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Private landlords gain £26.7bn from UK taxpayer, says campaign group
Comments
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the 75% figure is clearly nonsense : it may be true for parts of 'central ' London but not London over all.
The problem is the lack of housing : if there were enough houses for peoples wants then the price would reflect the supply - demand balance.
How will building houses for the 'most' vulnerable help provide for normal people like utility workers, teachers, nurses, shop workers etc?
What do you mean 'most vulnerable '? poor?, young? mental health problems?
I agree with you that the 75% number does not apply to all of London but the closer to Central London the higher those figures are. This is why former ghettos like Tottenham, Hackney, Brixton, and Peckham have been gentrified.
As I and others have said, there are more than enough houses in London the house the population, the relatively small number of homeless people in the city is a testament to that. It is the lack of affordable housing to buy or rent that is the issue and this will never be addressed by the private sector.
The cost of buying a house will be kept high by a mixture of domestic and foreign property speculators buying up a large number of the new builds mixed with the house builders sitting on large landbanks and building as few houses as possible to keep demand high.
The vulnerable people are the ones you state. Currently they are being housed by the private sector with large amounts of public money going into the back pockets of private landlords.
Taking these people off the market will remove a large number of people who are occupying private stock lowering rental prices.
This will also discourage property speculators from buying additional properties (as they may be less confident they will be able to rent properties) thus keeping the lid on house prices.0 -
lackingwedge wrote: »I agree with you that the 75% number does not apply to all of London but the closer to Central London the higher those figures are. This is why former ghettos like Tottenham, Hackney, Brixton, and Peckham have been gentrified.
As I and others have said, there are more than enough houses in London the house the population, the relatively small number of homeless people in the city is a testament to that. It is the lack of affordable housing to buy or rent that is the issue and this will never be addressed by the private sector.
The cost of buying a house will be kept high by a mixture of domestic and foreign property speculators buying up a large number of the new builds mixed with the house builders sitting on large landbanks and building as few houses as possible to keep demand high.
The vulnerable people are the ones you state. Currently they are being housed by the private sector with large amounts of public money going into the back pockets of private landlords.
Taking these people off the market will remove a large number of people who are occupying private stock lowering rental prices.
This will also discourage property speculators from buying additional properties (as they may be less confident they will be able to rent properties) thus keeping the lid on house prices.
Why do you patronise poor people by calling them vulnerable?
You clearly dislike private rental businesses : where do you think people wanting to rent should live?0 -
.... It's no conincidence that the only time in Post war history when we've built anything like the number of new houses we currently need is when we were doing just that.
Except that wouldn't be true. We built much closer to the "number of new houses that we needed" in the 1980s than the 1960s, and yet a much smaller proportion of those new builds were social housing.0 -
lackingwedge wrote: ».... with the house builders sitting on large landbanks and building as few houses as possible to keep demand high....
That isn't true either. House builders are not sitting on large landbanks. Do we have to go through the process of (yet again) debunking the land-banking myth?
It is planning that limits supply.0 -
..... There is even loads of empty ones, so there's plenty of houses...
Not really. The UK actually has very few empty homes compared to other European countries. And of course these homes are frequently empty for a very good reason; as in, the occupant has recently died, gone into a hospital or whatever.
We don't have enough houses. We need to build more.0 -
Why do you patronise poor people by calling them vulnerable?
You clearly dislike private rental businesses : where do you think people wanting to rent should live?
I would describe people who are exploited by slum landlords and unscrupulous politicians looking to score cheap political points (see changes in Housing benefit and the bedroom tax as examples) as vulnerable.
I have no issue with the private rental market, I just don't think that tax payers money should not be used to subsidise the buy to let market.0 -
That isn't true either. House builders are not sitting on large landbanks. Do we have to go through the process of (yet again) debunking the land-banking myth?
It is planning that limits supply.
How does planning limit supply?
Does it have something to do with the house builders not being willing to do anything to assist with the local infrastructure such as road improvements, expanding local schools and build a percentage of affordable housing etc?0 -
lackingwedge wrote: »How does planning limit supply?
Does itve something to do with the house builders not being willing to do anything to assist with the local infrastructure such as road improvements, expanding local schools and build a percentage of affordable housing etc?
Why should the builders have to provide these things rather than general taxation??
Should the car builders have to build train lines train stations and buses and trains to provide for people who can't afford to buy cars?? And if that were the case what would happen to car prices??0 -
lackingwedge wrote: »How does planning limit supply?
It generally works like this
council A has a guess at how much the local population will grow and how household size will change
it then has a local plan going forward 20-30 years and sets a quota of homes to be built to meet this projection of population growth and household size
where the system totally breaks down is that we have ignorant stupid people working for the councils who failed all their schooling but managed to have a family member or pal in the council to get them through the door. These ignorant people then guess too low a population increase or to high a needed household size. As such the quatas given are far too few
You can clearly see this in action in London. As a whole the city thinks it needs 50k homes a year to meet population and household size changes. But individually the boroughs set quatas closer to 20k and as such 20k homes are built.0 -
lackingwedge wrote: »I would describe people who are exploited by slum landlords and unscrupulous politicians looking to score cheap political points (see changes in Housing benefit and the bedroom tax as examples) as vulnerable.
I have no issue with the private rental market, I just don't think that tax payers money should not be used to subsidise the buy to let market.
However are people exploited by unscrupulous politicians looking score political points?
In what way does this make them vulnerable?0
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