montesquieu

It's some people's jobs to go on thinking excursions like this. I've run scenario planing workshops for companies myself. Scenario planing as a tool came into popularity after Shell used it to consider the possible impacts of an oil price spike prior to the Yom Kippur war in the 1970s, and a collapse - to $16 a barrel don;t forget - in the 1980s, and others including BP didn't ... Shell had made plans for such scenarios that they quickly enacted, and Shell ended the 80s as one of the strongest players in the field. Of course they also looked at for - and planned for- MANY other scenarios that didn't materialise.. Often extreme scenarios are used to flush out as many possible impacts as possible and are set alongside other scenarios, some equally extreme, in order to consider how situations might interact. Usually no-one expects the worst to arrive it's just a thinking and planning tool to help calibrate risk. When tin foil hat bloggers read reports like this and get a big stiffy, they are generally acting in total ignorance of the context for which they were created and used.

care to post the salient excerpts? murdoch isnt getting any of my money any time soon

Never lived there but had the misfortune to spend a few weekends there visiting friends in Hull who didnt have room to put me up. Try and avoid anywhere near the town centre as the sheep-sh*agging youth get over-excited and are as rowdy as I've seen anywhere including central London. Preferable to Hull though (though that isn't saying much). If you are into classical music the minster has loads including an annual Early Music Festival which is the finest in the country - missed it this year though.

That'll be the north and the celtic fringe then ... not exactly Tory core vote though could hurt the Liberals.

Check the train ticket price from Swindon to East London. Astronomical doesn't cover it. Only feasible if company pays travel expenses. Timewise it is feasible by train (over 4h return trip though - 2h+ each way). As for doing it by car - daily? It's a hard hard slog, it's 30mins fast drive Swindon to Reading in no traffic, figure an hour in peak time (ie any time after 7am). Reading-M25 another 40-45 mins at peak. Train from there - Uxbridge? - figure an hour to East London, stopping at every lamp post. It will be unreliable due to traffic & crap trains and you'll be late as often as you are on time. My advice (as someone who has done it) your wife should stick to Bristol, get a room near your work east London, off peak train or bus through sunday night, try to get friday working at home. Swindon is a boring dormitory town and the villages around are (mainly) pretty soulless unless you have an emotional connection to the place (family and a reason to be there). IMO daily commute by car from Swindon to London isn't sane or sensible.

I have to say this idea has some appeal. Scare stories about mundane social control that bother some uptight civil libertarians are a complete red herring - mashing and mining the datasets involved, which are both very huge and very fast-changing, is a massive, resource-intensive exercise and it would make no sense to go after trivia. Should play well in middle England with those of us who pay through the nose to fund the lifestyles of benefit cheats, cash-in-hand tax evaders and under-the-radar property speculators. I'd be happy to see them going after bank accounts as well. SOCA do this but its targeting drug dealers and the like, I would have no problems with government access to all family bank transaction details being a pre-requisite of receipt of IDS's unified benefit payment. All tied to an ID card of course.

Well done. the glorious US of A just re-invented feudalism.

My sister does this for a living for HMRC and takes great pleasure in catching people who abuse the system. Her little section - a team of a less than of dozen, all on sub £20k salaries BTW - were recently commended for bringing in over £15m in ceased fraudulent payments in a year. If there were more of them, they could do more. These are not the non-job wastrels that need to be cut, arguably the team needs expansion. However unless we want a world where there really is a paid-on-commission Stasi out there taking notes on the habits of every house in every street, the main source of information on benefit fraud is disgruntled workmates, tenants, even relatives. Following up these leads exactly what their job is ... along with other leads provided by a team whose job is doing data mining on cross-departmental data sets (but as you'd expect, the people who do this are paid rather more) - a waste of money as well I suppose? The kind of naive, totally uninformed rant makes my blood boil. Yes there is government waste but a lot of good work gets done too and people who don't acknowledge this are merely demonstrating their complete ignorance of the subject.

There was a brilliant one as well from Sadly Broke AKA Bradley Stoke in Bristol. http://www.bbc.co.uk/bristol/content/articles/2007/09/06/bradleystoke_video_feature.shtml this from 2008 http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/politics_show/7675653.stm

Classic!

£400k for 3 beds? In Essex? Give them a slap around the head. It's not friendly house price advice they need it's a shrink. A 10% fall (very likely, very soon) is £40k. How long does it take to save that amount (let alone pay it off with interest?) Why on earth do they want to buy NOW? Do they have the requisite £80k cash deposit burning a hole in their bank account?

Is there a particular reason they have to move right now (other than 'wanting to?')? If it's instant gratification they are after then they should go ahead, and feel crap about it later when prices have dropped 5% or more before they even complete. Any more info? House type/area/price? It's a cheap house in a cheap area any losses may be pretty low so they might as well say baaaaa and join the queue for the shearing shed.

+1 Surely the answer to the mystery.

East Berks - small development close to me was started in 2009 and is now sold out. Another one (bit bigger) completing and about to start marketing. Another one broke ground last week. Be interesting to see what happens re sales and completion of later phases of the second one/completion of the third one. People will pay over the odds for any old rubbish here though if you can walk to a train station and get on the M4 in 5mins.

Not just in the south-east, I moved back to the UK from New Zealand in 1995 and bought a place in Glasgow from a couple who had been stuck there since buying at the top of the market in 1989. We £60,500 for a 2-bed flat in a wonderful Victorian circus in the West End, with private residents' gardens in the middle to which we had a key, 2min walk from the underground station. Townhouse conversion and our living room was a massive drawing room with 15ft ceilings. Probably £300k these days. They made £500 on it in 6 years, we made £5k on it in 9 months when we had to move to Bristol in 2006. Agree totally on what's likely to happen ie frozen solid in the south for quite a few years. Only difference is the amount of personal debt and mewing that went on this time is off the scale compared to the 80s, and public sector contraction will be more severe, so there could potentially be a lot more forced sales than back then.

I sympathise with this point, but York, and Edinburgh, and Bath, and Bristol are doing just fine. My sense is that these things are mainly for locals anyway - community building exercises - rather than for tourists. Most visitors to this country never get further than the main bus trip routes out of London: Cotswolds & Bath; York & Hovis country, Edinburgh & the Highlands for the more adventurous. (EDIT: Forgot the 'other' bus trip, Stratford on Avon).

This kind of throwback is unfortunate and yes, the city is still segregated. That's why community-building exercises like this are important. The reasons for the recent riots are complicated and as ever the rioters are rather dumb pawns furthering someone else's more sinister agenda. Personally I would love to see the Ulster marching season as become a shared cultural celebration, but unfortunately the hate and triumphalism with which marches are often conducted mean this is a long way off - it's not a lot different to the Klu Klux Klan electing to (and being allowed to) march round black neighbourhoods reminding blacks of their underclass status and reminding them to stay in their place. (I speak as a Scot who witnessed similar growing up in the Glasgow area and it can be sickening). But most of the time there are no riots (these days they are pretty rare) ... the old city has a wonderful charm about it and, as I said, a thriving arts scene. Surely it's right to encourage this over the old culture of bigotry, hate and reaction.

These things are always simply tools in urban regeneration ... the whole point is to challenge the status quo and give locals something to strive for and hopefully leave some legacy behind when the circus moves on. Places like Oxford, Bath, York - long-established cultural centres outside London - don't really need this sort of intervention. So yes I think you did miss the point. Though I should ask - have you been to Derry lately? It's chokka with musicians, potters, painters, threatre groups. It's far from the place more people remember off the telly from the 1970s.

I thought we paid for the education system already - in general taxation. tbh a general graduate tax, retrospective - or perhaps a reduction in personal allowances - would be a better idea than increased fees and I'd be happy to do my bit if it meant today's students (& my kids in 6-8 years' time) not being loaded up with debt. a tax on those grads like me who benefited from free education in the 60s, 70s and 80s would be very fair ... though identifying who pays it could be a nightmare.

Well... since '97 Labour has been the party of the landlords .... whatever happened to Thatch's property owning democracy? On the way out according to the ONS.

I got this reply from Grant Shapps, the new Tory housing minister, following a letter where I complained about the cancellation of quite sensible proposals for a register of landlords & letting agencies. I made several 'pro' points - notably the huge extent of Tax Avoidance among the small-scale BTL crowd (on both rental income and CGT on disposal) - but these were ignored in favour of some 'cut and paste' paragraphs which simply spell out a Keith Josephs retro/default Right-wing Headbanger approach which sees all Regulation = Red Tapel, despite the promise of tens, possibly hundreds of millions of additional revenue to the taxpayer. Anyway here's his letter. Anyone hoping for a reduction in VI-favoring mendacity from the new crop of ConDem pols, prepare to be disappointed: (my emphasis) As you know, the Government will not be taking forward the regulatory measures proposed by the previous Government in response to the independent Rugg review of the private rented sector. These measures included a national register of landlords and mandatory regulation of letting and managing agents. Ministers are satisfied that the current legislation strikes a fair balance between the rights and obligations of landlords and tenants . In the past over-regulation drove many landlords out of the rental market. Ministers, therefore, have no plans to further regulate the sector as this would only introduce new burdens which would have the effect of reducing the numbers of properties to rent which would not help tenants or landlords . With regard to Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMOs), landlords require a licence from their local authority for these under the Housing Act 2004. The local authority can then impose conditions such as requirements for licensed properties to be occupied by a specified maximum number of occupants, and ensuring that there are adequate amenities in place, whilst landlords will need to be identified as being “fit and proper” in terms of their suitability to manage the property. Should a landlord of a licensable property fail to meet any conditions attached to a licence then they would be subject to a fine of £5,000, and in the most serious cases could have their licence revoked. In addition, Ministers have recently announced their plans to give local authorities more flexibility to manage HMOs without tying landlords in red tape , so that in those areas experiencing problems from high concentrations of HMOs, local authorities will still be able to take local action to control HMO development and require planning applications for changes of use from family dwelling houses to small HMOs. Further details be found in the news release on the Department's website at: http://www.communities.gov.uk/news/housing/1617158. http://www.communities.gov.uk/news/housing/1617158.' rel="external nofollow">Finally, as you may have seen, the Government announced in the recent Budget that Local Housing Allowance Rates (LHA), which are used to calculate Housing Benefit, will now be capped at £250 for a one bedroom property, £290 for two, £340 for three and £400 for a four bedroom property. LHA rates will now also be based on the thirtieth percentile of rents of the local area rather than the fiftieth percentile. This reform means hard working individuals and families will no longer have to subsidise people living in properties they themselves could not afford. Anyway, carte blanche to all those tax-evading mini Rachmans out there, courtesy of another brainless stuffed suit from Central Office. The LHA rates proposal is a good one but you can be sure on this form it came from Gorgeous Osborne at the Treasury not DOSAC or whatever the real-life name of the communities department is.

Bloody hell someone had it bad to pay that back in 2003 .. I would think we are right back there at the mo it certainly isn't worth much over that (bearing in mind 8-9 grand in stamp duty).

This piece of nonsense on the outskirts of Reading http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-29919011.html?premiumA=true '4-bed' (in theory at least) semi the back of Reading ... kick in the **** off £400k. They should be queuing up for this 'Open House'.

Not sure which one's the most thick, the handout girl (it was a girl wasn't it?) or the Liberal pol who came across as completely hopeless. Complete lack of comprehension on both sides either of the policy or of the real consequences (which for this girl is probably nix).

+1 Councils actually have very little discretion over how they spend what comes in (most of it in central government grants as it happens, not in council tax) and the vast majority goes on social services which by and large are nationally prescribed (one reason for the centralising urge of NuLab was to end the postcode lottery in services which is an inevitable consequence of devolution of decision-making and which is on its way back with a vengeance if the LibCons are to be believed). As it happens many Council services are private sector delivered already (things like call centres, bins, old people's homes etc etc) so the dividing line between local authority workers and private sectors staff is in terms of what they do on a daily basis is pretty thin. While it's true that the the average well-educated, well-off poster on here gets little more than a bin collection for their council tax (in my case around £240 a month), the reality is that without a lot of things that they do, social order would rapidly break down (or break down even further than it has already in some places), children would be far worse off in terms of abuse or neglect, and vulnerable adults such as the mentally handicapped or old people with dementia left to fend for themselves. But there are right wing nutters out there who simply refuse to see this. Of course services could be delivered more efficiently and we are about to have that debate, perhaps too, council workers' benefits need brought in line with the private sector - but I believe their current favoured position is a question of simple policy lag rather than mendacity on the part of any particular group, and will be amended in time. There really is no need for all this anti-council hysteria from the rabid right.