for ages), outside of the seasonal tourist ones.
The rest of the country should become more like London. We should force the ambitious young europeans who want to live in London to do a tour of duty in Scarborough and Hull first.
I am very torn about Milliband's rent control proposals.
My parents' flat was subject to rent controls, something for which we were eternally grateful when the new landlord (a total bastard) tried to force us out through neglect so bad that at one point the local council declared the property unfit for human habitation and ordered him to do the necessary repairs. And my very first professional legal experience was working for the North Kensington Law Centre helping tenants in some pretty scummy properties in Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove before they became chi chi. (Google the Claneicarde Gardens fire to get an idea of the sort of stuff that happened.)
So I have little love for poor landlords.
Milliband has rightly identified a key issue - housing.
One issue though is that rent controls are great for those tenants who benefit from them but not so great if the supply of good quality rental property dries up.
What we are going to do about increasing housing supply is the big unanswered question.
Rent controls restrict the supply of property onto the rental market.
Their long-term effect is to make the problem worse.
The other thing is that they provide no incentive for the landlord to keep the property in good condition.
You might have missed the other bid of Miliband's proposal. Keep the property in a fit state, or lose the generous tax breaks we provide to landlords.
What 'tax breaks'?
Please elaborate.
Every lefty in the Guardian knows that landlords get 'tax breaks'. Labour - the politics of envy.
It sorts of reminds you of the stories about lobsters stuck in a lobster pot. When one of them tries to climb out (social mobility) the rest pull it back down again. Labour don't care how small the economic cake is - as long as everyone shares it. The Tories want the country to make a bigger cake.
I am very torn about Milliband's rent control proposals.
My parents' flat was subject to rent controls, something for which we were eternally grateful when the new landlord (a total bastard) tried to force us out through neglect so bad that at one point the local council declared the property unfit for human habitation and ordered him to do the necessary repairs. And my very first professional legal experience was working for the North Kensington Law Centre helping tenants in some pretty scummy properties in Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove before they became chi chi. (Google the Claneicarde Gardens fire to get an idea of the sort of stuff that happened.)
So I have little love for poor landlords.
Milliband has rightly identified a key issue - housing.
One issue though is that rent controls are great for those tenants who benefit from them but not so great if the supply of good quality rental property dries up.
What we are going to do about increasing housing supply is the big unanswered question.
Clanricarde was a slum, because the tenants were paying such low rents that it wasn't economically worthwhile for the landlords to spent any money on the properties without making massive losses. Protected tenants were only paying a few quid for flats even in the early 90's
I know for a fact that your last sentence simply is not true. The rent tribunals could and did increase rents. What they did not do was charge the sort of silly rents that were being seen then and now and which has caused a real problem in places like London, as MaxPB has pointed out.
Clanricarde was a property where the landlord had so little care for the people he stuffed in there that he did not take even basic fire precautions so that people died as a result of his negligence.
I'm of the view that if you are going to become a landlord there are certain minimum standards of decency you should comply with.
Isn' the answer to intimidation not to give into it, rather than the opposite?
The answer is not to destroy the market in the first place.
Labour's rent controls of the 1970s were the worst single thing that any government has done in the 50 years I've been watching politics. An utter, unmitigated, no-holds-barred disaster, with no upside whatsoever. They effectively wiped out the rental market, and as a result many properties were left empty. They created Rachmanism. Properties fell into complete decline. It took about a quarter of a century to repair the damage to the rental market.
OK, I accept that Ed M is not proposing quite such a lunacy as his predecessors, but it is, frankly, terrifying that he can even be thinking vaguely of anything along those lines.
I have no personal financial interest in this at all - but I do remember very vividly the effect last time.
At least Miliband shows some understanding of the problem. Which is not as Cameron seems to think to make a few tenants rich
No he doesn't. The problem is simple but hard to fix:-
Interest rates are such that its not worth saving. Yet pensions have been destroyed so people need to save.
One possible investment is property which does provide a return (albeit with some work)... Hence people invest the £200,000 they can't do anything with in the most risk free asset that produces a return (i.e. property).. The problem is they are pricing out others to do that but that's fine as it means the priced out person has to pay rent instead.
So for any solution 1 part is to increase interest rates to provide a decent risk free return on savings.
But the only real solution is rapidly increase supply so supply constraints are destroyed. Yes it may annoy a few conservatives in the green belt but the young won't care if it gives them an affordable property of their own...
I don't believe buy to let owners are a problem as many on here seem to suggest. Landlords provide a service to those who are currently unable or unwilling to own their own property.
Whats wrong with this solution? Seems like a good one to me.
Strike your rent and fix it for 3 years.
It looks like a recipe for increased rents at the front end to me.
Any sensible landlord is going to do this and it could actually make rents higher. There is so much demand and so little supply, it isn't like other landlords are going to undercut them.
If there was enough supply and demand, people wouldn't be able to do that, as the prospect tenant would be able to shop around. However, if that was the case, we wouldn't need rent control in the first place.
All this is really just dancing around the big problems here, that neither Tory nor Labour have really managed to address.
#1) Not enough new homes being built + prohitivie planning + not enough high density / skyscrapers in places like London where space is at a premium
#2) Our country is far too London / SE centric.
#3) Immigration
The UK's housing problems are:
1) The green belt 2) The green belt 3) The green belt
2.27% of the England is built on. If we could make that just 2.5% then that would increase our supply by 10%
It would certainly help if we could fan out jobs / demand across the country more.
Smart young English people don't want to live north of where they went to uni. They can seek a husband or wife among their peers in London, or they can chance their arm in Bradford or Hull. No contest.
That is a huge problem. Every graudates first choice is London job and if they don't get it they somehow feel they have failed.
I somehow doubt that is the case in Germany, where you have Berlin, Frankfuhrt, etc each famed for different industries.
Britain is a second class country (like its European neighbours), but London is a world class, Tier 1 city. Perhaps the greatest city on earth. It's bound to exercise great magnetism on the young and ambitious, right across Europe.
It does unbalance the UK but I'm not sure there's anything that can or should be done about it.
I seemed to remember reading somewhere that outside of London, the only city /region that didn't suffer a big uptick in unemployment during the downturn was Bristol (in fact I think they were gaining on jobs, when everywhere else unemployment was going up)
I wonder if that was just some coincedence, or if there was something more to it?
One thing I do know, house prices have continue to go bonkers there to. Areas like Clifton, it is like a mini London when it comes to eye watering prices.
Whats wrong with this solution? Seems like a good one to me.
Strike your rent and fix it for 3 years.
It looks like a recipe for increased rents at the front end to me.
Any sensible landlord is going to do this and it could actually make rents higher. There is so much demand and so little supply, it isn't like other landlords are going to undercut them.
If there was enough supply and demand, people wouldn't be able to do that, as the prospect tenant would be able to shop around. However, if that was the case, we wouldn't need rent control in the first place.
All this is really just dancing around the big problems here, that neither Tory nor Labour have really managed to address.
#1) Not enough new homes being built + prohitivie planning + not enough high density / skyscrapers in places like London where space is at a premium
#2) Our country is far too London / SE centric.
#3) Immigration
The UK's housing problems are:
1) The green belt 2) The green belt 3) The green belt
2.27% of the England is built on. If we could make that just 2.5% then that would increase our supply by 10%
And huge numbers of people moving to live here.
When 97.73% of our land isn't built on, no the people moving here isn't the issue. If we loosened the green belt even slightly we could solve our housing issues immediately.
No that is one solution to the problem of too many people moving here.
Sunil Prasannan @Sunil_P2 · 1m1 minute ago #Conservatives and #Labour fine-detail in ELBOW (Electoral LeaderBoard Of the Week) since August. Lab lead 0.6%
'The rampant buy to let market must be controlled. Apart from the lack of social housing it's the biggest single reason for the housing inflation that has made home ownership so out of reach particularly in London. '
The rampant buy to let market is a result of New Labour trashing private pensions & people looking at alternative ways to fund their pensions,this together with their record of the lowest social house building since the second world war and a population increase of around 4 million in a very short period of time.
One likely result of Milibands tinkering will be a concentration of rental property ownership into the hands of an ever smaller group of super rich landlords. The little ones will simply give up, and walk away from the market.
That is a huge problem. Every graudates first choice is London job and if they don't get it they somehow feel they have failed.
I somehow doubt that is the case in Germany, where you have Berlin, Frankfuhrt, etc each famed for different industries.
Indeed and this is the core of the problem.
Economic illiterates above glibly claim it's just about supply and demand without any deeper understanding of how this works. The Demand for housing is not set by the price, it is set by the employment opportunities and the price of commuting and in both of those areas the UK has badly screwed up.
The rents problem is purely a London problem. And it's been allowed to develop because central government has refused to do anything about the over-centralised nature of the UK's focus on London. It could be partially solved quite easily by moving every central government function out of London.
It can also be solved in the short term by drastic reductions in commuting costs into London, shifting demand from London to not just the suburbs but the more distant but commutable towns surrounding London would have an immediate impact on the demand and significantly drop rent costs in central London and it's suburbs while having a less sharp impact on the towns further out.
However, the LibLabConKip won't do this. Their entire economic strategy and their predominant Growth mechanism is based on the fantasy of every inflating house prices. They have no compulsion to change this model until it breaks and that could be many years away.
Until then, voting for LibLabConKip you will just get more of the same.
I am very torn about Milliband's rent control proposals.
My parents' flat was subject to rent controls, something for which we were eternally grateful when the new landlord (a total bastard) tried to force us out through neglect so bad that at one point the local council declared the property unfit for human habitation and ordered him to do the necessary repairs. And my very first professional legal experience was working for the North Kensington Law Centre helping tenants in some pretty scummy properties in Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove before they became chi chi. (Google the Claneicarde Gardens fire to get an idea of the sort of stuff that happened.)
So I have little love for poor landlords.
Milliband has rightly identified a key issue - housing.
One issue though is that rent controls are great for those tenants who benefit from them but not so great if the supply of good quality rental property dries up.
What we are going to do about increasing housing supply is the big unanswered question.
Clanricarde was a slum, because the tenants were paying such low rents that it wasn't economically worthwhile for the landlords to spent any money on the properties without making massive losses. Protected tenants were only paying a few quid for flats even in the early 90's
I know for a fact that your last sentence simply is not true. The rent tribunals could and did increase rents. What they did not do was charge the sort of silly rents that were being seen then and now and which has caused a real problem in places like London, as MaxPB has pointed out.
Clanricarde was a property where the landlord had so little care for the people he stuffed in there that he did not take even basic fire precautions so that people died as a result of his negligence.
I'm of the view that if you are going to become a landlord there are certain minimum standards of decency you should comply with.
Whats wrong with this solution? Seems like a good one to me.
Strike your rent and fix it for 3 years.
It looks like a recipe for increased rents at the front end to me.
Any sensible landlord is going to do this and it could actually make rents higher. There is so much demand and so little supply, it isn't like other landlords are going to undercut them.
If there was enough supply and demand, people wouldn't be able to do that, as the prospect tenant would be able to shop around. However, if that was the case, we wouldn't need rent control in the first place.
All this is really just dancing around the big problems here, that neither Tory nor Labour have really managed to address.
#1) Not enough new homes being built + prohitivie planning + not enough high density / skyscrapers in places like London where space is at a premium
#2) Our country is far too London / SE centric.
#3) Immigration
The UK's housing problems are:
1) The green belt 2) The green belt 3) The green belt
2.27% of the England is built on. If we could make that just 2.5% then that would increase our supply by 10%
And huge numbers of people moving to live here.
When 97.73% of our land isn't built on, no the people moving here isn't the issue. If we loosened the green belt even slightly we could solve our housing issues immediately.
No that is one solution to the problem of too many people moving here.
Crashing the economy by closing the doors is a way to reduce demand but it won't improve matters. Plus demand will continue to increase with or without immigration - population growth plus a smaller people/household ratio means demand is going to increase anyway.
Unless you increase supply, killing immigration won't solve anything.
I know they have, and I know it isn't a simple fix. But the current state of affairs is unsustainable. As people have posted, London is now not just the captial of the UK, it has massive global reach.
We really have to do something to get jobs out of that SE region elsewhere. It isn't easy or a quick fix, but it needs to happen. Given the internet, so many jobs really don't need to be within 50 miles of London in the way they used to.
Just relocating public sector jobs hasn't really worked either. It was shown that in Newcastle, basically very few private sector jobs were created.
Cornwall is really struggling for jobs (and has done for ages), outside of the seasonal tourist ones.
Still, if there were an equal number of quality job offerings in London and Bradford, young people would nevertheless choose London, because it's larger with more to do and with a greater diversity of new experiences to enjoy. It's also just slightly closer to the rest of the world, via Heathrow or the Channel Tunnel. I think it's fair to assume they are the people who are motivating demand in the rental market there.
The internet did make it easier to do the same job from anywhere, but it looks like London turned out to be more popular than just anywhere. Some experts at the LSE said HS2 will lead to the same phenomenon of southward drift.
Isn' the answer to intimidation not to give into it, rather than the opposite?
The answer is not to destroy the market in the first place.
Labour's rent controls of the 1970s were the worst single thing that any government has done in the 50 years I've been watching politics. An utter, unmitigated, no-holds-barred disaster, with no upside whatsoever. They effectively wiped out the rental market, and as a result many properties were left empty. They created Rachmanism. Properties fell into complete decline. It took about a quarter of a century to repair the damage to the rental market.
OK, I accept that Ed M is not proposing quite such a lunacy as his predecessors, but it is, frankly, terrifying that he can even be thinking vaguely of anything along those lines.
I have no personal financial interest in this at all - but I do remember very vividly the effect last time.
Er, Rachman was in the 1950's and early 1960's. It wasn't Labour's rent controls in the 1970's which caused him to do what he did.
We now do not have a rental or housing market which works for us. So we have to find a solution.
I am not a Labour fan but I will give Ed M some marks for at least identifying a problem and trying - however ineptly it may turn out - a solution. The Tories, on this, are behaving as if there is no problem at all. Selling Housing Association properties is not, really, the solution to the problem.
I am very torn about Milliband's rent control proposals.
My parents' flat was subject to rent controls, something for which we were eternally grateful when the new landlord (a total bastard) tried to force us out through neglect so bad that at one point the local council declared the property unfit for human habitation and ordered him to do the necessary repairs. And my very first professional legal experience was working for the North Kensington Law Centre helping tenants in some pretty scummy properties in Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove before they became chi chi. (Google the Claneicarde Gardens fire to get an idea of the sort of stuff that happened.)
So I have little love for poor landlords.
Milliband has rightly identified a key issue - housing.
One issue though is that rent controls are great for those tenants who benefit from them but not so great if the supply of good quality rental property dries up.
What we are going to do about increasing housing supply is the big unanswered question.
Rent controls restrict the supply of property onto the rental market.
Their long-term effect is to make the problem worse.
@rcs: I understand the economic argument very well.
But the human argument is not so easy. Rent controls helped my parents. The bad landlord had acquired a property on the cheap, hoped to evict us, tart up and sell on and make a profit. But it was our home - what had been our home for over 20 years by then - he wanted to throw us out of and at a time when my father was dying of cancer and it was only because we had security of tenure that this did not happen.
When you're talking about families and their homes, it can't simply all be reduced to pounds, shilling and pence on a balance sheet. It's one reason why I have sympathy for old ladies who have lived in their houses for a long time and fear new taxes which might force them out. The sentimental attraction to a place where you've raised your family, where you have your memories is very strong and not to be underestimated.
We should be thinking IMO of houses as homes not just as investments.
Those politicians who know the price of everything but the value of nothing are missing a very important point.
Well put. Today I seem to be agreeing with people I normally don't agree with.
I am very torn about Milliband's rent control proposals.
My parents' flat was subject to rent controls, something for which we were eternally grateful when the new landlord (a total bastard) tried to force us out through neglect so bad that at one point the local council declared the property unfit for human habitation and ordered him to do the necessary repairs. And my very first professional legal experience was working for the North Kensington Law Centre helping tenants in some pretty scummy properties in Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove before they became chi chi. (Google the Claneicarde Gardens fire to get an idea of the sort of stuff that happened.)
So I have little love for poor landlords.
Milliband has rightly identified a key issue - housing.
One issue though is that rent controls are great for those tenants who benefit from them but not so great if the supply of good quality rental property dries up.
What we are going to do about increasing housing supply is the big unanswered question.
Clanricarde was a slum, because the tenants were paying such low rents that it wasn't economically worthwhile for the landlords to spent any money on the properties without making massive losses. Protected tenants were only paying a few quid for flats even in the early 90's
I know for a fact that your last sentence simply is not true. The rent tribunals could and did increase rents. What they did not do was charge the sort of silly rents that were being seen then and now and which has caused a real problem in places like London, as MaxPB has pointed out.
Clanricarde was a property where the landlord had so little care for the people he stuffed in there that he did not take even basic fire precautions so that people died as a result of his negligence.
I'm of the view that if you are going to become a landlord there are certain minimum standards of decency you should comply with.
"A speech given by Parry in 2006 at the Royal United Services Institute was reported by The Times after he said the migratory patterns that would emerge in the coming decade would resemble “the 5th century Roman empire facing the Goths and the Vandals”, as European nations experienced a process of “reverse colonisation”."
Have my S K Tremayne Antennae detected a new geopolitical meme?
It all sounds pretty hysterical to me. For a start the goths and vandals came from within Europe. They were organised armies supported by their own infrastructure. Most of the supposed modern ones are few and disorganised, poor and disenfranchised, weak and exploited refugees - and are busy drowning in the Mediterranean.
Rents are flying up 10% a year minimum. And with an ever increasing supply rents are going up no matter what.
We've got some properties that we let out; one I haven't increased the rent for 10 years (and then we gave her a reduction), the other two the tenants have been in for nearly five years now without increasing the rent, and I rented them out at the time for a rate I was happy with, not the punitive rate the estate agents wanted me to try. The cumulative market rates on the three is probably well in excess of 2,000 per month than I actually get for them. I have no intention either of raising the rents until the tenants leave.
They are all managed through agencies- whom I instruct at the outset that I do not want any tenants paying any charges to draft the contracts otherwise I will use a different agency. When contracts are renewed I ensure that this doesn't involve extra expenses for the tenant. They all have telephone numbers of builders who can come out at an emergency.
The reason why I have this number of properties is that we have lived in them all, and to be honest I cannot stand the hassle of selling and chains and the like (very bad experience in the past)- so when I have moved house, I simply rent out the last one. I buy houses to live in, not as building a buy to let portfolio. We are buying another property in Norwich to live between Italy and here- and probably in the fullness of time that'll be let out when we move on.
I think there are probably many other landlords like myself, but Ed is right, the market needs to be regulated allowing tenants to stay in properties for a longer period if they wish- I would go further and say 5 years rather three, stopping rental agencies piling on extortionate costs for an hours work to draft a contract, and to cap rises at RPI.
Free markets do not work- especially when you look at housing.
Whats wrong with this solution? Seems like a good one to me.
Strike your rent and fix it for 3 years.
It looks like a recipe for increased rents at the front end to me.
Any sensible landlord is going to do this and it could actually make rents higher. There is so much demand and so little supply, it isn't like other landlords are going to undercut them.
If there was enough supply and demand, people wouldn't be able to do that, as the prospect tenant would be able to shop around. However, if that was the case, we wouldn't need rent control in the first place.
All this is really just dancing around the big problems here, that neither Tory nor Labour have really managed to address.
#1) Not enough new homes being built + prohitivie planning + not enough high density / skyscrapers in places like London where space is at a premium
#2) Our country is far too London / SE centric.
#3) Immigration
The UK's housing problems are:
1) The green belt 2) The green belt 3) The green belt
2.27% of the England is built on. If we could make that just 2.5% then that would increase our supply by 10%
Not that it will change your view, but in 2013 I myself wrote the following article on built-up areas for the 2011 Census:
For England and Wales we made it to be 9.6% classified as Built-up. We then had an internal discussion about if this was a big number or not. I think it comes down to what kind of country we want to live in. We stopped building motorways to relieve congestion because we worked out that it just encouraged more road usage. The same, in my opinion, should apply to railways and when it comes to housing I think we should focus on building on brown field sites. It would also help if our economy wasn't so London centric.
That is a huge problem. Every graudates first choice is London job and if they don't get it they somehow feel they have failed.
I somehow doubt that is the case in Germany, where you have Berlin, Frankfuhrt, etc each famed for different industries.
Indeed and this is the core of the problem.
Economic illiterates above glibly claim it's just about supply and demand without any deeper understanding of how this works. The Demand for housing is not set by the price, it is set by the employment opportunities and the price of commuting and in both of those areas the UK has badly screwed up.
The rents problem is purely a London problem. And it's been allowed to develop because central government has refused to do anything about the over-centralised nature of the UK's focus on London. It could be partially solved quite easily by moving every central government function out of London.
It can also be solved in the short term by drastic reductions in commuting costs into London, shifting demand from London to not just the suburbs but the more distant but commutable towns surrounding London would have an immediate impact on the demand and significantly drop rent costs in central London and it's suburbs while having a less sharp impact on the towns further out.
However, the LibLabConKip won't do this. Their entire economic strategy and their predominant Growth mechanism is based on the fantasy of every inflating house prices. They have no compulsion to change this model until it breaks and that could be many years away.
Until then, voting for LibLabConKip you will just get more of the same.
America built Washington D.C.; it didn't mean New York diminished, and the same is true of Brasilia and Canberra.
The kids don't want to live in Southend or Rochester even with 50p train tickets.
Isn' the answer to intimidation not to give into it, rather than the opposite?
The answer is not to destroy the market in the first place.
Labour's rent controls of the 1970s were the worst single thing that any government has done in the 50 years I've been watching politics. An utter, unmitigated, no-holds-barred disaster, with no upside whatsoever. They effectively wiped out the rental market, and as a result many properties were left empty. They created Rachmanism. Properties fell into complete decline. It took about a quarter of a century to repair the damage to the rental market.
OK, I accept that Ed M is not proposing quite such a lunacy as his predecessors, but it is, frankly, terrifying that he can even be thinking vaguely of anything along those lines.
I have no personal financial interest in this at all - but I do remember very vividly the effect last time.
Er, Rachman was in the 1950's and early 1960's. It wasn't Labour's rent controls in the 1970's which caused him to do what he did.
We now do not have a rental or housing market which works for us. So we have to find a solution.
I am not a Labour fan but I will give Ed M some marks for at least identifying a problem and trying - however ineptly it may turn out - a solution. The Tories, on this, are behaving as if there is no problem at all. Selling Housing Association properties is not, really, the solution to the problem.
The rent controls of 1945-57 made Rachman's fortune.
I am very torn about Milliband's rent control proposals.
My parents' flat was subject to rent controls, something for which we were eternally grateful when the new landlord (a total bastard) tried to force us out through neglect so bad that at one point the local council declared the property unfit for human habitation and ordered him to do the necessary repairs. And my very first professional legal experience was working for the North Kensington Law Centre helping tenants in some pretty scummy properties in Notting Hill and Ladbroke Grove before they became chi chi. (Google the Claneicarde Gardens fire to get an idea of the sort of stuff that happened.)
So I have little love for poor landlords.
Milliband has rightly identified a key issue - housing.
One issue though is that rent controls are great for those tenants who benefit from them but not so great if the supply of good quality rental property dries up.
What we are going to do about increasing housing supply is the big unanswered question.
Clanricarde was a slum, because the tenants were paying such low rents that it wasn't economically worthwhile for the landlords to spent any money on the properties without making massive losses. Protected tenants were only paying a few quid for flats even in the early 90's
I know for a fact that your last sentence simply is not true. The rent tribunals could and did increase rents. What they did not do was charge the sort of silly rents that were being seen then and now and which has caused a real problem in places like London, as MaxPB has pointed out.
Clanricarde was a property where the landlord had so little care for the people he stuffed in there that he did not take even basic fire precautions so that people died as a result of his negligence.
I'm of the view that if you are going to become a landlord there are certain minimum standards of decency you should comply with.
When were you at North Ken?
First half of the 1980's.
I suspect many of the 'rogue' landlords and Winklers I knew around there a decade later were the same faces. But I won't name them here!
Two 2010 Labour voters in my household left the country today and will not return before the election. Neither could be bothered to mark the Ed box this time.
Is not one of the biggest problems that too few bedrooms are actually used on a regular basis? My elderly parents have 5 bedrooms across 2 houses in the SE. Property is cheap too hold and a good store of wealth. Their cleaner lives down the road alone in a nice 3 bed council house. Thus 3 people have 8 bedrooms between them.
Ed's solution is rent caps and eliminating the bedroom tax. Brilliant. Sheer genius.
That is a huge problem. Every graudates first choice is London job and if they don't get it they somehow feel they have failed.
I somehow doubt that is the case in Germany, where you have Berlin, Frankfuhrt, etc each famed for different industries.
Indeed and this is the core of the problem.
Economic illiterates above glibly claim it's just about supply and demand without any deeper understanding of how this works. The Demand for housing is not set by the price, it is set by the employment opportunities and the price of commuting and in both of those areas the UK has badly screwed up.
The rents problem is purely a London problem. And it's been allowed to develop because central government has refused to do anything about the over-centralised nature of the UK's focus on London. It could be partially solved quite easily by moving every central government function out of London.
It can also be solved in the short term by drastic reductions in commuting costs into London, shifting demand from London to not just the suburbs but the more distant but commutable towns surrounding London would have an immediate impact on the demand and significantly drop rent costs in central London and it's suburbs while having a less sharp impact on the towns further out.
However, the LibLabConKip won't do this. Their entire economic strategy and their predominant Growth mechanism is based on the fantasy of every inflating house prices. They have no compulsion to change this model until it breaks and that could be many years away.
Until then, voting for LibLabConKip you will just get more of the same.
America built Washington D.C.; it didn't mean New York diminished, and the same is true of Brasilia and Canberra.
The kids don't want to live in Southend or Rochester even with 50p train tickets.
The 'rampant buy-to-let market' has increased supply and reduced rents.
Do we really have to explain the most basic facts of economics again and again?
Utter nonsense. The supply is fixed in any given time period.
No its not you're showing your ignorance of economics and even basic logic.
Increased buy to lets increase the proportion of homes available to let versus the proportion of homes available to buy.
Without landlords, more property would be owned or just available to buy.
Increased numbers of buy to let landlords increase the cost of buying homes and reduce the costs of renting homes. Its basic supply and demand, the supply of homes available to let increases and the demand for homes to buy increases.
Isn' the answer to intimidation not to give into it, rather than the opposite?
The answer is not to destroy the market in the first place.
Labour's rent controls of the 1970s were the worst single thing that any government has done in the 50 years I've been watching politics. An utter, unmitigated, no-holds-barred disaster, with no upside whatsoever. They effectively wiped out the rental market, and as a result many properties were left empty. They created Rachmanism.
Labour in the 1970s caused something to happen in the 1950s? No wonder Timelords vote Labour.
We stopped building motorways to relieve congestion because we worked out that it just encouraged more road usage.
Correlation is not causation.
The exact same expansion in car ownership has been seen in every country relative to incomes regardless of the level of road construction. This myth seriously hampers the development of the UK.
Whats wrong with this solution? Seems like a good one to me.
Strike your rent and fix it for 3 years.
It looks like a recipe for increased rents at the front end to me. I could be wrong though. This is not my area at all, as I have not rented for nearly 30 years and don't rent anything out. But it strikes me that if you limit a sellers' on-going opportunities to make money, it will seek to mitigate that by making its product more expensive at the start - especially if its product is in demand.
It seems, prima facie, very similar to Germany which has a large rented sector [ 60%]. Rent control, in this case, is NOT rent freeze.
The 'rampant buy-to-let market' has increased supply and reduced rents.
Do we really have to explain the most basic facts of economics again and again?
Utter nonsense. The supply is fixed in any given time period.
No its not you're showing your ignorance of economics and even basic logic.
Increased buy to lets increase the proportion of homes available to let versus the proportion of homes available to buy.
Without landlords, more property would be owned or just available to buy.
Increased numbers of buy to let landlords increase the cost of buying homes and reduce the costs of renting homes. Its basic supply and demand, the supply of homes available to let increases and the demand for homes to buy increases.
Pardon me for interrumpting, but if the number of homes available to buy falls, doesn't the demand for homes to rent also increase, not just the supply? Or are those people who would otherwise be buying living in tents somewhere?
Is not one of the biggest problems that too few bedrooms are actually used on a regular basis? My elderly parents have 5 bedrooms across 2 houses in the SE. Property is cheap too hold and a good store of wealth. Their cleaner lives down the road alone in a nice 3 bed council house. Thus 3 people have 8 bedrooms between them.
Ed's solution is rent caps and eliminating the bedroom tax. Brilliant. Sheer genius.
If the price were right, people would vacate in favour of larger groups and families. But people like to keep nice houses and I can't say I blame them, and depending on the non-bedroom living space, some properties aren't very suitable for subdivision anyway.
That is a huge problem. Every graudates first choice is London job and if they don't get it they somehow feel they have failed.
I somehow doubt that is the case in Germany, where you have Berlin, Frankfuhrt, etc each famed for different industries.
Indeed and this is the core of the problem.
Economic illiterates above glibly claim it's just about supply and demand without any deeper understanding of how this works. The Demand for housing is not set by the price, it is set by the employment opportunities and the price of commuting and in both of those areas the UK has badly screwed up.
The rents problem is purely a London problem. And it's been allowed to develop because central government has refused to do anything about the over-centralised nature of the UK's focus on London. It could be partially solved quite easily by moving every central government function out of London.
It can also be solved in the short term by drastic reductions in commuting costs into London, shifting demand from London to not just the suburbs but the more distant but commutable towns surrounding London would have an immediate impact on the demand and significantly drop rent costs in central London and it's suburbs while having a less sharp impact on the towns further out.
However, the LibLabConKip won't do this. Their entire economic strategy and their predominant Growth mechanism is based on the fantasy of every inflating house prices. They have no compulsion to change this model until it breaks and that could be many years away.
Until then, voting for LibLabConKip you will just get more of the same.
America built Washington D.C.; it didn't mean New York diminished, and the same is true of Brasilia and Canberra.
The kids don't want to live in Southend or Rochester even with 50p train tickets.
All talk of rent, house prices, demand supply, is utter nonsense if its not factoring in immigration. We have here a classic case of economic diarrhoea.
London also has the best weather in the UK (bar, perhaps, a few sunny spots in Sussex or Hampshire).
It really is unfair, but there it is.
Thought you might have said Cornwall,right off to watch poldark ;-)
Egads, no. Cornwall has a nice climate by British standards (not exactly hard) but the Cornish have a special word for fine, light drizzle ("mizzle"), for a very good reason.
Tho it is noticeable how they've managed to film the entire Poldark series on the three cloudless days of the year, west of the Tamar.
I worked down near the Cornish / Devon "border" a number of years ago and when people came to visit in the summer they always used to say how lucky I was to live there, beautiful scenary, beautiful weather, etc....I had to inform them, all those green fields, they don't stay green on their own!
The 'rampant buy-to-let market' has increased supply and reduced rents.
Do we really have to explain the most basic facts of economics again and again?
Utter nonsense. The supply is fixed in any given time period.
No its not you're showing your ignorance of economics and even basic logic.
Increased buy to lets increase the proportion of homes available to let versus the proportion of homes available to buy.
Without landlords, more property would be owned or just available to buy.
Increased numbers of buy to let landlords increase the cost of buying homes and reduce the costs of renting homes. Its basic supply and demand, the supply of homes available to let increases and the demand for homes to buy increases.
Pardon me for interrumpting, but if the number of homes available to buy falls, doesn't the demand for homes to rent also increase, not just the supply? Or are those people who would otherwise be buying living in tents somewhere?
But people who want to buy are still buying. The buyers though compete with the buy-to-let landlords so have higher costs, unlike the lower costs for letting. Furthermore having a more liquid market generally results in cheaper costs too.
The 'rampant buy-to-let market' has increased supply and reduced rents.
Do we really have to explain the most basic facts of economics again and again?
Utter nonsense. The supply is fixed in any given time period.
Utter nonsense from you. There are more and more rental homes coming onto the market. Private renting has increased in each of the past two decades. Less than two weeks to the election date and Labour suddenly discover a problem with 'rip off rents'. This after 5 years in opposition and 13 in govt (where its own policies brought about the increase in investment in rental properties). A significant proportion of private landlords are honest to goodness plain ordinary people. Its housing association chiefs who live high on the hog.
Alun Cairns 03:38:25 Dan Jarvis 03:44:55 (PB) Timpson Edward 03:56:42 Graham Evans 05:28:30 Richard Drax 06:18:09 (debut)
I would have thought Timpson would be spending every second pounding the payment in Crewe and "NAN-WHITCH" (as the media kept calling it) than pounding the streets of London.
Comments
We aren't proposing full rent control though. Just the constant pay this for f%ck off attitude.
'One slight problem with PB is how limited its posters are in terms of experiences of the modern world. Renting in London is one of them.'
It's really not that complicated it's called demand & supply,unless the supply of accommodation increases rents will remain high & increases will be front loaded instead of being spread across the proposed 3 years.
Yeah this is exactly driven by supply and demand. The question is whether as a society we protect housing - we do with mortgages and banks ability to take your house. So there is no doubt in my mind that we should find a way of stopping the wild west situation that occurs in London all the time.
We would not have wanted to sign a three year agreement. Or to have to pay more for our six/18 months because the landlord had set a rate suitable for three years from now.
If there was enough supply and demand, people wouldn't be able to do that, as the prospective tenant would be able to shop around. However, if that was the case, we wouldn't need rent control in the first place.
All this is really just dancing around the big problems here, that neither Tory nor Labour have really managed to address.
#1) Not enough new homes being built + prohibitive planning + not enough high density / skyscrapers in places like London where space is at a premium
#2) Our country is far too London / SE centric, driving more and more people to a small area of the country.
#3) Immigration
https://twitter.com/Sunil_P2/status/592408416691322882
Another aspect of the crisis will be a huge future surge in housing benefit claims. As things stand, many new pensioners in 2035-40 will have rented their home all their life, unlike today's 60-70 year olds. So, in retirement, they'll need help with their housing costs.
1) The green belt
2) The green belt
3) The green belt
2.27% of the England is built on. If we could make that just 2.5% then that would increase our supply by 10%
Since there are large costs to moving - deposit, fees, hassle in general, etc - a landlord is able to ratchet up rents for a tenant above the market rate. The proposed reform protects tenants from being exploited in an unequal negotiation.
Yup - it will increase rents at the front end. That isn't the point. it is a way of giving someone security for 3 years.
Say a rent is £1200 a month but the Landlord goes for £1400 for 3 years. Vast vast majority of people will take that as it means they won't get bullied out by a landlord looking for £1500 after 11 months.
People who think its trying to lower the prices have no idea why this is going to be so popular amongst London renters.
But the human argument is not so easy. Rent controls helped my parents. The bad landlord had acquired a property on the cheap, hoped to evict us, tart up and sell on and make a profit. But it was our home - what had been our home for over 20 years by then - he wanted to throw us out of and at a time when my father was dying of cancer and it was only because we had security of tenure that this did not happen.
When you're talking about families and their homes, it can't simply all be reduced to pounds, shilling and pence on a balance sheet. It's one reason why I have sympathy for old ladies who have lived in their houses for a long time and fear new taxes which might force them out. The sentimental attraction to a place where you've raised your family, where you have your memories is very strong and not to be underestimated.
We should be thinking IMO of houses as homes not just as investments.
Those politicians who know the price of everything but the value of nothing are missing a very important point.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=24TZC08GRpM
Yeah good tenants are important - but the reality is that the London market prices out bad tenants. Ship out one good tenant for another and an extra £3600 a year.
No brainer for most landlords.
'Yeah this is exactly driven by supply and demand. The question is whether as a society we protect housing - we do with mortgages and banks ability to take your house. So there is no doubt in my mind that we should find a way of stopping the wild west situation that occurs in London all the time.'
Don't know how old you are , but Ed's policy is a rehash of the 70's rent controls which resulted in a reduction in the availability of rented accommodation.
Just like his energy price freeze this will result in higher rental costs.
I somehow doubt that is the case in Germany, where you have Berlin, Frankfuhrt, etc each famed for different industries.
I sold up my BTLs in 2007. I'm surprised how long the market can stay utterly irrational but eventually some sanity will return unless interest rates never increase..
To be honest the only immediate solution is 300,000 houses or so somewhere near London. Nothing else is going to solve the problem...
I still think your Model 3 has been too sympathetic to the Yellows. I believe they are heading for around 20 or even slightly less. Bradford East will go. I am not too sure about the Scottish gain to the Tories. What is surprising is that the "nailed on" Tory gains are only 7.
Now 1.36/1.37 - shortest EVER.
Go and find out about what has happened with rent control in NYC....there are many ways to increases costs directly and indirectly and lower service, if you really want to, especially in appartment complexs.
One thing I do agree with Ed on, is the way estate agents whack on a load of fees. I remember 10 years or so ago, I was renting, and I moved with the same estate agent. They charged me for a background check when I moved into the first place, and then had the cheek to claim they had to check me again when I relocated through them to the second place.
I proceeded to have a very very long ding dong with them as I stated how can I be suitable for property A, but now not possibly be suitable for property B, given previous background check and landlord of A can tell you about how I treated their property.
I weaker person would have just paid up.
Rents are flying up 10% a year minimum. And with an ever increasing supply rents are going up no matter what.
"One issue though is that rent controls are great for those tenants who benefit from them but not so great if the supply of good quality rental property dries up."
I agree. There are more obvious ways to solve the crisis and I don't believe Miliband's is the best but it's a start and probably the most politically acceptable.
The rampant buy to-let-market must be controlled. Apart from the lack of social housing it's the biggest single reason for the housing inflation that has made home ownership so out of reach particularly in London.
It's equivalent to allowing spivs to buy cup final tickets and then get rid of them on the black market. Something that has been outlawed for years yet housing which is a necessity is without regulation.
The real crime though is that the only affordable and regulated housing is now through housing associations. Cameron's decision to sell off these properties at up to a 70% discount will only benefit new buy-to-letters
At least Miliband shows some understanding of the problem. Which is not as Cameron seems to think to make a few tenants rich
https://twitter.com/Sunil_P2/status/592411313848057856
The people are stupid and knackering their kids lives.
I have always felt uneasy with the idea that because landlords fail to comply with their legal obligations and try and threaten / bully their tenants, the answer is to allow them to charge more which has the effect - long term as we are now seeing - of a lot of people (who are not the poor West Indian immigrants at the time of Rachman) unable to find anywhere to rent or, if they did, with no security which allows them to plan their lives in any sort of meaningful way.
It is something that the coalition failed to cotton onto. Its all very well promoting home ownership, but there will always be people who want to, or are only in a position to rent. With less social housing to rent, it makes more people privately renting.
There is a massive distinction between renting a council house and private rental, and that isnt of course just the size of the rent.
The security of tenure is pretty awful. Unlike a council/ha tenant, you can be evicted on a months basis as many people drop to the rolling tenancy.
When you think about putting roots. A job, school for the kids etc. It can all be uprooted very quickly.
It's no point saying leave it to the market, tenancies are regulated already. A new long term tenancy which gives a tenant longer security, but the upside, the eviction process becomes substantially quicker for non payment of rent, deterioration of property or failure to comply with the tenancy agreement.
Longer more secure tenancies (three years) + fast track eviction process for non payment = better deal for both landlord and tenant
Please elaborate.
We really have to do something to get jobs out of that SE region elsewhere. It isn't easy or a quick fix, but it needs to happen. Given the internet, so many jobs really don't need to be within 50 miles of London in the way they used to.
Just relocating public sector jobs hasn't really worked either. It was shown that in Newcastle, basically very few private sector jobs were created.
Cornwall is really struggling for jobs (and has done for ages), outside of the seasonal tourist ones.
The rest of the country should become more like London. We should force the ambitious young europeans who want to live in London to do a tour of duty in Scarborough and Hull first.
It sorts of reminds you of the stories about lobsters stuck in a lobster pot. When one of them tries to climb out (social mobility) the rest pull it back down again. Labour don't care how small the economic cake is - as long as everyone shares it. The Tories want the country to make a bigger cake.
Clanricarde was a property where the landlord had so little care for the people he stuffed in there that he did not take even basic fire precautions so that people died as a result of his negligence.
I'm of the view that if you are going to become a landlord there are certain minimum standards of decency you should comply with.
Good post.
Labour's rent controls of the 1970s were the worst single thing that any government has done in the 50 years I've been watching politics. An utter, unmitigated, no-holds-barred disaster, with no upside whatsoever. They effectively wiped out the rental market, and as a result many properties were left empty. They created Rachmanism. Properties fell into complete decline. It took about a quarter of a century to repair the damage to the rental market.
OK, I accept that Ed M is not proposing quite such a lunacy as his predecessors, but it is, frankly, terrifying that he can even be thinking vaguely of anything along those lines.
I have no personal financial interest in this at all - but I do remember very vividly the effect last time.
Interest rates are such that its not worth saving. Yet pensions have been destroyed so people need to save.
One possible investment is property which does provide a return (albeit with some work)... Hence people invest the £200,000 they can't do anything with in the most risk free asset that produces a return (i.e. property).. The problem is they are pricing out others to do that but that's fine as it means the priced out person has to pay rent instead.
So for any solution 1 part is to increase interest rates to provide a decent risk free return on savings.
But the only real solution is rapidly increase supply so supply constraints are destroyed. Yes it may annoy a few conservatives in the green belt but the young won't care if it gives them an affordable property of their own...
I wonder if that was just some coincedence, or if there was something more to it?
One thing I do know, house prices have continue to go bonkers there to. Areas like Clifton, it is like a mini London when it comes to eye watering prices.
No that is one solution to the problem of too many people moving here.
#Conservatives and #Labour fine-detail in ELBOW (Electoral LeaderBoard Of the Week) since August. Lab lead 0.6%
https://twitter.com/Sunil_P2/status/592413755214004225
'The rampant buy to let market must be controlled. Apart from the lack of social housing it's the biggest single reason for the housing inflation that has made home ownership so out of reach particularly in London. '
The rampant buy to let market is a result of New Labour trashing private pensions & people looking at alternative ways to fund their pensions,this together with their record of the lowest social house building since the second world war and a population increase of around 4 million in a very short period of time.
Economic illiterates above glibly claim it's just about supply and demand without any deeper understanding of how this works. The Demand for housing is not set by the price, it is set by the employment opportunities and the price of commuting and in both of those areas the UK has badly screwed up.
The rents problem is purely a London problem. And it's been allowed to develop because central government has refused to do anything about the over-centralised nature of the UK's focus on London. It could be partially solved quite easily by moving every central government function out of London.
It can also be solved in the short term by drastic reductions in commuting costs into London, shifting demand from London to not just the suburbs but the more distant but commutable towns surrounding London would have an immediate impact on the demand and significantly drop rent costs in central London and it's suburbs while having a less sharp impact on the towns further out.
However, the LibLabConKip won't do this. Their entire economic strategy and their predominant Growth mechanism is based on the fantasy of every inflating house prices. They have no compulsion to change this model until it breaks and that could be many years away.
Until then, voting for LibLabConKip you will just get more of the same.
Do we really have to explain the most basic facts of economics again and again?
Unless you increase supply, killing immigration won't solve anything.
The internet did make it easier to do the same job from anywhere, but it looks like London turned out to be more popular than just anywhere. Some experts at the LSE said HS2 will lead to the same phenomenon of southward drift.
The Harrowing of the North, bis.
We now do not have a rental or housing market which works for us. So we have to find a solution.
I am not a Labour fan but I will give Ed M some marks for at least identifying a problem and trying - however ineptly it may turn out - a solution. The Tories, on this, are behaving as if there is no problem at all. Selling Housing Association properties is not, really, the solution to the problem.
I have no intention either of raising the rents until the tenants leave.
They are all managed through agencies- whom I instruct at the outset that I do not want any tenants paying any charges to draft the contracts otherwise I will use a different agency. When contracts are renewed I ensure that this doesn't involve extra expenses for the tenant. They all have telephone numbers of builders who can come out at an emergency.
The reason why I have this number of properties is that we have lived in them all, and to be honest I cannot stand the hassle of selling and chains and the like (very bad experience in the past)- so when I have moved house, I simply rent out the last one. I buy houses to live in, not as building a buy to let portfolio. We are buying another property in Norwich to live between Italy and here- and probably in the fullness of time that'll be let out when we move on.
I think there are probably many other landlords like myself, but Ed is right, the market needs to be regulated allowing tenants to stay in properties for a longer period if they wish- I would go further and say 5 years rather three, stopping rental agencies piling on extortionate costs for an hours work to draft a contract, and to cap rises at RPI.
Free markets do not work- especially when you look at housing.
http://www.ons.gov.uk/ons/rel/census/2011-census/key-statistics-for-built-up-areas-in-england-and-wales/rpt-characteristics-of-built-up-areas.html#tab-conclusions
For England and Wales we made it to be 9.6% classified as Built-up. We then had an internal discussion about if this was a big number or not. I think it comes down to what kind of country we want to live in. We stopped building motorways to relieve congestion because we worked out that it just encouraged more road usage. The same, in my opinion, should apply to railways and when it comes to housing I think we should focus on building on brown field sites. It would also help if our economy wasn't so London centric.
The kids don't want to live in Southend or Rochester even with 50p train tickets.
Ed's solution is rent caps and eliminating the bedroom tax. Brilliant. Sheer genius.
Increased buy to lets increase the proportion of homes available to let versus the proportion of homes available to buy.
Without landlords, more property would be owned or just available to buy.
Increased numbers of buy to let landlords increase the cost of buying homes and reduce the costs of renting homes. Its basic supply and demand, the supply of homes available to let increases and the demand for homes to buy increases.
The exact same expansion in car ownership has been seen in every country relative to incomes regardless of the level of road construction. This myth seriously hampers the development of the UK.
https://twitter.com/Sunil_P2/status/592416445264461824
It could have been worse for Ed.
The younger one is a borderline Tory switcher. 51% tax (incl student loan) at 26 years of age.
What chance do they have at those punitive rates?
Alun Cairns 03:38:25
Dan Jarvis 03:44:55 (PB)
Timpson Edward 03:56:42
Graham Evans 05:28:30
Richard Drax 06:18:09 (debut)
Less than two weeks to the election date and Labour suddenly discover a problem with 'rip off rents'. This after 5 years in opposition and 13 in govt (where its own policies brought about the increase in investment in rental properties). A significant proportion of private landlords are honest to goodness plain ordinary people. Its housing association chiefs who live high on the hog.