Why have people tolerated the housing catastrophe of the last 30 years

[nomemono]

I know it has been good for those geared up or alt the top of the ladder in the mid 90s, and to a declining degree, most years since then, but really, how has this been allowed to happen. Just as one illustration, houses in the frankly crime ridden North London estate I grew up now cost 4 times their real, inflation adjusted, 1997 price. £420,000 to live in one of the worst areas of London, in an old, poorly insulated house. Oxford, affordable when I was a student, now almost worse than London. Cambridge, Brighton, anywhere well linked and with good transport links or local jobs, the same. People casually posting on this website about having £900k to spend on a house. Single people shafted, ditto those without inheritances. How has it come to this?

I’m ours will be roughly the same or slightly lower. The difference if it is lower will be negligible.

Trouble is that local tax offices were closed down, lots of highly experienced tax inspectors made redundant, when they were centralised into a handful of huge regional centres, so there's virtually no "local knowledge" anymore. So, yes, tax "inspectors" (or more likely young inexperienced trainees) are sat "chained" to the desks in huge call centres.

Before that, there were tax offices in every city and large town, and even some smaller towns, where the inspectors lived locally, so had a massive amount of local knowledge, which they put to good use.

I started in accountancy in the 80s, and lots of tax investigations/enquiries were started because one of the local inspectors "observed" something, such as a new shop opening, the van of a new start-up tradesman, or even simply observing the number of customers in a pub or restaurant and making a note to compare against recorded takings at a future random books inspection. We had one local inspector who compiled a list of deaths from the local newspaper, then got the details of the last known addresses from the local undertaker firms and plotted those living in care homes etc over timescales, etc. After a couple of years of tabulating the information he did books inspections of a few local care homes and found that a couple of them weren't declaring all their rooms - if, say, they had 10 rooms, they were only declaring income from 8 or 9 of them - turned out very lucrative for the inspector in terms of undeclared taxes over several years when the owners had to admit what they'd done in the sight of the evidence the tax inspector had accumulated!

It was a massive, massive mistake to get rid of local inspectors working out of local offices.