London rents to be capped at £1250

chucky

chucknorris wrote: »

I've just got back in and noticed this thread. I didn't feel threatened when I saw the headline of the thread, in fact I said 'b***ocks' as I opened it as I knew it would be a load of rubbish, and it was.

i can picture the OP building up a sweat and frothing at the mouth trying to link this story to rental values or even house prices.

carolt wrote: »

Looking forward greatly to seeing the effect this will have on tenants' rights and on subsidies for the housing market

desperate for a story or or what!!

julieq

My policy would be to put public sector staff through the sort of appraisals we have in the private sector, and where necessary make them work more efficiently under pain of dismissal. No need for cuts, no need for job losses, just more for our money.

For example in my company everyone is assessed against about 30 categories based on strategic goals. There are 4 assessment categories, one for excellence, one for adequacy, one for inadequate, and one for failing.

Anyone in the inadequate category is put into a formal process to improve their performance. If they fail they go back into the failing category. Anyone failing has a 30 day managed programme to succeed or get back to inadequate, if they can't get there they can be dismissed.

The interesting part is that at an appraisal, the rule is that there must be some level at which people are judged as inadequate on the basis that if not they're probably coasting. Very few people get marked excellent either.

I wonder how if this were applied in the public sector how much squealing we'd get. Yes it's a harsh regime, but we are paid for by shareholder money and we're here to generate value and results for them. It would be nice if public sector workers felt the same pressure to perform.

ruggedtoast

julieq wrote: »

My policy would be to put public sector staff through the sort of appraisals we have in the private sector, and where necessary make them work more efficiently under pain of dismissal. No need for cuts, no need for job losses, just more for our money.

For example in my company everyone is assessed against about 30 categories based on strategic goals. There are 4 assessment categories, one for excellence, one for adequacy, one for inadequate, and one for failing.

Anyone in the inadequate category is put into a formal process to improve their performance. If they fail they go back into the failing category. Anyone failing has a 30 day managed programme to succeed or get back to inadequate, if they can't get there they can be dismissed.

The interesting part is that at an appraisal, the rule is that there must be some level at which people are judged as inadequate on the basis that if not they're probably coasting. Very few people get marked excellent either.

I wonder how if this were applied in the public sector how much squealing we'd get. Yes it's a harsh regime, but we are paid for by shareholder money and we're here to generate value and results for them. It would be nice if public sector workers felt the same pressure to perform.

Yes because none of that happens in the public sector already does it? Never mind better not let facts get in the way of uninformed prejudice eh jules - dont want to set a precedent.

Edit - oh yes I just remembered, you dont think the current economic crisis has anything to do with profligacy in the banking sector do you - yes better wipe out the public sector, thats the cause of all the problems.

/faceplams

Generali

CLAPTON wrote: »

so your economic policy at the moment would be
-increased taxes
-reduced government spending
hence freeing up investment funds for the private sector


and you think that will help the private sector.

No.

If I was Chancellor of the Exchequer I'd cut taxes and spending to free up cash for private sector investment. I've been clear on that since I first started posting on here a few years ago and clear that if we continued down the path we were on a few years back we'd end up where we are now.

What would you do to try to solve the current problems the UK economy faces?

julieq

ruggedtoast wrote: »

Yes because none of that happens in the public sector already does it? Never mind better not let facts get in the way of uninformed prejudice eh jules - dont want to set a precedent.

Edit - oh yes I just remembered, you dont think the current economic crisis has anything to do with profligacy in the banking sector do you - yes better wipe out the public sector, thats the cause of all the problems.

/faceplams

Why not answer your own question and tell me where it does happen in the public sector. Otherwise you're really just blowing rhetorical hot air.

And who said anything about wiping out the public sector? I just said they should be more accountable to the people who pay for them in the way a private sector employee is. Unless you're claiming that the public sector is the epitome of efficient working with excellent and consistent results, there is room for improvement. So why should we not demand improvement?

macaque_2

Macaque, you poor deluded conspiracy theorist...

Dressing your arguements up with loaded phrases like 'conspiracy theory' is not only incorrect and unjustified but it is also rude.

tax rules were already favourable to BTL because they're business taxation rules and designed around what you need to do to run a business successfully.

Hanging onto your old house when you move cannot be described as 'runnning a business'. As far as I am aware, when you buy shares with borrowed money you cannot offset interest against dividends. BTL is wide open to CGT dodges (by moving into rented property for a time). One of the MPs was caught doing exactly this.

Mortgages were given with self certification because lenders decided that was how they wanted to run their business. It wasn't a government decision.

Wrong. Rules are now being implemented by the government to stop this practice.

And in fact there is no evidence of systematic fraud.

Wrong. There is plenty of evidence of systematic fraud. People are going to prison for mortgage fraud. If you listen to radio 4 yesterday, they inteviewed someone who confessed to wholesale miss selling of mortgages.

Most people even if they took a mortgage which didn't run formal income checks work under the assumption there may be checks and don't overstate income. Average loan to salary throughout the boom was 3.5x.

That is spin and nonsense.

Banks were allowed to operate dangerous policies because no-one, even their own management, had a clue how dangerous securitised debt was, and they were lightly regulated because they were apparently effortlessly generating money for the treasury via taxation.

Plenty of people were aware of the dangers that lay ahead. There was just no will in government to do anything about it.

Interest rates are low to bolster lending, and in fact a low currency value is basically a good thing anyway (and it meets your objective for a housing devaluation, because viewed from the outside we HAVE had 50% falls).

What industry needs is a stable and realistically priced currency, resonable taxes and not too much red tape. We have none of these. That is why we have the lowest level of manufacturing employment since the industrial revolution.

The list indeed goes on, but it was c0ck up and business as usual, not government conspiracy. Do you really think a government would run the country into the ground to feather their nests? It's laughable.

Are you trying to suggest that the government and the politicians have not been acting out of self interest? Good grief!

There is simply no reason why MPs will change their views. Most will be homeowners living in rented or hotel accomodation while working away from home, many people do exactly the same.

Of course it will change for the same reasons that politicians do something about traffic jams.

There is nothing wrong with property speculation, it's no difference really from cash speculation where you expect to become rich just from having money.

Property speculation is bad because highly leveraged property investors end up overbidding. First time buyers are then forced to live in overpriced and undersized boxes.

There isn't a massive amount of hoarding empty properties, there isn't evidence of systematic anti social behaviour by BTL landlords (if there is bad behaviour it comes from slum landlords who have been around since the days of Hoogstraaten, not people buying a couple of houses and having them paid for by tenants as savings scheme.

There are at least 1 million unoccupied properties in the UK. Speaking as renter myself, I would say that a very high proportion of landlords are unsuitable for the role (my current one is excellent).

chucky

macaque wrote: »

I would say that a very high proportion of landlords are unsuitable for the role (my current one is excellent).

macaque aka monkey boy doesn't know this yet but that is me, he's a good tenant too

ruggedtoast

julieq wrote: »

Why not answer your own question and tell me where it does happen in the public sector. Otherwise you're really just blowing rhetorical hot air.

And who said anything about wiping out the public sector? I just said they should be more accountable to the people who pay for them in the way a private sector employee is. Unless you're claiming that the public sector is the epitome of efficient working with excellent and consistent results, there is room for improvement. So why should we not demand improvement?

I didnt ask you a question julie - I was giving you the benefit of information to which you clearly were demonstrably ignorant.

Public sector workers on the whole get the same appraisals and reviews as everyone else - why do you think they wouldn't? If the funding for the department is cut then the jobs are assessed and the least important ones go, as determined by managers who usually consider their own jobs most important.

The vignette you described in your company is descriptive only of an appraisal process that happens in most organisations in most of the developed world.

julieq

Oh come off it ruggedtoast, do you really believe that an appraisal process leading to dismissal after 30 days would get past the watchful eyes of the public sector unions? I remember the wailing when there was some idea that teachers were going to be appraised or measured. I don't see a lot of teachers being dismissed, for example, and I see a lot of failing schools.

Remember, this is not about cutting funding, it is about becoming more efficient.

Let's ask you a direct question: do you believe the public sector is as efficient as the private sector organisationally?

If not, then it's perfectly reasonable to ask for improvements. Which is all I'm doing.

Incidentally "Yes because none of that happens in the public sector already does it?" appears to me to be a question. So you did ask one specifically.

julieq

macaque wrote: »

Hanging onto your old house when you move cannot be described as 'runnning a business'. As far as I am aware, when you buy shares with borrowed money you cannot offset interest against dividends. BTL is wide open to CGT dodges (by moving into rented property for a time). One of the MPs was caught doing exactly this.

But you can offset interest payments against profits when running a business. BTL is a business, no new legislation was brought in to support members of parliament doing it.

macaque wrote: »

Wrong. There is plenty of evidence of systematic fraud. People are going to prison for mortgage fraud. If you listen to radio 4 yesterday, they inteviewed someone who confessed to wholesale miss selling of mortgages.

But it wasn't the norm. It wasn't even close to being the norm. It was a tiny proportion of the total.

macaque wrote: »

What industry needs is a stable and realistically priced currency, resonable taxes and not too much red tape. We have none of these. That is why we have the lowest level of manufacturing employment since the industrial revolution.

No, business needs a competitive currency. It helps if it's stable for strategic planning, but it needs to be competitive, not "realistic" whatever that's supposed to mean. We have low levels of manufacturing because (sorry to say) UK workers became uncompetitive on a world basis, and much of the remaining manufacturing base and associated investment has moved East.

macaque wrote: »

Property speculation is bad because highly leveraged property investors end up overbidding. First time buyers are then forced to live in overpriced and undersized boxes.

No, the rental market determines the workable level of prices as a basic function of return on investment. It's not intrinsically bad that first time buyers struggle to get onto the ladder - they can always rent of course - it's always been like that. And this has almost nothing to do with your contention that MPs have set this up for their own benefit and will now shy away from the idea - if they want leveraged BTL, they can get them without parliamentary expenses.

macaque wrote: »

There are at least 1 million unoccupied properties in the UK. Speaking as renter myself, I would say that a very high proportion of landlords are unsuitable for the role (my current one is excellent).

And this has come up many times. Most of the properties are in the hands of local authorities. Some are in transition due to death or other similar factors, a few are empty because their owners choose to leave them emtpy, but it's hardly a big drag on the supply and demand equation which is driven mostly by demographic factors such as increased divorce rate and rate of creation of households via migration and so on.

It is paranoid rubbish to claim that the government or MPs framed legislation to feather their nests. The worst accusation you can throw at them is that they used the rules they were operating under to make a few quid, well so what? The laughable thing is that they were held to account by journalists, one of the sleaziest most corrupt expense abusing professions you'll ever meet.