The Reform revolution looks somewhat anemic this morning. If you can’t turn out a big protest vote at times like this, the general election is going to be challenging.
The Reform revolution looks somewhat anemic this morning. If you can’t turn out a big protest vote at times like this, the general election is going to be challenging.
That’s a claim that won’t have aged well, by the day’s end.
Is it? Obviously they’ll turn over a lot of Tory council seats. But confronted with a real opponent they obviously struggle. The LibDems would have won by more than 6.
Err, there’s talk that Labour will fail to hold a single seat in Durham! A swing of 17.4%, in one of Labour’s safest seats, is big.
And yet the obvious conclusion overnight is that Reform are beatable. I’m old enough to remember when Milliband won a lot of council seats in 2011.
The debate is whether Reform are beatable or unbeatable? Jeez!
I think they're just totally boxed in and socially incapable of squaring the circle.
Why? The big swing in Runcorn was Labour to Reform and in the Mayoral elections and council election results in so far that has also been the trend.
The Conservative vote is down on 2021 yes but that was the height of the Boris bounce, on 2024 and the last GE it is largely static
Er, halved, to be precise. But for an honourable reason - tactical voting to (nearly) keep Reform out. I wonder how to "rejoin EU" candidate feels this morning? Or indeed the Lib Dem and Liberal candidates.
The Reform revolution looks somewhat anemic this morning. If you can’t turn out a big protest vote at times like this, the general election is going to be challenging.
The Reform revolution looks somewhat anemic this morning. If you can’t turn out a big protest vote at times like this, the general election is going to be challenging.
hmmm - this was a safe seat.
Election Year
Labour
Reform UK
Conservative
Green
Liberal Democrat
Liberal
Social Democratic Party
2019 (Notional)
48.8%
4.8%
36.8%
2.9%
6.7%
–
–
2024
52.9%
18.1%
16.0%
6.4%
5.1%
1.1%
0.3%
2025 (By-election)
38.7%
38.7%
–
–
–
–
–
Do we think by-election conditions was more favourable to Reform or Labour? I think a case could be made for either. More motivation to give the government a kicking (though, motivation to stop Reform?), but Labour voters perhaps are the sort of people more likely to turn out in a by-election (how times change...). And then there's the resource issue. Lib Dems excellent in these conditions. Is it the same for Reform? I'm not so sure.
As an aside, good to see the OMLRP beating the English Democrats (represented by the first leader of the Brexit Party, as it happens). I will buy Alan a pint next time I see him in the pub.
I don’t envy Labour but the clear message from his support at the last GE and before was that people are done with austerity. To double down on it whilst doing stuff that really upsets middle England, like the war on nature, has been politics at its poorest.
How can austerity end without raising taxes which are already at a high level?
Growth. Essentially, it can't. We can't afford the level of welfare we're currently paying for - we've basically got UBI for anyone who can pass a PIP and keeping anyone over 65 in clover.
Which party is going to be brave enough to end the triple lock ? My answer none .
It's not just the state pension, public sector pensions need a 30-40% haircut too. In too many areas we're living well beyond our means and our welfare state is far, far beyond a safety net. Cut a million people from state employment to take us back to 2017, taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers, merge NI and income tax so that non-working income is taxed at the same rate as working income, cut to £2k the cash ISA allowance, push through a 30-40% haircut for defined benefit pensions (even for people currently receiving them), introduce much, much tougher criteria to receive disability benefits and exclude all but 5% of the most serious mental health cases by default. The rest can go back to work or live on £450 per month or whatever UC is for unemployed people. Also get rid of UC, move back to the old system if JSA and ESA, UC is an experiment that hasn't worked, it's just encouraged people to game the system worse than ever.
I think if Labour started that programme today by the end of the parliament we could be in a position to actually pay front line service staff more and attract better quality candidates for teachers, police, nurses etc...
What we have now is an underfunded and hugely over funded state at the same time it's literally the worst of both worlds.
There's no way a haircut to built up public sector pension entitlements would survive a court challenge. Some final salary public sector pensions were too generous, but those days are gone now (although the less generous career average DB pensions are still a draw). Still live recipients of those generous pensions, of course, but I don't think there's much to be done about that.
Cutting future pensions to be earned could work but only with substantial pay increases in many areas. I've looked at civil service roles a few times, but the pay is laughable in tech/science roles, coupled with the insistence of starting new entrants on the bottom of the scale. There's a post I looked at recently that had a range of. £55-£70k. £70k or even £65k would have had me apply, but the guidance was very clear it would be bottom of scale for me coming from outside and the path to pay progression was highly opaque. It was written in some ways as a more senior role, with more line management duties than I have at present, but would have been a pay cut for me. A the same time, I saw a 'lead python developer's post at the same place with the same pay range, which really is ridiculous. If they won't compete, they're not going to get good people and will end up spending more than funding a post properly - either lots of turnover as people gain experience and the leave or someone really mediocre who sits there doing not a great deal.
As a natural Thatcherite, heavily taxed business owner and wealth creator, I want to... thank you for your measured response to such an ill informed rant.
Anyone throwing around suggestions about taking away existing accrued pensions doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.
Why is it always people who have done so well out of the law of contract who make these kind of suggestions about other people's rights ?
I think they're just totally boxed in and socially incapable of squaring the circle.
Why? The big swing in Runcorn was Labour to Reform and in the Mayoral elections and council election results in so far that has also been the trend.
The Conservative vote is down on 2021 yes but that was the height of the Boris bounce, on 2024 and the last GE it is largely static
Er, halved, to be precise. But for an honourable reason - tactical voting to (nearly) keep Reform out. I wonder how to "rejoin EU" candidate feels this morning? Or indeed the Lib Dem and Liberal candidates.
Hm. I suspect those individuals feel pleased to have represented their cause. I'm no particular fan of our electoral system, but if we must have it it's only going to work if people vote for the party they most want, rather than the party they dislike second-least. And practically, it makes no odds to the likelihood of rejoining the EU if Reform have 5 or 6 MPs; it makes a massive difference if thousands of people are voting for a 'Rejoin EU' candidate even if that candidate is unsuccessful. As we saw the other way around 10 years ago. As it happens, it's quite a fringe position in Runcorn and Helsby. But still.
It seems to me that claiming these results aren’t that good for Reform (whose average vote share, so far, is 39%), is whistling to keep one’s spirits up.
It seems to me that claiming these results aren’t that good for Reform (whose average vote share, so far, is 39%), is whistling to keep one’s spirits up.
I agree.
I’ve found some of the takes on here to be quite odd this morning.
I don’t actually want a Reform advance, but I have to accept it’s been a very good result for them so far. If we’re debating that they’re beatable - of course they are. But it doesn’t mean that they’re not doing well.
It seems to me that claiming these results aren’t that good for Reform (whose average vote share, so far, is 39%), is whistling to keep one’s spirits up.
You have to keep your pecker up somehow at times like these.
I don’t envy Labour but the clear message from his support at the last GE and before was that people are done with austerity. To double down on it whilst doing stuff that really upsets middle England, like the war on nature, has been politics at its poorest.
How can austerity end without raising taxes which are already at a high level?
Growth. Essentially, it can't. We can't afford the level of welfare we're currently paying for - we've basically got UBI for anyone who can pass a PIP and keeping anyone over 65 in clover.
Which party is going to be brave enough to end the triple lock ? My answer none .
It's not just the state pension, public sector pensions need a 30-40% haircut too. In too many areas we're living well beyond our means and our welfare state is far, far beyond a safety net. Cut a million people from state employment to take us back to 2017, taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers, merge NI and income tax so that non-working income is taxed at the same rate as working income, cut to £2k the cash ISA allowance, push through a 30-40% haircut for defined benefit pensions (even for people currently receiving them), introduce much, much tougher criteria to receive disability benefits and exclude all but 5% of the most serious mental health cases by default. The rest can go back to work or live on £450 per month or whatever UC is for unemployed people. Also get rid of UC, move back to the old system if JSA and ESA, UC is an experiment that hasn't worked, it's just encouraged people to game the system worse than ever.
I think if Labour started that programme today by the end of the parliament we could be in a position to actually pay front line service staff more and attract better quality candidates for teachers, police, nurses etc...
What we have now is an underfunded and hugely over funded state at the same time it's literally the worst of both worlds.
There's no way a haircut to built up public sector pension entitlements would survive a court challenge. Some final salary public sector pensions were too generous, but those days are gone now (although the less generous career average DB pensions are still a draw). Still live recipients of those generous pensions, of course, but I don't think there's much to be done about that.
Cutting future pensions to be earned could work but only with substantial pay increases in many areas. I've looked at civil service roles a few times, but the pay is laughable in tech/science roles, coupled with the insistence of starting new entrants on the bottom of the scale. There's a post I looked at recently that had a range of. £55-£70k. £70k or even £65k would have had me apply, but the guidance was very clear it would be bottom of scale for me coming from outside and the path to pay progression was highly opaque. It was written in some ways as a more senior role, with more line management duties than I have at present, but would have been a pay cut for me. A the same time, I saw a 'lead python developer's post at the same place with the same pay range, which really is ridiculous. If they won't compete, they're not going to get good people and will end up spending more than funding a post properly - either lots of turnover as people gain experience and the leave or someone really mediocre who sits there doing not a great deal.
Here in .ac.uk we're trying to hire 'junior' developers just now (but with a job description very much not 'junior') with a pay scale that starts juuuust above a LIDL till assistant. It's getting to be quite embarrassing.
The last person we hired quit after about a month when they found another similar 'junior' role for 10k more, coupled with realising there was really no likely career progression in-post.
Seems to be the tories and Labour haven’t quite grasped the mood out there - seemingly continuing in the same way they have for decades and changing nothing.
Starmer needs to stop the “smash the gangs” rubbish as quite clearly it’s making no difference. Reeves needs to go. And we need to start having an honest conversation about the NHS and whether there is a “better way”.
Badenoch - well, she’s quite useless. She won’t be around for much longer I think.
Apart from that, really fascinating time in politics
Here's the problem - Labour will rightly start quoting statistics at people showing how many extra GP appointments they have created. Whilst I have no doubt that statistically that is true, people's lived experience is far worse.
What Labour seem to have blissfully forgotten in office is that statistics are not reality - they disguise reality. So many people can't see a GP and the queue for a scan to get onto a waiting list is in itself lengthy. So when they are they told that actually we're added another half a million GP appointments actually, they get rightly insulted.
My local doctors has gone to online triage, and when I tried to book an appointment last month, I was asked a series of vague multi choice questions about my symptoms, (which were flu like/covid-ish I guess).When I answered that I felt drowsy sometimes , it said I had to phone the doctors or 100, so I just logged off and had a lemsip.
Did this count as one of the millions of new GP appointments I wonder? Shows I wasn’t that ill I suppose
Do you mean 111? I think 100 is still the telephone operator. Good job it wasn't the Speaking Clock. I used to get a lot of speaking clock when I worked in a company which developed telephone exchanges - it was the standard outgoing call test number.
In my experience 111 is very good. It sounds as though the triage worked, though !
I think @Razedabode 's stuff about "start a conversation", "what alternatives" etc is just going round in the same old circles that has been the do-nothing rhetorical diversion for 3 or 4 decades.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
Woudn’t they be liable for business rates in that case? Or are “small businesses” somehow exempt from those?
I think they're just totally boxed in and socially incapable of squaring the circle.
Why? The big swing in Runcorn was Labour to Reform and in the Mayoral elections and council election results in so far that has also been the trend.
The Conservative vote is down on 2021 yes but that was the height of the Boris bounce, on 2024 and the last GE it is largely static
Er, halved, to be precise. But for an honourable reason - tactical voting to (nearly) keep Reform out. I wonder how to "rejoin EU" candidate feels this morning? Or indeed the Lib Dem and Liberal candidates.
Says the guy who did his best to thwart the LibDems winning Didcot and Wantage….
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
And HMRC has been a law unto itself ever since it took over the Inland Revenue in one of Gordon Brown's less publicised master strokes.
You’ve got that the wrong way round Customs and Excise always were a law unto themselves.
inland revenue decided they would adopt the same attitude on merger which is where the problems come from.
It wasn't a merger (it never is), it was a takeover.
I think they're just totally boxed in and socially incapable of squaring the circle.
Why? The big swing in Runcorn was Labour to Reform and in the Mayoral elections and council election results in so far that has also been the trend.
The Conservative vote is down on 2021 yes but that was the height of the Boris bounce, on 2024 and the last GE it is largely static
Er, halved, to be precise. But for an honourable reason - tactical voting to (nearly) keep Reform out. I wonder how to "rejoin EU" candidate feels this morning? Or indeed the Lib Dem and Liberal candidates.
Hm. I suspect those individuals feel pleased to have represented their cause. I'm no particular fan of our electoral system, but if we must have it it's only going to work if people vote for the party they most want, rather than the party they dislike second-least. And practically, it makes no odds to the likelihood of rejoining the EU if Reform have 5 or 6 MPs; it makes a massive difference if thousands of people are voting for a 'Rejoin EU' candidate even if that candidate is unsuccessful. As we saw the other way around 10 years ago. As it happens, it's quite a fringe position in Runcorn and Helsby. But still.
The age old Labour entitlement: that Lib Dems belong to them and voting for anyone but the one true faith is childish impertinence. It’s all a bit “Ukrainians are just Russians with a funny accent”.
I live in a very well to do part of the country and it is quite shocking that the Tesco Express in my nearest town now has the round the clock security and the check out is protected by floor to ceiling caging. I don't know if that is just a nationwide roll out by Tesco or that they genuinely think that things are so out of hand that they are in danger of getting stuck up like a cornershop in Baltimore aka The Wire.
It has yet to happen in Cannock despite the Tesco express in question being next to a very rough council estate.
I have a local Coop and Tesco across the road from each other (spine road into town through housing areas) - pre-bypass it was the A38.
The Coop significantly reduced their stock range last year they say due partly to shoplifting. Whilst Tesco don't have a cage like a USA penitentiary, they do have a door opened from the inside when it is dark and have a look at you before you get in - at the moment that is from perhaps 9pm to 10pm.
Causes? I think neglect of the public realm and of society. Cameron & co cut Policing expenditure by 20%, just as they did for Defence expenditure. Cuts to Council expenditure have been much more - you can see that just in Google Streetview by looking at the same piece of pavement in 2022 and 2008, and see how it has deteriorated.
As a Government, they lived off the capital from the past, and passed their costs on to the future, and did little or nothing themselves.
Here we had all our community policemen vanish in around 2015, and our local police stations (for a town of 30k, and another of 45k). And much real world police experience was lost with the 20% cuts.
The decision to tolerate petty crimes, and not act on them, have also been problematic. That is shop lifting, but also ASBO. I think County Lines are also perhaps a factor in towns and small cities.
The termination of many programmes such as Sure Start is also important - that was very good.
From a philosophical point of view I'd point to the loss of aspiration to a better society after the 2010 election, such as in the outright removal of any targeted commitment to improve road safety. We need the Kinnock-ish soundbite more firmly in Sir Keir's head: this Labour Government is a moral crusade, or it is nothing.
Moral crusades won't work - except as motivation. There is a dislike in politics for actually doing things. Or even allowing things to happen.
Consider the EV revolution.
Musk recognised (before he jumped a shark, while jumping over another shark) that the EV change over was an inflection point - a chance to *change* who led the market. The US and European manufactures refused to listen. Even after Merkle got Tesla to build in Germany, the slumber continued. Tesla went meaaaaahhhh. So the Chinese picked up the baton.
This was because
1) Talking about building EVs 2) Philosophising about EVs 3) Giving speeches about Evs
doesn't get you EVs
Building factories for batteries and cars that are measured in square kilometres does.
Then consider the BritVolt comedy - a farce involving no ability, or real intent, to do anything. Except farm subsidy money.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
The Tories performance in Hexham/(very) rural Northumberland is looking absolutely terrific compared to their other councils at the moment. Take Northumberland out Con 26 (-10) and it means they're 11 (-52) elsewhere !
Both myself and @RochdalePioneers were saying yesterday that the enthusiasm gap was going to defeat Labour in the byelection. I am quite pleased it was so close to be honest. It suggests to me that there is still a ceiling on the Reform vote.
We will get a better picture from the local elections today. Again, I fear that low turnouts will exaggerate the effect of the Reform vote, just as it used to for UKIP in the EU elections. With a 30% turnout every voter who can be arsed to turn out is worth 3.
The Tories are in serious trouble, there is no doubt about that. What I am not seeing is the Cameron/Osborne type figure who can lead them back. It is the complete lack of talent that is killing them and feeding Reform. Changing the leader for the sake of it yet again is only an answer if there is a much better alternative in the wings. Cleverly? Genuinely not sure.
I'm not sure if Cleverly would take it.
Might his reasoning not be unlike say Michelle Obama's - do I want a bucket of shit tipped on my head every day for the next 5 or 10 years?
Cleverly will run for London Mayor in 2028, he now has more chance of beating Sadiq Khan there than he does of becoming next Tory leader, let alone then beating Starmer and Farage to become PM
The Tories performance in Hexham/rural Northumberland is looking absolutely terrific compared to their other councils at the moment. Take Northumberland out Con 26 (-10) and it means they're 11 (-52) elsewhere !
I drove through Hexham yesterday. It looked pretty prosperous round there to me.
It feels like they've tilted England on it's side and all the fascists have rolled down towards the East coast
Reform voters are not fascists.
A few of them might be, but to label them all so is just offensive nonsense.
The 80s music discussion prompted me to consider that they're actually more like the right of the 80s Conservative Party. (Which also contained the odd fascist.)
Had a voter last night (in our council election) say that he'd never vote for a non-white candidate (which was a problem for him as Reform put up a Chinese-origin candidate) - the first time I've encountered of relaxed, outspoken racism. TBF also lots of personal votes for our (Asian-born) candidate, several of whom didn't normally vote Labour. One just has to face down the racists.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
So what? My “village” has increased in size by around 50% in the last 10 years. If I don’t like it I can move to a more rural place. It’s just the nature of the beast.
The Reform revolution looks somewhat anemic this morning. If you can’t turn out a big protest vote at times like this, the general election is going to be challenging.
That’s a claim that won’t have aged well, by the day’s end.
Is it? Obviously they’ll turn over a lot of Tory council seats. But confronted with a real opponent they obviously struggle. The LibDems would have won by more than 6.
Err, there’s talk that Labour will fail to hold a single seat in Durham! A swing of 17.4%, in one of Labour’s safest seats, is big.
And yet the obvious conclusion overnight is that Reform are beatable. I’m old enough to remember when Milliband won a lot of council seats in 2011.
The debate is whether Reform are beatable or unbeatable? Jeez!
I don't even see them as a threat. As Alastair Campbell says no one is more responsible for todays problems than Farage yet no one ever challenges him on it
What is believed to have been intended to be a Soviet Venera probe failed to break orbit having been launched a week or so after Venera 8 in 1972. And has been stuck in orbit ever since. Expected to make an uncontrolled reentry next week, could impact anywhere between 51 north and 51 south...
Should break up nearly completely. A propellant tank or 2 might make the surface. But the chances of that hitting anyone is basically zero.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
The population of the UK has increased by 10% since 2010. Good to see you are doing your share, but that is what is needed across the country, not something that should be seen as unusual.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
What's the point of building houses if they get bought up as second homes?
According to the Government, in 2021/2 there were 809,000 second homes in England. Reducing that number seems a very sensible way forward to me.
I see Andrea 'give the finger' Jenkyns' latest genius idea is to house migrants in tents rather than hotels. I'm sure Kent residents will feel a lot better when they're surrounded by migrant camps, though easier to burn down I guess.
I don’t envy Labour but the clear message from his support at the last GE and before was that people are done with austerity. To double down on it whilst doing stuff that really upsets middle England, like the war on nature, has been politics at its poorest.
How can austerity end without raising taxes which are already at a high level?
Growth. Essentially, it can't. We can't afford the level of welfare we're currently paying for - we've basically got UBI for anyone who can pass a PIP and keeping anyone over 65 in clover.
Which party is going to be brave enough to end the triple lock ? My answer none .
It's not just the state pension, public sector pensions need a 30-40% haircut too. In too many areas we're living well beyond our means and our welfare state is far, far beyond a safety net. Cut a million people from state employment to take us back to 2017, taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers, merge NI and income tax so that non-working income is taxed at the same rate as working income, cut to £2k the cash ISA allowance, push through a 30-40% haircut for defined benefit pensions (even for people currently receiving them), introduce much, much tougher criteria to receive disability benefits and exclude all but 5% of the most serious mental health cases by default. The rest can go back to work or live on £450 per month or whatever UC is for unemployed people. Also get rid of UC, move back to the old system if JSA and ESA, UC is an experiment that hasn't worked, it's just encouraged people to game the system worse than ever.
I think if Labour started that programme today by the end of the parliament we could be in a position to actually pay front line service staff more and attract better quality candidates for teachers, police, nurses etc...
What we have now is an underfunded and hugely over funded state at the same time it's literally the worst of both worlds.
There's no way a haircut to built up public sector pension entitlements would survive a court challenge. Some final salary public sector pensions were too generous, but those days are gone now (although the less generous career average DB pensions are still a draw). Still live recipients of those generous pensions, of course, but I don't think there's much to be done about that.
Cutting future pensions to be earned could work but only with substantial pay increases in many areas. I've looked at civil service roles a few times, but the pay is laughable in tech/science roles, coupled with the insistence of starting new entrants on the bottom of the scale. There's a post I looked at recently that had a range of. £55-£70k. £70k or even £65k would have had me apply, but the guidance was very clear it would be bottom of scale for me coming from outside and the path to pay progression was highly opaque. It was written in some ways as a more senior role, with more line management duties than I have at present, but would have been a pay cut for me. A the same time, I saw a 'lead python developer's post at the same place with the same pay range, which really is ridiculous. If they won't compete, they're not going to get good people and will end up spending more than funding a post properly - either lots of turnover as people gain experience and the leave or someone really mediocre who sits there doing not a great deal.
As a natural Thatcherite, heavily taxed business owner and wealth creator, I want to... thank you for your measured response to such an ill informed rant.
Anyone throwing around suggestions about taking away existing accrued pensions doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.
Why is it always people who have done so well out of the law of contract who make these kind of suggestions about other people's rights ?
It's yet another "do it to Julia". We all sort of know that the status quo isn't working, but we all want someone else to beat the brunt of making things add up.
(And yes, it would have been better had different decisions been taken about pensions in previous decades. But they weren't, and the country has had the benefits of the short-termism, so now we have the costs.)
I see Andrea 'give the finger' Jenkyns' latest genius idea is to house migrants in tents rather than hotels. I'm sure Kent residents will feel a lot better when they're surrounded by migrant camps, though easier to burn down I guess.
Lots of wasted tents after Glastonbury. I'm sure the Eavis's will be on board.
I see Andrea 'give the finger' Jenkyns' latest genius idea is to house migrants in tents rather than hotels. I'm sure Kent residents will feel a lot better when they're surrounded by migrant camps, though easier to burn down I guess.
Seems to be the tories and Labour haven’t quite grasped the mood out there - seemingly continuing in the same way they have for decades and changing nothing.
Starmer needs to stop the “smash the gangs” rubbish as quite clearly it’s making no difference. Reeves needs to go. And we need to start having an honest conversation about the NHS and whether there is a “better way”.
Badenoch - well, she’s quite useless. She won’t be around for much longer I think.
Apart from that, really fascinating time in politics
Here's the problem - Labour will rightly start quoting statistics at people showing how many extra GP appointments they have created. Whilst I have no doubt that statistically that is true, people's lived experience is far worse.
What Labour seem to have blissfully forgotten in office is that statistics are not reality - they disguise reality. So many people can't see a GP and the queue for a scan to get onto a waiting list is in itself lengthy. So when they are they told that actually we're added another half a million GP appointments actually, they get rightly insulted.
There are something like 350 million gp appointments per year....adding half a million is a rise of 0.14 % hardly a drop in the ocean
The Tories performance in Hexham/rural Northumberland is looking absolutely terrific compared to their other councils at the moment. Take Northumberland out Con 26 (-10) and it means they're 11 (-52) elsewhere !
I drove through Hexham yesterday. It looked pretty prosperous round there to me.
I don’t envy Labour but the clear message from his support at the last GE and before was that people are done with austerity. To double down on it whilst doing stuff that really upsets middle England, like the war on nature, has been politics at its poorest.
How can austerity end without raising taxes which are already at a high level?
Growth. Essentially, it can't. We can't afford the level of welfare we're currently paying for - we've basically got UBI for anyone who can pass a PIP and keeping anyone over 65 in clover.
Which party is going to be brave enough to end the triple lock ? My answer none .
It's not just the state pension, public sector pensions need a 30-40% haircut too. In too many areas we're living well beyond our means and our welfare state is far, far beyond a safety net. Cut a million people from state employment to take us back to 2017, taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers, merge NI and income tax so that non-working income is taxed at the same rate as working income, cut to £2k the cash ISA allowance, push through a 30-40% haircut for defined benefit pensions (even for people currently receiving them), introduce much, much tougher criteria to receive disability benefits and exclude all but 5% of the most serious mental health cases by default. The rest can go back to work or live on £450 per month or whatever UC is for unemployed people. Also get rid of UC, move back to the old system if JSA and ESA, UC is an experiment that hasn't worked, it's just encouraged people to game the system worse than ever.
I think if Labour started that programme today by the end of the parliament we could be in a position to actually pay front line service staff more and attract better quality candidates for teachers, police, nurses etc...
What we have now is an underfunded and hugely over funded state at the same time it's literally the worst of both worlds.
There's no way a haircut to built up public sector pension entitlements would survive a court challenge. Some final salary public sector pensions were too generous, but those days are gone now (although the less generous career average DB pensions are still a draw). Still live recipients of those generous pensions, of course, but I don't think there's much to be done about that.
Cutting future pensions to be earned could work but only with substantial pay increases in many areas. I've looked at civil service roles a few times, but the pay is laughable in tech/science roles, coupled with the insistence of starting new entrants on the bottom of the scale. There's a post I looked at recently that had a range of. £55-£70k. £70k or even £65k would have had me apply, but the guidance was very clear it would be bottom of scale for me coming from outside and the path to pay progression was highly opaque. It was written in some ways as a more senior role, with more line management duties than I have at present, but would have been a pay cut for me. A the same time, I saw a 'lead python developer's post at the same place with the same pay range, which really is ridiculous. If they won't compete, they're not going to get good people and will end up spending more than funding a post properly - either lots of turnover as people gain experience and the leave or someone really mediocre who sits there doing not a great deal.
More likely, the post remains unfilled and instead a Contractor is brought in on £800-£1000 per day.
I did once work out how much more it cost the government to employ me rather than just paying the market rate - it's something like 300%. That's where the savings can be made. But the Mail would throw a total hissy fit and it can't be done.
What is believed to have been intended to be a Soviet Venera probe failed to break orbit having been launched a week or so after Venera 8 in 1972. And has been stuck in orbit ever since. Expected to make an uncontrolled reentry next week, could impact anywhere between 51 north and 51 south...
Should break up nearly completely. A propellant tank or 2 might make the surface. But the chances of that hitting anyone is basically zero.
Its a million to one chance that it hits someone, but as the great man wrote, million to one shots happen pretty much every time.
I see Andrea 'give the finger' Jenkyns' latest genius idea is to house migrants in tents rather than hotels. I'm sure Kent residents will feel a lot better when they're surrounded by migrant camps, though easier to burn down I guess.
Lots of wasted tents after Glastonbury. I'm sure the Eavis's will be on board.
Are they not left, collected and donated to charity? Thats what I understood.
I see Andrea 'give the finger' Jenkyns' latest genius idea is to house migrants in tents rather than hotels. I'm sure Kent residents will feel a lot better when they're surrounded by migrant camps, though easier to burn down I guess.
I know it is radical but how about we actually fund the courts to process them quickly, within a month, so that we don't have to house them for 3 years whilst we ban them from working? Just a thought.
The Reform revolution looks somewhat anemic this morning. If you can’t turn out a big protest vote at times like this, the general election is going to be challenging.
hmmm - this was a safe seat.
Election Year
Labour
Reform UK
Conservative
Green
Liberal Democrat
Liberal
Social Democratic Party
2019 (Notional)
48.8%
4.8%
36.8%
2.9%
6.7%
–
–
2024
52.9%
18.1%
16.0%
6.4%
5.1%
1.1%
0.3%
2025 (By-election)
38.7%
38.7%
–
–
–
–
–
Look at that Conservative fall, though. Remove the Faragists, and they would be in with a decent shout at a by-election caused by the previous MP punching a constituent.
Once again- for all the talk about Reform getting old/blue Labour voters, and for all they got Reform over the line, they are just the icing on the cake. The bulk of the cake is ex-Conservative.
I see Andrea 'give the finger' Jenkyns' latest genius idea is to house migrants in tents rather than hotels. I'm sure Kent residents will feel a lot better when they're surrounded by migrant camps, though easier to burn down I guess.
I know it is radical but how about we actually fund the courts to process them quickly, within a month, so that we don't have to house them for 3 years whilst we ban them from working? Just a thought.
R4 Reunion covering Jean Charles De Menezes, 20 years this July.
A careers lesson in how demonstrating utter incompetence, and being totally compromised, can lead to rapid promotion in the Met.
PC Savage in action. 'The suspect was walking about being brown in a built up area during the rush hour.'
That's a disgraceful comment.
It's Chief Constable Sir Ronald Savage, OBE, DipSHit, to you.
The proud recipient for the 6th year running of the Met Police Award for Minority Community Relations.
Also proud of his work on Operation Darkie - the campaign to arrest people for ordering their coffee "black" {narrator: 97% of those arrested were black people on a Black Lives Matter demo}.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
Further proof that lawyers are the best of humanity (but what is about lawyers and shoes??)
A DWF solicitor had been given two bravery awards after he saved a man’s life by jumping into the Thames and pulling him to shore, RolIOnFriday can reveal.
Mike Cooper, an insurance specialist from the UK now based in Sydney, was jogging by the river last September after meeting clients in London when he encountered a small crowd of people.
“I wondered what was going on - I'll be honest, I thought, ‘Bloody London. It's some more street theatre getting in the way’”.
But when Cooper looked over, he saw there was a man floating face down in the water. The bystanders told Cooper they either couldn’t swim or weren't strong enough to reach him in the choppy water, and had been trying to get the man’s attention and throw him a buoyancy aid instead.
“There were steps going down, so I didn't do a full swan dive in or anything like that”, said Cooper. (He also didn’t do a Baywatch-style shirt-rip, prompting a friend to tell him afterwards: “Well, you bottled it then”.)
“For some reason, I don't know why, I took my shoes off. I think I was psyching myself up because I'm not a brilliant swimmer”.
“It was quite rough, though he was only about 15 meters out at the most”, said Cooper. “I got about two mouthfuls of the Thames and can confirm it is disgusting.”
“When I got to him I was a bit worried myself, so I forgot all the stuff about putting a hand under the chin, and, because I used to play rugby (badly), I basically got him in a scrum and kicked, hauling him back.”
I don’t envy Labour but the clear message from his support at the last GE and before was that people are done with austerity. To double down on it whilst doing stuff that really upsets middle England, like the war on nature, has been politics at its poorest.
How can austerity end without raising taxes which are already at a high level?
Growth. Essentially, it can't. We can't afford the level of welfare we're currently paying for - we've basically got UBI for anyone who can pass a PIP and keeping anyone over 65 in clover.
Which party is going to be brave enough to end the triple lock ? My answer none .
It's not just the state pension, public sector pensions need a 30-40% haircut too. In too many areas we're living well beyond our means and our welfare state is far, far beyond a safety net. Cut a million people from state employment to take us back to 2017, taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers, merge NI and income tax so that non-working income is taxed at the same rate as working income, cut to £2k the cash ISA allowance, push through a 30-40% haircut for defined benefit pensions (even for people currently receiving them), introduce much, much tougher criteria to receive disability benefits and exclude all but 5% of the most serious mental health cases by default. The rest can go back to work or live on £450 per month or whatever UC is for unemployed people. Also get rid of UC, move back to the old system if JSA and ESA, UC is an experiment that hasn't worked, it's just encouraged people to game the system worse than ever.
I think if Labour started that programme today by the end of the parliament we could be in a position to actually pay front line service staff more and attract better quality candidates for teachers, police, nurses etc...
What we have now is an underfunded and hugely over funded state at the same time it's literally the worst of both worlds.
There's no way a haircut to built up public sector pension entitlements would survive a court challenge. Some final salary public sector pensions were too generous, but those days are gone now (although the less generous career average DB pensions are still a draw). Still live recipients of those generous pensions, of course, but I don't think there's much to be done about that.
Cutting future pensions to be earned could work but only with substantial pay increases in many areas. I've looked at civil service roles a few times, but the pay is laughable in tech/science roles, coupled with the insistence of starting new entrants on the bottom of the scale. There's a post I looked at recently that had a range of. £55-£70k. £70k or even £65k would have had me apply, but the guidance was very clear it would be bottom of scale for me coming from outside and the path to pay progression was highly opaque. It was written in some ways as a more senior role, with more line management duties than I have at present, but would have been a pay cut for me. A the same time, I saw a 'lead python developer's post at the same place with the same pay range, which really is ridiculous. If they won't compete, they're not going to get good people and will end up spending more than funding a post properly - either lots of turnover as people gain experience and the leave or someone really mediocre who sits there doing not a great deal.
More likely, the post remains unfilled and instead a Contractor is brought in on £800-£1000 per day.
I did once work out how much more it cost the government to employ me rather than just paying the market rate - it's something like 300%. That's where the savings can be made. But the Mail would throw a total hissy fit and it can't be done.
Staffing the NHS properly, ending the agency stuff, would saves many, many billions.
Not just in direct costs. Every time a relative has been in hospital, it's been a parade of different staff - often on the same day. Continuity of care is a problem with this style of working.
Mind you, it might well lead to industrial action, since it would reduce incomes of some.
The Reform revolution looks somewhat anemic this morning. If you can’t turn out a big protest vote at times like this, the general election is going to be challenging.
Alastair Campbell worth listening to this morning. He's right about what's wrong with Labour and certainly labour's selling of itself
Or selling off itself to various bidders.
It's not just that he lacks courage it's that he makes it obvious. Where does he stand on anything? For a Party like labour that should be easy to answer but it isn't
I don’t envy Labour but the clear message from his support at the last GE and before was that people are done with austerity. To double down on it whilst doing stuff that really upsets middle England, like the war on nature, has been politics at its poorest.
How can austerity end without raising taxes which are already at a high level?
Growth. Essentially, it can't. We can't afford the level of welfare we're currently paying for - we've basically got UBI for anyone who can pass a PIP and keeping anyone over 65 in clover.
Which party is going to be brave enough to end the triple lock ? My answer none .
It's not just the state pension, public sector pensions need a 30-40% haircut too. In too many areas we're living well beyond our means and our welfare state is far, far beyond a safety net. Cut a million people from state employment to take us back to 2017, taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers, merge NI and income tax so that non-working income is taxed at the same rate as working income, cut to £2k the cash ISA allowance, push through a 30-40% haircut for defined benefit pensions (even for people currently receiving them), introduce much, much tougher criteria to receive disability benefits and exclude all but 5% of the most serious mental health cases by default. The rest can go back to work or live on £450 per month or whatever UC is for unemployed people. Also get rid of UC, move back to the old system if JSA and ESA, UC is an experiment that hasn't worked, it's just encouraged people to game the system worse than ever.
I think if Labour started that programme today by the end of the parliament we could be in a position to actually pay front line service staff more and attract better quality candidates for teachers, police, nurses etc...
What we have now is an underfunded and hugely over funded state at the same time it's literally the worst of both worlds.
There's no way a haircut to built up public sector pension entitlements would survive a court challenge. Some final salary public sector pensions were too generous, but those days are gone now (although the less generous career average DB pensions are still a draw). Still live recipients of those generous pensions, of course, but I don't think there's much to be done about that.
Cutting future pensions to be earned could work but only with substantial pay increases in many areas. I've looked at civil service roles a few times, but the pay is laughable in tech/science roles, coupled with the insistence of starting new entrants on the bottom of the scale. There's a post I looked at recently that had a range of. £55-£70k. £70k or even £65k would have had me apply, but the guidance was very clear it would be bottom of scale for me coming from outside and the path to pay progression was highly opaque. It was written in some ways as a more senior role, with more line management duties than I have at present, but would have been a pay cut for me. A the same time, I saw a 'lead python developer's post at the same place with the same pay range, which really is ridiculous. If they won't compete, they're not going to get good people and will end up spending more than funding a post properly - either lots of turnover as people gain experience and the leave or someone really mediocre who sits there doing not a great deal.
Parliament is sovereign, it can pass primary legislation to mandate a haircut for db pensions. It will of course make them wildly unpopular with people who lose out but it is absolutely possible.
I've also said many times that pension contributions should be cut and salaries increased in the public sector. People want the money today, not at some nebulous point in the future. A friend of mine was contacted to apply for senior on prem cybersecurity admin but the salary is well below market rate and they make it up in the pension, the overall package isn't dissimilar to what he might get elsewhere but he can't afford the pay cut so politely declined.
But aside from that, we just have too many people doing too little in that £40-60k band in the public sector. Lots of salary collectors creating micro bureaucracies around them to justify their roles. We should sweep the lot of them away and bank the saving, reduce the deficit and bank the subsequent drop in the interest bill as gilt prices increase and yields fall.
I still have faith in my fellow person not to deliver a huge Reform victory, howsoever that is determined (UKIP had around 500 seats IIRC at one time).
I think they're just totally boxed in and socially incapable of squaring the circle.
Why? The big swing in Runcorn was Labour to Reform and in the Mayoral elections and council election results in so far that has also been the trend.
The Conservative vote is down on 2021 yes but that was the height of the Boris bounce, on 2024 and the last GE it is largely static
I'm quite content for you to sell this as a good day for the Tories if it clips Jenrick's wings.
It is not a good day for the Tories given the number of seats lost since 2021 but if the Tories still scrape most councillors ahead of Reform by this evening then Kemi will be relieved. If not Jenrick will be breathing down her neck
An interesting take from you - you have always insisted Mel Stride was nailed on if Kemi bites it.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
And yet still they sell, so people clearly can afford them.
If we build enough, they will become affordable to more people. That's the glory of the market. This is true whether we build a million 5-bedroom detacheds or a million flats (though the former would cause more reshuffling).
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
Really interesting.
On @Benpointer's mate's Cornish Cottage, the Welsh are running an action-learning experiment for us. This is tactical manipulation of the system for personal benefit. Some will defend as "permitted, so it's OK", and then defend an ineffective system as 'their voters' can exploit it. To me change on this is an obvious necessity.
On @IanB2 's casework, the first one is going to get tied up in Change of Use (unless they have been renting it out 'unofficially').
They won't get "uninhabitable" by taking out a loo - definitions are stringent. Try and get a Council Tax exemption for a rental property due to "major work" being done, and it will have to be pretty much back to the bricks before they will say yes.
They are on a version of the same cleft stick as Dominic Cummings was with the holiday let on his family's farm.
If it's a habitable chalet, its habitability convincingly proved by years of habitation, I'd say it's either ancillary to the main property and a grannexe / teenage pad, or a separate dwelling. That is probably either an extra band of Council Tax or an extra dwelling. Since Councils (OK the VOA) often define each bedroom in a HMO as a separate Band A dwelling, it may be a hiding to nothing to try and dispute that it is a dwelling if they cannot do "grannexe".
As a pragmatic answer, and if they can't grannexe it, I'd say:
- a rental as a pied a terre to eg a Dr at a local hospital would work as they would be there 5 days a week, - or to a well-behaved mature student (who would incidentally get a Council Tax exemption), - or to a one man band as an office.
Or if entrances, parking etc is suitable, sell it off as a separate dwelling. There is even a market in secondhand garden buildings.
On the conservatory, the Council are just operating the system as it stands, and the people should have known about the increase before they moved in. There is an appeal system, or they may have comeback against their solicitor or someone else.
I don’t envy Labour but the clear message from his support at the last GE and before was that people are done with austerity. To double down on it whilst doing stuff that really upsets middle England, like the war on nature, has been politics at its poorest.
How can austerity end without raising taxes which are already at a high level?
Growth. Essentially, it can't. We can't afford the level of welfare we're currently paying for - we've basically got UBI for anyone who can pass a PIP and keeping anyone over 65 in clover.
Which party is going to be brave enough to end the triple lock ? My answer none .
It's not just the state pension, public sector pensions need a 30-40% haircut too. In too many areas we're living well beyond our means and our welfare state is far, far beyond a safety net. Cut a million people from state employment to take us back to 2017, taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers, merge NI and income tax so that non-working income is taxed at the same rate as working income, cut to £2k the cash ISA allowance, push through a 30-40% haircut for defined benefit pensions (even for people currently receiving them), introduce much, much tougher criteria to receive disability benefits and exclude all but 5% of the most serious mental health cases by default. The rest can go back to work or live on £450 per month or whatever UC is for unemployed people. Also get rid of UC, move back to the old system if JSA and ESA, UC is an experiment that hasn't worked, it's just encouraged people to game the system worse than ever.
I think if Labour started that programme today by the end of the parliament we could be in a position to actually pay front line service staff more and attract better quality candidates for teachers, police, nurses etc...
What we have now is an underfunded and hugely over funded state at the same time it's literally the worst of both worlds.
There's no way a haircut to built up public sector pension entitlements would survive a court challenge. Some final salary public sector pensions were too generous, but those days are gone now (although the less generous career average DB pensions are still a draw). Still live recipients of those generous pensions, of course, but I don't think there's much to be done about that.
Cutting future pensions to be earned could work but only with substantial pay increases in many areas. I've looked at civil service roles a few times, but the pay is laughable in tech/science roles, coupled with the insistence of starting new entrants on the bottom of the scale. There's a post I looked at recently that had a range of. £55-£70k. £70k or even £65k would have had me apply, but the guidance was very clear it would be bottom of scale for me coming from outside and the path to pay progression was highly opaque. It was written in some ways as a more senior role, with more line management duties than I have at present, but would have been a pay cut for me. A the same time, I saw a 'lead python developer's post at the same place with the same pay range, which really is ridiculous. If they won't compete, they're not going to get good people and will end up spending more than funding a post properly - either lots of turnover as people gain experience and the leave or someone really mediocre who sits there doing not a great deal.
Parliament is sovereign, it can pass primary legislation to mandate a haircut for db pensions. It will of course make them wildly unpopular with people who lose out but it is absolutely possible.
I've also said many times that pension contributions should be cut and salaries increased in the public sector. People want the money today, not at some nebulous point in the future. A friend of mine was contacted to apply for senior on prem cybersecurity admin but the salary is well below market rate and they make it up in the pension, the overall package isn't dissimilar to what he might get elsewhere but he can't afford the pay cut so politely declined.
But aside from that, we just have too many people doing too little in that £40-60k band in the public sector. Lots of salary collectors creating micro bureaucracies around them to justify their roles. We should sweep the lot of them away and bank the saving, reduce the deficit and bank the subsequent drop in the interest bill as gilt prices increase and yields fall.
How would you like Parliament to impose a one-off 20% tax on all wealth?
Your proposal is about as unjust, unprecedented and (thankfully) unlikely.
(*I am most definitely not advocating that but it would at a stroke wipe out the National Debt and fund as much Defence and infrastructure spending as we could ever need.)
The Reform revolution looks somewhat anemic this morning. If you can’t turn out a big protest vote at times like this, the general election is going to be challenging.
hmmm - this was a safe seat.
Election Year
Labour
Reform UK
Conservative
Green
Liberal Democrat
Liberal
Social Democratic Party
2019 (Notional)
48.8%
4.8%
36.8%
2.9%
6.7%
–
–
2024
52.9%
18.1%
16.0%
6.4%
5.1%
1.1%
0.3%
2025 (By-election)
38.7%
38.7%
–
–
–
–
–
Look at that Conservative fall, though.
Eh?
37 percent (notional) in 2019, 16 percent last year, 7 percent yesterday.
I don’t envy Labour but the clear message from his support at the last GE and before was that people are done with austerity. To double down on it whilst doing stuff that really upsets middle England, like the war on nature, has been politics at its poorest.
How can austerity end without raising taxes which are already at a high level?
Growth. Essentially, it can't. We can't afford the level of welfare we're currently paying for - we've basically got UBI for anyone who can pass a PIP and keeping anyone over 65 in clover.
Which party is going to be brave enough to end the triple lock ? My answer none .
It's not just the state pension, public sector pensions need a 30-40% haircut too. In too many areas we're living well beyond our means and our welfare state is far, far beyond a safety net. Cut a million people from state employment to take us back to 2017, taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers, merge NI and income tax so that non-working income is taxed at the same rate as working income, cut to £2k the cash ISA allowance, push through a 30-40% haircut for defined benefit pensions (even for people currently receiving them), introduce much, much tougher criteria to receive disability benefits and exclude all but 5% of the most serious mental health cases by default. The rest can go back to work or live on £450 per month or whatever UC is for unemployed people. Also get rid of UC, move back to the old system if JSA and ESA, UC is an experiment that hasn't worked, it's just encouraged people to game the system worse than ever.
I think if Labour started that programme today by the end of the parliament we could be in a position to actually pay front line service staff more and attract better quality candidates for teachers, police, nurses etc...
What we have now is an underfunded and hugely over funded state at the same time it's literally the worst of both worlds.
There's no way a haircut to built up public sector pension entitlements would survive a court challenge. Some final salary public sector pensions were too generous, but those days are gone now (although the less generous career average DB pensions are still a draw). Still live recipients of those generous pensions, of course, but I don't think there's much to be done about that.
Cutting future pensions to be earned could work but only with substantial pay increases in many areas. I've looked at civil service roles a few times, but the pay is laughable in tech/science roles, coupled with the insistence of starting new entrants on the bottom of the scale. There's a post I looked at recently that had a range of. £55-£70k. £70k or even £65k would have had me apply, but the guidance was very clear it would be bottom of scale for me coming from outside and the path to pay progression was highly opaque. It was written in some ways as a more senior role, with more line management duties than I have at present, but would have been a pay cut for me. A the same time, I saw a 'lead python developer's post at the same place with the same pay range, which really is ridiculous. If they won't compete, they're not going to get good people and will end up spending more than funding a post properly - either lots of turnover as people gain experience and the leave or someone really mediocre who sits there doing not a great deal.
Parliament is sovereign, it can pass primary legislation to mandate a haircut for db pensions. It will of course make them wildly unpopular with people who lose out but it is absolutely possible.
I've also said many times that pension contributions should be cut and salaries increased in the public sector. People want the money today, not at some nebulous point in the future. A friend of mine was contacted to apply for senior on prem cybersecurity admin but the salary is well below market rate and they make it up in the pension, the overall package isn't dissimilar to what he might get elsewhere but he can't afford the pay cut so politely declined.
But aside from that, we just have too many people doing too little in that £40-60k band in the public sector. Lots of salary collectors creating micro bureaucracies around them to justify their roles. We should sweep the lot of them away and bank the saving, reduce the deficit and bank the subsequent drop in the interest bill as gilt prices increase and yields fall.
How would you like Parliament to impose a one-off 20% tax on all wealth*?
Your proposal is about as unjust, unprecedented and (thankfully) unlikely.
Deleted - accidental comment on my own post - bad form
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
What's the point of building houses if they get bought up as second homes?
According to the Government, in 2021/2 there were 809,000 second homes in England. Reducing that number seems a very sensible way forward to me.
Good luck with that one. I am often in touch with but not part of a culture/social group which takes multiple house/flat ownership for personal use both in the UK and abroad as the cultural norm. It has a substantial overlap with the group which takes the use of private education for granted for them and their circle, and also a substantial overlap with inherited wealth and current though unreliable support for Labour and the LDs.
Not only do they all vote, between them they know everyone in the structures of power.
i don't know the size of the total group, but if it is 2% of the UK population, that's heading towards 1.5 million.
Seems to be the tories and Labour haven’t quite grasped the mood out there - seemingly continuing in the same way they have for decades and changing nothing.
Starmer needs to stop the “smash the gangs” rubbish as quite clearly it’s making no difference. Reeves needs to go. And we need to start having an honest conversation about the NHS and whether there is a “better way”.
Badenoch - well, she’s quite useless. She won’t be around for much longer I think.
Apart from that, really fascinating time in politics
Here's the problem - Labour will rightly start quoting statistics at people showing how many extra GP appointments they have created. Whilst I have no doubt that statistically that is true, people's lived experience is far worse.
What Labour seem to have blissfully forgotten in office is that statistics are not reality - they disguise reality. So many people can't see a GP and the queue for a scan to get onto a waiting list is in itself lengthy. So when they are they told that actually we're added another half a million GP appointments actually, they get rightly insulted.
There are something like 350 million gp appointments per year....adding half a million is a rise of 0.14 % hardly a drop in the ocean
The English NHS is a fragmented mess. Never mind a postcode lottery, you can have multiple GP surgeries in the same building and one has good systems and the other has crap systems.
Far too many people can't get an appointment without serious faff and then a lengthy wait. That is the lived reality and no statistical quoting will change that lived reality.
The Reform revolution looks somewhat anemic this morning. If you can’t turn out a big protest vote at times like this, the general election is going to be challenging.
I profoundly disagree. Leave aside Runcorn - a seat Labour won by 35% a year ago - they've taken one mayoralty and have come perilously close to winning three more, all from pretty much a standing start. They were ahead of all other parties in councillor-count last I saw (early days, granted). They're far ahead of their main rival on the right-of-centre in all the mayoral contests.
Labour is talking itself into denial and complacency by setting Reform's bar ludicrously high.
I don’t envy Labour but the clear message from his support at the last GE and before was that people are done with austerity. To double down on it whilst doing stuff that really upsets middle England, like the war on nature, has been politics at its poorest.
How can austerity end without raising taxes which are already at a high level?
Growth. Essentially, it can't. We can't afford the level of welfare we're currently paying for - we've basically got UBI for anyone who can pass a PIP and keeping anyone over 65 in clover.
Which party is going to be brave enough to end the triple lock ? My answer none .
It's not just the state pension, public sector pensions need a 30-40% haircut too. In too many areas we're living well beyond our means and our welfare state is far, far beyond a safety net. Cut a million people from state employment to take us back to 2017, taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers, merge NI and income tax so that non-working income is taxed at the same rate as working income, cut to £2k the cash ISA allowance, push through a 30-40% haircut for defined benefit pensions (even for people currently receiving them), introduce much, much tougher criteria to receive disability benefits and exclude all but 5% of the most serious mental health cases by default. The rest can go back to work or live on £450 per month or whatever UC is for unemployed people. Also get rid of UC, move back to the old system if JSA and ESA, UC is an experiment that hasn't worked, it's just encouraged people to game the system worse than ever.
I think if Labour started that programme today by the end of the parliament we could be in a position to actually pay front line service staff more and attract better quality candidates for teachers, police, nurses etc...
What we have now is an underfunded and hugely over funded state at the same time it's literally the worst of both worlds.
There's no way a haircut to built up public sector pension entitlements would survive a court challenge. Some final salary public sector pensions were too generous, but those days are gone now (although the less generous career average DB pensions are still a draw). Still live recipients of those generous pensions, of course, but I don't think there's much to be done about that.
Cutting future pensions to be earned could work but only with substantial pay increases in many areas. I've looked at civil service roles a few times, but the pay is laughable in tech/science roles, coupled with the insistence of starting new entrants on the bottom of the scale. There's a post I looked at recently that had a range of. £55-£70k. £70k or even £65k would have had me apply, but the guidance was very clear it would be bottom of scale for me coming from outside and the path to pay progression was highly opaque. It was written in some ways as a more senior role, with more line management duties than I have at present, but would have been a pay cut for me. A the same time, I saw a 'lead python developer's post at the same place with the same pay range, which really is ridiculous. If they won't compete, they're not going to get good people and will end up spending more than funding a post properly - either lots of turnover as people gain experience and the leave or someone really mediocre who sits there doing not a great deal.
Parliament is sovereign, it can pass primary legislation to mandate a haircut for db pensions. It will of course make them wildly unpopular with people who lose out but it is absolutely possible.
I've also said many times that pension contributions should be cut and salaries increased in the public sector. People want the money today, not at some nebulous point in the future. A friend of mine was contacted to apply for senior on prem cybersecurity admin but the salary is well below market rate and they make it up in the pension, the overall package isn't dissimilar to what he might get elsewhere but he can't afford the pay cut so politely declined.
But aside from that, we just have too many people doing too little in that £40-60k band in the public sector. Lots of salary collectors creating micro bureaucracies around them to justify their roles. We should sweep the lot of them away and bank the saving, reduce the deficit and bank the subsequent drop in the interest bill as gilt prices increase and yields fall.
Which makes public sector pensions much less valuable, because there's a risk a MaxPB CofE could come in and simply abolish them.
I don’t envy Labour but the clear message from his support at the last GE and before was that people are done with austerity. To double down on it whilst doing stuff that really upsets middle England, like the war on nature, has been politics at its poorest.
How can austerity end without raising taxes which are already at a high level?
Growth. Essentially, it can't. We can't afford the level of welfare we're currently paying for - we've basically got UBI for anyone who can pass a PIP and keeping anyone over 65 in clover.
Which party is going to be brave enough to end the triple lock ? My answer none .
It's not just the state pension, public sector pensions need a 30-40% haircut too. In too many areas we're living well beyond our means and our welfare state is far, far beyond a safety net. Cut a million people from state employment to take us back to 2017, taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers, merge NI and income tax so that non-working income is taxed at the same rate as working income, cut to £2k the cash ISA allowance, push through a 30-40% haircut for defined benefit pensions (even for people currently receiving them), introduce much, much tougher criteria to receive disability benefits and exclude all but 5% of the most serious mental health cases by default. The rest can go back to work or live on £450 per month or whatever UC is for unemployed people. Also get rid of UC, move back to the old system if JSA and ESA, UC is an experiment that hasn't worked, it's just encouraged people to game the system worse than ever.
I think if Labour started that programme today by the end of the parliament we could be in a position to actually pay front line service staff more and attract better quality candidates for teachers, police, nurses etc...
What we have now is an underfunded and hugely over funded state at the same time it's literally the worst of both worlds.
There's no way a haircut to built up public sector pension entitlements would survive a court challenge. Some final salary public sector pensions were too generous, but those days are gone now (although the less generous career average DB pensions are still a draw). Still live recipients of those generous pensions, of course, but I don't think there's much to be done about that.
Cutting future pensions to be earned could work but only with substantial pay increases in many areas. I've looked at civil service roles a few times, but the pay is laughable in tech/science roles, coupled with the insistence of starting new entrants on the bottom of the scale. There's a post I looked at recently that had a range of. £55-£70k. £70k or even £65k would have had me apply, but the guidance was very clear it would be bottom of scale for me coming from outside and the path to pay progression was highly opaque. It was written in some ways as a more senior role, with more line management duties than I have at present, but would have been a pay cut for me. A the same time, I saw a 'lead python developer's post at the same place with the same pay range, which really is ridiculous. If they won't compete, they're not going to get good people and will end up spending more than funding a post properly - either lots of turnover as people gain experience and the leave or someone really mediocre who sits there doing not a great deal.
Parliament is sovereign, it can pass primary legislation to mandate a haircut for db pensions. It will of course make them wildly unpopular with people who lose out but it is absolutely possible.
I've also said many times that pension contributions should be cut and salaries increased in the public sector. People want the money today, not at some nebulous point in the future. A friend of mine was contacted to apply for senior on prem cybersecurity admin but the salary is well below market rate and they make it up in the pension, the overall package isn't dissimilar to what he might get elsewhere but he can't afford the pay cut so politely declined.
But aside from that, we just have too many people doing too little in that £40-60k band in the public sector. Lots of salary collectors creating micro bureaucracies around them to justify their roles. We should sweep the lot of them away and bank the saving, reduce the deficit and bank the subsequent drop in the interest bill as gilt prices increase and yields fall.
How would you like Parliament to impose a one-off 20% tax on all wealth*?
Your proposal is about as unjust, unprecedented and (thankfully) unlikely.
Deleted - accidental comment on my own post - bad form
Except that much of that *wealth* is in the value of semi-detached houses (and the like). Attempting to extract on that scale would cause it to evaporate.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
And yet still they sell, so people clearly can afford them.
If we build enough, they will become affordable to more people. That's the glory of the market. This is true whether we build a million 5-bedroom detacheds or a million flats (though the former would cause more reshuffling).
In fact, if we build a million 5 bed detached houses we’re adding more to the housing stock than with a million 2 bed flats. The issue is only if we build fewer but larger houses and half of the bedrooms remain unoccupied.
The Reform revolution looks somewhat anemic this morning. If you can’t turn out a big protest vote at times like this, the general election is going to be challenging.
hmmm - this was a safe seat.
Election Year
Labour
Reform UK
Conservative
Green
Liberal Democrat
Liberal
Social Democratic Party
2019 (Notional)
48.8%
4.8%
36.8%
2.9%
6.7%
–
–
2024
52.9%
18.1%
16.0%
6.4%
5.1%
1.1%
0.3%
2025 (By-election)
38.7%
38.7%
–
–
–
–
–
Look at that Conservative fall, though.
Eh?
37 percent (notional) in 2019, 16 percent last year, 7 percent yesterday.
Yes, I know. But I followed your instruction to look at the quoted post, but didn’t see it.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
Woudn’t they be liable for business rates in that case? Or are “small businesses” somehow exempt from those?
I think there's a threshold on rateable value below which Business Rates are not charged. It's a surprisingly high threshold, and when I looked there was a taper, too.
A 2000-3000sqft light manufacturing unit may be exempt.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
Woudn’t they be liable for business rates in that case? Or are “small businesses” somehow exempt from those?
You will not pay business rates on a property with a rateable value of £12,000 or less, if that’s the only property your business uses.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
And yet still they sell, so people clearly can afford them.
If we build enough, they will become affordable to more people. That's the glory of the market. This is true whether we build a million 5-bedroom detacheds or a million flats (though the former would cause more reshuffling).
In fact, if we build a million 5 bed detached houses we’re adding more to the housing stock than with a million 2 bed flats. The issue is only if we build fewer but larger houses and half of the bedrooms remain unoccupied.
If people had all those spare bedrooms, rather than living 1 to a bedroom in an illegal HMO, then they might fill them with children?
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
And yet still they sell, so people clearly can afford them.
If we build enough, they will become affordable to more people. That's the glory of the market. This is true whether we build a million 5-bedroom detacheds or a million flats (though the former would cause more reshuffling).
David, there is a major difference between being sold and people being able to afford them. Far too many people are trapped paying mortgages they can't afford, which extracts cash from the economy as they can't then spend it on stuff in shops and hospitality.
Other property is bought by landlords to let to the people who can't afford a mortgage at all. Or where the exorbitant rent is paid by the state.
Either way you look at it the market is broken. We need to build a significant number of smaller houses and apartment blocks. But we can't do that - councils and housing associations are communist and broke, developers only want to build executive style homes, and MPs have too many rentier types in their ranks who refuse reforms.
I still have faith in my fellow person not to deliver a huge Reform victory, howsoever that is determined (UKIP had around 500 seats IIRC at one time).
The reason that the Fukkers are not a lock for the next government is the same reason that they might be: Farage. He is their greatest strength and their greatest weakness. His ability to sell simplistic, xenophobic high fantasy to chavs as a serious political program is unmatched. However, Lucifer himself could not hold bell, book or candle to Farage when it comes to pride and spite. While the probability that the Fukkers will be riven by expulsions and desertions between now and the next GE is not 1.0, it asymptotically approaches it.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
What's the point of building houses if they get bought up as second homes?
According to the Government, in 2021/2 there were 809,000 second homes in England. Reducing that number seems a very sensible way forward to me.
Good luck with that one. I am often in touch with but not part of a culture/social group which takes multiple house/flat ownership for personal use both in the UK and abroad as the cultural norm. It has a substantial overlap with the group which takes the use of private education for granted for them and their circle, and also a substantial overlap with inherited wealth and current though unreliable support for Labour and the LDs.
Not only do they all vote, between them they know everyone in the structures of power.
i don't know the size of the total group, but if it is 2% of the UK population, that's heading towards 1.5 million.
It’s a much smaller group in the UK than almost any other European country, except perhaps Benelux. Second home ownership is a very minority pastime. Contrast with Italy, France, Scandinavia, where it’s normal for a family on modest income to have a summer house in the sticks, often one they inherited from an old relative and never sold.
Der Spiegel explains that the change in classification – underpinned by a 1,100-page report on the party – lowers the threshold for monitoring the party through intelligence means.
“The ethnicity- and ancestry-based conception of the people that predominates within the party is not compatible with the free democratic order,” the domestic intelligence agency said in a statement, quoted by Reuters.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
And yet still they sell, so people clearly can afford them.
If we build enough, they will become affordable to more people. That's the glory of the market. This is true whether we build a million 5-bedroom detacheds or a million flats (though the former would cause more reshuffling).
With the same resources (particularly land and utilities) you can get a lot more housing in with flats than with detached Barratts. And they happen to suit our increasingly small household sizes much better.
Housing costs are, on average, the lowest they've been since the early 1980s. It's just a function of various inequalities that they are expensive for some of us.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
No, we need new towns to be built in the frozen north, in part to rejuvenate that part of the world and rebalance the economy. What we should not do is concentrate on an already overheated London. It is hard to think of a peer economy so unbalanced, so dependent on a single region. It is hard to think of a time in our own history when that was true of Britain.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
What's the point of building houses if they get bought up as second homes?
According to the Government, in 2021/2 there were 809,000 second homes in England. Reducing that number seems a very sensible way forward to me.
Good luck with that one. I am often in touch with but not part of a culture/social group which takes multiple house/flat ownership for personal use both in the UK and abroad as the cultural norm. It has a substantial overlap with the group which takes the use of private education for granted for them and their circle, and also a substantial overlap with inherited wealth and current though unreliable support for Labour and the LDs.
Not only do they all vote, between them they know everyone in the structures of power.
i don't know the size of the total group, but if it is 2% of the UK population, that's heading towards 1.5 million.
It’s a much smaller group in the UK than almost any other European country, except perhaps Benelux. Second home ownership is a very minority pastime. Contrast with Italy, France, Scandinavia, where it’s normal for a family on modest income to have a summer house in the sticks, often one they inherited from an old relative and never sold.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
And yet still they sell, so people clearly can afford them.
If we build enough, they will become affordable to more people. That's the glory of the market. This is true whether we build a million 5-bedroom detacheds or a million flats (though the former would cause more reshuffling).
In fact, if we build a million 5 bed detached houses we’re adding more to the housing stock than with a million 2 bed flats. The issue is only if we build fewer but larger houses and half of the bedrooms remain unoccupied.
Here's the housing in the poorest town in West Virginia.
Activists who were planning to sail an aid ship to Gaza say it was struck by drones in international waters off the coast of Malta - and appeared to accuse Israel of being behind the attack.
I don’t envy Labour but the clear message from his support at the last GE and before was that people are done with austerity. To double down on it whilst doing stuff that really upsets middle England, like the war on nature, has been politics at its poorest.
How can austerity end without raising taxes which are already at a high level?
Growth. Essentially, it can't. We can't afford the level of welfare we're currently paying for - we've basically got UBI for anyone who can pass a PIP and keeping anyone over 65 in clover.
Which party is going to be brave enough to end the triple lock ? My answer none .
It's not just the state pension, public sector pensions need a 30-40% haircut too. In too many areas we're living well beyond our means and our welfare state is far, far beyond a safety net. Cut a million people from state employment to take us back to 2017, taper the state pension for higher rate tax payers, merge NI and income tax so that non-working income is taxed at the same rate as working income, cut to £2k the cash ISA allowance, push through a 30-40% haircut for defined benefit pensions (even for people currently receiving them), introduce much, much tougher criteria to receive disability benefits and exclude all but 5% of the most serious mental health cases by default. The rest can go back to work or live on £450 per month or whatever UC is for unemployed people. Also get rid of UC, move back to the old system if JSA and ESA, UC is an experiment that hasn't worked, it's just encouraged people to game the system worse than ever.
I think if Labour started that programme today by the end of the parliament we could be in a position to actually pay front line service staff more and attract better quality candidates for teachers, police, nurses etc...
What we have now is an underfunded and hugely over funded state at the same time it's literally the worst of both worlds.
There's no way a haircut to built up public sector pension entitlements would survive a court challenge. Some final salary public sector pensions were too generous, but those days are gone now (although the less generous career average DB pensions are still a draw). Still live recipients of those generous pensions, of course, but I don't think there's much to be done about that.
Cutting future pensions to be earned could work but only with substantial pay increases in many areas. I've looked at civil service roles a few times, but the pay is laughable in tech/science roles, coupled with the insistence of starting new entrants on the bottom of the scale. There's a post I looked at recently that had a range of. £55-£70k. £70k or even £65k would have had me apply, but the guidance was very clear it would be bottom of scale for me coming from outside and the path to pay progression was highly opaque. It was written in some ways as a more senior role, with more line management duties than I have at present, but would have been a pay cut for me. A the same time, I saw a 'lead python developer's post at the same place with the same pay range, which really is ridiculous. If they won't compete, they're not going to get good people and will end up spending more than funding a post properly - either lots of turnover as people gain experience and the leave or someone really mediocre who sits there doing not a great deal.
Parliament is sovereign, it can pass primary legislation to mandate a haircut for db pensions. It will of course make them wildly unpopular with people who lose out but it is absolutely possible.
I've also said many times that pension contributions should be cut and salaries increased in the public sector. People want the money today, not at some nebulous point in the future. A friend of mine was contacted to apply for senior on prem cybersecurity admin but the salary is well below market rate and they make it up in the pension, the overall package isn't dissimilar to what he might get elsewhere but he can't afford the pay cut so politely declined.
But aside from that, we just have too many people doing too little in that £40-60k band in the public sector. Lots of salary collectors creating micro bureaucracies around them to justify their roles. We should sweep the lot of them away and bank the saving, reduce the deficit and bank the subsequent drop in the interest bill as gilt prices increase and yields fall.
How would you like Parliament to impose a one-off 20% tax on all wealth*?
Your proposal is about as unjust, unprecedented and (thankfully) unlikely.
Deleted - accidental comment on my own post - bad form
Except that much of that *wealth* is in the value of semi-detached houses (and the like). Attempting to extract on that scale would cause it to evaporate.
Just stick a charge on it payable on death. Offset that government 'lending' against the national debt.
The turnout was reasonably decent for a by-election, at 40-something percent. But by what slight margins the world is changed. No doubt that with a by-election victory Reform confirm their polling is not entirely froth (though, of course, by-election victories have been known to evaporate at subsequent general elections), but if they'd fallen six votes short then it would have been a severe knock to their credibility.
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
Well my small bet on Lab in Runcorn and Helsby turned out to be a value loser. Oh well. But more generally, I'd say there was more value in the second favourites last night than in the favourites. And also, Reform still struggle to get their vote out. I just need about a dozen nights like last night in order to win at slightly favourable odds 5 times out of 12 and I'll be a slight net winner
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
That's what happens when you build houses in dumps where nobody with any choice wants to live instead of in the prosperous successful areas of the country which are in desperate need of new housing.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
It's a matter for society how purely and extensively we allow markets to operate.
We don't for example have a market in child labour, or allowing departure from compulsory education at 11 or 14.
Seems to be the tories and Labour haven’t quite grasped the mood out there - seemingly continuing in the same way they have for decades and changing nothing.
Starmer needs to stop the “smash the gangs” rubbish as quite clearly it’s making no difference. Reeves needs to go. And we need to start having an honest conversation about the NHS and whether there is a “better way”.
Badenoch - well, she’s quite useless. She won’t be around for much longer I think.
Apart from that, really fascinating time in politics
Here's the problem - Labour will rightly start quoting statistics at people showing how many extra GP appointments they have created. Whilst I have no doubt that statistically that is true, people's lived experience is far worse.
What Labour seem to have blissfully forgotten in office is that statistics are not reality - they disguise reality. So many people can't see a GP and the queue for a scan to get onto a waiting list is in itself lengthy. So when they are they told that actually we're added another half a million GP appointments actually, they get rightly insulted.
My local doctors has gone to online triage, and when I tried to book an appointment last month, I was asked a series of vague multi choice questions about my symptoms, (which were flu like/covid-ish I guess).When I answered that I felt drowsy sometimes , it said I had to phone the doctors or 100, so I just logged off and had a lemsip.
Did this count as one of the millions of new GP appointments I wonder? Shows I wasn’t that ill I suppose
Do you mean 111? I think 100 is still the telephone operator. Good job it wasn't the Speaking Clock. I used to get a lot of speaking clock when I worked in a company which developed telephone exchanges - it was the standard outgoing call test number.
In my experience 111 is very good. It sounds as though the triage worked, though !
I think @Razedabode 's stuff about "start a conversation", "what alternatives" etc is just going round in the same old circles that has been the do-nothing rhetorical diversion for 3 or 4 decades.
I did mean 111, sorry
Yes it did work! Saved me wasting valuable GP time
So, it's going to be an interesting day. Like @TSE I only woke up an hour ago and slept through the drama.
Reform are going to have higher stakes to play with; these election results will have a non-neutral impact and increase both potential costs and potential benefits for RfUK. They are on a longer, higher tightrope, and the practice safety net has been removed for the performance.
A couple of furthers comments on my conversation with a local candidate whilst I was voting. He is PB age - recently retired, is with the AIs, and reported that he had walked 700 miles during the run up to this election.
They have (both AI and Reform) pursued pavement politics, LD style, and the AIs rest on things such as having brought in money to the area (which is fair - £50m+ via Towns Fund etc and a two new / refurbed sports centres, and an overhaul of a couple of town centre squares, county youth centre, observatory, upgraded indoor market). And they pursue a bar-chart rhetoric focused on "it's Us vs X", when it's actually Y, plus a blizzard of Focus-alike leaflets. Rubbish collections are improved.
But the extra one-of sticky-plaster money is far less than cuts due to Osborne / Cameron, and at national level the need for Council Tax Reform has simply been ignored - the South will squeal if it is made significantly less regressive even by eg property revaluation, or removal of the 3x limit to the multiplier, so the relative increase in property values over 3 decades and the benefit thereof is used in the calculation.
Worth reminding people that the VOA (who calculate the value of properties subject to business rates and council tac) are now part of HMRC rather than being an arms length removed.
As my daughter pointed out on the all hands call yesterday it means it’s very hard to pretend to be independent
I have two bits of council tax casework on hand at the moment.
In the first, residents who had been renting out a chalet in their garden as a holiday let, registered as a business to pay (nil) business rates rather than council tax, have now decided to stop, and the council has hit them not only with council tax, but double council tax as a ‘second home’, on what they are trying to argue is now just a large garden shed.
In the second, someone who has just moved into a property has had their banding increased on the grounds that the previous owner had added a conservatory (home improvements only becoming liable for a rebanding when the property is sold).
The second case, I have some sympathy with, as a conservatory isn’t the same as an extension to make an extra bedroom or room.
In the first case, the owners have removed the toilets from their chalet in order to try and argue it is no longer habitable. I’m not sure that is going to wash.
IMO it's absolutely outrageous that people can have a second home, rent it out for half the year and then qualify for CT exemption because it's a 'small business'. Friends of ours do this with their Cornwall 'cottage' thus depriving the local population of a starter home and any CT revenue. Totally wrong - the rules need to change.
No what's wrong is we arent building houses.
You wouldn't post that if you lived in at some parts of Essex. Maldon is an example; hundreds of homes have been built to the South and West of the town. And a village nearby is protesting about 600 new homes being built. In our small town around 100 extra houses have recently been added, increasing the population by around 10%.
We had similar debates in Stockton-on-Tees when I lived there. The whole borough had been endless housebuilding for a decade. Multiple projects with hundreds of homes per site as well as smaller infill builds. And even bigger ones in the planning stage which are now going up.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
And yet still they sell, so people clearly can afford them.
If we build enough, they will become affordable to more people. That's the glory of the market. This is true whether we build a million 5-bedroom detacheds or a million flats (though the former would cause more reshuffling).
David, there is a major difference between being sold and people being able to afford them. Far too many people are trapped paying mortgages they can't afford, which extracts cash from the economy as they can't then spend it on stuff in shops and hospitality.
Other property is bought by landlords to let to the people who can't afford a mortgage at all. Or where the exorbitant rent is paid by the state.
Either way you look at it the market is broken. We need to build a significant number of smaller houses and apartment blocks. But we can't do that - councils and housing associations are communist and broke, developers only want to build executive style homes, and MPs have too many rentier types in their ranks who refuse reforms.
Housing affordability is at its worst by far in London and the South East. Adjust for housing costs and people here have less disposable income than much of the rest of the country.
The economically logical policy is to build where there is demand, ie here. And build at high density. A lot of that is happening around me but it’s not enough. But the politically logical policy is of course to spread the building, which exacerbates the regional disparity in affordability.
Comments
If I was in that situation I'd try and beg, borrow or steal the extra 60k for Farm Road.
Anyone throwing around suggestions about taking away existing accrued pensions doesn't deserve to be taken seriously.
Why is it always people who have done so well out of the law of contract who make these kind of suggestions about other people's rights ?
As it happens, it's quite a fringe position in Runcorn and Helsby. But still.
I’ve found some of the takes on here to be quite odd this morning.
I don’t actually want a Reform advance, but I have to accept it’s been a very good result for them so far. If we’re debating that they’re beatable - of course they are. But it doesn’t mean that they’re not doing well.
The last person we hired quit after about a month when they found another similar 'junior' role for 10k more, coupled with realising there was really no likely career progression in-post.
In my experience 111 is very good. It sounds as though the triage worked, though !
I think @Razedabode 's stuff about "start a conversation", "what alternatives" etc is just going round in the same old circles that has been the do-nothing rhetorical diversion for 3 or 4 decades.
Consider the EV revolution.
Musk recognised (before he jumped a shark, while jumping over another shark) that the EV change over was an inflection point - a chance to *change* who led the market. The US and European manufactures refused to listen. Even after Merkle got Tesla to build in Germany, the slumber continued. Tesla went meaaaaahhhh. So the Chinese picked up the baton.
This was because
1) Talking about building EVs
2) Philosophising about EVs
3) Giving speeches about Evs
doesn't get you EVs
Building factories for batteries and cars that are measured in square kilometres does.
Then consider the BritVolt comedy - a farce involving no ability, or real intent, to do anything. Except farm subsidy money.
So why aren’t they voting LibDem?
According to the Government, in 2021/2 there were 809,000 second homes in England. Reducing that number seems a very sensible way forward to me.
https://x.com/StaffordshireCC
A careers lesson in how demonstrating utter incompetence, and being totally compromised, can lead to rapid promotion in the Met.
(And yes, it would have been better had different decisions been taken about pensions in previous decades. But they weren't, and the country has had the benefits of the short-termism, so now we have the costs.)
Northumberland looking an absolute triumph in comparison
I did once work out how much more it cost the government to employ me rather than just paying the market rate - it's something like 300%. That's where the savings can be made. But the Mail would throw a total hissy fit and it can't be done.
'The suspect was walking about being brown in a built up area during the rush hour.'
Once again- for all the talk about Reform getting old/blue Labour voters, and for all they got Reform over the line, they are just the icing on the cake. The bulk of the cake is ex-Conservative.
It's Chief Constable Sir Ronald Savage, OBE, DipSHit, to you.
The proud recipient for the 6th year running of the Met Police Award for Minority Community Relations.
Also proud of his work on Operation Darkie - the campaign to arrest people for ordering their coffee "black" {narrator: 97% of those arrested were black people on a Black Lives Matter demo}.
The comedy factor? With the 2014 planning regs change the council was deemed to be "not building enough houses", allowing developers to do what they liked regardless of what councillors or even the MP thought.
The issue? The wrong type of houses being built. I lived on a development that ran to nearly 1,000 houses. Part of the site used to have a run down council estate on it, which was bulldozed. A small number of LHA houses added to the project did not adequately replace the hundreds of smaller affordable houses removed.
We're building houses that people can't afford.
A DWF solicitor had been given two bravery awards after he saved a man’s life by jumping into the Thames and pulling him to shore, RolIOnFriday can reveal.
Mike Cooper, an insurance specialist from the UK now based in Sydney, was jogging by the river last September after meeting clients in London when he encountered a small crowd of people.
“I wondered what was going on - I'll be honest, I thought, ‘Bloody London. It's some more street theatre getting in the way’”.
But when Cooper looked over, he saw there was a man floating face down in the water. The bystanders told Cooper they either couldn’t swim or weren't strong enough to reach him in the choppy water, and had been trying to get the man’s attention and throw him a buoyancy aid instead.
“There were steps going down, so I didn't do a full swan dive in or anything like that”, said Cooper. (He also didn’t do a Baywatch-style shirt-rip, prompting a friend to tell him afterwards: “Well, you bottled it then”.)
“For some reason, I don't know why, I took my shoes off. I think I was psyching myself up because I'm not a brilliant swimmer”.
“It was quite rough, though he was only about 15 meters out at the most”, said Cooper. “I got about two mouthfuls of the Thames and can confirm it is disgusting.”
“When I got to him I was a bit worried myself, so I forgot all the stuff about putting a hand under the chin, and, because I used to play rugby (badly), I basically got him in a scrum and kicked, hauling him back.”
https://www.rollonfriday.com/news-content/exclusive-dwf-lawyer-saved-drowning-man-thames
Not just in direct costs. Every time a relative has been in hospital, it's been a parade of different staff - often on the same day. Continuity of care is a problem with this style of working.
Mind you, it might well lead to industrial action, since it would reduce incomes of some.
I've also said many times that pension contributions should be cut and salaries increased in the public sector. People want the money today, not at some nebulous point in the future. A friend of mine was contacted to apply for senior on prem cybersecurity admin but the salary is well below market rate and they make it up in the pension, the overall package isn't dissimilar to what he might get elsewhere but he can't afford the pay cut so politely declined.
But aside from that, we just have too many people doing too little in that £40-60k band in the public sector. Lots of salary collectors creating micro bureaucracies around them to justify their roles. We should sweep the lot of them away and bank the saving, reduce the deficit and bank the subsequent drop in the interest bill as gilt prices increase and yields fall.
Opening sentence of actual article: "The revolution continues."
If we build enough, they will become affordable to more people. That's the glory of the market. This is true whether we build a million 5-bedroom detacheds or a million flats (though the former would cause more reshuffling).
On @Benpointer's mate's Cornish Cottage, the Welsh are running an action-learning experiment for us. This is tactical manipulation of the system for personal benefit. Some will defend as "permitted, so it's OK", and then defend an ineffective system as 'their voters' can exploit it. To me change on this is an obvious necessity.
On @IanB2 's casework, the first one is going to get tied up in Change of Use (unless they have been renting it out 'unofficially').
They won't get "uninhabitable" by taking out a loo - definitions are stringent. Try and get a Council Tax exemption for a rental property due to "major work" being done, and it will have to be pretty much back to the bricks before they will say yes.
They are on a version of the same cleft stick as Dominic Cummings was with the holiday let on his family's farm.
If it's a habitable chalet, its habitability convincingly proved by years of habitation, I'd say it's either ancillary to the main property and a grannexe / teenage pad, or a separate dwelling. That is probably either an extra band of Council Tax or an extra dwelling. Since Councils (OK the VOA) often define each bedroom in a HMO as a separate Band A dwelling, it may be a hiding to nothing to try and dispute that it is a dwelling if they cannot do "grannexe".
As a pragmatic answer, and if they can't grannexe it, I'd say:
- a rental as a pied a terre to eg a Dr at a local hospital would work as they would be there 5 days a week,
- or to a well-behaved mature student (who would incidentally get a Council Tax exemption),
- or to a one man band as an office.
Or if entrances, parking etc is suitable, sell it off as a separate dwelling. There is even a market in secondhand garden buildings.
On the conservatory, the Council are just operating the system as it stands, and the people should have known about the increase before they moved in. There is an appeal system, or they may have comeback against their solicitor or someone else.
Your proposal is about as unjust, unprecedented and (thankfully) unlikely.
(*I am most definitely not advocating that but it would at a stroke wipe out the National Debt and fund as much Defence and infrastructure spending as we could ever need.)
2026 is surely when they would move - if RefUK beat them in Scotland and Wales that will be a huge headline.
We need 8 million or so houses to match France, but very few of those should be built in the north.
It's so staggeringly obvious where the demand is when you look at the price/incomes ratio: from memory, 4x in the north, 10x in the SE and 14x in London.
But as we're governed by a bunch of economically illiterate, social media-obsessed cowards, focused on the next opinion poll not the next generation, I don't expect that to change anytime soon.
Not only do they all vote, between them they know everyone in the structures of power.
i don't know the size of the total group, but if it is 2% of the UK population, that's heading towards 1.5 million.
Far too many people can't get an appointment without serious faff and then a lengthy wait. That is the lived reality and no statistical quoting will change that lived reality.
Labour is talking itself into denial and complacency by setting Reform's bar ludicrously high.
https://x.com/EstherMcVey1/status/1918212127841763603
A 2000-3000sqft light manufacturing unit may be exempt.
I may not be up to date.
https://www.gov.uk/apply-for-business-rate-relief/small-business-rate-relief
Other property is bought by landlords to let to the people who can't afford a mortgage at all. Or where the exorbitant rent is paid by the state.
Either way you look at it the market is broken. We need to build a significant number of smaller houses and apartment blocks. But we can't do that - councils and housing associations are communist and broke, developers only want to build executive style homes, and MPs have too many rentier types in their ranks who refuse reforms.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/live/2025/may/02/russia-ukraine-us-minerals-romania-vatican-conclave-europe-news-live-updates
Der Spiegel explains that the change in classification – underpinned by a 1,100-page report on the party – lowers the threshold for monitoring the party through intelligence means.
“The ethnicity- and ancestry-based conception of the people that predominates within the party is not compatible with the free democratic order,” the domestic intelligence agency said in a statement, quoted by Reuters.
Housing costs are, on average, the lowest they've been since the early 1980s. It's just a function of various inequalities that they are expensive for some of us.
https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@38.4021501,-82.3874596,3a,75y,141.93h,85.08t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1s2SghGBuzjJHt_HSk5eGbVQ!2e0!6shttps://streetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com/v1/thumbnail?cb_client=maps_sv.tactile&w=900&h=600&pitch=4.922037006695405&panoid=2SghGBuzjJHt_HSk5eGbVQ&yaw=141.93015502460662!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu&g_ep=EgoyMDI1MDQyOS4wIKXMDSoASAFQAw==
UK housing is just generally terrible all round tbh. The Barratt estate near me is improving the next village down.
I just need about a dozen nights like last night in order to win at slightly favourable odds 5 times out of 12 and I'll be a slight net winner
We don't for example have a market in child labour, or allowing departure from compulsory education at 11 or 14.
Yes it did work! Saved me wasting valuable GP time
The economically logical policy is to build where there is demand, ie here. And build at high density. A lot of that is happening around me but it’s not enough. But the politically logical policy is of course to spread the building, which exacerbates the regional disparity in affordability.