To feel our quality of life in the UK gets lower every year?

[Playingvideogames]

Off the back of another thread where I mentioned my childhood homes being bought by my parents for under 300k in the late 90s/early 2000s, and are now all selling for 700k+.

I feel like our quality of life just dwindles every year. Everything becomes more expensive. Housing is low quality, small and extortionate. The weather is awful 70% of the time. Everything feels so overcrowded with fewer green spaces and natural beauty as more housing estates go up. The roads are awful, choked with traffic and potholed. Constant roadworks here yet nothing ever seems to get solved. Customer service is a bit rubbish, nothing really works as intended. More and more rules about what you can and can’t do. People just seem stifled and stressed.

I’m sure people will rush along to say how wonderful the NHS is and similar, but I sometimes feel really envious of people living in places where (although not perfect) they have something reliable to enjoy - great weather, a nice big house, just more space and less overcrowding.

I don’t think I’m being unreasonable but I wonder if you do!

Brexit? The problem is years of cheap mortgage debt and people stupidly gobbling it up until no one can afford a house, it is just Greed of Bankers x Stupidity of Public = Right old mess.

Leading economists said it would take a decade to recover from the 2008 crash, i.e. to get back to where we were before it. Then of course, 2020, covid happened and economists are saying it'll take a decade to get back to where we were before covid. We're basically looking at 20 years of stagnation and reduced quality of life due to these two financial disasters, before we get back to where we were in 2007, before we can start to improve our finances again, and no doubt, there'll be another financial disaster late in this decade (maybe world war etc) that will knock it back another decade.

Not sure I agree on that, 2008 happened, then what happened - MASSIVE Bailout, if you had mortgage debt you got lucky as the bankers were thrown a lifeboat, most people just doubled down on the debt taking and kept spending though.

Covid happened, some say the repo market/bond market "event" in I think the September before Covid was announced was linked, join your own dots on that one, but Covid happened, then what happened MASSIVE money printing, people were getting paid to stay at home! The average person never had it so good, but the main reason for the giveaway was more likely to make sure mortgage debt to banks and rent to landlords who owed money to banks got paid.

The best way to improve the finances of ordinary people is access to cheap housing not 35 year mortgage debt liability. If you want to speculate and make money that is what the stock market is for. The main reason ordinary people have been "knocked back" is because they are carrying too much debt liability, most of it linked to housing.

I completely agree that the best way to improve the economy and people's lives is to build a shit load of houses - like 500k plus per annum.

This will reduce house prices meaning that less of people's net income is taken up with mortgage costs and more is available for either consumer spending in the economy or pension contributions or simple savings that is then reinvested into the economy.

The main reason houses are expensive is restrictive planning regulations creating a shortage of sites. House builders are then incentivised to land bank permitted sites because the longer they delay building on it the more valuable it becomes plus if they build out on their entire permitted sites then they know it will be difficult to get new permitted sites.

No, the mass house-building thing that people talk about will never happen, there are plenty of houses, new-build sales in London are down about 60%, the political mood is moving rapidly towards letting less people into the country, houses are expensive because people were allowed to borrow too much and people believed the Not Enough Houses! rubbish, everyone viewing a house to buy or rent already lives somewhere, all the Help to Borrow schemes and stamp duty holidays, shared ownership schemes etc. are designed to help developers flog their overpriced rubbish to financially gullible people, developers are starting to go bust though and the bond market had a wobble today due to the obvious need for KS to step down, we are heading in the right direction without building a single unit.

The main reason houses are expensive is restrictive planning regulations because governments have stood by whilst firms have prioritised profits over affordability and healthy communities. Without changes with real teeth, Labour’s current housebuilding plans will be more of the same.

More homes are absolutely needed, but restrictive regulation isn’t the main problem. The UK housebuilding model is driven by margins. Developers want to build high margin executive homes, not what the communities might actually need. They’ll happily landbank if they can’t get the terms or margins they want. And even when schemes go ahead, affordable and social housing and community infrastructure is often promised at planning, then quietly cut back once permission is granted. Councils don’t have the power or resources to stop it.

Brownfield should be the first port of call, but it’s more expensive to develop, so greenfield sites are usually preferred by developers - land we should be preserving to help protect against imported food price inflation/ general quality of life. Infrastructure constraints are ignored, as are the effects on biodiversity and wider environmental issues. Not all objections are NIMBYism - how many new homes have been built on flood plains?

Expensive new homes (many not even that well built) are snapped up by higher earners and deep-pocketed investors, pushing prices beyond local wages. Add in annual estate management charges, another cost buyers have little protection against and you have a masterclass in how not to fix the housing crisis, unless the aim is to sell off more of the family silver whilst lining the pockets of corporates, investors and the already wealthy (many using clever tax planning to avoid as much tax as possible), whist saddling homeowners and taxpayers with the financial, social, and environmental costs.

And if anyone needs further proof this is all about margins, look at the drift away from building proper homes towards HMOs: transient housing, minimum space, maximum yield. More profit, fewer family homes. Yet another successful community building public + private collaboration...🙄

@KeepPumping Are you sure it's only demand side issue?

"Expensive new homes (many not even that well built) are snapped up by higher earners and deep-pocketed investors"

Really? Where is this happening?

https://thenegotiator.co.uk/news/land-new-homes/collapse-in-london-newbuild-sales-revealed/

You do realise that most of the country lives outside of London. Some areas have fallen, some have stayed the same and some have risen.

When prices fall developers and investors react, they pull back or shift focus ie HMOs.

Large numbers of "high earners" live in and around London though, so these articles are significant, pretending that it is business as usual really isn"t going to fly TBH.

The main reason houses are expensive is restrictive planning regulations because governments have stood by whilst firms have prioritised profits over affordability and healthy communities.

Developers want to build high margin executive homes, not what the communities might actually need.

This may be true but businesses are not charities/public bodies. Their primary focus is making profit.

It is mainly demand for debt, price of debt, plus sentiment towards the asset class, if people see price falls they certainly won"t be borrowing hard for some shoebox next to a ring road.

Nothing wrong with profit. But profit at the cost of wider society is unacceptable.

This. It could get a lot worse than this, you just have to look at the current climate in the US to see this. We have issues but the UK has good things too. We need to focus on building community and push for a better standard of living and decisions that benefit everyone, not letting snake oil salesmen like Farage divide us. Reform has links to Russia - Nathan Gill went to prison for it and Farage used to go on Russia Today.

They pay lower rates of taxes than we do though, that isn't fair. They have more and they pay a lower %. Elon Musk doesn't pay any tax because he doesn't take a wage but borrows against his shares to raise money. They should pay their fair share. The economy did better in the 60s when tax rates were higher. Ordinary people had more money and they spent it. Trickle down economics isn't working, we aren't seeing the benefits.

We can’t afford the endless means tested benefits being lammed out, or ever increasing disability benefits, but what’s the alternative?

state pensions & the NHS cost a lot more then disability benefits.

Abolish the triple lock, include house value when calculating care in the home eligibility, move to a European health system.

Of course it's is. The freezing of tax thresholds means we are all paying more tax. If tax thresholds had increased with CPI a normal tax code would be around 1650, meaning we'd be paying far less tax!

The main reason that houses are expensive and people have to spend so much of their income on them is the lenders.

From lending 3 times one income or 2 times one and 1.5 times the other to colurrent many multiples of income, sometimes up to 6 x income. If this hadn't happened then house prices couldn't have ride so much as people couldn't have afforded it and they wouldn't sell

Business as usual is the problem. Stacked too far in the favour of developers, corporate and investors with tax payers picking up the tab.

People selling their homes/ using savings pay for cares homes are already subsidising the care costs for those who don't have assets. Are some homeowners exempt from paying towards their costs?

Yes if it’s the only real asset they have and there is a spouse or another over60 still in the home. They can only take assets that exclusively belong to that person .

Thanks. I was not aware of that. I have only known divorced people and widowers who have had to sell their homes to their fund care.

I suspect that will change a some point, and probably in away that penalises the surviving spouse/ partner.

Yep - reason I know is an acquaintance of mine, early 60s ( married) moved herself into her fathers nice home a few months before it was obvious he needed to go into care , registered for council tax etc, she then moved him and he was self funding for about 10 months and once below the level they got it paid and he didn’t have to move - the minute he passed on , it was spruced up and on the market