Governments First Budget

Rosie51 - yes of course I would apply the same to Angela Raynor, why wouldn't I?

Allira

My post was to Wyllow but others appeared in between.

I dont recall a new tax on farms being mentioned in the budget at all?

This could push up food prices.
As I said previously, most governments have little or no understanding of farming.

OR it could mean passing the farms on to family at an earlier age?

Whitewavemark2

Imo council housing should remain exactly that. I also think that the rent charged should reflect people’s ability to pay. It may do so I don’t actually know how the poorest are assisted?

It depends on their income and rent. Many receive support through Universal Credit and Housing Benefit, if they're pensioners.

Whitewavemark2

Imo council housing should remain exactly that. I also think that the rent charged should reflect people’s ability to pay. It may do so I don’t actually know how the poorest are assisted?

I agree that social housing should stay as such, but not that people should be dragged down by means-tested rents. People need incentives to make their lives better, and increasing rent in line with earnings would discourage that, as does means-testing benefits of all kinds so that qualifying for them is contingent on not earning over a threshold by restricting hours or not saving more than a fixed amount. People on low incomes should be able to save and to work overtime without penalty.

Everyone who wants it should be eligible for social housing, and that would be possible if nobody could buy it, and the houses stayed in council ownership.

Thanks.

Rosie51

Casdon

Angela Rayner bought her council house before the heavily discounted rate was introduced. People will still be able to buy their council houses under similar terms to hers.

I don't dispute that Casdon, but Greyisnotmycolour, has called TakeThat7 incredibly selfish for wanting to buy her council house. Discounts aside, the taking a council house out of public ownership is exactly the same.

I don’t have a problem with council houses being sold to tenants, if they want to stay in a house that is already their home, fine. However, the house should be sold to them at a price that enables the council to reinvest to build another house for another tenant at an affordable rent.

Casdon

Angela Rayner bought her council house before the heavily discounted rate was introduced. People will still be able to buy their council houses under similar terms to hers.

No she didn’t she’s not that old! My parents bought their council house in 1986 at the maximum discount having paid full rent for 35 years. My Dad always said they had paid for that house twice over.

NotSpaghetti

Allira

My post was to Wyllow but others appeared in between.

I dont recall a new tax on farms being mentioned in the budget at all?

This could push up food prices.
As I said previously, most governments have little or no understanding of farming.

OR it could mean passing the farms on to family at an earlier age?

And being able to guarantee you'll survive another 7 years? No death in an accident for example? A farm worth one million pounds or less wouldn't be a farm, it would be a smallholding. It is a worry that farms will have to be sold ending generations farming the same land. Starmer seemed to understand that in this video, but that was before he came to be PM.

There are some good changes in this budget, but this change isn't one of them.

x.com/NFUtweets

Not terribly far from where I live, there is what I can only describe as a model council house estate. They are solid, well built and planned semis surrounded by grass, trees and a park. A very pleasant area indeed. They were all sold off at a discounted rate, which was something that should never have happened. All the houses which must amount to over 100 have now been taken out of the social housing stock, and never replaced.

So bad.

It has always been possible to buy your council house Primrose53, Angela Rayner bought hers in 2007. In 2012 David Cameron introduced a new scheme which offered much more advantageous terms to tenants to incentivise them to buy.
www.insidehousing.co.uk/news/cameron-launches-reinvigorated-right-to-buy-31168

Jeremy Clarkson
@JeremyClarkson
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Farmers. I know that you have been shafted today. But please don’t despair. Just look after yourselves for five short years and this shower will be gone.

Casdon

Rosie51

Casdon

Angela Rayner bought her council house before the heavily discounted rate was introduced. People will still be able to buy their council houses under similar terms to hers.

I don't dispute that Casdon, but Greyisnotmycolour, has called TakeThat7 incredibly selfish for wanting to buy her council house. Discounts aside, the taking a council house out of public ownership is exactly the same.

I don’t have a problem with council houses being sold to tenants, if they want to stay in a house that is already their home, fine. However, the house should be sold to them at a price that enables the council to reinvest to build another house for another tenant at an affordable rent.

Can that happen though? There can't be both a discount and enough money to build an equivalent new house.

Also, the numbers of council houses should be growing, not just replaced like for like. If people want to buy they should buy on the open market. Council tenants are paying lower rent than those forced into the private sector, who have less and less chance of being offered a council house with a decent rent if the houses are constantly being sold. They are doomed to pay others' mortgages with rents that are often so high that they can't save deposits to buy houses of their own.

I think that people buying them are selfish, but I can't blame them for that. It is free money, and realistically, someone turning down the opportunity might spend the rest of their lives paying rent. If they did buy privately, they would be putting a hypothetical family before their own, which is a big ask. I don't think many people are highly principled enough to do that.

For that reason, I think that the RTB should be stopped altogether.

Ability to build new homes at an affordable rate must vary by Local Authority area Doodledog. Councils generally own land which is redundant which they can build on still, and per council area there are not large numbers of council homes sold annually. Where I live the strategy has been to build more small units of accommodation, and some larger homes that were formerly privately owned that come up for sale have been bought back by the council at full market rate. People do get very attached to their houses, and I think wherever possible they should be enabled to buy them, just my personal view.

It would be good if the government were to offer grants for builders to construct new homes exclusively as starter homes.

Thank you for all the details laid out, WWM.

The discussion on the radio earlier talked about building smaller units, preferably terraces because the space in between houses (when they are crammed close together) is wasted. I couldn’t help thinking that the speaker had never lived in a terraced house next to someone who gave piano lessons for a living, or where children learning an instrument lived, or even just noisy neighbours.
Smaller houses with limited or no parking even for EVs will certainly drive people back into public transport despite the increases.
Do you think a government is right to do things that will compel people to make that decision, whilst they themselves are sitting in large houses, plenty of parking and expenses to cover their travel?

Casdon

Ability to build new homes at an affordable rate must vary by Local Authority area Doodledog. Councils generally own land which is redundant which they can build on still, and per council area there are not large numbers of council homes sold annually. Where I live the strategy has been to build more small units of accommodation, and some larger homes that were formerly privately owned that come up for sale have been bought back by the council at full market rate. People do get very attached to their houses, and I think wherever possible they should be enabled to buy them, just my personal view.

That's true about differentials between areas. If they are sold at the going rate for the area it's maybe less of an issue, but I still think that as long as there is homelessness and people struggling on high rents then social housing should stay state owned.

Too many young people are running to stand still because of high rents, and can see no hope of having somewhere with a secure tenancy, never mind something of their own.

I think a mixture of housing types is best. One issue at the moment is that there are a lot of single occupants of family sized council homes who can’t be accommodated in single person units, because there aren’t enough of them available. Surely local decision making based on known needs assessments will be the way forward.

I was listening to You and Yours (R4) earlier this week and a dveloper was talking of the problems he was having building a new estate.

Recent legislation states that 40% of houses on new developments need to be affordable. That is not usually a problem, because the developer does a deal with a Housing Association to buy the affordable houses at a price below the open market price and all works well.
BUT
The government has put a requirement on Housing Associations(HAs) to bring all their properties up to certain insulation standards by (I think) 2030, but not given them any extra money, so most of their investment is currently going into house refubishment not house acquisition.
THE RESULT
The developer cannot start on a new estate because he cannot find any HA willing to buy the affordable homes. He had approached 20 different HAs and not one was interested. So with no HA willing to take on the affordable homes, he therefore cannot develop this new estate meaning no new open market houses are being built either.

He also said that HA's are getting pickier and do not want to take up the HA allocation on small estates because they do not want to be responsible for little groups of houses , perhaps only 5 or 10, they prefer to have their houses in minimum groups of 20 plus, for ease of maintenance.

Now here is a problem that surely ought to be solvable, perhaps allow developers to dsitribute HA properties across their estates, more in the bigger estates, none in the very small ones. On other estates, open market houses could be built, but HA houses only built when there was an HA ready to buy them. Not only that a solution that has no cost implications.

I am not a housing expert by any means but isn’t the idea of housing associations flawed? If estates were owned by councils as they used to be, and rent used for maintenance rather than profit, any surplus could be used to build more homes- ideally with subsidies from the government when they can afford it.

Full council rents are not subsidised, contrary to popular belief. Private rents are seen as ‘market rate’ as so many council houses have been sold, but they are covering mortgages and profit as well as maintenance, so are artificially high.

I would like to see a ban on sales, and a concerted effort to go back to the days when anyone who wanted one could get a council house and stay there as long as they wanted.

Doodledog

Casdon

Rosie51

Casdon

Angela Rayner bought her council house before the heavily discounted rate was introduced. People will still be able to buy their council houses under similar terms to hers.

I don't dispute that Casdon, but Greyisnotmycolour, has called TakeThat7 incredibly selfish for wanting to buy her council house. Discounts aside, the taking a council house out of public ownership is exactly the same.

I don’t have a problem with council houses being sold to tenants, if they want to stay in a house that is already their home, fine. However, the house should be sold to them at a price that enables the council to reinvest to build another house for another tenant at an affordable rent.

Can that happen though? There can't be both a discount and enough money to build an equivalent new house.

Also, the numbers of council houses should be growing, not just replaced like for like. If people want to buy they should buy on the open market. Council tenants are paying lower rent than those forced into the private sector, who have less and less chance of being offered a council house with a decent rent if the houses are constantly being sold. They are doomed to pay others' mortgages with rents that are often so high that they can't save deposits to buy houses of their own.

I think that people buying them are selfish, but I can't blame them for that. It is free money, and realistically, someone turning down the opportunity might spend the rest of their lives paying rent. If they did buy privately, they would be putting a hypothetical family before their own, which is a big ask. I don't think many people are highly principled enough to do that.

For that reason, I think that the RTB should be stopped altogether.

There can't be both a discount and enough money to build an equivalent new house.

Yes, they can. Over the years, councils take in more in rent than a house costs to build, so they can build up funds to rebuild. This can be supplemented by income from the sale of properties. Not only that, but if they were to be allowed to borrow, they can earn more in rent than the interest on the loans.

Moreover, many people in private rentals receive Housing Benefit (or the housing element of Universal Credit) from councils, which would reduce if people were paying lower rents.

PS. My son works for a housing charity/housing association and explained to me how it works. I think they've been expecting the latest news.

MOnica Can you remember who the developer was? I suspect his views might be a tad biased.

Mollygo

The discussion on the radio earlier talked about building smaller units, preferably terraces because the space in between houses (when they are crammed close together) is wasted. I couldn’t help thinking that the speaker had never lived in a terraced house next to someone who gave piano lessons for a living, or where children learning an instrument lived, or even just noisy neighbours.
Smaller houses with limited or no parking even for EVs will certainly drive people back into public transport despite the increases.
Do you think a government is right to do things that will compel people to make that decision, whilst they themselves are sitting in large houses, plenty of parking and expenses to cover their travel?

I live in a terraced house in a block of four, which was originally built as "affordable housing". The sound insulation is good. I have allocated parking just round the corner from my house, where it would be easy to install a charging point. I have never been happier than living here.

I would like to see a ban on sales, and a concerted effort to go back to the days when anyone who wanted one could get a council house and stay there as long as they wanted. When was this as I honestly can't remember a time when that was possible and I'm a little older than you? Certainly when I got married there was no chance of getting a council property, it was private rental or buy your own. My parents with two children only managed to get a council maisonette (the type with two floors within a block of what looked like flats), no chance of a house with garden. Maybe it varied by area, but in the SE if I'd applied the waiting lists ran to many years if not decades with no realistic chance of getting to the top.
That's not to say I don't agree with your wish, just that I don't remember it ever being a real possibility in my lifetime.