Salz

Exactly - as one who ran a leased pub until December 2007, I can say that the main reasons they are going under is: The pubco rents are extortionate The ties for alcohol from the pubco's mean you have to charge ridiculous sums of money per pint Supermarkets selling cheap alcohol Smoking ban stopped a lot of trade - we had a few groups of regulars that started going to peoples houses when the smoking ban came into effect Cost of Utilities shot up. The pubco's have shot themselves in the foot by refusing to be reasonable about rents, so end up with nothing when tennants can't make the business work. The sooner the likes of Punch and Enterprise go under the better.

If they have just laid off a fifth of their workforce, then it stands to reason that the ones remaining would be busier as they have to do the work of the 20 staff that have gone.

The social housing may be down the other end of the development at present, but if they cannot get enough buyers, the developers WILL sell to the Housing Associations as a way of offloading their properties. The new estate I live on is currently going through this at the moment - The site was originally planned to contain social housing making up 30% of the total number of properties, however a revised planning application has seen that level rise to 42%, with 20 out of 67 new homes set aside for social housing. I am sure this is not just happening here. Secondly, I am currently renting a Persimmon new build - approx 2.5 years old now, and one of the worst houses I have ever lived in (and I have lived in a Barratt before!) The only decent newish home I lived in was a Westbury, but that was 10 years old. If it has been built in the last 5 years, dont do it unless you can get it for half price

Old topic, but bumped up, as I have just been searching properties in Quedgeley, Gloucester, and nearly every property has changed the agents phone number today - except for Taylors who changed theirs on the 13th June. Has anyone figured out why this happens yet?

They are still better than Tewkesbury though. I remember going to Tewkesbury and other smaller towns like this when I was younger - mainly to visit the markets as they were very popular 20 years ago, but with the advent of supermarkets and Primark who needs the market? At least Gloucester is trying to do something about it. Cheltenham has done nothing except build thousands of new flats, and seems to think it is above the recession. They are lucky in that they have GCHQ which is a massive employer in the town, but there is also a great deal of aerospace industry in the town that regularly comes in for a beating at the best of times, so goodness knows what will happen there. On the plus side, if they all go bust I may actually have a chance of buying a house there.

The problem with this programme is that Tewkesbury has been getting worse for years. It is a 20 minute drive to Cheltenham so where would you rather go, a town full of charity shops, or a large shopping centre with as good a variety of shops as you will see anywhere in the UK. Also now Gloucester has opened it's new factory outlet centre, that's pretty much the straw that will break the camel's back

With an 8 year old, your best bet would be Charlton Kings, as the schools are good there - both primary and secondary. However it depends on where you are going to be working, as the rush hour traffic is not great from Charlton Kings into the centre in the morning. The new estates are mainly being built on the outskirts of the slight less desirable areas - do NOT go to the new houses by GCHQ! House prices at the lower end of the market have definitely come down, but there seems to be a fair bit of stability in the higher range, although the houses are moving slower. You should be able to get something pretty decent for your money though

How quickly do hot cakes sell though? I prefer my cakes cold, and my pasties hot

I'm also looking in Cheltenham at the cheaper end of the market, and I havent seen anything selling - there are 3 or 4 on property bee that were SSTC in January and are now available again, and there are a couple that say sold, but I dont recall seeing them up for Sale in the first place, so wondered whether they were sold 2 years ago

Its Not Just Northern Rock. Go into the Halifax Mortgage Calculator: https://www.halifax.co.uk/mortgages/calcula...&app=borrow The additional Income box has one for Tax Credits. If you put single applicant on £20000 plus tax credits of £600 it offers you £136000. So on an annual income of 27200 you can get 5 times!!

There is no point - but where else do you put it, apart from under the mattress?

It must be your store - we got some 100W equivalent (allegedly ) bayonet fittings from our local store yesterday

Do the government actually pay the mortgage? From what I have read, they simply say you can defer interest payments for up to 2 years if the bank agrees. That's why the banks were reluctant to sign up to the scheme, because they won't get their money straight away

Please be gentle as this is my first post on here. (Lurked for a while though!!) I look at it like this: The government used to pay the interest on mortgages after 39 weeks(?). Now they wont pay it for 2 years - Then they will pay it all back. In the meantime the banks aren't getting any of this money back at all. Therefore they have to go to the Government for more loans, and the Government owns a larger part of the banks. Eventually the government will own outright several of the banks. In 2 years, when they have to pay the interesdt back, they are paying it back to themselves, plus, when they repossess all the houses, (from those who couldn't pay, and are in even worse negative equity than they are now), they then own those houses and have a nice stock of council housing, much of which will still be within NHBC, so all the repairs can be done at their expense. Just a theory