Who is going to Blog the Budget for us?

chucky

wageslave wrote: »

I get my bin emptied.

I pay a fortune to the local bliddy council and all I can see is a bin enptied every Thursday. I pay a man with a van to take my garden rubbish away so, I suspect, the bin emptying thing is a waste of their time and my money.

I am sure I get more for my money. Christmas lights, free internet at the library.

Tell me I am getting more........

you're a sound woman Miss W - that's all that matters

wageslave

chucky wrote: »

you're a sound woman Miss W - that's all that matters

I am a taxed to bliddy death woman.

That matters to me

chewmylegoff

vivatifosi wrote: »

There was an article in the Evening Standard tonight showing which areas of London will now be off-limits for HB. The article is at the link before, you can click in a map once there:

http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/standard/article-23848265-housing-benefit-curbs-will-push-out-the-poor.do

the article in the paper had a table accompanying it - it listed areas of london where the current maximum HB available currently exceeds the new limits set out in the budget. this doesn't mean these areas are "off limits" for HB - it will be possible to rent properties in many of these areas for less than the new HB limits. they just won't be as nice as the properties that could be rented on the old limits. perhaps now benefits will only get you a crappy ex-LA property rather than a nice detached house. sounds pretty reasonable to me.

Thrugelmir

wageslave wrote: »

I honestly don't think think the budget went far enough.

A new government has a certain amount of goodwill, you have maybe six months before that dries up.

I think they have wasted the single chance they had to really make a difference.

Are you forgetting March's budget? Yesterdays was on top.

Another 50% in fact.

With more reform to come.

fc123

vivatifosi wrote: »

My guess is that the rents will be much lower. However I'm also thinking if I was sitting in a £750k council house in a nice area of London, I'd have found a way to use right to buy by now.

Back in the mid 80's, we knew someone whose mother had a 3 bed mansion flat in Russell Square, Bloomsbury WC1. She was in her late 70's and didn't like it very much at all. She would have preferred a nice semi with a garden in the suburbs or Kent....not an old fashioned draughty flat in central London. Anyway, the family applied to RTB and it was way too expensive even with the full discount (70% I think) so, when she died, it went back to the council.

However, I did know someone who bought a whole giant Viccy house from a housing association in Beckenham for 30k in 1985 ish(which was quite a struggle for her at the time) and they now sell for 1.2 million or thereabouts. There was one for sale in The Standard tonight.

vivatifosi

Looks like there will be a couple more budget related stories in the press tomorrow:

Pensions shake up could see most people working into seventies (Telegraph):
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/politics/7850626/Pensions-shake-up-could-see-most-people-working-into-their-seventies.html

High earners to put off asset sales (FT):
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/3d336c0a-7f09-11df-84a3-00144feabdc0.html

Osborne accused of cutting too hard (Guardian):
http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2010/jun/23/emergency-budget-2010-george-osborne

It will be decades before the squeeze is over (Mail):
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/money/article-1289046/It-decades-squeeze-over.html?ito=feeds-newsxml

fc123

chucky wrote: »

i thought that it was quite a pleasant budget and doesn't sound like it will be too painful - uncomfortable maybe but not the kind of pain people were predicting.

hopefully these guys have got the balance right and they sort a few of the issues out.

From a selfish POV, the budget was OK for us in our situation and moment in time.

I feel a bit silly writing it, but it did give me a more positive feeling (maybe I feel more supported?) about our business. It also felt a bit more 'fair' in some ways.

It doesn't mean I am unsympathetic to those it has affected (like the high rents paid by HB) but I feel a bit 'safer'. Don't really know why..I just feel it.

vivatifosi

fc123 wrote: »

It doesn't mean I am unsympathetic to those it has affected (like the high rents paid by HB) but I feel a bit 'safer'. Don't really know why..I just feel it.

I know exactly what you mean fc. In the lead up to this I had mental images of the four horsemen of the apocalypse riding through my local high street to the strains of Carmina Burana. I'm actually quite relaxed now, though I won't be in a couple of months when the public sector comes under the spotlight...

fc123

vivatifosi wrote: »

I know exactly what you mean fc. In the lead up to this I had mental images of the four horsemen of the apocalypse riding through my local high street to the strains of Carmina Burana. I'm actually quite relaxed now, though I won't be in a couple of months when the public sector comes under the spotlight...

I am back in SE London and all my life, we had a huge library on the High St. A lovely, ornate, Victorian affair. Closed down a couple of years back. No library at all now.

vivatifosi

fc123 wrote: »

I am back in SE London and all my life, we had a huge library on the High St. A lovely, ornate, Victorian affair. Closed down a couple of years back. No library at all now.

Libraries are going to get a total thwacking unfortunately. KPMG published a report a week or so ago saying that they should be handed over to the community and staffed entirely by volunteers because there are plenty lining up to work in charity shops :rotfl:. The fact that it takes about a year to train as a library assistant for the princely sum of about £16k pa, or that many libraries seem to have problems recruiting volunteers already has been ignored. The danger of course is that in genteel areas volunteers will staff lovely little community libraries with plenty of donations from the wealthy to keep stock going, while those where they are needed most die on their feet. We shall see...

The big crafty with libraries at the moment is the government is stopping sending out a lot of benefit forms and telling those that can least afford a computer that they should go to the library to print out these mammoth tomes. The net result is that you have someone on very little paying over £5 in printing charges to print their forms out.