To be sick of hearing about 'the housing crisis'?

Well I've just calculated my income as a working person and am still under the NI threshold. As I was when I job shared so worked half a week.

The government did look at this for the retired but decided not to alter the system

I never said anything else. I didn't even mention income tax. NIC is just a tax, but unfairly only on workers.

Ah so your issue is that pensioners don't pay national insurance . You accept that they pay the same rate of income tax.

No, it is a housing crisis, but family breakdown is a contributing factor, along with inflation, high rents and taxes meaning hard to save a deposit, wage stagnation due to limited economic growth and probably lots of other things

Yes I know. My point is that they should pay the SAME taxes! I.e. Same level of taxes from wages should result in the same level of taxes from pensions etc. It's grossly unfair to charge workers higher taxes on the same income, i.e. national insurance, which is just another tax.

I totally agree with the OP.
There is a population crisis foremost!
Poor quality housing is being thrown up and advertised as sustainable and affordable which is an absolute laugh. Affordable to whom? I have watched a beautiful green space being devasted with horrible new builds which are basically brick fronted sheds, while a local factory remains empty and could have been renovated to many decent flats/apartments.
There is so much city wide brown space that goes unused while nature is being devastated with concrete.
Follow the money. If you think "they" care one jot about normal people think again.

But they do pay tax HMRC are aware of all income state and private pensions and tax accordingly.

They should be taxed exactly the same on the same level of income as a worker. I.e. if a worker earns £12k and pays no tax, then fair enough the pensioner with a total income of £12k pays no tax. But if the worker earns £25k there's no reason on Earth why they pay more tax than an pensioner with a total income of £25k.

Retired people receive around 12k a year. You rea have think they should be taxed on that amount?

If they've private pensions they do pay tax BTW

With the stress of trying to keep on top of my housing costs and the battle to find a better job in my struggling field no government wants to invest in, I’m going to assume I’ll be dead by then.

Perhaps the "retired people" need to accept that they need to pay more tax and stop voting for tax cutting parties in elections!

It's time that the tax burden was shared more fairly among the full population and that we stopped taxing workers more than pensioners.

The young people, at any cost apparently.

Because we are also getting older at the same time. If you look at the numbers of workers to pensioners over the last 50 years, it's got smaller and smaller. Who is going to pay for retired people?

So its not a housing crisis but a family breakdown crisis

We are nowhere near population collapse. I was making the point that UK births and deaths have reached equilibrium. A stable population is a good thing and allows sensible planning by governments. However, our government seems to want to increase our population by massive net immigration - last year - something like 750,000.

Why is a decreasing population - which would free up housing without building more - seen as a problem? When an increasing population - which is currently depriving millions of people of the chance ever to buy a home - seen as a catastrophe?

No, not Bath, a bit bigger than that. The enormous student developments went up here a few years ago. They said it would free up private rentals but private rentals have dropped off a cliff.

Read an interesting article the other day. Pension funds are investing money in property development. Their high street investments are not producing the returns these days so they're becoming landlords in domestic developments. The Americans have been investing, Asians. They've spotted a lucrative gap and can walk all over our councils. With our government promise of more homes it's inevitable.

@TheFatCatsWhiskers1 are you in Bath? I've posted about this earlier on in thread - we def have some of this going on here , all very similar , but a large amount of it is for student billets for overseas students mainly Asian and happy to pay silly money for a mini studio flat ( or more likely their parents are)

It's very similar in my area. I live in a suburb of a small city. Phase 1 of a three phase apartment complex has just gone up 10 minutes away, and at least six tower blocks are in the process of being built as part of an enormous development a short walk from there. Just around the corner phases 3 and 4 of another tower block development are going up, and there are smaller blocks of 'luxury apartments' dotted around in between. One of the luxury blocks is going on the site of a luxury house built just five years ago. They're going to demolish it to make way for them, what a waste This is all within a half mile radius.

The roads around the developments are tiny, the sort that have cars parked on each side so there isn't enough space for two cars to pass, and they're in very poor condition. There's also a railway line in the centre of the whole thing and only two roads which cross it. One of the two roads is a narrow residential street.

The prices are massively inflated and unaffordable to the average person. One of the blocks is for renters, prices start at £1750pm for a 50 sqM 1 bed flat which is significantly higher than equivalent rentals in the area. In a nearby development they're asking £400k for a 1 bed. Their websites have a dedicated section for investors.

No additional GP surgeries or schools, obviously. In fact, a local school on a 2 acre site has just been sold for several million to make way for more developments.

None of these developments is motivated by the need for people of all incomes to have secure, good quality, affordable homes and access to education and healthcare. They're motivated by greed and focused on maximising profit. The developers of my block cut corners to save time and money. We're the ones paying the price, stuck with enormous service charges, unable to sell and move on with our lives while they're laughing all the way to the bank.

We're getting ribbon development. From our village into the town off the main road about two miles are fields. They're building estates on them. It's stopped for now because of the economy.

Another village on a main road they're building social housing. I looked at planning last night. The next phase 109 properties 30% social housing.

Affordable housing is still too expensive for most so they'll be part rent their blurb says.

@anon666 yep- I drive through Wiltshire and Somerset via the A303 quite regularly and still looks like vast amounts of countryside to me -

Yep there's the odd bit of development along the way and quite a few new developments on edge of Frome , but the development isn't just randomly everywhere in countryside. I've spied the odd bit of building of say 6 houses out in proper countryside but that's about it - most is focussed on edge of towns and cities, here in Bath it's all around a particular basin that was pretty derelict anyway and is quite central . My own personal bugbear is far too much student mini hotel type stuff- for god sake put them in the vast amounts of shared houses we have - and leave proper new development for social housing or over 55 rentals etc ( which we have very little of )

I live in a town, and I can assure you that they are building more "houses" here than on green fields.

We've gone from one 70s tower block to looking like Canary Wharf. They've built on every last scrap of under-used land. They are completely repurposing the town centre to be more residential. They are knocking down council offices, B&Q, etc etc to build more tower blocks.

The idea that the countryside is most affected is wrong. They are massively increasing density in cities and towns. Have you seen Manchester lately?

http://www.peterbarberarchitects.com/edgewood-mews2

this is an example of really well thought out homes. They’ve really thought about what is attractive to people and how to build communities. They’ve also squeezed more in, with less loss of space than a traditional development

I agree about building upwards. However with a quality reliable public transport system nationally it would transform the housing market allowing people to live more spread out and would boost our economy. Also employers incentivized to allow work from home or work from a local hub wherever possible, to discourage avoidable commuting.

If the housing crisis is really so bad, why isn't the Government taking more of an innovative approach? How many town centres/high streets have empty shops that could be converted to residential use? Or properties that have stood empty for years and haven't been brought back to market?

A quick Google would have gone at least some way towards educating yourself about various initiatives and the raft of new Permitted Development Rights introduced over the last 5 years trying to do exactly what I think you're getting at (spoiler alert: it's not very successful and doesn't solve the housing crisis)