Today the average deposit on a home across the UK has reached £65,000. In London it is £100,000. We have reached the point in Britain where it is simply impossible for people to buy a home without significant help from their parents, grandparents or some other benefactor.Actually, that’s totally misleading – that statement should instead read “We have reached the point in Britain where it is often impossible for people to buy a home in the area they prefer to live and work without significant help from their parents, grandparents or some other benefactor.”
Liberal Democrats are therefore energetically exploring new ideas to increase access to housing. Nick Clegg's announcement on Sunday that we will work out how parents and grandparents can use other assets such as pension funds to help fund first purchases by their young people is hugely welcome.Really? It went down like a cold cup of sick, actually.
But we must also increase the supply.Ah, here we go. Building on the green belt, again? Well, yes. But there’s another angle:
Dealing with land banks by imposing use-it-or-lose-it planning permission, or the long-held Liberal policy of land value taxation, will free up land we need to build on. But I am clear that many of these measures to improve the supply of housing will be ineffective unless we also look at the demand created by second homes and the massive influx of foreign capital into the housing market.But we should turn a blind eye to the massive influx of foreigners, I assume?
In London, 60% of new housing last year was bought by foreign investors – a misallocation of an increasingly scarce resource on an unacceptable scale.Only a modern LibDem could possibly describe the buying and selling of private property a ‘misallocation’…
Local authorities should be able to introduce optional-use clauses to prevent housing from being bought unless it is going to be lived in.And how would that work? What defines ‘lived in’? For how long? I mean, never mind the illiberality of the idea, what about the logistics? But then, might as well go the whole
But no matter how much we improve access to home ownership there will always be some people for whom home ownership is just not appropriate, desirable or possible. Many will be in need of social housing: These people often make an extremely important contribution to our society. they may be in jobs that are essential but pay little, or they may be out of work for long periods because they are carers or sick or disabled. They should have as much opportunity as anyone else to live near to their employment, children's school, family and friends.And just how do you plan to give them that ‘opportunity’?
To achieve this every community needs a diverse mix of housing, principally planned to meet community need rather than simply market demand.Ahhh, central planning for people’s lives! What could be less liberal?
That is why Liberal Democrats across the country should oppose those councils, such as Southwark, who sell their more valuable housing in order to fund the building of new council housing somewhere else. Such a policy will create ghettos. In London it would gradually wipe out social housing from large parts of our capital city and create unacceptable physical divisions in our community.So, to prevent this awful situation of people being free to live wherever they want and can afford, we will take away that choice.
You’ll live where we tell you to, or else!
Just what is Hughes smoking these days?
8 comments:
Ideally, his last cigarette, in front of a firing squad.
*** Ideally, his last cigarette, in front of a firing squad.••
Wonderful!
I suppose I must be a bigot if I suggested that if the UK government pulled it's finger out of it's very smelly arsehole and started to look after it's own citizens rather than most of the fucking world's shit then accommodation might be easier to find. Boot out all the illegals, fuck their sob stories, put up the barricades and lo! Any so called citizen that defrauds the state including sub-letting their council house should be stripped of their citizenship and booted back, say, to Nigeria taking all their spawn with them.
Building on Green Belt land is an option. It always will be as plants and those small furry things that live there can always move elsewhere when bricks and mortar arrive (or like the fox, change into the urban variety and root round in bins)
But there's a but that houses alone won't solve, and that's the high cost of transport. A bus service may be relatively cheap to install but rail and maybe one day a tube system all costs a great deal to put in place. Those costs are passed on to the user (and subject to the eternal blackmail of strikes for higher wages) and those costs escalate.
The further people live from work the more of their after-tax cash goes on fares -- and a lot of the their taxed money goes on subsidies, which are never quite good enough to make public transport attractive.
Driving to work? Ah well, cities don't want motorists spoiling their nice road schemes, do they?
The bottom line is the houses alone (and the utilities needed) only go part of the way to answering the problem. I used to live in an area where all the modest houses were once built to provide walk-to-work accommodation for the local factory. Not great, but it certainly answered the problem of travel. But no office based business and hardly any factories are going to invest in terrace houses and small gardens for their workers these days.
So, dear politicians, argue for building whatever you want wherever, but note that the bigger the commute becomes, the more crippling the costs involved and the less you will get votes eventually.
Housing crisis? No, immigration crisis, but it's a bit late in the day now, so basically we're fucked. Get use to it and try not to think back to the times before all and sundry were let in, it'll only upset you.
Green Lane is perfectly right - but the dear politicians want the votes NOW and don't care about the comsequences further down the line.
"Ideally, his last cigarette, in front of a firing squad."
/applause
"... and started to look after it's own citizens rather than most of the fucking world's shit .."
Spot on!
"But there's a but that houses alone won't solve, and that's the high cost of transport."
Indeed. Plus the added infrastructure needed to sustain new developments.
It' time homeworking became a real option, rather than one reserved for journalists.
"In London, 60% of new housing last year was bought by foreign investors – a misallocation of an increasingly scarce resource on an unacceptable scale."
What does think about foreigners being given council houses? Or having their housing benefit paid for them?
does anyone take the liberals seriously ? that twot nick clegg has been named ars*le of the year buy a student newspaper, and about right, this idae of his to import african homosexuals for relocation in lincolnshire is totaly mental, the Russian and polish mafia who now run the county have said we just dare you to put queers among our kids, not one body is in favour even the liberl party, local council leader said if you want them over here have them near you >
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