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UK politics general discussion

BarryZola said:
If the pricing of housing and energy was more reasonable then wages wouldn't need to go up. Unfortunately, the people in control of the supply of homes and energy are greedy (or unwilling to do anything about the lack of supply). What a time to be alive!
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And the people who could do something about it either won't or choose not too because someone from the energy industry has donated money to the party and therefore can't upset them.

Same for the issues regarding transport and NHS.

Can't see pricing for housing going into what is actually affordable though. Most of them have been snaffled up by landlords it seems. And most new builds are awful quality to boot.
 
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BarryZola said:
If the pricing of housing and energy was more reasonable then wages wouldn't need to go up. Unfortunately, the people in control of the supply of homes and energy are greedy (or unwilling to do anything about the lack of supply). What a time to be alive!
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House prices are high because planning laws prevent building where demand is high, and the government stopped supporting social housing meaning private landlords started buying up all the builds to make money of renters.
 
Yep if the government stopped focusing on incentives to help people buy houses and instead focused on council and social rent building that would go someway to reducing the dependancy on private rent which would also make more houses available for buyers.
 
But they only flogged off two and a half million council houses...
Social rent building, that sounds so nineteen seventies.
I remember when housing associations built really good houses, and managed them well with set fair rents.
But I'm a sad old git.
 
House prices are driven by supply and demand, right now demand is still outpacing supply so prices are unbelievably still going up even though they aren’t affordable.
I have been looking for a holiday / future retirement home to purchase near the coast and was hoping prices would drop off but no such luck yet.
I also have a pal that put down a deposit on a new build last April, was supposed to move in in September but has now been given a date of beginning of May!
Apparently there is a shortage of building materials due to Covid so new builds aren’t getting finished either.
 
I wonder if the selling off of two and a half million homes owned by the state has anything to do with the price of housing overall?
I keep hearing that developers are being slow to complete new houses to keep the price artificially high as we go into recession.
Nothing like a bit of a fake shortage to keep prices up.
 
BigT said:
House prices are driven by supply and demand, right now demand is still outpacing supply so prices are unbelievably still going up even though they aren’t affordable.
I have been looking for a holiday / future retirement home to purchase near the coast and was hoping prices would drop off but no such luck yet.
I also have a pal that put down a deposit on a new build last April, was supposed to move in in September but has now been given a date of beginning of May!
Apparently there is a shortage of building materials due to Covid so new builds aren’t getting finished either.
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As Rob says the selling off of social housing coincides with the dramatic increase in house prices.

The prices became too high for most long before the pandemic, the pandemic has certainly exacerbated the situation but is not the cause.
 
Prices became too high 2 decades ago and despite some movement downwards in the wake of the financial crisis, they've continued to climb because the policy foundations laid down in the 80's has remained the same. Not replacing social housing and not building enough homes to keep up with demand. The Thatcher and Major governments celebrated Right to Buy and arguments about lack of replacement homes were ignored. The Blair and Brown governments wore the fact that house prices were high as a badge of honour and completely failed to do anything about supply. The Cameron government made it harder to obtain mortgages then foolishly implemented sticking plaster measures with government schemes which exasbated the problems with Help to Buy to intentionally keep house prices high.

Many things that have happened since have made the problem worse. I even recall Michael "poll tax" Portillo of all people claiming around 10 years ago that the housing market was so broken it needed radical government intervention. Yes, Michael Portillo or all people told Andrew Neil that the government should be buying up land and if home builders weren't going to develop, then the government should.

I remember sensible and sometimes even civilised cross party debate being had during the 2005 and 2010 elections about the problem. But it was largely ignored in favour of having debates about bashing immigrants. In 2010, there was a cross party comission that nearly reached consensus on social care with a view that if they didn't act on the problem it would one day cripple the NHS. But the campaign ended up being about telling lies about national bankruptcy and agreeing with Nick. In the run up to the EU referendum the issue of the Northern Ireland border was discussed, but it was hard to notice amongst all the nonsense.

No government in Northern Ireland, the NHS imploding and housing in absolute crisis yet we can't say we didn't see any of this coming. The usual modern day excuses of Putin, material shortages, worker shortages, land banking, Covid, money and even the weather are having the finger pointed at them. But they're mere fuel being added to fires that should have been put out by our great leaders long ago.
 
We lost the right to have a fair rent set on a property in 1988.
I forced a rent reduction on my landlord as a student in the mid eighties...Imagine that!
Since then, the ball has been in the landlords court, and the big money/ profiteering/ money laundering/ rampant capitalism kicked in.
 
...and then the younger generation will have less kids because they can't even afford a home for themselves, let alone another mouth to feed. So that's less little tax-payers to pay for public services, pensions and social care in the future, so the country is pretty screwed really. All too late now without immediate drastic government action. But those in power like house prices to rise, so...

Inevitably we will rely on an immigrant workforce to replace the lost taxes from what would have formerly been a British workforce.

The government need to compulsory purchase loads of land in various areas and build a lot of pre-fab homes. They can do similar to grab land for HS2 so they could do the same for a housing crisis. The will is just not there, at all.
 
Yes, those pesky kids becoming economically active filling labour shortages in a struggling economy and paying taxes in a country struggling to deal with the magnitude of having such an ageing population. Lower birth rates and less economically active adults is just what the doctor ordered. It's working wonders for Japan right now.
 
Matt.GC said:
Yes, those pesky kids becoming economically active filling labour shortages in a struggling economy and paying taxes in a country struggling to deal with the magnitude of having such an ageing population. Lower birth rates and less economically active adults is just what the doctor ordered. It's working wonders for Japan right now.
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Good god humour really is lost on these forums these days isn’t it
 
This is why we struggle discussing religion and politics on forums...we need all those non verbal clues to make sure people know when we are taking the mickey.
No need for thoosie hate.
 
Dave said:
As Rob says the selling off of social housing coincides with the dramatic increase in house prices.

The prices became too high for most long before the pandemic, the pandemic has certainly exacerbated the situation but is not the cause.
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I agree it certainly wasn’t the cause, it’s a strange phenomenon house prices, you would have thought that either a pandemic or selling off thousands of houses would reduce prices but the opposite happened.

Governments of the last 30 years or so have been quite happy to see the rises though as people remortgaging and borrowing more have been effectively growing the economy by using the money to buy luxury items that they would otherwise be unable to afford.

This country was screwed the second we stopped manufacturing stuff, the growth of the last 30 years has largely been driven by cheap credit.
 
What’s causing the housing crisis? Is it selling off the council houses? Is it allowing international investors to buy up property? Is it because the UK has weak regulation on money laundering, meaning money from international crimes gets deposited in Britain’s housing stock? Is it the ease of credit to buy housing? Is it because owning housing attracts low taxes, and because when house prices slow, they introduce things like tax duty holidays? Do schemes like help to buy and key workers schemes keep on pushing up house prices? Does the lack of regulation on landlords, such as the lack of an independent ombudsman, make it attractive for profiteering? Does the lack of rent controls and secured tenancies also attract dubious investors? Is there a shortage of housing caused by tough planning laws? Is there a shortage of housing caused by developers ‘land banking’? Is there a shortage of housing caused by a lack of qualified builders in the UK? Is it caused by a move away from traditional hotels to Airbnb? Is there a housing shortage caused by an upward movement of money through the generations, meaning younger families live in one bedroom flats and elderly people living on their own have big houses? Is it caused by jobs and opportunities being unevenly distributed through the UK, meaning too many people want to live in the same places?

The housing crisis has lots of causes and no single magic bullet solution. At almost every opportunity, politicians have voted to exacerbate the housing crisis, and this has been done out of shameless self interest, profiteering and corruption.
 
On a separate note, I feel like there’s another interesting discussion to be had after statistics that were released yesterday.

A lot has been said recently about a staffing crisis within the NHS, but it would appear that there may be staffing and recruitment issues within another public sector field, and that is education.

According to a recent Labour analysis of Department for Education (DfE) figures, around a third of English teachers who qualified between 2011 and 2020 have since left the profession: https://www.theguardian.com/educati...qualified-in-last-decade-have-left-profession

Of the 270,000 English teachers who qualified between 2011 and 2020, 81,000 have since left the profession.

Within a more recent timeframe, 13% of teachers who qualified since the last general election in December 2019 have now left the profession.

The picture does not get a lot better when you go to the rate at which teachers are entering the profession; data from a month ago showed that in 2022, the number of qualified teachers entering teaching in the UK was at a “catastrophically low” level: https://www.theguardian.com/educati...s-teacher-training-england-catastrophic-level

Secondary school teacher recruitment was only at 59% of the DfE’s annual target, and key subjects missed recruitment targets by even more. Physics teacher recruitment was only at 20% of the government’s target, and Computer Science teacher recruitment was only at 30% of the government’s target.

To me, that sounds like there is clearly an issue within the teaching profession. Those job retention figures do not sound very high at all given that the average qualified earner will work for 45 years or so (assuming they start at 21/22 after leaving university and retire at 66/67), and the recruitment of new teachers is clearly far short of where the government wants it to be.

I’m aware that there are quite a few teachers on this forum, so I’d be keen to know; what do you think needs to be done to make the profession more attractive and improve retention? I’m aware that pay has been cut in recent years, but does pay on its own necessarily tell the whole story of why people are leaving the profession in droves and no one is taking their place?

This could certainly pose an issue if left unchecked, though. Teachers are an essential part of a high-skill economy; without teachers, who will be there to teach these required skills to the children of the future?
 
Like with most other public sector roles, the job has been cut to ribbons and people simply cannot cope with the stresses such a role causes.

But because they get more holidays than average people it's allowed to beat them with a stick. Even if most of those holidays involve some part of working in preparation. Plus ignores the often lost evenings and weekends for work related activities as well.
 
Cut the needless paperwork.
Give classroom assistants their jobs back.
Give administrative support so the typical teachers hours aren't fifty plus a week.
Go back to paying them properly.
Reduce class sizes.
.
Easy.
I spent much time, effort and money qualifying to be a teacher after twenty years doing other relevant associated child based work.
I lasted precisely one term.
Loved the actual job, and could manage the teaching, lesson preparation and marking, but I had a three foot pile of "essential" admin that had to be processed for ofsted...that was all useless.
I didn't have the time or inclination to do masses of needless paperwork, for nobody's benefit, on top of a massive workload.
So I quit, on good terms.
My headteacher said I was a good teacher, but had no chance in teaching...because I had a real life in the real world as well, and most teachers don't get much of that.
So I became a gardener, with no actual training, shorter hours, and a better hourly rate, and ten minutes administration a week.
I still use a school style printed timetable for each week's planning however, so all that expensive modular training didn't go to a complete waste.
 
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