Wednesday, Sep 09, 2009
The Most Laughable Initiative Of All Time
BBC: Go-ahead for 2,000 council homes
"Ministers have given the go-ahead for 2,000 council houses to be built across England - as a report says there is too much emphasis on building new homes. The project, covering 47 areas, is being described as the biggest of its kind over the past 20 years." WOT? Yes, two thousand. If they'd said 200,000 I'd have shouted yippee, but 2,000? At that rate it will take them eight hundred years to build one for every family on the waiting lists ... oh hang on, they'll all be dead by then anyway. Problem solved!
Posted by mark wadsworth @ 10:04 AM (964 views) Add Comment
25 Comments
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1. uncle tom said...
Does the government not realise just how pathetic such an announcement looks to the public?
But I wonder if it was prompted by this written question & answer published on the ariament site last week:
Robert Neill: To ask the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government how many local authority housing units have been (a) started and (b) completed in the last 12 months.
Mr. Malik: 330 local authority dwellings were started, and 520 local authority dwellings were completed in England in the 2008-09 financial year.
- Dismal numbers indeed..
2. uncle tom said...
Oops parliament
3. mark said...
no-one seems to get it, UK is bankrupt, hence darling preparing us all for dramatic cuts in public spending as announced on BBC Wales News last night..
there is no more money in the pot...
4. mark wadsworth said...
@ Mark - if done sensibly, council housing makes money for the state, i.e. the taxpayer generally. Let's assume bricks and mortar £60,000 for a nice flat or a small house. The council borrows the money to build it at a notional interest cost of 1.5% (as the rental receipts which will pay the interest go up with inflation, so we can take an index linked interest rate) plus 2% for maintenance, insurance etc.
As long as the council can get more than £40 a week rent, on average, it's a break even - and it's saving the DWP/the council/the taxpayer about £100 per week to pay to a private landlord - which is a real cash cost, not to mention a subsidy to private land ownership.
Ane the more they build, the more likely it is that people with proper jobs will move in who can afford £60 a week rent, or £100 for a house, or whatever, so the more they build the more the average rent paid goes up!
What's not to like?
5. uncle tom said...
"What's not to like?"
Town Hall dependency really - the more self-reliant people are, the better.
Grab 100 square miles of land the MOD no longer needs, divide it up into decent plots, and flog them off for an average £20k apiece to individuals (not developers) to pay for roads and other services.
Then let the people do their own thing - that's what I'd like!
6. Fly By Night said...
There should be many many more council homes built, not a measly 2,000.
7. mark wadsworth said...
Uncle Tom, your plan dovetails nicely with my three-point plan (1. Liberalise planning laws, 2. Introduce LVT, 3. Build more council housing). In fact four-point plan, 4. Supervise banks properly. In fact five-point plan, 5. Scrap the BoE monetary policy committee.
But why do you equate paying rent every month with not being self-reliant? Is paying rent to a private landlord (like wot I do) being self-reliant but rent to the Town Hall not self-reliant? Where is the moral difference? Would you say that businesses who rent premises from Crown Estates etc aren't self-reliant?
Instead of giving people MIRAS and other tax breaks to "get them on the housing ladder" (which merely inflates prices and is redistribution from the lower middle to the upper middle) we could just as well "get them on the housing ladder" by giving everybody at age 25 (or whatever) planning permission for one unit of housing to be used wherever he or she sees fit. A one-off payment of £20k seems perfectly fair to me. I just worry that most MOD land is miles from anywhere and nobody wants to live there.
8. mark said...
MW
Maybe they do make money, my point was there is not enough money in the pot to build a lot..lol
also from my experience of local authorities and how they handle anything, they will make a hash of it, estates are left to get run down, become crime zones, they treat the public like dirt, fine them for having a bin, fine them for everything they can, don't supply decent services, yet the CEO of a council earns in excess of 100k per year, gets a payoff of 450k to leave, then is re-employed by same council, this is what they do with public money, they screw the public down and see them as mini banks.
Anything the local authority does is rubbish...simply put they re run by idiots who get back handers for everything, then are asked to destroy someones life, like the guy who is bank rolling the fight against the tescos planning in liverpool, I have inside info from the council, a person in the council was asked to cancel this guys contract for the services he supplied to the council because he was paying for leaflets to fight the planning of a tescos superstore in his neighbourhood , this guy will lose his house now , his kids wont eat, yet the council guy will get his payoff from tescos and tescos will build the superstore, the system is corrupt from top to bottom..
9. uncle tom said...
Mark,
The theory is fine, but I am old enough to remember the old days of council housing, and am in no hurry to see it return.
Fine for those in genuine need, but town halls are actually pretty useless landlords, - so best not pursued as the solution for the mainstream..
10. dbc reed said...
If you were given a national tenancy ,as of right,the public provision of affordable housing could be highly liberating.The problem with the old mass council house system was transfers : the system was knocked on the head just before the onset of the Internet.With the Internet, you should be able to change dwellings faster than in the private for sale sector with a huge improvement to the mobility of labour.It was,according to free-market fundamentalists,supposed to be liberating for miners to buy their old pit cottages but with the end of mining they were well and truly stuck because their houses had no market value ,there being no market for them .The wonders of the market are bound to include built-in immobilism as the unemployed homeowner cannot move to where there is well-paid work because of the house- price differential.
Things are more complicated than always trusting market-forces ,which as the last year has shown, are destructive if left to run on out of control.
11. the number cruncher said...
UT where the council estates of the 50's 60's and 70's really that bad when compared to the private slums of the 20's and 30's and 40's. I think we have had a progression in housing as our economy and technology has evolved. Ever read the Road to Wigan Pier?
The problem we have toady is their is a monopoly on building land and the VI's have a very tight control on it. I think both state housing and liberalisation of individual development needs to be pursued.
The green belt/wildlife augment is a complete red hearing - 98% of wildlife has been destroyed by industrial agriculture and not development. A housing estate has a dam site more wildlife living on it than a farmers field.
So whether private or state we should say: Build baby build...
12. buctootim said...
The problem isnt who builds and manages new housing, simply that no enough is being built. If he UK had a much larger housing stock excess demand would reduce, purchase prices and rents would fall and many of the people who are currently priced out of the market would no longer need to seek social housing. We have similar income and population densities to Germany but their housing prices and the easy ability to move are far better than in the UK. Building additional housing stock benefits the whole population apart from those simply seeking to profit from speculation (ie make money out of the rest of the population).
13. paranoia blue said...
NC @ 10
It depends on ones definition of "wildlife!" :{
14. uncle tom said...
"Build baby build"
On that we are agreed..!
15. mark wadsworth said...
@ Mark, Uncle Tom, I accept that in practice many council estates are not nice places to live. But ask yourselves why?
1. Because councils are too lazy to evict nuisance neighbours (and would be obliged to rehouse them if they did). One crappy family can ruin things for a hundred others. Weed out the crappy families (who can go and live on an ex-MOD barracks as far as I am concerned) and things will improve enormously.
2. Selling off the nicer bits of council housing to the better off poor must, by definition, mean the average quality of the buildings and tenants left over go down. So build nicer stuff again and instead of giving people on the waiting lists points for how 'disadvantaged' they are, give them points for how long they've been in employment. And extra points for couples who are legally married. Or whatever.
3. Because the local council has no profit motive. Again, easily fixed. They can auction off the right to manage the day to day stuff for a share of the rents to professional letting agents or residents' associations or whomever.
If you look at the reasons "why" we have this state of affairs, you will find that the solutions thereto are obvious. Like I said, Crown Estates manages office blocks and so on quite professionally and they are indistinguishable from any other office blocks.
16. the number cruncher said...
PB @12
The often perpetrated myth is that housing and industrial development has destroyed wildlife
A modern farm is a compete wildlife desert - walk through one and you will see no birds, beetles, butterflies our other plants. The only wildlife you will see are in hedges and field margins which are most likely paid for by our taxes in the form of agri-environment schemes.
back gardens are normally full of wildlife, especially if they are a bit wild - It always amazes me that people look at green belt and think its full of wildlife - it is not.
The Dutch have some great schemes whereby building new houses integrates wildlife areas and corridors allowing wildlife to move between nature reserves. They call it there nature grid.
17. paranoia blue said...
NC @15
I was brought up in country and you would be surprised at the range of wildlife, and we also have a lot of set-aside [which is another matter all together], also a lot of animals have become urbanised.
However, my point was somewhat tongue-in-check, i.e. “wildlife in housing estates.” ATB
18. jack c said...
mark (currently @3) said...no-one seems to get it, UK is bankrupt, hence darling preparing us all for dramatic cuts in public spending as announced on BBC Wales News last night.. there is no more money in the pot... Wednesday, September 9, 2009 10:32AM
"no-one seems to get it" - I do loud and clear and have done so for a long time - IMO (for what it's worth) this is a very valid point
19. denzil said...
Mark W said:
"At that rate it will take them eight hundred years to build one for every family on the waiting lists "
Do we have lack of supply of property? I'm sure the BTL brigade will be rubbing their hands with glee.
20. dbc reed said...
Highly recommended for supporting the argument that homeownership causes unemployment is Prof Andrew Oswald's The Housing Market and Europe's Unemployment: A Non-Technical Paper,accessible on the Net.
21. mark wadsworth said...
@ Jack C "there's no more money in the pot" that's the whole point!
At present, the state is paying £100-plus a week for 800,000 households living in private rented accommodation. They don't need a big cash outlay for a social unit as they can borrow the money, and even if the occupants lived their rent free, it would cost £2,100 a year rather than £5,200. That saves the state (i.e. the taxpayer a heck of a lot of money). I have thought this through, you know.
And there may be plenty of BTLers ready to let out their properties and get the council to pay inflated rents, but will they be so happy to drop their rents once I'm in power and we scrap housing benefit for private tenants? As well imposing LVT?
22. drewster said...
dbc reed,
Not only does home ownership cause unemployment, but in some areas council housing causes unemployment too. If you're an unemployed 19 year old in the Welsh valleys (with few jobs around), you might think about moving to e.g. London where the jobs are. However if the government gives you a council house in your local village, you're probably better off staying put.
23. mark wadsworth said...
Drewster, I think DBC's perfectly valid point was that if people are tied to one location, they are more likely to be unemployed.
His example was home ownership where your home has fallen in value. The same logic applies today to people in council houses where it takes ages to get allocated a council house in a different area - which he also acknowledged was a problem in his first comment.
But if you go back to my comment 15, don't just say "It's difficult to change council flats. Therefore council flats are bad". Ask yourself WHY it's so difficult. The answer is because there aren't enough and waiting lists are far too long. Which would be fixed if we just had a lot more of them, which was the whole point of the thread.
Or turning to your example, if unemployed Welsh people can find jobs in London, then let's build more round London.
Problem solved.
24. drewster said...
MarkW - I was agreeing with DBC's point. My point was in addition to what he said; not in opposition.
I'm still not entirely persuaded by your council housing solutions though. Sticking with my example, if there were no council houses in either the Welsh valleys or in London, then people would naturally gravitate to whichever makes the most economic sense for them.
25. mark wadsworth said...
Drewster, oops, sorry!
Sure people would try and move where it made most economic sense. But NIMBYs would make it as difficult as possible for them to do so. More social housing is not the absolute answer to everything of course, but it's all part of the MW five-point-plan.