Tories slash 10,000 jobs

Blacksheep1979

woodbine wrote: »

so you make some low paid civil servant who earns £15k(plenty of them)redundant,pay them redundancy then pay them possibly £12k in benefits(couple 2 kids rent etc a figure easily reached)
How on earth is that saving the country money?

Unless my primary school maths is failing me 12k < 15k....

I'd also like to think that these people would aspire to getting another job - if not it kind of hints at what their original 'job' really was.

lynzpower

I think people here are really being rather unfair.

I did a albeit very short stint working in Hips when they were just launched.

1) just because you compiled hips or sold them in some capacity - doesnt mean you agree with them
2) The government ( rightly or wrongly) brought them in so someone obviously had to provide/ compile them
3) As i understand it, the most successful HIPS companies in the early days of hips provisions were small solicitors who were used to conveyancing, not warehousingf firms stacked full of temps.
4) of course like everything you are going to get large providers wading in - One of the "leading newspapers" who is very anti- HIPs had a HIP providing company.
5) Anyone who was selling and buying somewhere else spent effectively the same money as they spent before nad will spend afterward.

The original idea was fantastic ( IMO) but unfortunately it was watered down the end result was almost pointless. It was supposed to be that you could look in an EA window, see a property you could afford, ask straight away to see the HIP, all would be there, and you can make a decision as to whether you want to view. If you viewed and liked, youd offer and when the offer was accepted the HIP went directly to your solicitor to do the conveyance.

If it had all gone to plan, then we could have been buying properties and exchanging within a week!

Alas, tough to get through as lenders didnt want that and there was the intractable issue of surveying/lending in a bubble market, and that was the sticking point.

Yes I am glad to see the back of them like many people, however, I think there is definately an issue about speculative sellers that moneysavers wont be protected from.

Iwould be interested to know peoples thoughts on whether buyers or prospective buyers should be protected from speculative sellers, especially in a rising market. Many moneysavers would pay fopr surveys, searches etc, vendor pulls out because they want to sell it for more. I know that seems quite far away in this climate ! But its not that long ago and there is real potential for that to happen again.

Running_Horse

I agree it should have been all or nothing. Not the pointless excercise it became. Would people rely on a survey paid for by the seller? You would need an arbitration and insurance element for that, and it would encourage moaners and complainers. Might as well redesign the whole system. The Scottish system sounds attractive, but no doubt has its own problems.

treliac

lynzpower wrote: »

It was supposed to be that you could look in an EA window, see a property you could afford, ask straight away to see the HIP, all would be there, and you can make a decision as to whether you want to view.

I haven't been involved with HIPs but wouldn't it have been the case that any HIP was just a snapshot of time, the information contained could become out of date fairly quickly and therefore making them potentially pretty pointless anyway?

marklv

woodbine wrote: »

so you make some low paid civil servant who earns £15k(plenty of them)redundant,pay them redundancy then pay them possibly £12k in benefits(couple 2 kids rent etc a figure easily reached)
How on earth is that saving the country money?
Its just f!!king with peoples lives and cutting back services.
And dont forget these 10`s of 000`s of ex civil servants will have brought coffee at starbucks pasties at greggs everyday,that`ll be another few 000 on the dole.

Yes, there would be only a modest saving and that's why I don't believe there will be as many redundacies as what the national press is saying.

A._Badger

lynzpower wrote: »

Iwould be interested to know peoples thoughts on whether buyers or prospective buyers should be protected from speculative sellers, especially in a rising market. Many moneysavers would pay fopr surveys, searches etc, vendor pulls out because they want to sell it for more. I know that seems quite far away in this climate ! But its not that long ago and there is real potential for that to happen again.

Whatever the alleged benefits, nothing, in my opinion, justifies the government having made yet anther expensive element compulsory. Had the government (which contained the usual number of lawyers, let's not forget) wished to ease the process of buying and selling, the better route would have been to have reformed the costly and abusive process whereby solicitors all too frequently sit on their backsides, delay the entire process, charge a fortune for it and then, in the event of a problem, are largely insulated from the consequences by the usual legal mutual defence pact.

HIPS was a ham-fisted, irrelevance brought in by an arrogant, control-freak government. Good riddance - both to them and HIPS.

lynzpower

treliac wrote: »

I haven't been involved with HIPs but wouldn't it have been the case that any HIP was just a snapshot of time, the information contained could become out of date fairly quickly and therefore making them potentially pretty pointless anyway?

yes, but then so are any searches in any conveyance. You might do a search on a property, it shows nothing, then a few weeks later someone agrees your adjoiing neighbouring post office change of use from say a shop to a takeaway. It happened to a freind of mine :eek: Long storyt but suffice to say the outcome was a massive health hazard and the property is/was unsellable.

Whatever the alleged benefits, nothing, in my opinion, justifies the government having made yet anther expensive element compulsory. Had the government (which contained the usual number of lawyers, let's not forget) wished to ease the process of buying and selling, the better route would have been to have reformed the costly and abusive process whereby solicitors all too frequently sit on their backsides, delay the entire process, charge a fortune for it and then, in the event of a problem, are largely insulated from the consequences by the usual legal mutual defence pact.

Actually I disagree there. In my experience the delays for conveyancing was usually due to searches not coming back from local authorities or water boards. I remember waiting almost 4 months for a contaminated land report for the new build flat that I was buying- go figure!! ( I bought prior to HIPS) Inevitably this cost me money in terms of storage unit and a few other incidentals- no biggie for me , but money wasted due to admin delays.

Other delays are OR the lender OR the chain. I know government now is going to try and legislate to get lenders to lend quicker, I dont know what you could ever do legislation wise to quicken up a chained purchase when someone "goes down" in the middle.

treliac

lynzpower wrote: »

yes, but then so are any searches in any conveyance. You might do a search on a property, it shows nothing, then a few weeks later someone agrees your adjoiing neighbouring post office change of use from say a shop to a takeaway. It happened to a freind of mine :eek: Long storyt but suffice to say the outcome was a massive health hazard and the property is/was unsellable.

That's my point.... you do the search when it's needed, okay if things change after purchase there's not much anyone could do, but it's a lot better than having a HIP in the drawer for as and when.

lynzpower

treliac wrote: »

That's my point.... you do the search when it's needed, okay if things change after purchase there's not much anyone could do, but it's a lot better than having a HIP in the drawer for as and when.

Agree completely.

The thing was ( all IMO) that it wa\s a total bubble market that lets face it neither the Conservatives or Labour accepted was a bubble market.

If you cast your mind back to about 3 years ago when the HIPS came in, property was "flying" - literally flying off the shelves. Prior to hips I worked in an estate agency ( was the worst EA in history lol " are you sure you want to spend all that money on this??!") Most of what was being sold through our EA then was under offer within a couple of days and MOST were going to sealed bids including knackered ol' ex locals - one went for nearly half a million and it was a rat hole :eek:

My point being, at that time, everyone had forgotten that property can sit about on the market for years without a viewer for weeks or no offers forthcoming because there was "no more boom and bust" of course and what was happening at the time was thought to be normal, accepted, and not subject to change.

WRONG!!

treliac

lynzpower wrote: »

My point being, at that time, everyone had forgotten that property can sit about on the market for years without a viewer for weeks or no offers forthcoming because there was "no more boom and bust" of course and what was happening at the time was thought to be normal, accepted, and not subject to change.

WRONG!!

Mmmm and we had a govt who didn't have the foresight to realise that things change, the understanding or memories of cyclical markets, the impact of their governance, etc. etc.... oh well, we could go on forever on that tack. We now have to pay for all the mistakes that were made.

And it's good to hear that there are EAs (albeit ex-EAs) with ethics.