to ask how we can sort out housing?

[Hullygully]

So. First time buyers largely priced out. Rents going up. No new building. HB cap. Little security of tenure for private renters. Landlords being stuffed.

When Right-to-Buy was introduced, both as cynical gerrymandering and vote gathering, and because the govt wanted rid of the responsibility for social housing, there was an encouraged explosion in Buy-to-Let to take up the slack.

Now we have a large number of landlords with a few properties operating on narrow margins who have little protection against rogue tenants (particularly those on HB who are told by their councils to wait it out until eviction) and who are able to pocket the first 8 weeks of rent before any action can be taken, and who are therefore understandably reluctant to take on HB tenants, plus, with the introduction of the Cap, HB tenants will be able to pay less than the market rent in large areas of the country.

Then renters have little security, they can be given two months' notice after six months, a nightmare particularly for families settled at schools etc. And of course there are some nightmare landlords around who don't carry out repairs etc.

Suggestions?
Solutions?

I think the answer is simply to allow more land to be built on. Where I live (Hampshire) agricultural land trades for around £2k per acre. If land has planning permission that value skyrockets up to between £60k and £200k depending upon location.

The major cost of any building these days is the land that it's built on and the reason it is so expensive is because land with planning permission is so scarce. Ergo, make it more available and the cost will go down.

Levels society. The alternative is to have groups of people for whom buying a house is easy

Inheritance tax is just another stealth tax for the government. Why should society be "levelled" in that way. We are not a communist state.

Why should people who have worked hard to provide an inheritance for their children be penalised?

I think the answer is simply to allow more land to be built on

That just doesnt work though. You build more homes, you then need more facilities, schools, hospitals, etc. You cannot just keep building and building. The money is not there to provide the services that the new homes need.

In my area a huge estate has just been built. 800 homes.

Brilliant you would think. Nope.. there are no places in the local schools, it now takes an hour to get out of the area during rush hour because the increased traffic implication have effectively grid-locked the area.

"worked hard"

that is a whole other thread, squeaky.

Why should people who have worked hard to provide an inheritance for their children be penalised?

then why have any tax at all?

i want to live in a meritocracy.

you can't have a meritocracy without a level and fair playing field at the outset, which there isn't if some start off with silver spoons...

But back to the POINT.

Housing.

Having grown up in stereotypical sink estate social housing I really don't think building more of it is the solution. Social housing leaves the people living in it dependent on the state, very vulnerable to changes in state policy and lacking a major asset (property owners have a big head start in providing for their old age and their children can look forward to a decent inheritance). And its more likely to be built on the cheap, as the house I grew up in definitely was. I would much prefer a serious effort to try to bring home ownership within the reach of lower income people. It would give them a major asset in the long run and real control over a major part of their lives.

Much longer tenancies in private rentals

More social housing

Cheaper houses to buy

Thats all i can think of, but have no idea how this would be actually implemented

i hope it improves in the next 10 - 20 years as i fear for my dcs future, i really do.

This a very difficult. I know what I want:

Reasonably priced housing for people who wish to settle somewhere and make a home
Decent rights for tenants, secure tenancies and reasonable rental costs that aren't subject to above inflation rises.

But how to get there.

Higher inheritance tax would work
Higher taxes on BTL, second homes
More shared ownership
More house building, etc

It is very complicated. I think this is perhaps the biggest issue facing the country, but so far, the wealthy and a significant minority benefit from the current system.

I live near Paddington Station - close to the station stood derelict land which has been developed in to office blocks and luxury apartments - no social housing at all; yet this borough is desperate for housing. The council/HA's could have sorted out most homeless people if they had built on that land! These luxury apartments are empty all weekend - the place is like a ghost town. The opportunities are there but the councils are not taking them. Money always comes before people.

Another point - the argument is the council homes that were sold off have families living in them so therefore they would not be available anyway. On my floor two elderly ladies recently passed away. They had bought their council homes which their families sold back to the council at market value. How does that make economic sense? If the properties had remained owned by the council two families would have been homed - and that is on one floor in my block. Instead the council have had to shell out £700,000 approx to buy back what was their's in the first place!

In the sense of trying to increase home ownership, Thatcher wasn't wrong (I believe it had been a Labour policy) as it does increase prosperity, social mobility, etc, but it has been handled so badly to the detriment of the majority in recent years

I am very curious - I rented in London for years (and never felt it was unsecure!), and I am currently a landlord on my flat in London as we moved abroad. I do offer 2 years contracts to my tenants after their first year or 6 months (I want to make sure they are good tenants), and no one ever has taken up that offer. Our managing agents say that no one ever does that in London, so I now just offer a standard one year renewal. So that particular piece of legislation would not affect me as there is simply no demand for longer rental periods: but then again, it may be because it's London.

If someone capped the rent I can ask for (incredibly complex thing to do, given that incredible variation of rental prices in the UK), I would probably not take the risk of renting out the property, which would therefore remain vacant for a large part of the year. So, as with any other price cap, you would probably end up with more demand and not sufficient supply (or crap supply, as landlords will not upkeep the property and not invest in new properties either). This may have a temporary positive effect in the short term, but on the longer term will not help renters, particularly in a country where the population is rising and very little house building is going on.

Finally, I am "continental", and even if here a lot of people rent for longer, the vast majority do so whilst they wait to be ready to buy their "forever" home. People do not tend to "climb up the ladder" but want to buy once and stay there until they are old. This means that the housing market is "slower" than in the UK, perhaps stopping prices skyrocketing despite the fact that mortgage interest is tax exempt and first time buyers are subsidised.
And as pensions and pretty much any other type of investment become less secure (even gilts are not quite safe anymore!), "forever renters" are becoming few and far between as the house becomes the only form of security a lot of people will have (no one I know in my generation aims to be a forever renter... Actually I only know of one family who rents).

the only solutions that this govt will implement are:

(1) use the current stock of housing better.
(2) they might try to get more private money in social housing (not saying this is a good thing)

somewherewest
their children can look forward to a decent inheritance

Not if it needed to pay for care home fees - unless those rules have changed?

Probably need more affordable housing but also less need to buy just to have stability which longer rental leases and more protection could provide. That and changes to process of buying and selling houses that make it an easier less expensive and more predicable process - so people can move for work easier.

That and more decent quality social housing - and it would all be sorted or they just might be different problems.

Why should people who have worked hard to provide an inheritance for their children be penalised?

Why should people who work hard to provide for their families be forced to live in overcrowded shit holes? If someone doesn't own their own home DOES NOT MEAN THEY DON'T WORK HARD........and breathe

Firstly remove stamp duty for 1 and only 1 property. No "switching" allowed if you own more than one property. Encourage developers to build the bigger family houses with gardens. These measures will allow people to "move up" without additional costs of stamp duty. The idea is to swamp the "family house with a garden" market because it frees up smaller houses, flats and starter homes at the same time as making these family houses more affordable. The more houses there are the cheaper they will become. The last decade of intense building has seen a glut of flats built, we don't need more flats we need more houses.

The biggest problem in the UK is scarcity of housing which is compounded by severe Nimbyism.

We need to see the end of vast housing estates and incentivise lots of little developments of 10-12 houses. There is less to object to if a few small developments are built in each town/village. The schools and hospitals are more likely to be able to assimilate the additional people.

This doesn't solve the housing benefit problem or the rental problems but it might be the only way to drive house prices down because realistically most people want to own their own him and home ownership is good for the economy.

Talking of realistically the developers need to realise that we are a nation of drivers - so give us enough parking too but demand that new developments are well served by public transport.

Locally to me, A proposed new housing development is being refused due to the fact it is planned to go on woodland which apparently has rare birds, There is an RSPB reserve less than 5 miles away, Could the birds not be moved there??

Since when are birds more important than people? The village in question is going to lose it's school if these new houses do not get built meaning that families are unlikley to buy here even if they could afford it.

The village is full of holiday homes and retired people as it is. Very sad to see :(

I never said they did or did not work hard did I?

But why should people who do own their properties be penalised? They have not been cheating the system, or doing anything wrong.

You cannot expect the goverment to sort everything out, people need to take responsibility for their own lives.

If you cant afford big families, you dont have big families, it is as simple as that.

People who own their properties do not have the "luxury" of being able to get a bigger property if they become overcrowded. They have to put up with it. So many tend to only have the number of children that they can realistically cope with.

It may sound Daily Mail'esque, but it is also true.

Higher inheritance tax really isn't a winner for any political party, the electorate hate it.

Freeing up greenbelt is unlikely to help house prices. Private Eye did an interesting story on it.

it is not in house builders interest to see house prices drop. the increase in price makes them money.

it is in their interest to let them build on greenfields instead of brown as it cheaper so helps their profits.

also i cannot see a tory govt overseeing house prices drop.

I have lived in private rented for 25 years on standard shorthold tenancy contracts. Witha few exceptions our landlords have been good and we have generally stayed as long as we wanted in each place.

However, we have only managed to do that by signing fixed term contracts for 1 - 3 years that neither party can give notice on. We do not do 6 month contracts because of the lack of security.

In my view, both LLs and tenants need more protection.

It is a good thing that deposits are now more fully protected by the tenancy deposit scheme (TDS) because agents and landlords seriously abused deposits before that.

I think a further protection would be to allow instant eviction of non paying tenants. The whole process of getting an eviction is far too lengthy and LLs always lose money in that process. It is unfair and makes LLs unwilling to rent out propertry to people on HB. That said, I also think HB should be paid direct to LLs. Giving the tenants the money to pass on to LLs was a bad idea.

On the issue of tenant security of tenure, I do think that LLs should be on a central register and that mortgage firms should be forced to honour any tenancy agreement on the property if the LL defaults on their mortgage. It is unfair to a tenant who signed a contract in good faith to be evicted through no fault of their own because their LL defaulst. In return, mortgage firms should of course be able to accept rent from a tenant if the LL defaults on the mortgage.

minerva

1. have you thought about offering a two-year lease with a one-year break clause? That's what we had in our last flat.

1. I'm not sure I understand why you would leave a flat vacant rather than rent it under a price cap. Say you want to rent it for 1000 but the government says you can only charge 900. Wouldn't you still rather have 900 than 0?

1. I agree with you on the 'forever home' thing -- my ILs for example raised four kids in rental flats, then finally bought when they all left home. DH and I will probably rent until we retire.

I think the problem in the UK is not so much an emphasis on home ownership but the allure of the 'property ladder'.

Private renting is the pits :(

I rent an apartment under Assured Short Term tenancy which guarantees a minimum six months stay. However I have been served notice to vacate just two months into the tenancy because the landlord has found a buyer.

We have the law on our side but little money and resources to fight out our case in court. We are here on a Tier 1 visa for a few years.

We are being intimated by the estate agents and being threatened of all sorts of consequences if we don't vacate.

Now running around trying to seek legal counsel and find another house.

Had to cancel the much awaited week long holiday we had planned next week and have spent the last few days crying my heart out.

If house price inflation and social conditions add a million pounds to the price of a house in area "A" and not in area "B," is there a good reason why the offspring of people who bought a house in area "A" fifty years ago, should pocket a tax-free million?

sorry, that was for squeakytoy