In August 2017 Swire spearheaded a campaign to keep heart services going at London’s Royal Brompton Hospital (having miserably failed to lead similar campaigns in East Devon, leaving Claire Wright to fight for us:
Well, his attempts in London don’t seem to have worked either:
“The world-leading Royal Brompton Hospital in London, recently ‘saved’ by NHS bosses, is being lined up for a billion pound sale to make way for luxury flats. …”
“Scottish Widows is the sort of unassuming pensions company that rarely likes to publicly criticise government policy. But an analysis it published this week is a stark warning about the ticking time bomb that will explode in 10 to 20 years’ time. And it’s not pension incomes that are the worry – it’s the fact that so many of tomorrow’s pensioners who never got on to the property ladder in the 2000s and 2010s will have to find huge amounts of money to pay ever-escalating rents to private landlords.
Scottish Widows skirts around the issue by suggesting that non-homeowners currently in their 50s should start saving an extra £6,000 a year now to be able to afford their rent in retirement. As if people on low incomes are going to find that sort of money. The reason they are renting is that they were never able to find the savings for a deposit on a house in the first place, or didn’t earn enough to qualify for a mortgage.
The reality is that these people are likely to retire with little more than the state pension plus a small bit of private pension. Maybe they will be picking up about £200 a week once they are 67. Given that the average rent in England and Wales is £845 a month – and in London it’s about £1,250 a month – then the whole lot will be gobbled up by the landlord. So the taxpayer will have no alternative but to step in and pay most of the rent, and we are then on the hook for payments going on for maybe 20 or 30 years. All so that the buy-to-let landlord with multiple properties can enjoy a lavish retirement themselves.
This is the lunacy of promoting buy to let as a long term form of tenure for millions of people. Even in developed countries where renting is common, such as Germany, most people are living in a home they own by the time they reach retirement. Renting all the way through retirement, funded by the taxpayer, to a landlord who has the power to evict without reason and at short notice, is the worst possible situation. And it’s one we are hurtling towards.
Make no mistake about the dramatic change in the retirement landscape that is coming. Scottish Widows projects that one in eight retirees will be renting by 2032 – treble today’s figure. After that it will continue rising. It says there is a £43bn gap between the income and savings people have now and what the rent bill will be in retirement. That’s more than one-third of the entire NHS budget for a year – to be squandered on rent.
Dan Wilson Craw of campaign group Generation Rent says: “The common perception is that retirees either own their home outright or have a council tenancy, so the government will be in for a nasty shock as more of us retire and continue to rent from a private landlord. Many renters relying on pensions will qualify for housing benefit which will put greater strain on the public finances.”
Aviva, the UK’s biggest pensions company, also publishes figures on Saturday on the colossal financial issues facing non-homeowners currently in their 50s. While those who have bought their homes feel pinched – and expect to use the equity in their home to pay for a better retirement – the outlook for non-homeowners is so grim that 20% believe their only hope is having a lottery win. Most non-homeowning workers aged above 50 say they have no money left after basic costs to put aside extra money for a pension.
There was some good news on pensions this week: the Resolution Foundation said that auto-enrolment schemes will mean tomorrow’s pensioners will enjoy a roughly similar income (about £300 a week) to today’s pensioners. But they didn’t account for the large number that will now have to pay rent out of that money.
The solution? Build more houses, of course. But even 300,000 a year won’t solve this problem if they are snapped up by landlords. That only leaves us with rent control and much higher taxes on buy to let.”
https://www.theguardian.com/money/blog/2017/dec/02/pensions-timebomb-rents-homeowners
Estate rent charges apply in Cranbrook:
“Thousands of homeowners on private estates are facing unregulated and uncapped maintenance fees, amid allegations that developers have created a cash cow from charging for communal areas not maintained by the council.
Management contracts for “unadopted” private estates are frequently sold off to speculators and property management companies in the same way as freeholds and ground rents – leaving homeowners with spiralling fees and nowhere to turn.
If a new-build estate is “unadopted” it means communal areas such as roads, grass verges, pavements and playgrounds are retained by the developer. The developer then usually sub-contracts day-to-day management.
These companies then pass on the costs to homeowners (both freeholders and leaseholders) via a deed of transfer which obliges the homeowner, under the Law of Property Act 1925, to pay for maintenance of this land. This is often referred to as an “estate charge” or “service charge”. These are on top of full council tax – even though the council doesn’t maintain their street.
Critics say the system is open to abuse because management companies have no obligation to keep costs down or provide evidence the services they charge for are being carried out. Buyers may find the bills spiral as soon as a management contract is sold on.
Lynn Myers bought her two-bed leasehold house in Penrith, Cumbria, from developers Persimmon in September 2016. The sales agent told her the estate would be managed by Carleton Meadows Management Company with an estate charge of £100 a year per household for grass cutting.
When Gateway Property Management took over in July 2017 it tripled the fee to £308 a year – that’s £17,000 from the 55 residents. Myers alleges that the fee includes more than £3,000 “postage”.
“I am on a lower-end income and ploughed my late husband’s insurance money into this property,” says Myers. “I worry that I will be unable to afford this on top of full council tax etc, and also I will be unable to sell. I have been mis-led by Persimmon and the government.”
Persimmon says the initial costs had been miscalculated and that it was working with Gateway to resolve the issue.
Meanwhile, 40 miles away across the Lake District, residents in Church Meadows in Great Broughton are in a similar situation. Richard Elsworth moved into his Persimmon-built freehold property in May 2013. The estate’s 58 residents each pay Gateway a service charge of £125.53 a year, amounting to £7,281 to maintain about 600 square metres of grass.
But Gateway’s charges don’t stop there. When Elsworth’s neighbours sold their home, they were charged £360 for a “management pack” for the buyer, plus £144 for a deed of covenant.
“The only part of the pack that is relevant to the sale is a financial statement so that the service charge information is available to the prospective buyer. As the properties are freehold, Gateway has no responsibility whatsoever for the conveyancing process, other than to receive a deed of covenant from the conveyancing solicitors,” says Elsworth.
Gateway claims it provided an “often exhaustive” amount of information to purchasers’ solicitors when a sale takes place. It said it was common practice for managing agents to charge fees for sales packs and additional legal documentation. It says: “The information we are asked to provide varies from development to development and this is reflected in the amount we charge ranging from £150-£300 plus VAT.
“It is best-practice for the information to be prepared by professionally qualified staff because purchasers are reliant on information being accurate to enable the sale to proceed as smoothly as possible. Typically, a sales pack contains in excess of 25 pages and is tailored to the development.”
Privates estates were debated in parliament earlier this month. Kelly Tolhurst, Conservative MP for Rochester and Strood in Kent, told MPs how homeowners in Hoo bought from Taylor Wimpey and Bellway but are now in dispute with their property management company, SDL Bigwood.
Tolhurst went on to criticise Hyde Housing Association, and London and Quadrant. The latter tried to charge residents at Lodge Hill, Chattenden, for street lamps and street cleaning undertaken by Medway Council.
The Homeowners’ Rights Network (Hornets) is the campaign group fighting for a fairer deal for homeowners on private estates. Its main issue is a lack of a cap on charges and that homeowners don’t have a choice of provider. And, if homeowners have a dispute, there’s no resolution service in place.
Cathy Priestley, spokesperson for Hornets and a freeholder on a private estate, says the private estate model seems to be the norm for new-build estates. “We can only speculate as to why this has happened. The main benefactors are the plc developers who get to keep the estate land, don’t have to prepare it to adoption standards and don’t have to pay for its maintenance or the commuted sums for adoption,” she says. “All councils have to do, under planning, is to ensure there is a long-term sustainable arrangement to maintain the land (under the Town and Country Planning Act). They seem to readily accept assurances from the developers that the management company will deliver this. They don’t appear to have thought about how this affects homeowners.”
While leasehold owners have some (albeit limited) statutory protection, freeholders have very few options. They can take cases to court, but this can be expensive and time consuming. If they decide to simply not pay, they can ultimately lose their home. “Any arrears will normally be recoverable as a debt claim in the county court.
“However, homeowners should be cautious as the rent charge owner may have a number of options including the ability to take possession of the property,” says Adrian McClinton, associate solicitor at Coffin Mew.”
Daily updates:
https://saveoursidmouth.com/
“The Government should prove it is serious about boosting homebuilding by forcing landowners to sell up, a top housing association boss has told MPs.
Public land should also be used for construction to bypass the sluggish system for buying and building on private space, said David Orr, chief executive of the National Housing Federation, which represents non-profit associations.
“If we are going to build 300,000 homes a year we need quite muscular government action on land, on the compulsory purchase of land in the way that we did in the 50s and 60s for the new towns and the peripheral estate urban extensions that were built in those years,” Mr Orr told the Treasury Select Committee.
“And I certainly think that we need a much much more vigorous approach to the use of publicly-owned land.
“If we are to make a transformative change in the level of supply, if you are going to build houses, you need access to land.”
Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, used last week’s Budget to set out plans to boost construction by offering funds and guarantees to builders as well as scrapping stamp duty for most first-time buyers.
Bur Mr Orr was unimpressed with the effort, noting that the Office for Budget Responsibility did not change its forecast for construction levels despite the Budget’s measures.
He said that extra guarantees beyond the £8bn offered last week would also be a substantial help.
Brian Berry at the Federation of Master Builders, which represents smaller construction firms, said those solutions from the Chancellor do little to address the supply shortfall.”
“… HuffPost UK has discovered that tucked away in the Office for Budget Responsibility’s analysis of the Chancellor’s Budget last week is the truth about where that £2billion money is coming from.
It is not new money, and is instead being raised “by reducing spending on ‘accelerated construction’ and ‘starter homes’ across the four years from 2017-18 to 2020-21. …
… The OBR claimed his policy of scrapping stamp duty for first-time buyers on the first £300,000 of a home would actually drive up prices – although this was disputed by the Chancellor.
Housebuilding figures released today by the Government show 199 homes for social rent were completed between April and September this year, compared to 10,597 completed over the same period in 2009.”
Guardian letter:
“Why does nobody address crippling private rent (Nils Pratley, 21 November)? Why is it OK for my daughter and boyfriend to pay someone else’s mortgage by renting and having to share with several other people, only living in a room, sharing a bathroom and small kitchen and no communal area, not being able to afford to rent a place of their own or to get a mortgage, despite both working. If people can afford to pay rent they should be able to get an affordable mortgage. My daughter could never afford a property over £250,000, so a new allowance for properties up to £300,000 is an irrelevance.
My husband and I both work more than full time. I work two jobs and we only scrape by; we could not afford a mortgage now if we were first-time buyers. I am guessing that the young people who can afford £300,000 on a house are young professionals on a very high wage or are from a wealthy background where they have help? My daughter and her boyfriend both have degrees and have been saddled with debt. Sadly, we, like many parents, are not in a position to be able to help. The government needs to look at more social housing, charging people who own more than one property extra tax for each additional property, and ensure rents are capped.
Stephanie Lovatt
Liverpool”
“Children from deprived backgrounds face the worst prospects in some of the richest parts of the country, according to a damning new study that lays bare deep geographical divisions across Britain.
An annual report by the government’s own social mobility watchdog warns that while London and its suburbs are pulling away, rural, coastal and former industrial areas are being left behind.
The State of the Nation report finds that some of the wealthiest areas in England – including west Berkshire, the Cotswolds and Crawley, deliver worse outcomes for their disadvantaged children than places that are much poorer, such as Sunderland and Tower Hamlets. …
… Other findings include that:
51% of children on free school meals in London achieve A* to C grades in English and maths GCSE compared with a 36% average in all other regions.
There is a gulf between the highest figures of 63% in Westminster and the lowest, 27% on the Isle of the Wight
Meanwhile in Kensington and Chelsea, 50% of disadvantaged youngsters make it to university compared with just 10% in Hastings, Barnsley and Eastbourne
Some of the worst performing areas, such as Weymouth and Portland, and Allerdale, are rural not urban
In fact, in 71, largely rural areas, more than 30% of the people earn below the voluntary living wage – with average wages in west Somerset just £312 a week, less than half of the best performing areas
In Bolsover just 17% of residents are in jobs that are professional and managerial positions compared with 51% in Oxford
The study says that a critical factor in the best performing councils is the quality of teachers available, with secondary teachers 70% more likely to leave the profession in deprived areas.
Although richer parts of Britain do tend to outperform more deprived areas overall in the social mobility index designed by researchers, that isn’t always true. Some of the most affluent areas do worse for the poor kids than some of the least well off.
Coastal areas are a focus of the report, with warnings about schools being isolated. Recommendations include more collaboration between schools and subsidised travel for disadvantaged young people in isolated areas. The commission also calls for central government to fund a push for schools in rural and coastal areas to work together.
They also say that the government should rebalance the national transport budget to help tackle regional disparities. …
…. The report calls for the Department for Education’s £72m funding for opportunity areas to be matched by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills in order to link up schooling and workplace opportunities.”
“Almost 100,000 households in England are being priced out of the property market each year because of a shortage of affordable homes to rent or buy, according to a report. …
… About 96,000 households are unable to afford homes at the market rate, either to buy or rent, Savills said, with the vast majority in London and the south. It said varying approaches were needed to address the shortfall in different parts of the country: low-cost rented homes were needed more in markets in which incomes were smaller, while a mixture of homes, including shared ownership, would help in more expensive areas.
In London, 20% of the households affected have incomes above £35,000, Savills said, while the same proportion earn less than £10,000.
Over the past three years, 55,000 fewer affordable homes have been built each year than were needed, the research found. Although 42,500 households in the capital required below market rate housing, only 8,800 affordable homes a year had been delivered. In the south outside London, 15,500 affordable homes a year were being built while 34,100 were needed.
Meanwhile, in the north of England, low incomes were locking out 9,600 households a year, with 8,900 homes being delivered.
A speech by the prime minister, Theresa May, at the Conservative party conference in October made a commitment of £2bn over four years to fund social housing. However, to house 100,000 emerging households over this period would need funding of £7bn a year, Savills said.
Paying for the new homes would reduce the housing benefit bill by £430m a year. …”
“The boss of one of Britain’s biggest housebuilders is in line for an ‘outrageous’ £50 million New Year shares windfall despite Theresa May’s crackdown on fat-cat pay.
Persimmon’s chief executive Jeff Fairburn will next month pocket the first chunk of a share bonus worth a total of about £130 million at the current share price, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.
The Persimmon incentive scheme, which will see 150 managers share a bonus pot of more than £800 million, is likely to make Fairburn the best-paid FTSE 100 chief executive. … “
It is interesting to compare the Millbrook development in Exeter with PegasusLife’s at the Knowle, Sidmouth.
At Millbrook [the retirement complex in Exeter, Exeter City Council being the planning authority] the development was considered to be C3 (dwelling houses) and therefore attracted affordable housing provision which consisted of a payment to the Council of £5.65 million plus the transfer of land at no cost to enable the Council to construct a public extra care facility on the site. In addition the developer contributed almost £300,000 towards sports facilities and £35,000 towards archeological recording.
And what are PegasusLife, who are backed by Oaktree, a billion-dollar equity giant with offshore tax-haven connnections, contributing?
Answer: nothing, whether the development is adjudged to be C2 (residential institution) or C3. Unless of course, you include an information board to tell you where the elegant lawn terraces in the public gardens used to be.
So how many “affordable” houses (or other provision) is East Devon losing out on?
Guardian letters:
“The £350m for the NHS now and £1.6bn next year is dwarfed by the extra £10bn Philip Hammond recently found to shovel to development-sector shareholders through “help to buy”. And now we have the removal of stamp duty on houses up to £300,000, which will also push up prices, with the difference again going to developers or other vendors, instead of the exchequer. Another outrage.
John Worrall
Cromer, Norfolk”
Local media knew about this for YEARS but refused to take it up or investigate, leaving a lone Grenfell Tower blogger to document the unfolding disaster. One so-called “local” journalist was actually filing copy from Dorset!
“[Edward] Daffarn [a social worker who had lived in Grenfell Tower for 15 years] is understandably emotional when reflecting on the last few months, but more than that he is angry. Angry with the way he feels Grenfell residents were treated by the Kensington and Chelsea Tenant Management Organisation – the people who were entrusted to maintain the estate and keep its residents safe. Angry with the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Council, which was meant to scrutinise the KCTMO. Angry with a society which didn’t seem to care about people like him – people who live on housing estates – until it was too late.
“The reality is if you’re on a housing estate it’s indifference and neglect, two words that sum up everything about the way we were treated,” he says. “They weren’t interested in providing housing services, keeping us safe, maintaining the estate. They were just interested in themselves.”
It wasn’t for us to tell the council what they should be doing we were just trying to raise an alarm.
Edward Daffarn, Grenfell Action Group blog
Daffarn and fellow Grenfell resident Francis O’Connor had been blogging on behalf of the Grenfell Action Group since 2012. They wrote about issues that concerned their tight-knit community – air pollution, the closure of the local public library, and their fears that corners were being cut during the refurbishment of the tower.
“We wanted to record for history how a community on a housing estate in the fifth richest country in the world could be ignored, neglected, treated with indifference. We never thought we could make change. We just wanted to record what was happening,” he says.
Daffarn and O’Connor shared a theory that Kensington and Chelsea – a London borough more widely known for its museums, designer shops and flower shows – actually wanted its council estates to go into decline, so that the residents would leave and expensive flats could be built in this sought-after location. For this they were described as fantasists.
“We weren’t fantasists,” he says, visibly hurt. “We were trying to raise genuine concerns about how our community was being run down.”
The natural consequence, he concluded, would be loss of life. Which is why on 20 November 2016, frustrated and desperate, Edward wrote the blog post KCTMO – Playing with fire!
“It is a truly terrifying thought but the Grenfell Action Group firmly believe that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord.”
A few months earlier a fire had ripped through five floors of a tower block in Shepherd’s Bush, just down the road. Edward was worried that if a fire broke out in his tower block residents wouldn’t know what to do. They had been given no proper fire safety instructions from the KCTMO. There were no instructions on individual floors on how residents should act in the event of a fire, there was only a recent newsletter saying residents should remain in their flats – advice which in the case of the Shepherd’s Bush fire would have led to fatalities.
There’s a lot of abusive behaviour evidenced forensically about what was happening to our community, but it wasn’t sexy so it never got picked up.
In March 2017 the KCTMO installed fire safety instruction notices in the entrance hallway to Grenfell Tower and outside the lifts on every floor of the building, again urging residents to “stay put” unless the fire was “in or affecting your flat”.
It wasn’t the first time the Grenfell blog’s authors had raised concerns about fire safety.
Before the blog began, when a school was built on the only green space the residents had, they wrote to the borough pointing out that access for fire and emergency vehicles had been compromised.
Later they blogged about the blocking of a fire exit with mattresses during the refurbishment and the power surges in 2013 that manifested in flickering lights, computers and stereos blowing up, and entire rooms filling with smoke. These continued for three weeks, Daffarn says.
“We were tenants we weren’t fire safety specialists but we were switched on enough to feel this was important and it was not being dealt with on our estate and that’s why we were blogging. It wasn’t for us to tell the council what they should be doing., We were just trying to raise an alarm.”
An alarm that went unanswered. The November 2016 blog post represented the last moment at which something might have been done to avert the disaster which followed six months later. But why didn’t anyone heed or investigate Daffarn’s claims?
Hidden within the story of the Grenfell blog is another story of the decline of local media. There simply was no local press on the ground in the borough of Kensington and Chelsea scrutinising the authorities and helping to amplify the voice of people like Edward Daffarn.
The last time he had the attention of a local journalist was in 2014 when Camilla Horrox, the reporter for the Kensington and Chelsea Chronicle ran front page stories about Grenfell residents’ concerns regarding the possible presence of asbestos on the site of the new school and about the power surges.
She had met Daffarn several times, and had been concerned about KCTMO’s dealings with the residents of the properties it managed.
But when the newspaper was closed down later that year Horrox was made redundant and all her Grenfell articles disappeared from the web. The Kensington and Chelsea Chronicle was incorporated into a website that reports on 29 west London districts.
Horrox’s replacement was expected to report on three boroughs – Kensington and Chelsea, Westminster and Hammersmith and Fulham – while based in Surrey, an hour’s drive away.
Some residents of the borough might have been under the mistaken impression that they did have a local newspaper. In 2015 a free paper, The Kensington and Chelsea News, was established to fill the gap left by the closing of the Chronicle.
But when I tracked down its reporter he explained that he was the sole reporter working on the paper, and on two other local newspapers – his salary was £500 a week and he did almost all his reporting from home in Dorset, 150 miles away. He made it to the borough only twice in two-and-a-half years, and the one story he ever published about Grenfell was from a council press release about the installation of the new cladding.
Though he always searched for a “good front page splash” for each of the three editions, he also made sure to find two pages of royal stories and two pages of entertainment stories.
Edward Daffarn didn’t take his concerns to the media in November 2016 because he no longer thought anyone would listen. But the blog was out there for everyone to see, he points out, if only they had been looking.
“We’d been blogging for three or four years and you go back over that time there’s a lot of abusive behaviour evidenced forensically about what was happening to our community, but it wasn’t sexy so it never got picked up.”
For Edward, what was going on at Grenfell wasn’t just a local story, but a national one. A story about invisible people in a society that cared more about celebrity and wealth than its most vulnerable residents.
Close to tears, he admonishes the nation’s journalists.
“If you look back now our whole community of North Kensington, the policy that the local authority was taking every public space and privatising it, that that could be missed by the BBC, by Channel Four, by these wider news agencies… The question should be for you, why did you miss it?
“Why aren’t our lives important enough for you?”
“Councils received mixed messages on housing in the 2017 budget – with borrowing freedoms to help build more homes accompanied by a renewed threat of forced sales.
There was a cautious welcome for the chancellor Philip Hammond’s announcement that the government will increase the Housing Revenue Account borrowing cap for a limited number of councils.
However, there was concern that the government is pushing ahead with a pilot to test the idea of forcing councils to sell high value homes to fund an extension of Right to Buy (RTB) to housing association tenants….
… Paul Dossett, head of local government at accountancy firm Grant Thornton, said: “It looks like a very small pot in total when compared to other housing initiatives announced in the budget and in other recent government announcements.”
He also called on the government to clarify what the government meant by areas of high affordability pressure.
“In our view the cap should be lifted for all housing authorities so they can plan holistically across the country to build the social housing that we need,” he said. …
… The chancellor also announced plans to press ahead with a £200m pilot extending the Right to Buy for housing association tenants in the Midlands.
Councils had hoped that the idea, along with many housing policy initiatives from former chancellor George Osborne, had been shelved after a scheduled pilot scheme failed to materialise.
But documents released alongside the budget by the Office for Budget Responsibility, said: “A small pilot scheme was due to run from January to May 2016 but was delayed to July due to the process of applications taking longer than expected and there being a longer lag between issuing instructions to solicitors and completions being achieved.
“A larger pilot was announced in Autumn Statement 2016 and was due to begin in April 2017. This did not take place. It has instead been replaced by a new pilot announced at this budget, due to run for one year from July 2018.”
“… Because this is a permanent reduction in stamp duty for first-time buyers, it will actually increase the price of properties by twice the size of the tax cut,” the think tank said. “As such prospective first-time buyers’ net costs will actually increase not decrease.
“In reality, a first-time buyer purchasing an average priced property would experience a £3,200 price increase to offset the £1,600 tax cut.”
Those buying cheaper properties, however, are likely to save more in stamp duty than the extra they have to pay in inflated house prices, it added. The stamp duty cut also means that more of a buyer’s savings can go towards a deposit, enabling more to afford a home.” …
“No new homes guaranteed either despite £44bn claim.
Philip Hammond’s Budget bid to woo younger voters with stamp duty cuts unravelled within minutes after the UK’s economic watchdog warned the move would push up house prices.
The Chancellor was cheered by Tory MPs as he unveiled a surprise move to scrap stamp duty for first time buyers of homes worth less than £300,000 and Treasury officials claimed it would save a million people an average of £1,600.
But the independent Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) demolished the policy, declaring it would lead to a spike in house prices – and may only result in just 3,500 more people buying a home than otherwise.
Hammond’s wider claim to be spending £44bn on housing also came under fire as it emerged the actual new money was £15bn and not a single new home would be built as a direct result of the measures unveiled on Wednesday.
After the summer’s snap election disaster and weeks of Cabinet resignations and Brexit rows, Hammond tried to reconnect with voters with a £25bn spending package aimed at the cost of living, NHS underfunding and the housing crisis.
But his hopes of a political recovery were knocked back as:
* A new pledge of £3.7bn for Brexit preparations outstripped the £2.8bn promised in day-to-day spending for the NHS
* Growth forecasts were slashed, with claims that weaker pay will lower household income by £540 by 2023 and the national minimum wage going up slower than planned
* A promised pay rise for nurses was unspecific and delayed, with no other public sector workers given an penny extra
* Universal Credit wait times were cut by a week but not down to the month demanded by critics, with no halt in its roll-out nationwide
* Fast-tracked plans to sell off state shares in RBS bank to raise £15bn were described as “desperate”
Jeremy Corbyn attacked the Budget’s failure to provide the radical policies Britain needs and seized on the housing measures as more spin than substance.
“The government promised 200,000 starter homes three years ago and not a single one has been built. We need a large-scale public housebuilding programme, not this government’s accounting tricks and empty promises.”
The stamp duty change – which kicks in from midnight on Tuesday – won cheers from Tory MPs as it was the “rabbit in the hat” plucked out by Hammond to end his Budget speech with a final flourish.
Yet the OBR was swift with a savage take-down of the plan and the Resolution Foundation claimed that “it would be literally cheaper” to buy the tiny number of winners a house each.
In a withering verdict, the OBR said: “The main gainers from the policy are people who already own property, not the first time buyers themselves… It is also possible that non-first time buyers will abuse the relief.”
The stamp duty cut only applies to house sales over £120,000 and as a result won’t help many people outside the south east and in poorer parts of the country.
A Treasury spokesman insisted the stamp duty cut would make a difference to many. “We don’t think that £1,600 on average for a million people over the next five years is a small move at all,” he said.
The Treasury repeatedly refused to say if a single new home would be guaranteed as a result of the wider housing package, which includes loans and funds and incentives for developers rather than concrete spending for things like council homes.”
First, it should be noted that MANY of the Daily Telegraph’s readers are sitting in undeveloped housing plots!
and
Second, they don’t mention the company’s financial interest in nursing homes.
It’s a story they are pushing to attempt to get him out as he seems to be perceived as much too wimpy for the Telegraph on Brexit, but nevertheless it is a topical story, and throws up some interesting issues.
Naturally, Hammond says it is a blind trust so he’s not responsible for its decisions. However, companies have the option of behaving morally and responsibly, particularly if they are aware that their ultimate beneficial owner occupies a high-profile position where a possible potential conflict of interest will be magnified by the public gaze.
“A housebuilding business founded by Philip Hammond has been accused of sitting on an undeveloped plot of land which has been granted planning permission for four new homes.
Castlemead Limited, which was co-founded by the Chancellor in 1984, builds new homes and doctor’s surgeries.
It has been reported that Castlemead Group, which is majority-owned by the company, was granted permission to build four homes in north Wales in June 2010 on the condition work on the site would begin within five years.
However, The Times report that the site still remains undeveloped.
Mr Hammond resigned as a director of the company in 2010, but his sole entry in the most recent House of Commons’ MPs’ register makes reference to the fact that he is “a beneficiary of a trust which owns a controlling interest in Castlemead Ltd, a company engaged in construction, house building and property development”.
The revelation comes after Mr Hammond gave an interview with The Sunday Times this week, in which he hit out at house builders who are sitting on hundreds of thousands of undeveloped plots of land which have planning permission for new homes.
He said: “We are generating planning permissions at a record rate.“It’s builders banking land, it’s speculators hoarding land, it’s local authorities blocking development.”
Mr Hammond resigned as a director in 2010 and does not have any direct influence over the company’s activities.
A spokeswoman for Mr Hammond said: “Any shares in Castlemead are held in a trust. The chancellor has no direct influence or involvement and so is unable to comment.”
Castlemead did not respond to The Telegraph’s request for comment.”
And what starts in Exeter ripples immediately to East Devon – where the western side is now just another “Greater Exeter” suburb.
“Exeter would need to build houses more than twice as fast if it wanted to keep up with population growth.
The number of homes being built in the area actually dropped last year, the latest figures show – and housing is growing at a far slower
rate than the booming population.
… Government data reveals 450 homes were built in Exeter in 2016-17 – down from 651 the year before – bringing the total number of houses and flats to around 53,930.
That works out as a growth in Exeter housing of 0.84 per cent in the last year.
In comparison, the population of the area grew by nearly 2,500 people between mid-2015 and mid-2016 – the latest data available.
It means only one new home is being built for every six extra people in the area.
Population growth in Exeter is fuelled by both ‘natural’ factors – more births than deaths – as well as immigration from other parts of
the UK and abroad.
Thanks to this there are now nearly 130,000 people living in Exeter – a growth of 1.96 per cent in a single year.
It means the population in the area is growing more than twice as fast as homes are being built – one of the worst discrepancies seen in the
whole of England.
Across the country, rates of house building have actually overtaken total population growth in the last year, with the number of homes in
England increasing by more than 217,000 in 2016-17.
That brings the total number of dwellings in the country to around 24 million – up by 0.92 per cent on the year before. …”
http://www.devonlive.com/news/devon-news/fears-exeter-housing-crisis-figures-811954
East Devon Watch 