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shootin' the shit / Re: UK General Election 2024
« Last post by Davo on Today at 01:22:19 pm »
I've said it before on here, but to me, the number one problem for why so many of the country are living miserable lives, is the cost of housing. And that the government can start doing something about by simply getting out of the way. ie: Essentially make a bonfire out of most of the planning regulations in this country. You can't build anything anywhere in the UK. Environmentalism has been weaponised by every NIMBY out there, to block anything being built. That needs to end.
This is quite a surprising post to read Nemo. Has someone in Tufton Street hijacked your account?
The reason housing is so problematical has very little to do with restrictive planning. No doubt some improvements should be made, but a bonfire of the green belt will do nothing to ameliorate the problem. Namely, asset prices.
This isn’t being driven by a shortage of supply, but by an excess of money driving asset values up and out of reach of what used to be called the working classes. The middle classes will be similarly impoverished in a generation. Thatcher’s ’home owning revolution’ has been great for foreign owned capital owning UK homes. Bob and Brenda in Birmingham, not so much. You are talking about tinkering with symptoms, not causes.
Primary steps to address this:
1 Seriously high levels of tax on the very rich whose wealth has grown exponentially in the last decade are needed. Billionaires can leave, but their fixed assets can’t.
2 Legislate against housing being owned by funds rather than individuals or UK owned business.
Secondary steps:
3 Rebuild significant social housing stock.
4 Fix social care. Ideally, bring it back into the NHS, or set up a dedicated national body rather than the fragmented current state of affairs.
5 Raise IHT thresholds (eg £1m) so that ordinary householders can keep their homes. Currently, once forced to sell they are just another spiralling asset increasingly out of the reach of ordinary people.
6 Rigorously enforce high levels of IHT compliance above the threshold.
7 Introduce fair rent legislation.
8 Increase house building, especially on brownfield sites.
Without 1 and 2 we are all going to be renting in a generation or two.
I wholeheartedly agree with all your points and ideas here. Housing should quite clearly be for accommodation and not another asset that the already wealthy accumulate and put of the reach of most people.
I very much agree with bringing social care funding back into the NHS. The current system where a person gets discharged from hospital into care and then becomes almost immediately a council/social care problem is a nightmare and just creates lots of perverse incentives that do not help the person involved one little bit.
Cheers Dave