Right to buy

antrobus

tincans6 wrote: »

Please feel free to defend Shirley Porter who was described by a high court judge as engaging in "deliberate, blatant and dishonest misuse of public power"...

Straw man fallacy.

tincans6 wrote: »

...
There is a significant difference in perpetrating a fraud as to failing to detect frauds.

Hope this helps.

Generali wrote "Unfortunately as we have seen time and time again, local councils are in many cases incompetent."

All you have done is drawn attention to an example of a local council being incompetent, thereby proving his point.

Generali

antrobus wrote: »

Straw man fallacy.



Generali wrote "Unfortunately as we have seen time and time again, local councils are in many cases incompetent."

All you have done is drawn attention to an example of a local council being incompetent, thereby proving his point.

Funny how lots of people on here will argue that I'm right until they're blue in the face, all the while convinced that I'm wrong.

BobQ

antrobus wrote: »

What! We are being governed by a US supplier of data cooling systems? When did this happen?

Oh.

Hang on a minute. You mean 'vigilant' don't you? Now I get you.

Well, if you're going to play the attack politics game, you should at least learn to use a spellchecker.

If pedantry is your first response, it says something about the quality of your arguments.

Well yes, after all, they own the property concerned. At least the current mob have taken social housing fraud (in general) seriously, and passed an act to tackle it. And at least we are seeing the odd prosecution.

http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/birmingham-right-buy-fraudster-who-7764383

Not that I'm all that much keen on RTB. But that's not the point.

Surely that is the point, they have not taken it seriously, fraud has gone up 400%

antrobus

BobQ wrote: »

If pedantry is your first response, it says something about the quality of your arguments....

Yes. It obviously tells you that they are in tip-top condition, since I can immediately spot the mistake in vigilent (sic). And make a joke about it.:)

BobQ wrote: »

...Surely that is the point, they have not taken it seriously, fraud has gone up 400%

So you're saying that the London councils who administer RTB are failing to take fraud seriously, and that (presumably) something should be done about it.

Good to know.

Generali

antrobus wrote: »

So you're saying that the London councils who administer RTB are failing to take fraud seriously, and that (presumably) something should be done about it.

....and rather ironic that an OP that was presumably meant to be critical of the Conservative Government has ended up demonstrating the ineptitude of London local Government, the vast majority of which (20/32 boroughs) are run by Labour!

http://www.londoncouncils.gov.uk/londonfacts/elections2014/

wotsthat

RTB is a scheme to transfer money from the taxpayer to random people for reasons I still don't entirely understand. Seems to be working perfectly.

michaels

wotsthat wrote: »

RTB is a scheme to transfer money from the taxpayer to random people for reasons I still don't entirely understand. Seems to be working perfectly.

Exactly the same as providing discount rent council housing regardless of renters income or ability to pay market rents....so rtb is just capitalising this future stream of discounted rent payments and giving them all in a single hit.

kabayiri

Generali wrote: »

....and rather ironic that an OP that was presumably meant to be critical of the Conservative Government has ended up demonstrating the ineptitude of London local Government, the vast majority of which (20/32 boroughs) are run by Labour!

http://www.londoncouncils.gov.uk/londonfacts/elections2014/

Since the 80s there have been hundreds of Rotten Boroughs pages in Private Eye. I can't remember a single publication which has been starved of content.

It just seems that corruption, or more mildly - the exploitation for personal gain, exists in councils up and down the land regardless of political colour.

Some of these councils may fly the socialist flag, but it conveniently provides a mask for people to make real personal gains.

Why should the process of 'flogging a house' be so difficult?

Allow someone to buy it at market price (which is very easy to establish). Anything else is going to lead to potential abuse.

antrobus

wotsthat wrote: »

RTB is a scheme to transfer money from the taxpayer to random people for reasons I still don't entirely understand. Seems to be working perfectly.

Funnily enough, I was thinking about this very thing, and realised that RTB is a scheme to transfer money from middle class taxpayers to working class council tenants, thereby helping to reduce wealth inequality in the UK.

One would have thought that the Labour Party (for example) would be in favour of that sort of thing. But apparently not. The cynic in me tends to think that's because they want to keep the working class poor for fear that they will otherwise vote for somebody else.:)

antrobus

Since I'm passing, I thought I'd firstly point out that the OP refers to a BBC article that refers to a report by the Audit Commission. And, of course, the Audit Commission deals (*) with the audit of local public bodies, and not central government. Which should have been a big clue that the fraud being talked about was the responsibility of somebody else other than the Government, vigilent (sic) or otherwise.

Secondly, if the OP had bothered reading the actual Protecting the Public Purse report, or even the accompanying press release, rather than relying on publicity material issued by the BBC promoting one of its documentaries, they would have discovered that the Audit Commission is talking about detected fraud cases.

So that, for example, Between 2009/10 and 2013/14 we have witnessed .... a nearly six-fold increase in the number of detected Right to Buy fraud cases and In the two years between April 2012 and March 2014, when the new discount applied, detected Right to Buy frauds have increased by over 400 per cent.

http://www.audit-commission.gov.uk/2014/10/highest-value-of-fraud-detected-by-councils-since-audit-commission-turned-the-spotlight-on-25-years-ago/

Obviously, no loss to the public purse is involved in detected fraud cases, because having detected them the councils do not proceed with the case. (At least that's my assumption.:)) And the fact that councils are detecting more RTB fraud cases, as well as detecting more housing tenancy fraud cases, would suggest that local councils are getting less incompetent.

I'd have thought that was a good thing.

(*At least until March 2015, after which alternative arrangements will apply.)