To be irritated by the Londoner exodus to my town?

[thesecondnamegame]

I've been priced out of my Greater Manchester town by the London diaspora. Anybody who knows the area will know which town I mean. My tatty council town centre terrace is worth 300k. A load of Londoners came up after the BBC moved to Manchester. Half the kids in my kid's school's parents are from London and they love to make sure you know that. House prices have become ridiculous and are in a different world to the rest of Greater Manchester. It's ridiculous as it used to be a very unremarkable market town (albiet with not much to it) and now it's gone all 'naice' and I'm having to move 10 miles away because it's reaching the surrounding towns and I simply cannot afford to live here and I want to buy a property. It annoys me, I keep imagining somebody who had a London salary and bought a house in London, sold it, and came up here and bought a house 3 times bigger for the same price as their smaller London home. It just seems like they cheated. There are no school places either, because a lot of the Londoner's chose this particular town for the schools. The catchments are bloody tiny, I know somebody who lives in a village about 4 miles away. The schools in this town are the closest schools. No school would take her child and she ended up having to home educate for months.

All my relatives who bought properties or private rented have had to leave, even those who went to uni and got great jobs.

'Moving out of their neighbourhood' that should have said

@magicflange

Yep *@Oldermum6* foreign buyers whose properties sit empty are a big issue in London. That inflates prices for the rest of us. Some have never even set foot in the city and never will. The issue is the system not the people trying to make the best of a very competitive market.

Absolutely!

Let's say they managed to get a graduate salary of 50k

Well you can say it. But there aren't many graduates starting on £50k, even in London.

Not unreasonable to be irritated. However, OP, did you vote in the last election, or did you vote Conservative? You have in a small way contributed to this.

Had the length of time of so-called 'lockdowns' been shorter, then perhaps some of those who have moved might not have considered doing so.

One of the things that drives prices up is that houses / flats in London are used as worldwide investments.
How would you stop that. Companies could just set up in the UK then buy the properties with 'UK' money.

Quite easily. Right of first refusal for residents (and the ownership of companies isn't difficult to dig into). Licences to buy that need to be applied for, for specific properties by anyone non-resident. A prohibitive tax that makes it non-viable for anyone but the ultra-ultra wealthy, rather than "just" the wealthy Chinese middle classes etc. There just isn't the willpower for it.

@AlackAlasAlackaday

One of the things that drives prices up is that houses / flats in London are used as worldwide investments. How would you stop that. Companies could just set up in the UK then buy the properties with 'UK' money.

Quite easily. Right of first refusal for residents (and the ownership of companies isn't difficult to dig into). Licences to buy that need to be applied for, for specific properties by anyone non-resident. A prohibitive tax that makes it non-viable for anyone but the ultra-ultra wealthy, rather than "just" the wealthy Chinese middle classes etc. There just isn't the willpower for it.

the ownership of companies isn't difficult to dig into

It's nigh on impossible - all it needs is to be registered somewhere where the details aren't in the public domain.

The problem the UK has is that a LOT of money moves through London because of our connections to tax havens. Much of it is undoubtedly dodgy, but it earns London a lot of money having this "business". If the UK cracks down on this, then the money moves elsewhere - so we have a situation where companies can buy/sell stuff in the UK, and we have no idea who's behind them.

It's nigh on impossible - all it needs is to be registered somewhere where the details aren't in the public domain.

Right. But if the ownership of Random Person ABC UK Ltd turns out to be Random Person ABC Tax Haven or if the ultimate beneficial ownership can't be determined, we could disallow ownership (in other words, the right to buy here allowed only where the ultimate beneficial owner is a) known b) resident in the UK, and if it's a company or private holding the directors are to be resident here). As it stands, as you say, the UK gets a lot of "investment" from this sort of thing so there's no incentive to change at a gov't level - but that's the decision "we" are making, at the expense of ordinary people here.

There are lots of countries where foreigners need to jump through lots of hoops to buy, to protect local residents.

Now then @Tealightsandd the OP has us banged to rights. You know we all sit in large gardened mansions in the middle of the city, grass cut with nail scissors and grapes peeled by down trodden serfs from outside of London.

As we sit we work out how many Hermes bags to buy with the gold which litters our pavements and how best to grind down poor hard done by notfromlondoners.

Meanwhile in the real world stats on homelessness and poverty are freely available from teh ONS, other gov departments and national charities looking at poverty and homelessness. No need to sully ones eyes with evil London media.

Also in real world this is about class and poverty all over the country, making it an issue of geography is a distraction from that.

OP I think you're absolutely right to be annoyed (or angry, even) that you're being pushed out of your hometown because of rising house prices.

But your anger is misplaced. YABU to blame the people who are buying those houses as the same is happening to many of them.

Your irritation / anger should be towards successive governments for creating this situation and for this one for doing nothing to address it.

When Thatcher sold off the council housing, people said this would happen. And here we are.

It wasn't just the selling off of the council housing that was the issue, it was also that local councils were forbidden from spending the money from sales of housing stock on new housing.

Just imagine if we lived in a country where it was easy to get decent, secure social housing, with no stigma attached. And where trading houses for profit (rather than to live in) wasn't made easy.

This world is perfectly achievable, we just need the political will to do it. But as long as people keep on voting in the Tories, we've no hope.

Yes, your beef is with capitalism/governments.

What could be done to make housing more affordable now that wouldn't fuck over existing homeowners?

As if people from around the UK haven't been moving to London and pricing us out for years and years!!

There will be more people from Manchester living in London than the other way around.

There will be more people from Manchester living in London than the other way around.

Quite

Also PMSL that the OP thinks all you have to do is grow up in London to get a well paying job. Maybe the OP should have tried harder at school and been more career focused to get a good job in Manchester? They do exist you know... Manchester is the UK's second city for most industry with many many salaries comparable to London eg. tech, finance and law

@HarebrightCedarmoon

^IF you're so clever, what exactly do you expect the Government to do? Any Government for that matter?

It's just market forces surely^

I expect the government to make policies and laws and run the country, and not just leave it to "market forces." They could build some fucking council houses for a start, to replace all the ones that were sold off in the 1980s and started off a housing boom.

And are you, the general hardworking public, willing to pay more taxes to facilitate this purported council house building??

Perhaps try to convince some of the high earning tax individuals to return their tax £££'s to the UK rather than hide in Monaco for instance.

Just to remind you....council houses were sold off to rid tax payers of the maintenance costs of old housing stock.

Shared equity housing is a better approach. It gives people something to aspire to, especially in areas of high housing cost.

OP whilst people have said that this could be various places in Greater Manchester, its quite clear where you're talking about when you factor in market town, grammar schools etc.

Its always been expensive to buy there and whilst there are more people re-locating to the area, its nothing new. The proximity to the airport, the tram system for access to Manchester city centre and the schools is what has pushed / keeps pushing prices up. The grammar schools in particular are consistently rated as among the best schools in the country and I don't think there is a single primary school locally that isn't rated "Outstanding" - hence the scramble / demand for school places.

I see your point - absolutely - about not being able to afford to buy locally but that's no different to lots of places which are / have become popular and therefore expensive. It's not a reason to bash Londoners or anyone else who choose to settle locally.

And if you tried to stop non nationals buying properties, the human rights lawyers (a la Keir Starmer and Cherie Blair) would have a field day.

Non residents? But I was planning to move to the UK in the near future. Again, feel free to see how well that goes in court.

Labour in their last stint built less social housing in total than Thatcher's lot were building per year and I really don't see what they would do differently (probably because they don't appear to have any actual policy ideas other than sniping).

As always on these threads, there's absolutely no talk of trying to slow the demand. People want all this housing to be built with all the space to go with it. Where is this land coming from for all the additional people requiring such properties going forward?

So glad people from
London are moving away. Less traffic and passengers on the tubes.

Am I "a Londoner"? I've been here for 15 years, but I moved here as an adult. You won't drag me back to where I was born and its cheap property without wild horses, tho. I moved here - as anyone is free to do - and lived in a houseshare and worked my way up to that London salary, as did DH.

Personally, one of my favourite things about this fucking city is that anyone who pays council tax here and knows to stand on the right is a Londoner. So if having ever lived here for 6 months makes you worthy of the OP's contempt... I hope she packed a lunch, because she has most of the UK and a good chunk of Europe to resent.

@Mytiredeyeshaveseenenough there are many non nationals in London that's not the issue. My partner is an EU national as are many of our neighbours we all own and pay taxes and contribute to the local community. Non residents (who spend no time in the U.K.) is another issue all together, I think they should pay much higher taxes on their properties. If they are proved to be sitting empty for a certain amount of time this should increase.

The just isn't enough hosting stock to GLA around. I also think something that contributes to the issue is the British obsession of own a house rather than a flat. If we built blocks of flats with balconies and lovely communal gardens surely this would be a great alternative. I live in a flat and we have a great community in our building.

@Flaxmeadow

VashtaNerada What a nasty thread. Migration to where jobs are is a normal part of life

What jobs? What houses? What Schools, hospitals, transport and infrastructure.

There are too many people. In London and in the North. England is one of the most densely populated countries in Europe, if not the most. You can't move for people. The roads are jammed, supermarkets packed out all the time, empty shelves all the time, they can't restock fast enough. Queues for everything. No wonder covid has ripped through this country the way it has

Nowhere near. Even if you exclude principalities & islands, we're a long way behind places like The Netherlands (525 people/sq km) & Belgium (367/sq km) and roughly in line with Germany (232/sq km for Germany v 260/sq km for the UK).

Any way, we need a land value tax - you tax the underlying value of the land, which is driven by location, not the specific use at any point in time. It's been known to be the most economically efficiency form of taxation since the 18th century, doesn't produce market distortions and stops people benefitting to such an extent from unearned increases in the value of their property. It also encourages more sustainable patterns of development, discourages landbanking & it's progressive because the burden falls mainly on the wealthiest in society.

And are you, the general hardworking public, willing to pay more taxes to facilitate this purported council house building??

Yes, absolutely, and to have a better NHS and schools as well.

‘Personally, one of my favourite things about this fucking city is that anyone who pays council tax here and knows to stand on the right is a Londoner.’

Quite right. Of the people I speak to regularly on my road, there’s a mix of Spanish, Scottish, Jamaican, Northern and Midlands English as well as generations deep Cockneys and my DH is Aussie born. We’re all Londoners.

Nobody cares where anyone came from originally. That’s one of the reasons it’s so expensive because people want to live somewhere they feel welcome and accepted.

@magicflange. How do you police that? Do you stop the defence of "I'm planning to move soon"?

A land tax? The burden would fall on the asset rich, cash poor more than the mega rich. I'm also sure that companies who landbank and then develop over time when market conditions were right would also have something to say.

@Mytiredeyeshaveseenenough it def needs some kind of policing in my opinion. If they don't move or visit for a period of time within a certain timeframe their council tax is put up considerably. I think that's fair. I'm talking about properties that just sit empty making their owner richer without them ever putting into their community.