Sir K claims "a budget for Working People", ha!!!

ronib

The census shows £31912 average salary and £714886 average property. Something doesn’t add up here. Unless wealthy families are buying property in St Albans for their adult children. This has been known.

www.ons.gov.uk/visualisations/housingpriceslocal/E07000240/

House prices and rents in St Albans. It is a very expensive place to live.

ronib

Shinamae well of course. Bucking the trend a bit as quite a few families move further out once their children have a place at a coveted St Albans school….

That’s my girl, bucking the trend 🤓😁

My daughter has a very good job, and was recently promoted..
She works mainly from home, but does have to spend some time in London..
The house she is in at the moment is a two bedroom mid terrace Victorian house,for this she has been paying £1650 a month…

Now she works from home 3 days a week DD is moving 25 miles further from London to buy her 'perfect' house, or it will be by the time she has completed her renovation project.

Doodledog

silverlining48

St Albans is one of the most expensive areas in the country.
A 3 bed mid terrace where I live, 15 miles from central London, would be less than half that.

There was a thread on MN recently where someone was asking why her St Albans house wouldn't sell for £600k. She was aiming at first time buyers and divorcees. The house had 2 beds (one tiny), a downstairs bathroom and no parking (not just no garage or driveway, but no parking outside at all). One of the bedrooms may have been in a basement - I can't remember now.

My gast was flabbered. Prices like that are insane, and if people have to reduce them, so be it. It is sad for those who may have bought them at a similarly insane price, but it's just not sustainable to have £600k as a starter price for young people or older ones starting again on their own. The fact that this may be the case in some parts of the country doesn't make it ok.

This one wouldn't have been much use as a family house, as the baby would have been on another floor from the parents, so a young couple would likely have to budget for a probable next move soon afterwards. She'd done it out nicely, but all the same. . .

No wonder the birthrate is falling.

St Albans is a lovely place, good schools, but £600k would be considerably too much for many people - I wonder if she lowered her price 10% quarterly as often advised by ones agent?

The birthrate is another matter, imo,

Shinamae

My daughter has a very good job, and was recently promoted..
She works mainly from home, but does have to spend some time in London..
The house she is in at the moment is a two bedroom mid terrace Victorian house,for this she has been paying £1650 a month…

I know I'm terribly out of touch - however your daughter's rent seems exceedingly high to me. Nice job we live in a inexpensive area.

Norah

Shinamae

My daughter has a very good job, and was recently promoted..
She works mainly from home, but does have to spend some time in London..
The house she is in at the moment is a two bedroom mid terrace Victorian house,for this she has been paying £1650 a month…

I know I'm terribly out of touch - however your daughter's rent seems exceedingly high to me. Nice job we live in a inexpensive area.

Yes, that’s what she pays and when she was going for that there were four other people after it as well.
Believe me I’ve tried to get to relocate back to Devon but she has her life up there. Her children are in the schools. She has a good job and she has a good support network of friends which she has needed due to a very acrimonious time with her ex.

So. Watched BBC not what I usually watch and can tell people
Angela Raynor was on the bbcnews twelve minutes past 8was very
quick social housing being bought Well that's what can happen with affordable housing isSo labour are going to make social housing.
Less available she would have made a lot of bitter complaints
If Tories did This doesn't it deserve a discussion in parliament and house of lord

No. It wasn’t discussed when Thatcher sold the houses off in the first place. It was clearly a policy to buy votes (and it worked). I think it would be a very good thing to stop it altogether and have a safety net for those who need it as well as secure and reasonable tenancies for those who want them. That is far more important than a quick profit for those lucky enough to get a tenancy.

So working people presumably Angela Raynor was a worker would no longer have motivation to work and buy their social housing which is always for minimum wage people difficult but Tories tried to make itpossible for working class to dothat

They also made it impossible for many working people to have a secure roof over their heads.

Nothing new about that having been homeless when labour werei in previously

How exactly didthe conservatives do that anyway they supported people in the pandemic and reduced the discount and gave out cost of living payments With labour water forms charging more and where are the cost of living payments going

Buying your own house isn't necessarily a 'motivation to work'. What generally motivates initially is having enough money to feed and clothe yourself (and , perhaps, family) and live comfortably. Owning one's own house isn't an essential part of this.

In fact, for hundreds of years most sections of society were perfectly content to rent their accommodation, and still are in many countries.

I think it was Thatcher who put the idea into people's heads that house owning was very important, and it has been part of the tory ethos to denigrate people who rent as being unable to be properly self sufficient. While at the same time, of course, being perfectly happy to be landlords with multiple properties*

* I'm not saying that only tories are landlords, just that the two tory ideas are somewhat contradictory...

Living at the hands of greedy uncaring landlords, whether Tory or the recent Labour example, is a big incentive to try and buy rather than rent.

TakeThat7

How exactly didthe conservatives do that anyway they supported people in the pandemic and reduced the discount and gave out cost of living payments With labour water forms charging more and where are the cost of living payments going

The tories supported people in the pandemic because they had no choice. Sunak didn't want to at first but was finally brought to the realisation that without people being paid by their employers the economy would collapse.

Mind you, there were a considerable number of self employed people who got nothing because they didn't quite match the criteria. I think growstuff would tell you all about that.

And they paid out even more to many of their friends and donors through the PPE racket and 'VIP' lanes, many of whom pocketed £millions

The increased water charges are nothing to do with Labour. They are a direct result of the privatised water companies neglecting to invest in upgrading and extending the water infrastructure in favour of paying large dividends to their shareholders. 30 plus years of neglect are coming home to roost as they struggle to afford the work needed.

Mollygo

Living at the hands of greedy uncaring landlords, whether Tory or the recent Labour example, is a big incentive to try and buy rather than rent.

That is why Labour are trying to clamp down on 'greedy and uncaring' and ensure security of tenure for more renters.

As long as they start with their own.

It's worth remembering that Angela Rayner; she who has suggested that she wants to stop new council homes in England from being sold under the Right to Buy scheme; actually did precisely this in 2007. She bought her former council house in Vicarage Road, Stockport under the right-to-buy scheme in 2007 and sold it for £48,500 more than she paid for it just 3 years later. Funny how she had no finer feelings about taking social housing out of stock then but she's happy to pull the ladder up behind her now.

While I don’t criticise anyone who took advantage of the opportunity to buy a property at a huge discount, it was the worst idea possible and it was done to pump up Margaret thatchers popularity which was heading south.
It has meant that all these homes are no longer available to those who need social housing and when sold they are now at market rates, thus private landlords both good and bad, have sprung up demanding their own much higher rents, which still have to be covered by councils, and tenants no longer have without long term security.

Typo .
Tenants no longer have long term security.

What's wrong with getting votes for helping working people silver lining above I thought politicians were supposed to make some good deciçions

The decision was not made for working people, but to help her with her failing popularity.

Before the sell-off, 'working people' had reasonable rents and regulated landlords, and there was a safety net for people who didn't want to, or weren't able to buy on the open market, such as women and children leaving abusive marriages.

As has been said, those who took advantage of the scheme can't be blamed of doing it. As with most things, people do what is right for them at the time, but that doesn't mean that it can't be recognised that what may have been right for individuals at one time is not good for society at large at another, and it is not hypocritical of someone who did something decades ago to recognise that fact.

At a time when the country is struggling, why should individuals be given free money? Who is supposed to pay for the houses they expect to buy at huge discounts, when there are people sleeping rough, and families vulnerably housed? It is particularly exasperating when some of those families are living in what used to be council houses, but are now private rentals making a fortune for people who bought them at a discount.

^ Before the sell-off, 'working people' had reasonable rents and regulated landlords, and there was a safety net for people who didn't want to, or weren't able to buy on the open market, such as women and children leaving abusive marriages.^
There was all that, if you were lucky.
In my experience, none of the above were guaranteed, especially the ^women and children leaving abusive marriages.