cartimandua51

I let in Bournemouth, which is probably one of the stronger ones - partly because the nearest alternatives are Southampton, Winchester & Bristol / Bath and partly because it is relentlessly vocational and has a high graduate employment rate. Nice area; lots of Middle class students whose parents would have liked them to go to Exeter but they didn't get the grades. Two of the houses were fully let by an agent for next September by this February; the third is not yet advertised but we've never had any trouble in previous years letting by the room in Sept /Oct to students (normally lads!) who have left it till the last minute. We looked at Nottingham 6 years ago when my daughter went to Uni there, but even then there seemed to be a major excess of supply.

Because the Polys were originally under Local Authority control like schools & FE colleges. LAs will fight tooth & nail to keep their local Uni going - it's often the biggest employer in the borough apart from the LA itself.

I guess we must have unwittingly parked in their favourite space, no good louts that we are.

Could be either. In the late 60s Leeds Uni regularly chucked out 10% of its First Years. The line was that they didn't trust A-levels that much, so they gave doubtfuls a chance to prove themselves, and it also knocked out the rich-but-dim entrants who had been intensively coached at their private schools but couldn't cope on their own. Seems fair enough to me.

Different styles of learning. Some learn best holed up in a box room, but many find that physically getting their bodies into a lecture room at the same time every week gives a structure to their learning & provides interaction with their fellow students that improves the process. Bit like TV - there's been research (I think quoted extensively in The Economist) showing that despite all the time-shifting devices around, most people watch most TV live, even though that means sitting through adverts. Bit like watching a film on TV even though you've had the DVD sitting on your shelf for 6 months. Academic institutions go further back than that - the philosophers of ancient Athens gethered groups of students round them, which I suppose was a primitive Uni...

Lettings relief: Lettings relief is worth the same as the figure calculated for private residence relief or £40,000, whichever is lower. So if you worked out that you would get £30,000 in private residence relief, you would also get £30,000 lettings relief. But if your private residence relief was £60,000, you would get only £40,000 lettings relief. DON'T conceal the letting - that's fraud and HMRC could throw the book at you. Unfortunately it doesn’t work this way. There's no way for you to tell the revenue the circumstances and let them work out the gain after all reliefs. Yep. What I meant was, don't just pretend it was your PPR all along so as not to have to fill in a tax return. Most people HATE filling in returns; even if you are capable of it, it's very easy to get into a "rabbit in the headlights" state of fear about it! May well be worth springing the accountant's fee - there are firms which specialise in doing straightforward returns.

You are most unlikely to have a taxable gain. The last 3 years of ownership and the year you were resident are exempt; and by the time you take off lettings relief the chances of you having a gain exceeding the annual allowance of c. £10K are pretty low, unless you got a spectacular bargain 6 years ago. there may be other reliefs, but you'd need to read up the leaflet (available online from HMRC's website) to check. This, of course is on the current rules - June 22nd could change all that, but it's too late to sell by then unless you get it into an auction very fast. DON'T conceal the letting - that's fraud and HMRC could throw the book at you.

But probably not by breaking a "promise" established 40 years ago. Once trust is destroyed the whole system falls apart. Think of it from your own point of view - if you support pulling the rug from under people who made their plans on the basis of what they were told the system would be (and who would have acted otherwise had they thought it was in doubt,) what are the chances of you as a twenty-something saving for any sort of pension in retirement? Zip. You'd spend everything & rely on benefits or squirrel it under the mattress in Krugerrands. Result - an even worse situation for the generation after you. The whole point about pensions is they are long-term commitments - think carefully before you destroy the trust basis of them. That said, I'm expecting some sort of means testing in the next few years, and am kicking myself for making contributions for thirty-odd years which resulted in a pension of about £8000 pa - probably just enough to get disqualified!

Stop, or at least discourage councils from feeling they have to translate everything into 20 different languages. The before-you-enter English test just featured on the news is a good start. Most foreigners have a friend who speaks English - self-help! The French don't provide this sort of service, so the EU can hardly kick up. I suppose I'd make an exception for those accused of crimes - locking people up because they can't defend themselves because they don't understand what they are accused of is a step too far for me.

For starters: Or equality or outreach. In fact, go through the Guardian's Social & Public Jobs page (Wednesdays, is it?) and nuke any job title where it's not obvious to a layman what this person would DO all day Remove the ability of anyone single & unemployed and receiving Housing benefit to get the one-bed flat rate as soon as they turn 25. Make it 30 at least. If you had already been occupying a flat you get 6 months grace before dropping to the lower rate. Remove the requirement that councils house people in the area where they happen to live now. If you're on benefits for two years you move to an area of cheap housing unless you can produce a very good reason why not (e.g. very disabled child, grandparents living locally help out so child doesn't have to be taken into care) Means test winter fuel allowance & child benefit No child benefit for third or subsequent children ( unless you get hit with accidental [not IVF] twins Increase road tax massively on RangeRovers and the like - genuine farmers can get a rebate. Legalise, organise & tax pretty well all drugs thereby removing massive numbers from the criminal system Tighten up the rules on no-win no-fee lawyers4you to try to stem the compensation culture Cut paperwork in Gov't depts to free up front-line staff (Did anyone see last night's "Dispatches"??)

The LA can go back donkeys years (I've heard 20 mentioned, though I can't quote you a source) if it suspects deliberate deprivation of capital. My tax is a bit hazy but yes, you would certainly have to pay tax on the rent, and to stand any chance at all of getting it out of IHT it would have to be full maket rent - possibly not even then; "reservation of title" or "reservation of interest" are phrases that spring to mind. An accountant might be a better source of advice here.

If you are only going to be there for 5-10 years can't you make do rather more drastically? I was in a similar situation - house built by spec developer 1840s; never sold (at least not since WW1) Very ropey condition (by which I mean for example top floor unusable because of holes in the roof!) But it took us 10 minutes to make up our minds because we REALLY liked the house & location. We fixed the roof, put in central heating and a basic bathroom and that was it apart from a lick of paint. We lived there for over 20 years, bringing up 3 children. You don't HAVE to have a wonderful Smallbone of Devizes kitchen or C P Hart's bathroom. If you don't absolutely want the house, and your time horizons are short, I wouldn't go in intending to spend a lot of money on it. You probably won't recoup it.

'Taint necessarily so. See the supplementary guidance published by the G'vt for local authorities in 2009 http://www.communities.gov.uk/publications/housing/intentionalhomelessnessguide did the applicant’s home constitute accommodation that it would have been reasonable for him or her to continue to occupy? It would not have been reasonable for the applicant to continue to occupy his or her home, for example, if the home was not affordable, for example, because the applicant could not meet the cost of his or her mortgage commitments. And ultimately, the LA has to take one of two actions if a woman with 4 young children is sitting on the council steps with their belongings in bags around them: either they find her emergency accomodation at, say, (depending on location, obviously) £1600 pm or they leave her sitting there, and eventually they will be scooped off the street in the midddle of the night by the Police who will drag the Social Services duty officer (or whatever they're called) out of bed and tell them to get it sorted. Then they have to take the children into care at a cost of at least £700 per child per week (NHS report figure), possibly much more if you prefer the groups who say it costs 4 times as much to keep a child in care as send him to Eton. Cost per month c£10,000. What do you think the LA is going to do?

It's about time it was rationalised. Remember the dust-up with HM Customs about whether Jaffa Cakes were cakes (no VAT) or chocolate biscuits (VATable)? There does seem to be anrgument for ALL "manufactured" foods being VATable, leaving just raw staple foods VAT free. By raw staples I mean fruit, veg, flour, meat, fish; and though it's not raw, I suppose bread. if it discouraged junk food eating any loss of revenue would probably be recoupled in lower medical costs.

I'd support the mumsnet suggestion - my (very) occasional forays onto it have seen the fluffy bunnies and yummy mummies so derided on HPC, but also some tough cookies who have been through the wringer themselves and emerged bloody but unbowed!

A lot of people go to the CAB / Solicitors and then complain they weren't much help. What they are really complaining about is that they didn't produce a magic wand, say Abracadabra and make everything all right. Presumably they told her she was up against it, and I'm afraid that's about the size of it. Sometimes repossession / bankruptcy is the best or only way to go.

I take it she can't get help from her previous partner - has she got the child support people involved (or threatened to)? I know you say "nice ordinary people", but it sounds as if she has picked two consecutive deadbeats (what was his illness?) and this has been coming for a long time. I think she is probably going to have to get repossessed; if she has 4 children presumably she will be fairly high up on the housing list. If her partner is drunk and vindictive he can probably stymie any scheme such as renting the house out that she comes up with. In order to separate from him she is probably going to have to lose the house. With the summer vacation coming up fast are her students going to move on? That will compound the problem. I can't see any way out of it except to live at a reasonable level (stocking up on kids clothing, car repairs etc) then stop paying the mortgage and wait to be repossessed. Stuff any spare cash under the mattress not in the bank!

Sounds like the vendor has priced in the long-shot possibility of planning permission.

Souns like the Roman Empire to me!

Me too. But that doesn't mean I'm not (at least) half expecting it to happen. Events, dear boy, events.

You pay a fortune for crispy fried ears in posh restaurants now!

Boyle said that for a small farmer in the 12th century to make a sufficient amount to live on for a year, he would be able to take 170 days' holiday. The trend ever since, it seems, has been for work to take over. In 1495, he estimated, such a person would have to work 15 weeks of the year, but by 1564 the figure was 40 weeks and in 2010 most British households require two adults to work full-time to support a home and family. I don't doubt it; my problem is that the majority were probably not small farmers. My history of that era is lamentably rusty, but weren't the majority still landless serfs? Small farmer in the social scale then probably equates to teacher now. How much holiday did the serfs get? (Assuming they didn't die in infancy or get slaughtered in the matilda / Stephen civil war?)

I await some of the more rabid right-wing responses with interest - have you read the thread "Housing Benefit Families Pocket £26,000-Plus As Excessive Claims Continue To Rise" - on p 4 as I write? The complaint some of the above posters have is that you are complaining, but, this is the pretty much the first time in recorded history that you have a choice at all - a hundred years ago you would probably have been working 80 hours a week to survive at all. Now you feel hard done by because working 40 hours a week "only" makes you a net £30 a week better off! People who have taken the work option and whose taxes keep you on the dole, might just understandably feel a little peeved.

Also, you had to have owned it for at least a year, AND it had to have a valid MOT. Which is why I've got a rusting MG Midget sitting on my drive - by the time I knew how much it was going to cost to get it through its MOT this time it was too late to Swappage it:( That said, I've seen very few 10s here in rural Wiltshire.

Sell, sell, sell! Your ex may be being fairly reasonable now; but who's to say that 6 months down the line she still will be? Especially as you will be moving abroad, you need certainty above all.