Where is supply falling short of demand? Higher purchase prices & rents? Relative to when? I think you'll find the house price boom is a thing of the past.

Took a while, but she's finally made it into the discourse.

Boot them out? Why should there be social housing apart from the most needy in society? Why should anyone who can afford not to be subsidised by the state be so?

The benefits paid out [imay[/i be higher, but there's no capital outlay & ongoing capital costs. You seem to be missing this point.

Still no one has said why money circulating between government departments is better than it stimulating the economy. e.g people need homes to rent/buy, developers will build them.

No answer to the question then?

Do you, it appears not.

This has always been the case, nothing new here.

Of course there were absolutely no instances of the system being screwed by thousands of bogus hosuing benefit claims from unscrupulous landlords were there?

Why is paying benefit to the claimant an ill thought out policy? Are you saying that because someone is in receipt of benefit, they are completely incapable of knowing they have to pay their rent?

Can benefit claimants not be trusted?

How many of you that are against the spare room subsidy being applied to social housing think it should be repealed in regard to private rented housing? Give reasons.

So are you in agreement that the best administrators of social housing are local authorities and housing associations who can also offer unbiased and free advice via their housing offices to claimants regarding the claiming and payment of such benefits as may be available ?

The case is slightly different with regard to private landlords but the overall ruling can still be penury - the private market that caters for benefits claimants (and its by no means the whole of the sector that do) is quicker to adapt to the requirements of its clients, so in a district that requires accommodation for couples, or students or single people you will within a short space of time find dwellings split to offer just that - or alternatively if 3 or more beds are required, no private landlord wants their property standing empty and they tend to be very savvy about what is currently letting well in their district.

Local Authorities have been stymied for decades and their inability to invest in their own housing stock means that they simply cannot adapt to trending housing requirements - back int he 70s when I was involved in construction we built lots of council properties (and I mean thousands) and the majority of those were "family" homes, two and a half or three bed properties - its those very properties that are causing the problems now as those families have either dispersed leaving the parents, or the new incoming tenants are singles or couples.

If the country needs full employment (and its generally been seen as a target to achieve) and that full employment is created on the alter of NMW and non-committal contracts, then housing benefit will be required and housing to match the claimants needs will be required - you can't screw those people twice.

Yes, that old chestnut.
Do you dispute it?
If so, give reasons.






That's the level of borrowing not the yield rate.
Jeez.


The US has had rising GDP growth for the last fourteen successive quarters, all of which were greater increases in growth than ANY that the UK has had since the recession.
e.g. Obama lent huge amounts to the US car industry, saving hundreds of thousands of jobs, the industry has restructured and has now almost completely paid back those loans.
It is not a case of kicking the debt down the road ... the greater the number of people that are employed, the greater the tax take (obviously!) to pay down debt ... and the greater the GDP (obviously!).


Who mentioned the boom?
Take a look at the house-price-to-earnings ratio which currently stands at about 5.5 ... that is to say that the average house costs around 5.5. times the average salary.
Averaged-out since 1981 the ratio has been around 4.0
Just before the banking crisis it was about 6.5 times.
It's come down since to 5.5 but is still high.
Considering that for decades up to the late 1980's the level was about 3.0, it is still nearly twice as high.
Greater supply would bring the price down in terms of multiples of annual earnings (obviously!).


Untrue, look at the stats, Darling's stimulus brought GDP from minus 6.8 to plus 0.5 and still rising ... until the election, two quarters later it went down again.
This government cancelled the greater part of all capital investment in infrastructure etc, immediately depressing GDP.
Cuts were needed, Labour said they'd halve the deficit in one parliament ... Tories said they'd eliminate it entirely in one parliament but every year over the last four years, that estimate has moved by another year ... it's still five years away, so they say, so they have failed miserably in their own past estimation.


Have you not read my reply?
Who said they can afford it? Look at the earnings to price ratio.


No, it is you who is missing the point that capital outlay and ongoing capital costs don't vanish just because they are in the private sector, they are recouped via rents, hence the higher benefits required to pay for them.
Christ, this is like pulling teeth.

Do you think the Labour government's actions caused Lehmann Brothers to fail? If not then maybe that "old chestnut" is true? Labour are at fault for not regulating our economy, so are multiple, successive governments in multiple countries.


That has nothing to do with affordability of borrowing.
You need to look at the bond yield rates and maturation.

They show that in 2012 UK bond yields hit a record low of 1.5%. A low not seen in the 300+ year history of the BoE. Borrowing has literally never been so cheap. Taking inflation into account lenders were effectively paying HMG to borrow money from them. Bizarre then that dear old Osborne was so intent on lowering borrowing rather than taking advantage of that record low.
The rate has edged up slightly since then, but still lower than at any time (excluding the record low) in the last half century.


Public Sector employment fell by 300,000 from 2010 to 2012, or 5% of the workforce.
To reach 1.2m by 2018.

6,800 fewer police. Is that accurately reflecting what's needed? I mean there's just nothing for all these police to do!


The US model worked. Higher growth, lower unemployment. Not all hunky-dory but significantly better than the Tory way. The US spent big at the right time and can now reduce their spending because they filled at least some of the demand gap when it was most needed. Kept people in jobs, improved infrastructure, saved industries. So those people and industries can now spend and let the private sector recover.


The cut in VAT did increase growth, led unemployment to fall and helped the deficit come in lower than projected by £21bn.
Sadly, the current government went and increased this regressive tax.
However the VAT cut should have been accompanied by a large investment in youth training and infrastructure.

I'll take it you're not as new here as you pretend. And I suggest, right now, that if you wish to continue in this place, you don't launch a new ID one day and try to throw your weight around instantly.

I hope that's quite clear.

Local authorities are clearly not good administrators of housing. The allocative inefficiency highlighted is proof of this.

Local authorities are not unbiased. Nor are housing associations.

So because you have been torn apart in a discussion, you have to resort to making false accusations and thinly veiled threats. How utterly juvenile.

There is no difference.

You say on one hand that the private sector is quicker to react to demand. The spare room subsidy had no bearing on this ability. On the other hand you don't want this change that will force local authorities to react to that demand.

There is no problem with those houses. The demand is there for them. The problem is that fixed resources have not been efficiently allocated. Why should a two/three bedroomed house be provided to a couple who no longer have children living at home?

The housing benefit rules prevent this in the private sector, why not in social housing? If there isn't capacity in the social sector, the private sector can take up the slack.

If you could, as already suggested, learn to use the quote facility, there would be a lot less confusion on every thread you join

[url=http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-24149763One in three behind on rent since housing benefit changes.[/url

So, an unmitigated success.

Regarding the "old chestnut" about the banking crisis, again I ask, do you dispute it occurred?
Or did Gordon Brown pull the rug from under banks right across the Western economies?

Regarding cost of borrowing ...

Nice attempt at a wriggle but wrong again.
Even though the UK's credit rating has gone down, so have bond yields.
Monthly average bond yield percent on 10 year bonds has gone from 5% (before the crash) to 1% (today).
SOURCE : Bank of England, so any disagreement you may have, take it up with Mark Carney, although I think he probably already knows the difference between debt/gdp and bond yields and which actually reflects the cost of borrowing.
So, anyway, back to the point ... you say borrowing is not cheap ... when was borrowing cheaper than this parliamentary term?

In reply to my US example of how stimulus can lead to growth (i.e. fourteen consecutive quarters of growth), you said ...
Not bizarre at all, the US case was presented to demonstrate the validity of intervention for stimulus, which you seem to want ignore now it's been pointed out to you that Osborne could have done the same but didn't, preferring instead to rely (unsuccessfully) on cuts.

In reply to my contention that house prices are high and my factual comparisons of prices to earnings over the years, you try to shift the argument as follows ...
As you are switching the discussion to the house price boom, I take it that you accept my point that at 5.5 times average national earnings, prices are still historically high and are driven by supply and demand?
Why you mentioned the [iHelp to Buy[/i scheme, I don't know but, as you have, I'd like to ask why is it OK for HMG to subsidise private new-house purchases when you are so staunchly against social housing?
(I use the term [isubsidise[/i here to mean the interest-free first-five-years of the government loan to the buyer and the lower rate that the buyer can demand from the lender because the buyer has a larger deposit courtesy of the Chancer of the Exchequer).

After I quoted the stats about Darling's stimulus, and how the current coalition government cut back on capital investment thereby depressing GDP, you responded ...
I have quoted stats, are they tosh?
Where is your evidence?

Regarding the economy and cuts you say that Labour plans were practically the same as the Tories.
Unfortunately you are wrong again.
Both Lib Dems (before the election and before the 180 degree U-turn after) and Labour said they'd cut slower to avoid dips in GDP growth.

You failed to comment on the bit I mentioned about the effect of the earnings/house-price ratio as one of the reasons why people not on benefits remain in social housing.
Can I assume you agree?

You still maintain that private rental is cheaper because of the capital outlay on social housing.
Maybe if you look at the fact that surpluses from council housing (yes, [usurpluses[/u, which actually exceeded the maintenance grants etc paid from HMG) were paid to the Treasury during the Labour Government (and I haven't seen any mention that this changed, although I concede it may have) ... and also recall that since the time of Thatcher's "Right to buy" councils were specifically prohibited from re-investing that capital in housing ... what actual capital outlay are you talking about?

Of course, you can just say "Tosh" again in lieu of debate or evidence.

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/po ... 25074.html I can't say anything except, we told you so, but no one would listen and we are fed the "its to free up larger properties" mantra when everyone knows that they know there are not the properties and the "tax" has to be paid. I'd like to think Grant Shapps will read this article and have some sort of conscious but I've more chance of flying to the moon this afternoon. Edit: See Minty beat me to it

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/po ... 25074.html I can't say anything except, we told you so, but no one would listen and we are fed the "its to free up larger properties" mantra when everyone knows that they know there are not the properties and the "tax" has to be paid. I'd like to think Grant Shapps will read this article and have some sort of conscious but I've more chance of flying to the moon this afternoon. Edit: See Minty beat me to it

I do worry a little when reading statements like this one from the DWP (taken from the above link)...




That statement is clearly drafted directly from IDS, or from Tory central office, but is attributed to a civil service department - they should not be used as a mouthpiece for any political party and should not have to repeat any political dogma as part of their own statement, a simple "We are enforcing the new rules introduced by parliament" would do rather than making it appear to be their own policy, which it clearly isn't.

"the taxpayer can no longer afford to pay for people to live in properties larger than they need"

About time the "taxpayer" started applying this logic to MPs

It would be nice, wouldn't it?

On only a slightly different note, I commented on the BBC site the other day under the story about increased prison sentences for convicted benefit fraudsters. I simply asked what increase in sentences there was going to be for any MPs who ripped off the taxpayer via their expenses.

It was deleted.

Apparently, you can't link how MPs are paid by the taxpayer etc to benefits paid by the taxpayer.

You mean when he calculated that Abbey, A&L, and B&B were completely worthless, and handed their assets and ongoing business to Santander, thanking them for helping keep those business afloat. This rendered shares in those companies worthless.

12 months later, Santander's annual accounts stated they made a E4bn profit, which consisted of an operational loss of E12bn, plus a transfer of E16b net assets from the 'acquisition' of Abbey, A&L, and B&B" ....... Worthless eh?

For those who don't know, the shareholders of all of those companies are still pressing for legal action against the then government for compensation - however, according to a government statement last month, "All files pertaining to the valuation and transfer of B&B assets to Santander were accidentally destroyed during the parliamentary changeover in 2010" .....

I don't think that was what either El Barbudo or Him were meaning.

I think that they were referring not to what happened after the onset of the financial crisis, but what caused the financial crisis in the first place – hence mentions of Lehman Brothers etc.

The matter of how Brown handled the immediate aftermath is still up for debate, although some analysts have suggested that Brown's actions after the crisis hit, and the speed of them, possibly avoided the situation becoming worse – maybe even up to a full-scale depression.