Green Woodpecker

I did this at my local branch. It works out as the equivalent of a good rate of interest. Have you looked at Lloyds? My kids are getting 2.5% on their under 19s account and they seem to offer up to 4% on larger balances in the current account with Vantage.

I think you are spot on. This sounds llike a proper modern democratic state to me.

Exactly - if we pay for twits we get twits running the country. Obviously it is far too important a job to do this. I'm sorry but we need to pay our MP's a good wage. Look at our chancellors - Brown and Darling. What a pair of rank amateurs they turned out to be. There was a time where the MP/ government minister's role representing the man in the street or the gentry in the big house was appropriate.Perhaps they didn't need any specialist knowledge. Life is too complicated now . We need a pool of clever, able people working hard for us as MP's from which to pick our policymakers at the top. Anything else is madness! Vince Cable is now the best thing since sliced bread because he understands economics. We need loads of good economists as MP's to give us a choice of policies and policymakers. It's no good going on about what a load of self serving, lazy misfits the MP's are, so they don't deserve high salaries. WE NEED decent clever people in Parliament and I think that requires a decent salary. Cut the number of MP's in order to balance the books. This has been said many times recently.

When I first saw this story I assumed the development was somewhere like Solihull, where you expect the residents to be NIMBYs. I nearly fell off my chair when I saw the houses were in Netherton! Now there is nothing wrong with Netherton, but it is a typical Black Country town with a lot of Victorian terraces in poor condition, post-war council housing estates and pockets of new developments on brownfield sites, interspersed with small factories (often metal working), small industrial estates and warehouses. How these new home buyers must have lapped up the advertising from the developers " Contemporary waterside living" - next to the canal, inevitably complete with rats, "Great transport links to Birmingham" - slapbang in the middle of the West Midlands conurbation with miles of gridlock in every direction at 5 o'clock every evening and you can imagine the drawings of beautiful children playing under trees next to the gorgeous houses.(No sign of the major road running straight past though!) They were sold the dream by the developers, by the telly and by the papers. Own your own home and you will suddenly be in this glamorous new world. Then down to earth with a bump, because once you come out of your shiny new front door I am afraid you still live in the same old town with its mixture of people, poor and better off, council tenants and owner occupiers. This is the real world (and always has been) Its not that house prices will drop because of the tenants - it's that you overpaid for a reality that never really existed.

Oh Sibley. You just can't understand simple logic can you? If we all get "priced out", then loads of other people will be priced out too. Demand for houses will go down again and the price of houses will fall. It's not that hard is it?

Sorry - wrong about Waterfields development - it's back on Rightmove today, and with the same stupid asking prices as before. These new developments always seen to have one house SSTC don't they? To lure you into thinking some misguided individual is actually willing to pay the inflated asking price.

Anyone out there looking at the B63 market (or lack of it)? Waterfields development of "executive homes" appears to have been withdrawn from sale this week - well who was ever going to pay £375,000 to live on a roundabout? Are Hadzor Davies in trouble, I wonder? I think they must be, to mothball this site in March, just before the "peak buying season" We have been looking to move up "the ladder" for two years and stagnation is a total understatement of the situation. What planet are these sellers on? If you haven't sold after two years YOU ARE TOO EXPENSIVE! And yet all the estate agents are still there - we even had a new one open in December 2008! Any other HPC ers equally frustrated at the time this crash is taking to happen here?