Off Topic Political Debate

Agree with most of this - and especially you have to be careful to build small pockets of "state" housing not huge estates. These options though can be aggregative not mutually exclusive. Govt part purchase / part rent; self build; Yorkie's Housing Association as well as council if appropriate. In our society where there has been massive under investment in the housing stock for decades we should look for as much expansion now as possible - it has the added advantage of boosting the economy generally.

 

Of course the aspiring will always find as way where possible... there is a great development of eco build houses in Leeds for example....

yes... for goodness sake build cheap housing and offer incentives to start on the ladder

 

The UK housing market is overwhelmingly dominated by the large house builders who have massive land banks. I am not in favour of attacking these companies by charging rates on unbuilt land, as some have suggested, but I am in favour of more positive discrimination for small builders and self builders as currently in place for the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL). This allows councils to locally determine contribution rates from developers. I think the government are trying to force councils to provide land specifically for self builders but they have plenty of brownfield land which could be used.

 

Why not charge rates on land that these companies own but fail to build on? Hoarding land to see it's price rise is not good for housing and has a social cost which ought to be paid by the owners. That is positive discrimination

 

I think, as a young property owner in London, that we should let the market go crazy, give it a handful of years, let me sell my property for a huge profit, then deal with the housing issue, let prices drop and I can buy myself somewhere new and better at the fresh low prices

 

This is a bit shortsighted. There would be an initial financial gain and hurry up but would ultimately lead to less house building from these giants. I prefer making it much easier for self builders and small building companies. One way is for the government to buy up land / release its own brownfield land which it could limit to preferred small scale self build groups. I know this is already happening but it needs to be on a much greater scale. If this could be done on a much larger scale it would devalue the land being stockpiled so they would quickly release it or sell on to small builders.The large builders have dominated far too long.

Despite the government drastically reducing the planning regulations via the NPPF the interpretations by individual planning officers is still too arbitrary. The aim of the NPPF is to positively effect planning decisions so the default position is to allow building unless there are good reasons to refuse. Even with the new planning laws they are so wooly it is possible to argue either way, sometimes it is simply down to personalities, this has got to be wrong. I have had some unnecessary nightmare experiences with Dacorum District Council.

 

Good idea -except for anyone who admits to supporting Arsenal for whom there should be a 99% tax

Yep - good idea.

 

One frequently sees that there are over 600,000 empty houses in England which could help to re-house people, but it is not so easy when you look into the figures in greater depth. Go to an auction in parts of the north west and you can still buy a house for £1. Why? Because no one wishes to live in it. Councils have thousands of empty houses. Correct, but some of them have been allowed to fall into such a poor state of repair that they are not habitable. More than half the 600,000 are re-occupied within 6 months. Correct.
In my village in England the district council had 20 council houses, which were in a poor state. They came up with a scheme to renovate them at a cost of £28,000 each which included double glazing and central heating. Many of the owner occupiers wished that they had this amount of money to spend on their houses. The council tenants were also unhappy when they were told that if the work was done they would have to pay an extra £4 per week rent. The council then offered to sell the houses at a discount, depending on how long they had lived there, and not carry out the work. All of them except four opted to take the buy route and carried out the work at half the cost the council said it would cost. This example suggests that councils are not the best people to manage housing, but they did ensure that those who wished to buy were found the funding. The area looked far better as people made sure their investment was well looked after.
Many of the large supermarkets are sitting on huge land banks which they now realize they will never use. Let councils redesignate this land for housing rather than commercial use and charge the owners 110% of any increase in value per annum if they do not release it. If that ground were used to create houses with gardens it would help to dispose of excess rainwater compared to a concrete car park.

 

Love it

 

Well said....

and I note that in Leeds and other cities we are now building inner city housing........ much more area for this sort of build..

 

I wonder if the 2016 crash will be blamed on the Tories? It's apparently still Labour's fault that the US banks crashed last time round...

Investors face a “cataclysmic year” where stock markets could fall by up to 20% and oil could slump to $16 a barrel, economists at the Royal Bank of Scotlandhave warned.

In a note to its clients the bank said: “Sell everything except high quality bonds. This is about return of capital, not return on capital. In a crowded hall, exit doors are small.” It said the current situation was reminiscent of 2008, when the collapse of the Lehman Brothers investment bank led to the global financial crisis. This time China could be the crisis point.

Stock markets have already come under severe pressure in 2016, with the FTSE 100 down more than 5% in its worst start since 2000. In the US, the Dow Jones industrial average has made its poorest ever start to a year.

Oil prices have also fallen sharply on fears of lower demand and a supply glut, especially with Iran due to start exporting once more when sanctions are lifted. Tensions between Iran and Saudia Arabia make it less likely that Opec can agree to cut production to halt the slide in prices. Brent crude is down another 1% at $31.18, its lowest level since April 2004.

Investors have been spooked by fears of a severe slowdown in the Chinese economy and a fall in the value of the yuan, not helped by a crash in the country’s stock market despite attempts by the country’s authorities to curtail selling.

Andrew Roberts, RBS’s credit chief, said: “China has set off a major correction and it is going to snowball. Equities and credit have become very dangerous, and we have hardly even begun to retrace the ‘Goldilocks love-in’ of the last two years.”

Markets have been supported for some time by low interest rates, stimulus measures from central banks including quantitative easing, and hopes of economic recovery. But with the Federal Reserve raising rates and the Bank of England expected to follow suit, that prop is being removed.

Roberts said European and US markets could fall by 10% to 20%, with the FTSE 100 particularly at risk due to the predominance of commodity companies in the UK index. “London is vulnerable to a negative shock. All these people who are long [buyers of] oil and mining companies thinking that the dividends are safe are going to discover that they’re not at all safe.

“We suspect 2016 will be characterised by more focus on how the exiting occurs of positions in the three main asset classes that benefited from quantitative easing: 1) emerging markets, 2) credit, 3) equities … Risks are high.”

RBS is not the only negative voice at the moment. Analysts at JP Morgan have advised clients to sell stocks on any bounce.

Morgan Stanley has said oil could fall to $20 a barrel, while Standard Chartered has predicted an even bigger slide, to as low as $10. Standard said: “Given that no fundamental relationship is currently driving the oil market towards any equilibrium, prices are being moved almost entirely by financial flows caused by fluctuations in other asset prices, including the US dollar and equity markets.

“We think prices could fall as low as $10 a barrel before most of the money managers in the market conceded that matters had gone too far.”

 

Boom and bust is great for the handful (we're talking 0.0000001%) of the global population that profit from it, weirdly enough it's also the people that seem to cause the crashes too

With the internet and the rise of social media and coordinated campaigns/protests we still have a vague hope of changing the world for better one day...Oh wait, the government is trying to spy on EVERY communication we make, because of what? Terrorists?

We could go and protest against the decisions the people WE elect to SERVE us as a nation, to tell them that we don't agree? Oh wait, you just get kettled and beaten with batons or tear gassed...

What a wonderful time to be alive...

 

We must keep breathing Toby

 

I also read that article and it filled me with alarm. With a global economy that I cannot see a way out of even if we wished to, events almost anywhere in the world can set off an economic downturn.

 

Here's hoping for a decent Cheltenham and Royal Ascot then...

 

All of this suffering and misery so a handful of people can own the planet...

Global inequality is growing, with half the world’s wealth now in the hands of just 1% of the population, according to a new report.

The middle classes have been squeezed at the expense of the very rich, according to research by Credit Suisse, which also finds that for the first time, there are more individuals in the middle classes in China – 109m – than the 92m in the US.

Tidjane Thiam, the chief executive of Credit Suisse, said: “Middle class wealth has grown at a slower pace than wealth at the top end. This has reversed the pre-crisis trend which saw the share of middle-class wealth remaining fairly stable over time.”

The report shows that a person needs only $3,210 (£2,100) to be in the wealthiest 50% of world citizens. About $68,800 secures a place in the top 10%, while the top 1% have more than $759,900. The report defines wealth as the value of assets including property and stock market investments, but excludes debt.

About 3.4 bn people – just over 70% of the global adult population – have wealth of less than $10,000. A further 1bn – a fifth of the world’s population – are in the $10,000-$100,000 range.

Each of the remaining 383m adults – 8% of the population – has wealth of more than $100,000. This number includes about 34m US dollar millionaires. About 123,800 individuals of these have more than $50m, and nearly 45,000 have more than $100m. The UK has the third-highest number of these “ultra-high net worth” individuals.

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Photograph: Credit Suisse
The report said: “Wealth inequality has continued to increase since 2008, with the top percentile of wealth holders now owning 50.4% of all household wealth.”

At the start of 2015, Oxfam had warned that 1% of the world’s population would own more wealth than the other 99% by next year. Mark Goldring, Oxfam GB’s chief executive, said: “The fact it has happened a year early – just weeks after world leaders agreed a global goal to reduce inequality – shows just how urgently world leaders need to tackle this problem.

“This is the latest evidence that extreme inequality is out of control. Are we really happy to live in a world where the top 1% own half the wealth and the poorest half own just 1%?”

The Credit Suisse report concludes that global wealth has fallen by $12.4tn so far in 2015 - to $250tn – the first drop since the 2008 banking crisis. This is largely a result of the strength of the dollar, the currency used for Credit Suisse’s calculations.

The estimates are for the end of June 2015, when Chinese stock prices had fallen 20% from the peak after soaring by more than 150% between June 2014 and mid June 2015. The report was published at the end of September, by which time the Chinese stock market had fallen a further 25%.

A year ago, the the UK had been singled out as the only country in the G7 where inequality had risen this century. In this year’s report, the authors say:

“[In the UK] wealth inequality has risen since 2000, as the gap in wealth per adult between the lower segment and rest of the population has increased.”

The UK is fourth in the world for median wealth – which strips out the impact of those at the highest and lowest end of the wealth league – at $126,500 (£83,000) per person, down 13% on a year earlier.

The Credit Suisse survey calculates that there are now 2.4 million dollar millionaires in the UK , up 68,000 on a year earlier. In the US the number of millionaires is now more than 15m – up 903,000.

The UK was one of only three countries, along with the US and China, to record a rise in household wealth in 2014. It also leapfrogged Germany in the number of people with more than $50m, with 400 more than 2014 and a total of 5,400. This put the UK in third place, behind the US with 61,300 of the world’s wealthiest andChina with 9,600.

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Photograph: Credit Suisse
This year’s report focuses on the middle classes, as defined by personal wealth rather than profession. It says 14% of adults worldwide are middle class, with $50,000-$500,000 of assets.

But Markus Stierli, of the Credit Suisse Research Institute, said: “From 2008 onwards, wealth growth has not allowed middle-class numbers to keep pace with population growth in the developing world. Furthermore, the distribution of wealth gains has shifted in favour of those at higher wealth levels. These two factors have combined to produce a decline in the share of middle-class wealth.”

 

When I read that, I cannot square it with the market forces growth ideology spouted by The current Govt...

Yet if anyone questions it they are seen as loony left.

 

What gets me is that everyone's misery is blamed on the poor and immigrants, taking our stuff and making our lives worse.

No-one was prosecuted in the UK for the last crash, yet the government is rarely that lenient with ordinary people...

And now? We're planning on dropping £millions of bombs on Syria/Iraq again, Tories want to sell off existing council housing stock to their rich mates, benefits are being slashed and no extra tax seems to have been claimed back from all the massive tax-avoiding corporations.

I'm not one of those people who think Corbyn is the Messiah, but there's absolutely NO ARGUMENT that he would put the needs of the British public first rather than pandering to a tiny minority. Tories are going to change the funding rules for Unions (which was only half of the original plan which would also have capped the amount individual investors could donate), which will cripple the Labour party, along will the daily media bashings poor Corbyn receives.

We've not had a real left-wing party in power since I've been alive, 30 years, and I doubt we ever will now

 

RBS - now there is a Bank to trust. Over reached in trying to buy a Dutch Bank and had to be bailed out by Gormless Gordon - Fred the Shread's best mate.
Funny how in one breath we blame the banks and in the next quote them on their forecasting skills....