Tag Archives: housing

House prices will fall under a Labour government: it’ll build on Green Belt, says Keir Starmer

Keir Starmer: he’s pointing where he wants the value of people’s housing to go – down.

Here’s another Keir Starmer promise that may never be honoured.

He reckons house prices will fall under a Labour government because he’ll boost the supply of housing – build new homes.

So for many homeowners, the biggest investment they have ever made in their lives will lose value, thanks to Labour.

And there is no guarantee that the people who need new housing will be able to afford whatever Starmer may build.

Here’s what he said:

“At the moment, one of the reasons that house prices are so high is because people hold land, trying to ensure that it gains as much value as possible,” he said.

The Labour leader added: “Developers and landowners actually have a vested interest in not building so many houses, because that keeps the price high. We want to change that model and make sure that many, many more houses are built – and that the price comes down.”

He did make an interesting point about building on the Green Belt; and having just heard a discussion of this on the BBC’s Politics Live, it seems clear that a lot of nonsense is talked about this.

Starmer said a discussion was needed on building over the Green Belt, but added that he wanted to end confusion in rules that meant housing was built over a playing field in Maidstone, rather than a car park, because the car park was classified as being in the Green Belt.

To This Writer, the answer is to re-classify the car park so it isn’t in the Green Belt any more (how did it get put into the Green Belt in the first place?) – and then there would be no need to legislate to allow building in the Green Belt at all.

It should be clear to everybody that green land should be preserved, for the good of us all.

Ultimately, this seems yet another attempt by Starmer to cripple his own party’s electoral chances.

Current homeowners won’t support a party that actively campaigns to make them poorer by reducing the value of their houses, and potential homeowners won’t want to be forced to choose between having a new house and taking away everybody’s green space.

If he isn’t intentionally trying to sabotage his party’s chances, then he needs to learn how to do something that should be as natural to a lawyer as breathing: he needs to think before speaking.

Source: House prices will fall under Labour government, says Keir Starmer


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Five demands for a better Britain from the Peace and Justice Project

Jeremy Corbyn: his Project for Peace and Justice has just announced its five demands for government (of any stripe) to deal with the cost of living crisis and bring real prosperity to everyone.

After Jeremy Hunt announced his “E’s and Wizz” Budget and Keir Starmer brought out his “five missions”, here’s a message from the Project for Peace and Justice, brought to you by Jeremy Corbyn:

Last week, the Chancellor announced a budget that did nothing to alleviate the obscene levels of poverty and inequality in our society – instead protecting the riches of global corporations and the wealthiest in our society.

He should have used the opportunity to present policies to deal with the cost of living crisis with a budget that could have made a difference to the lives of all those that have suffered under 13 years of austerity, the Covid-19 pandemic and a decline in real wages.

That’s why we need an alternative budget that puts people first, based on the following five demands:

A REAL PAY RISE FOR ALL 

Everyone has a right to live and work with dignity. That means giving nurses, teachers and public sector workers an above-inflation pay rise, implementing a minimum wage of £15 per hour, banning zero-hours contracts and reversing cruel benefit sanctions.

DEMOCRATIC PUBLIC OWNERSHIP

As millions struggle to pay their energy bills, fossil fuel giants are taking home record profits.  Private profiteering is ripping people off and destroying our planet.  Alongside water, rail and mail, it’s time we put energy back where it belongs: in public hands.

Democratic public ownership will empower communities, bring prices down and kickstart a Green New Deal that invests in clean energy.

HOUSING FOR THE MANY

Housing is a human right, not a commodity – everyone deserves a decent, safe, warm and affordable place to live.

We need an immediate rent freeze and reduction, an end to no-fault evictions and an urgent mass council home building programme.

TAX THE RICH TO SAVE THE NHS

After years of austerity and privatisation, our NHS is on its knees. It’s time to end outsourcing, invest in a fully public system of universal healthcare and build a National Care Service.

The government says there’s no more money for our NHS – but they’re wrong. We can give our public services the money they need by introducing a wealth tax, raising income tax on the top five per cent of earners and making corporations pay their fair share.

WELCOME REFUGEES AND A WORLD FREE FROM WAR

Refugees are being scapegoated for an economic crisis they didn’t create. We must work towards a world of peace, free from nuclear weapons where conflicts are resolved through diplomacy and negotiation. We need a humane migration system based on dignity, compassion and care, which gives asylum seekers the right to work, healthcare and housing.

The refugees of today are our doctors, teachers and neighbours of tomorrow.

As we face the starkest cost-of-living crisis in a generation, we cannot afford to be timid. We need to offer a clearer alternative to the Tories’ failed economic experiment. As striking workers in Trafalgar Square demonstrated, there is an appetite for something different.

The manifesto [Labour] put forward in 2017 and 2019 gave hope to millions around the country – and now we must continue to build [a] radical alternative vision for our country. You can find out more about these demands in my article in the Morning Star.

We must unite, organise and build our vision for a fairer world.  I hope you will join me in demanding and campaigning for these policies, and sign up to support them here.

Fair enough?


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Does Therese Coffey really know nothing – apart from how to take donor cash?

Therese Coffey: not the best person to ask for a crackdown on smoking?

Therese Coffey proved her worthlessness as deputy prime minister in an interview with Kay Burley of Sky News.

Asked if the government was abandoning its target for building affordable homes, she said she didn’t know anything about it.

Burley then reminded her that, as deputy PM, she should:

Meanwhile, the Guardian has claimed that Coffey, as Health Secretary, is ending plans for a campaign to crack down on smoking.

Could this be because she herself smokes and has accepted hospitality from the tobacco industry?

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Liz’s legacy: crashing pound and pensions, housing crisis, inflation, unemployment. What’s to be done?

Liz Truss: “Duh… what did I do?”

Economist Richard Murphy has given his verdict on the result of Liz Truss and Kwasi Kwarteng’s new economic direction for the UK – and it is damning.

But he has also done something far more important; he has suggested ways forward for the UK. Principal among those is making sure the Conservative Party is never allowed into power on its own again, so it can never again ruin the finances of millions of people for the benefit of a few spoilt rich kids.

It’s the first positive series of suggestions This Writer has seen.

See what you think – and be sure to send those thoughts in via the comments section:

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DWP threatens court action against man who owes just 2p

We’ve heard the expression, “look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves”, but this is ridiculous.

It seems that a man whose sole contact with the benefit system was a week on Housing Benefit has been contacted by the Department for Work and Pensions about an overpayment – of just 2p.

The letter, which cost more than the alleged overpayment, threatens court action that would be even more expensive if Damien Dove, of West Rainton in Sunderland, fails to pay up.

It states – in all seriousness: “If you cannot pay this amount in full we can discuss terms for repayment… We recommend that payments are made by Direct Debit.”

Mr Dove, 53, has said he will pay but questioned whether the DWP was “having a laugh”.

The Department itself has pointed out that the debt is actually owed to local government, which administers Housing Benefit.

Apparently the DWP is required to collect such debts when requested, and the process is automated, meaning no human being was involved in the notification process.

That seems feasible – but it still isn’t good enough. If collection of a debt costs more than the debt itself, then it clearly isn’t worth the effort.

There is no reason this cannot be written into any automated debt collection process and it staggers the imagination that it was not anticipated before such a process was implemented.

What’s even more astonishing is that nobody has mentioned making these changes now.

Source: Department of Work and Pensions demands man repay 2p | Metro News

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Here’s why it isn’t ‘Right to Buy’ the UK’s diminishing stock of social housing

Headcase in a hard hat: you can be sure the houses Johnson was helping – if you can call it that – to build weren’t publicly-owned.

I just heard a cautionary tale about a family who had a disabled child.

This youngster needed a lot of extra attention and help, so the family needed to be close to what might nowadays be called their “support network” – family members and friends able to help out.

Fortunately, they were able to rent a council house exactly where they needed it.

All was well for some time – until Margaret Thatcher introduced her “Right to Buy” scheme that allowed tenants to purchase their council houses, taking out mortgages on them. The houses lost to the private sector in this way were not replaced.

The family in my story took advantage of the offer and bought their home.

And then the child’s father lost his job.

The family became unable to keep up payments on the mortgage and the lender foreclosed. They lost their home – and were rehoused a considerable distance away, meaning they also lost the “support network” on which they had come to rely.

Nobody bought the now-empty former council house – not for a number of years anyway, and certainly not to the knowledge of the person who told me this tale.

So, as a result of Thatcher’s “Right to Buy” scheme, a family lost their home and it went empty – and this was not a unique situation. Homelessness increased exponentially under Thatcher, and this was a major contributor.

I mention all this by way of introduction. Now let me direct you to an article by the I newspaper’s housing correspondent Vicky Spratt (link below), arguing strongly against Boris Johnson’s plan to revive the “Right to Buy”.

It’s a long read, which I strongly advise you to take the time to absorb. One significant point is that failure to provide good-quality social housing leads to the spread of disease, and private landlords will never be able to provide the quantity or quality of homes people need.

But I’ll cut to the chase. Her verdict on social housing is as follows:

Social housing was a national asset, both because it was state-owned and because it benefited society, empowering people with secure, healthy homes.

Social housing allows people not merely to survive but to build their lives.

On “Right to Buy”:

The problem is that it enabled the transfer of social housing – and the rental income it generates – from local authorities to private landlords, who can charge renters as much as they like. Between 1980 and 2015, it resulted in the sale of more than 2.8 million dwellings. In the same period, we did not come close to replacing these with new social housing.

Jim Strang, former president of the Chartered Institute of Housing, wrote in 2019 that this made it “the biggest act of economic and social self-harm ever inflicted on this nation”.

Who has benefitted most from the policy over the decades? Right to Buy homeowners turned private landlords, and investors who bought up former social homes to rent out. Right to Buy became Right to Buy-to-let.

Hundreds of private landlords now own five or more Right to Buy properties; they are hoarding them and it’s good business. This means that Government pays significantly more in Housing Benefit than they would have if they had kept council properties in state ownership – and it is going straight into the pockets of private landlords. It has become a state subsidy to private landlords.

Delivered through Universal Credit, Housing Benefit is calculated through the Local Housing Allowance (LHA). In his 2010 austerity budget, Osborne announced that he would cut LHA from covering the lowest half of rents in any given area to the lowest third. He also made it impossible for single people under 35 to get Housing Benefit for a place of their own, thinking this would encourage people to look for cheaper properties. In 2016, the Government announced a four-year freeze in LHA.

But rents kept rising, causing low-income renters to have to choose between eating and paying their rent. It forced many out of their homes. And none of Mr Osborne’s cuts reduced the amount that private renters had to pay their landlords – they simply took cash out of renters’ pockets. The private rental market was out of control, with both rising house prices and the social housing shortage enabling it.

Ms Spratt’s comments on the effect of the Covid-19 pandemic – and Rishi Sunak’s pathetic offer to tenants – are also well worth noting.

And on Johnson’s new plan, she says:

His policy unit, led by Andrew Griffith, is beginning to examine how up to 2.5 million households – or five million people – who rent from housing associations could be allowed to buy their homes at a discount of up to 70 per cent. Polly Neate, chief executive of the housing charity Shelter, said the “hare-brained idea” is “the opposite of what the country needs”.

But Boris Johnson has always been about doing “the opposite of what the country needs”. Look at Brexit. Look at his overall response to the Covid-19 pandemic and the thousands of people who died needlessly. Look at his lawbreaking and his lies.

He wants to help private landlords buy up more of the social housing stock because it will put millions more people into housing insecurity; because it will force more of you to have to choose between eating and paying the rent; because it will make more of you homeless.

What do you think of that?

Source: Social housing saved my grandparents in 1956, but Right to Buy has betrayed today’s young families

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Let’s not accuse Gove of Housing corruption prematurely

Michael Gove: he has taken a lot of money from property developers and now he is Housing Secretary. But we should not shout “corruption” until there is actual evidence of it.

This Site is all in favour of accusing Tory ministers of corruption when they do something wrong.

But we need to give them a chance to actually commit an offence before we start criticising them.

Michael Gove is a deeply dodgy character for many reasons – some of which have been discussed in detail on This Site.

And it is true that in the run-up to the announcement that he would become the new Housing Secretary in Boris Johnson’s Cabinet reshuffle, he took £120,000 in donations from property developers. That amounts to 87 per cent of the donations he has taken in 2021 so far.

Some people have claimed that this creates a conflict of interest, and it certainly does make it possible.

However:

Gove’s first act in his new job has been to suspend work on controversial planning reforms that were accused of giving “too much power to developers”.

Try as I might, I can’t fit that into any narrative that puts him at their beck and call.

Of course, suspension is not rejection, and if he reinstates the scheme, or comes up with one that offers more opportunities for the businesspeople to make cash, then he will deserve all the brickbats we can throw at him.

So let’s reserve judgement for now.

And hope that Gove gets the message.

It is this: we’re watching you, Michael.

Source: Michael Gove: UK Housing Secretary Took £120k From Property Developers

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Bent Bob Jenrick won’t be making any more dodgy decisions on housing developments

Jenrick and Johnson: both had personal connections with property developer Richard Desmond. It has been suggested that Jenrick only stayed in his post after the Westferry scandal broke because Johnson also had a hand in the decision.

Robert Jenrick, the Tory Housing Secretary best-known for fiddling an inner-London development in order to deprive the local council of a huge fee, has been kicked out of Boris Johnson’s Cabinet – and not a moment too soon.

Not only did he override both the local planning authority and the Independent Planning Inspectorate to grant planning permission for Richard Desmond’s controversial Westferry development, despite it having been found not to meet acceptable planning standards…

… but he did it to allow the developer to avoid paying a £45 million levy to Tower Hamlets Council that he had decided should not apply – and then used that as his reason for granting the application.

Text messages between Desmond and Jenrick show the former Express newspaper owner and pornographer pressured the minister to grant planning permission, saying: “We don’t want to give Marxists loads of doe [sic] for nothing!”

He broke Covid-19 lockdown rules to travel between his three homes – and then insisted that young people should adhere to restricts, even though there was no evidence to suggest they did not.

He corruptly induced a fellow MP to approve a grant for his constituency totalling £237 per person recently – but negotiated Covid-19 support for the people of Manchester down to £7.95 per person.

So it is undoubtedly good that Boris Johnson has finally had the guts to kick Jenrick out of the Cabinet.

The only question is, why did it take so long?

Was it because Johnson himself was also involved in helping Desmond? I guess we may never know.

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Blatant corruption as Jenrick and fellow Tory Berry allocate millions to each other’s constituencies

Robert Jenrick: he reckons it is ‘perfectly normal’ for ministers to corruptly funnel money from their own department’s funds into their own constituencies.

“Perfectly normal” is it, Robert Jenrick?

If you are utterly corrupt, it might be perfectly normal to allocate millions of pounds from a regeneration fund to your fellow MP’s constituency in return for him giving £25 million to yours. Not if you’re honest!

Jenrick tried to brazen out the Labour Party’s accusation against him when he appeared on the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show:

Communities Secretary Robert Jenrick has dismissed Labour’s call for an investigation into the award of a £25m regeneration grant to his constituency.

He told BBC One’s Andrew Marr show the decision to give the money to Newark, Nottinghamshire, had been taken by fellow minister Jake Berry.

Mr Jenrick said he had himself decided to grant funds to a town in Mr Berry’s constituency under the same scheme.

He called this “perfectly normal” and accused Labour of “distraction”.

The £25m was awarded to Newark under the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government’s £3.6bn Towns Fund, set up last year to help places that had “not always benefitted from economic growth in the same way as more prosperous areas”.

Here’s a clip of him doing just that:

Jenrick is the Secretary of State for Housing and Berry is a minister within the same government department.

The public has already passed its own verdict on whether the decisions were corrupt – and both Jenrick and Berry have been found lacking:

There will be no inquiry into this and neither Jenrick nor Berry will face the sack, or even any disciplinary action. Boris Johnson’s government doesn’t believe it is accountable to the public.

They’ll probably divert attention by claiming the controversy is about something different. Jenrick has already tried:

He added: “This is perfectly normal. Ministers don’t get involved in making decisions for their own constituency.

“But neither should their constituencies be victims of the fact that their MP is a minister.”

That is not the issue. Just to spell it out so it is perfecly clear: The issue is that ministers from the Ministry of Housing have colluded to funnel cash from that ministry’s Towns Fund into their own constituencies.

Jenrick’s passion for corruption is already well-established – remember the controversy over his decision to help Richard Desmond avoid paying £50 million to a community where he wanted to build a new development that did not conform to planning rules.

Now we may add Berry to our ever-growing list of corrupt Tories.

Source: Robert Jenrick dismisses call for constituency fund probe – BBC News

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Court brands ‘no benefits’ rule by landlords illegal in disabled dad’s landmark case

A disabled dad suffered unfair discrimination when he was made homeless because a landlord did not accept people who receive state benefits.

The ‘no benefits’ rule meant Stephen Tyler was banned from viewing properties advertised by a Birmingham estate agent, purely on the grounds of receiving housing benefit.

Mr Tyler, 29, had been involved in a road accident in 2016. He was made homeless because of the estate agent’s “no benefits” rule.

Birmingham County Court ruled that the estate agent had breached the Equality Act because the rule disproportionally affects disabled people, who are more likely to need some support with paying their rent.

Judge Mary Stacey ruled that: “There is no doubt that there was a blanket policy that no one in receipt of housing benefit would be considered for the three properties. It put the claimant and other disabled people at a particular disadvantage when compared to others.

“To be told simply, because of his benefit status, that he could not apply for three properties which were perfectly located for his children’s school, his GP and health needs, and extended family support, […] would be distressing.

But “no benefits” discrimination is still going on (sometimes it is called “no DSS”, in reference to the former government department responsible for benefits.

This case was brought with help from homelessness charity Shelter, which has vowed to keep campaigning until the discrimination is completely stamped out.

Source: Disabled dad wins high court battle after estate agent banned him for claiming benefits – Mirror Online

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