So Ed is going to promise to build lots of homes...Gordon used to promise that every conference season!!!
Even a cursory google search will bring up year after year Gordon promising 200k homes a year, 3 million new homes by ...., etc etc etc.
Miliband is a bit of a lightweight compared to Brown. Here's Gordon at conference 2007
"So we plan to help first time buyers and we will increase house-building to 240,000 new homes a year - in places and ways that respect our green spaces and the environment. My aim by 2010 two million more homeowners than in 1997."
May I respectfully draw attention to item Number 6 in TSE's magisterial list? It's a real humdinger. John Rentoul has noticed a rather fundamental, indeed fatal, flaw in Labour's new strategy.
...
This is why tim's fantasies about Labour spending on infrastructure and housing are just fantasies.
Both the pressure from the unions and the need to buy votes will instead see Labour yet again target the money on personal consumption via increases in public sector pay and welfare payments.
Without building houses the housing benefit bill will never come down, Osborne has tested to destruction the theory that you can get benefit spending down by issuing briefings to the Mail, the Sun and the Telegraph, and he's increased benefit spending on the back of that pointless posturing.
tim
To save Bobajob I am not going to give you a three post reply.
But some of your assumptions need questioning. I list some observations:
1. House prices are only marginally sensitive to increases/decreases in new housing stock.
2. Rental yield and capital value have an inverse relationship: if capital prices rise rents tend to fall and vice versa.
3. Housing benefit bills need to go up to market rental levels allowing the social housing sector to become profitable and self-financing. Self-financing includes provision for 'owners' to generate sufficient funds to service borrowing at market rates for the purposes of building new stock.
On 2 it's rental YIELDS that fall, not absolute rents which often rise (e.g. as in London at the moment)
Other than the uncertainty it puts into the Corporation Tax system, there's nothing in principle wrong with the specific proposal, tiny though it is - but what on earth is he doing trying to fine-tune the 2015 budget to that level of detail?
Miliband is a bit of a lightweight compared to Brown. Here's Gordon at conference 2007
"So we plan to help first time buyers and we will increase house-building to 240,000 new homes a year - in places and ways that respect our green spaces and the environment. My aim by 2010 two million more homeowners than in 1997."
@tim You don't need to make it compulsory, just make immunisation a precondition of nursery, school and university
I'm not sure in what way you regard that as "not compulsory", exactly. Excluding people's children from education, for life, is a far bigger punishment than you would ever impose through the justice system.
And? People who don't want to wear seat belts can drive on private land
Given that most people drive so they can get about on public roads to travel to places they want to get to, wearing seatbelts is effectively compulsory. Your idea that vaccination wouldn't be compulsory - but failure would exclude the child from the public education system - is compulsion. Only you in your deranged little totalitarian mind could believe otherwise. Why not grow a pair, and stand up for your beliefs?
Can we agree on one thing: any new social housing (indeed any housing) has to be of good quality and learn the lessons from the 1960s and 1970s? We want them to be good homes, not more Ronan Points.
I doubt it, he needs somewhere to keep the lifelong benefit claimants.
May I respectfully draw attention to item Number 6 in TSE's magisterial list? It's a real humdinger. John Rentoul has noticed a rather fundamental, indeed fatal, flaw in Labour's new strategy.
...
This is why tim's fantasies about Labour spending on infrastructure and housing are just fantasies.
Both the pressure from the unions and the need to buy votes will instead see Labour yet again target the money on personal consumption via increases in public sector pay and welfare payments.
Without building houses the housing benefit bill will never come down, Osborne has tested to destruction the theory that you can get benefit spending down by issuing briefings to the Mail, the Sun and the Telegraph, and he's increased benefit spending on the back of that pointless posturing.
tim
To save Bobajob I am not going to give you a three post reply.
But some of your assumptions need questioning. I list some observations:
1. House prices are only marginally sensitive to increases/decreases in new housing stock.
2. Rental yield and capital value have an inverse relationship: if capital prices rise rents tend to fall and vice versa.
3. Housing benefit bills need to go up to market rental levels allowing the social housing sector to become profitable and self-financing. Self-financing includes provision for 'owners' to generate sufficient funds to service borrowing at market rates for the purposes of building new stock.
On 2 it's rental YIELDS that fall, not absolute rents which often rise (e.g. as in London at the moment)
Pedant. I did start the sentence with yields.
And there will be cases where rents fall in real terms when real capital values rise.
And much rarer instances when rents fall in nominal terms as capital values rise.
RBKC will not be among the exceptions though!
Interesting report on housing rents coming out this week from the ONS. It is, I think. only the second publication in a new series of reports.
I am hoping for some good historical series to prove the theory of there being an inverse relationship between capital values and rental yields.
Not true, according to my hospital doctor friend. Doctors can overrule on the spot in case of emergency - they have a legal eagle on hand for greyer areas however.
I can understand the cure now and argue later nature of emergencies, But this is unlikely to apply to vaccination except in circumstances of an epi/pandemic.
"Immediate threat" I think is the watchword.
Returning to tim's point, Article 2 of the First Protocol grants citizens of signatories a "right to education". That would require it to be necessary and proportionate. I haven't found anything on infectious disease; cases have tended to focus on disability (where the local authority wants to send a child to a non-mainstream school) or exclusion. The phrase " right of access to the existing public educational institutions" is used a lot but I don't know where it comes from. I think the exclusion cases might be most insightful.
"Finally, the commission will set out detailed plans to establish New Towns and Garden Cities, as pioneered by Milton Keynes, an idea set out by the deputy prime minister, Nick Clegg, but so far stuck in the Whitehall machine.
The commission will set out the financial incentives and freedoms for local authorities within the scheme, such as retaining an increased share of business rates for 30 years, to invest in infrastructure and services for the area."
Mr Brown said he wanted to speed the development of new "eco towns" with zero or low carbon housing. Town halls would be able to build council houses with new rules letting them borrow against future rent income.
@hendopolis: GUARDIAN: Miliband stakes the house on huge new build programme #tomorrowspaperstoday #BBCPapers http://t.co/bdwThTz1Gg
Sense at last vs Bubble Boy Osborne the benefit junky
I can't read the story beyond the headline, but 200,000 homes a year is roughly double the current start / completion rate.
Say £150,000 per home, with the extras I mentioned below.
That's £30 billion per annum. Or a full HS2 every one-and-a-half years, or two Crossrails..
Even saying £100,000 per home, that's £20 billion per year.
That won't happen, and it leaves aside where they go, planning issues, transport links, employment, and all the other things.
Do you think that's feasible or realistic?
No because your figures are bollocks
Why?
Because you made them all up. Go and do some googling on Osbornes schemes and estimates, how much different types of houses and flats cost in the social sector and greenfield new town build costs.
I have looked them up, thanks. And I've also noticed what many of the prices given don't include. For instance some don't include land costs.
I'd love it if you could do similar posts to the ones I've given below, detailing what you think are realistic costs. But even if each house cost just £50,000, it would still be £10 billion per annum. And there's also the planning and other issues.
Can we agree on one thing: any new social housing (indeed any housing) has to be of good quality and learn the lessons from the 1960s and 1970s? We want them to be good homes, not more Ronan Points.
I'll add one thing: any politician who mucks about with minimum quality standards for housing in any sector, should be forced to live in such housing for as long as they are a politician.
Of course, every home would need to be built to at least the Parker Morris standards wrt space. Getting rid of P-M was one of the Thatcher government's sillier mistakes, and good on the London team for bringing back the guidelines, plus 10%.
I was dropping my son off at University, so distracted from important PB business, my apologies good sir!
It would be quite an essay to cover all aspects of Informed consent and treatment of minors.
In principle it is quite possible to treat patients against their will, most notably with the mental health acts, but also with the quarantine acts.
In practice this can only be done if the danger to the individual or to public health is sufficiently severe to justify the forcible treatment, which in other circumstances would be an assault.
Treatment of children under the age of 16 requires them to be Gillick competent (ie able to make an informed case in their own right) or to have the consent of their parent or Guardian.
It is possible to override this in circumstances that are life threatening (the child of a Jehovahs witness requiring transfusion for example). This requires them to be made the ward of court, and the court then gives consent on behalf of the child.
Would a court consider that an unvaccinated child should be vaccinated against its parents wishes? I think not under current law, as there is no immediate risk to child or society. It is possible there would be a long term risk, but this would not reach the current threshold.
It would of course be possible to change the law.
Dr. Sox.
You have written Robert Chote's P45.
Did you catch the thread last night where we were discussing the now denied Labour plans to withdraw benefits from parents who refused to MMR vaccinate their children?
It got quite detailed, with Grandiose in particular, quoting legal principles which might make such a policy illegal in human rights law.
A question I had for you - and we sent out a search party to no avail - was whether statute has ever mandated a medical intervention. Are there any procedures or treatments which doctors are required to provide by law regardless of a patient's or guardian/parent's wishes?
Miliband is a bit of a lightweight compared to Brown. Here's Gordon at conference 2007
"So we plan to help first time buyers and we will increase house-building to 240,000 new homes a year - in places and ways that respect our green spaces and the environment. My aim by 2010 two million more homeowners than in 1997."
A v Head Teacher and Governors of Lord Grey School [2006] UKHL 14 (House of Lords)
24 The Strasbourg jurisprudence, summarised above in paras 11–13, makes clear how article 2 should be interpreted. The underlying premise of the article was that all existing member states have an established system of state education. It was intended to guarantee fair and non-discriminatory access to that system by those within the jurisdiction of the respective states. The fundamental importance of education in a modern democratic state was recognised to require no less. But the guarantee is, in comparison with most other Convention guarantees, a weak one, and deliberately so. There is no right to education of a particular kind or quality, other than that prevailing in the state. There is no Convention guarantee of compliance with domestic law. There is no Convention guarantee of education at or by a particular institution. There is no Convention objection to the expulsion of a pupil from an educational institution on disciplinary grounds, unless (in the ordinary way) there is no alternative source of state education open to the pupil (as in Eren v Turkey (Application No 60856/00) (unreported) 7 February 2006 ). The test, as always under the Convention, is a highly pragmatic one, to be applied to the specific facts of the case: have the authorities of the state acted so as to deny to a pupil effective access to such educational facilities as the state provides for such pupils?
Excluding children who were not vaccinated from any sort of mainstream education would therefore seem eminently challengable under the HRA.
"I was dropping my son off at University, so distracted from important PB business, my apologies good sir!"
I was banned by No1 son from going down and helping him move into student halls when he started at University a couple of years ago. He took his Dad and his Granny instead as he felt they would be both practical and far more stoic on the day, and there was no chance of them bursting into tears and embarrassing him when it was time to say goodbye!
As a long-standing agnostic on HS2 (it's got significant advantages and drawbacks for Broxtowe), I'd just observe in response to Fox that additional homes don't create new commuters. They aren't new people, merely existing people living better.
An agnostic sort of question: if a government in 2015 were to cancel the project, how much money would already have been spent/committed? In other words, would be be saving X (£50 billion or whatever we decide it to be) or N% of X?
ISTR a couple of hundred million has been spent. My memory might be faulty on that, so treat with a large pinch of salt.
But scrapping HS2 may not saving anything, because something will need to be done about the railways. If not, there will be other, negative costs, for instance in terms of congestion.
I'm surprised you're agnostic given the constituency you're hoping to re-represent. Surely your would-be constituents deserve leadership on an issue that will impact them so heavily? Tim's also agnostic, strangely enough. It's like you're both waiting for instructions from above or something ...
You're being tiresomely ad hominem with that sneer. As I've said, I've been publicly dubious long before anyone significant on either side indicated doubts. The proposals will essentially replace a large residential area of Broxtowe with a busy business centre, construct a viaduct over another part and produce extensive disruption. In return, said business centre will bring new jobs and cash inflow and the constituency will be very well placed for businesses with London interests. The balance of advantage locally isn't really clear.
"I was dropping my son off at University, so distracted from important PB business, my apologies good sir!"
I was banned by No1 son from going down and helping him move into student halls when he started at University a couple of years ago. He took his Dad and his Granny instead as he felt they would be both practical and far more stoic on the day, and there was no chance of them bursting into tears and embarrassing him when it was time to say goodbye!
Hardly totalitarian, it's what they do in the USA, Canada, Australia etc. I posted a link on the last but one thread in response to a post by Richard Tyndall. And in the US they've got 95% + immunisation rates and only 90,000 exemption certificates out of over 4,000,000 children in kindergarten
I didn't have time to follow that link as I had to go to work, but I looked at the Australian one. Actually what seems to be compulsory is either to have the immunisations done (and while there is a long list of them, the way in which you have them done seems a lot less prescriptive than in the UK), or you complete an exemption certificate, which you can do for purely "personal" reasons. So in Oz what seems to be compulsory is actually to formally record that you don't want your child immunised.
Not sure what the immunisation rates are in the UK but we do need to get them up.
The totalitarian comment was based on the following:
* You say you don't want compulsory immunisation. * Failing to immunise your children will therefore not become illegal. * If something is not illegal, you should be freely able to do it * Hold on says the State, while that's quite legal, we don't like you doing it * State introduces quite swingeing penalties for not doing something * Said penalties are introduced by administrative fiat, rather than the operation of the usual swings & balances of the law.
That's what I find totalitarian. The State should be indifferent between things that are not-illegal.
I would find it far more honest of you to state that you believe in compulsory immunisation and propose the introduction of a law to that effect.
Edited to add: you would be better off finding a European example, as none of the countries you cite are signatories to the EHCR.
And there will be cases where rents fall in real terms when real capital values rise.
And much rarer instances when rents fall in nominal terms as capital values rise.
RBKC will not be among the exceptions though!
Interesting report on housing rents coming out this week from the ONS. It is, I think. only the second publication in a new series of reports.
I am hoping for some good historical series to prove the theory of there being an inverse relationship between capital values and rental yields.
Sometimes accuracy matters...
(as for your grand theory, I would put that in the container marked "bleeding obvious") Price goes up, yield goes down. Basic maths.
Of course, but owner-occupied housing is not a simple standalone tradeable asset. The benefits and requirements of occupation add distortions.
And house prices (except in the top end cash purchase market) are driven far more by cost and availability of mortgage finance than they are by volume of stock on the market.
Rents (especially from commercial landlords) tend to be more driven by normal volume of supply and demand pressures.
So it is worth looking at the statistics to observe actual trends rather than relying on assumption.
France looks like an interesting Council of Europe vaccination case. I'm struggling to get details, but there appears to be an element of doing what tim suggests, albeit that the take up rate is quoted as 85% and they have a measles epidemic much larger than ours. More research needed.
I was banned by No1 son from going down and helping him move into student halls when he started at University a couple of years ago. He took his Dad and his Granny instead as he felt they would be both practical and far more stoic on the day, and there was no chance of them bursting into tears and embarrassing him when it was time to say goodbye!
Blimey we are building a nation of softies. I might have been given a lift to the local station. I then got me and my rucksack to London, Kings Cross and then Newcastle. It seems bizarre to even think about snivelling when an adult is going to live away from home for a mere 9 weeks or so.
In order to make the most of land value, and to minimise the amount of new roads required for commutting, it does look that the only way to do this is via high density flats, built in urban areas near transport hubs.
The key to these is to populate these with people who will look after them. Park Hill in Sheffield is an example, but there are similar ones in other cities.:
My own view is that Council tenancies should be short term (say 3-5 year leases) with no option to inherit the tenancy for children (unless they purchase via a right to buy scheme). When the tenancy expires the housing should be returned to the council, and re-allocated, with tenants who have maintained the property well, and not been a nuisance being first in the queue when re-allocation takes place. This would create an incentive to look after the neighbourhood, and would get away from the spare room subsidy issue, by reassessing the amount of space needed, and allocateing the bigger homes to those that need them.
I was dropping my son off at University, so distracted from important PB business, my apologies good sir!
It would be quite an essay to cover all aspects of Informed consent and treatment of minors.
In principle it is quite possible to treat patients against their will, most notably with the mental health acts, but also with the quarantine acts.
In practice this can only be done if the danger to the individual or to public health is sufficiently severe to justify the forcible treatment, which in other circumstances would be an assault.
Treatment of children under the age of 16 requires them to be Gillick competent (ie able to make an informed case in their own right) or to have the consent of their parent or Guardian.
It is possible to override this in circumstances that are life threatening (the child of a Jehovahs witness requiring transfusion for example). This requires them to be made the ward of court, and the court then gives consent on behalf of the child.
Would a court consider that an unvaccinated child should be vaccinated against its parents wishes? I think not under current law, as there is no immediate risk to child or society. It is possible there would be a long term risk, but this would not reach the current threshold.
It would of course be possible to change the law.
Dr. Sox.
You have written Robert Chote's P45.
Did you catch the thread last night where we were discussing the now denied Labour plans to withdraw benefits from parents who refused to MMR vaccinate their children?
It got quite detailed, with Grandiose in particular, quoting legal principles which might make such a policy illegal in human rights law.
A question I had for you - and we sent out a search party to no avail - was whether statute has ever mandated a medical intervention. Are there any procedures or treatments which doctors are required to provide by law regardless of a patient's or guardian/parent's wishes?
Regina (SB) v Governors of Denbigh High School [2006] UKHL 15 is also informative. (Handed down almost exactly the same time. But with the advantage it's a case I have to know.)
The claimant insisted on wearing particular items of Muslim dress. In essence she and the school could not agree on any clothing that would be acceptable to both her and the school. Just like the hypothetical MMR-less child, she was not being excluded per se (whether she was being 'constructively' excluded was open for debate in the case) but rather had she come back dressed in line with the policy she would have been admitted.
"69 I can be brief in dealing with the claim of denial of the right to education guaranteed by article 2 of the First Protocol . As your Lordships have decided today in A v Head Teacher and Governors of Lord Grey School [2006] 2 AC 363 , that article confers no right to go to any particular school. It is infringed only if the claimant is unable to obtain education from the system as a whole. In the present case, there is nothing to suggest that Shabina could not have found a suitable school if she had notified her requirements in good time to the local education authority."
If the state is still obliged to provide MMR-less children with "a suitable school" then it'll have to fund schools if they aren't otherwise available.
Not sure I'd want to live in a country that did that, myself.
Where does the £100bn to do it come from? Even scrapping HS2 and every other investment project wouldn't save enough. Lowering property and corporation taxes might do it but then you would get the inevitable housing boom to deal with.
Seems like an empty promise made to grab headlines and little else.
Where does the £100bn to do it come from? Even scrapping HS2 and every other investment project wouldn't save enough. Lowering property and corporation taxes might do it but then you would get the inevitable housing boom to deal with.
Seems like an empty promise made to grab headlines and little else.
how's he going to achieve that in a parliament if it includes "a Rebuilding Britain Commission to locate sites for new towns and garden cities akin to Milton Keynes and Welwyn Garden City." Places to put them will take years to find and develop.
So it looks like Gordon Brown, Ed Balls and Ed Miliband have now become the three monkeys who didn't see, hear or speak when it comes to McBride's spin and smear operation.
The pledge to build a million new homes over a five year term is as much a sleight of hand as Gordon promising in 2007 that Labour will have built 2 million houses over its 13 years in power.
Given that the economy will be near full recovery by 2015 such a promise is only par for the course. In the five years before the crash, dwelling completions averaged well over 200,000 per year (see post to RN below).
So Miliband is not promising anything much more than returning to a normal house build rate.
A million new houses either means spending about £20 billion per year (see sums below) or including the ones built by the private sector in this target.
From Avery's figures, we only need to build about 50 000 per year more, to get back to that total.
Or is Ed really proposing that housing completions will be 350-400 000 per year in 2016 under Labour?
Where does the £100bn to do it come from? Even scrapping HS2 and every other investment project wouldn't save enough. Lowering property and corporation taxes might do it but then you would get the inevitable housing boom to deal with.
Seems like an empty promise made to grab headlines and little else.
Ed Miliband and Ed Balls spent so much time with Gordon Brown, the headline grabbing, but empty future housebuilding claims really are classic Brownite spin by numbers to them these days. The Conservative party should respond by simple adding up the number of houses that the last Labour Government claimed they were going to build and compare to the number they actually built while in Office for 13 years.
Any Labour party claims to be planning to invest in the UK infrastructure through housing building or our train network should be taken with a pinch of a salt. Labour are going to struggle to deliver on their other promises to reverse cuts or deliver an increase in welfare spending. They cannot afford to invest in desperately needed infrastructure in housing, transport or energy if they are going to reverse all the sound economic rebalancing being carried out by this Government in the hope of yet another quick political bounce. Labour didn't fix the roof while the sun was shining last time they were in power, this time they are hell bent on concentrating on just fixing the noisiest leaks in the hope the whole ceiling doesn't then collapse on them.
A million new houses either means spending about £20 billion per year (see sums below) or including the ones built by the private sector in this target.
From Avery's figures, we only need to build about 50 000 per year more, to get back to that total.
Or is Ed really proposing that housing completions will be 350-400 000 per year in 2016 under Labour?
' Miliband's pledge to build a million new homes could be the game-changer he needs http://t.co/O7ntYGd76b'
And Labour's 13 year record when money was available no questions asked.
'Despite the huge building boom under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, only 13 percent of the 2.5 million homes which rose up under their watch were built by ‘social’ landlords. This compares with almost a quarter of 3.8m homes under Margaret Thatcher and John Major’s reign. Even David Cameron appears on track to match his predecessors’ trend, in market share at least. If Labour had caught onto the coat tails of their building boom to the same degree as the Tories, almost 300,000 more social homes would be dotting this land. What a massive missed opportunity.
Whichever way you look at it Labour’s council housing halo has slipped. Investment in housing plunged under Blair and Brown to its lowest level for decades. During their first 12 months in power they spent less than in any year of Thatcher and Major’s 18-year reign. Their poverty of social housing ambition persisted throughout most of their administration. A big increase only arrived in its dying days- as a prop for builders tripped up by the financial crisis.
One council housing crown does belong firmly in Labour’s territory, though not one its grassroots members ever wanted. As these charts show, council houses and flats passed into private ownership at a far greater rate in Brown and Blair’s 13 years than under two decades of Thatcher, Major and Cameron premierships.'
Iain @Iain_33 If there were a budget tomorrow Labour would repeal the VAT rise, if a budget on May 8th 2015 they wouldn't unless they lost then they would
' Miliband's pledge to build a million new homes could be the game-changer he needs http://t.co/O7ntYGd76b'
And Labour's 13 year record when money was available no questions asked.
'Despite the huge building boom under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, only 13 percent of the 2.5 million homes which rose up under their watch were built by ‘social’ landlords. This compares with almost a quarter of 3.8m homes under Margaret Thatcher and John Major’s reign. Even David Cameron appears on track to match his predecessors’ trend, in market share at least. If Labour had caught onto the coat tails of their building boom to the same degree as the Tories, almost 300,000 more social homes would be dotting this land. What a massive missed opportunity.
Whichever way you look at it Labour’s council housing halo has slipped. Investment in housing plunged under Blair and Brown to its lowest level for decades. During their first 12 months in power they spent less than in any year of Thatcher and Major’s 18-year reign. Their poverty of social housing ambition persisted throughout most of their administration. A big increase only arrived in its dying days- as a prop for builders tripped up by the financial crisis.
One council housing crown does belong firmly in Labour’s territory, though not one its grassroots members ever wanted. As these charts show, council houses and flats passed into private ownership at a far greater rate in Brown and Blair’s 13 years than under two decades of Thatcher, Major and Cameron premierships.'
For the sake of completeness, here is Labour's record on Housing Association Dwellings Completed:
'Miliband is a bit of a lightweight compared to Brown. Here's Gordon at conference 2007
"So we plan to help first time buyers and we will increase house-building to 240,000 new homes a year - in places and ways that respect our green spaces and the environment. My aim by 2010 two million more homeowners than in 1997."
Ed was Brown's lackey,that's where he learnt all this fantasy stuff..
Every conversation in Brighton, it seems, includes an admission that the Conservatives are winning the propaganda war hands down. If Craig Oliver and Lynton Crosby could hear what the shadow cabinet are saying in the bars, they would blush: “Their attack unit is ruthless. Their messaging is consistent and disciplined. They are beating us.” This is not something said often in Westminster – but for the past six months or so, the Labour high command has been noticing that a widespread perception of Tory incompetence lags behind the reality. The Conservatives may complain about their own machine, but the Opposition is arguably the better judge. And they are definitely hurting. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/benedictbrogan/100237486/labour-has-a-new-problem-with-spin-the-tories-are-better-at-it/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
Baron Robertson still doing his bit to kill nationalism stone dead.
Tonight SNP's Stewart Hosie debated with BT's George Robertson at Abertay University with 250 attending. Results Before Debate 21% Yes, 59% No and 20 % D/K Results after debate 51% Yes, 38% No, 11% D/K
This is why debates with Cameron and others will be limited as scare arguments do not stack up after debate. The more people know the more they ask questions. And if they ask questions they will start to consider different answers.
I caught the Damian McBride interview on Newsnight, then the Alastair Campbell interview on STV's Scotland Tonight. One thing is for sure, after all these revelations from McBride and the stampede from those around him to deny any knowledge of his activities, the ship that was the Labour Party's morale compass and dignity has long sailed away in the wrong direction. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4OBzH-NWtU
Treatment of children under the age of 16 requires them to be Gillick competent (ie able to make an informed case in their own right) or to have the consent of their parent or Guardian.
Oh dear. I hope you meant "guardian", not "Guardian".
Damien claims that Robert Peston has a far closer relationship with Ed Balls than he does...So Peston and Flanders are big mates with Eddie Balls, I'm sure that doesn't influence their on screen musings at all.
Every conversation in Brighton, it seems, includes an admission that the Conservatives are winning the propaganda war hands down. If Craig Oliver and Lynton Crosby could hear what the shadow cabinet are saying in the bars, they would blush: “Their attack unit is ruthless. Their messaging is consistent and disciplined. They are beating us.” This is not something said often in Westminster – but for the past six months or so, the Labour high command has been noticing that a widespread perception of Tory incompetence lags behind the reality. The Conservatives may complain about their own machine, but the Opposition is arguably the better judge. And they are definitely hurting. http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/benedictbrogan/100237486/labour-has-a-new-problem-with-spin-the-tories-are-better-at-it/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter
Every political party in the history of ever has thought that the other side is meaner, more ruthless and better than them at spin. It's the way you resolve the obvious rightness and justness of your own cause with the fact that there seem to be a bunch of voters out there who don't want to vote for you.
Damien claims that Robert Peston has a far closer relationship with Ed Balls than he does...So Peston and Flanders are big mates with Eddie Balls, I'm sure that doesn't influence their on screen musings at all.
Ed Miliband will propose on Tuesday to reform Britain's dysfunctional housing market by building 200,000 new houses a year by 2020, the end of the next parliament.
Ed Balls has spent the past few days attempting to persuade anyone who will listen that he had nothing to do with the disgusting smear campaign carried out against Gordon Brown’s enemies by Damian McBride. Sadly, the shadow chancellor has not been particularly successful, not least because he has always seemed only too happy to take the fight to his enemies.
In his speech to the Labour conference yesterday, Mr Balls pursued this approach to the point of self-parody. With economic indicators providing daily refutation of his prophecies of doom, he was reduced to attacking not the Conservatives, but his own caricature of them. Tory policy, he insisted, was constructed by millionaires for millionaires. Only Labour cared about ordinary working people, which it would prove by increasing the minimum wage, abolishing the so-called “bedroom tax”, undoing the Tory “privatisation” of the NHS, raising taxes on bankers and rich foreign homeowners, and generally summoning the spirit of the 1945 Attlee government to make this once more a land fit for heroes. In essence, his speech can be summarised as: “Labour will be fiscally responsible. Except when it feels like spending, in which case the bankers will pay for it.”
You're being tiresomely ad hominem with that sneer. As I've said, I've been publicly dubious long before anyone significant on either side indicated doubts. The proposals will essentially replace a large residential area of Broxtowe with a busy business centre, construct a viaduct over another part and produce extensive disruption. In return, said business centre will bring new jobs and cash inflow and the constituency will be very well placed for businesses with London interests. The balance of advantage locally isn't really clear.
Not going to pollute the next thread with my reply, so here goes.
Sorry if you think it's tiresome, but I have a point.
You want to represent a constituency that, as you say, will see both potential benefits and potential negatives in large measure, the balance between the two probably changing depending on constituents' location. Yet you sit on the fence and twiddle your thumbs, at exactly the same time Labour as a whole are.
HS2 doesn't exactly get many mentions on your blog, and when it does, it's the worryingly stupid "And I’m tempted to wonder whether we should be spending £40 billion on HS2 with a view to benefiting in 2030, rather than, say, 20 projects of £100 million each, easing bottle necks all over the country here and now, with the balance used (for non-infrastructure projects)", without considering what these magical £100 million projects are, and quite how they'd happen 'here and now' with all the other improvements going on such as electrification to Derby and Nottingham. It shows a rather concerning lack of knowledge about the problems facing the network.
If you (and the people you talk to) think there are problems with the viaduct, business centre et al, now's the time to speak out about it. You're their ex-MP, a candidate at the next election, and still write a newsletter for constituents. You have some influence. There's a consultation going on at the moment until January, and input from anyone in your position would be extremely helpful, on either side of the debate.
HS2 is going to be the biggest thing to happen in the constituency for many a year. The consultations are a vital time to get opinions across and get alterations designed in before more money is spent. Maybe you're doing this already?
The housing market can ONLY be reformed by the abolition of (almost) all planning laws AND the recognition (which is, seemingly, counter-intuitive to those in Whitehall) that the way to create much more 'affordable' housing is to start building homes at 1930's densities on farming land costing £4-20k/acre rather than on tiny pockets of 'brownfield' land costing >£1 million acre.
If 200,000 new 2-3/acre homes were built each year, costing £200k or so each (since the land was not artificially inflated by the current impossibility in obtaining planning consent) then the price of the slums now being built would plummet, so lowering ALL housing prices and ensuring that young people can afford to buy.
I read recently that the cost of an average home today is £165k or so and that, had houses merely following average house price inflation since 1945 (or so - I forget exactly when, but it was when planning laws became onerous), they would be worth £60k.
Which is a truly damning indictment of the effect that nationalisation of new housing supply - (through planning laws) have produced: rationing, shortages - and rampant inflation.
If you MUST have 450k new people entering the UK every year, you need >250k houses to home them - and that is simply not possible with Green Belt restrictions on new building. In addition, the newly-built homes are small, dark, over-crowded and have minimal or no parking spaces - the perfect definition of a slum.
Lord alone knows how we arrived at such a situation - too few homes, which are far too small, dark and tightly packed, sold at outrageous prices, in places where people do NOT want to live - all in the name of 'affordability'.
Truly, Whitehall/Westminster/Downing St/Council HQ and Town Halls could not organise a children's tree house, let alone C21st housing for 65+ million people.
Comments
Miliband is a bit of a lightweight compared to Brown. Here's Gordon at conference 2007
"So we plan to help first time buyers and we will increase house-building to 240,000 new homes a year - in places and ways that respect our green spaces and the environment. My aim by 2010 two million more homeowners than in 1997."
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7010664.stm
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-24213366
Other than the uncertainty it puts into the Corporation Tax system, there's nothing in principle wrong with the specific proposal, tiny though it is - but what on earth is he doing trying to fine-tune the 2015 budget to that level of detail?
People who don't want to wear seat belts can drive on private land
Given that most people drive so they can get about on public roads to travel to places they want to get to, wearing seatbelts is effectively compulsory. Your idea that vaccination wouldn't be compulsory - but failure would exclude the child from the public education system - is compulsion. Only you in your deranged little totalitarian mind could believe otherwise. Why not grow a pair, and stand up for your beliefs?
And there will be cases where rents fall in real terms when real capital values rise.
And much rarer instances when rents fall in nominal terms as capital values rise.
RBKC will not be among the exceptions though!
Interesting report on housing rents coming out this week from the ONS. It is, I think. only the second publication in a new series of reports.
I am hoping for some good historical series to prove the theory of there being an inverse relationship between capital values and rental yields.
Returning to tim's point, Article 2 of the First Protocol grants citizens of signatories a "right to education". That would require it to be necessary and proportionate. I haven't found anything on infectious disease; cases have tended to focus on disability (where the local authority wants to send a child to a non-mainstream school) or exclusion. The phrase " right of access to the existing public educational institutions" is used a lot but I don't know where it comes from. I think the exclusion cases might be most insightful.
Gordon Brown has promised to double the number of "eco-towns" to be built across the UK from five to 10.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7010888.stm
Mr Brown said he wanted to speed the development of new "eco towns" with zero or low carbon housing. Town halls would be able to build council houses with new rules letting them borrow against future rent income.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/1557171/Brown-promises-three-million-new-homes.html
Of course, every home would need to be built to at least the Parker Morris standards wrt space. Getting rid of P-M was one of the Thatcher government's sillier mistakes, and good on the London team for bringing back the guidelines, plus 10%.
http://www.designofhomes.co.uk/024-more-on-parker-morris-standards.html
It would be quite an essay to cover all aspects of Informed consent and treatment of minors.
In principle it is quite possible to treat patients against their will, most notably with the mental health acts, but also with the quarantine acts.
In practice this can only be done if the danger to the individual or to public health is sufficiently severe to justify the forcible treatment, which in other circumstances would be an assault.
Treatment of children under the age of 16 requires them to be Gillick competent (ie able to make an informed case in their own right) or to have the consent of their parent or Guardian.
It is possible to override this in circumstances that are life threatening (the child of a Jehovahs witness requiring transfusion for example). This requires them to be made the ward of court, and the court then gives consent on behalf of the child.
Would a court consider that an unvaccinated child should be vaccinated against its parents wishes? I think not under current law, as there is no immediate risk to child or society. It is possible there would be a long term risk, but this would not reach the current threshold.
It would of course be possible to change the law.
Dr. Sox.
You have written Robert Chote's P45.
Did you catch the thread last night where we were discussing the now denied Labour plans to withdraw benefits from parents who refused to MMR vaccinate their children?
It got quite detailed, with Grandiose in particular, quoting legal principles which might make such a policy illegal in human rights law.
A question I had for you - and we sent out a search party to no avail - was whether statute has ever mandated a medical intervention. Are there any procedures or treatments which doctors are required to provide by law regardless of a patient's or guardian/parent's wishes?
Would be interested in your comments on this.
(as for your grand theory, I would put that in the container marked "bleeding obvious") Price goes up, yield goes down. Basic maths.
New dwelling completions: About 85% private sector, 14% Housing Association and 1% Local Authority.
A v Head Teacher and Governors of Lord Grey School [2006] UKHL 14 (House of Lords)
24 The Strasbourg jurisprudence, summarised above in paras 11–13, makes clear how article 2 should be interpreted. The underlying premise of the article was that all existing member states have an established system of state education. It was intended to guarantee fair and non-discriminatory access to that system by those within the jurisdiction of the respective states. The fundamental importance of education in a modern democratic state was recognised to require no less. But the guarantee is, in comparison with most other Convention guarantees, a weak one, and deliberately so. There is no right to education of a particular kind or quality, other than that prevailing in the state. There is no Convention guarantee of compliance with domestic law. There is no Convention guarantee of education at or by a particular institution. There is no Convention objection to the expulsion of a pupil from an educational institution on disciplinary grounds, unless (in the ordinary way) there is no alternative source of state education open to the pupil (as in Eren v Turkey (Application No 60856/00) (unreported) 7 February 2006 ). The test, as always under the Convention, is a highly pragmatic one, to be applied to the specific facts of the case: have the authorities of the state acted so as to deny to a pupil effective access to such educational facilities as the state provides for such pupils?
Excluding children who were not vaccinated from any sort of mainstream education would therefore seem eminently challengable under the HRA.
I was banned by No1 son from going down and helping him move into student halls when he started at University a couple of years ago. He took his Dad and his Granny instead as he felt they would be both practical and far more stoic on the day, and there was no chance of them bursting into tears and embarrassing him when it was time to say goodbye!
http://swmobilestorage.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/Container-city-1.jpg
It was a long drive home, :-(
Not sure what the immunisation rates are in the UK but we do need to get them up.
The totalitarian comment was based on the following:
* You say you don't want compulsory immunisation.
* Failing to immunise your children will therefore not become illegal.
* If something is not illegal, you should be freely able to do it
* Hold on says the State, while that's quite legal, we don't like you doing it
* State introduces quite swingeing penalties for not doing something
* Said penalties are introduced by administrative fiat, rather than the operation of the usual swings & balances of the law.
That's what I find totalitarian. The State should be indifferent between things that are not-illegal.
I would find it far more honest of you to state that you believe in compulsory immunisation and propose the introduction of a law to that effect.
Edited to add: you would be better off finding a European example, as none of the countries you cite are signatories to the EHCR.
And house prices (except in the top end cash purchase market) are driven far more by cost and availability of mortgage finance than they are by volume of stock on the market.
Rents (especially from commercial landlords) tend to be more driven by normal volume of supply and demand pressures.
So it is worth looking at the statistics to observe actual trends rather than relying on assumption.
The key to these is to populate these with people who will look after them. Park Hill in Sheffield is an example, but there are similar ones in other cities.:
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2012/dec/30/park-hill-estate
My own view is that Council tenancies should be short term (say 3-5 year leases) with no option to inherit the tenancy for children (unless they purchase via a right to buy scheme). When the tenancy expires the housing should be returned to the council, and re-allocated, with tenants who have maintained the property well, and not been a nuisance being first in the queue when re-allocation takes place. This would create an incentive to look after the neighbourhood, and would get away from the spare room subsidy issue, by reassessing the amount of space needed, and allocateing the bigger homes to those that need them.
With Grandiose's post on human rights law, I think we now have the last piece of the jigsaw.
I can understand why Labour dropped the policy announcement within 24 hours of it being trialled by press coverage.
I assume your son is a fresher and that the mittel-europa trip was his reward for gaining entry to University?
He is a sound lad, with a good sense of right and wrong, and a good cook. He will be fine in freshers week.
http://www.500kmh.com/
The claimant insisted on wearing particular items of Muslim dress. In essence she and the school could not agree on any clothing that would be acceptable to both her and the school. Just like the hypothetical MMR-less child, she was not being excluded per se (whether she was being 'constructively' excluded was open for debate in the case) but rather had she come back dressed in line with the policy she would have been admitted.
"69 I can be brief in dealing with the claim of denial of the right to education guaranteed by article 2 of the First Protocol . As your Lordships have decided today in A v Head Teacher and Governors of Lord Grey School [2006] 2 AC 363 , that article confers no right to go to any particular school. It is infringed only if the claimant is unable to obtain education from the system as a whole. In the present case, there is nothing to suggest that Shabina could not have found a suitable school if she had notified her requirements in good time to the local education authority."
If the state is still obliged to provide MMR-less children with "a suitable school" then it'll have to fund schools if they aren't otherwise available.
Not sure I'd want to live in a country that did that, myself.
Seems like an empty promise made to grab headlines and little else.
nothing was our fault
The pledge to build a million new homes over a five year term is as much a sleight of hand as Gordon promising in 2007 that Labour will have built 2 million houses over its 13 years in power.
Given that the economy will be near full recovery by 2015 such a promise is only par for the course. In the five years before the crash, dwelling completions averaged well over 200,000 per year (see post to RN below).
So Miliband is not promising anything much more than returning to a normal house build rate.
From Avery's figures, we only need to build about 50 000 per year more, to get back to that total.
Or is Ed really proposing that housing completions will be 350-400 000 per year in 2016 under Labour?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cummingtonite
Ed Miliband and Ed Balls spent so much time with Gordon Brown, the headline grabbing, but empty future housebuilding claims really are classic Brownite spin by numbers to them these days. The Conservative party should respond by simple adding up the number of houses that the last Labour Government claimed they were going to build and compare to the number they actually built while in Office for 13 years.
Any Labour party claims to be planning to invest in the UK infrastructure through housing building or our train network should be taken with a pinch of a salt. Labour are going to struggle to deliver on their other promises to reverse cuts or deliver an increase in welfare spending. They cannot afford to invest in desperately needed infrastructure in housing, transport or energy if they are going to reverse all the sound economic rebalancing being carried out by this Government in the hope of yet another quick political bounce. Labour didn't fix the roof while the sun was shining last time they were in power, this time they are hell bent on concentrating on just fixing the noisiest leaks in the hope the whole ceiling doesn't then collapse on them.
' Miliband's pledge to build a million new homes could be the game-changer he needs http://t.co/O7ntYGd76b'
And Labour's 13 year record when money was available no questions asked.
'Despite the huge building boom under Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, only 13 percent of the 2.5 million homes which rose up under their watch were built by ‘social’ landlords. This compares with almost a quarter of 3.8m homes under Margaret Thatcher and John Major’s reign. Even David Cameron appears on track to match his predecessors’ trend, in market share at least. If Labour had caught onto the coat tails of their building boom to the same degree as the Tories, almost 300,000 more social homes would be dotting this land. What a massive missed opportunity.
Whichever way you look at it Labour’s council housing halo has slipped. Investment in housing plunged under Blair and Brown to its lowest level for decades. During their first 12 months in power they spent less than in any year of Thatcher and Major’s 18-year reign. Their poverty of social housing ambition persisted throughout most of their administration. A big increase only arrived in its dying days- as a prop for builders tripped up by the financial crisis.
One council housing crown does belong firmly in Labour’s territory, though not one its grassroots members ever wanted. As these charts show, council houses and flats passed into private ownership at a far greater rate in Brown and Blair’s 13 years than under two decades of Thatcher, Major and Cameron premierships.'
If there were a budget tomorrow Labour would repeal the VAT rise, if a budget on May 8th 2015 they wouldn't unless they lost then they would
Wee Timmy, we all know Ed's housing pledge is bullshit, you can't be that gullible surely?
'Miliband is a bit of a lightweight compared to Brown. Here's Gordon at conference 2007
"So we plan to help first time buyers and we will increase house-building to 240,000 new homes a year - in places and ways that respect our green spaces and the environment. My aim by 2010 two million more homeowners than in 1997."
Ed was Brown's lackey,that's where he learnt all this fantasy stuff..
The Telegraph @Telegraph 22 Sep
Here's @Adamstoon1's take on the Labour Party Conference #Lab13 pic.twitter.com/Rxk0RAxnKf
Wooophs!
Video of Damian McBride’s @BBCNewsnight interview specc.ie/16mRwcV
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J4OBzH-NWtU
Damien claims that Robert Peston has a far closer relationship with Ed Balls than he does...So Peston and Flanders are big mates with Eddie Balls, I'm sure that doesn't influence their on screen musings at all.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2430201/Kenyan-Mall-Massacre-Off-duty-SAS-soldier-handgun-saved-100-lives.html
http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2013/sep/23/labour-ed-miliband-housebuilding-pledge
Ed's big housing pledge is even less exciting when you start to read the details...more reviews....Just another 7 years to wait....
Ed Balls has spent the past few days attempting to persuade anyone who will listen that he had nothing to do with the disgusting smear campaign carried out against Gordon Brown’s enemies by Damian McBride. Sadly, the shadow chancellor has not been particularly successful, not least because he has always seemed only too happy to take the fight to his enemies.
In his speech to the Labour conference yesterday, Mr Balls pursued this approach to the point of self-parody. With economic indicators providing daily refutation of his prophecies of doom, he was reduced to attacking not the Conservatives, but his own caricature of them. Tory policy, he insisted, was constructed by millionaires for millionaires. Only Labour cared about ordinary working people, which it would prove by increasing the minimum wage, abolishing the so-called “bedroom tax”, undoing the Tory “privatisation” of the NHS, raising taxes on bankers and rich foreign homeowners, and generally summoning the spirit of the 1945 Attlee government to make this once more a land fit for heroes. In essence, his speech can be summarised as: “Labour will be fiscally responsible. Except when it feels like spending, in which case the bankers will pay for it.”
Sorry if you think it's tiresome, but I have a point.
You want to represent a constituency that, as you say, will see both potential benefits and potential negatives in large measure, the balance between the two probably changing depending on constituents' location. Yet you sit on the fence and twiddle your thumbs, at exactly the same time Labour as a whole are.
HS2 doesn't exactly get many mentions on your blog, and when it does, it's the worryingly stupid "And I’m tempted to wonder whether we should be spending £40 billion on HS2 with a view to benefiting in 2030, rather than, say, 20 projects of £100 million each, easing bottle necks all over the country here and now, with the balance used (for non-infrastructure projects)", without considering what these magical £100 million projects are, and quite how they'd happen 'here and now' with all the other improvements going on such as electrification to Derby and Nottingham. It shows a rather concerning lack of knowledge about the problems facing the network.
If you (and the people you talk to) think there are problems with the viaduct, business centre et al, now's the time to speak out about it. You're their ex-MP, a candidate at the next election, and still write a newsletter for constituents. You have some influence. There's a consultation going on at the moment until January, and input from anyone in your position would be extremely helpful, on either side of the debate.
http://www.hs2.org.uk/phase-two/route-consultation/document-library
HS2 is going to be the biggest thing to happen in the constituency for many a year. The consultations are a vital time to get opinions across and get alterations designed in before more money is spent. Maybe you're doing this already?
AND
the recognition (which is, seemingly, counter-intuitive to those in Whitehall) that the way to create much more 'affordable' housing is to start building homes at 1930's densities on farming land costing £4-20k/acre rather than on tiny pockets of 'brownfield' land costing >£1 million acre.
If 200,000 new 2-3/acre homes were built each year, costing £200k or so each (since the land was not artificially inflated by the current impossibility in obtaining planning consent) then the price of the slums now being built would plummet, so lowering ALL housing prices and ensuring that young people can afford to buy.
I read recently that the cost of an average home today is £165k or so and that, had houses merely following average house price inflation since 1945 (or so - I forget exactly when, but it was when planning laws became onerous), they would be worth £60k.
Which is a truly damning indictment of the effect that nationalisation of new housing supply - (through planning laws) have produced: rationing, shortages - and rampant inflation.
If you MUST have 450k new people entering the UK every year, you need >250k houses to home them - and that is simply not possible with Green Belt restrictions on new building. In addition, the newly-built homes are small, dark, over-crowded and have minimal or no parking spaces - the perfect definition of a slum.
Lord alone knows how we arrived at such a situation - too few homes, which are far too small, dark and tightly packed, sold at outrageous prices, in places where people do NOT want to live - all in the name of 'affordability'.
Truly, Whitehall/Westminster/Downing St/Council HQ and Town Halls could not organise a children's tree house, let alone C21st housing for 65+ million people.