As financial advisers Hargreaves Lansdown note this morning, Nationwide has published its House Price Index for March 2023. As they note:
House price slip becomes a slump: biggest annual drop in 14 years
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House prices are down 3.1% - the biggest drop since July 2009.
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It's the seventh consecutive month of house price falls.
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Prices fell faster in March than in February – down 0.8% in a month compared to a 0.5% drop in February.
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The average house price is £257,122. This is 4.6% below August's peak (£273,751).
Three thoughts. First, such drops are the usual harbinger of recession.
Second, there is some comfort for the Bank of England in this: the misery it is creating for homeowners with a mortgage is having an impact.
Third, significant as this is in the short term it does not make housing any more affordable for most people. The urgent need for massive government intervention to create secure long-term tenancy of properties available to vastly more people is vital if this problem is to be solved.
I am curious as to what people think about this last issue, which was discussed on Question Time last night. What are your preferred solutions to the housing crisis (you have three votes as this is a multi-faceted issue):
How should we solve the housing crisis?
- Build more social housing (31%, 377 Votes)
- Significantly increase the cost of second home owning (16%, 196 Votes)
- Cap rents (15%, 190 Votes)
- Make carbon-neutral housing the focus of a government Green New Deal (14%, 170 Votes)
- Compulsorily purchase empty properties (9%, 112 Votes)
- Build more houses (7%, 92 Votes)
- Increase council tax on under-occupied property (4%, 54 Votes)
- Change planning laws (2%, 29 Votes)
- I'm abstaining, but show me the results anyway (1%, 9 Votes)
Total Voters: 487
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My preferred solution is a private ‘right to buy scheme’ for renters. We want to eliminate rent seeking in housing, so any money paid in rent becomes a charge the tenant has against the landlord. If the landlord does some work, fixes the roof, the boiler etc or improves the house, then they can be paid for that work by reducing the tenant’s charge. The obvious way would be the cost of the materials and labour by some small multiplier.
Perhaps this would in fact create all sorts of perverse incentives, but I like the idea of taking rent seeking out of the rental market.
thanks for all the effort Richard
‘Maximum number of choices allowed: 3’ ???
I am not able to select 7 of the options.
This seems like an administrative oversight.
I think you will find only three will count
But I will check this
If the government spends money on building houses, it creates a valuable asset. More than that, if gives someone a place to live, a home, and one less worry in life.
Building houses grows the building sector, provides jobs with taxable wages, reduces unemployment, and improves everyone’s standard of living.
Who loses out, what is there not to like?
Scrapping ‘Right to buy’ and ‘Buy to rent’ will help.
If we build more housing it has to be on brownfield sites – there are too many hanging around.
My late father did not like landlordism and wondered why the State could not build houses for people to own as well as rent. It would be using the same forgotten principle behind state pensions and other functions – the fund would be huge hopefully and affordable from that perspective and offer affordable rates and prices since there would be no investor clinging to it to extract a reward and none of the choice theory bollocks about competing providers keeping prices down (yeah right).
It is well known anyway in housing development circles that local authority built housing is better built than the private sector. If anyone on this blog ever buys a new house then my advice is that you simply employ an independent Corgi registered gas engineer and an electrician to check it over before you part with your cash because the big boys cut more corners than a F1 driver at the Monaco Grand Prix no matter how many completion certificates they show you. I know this because as a development officer we do acquisitions too. Private sector standards of build are inferior in my experience and the bigger the builder/developer, the worse it is.
But the major thing I learnt from my housing degree, is that housing’s use value (shelter, accommodation, a basis for a life) is secondary now to its investment or asset value. That is where the market is totally screwed up in my view.
We need to stop using housing to gain wealth and go back to basics. Part of this is also having a society where wealth is derived from labour (so a decent industrial policy is needed) and a decent pension system.
The other thing of course is rents. The 80% market rent for social lets exists simply because Government (even New Labour) has chosen to underfund the supply side and fund consumption instead through housing benefit so paying for new build comes from the rent (remember social rents are calculated on comparative 1999 poll tax value, market sales values, market rent values – yes those 1999 values – its all screwed up). Taking rents back to target rent or the ‘old’ social rent would help in a cost of living crisis and stop the tenant subsidising their own home to rent. But Government would have to stump up more supply subsidy – and not just to Help to Buy – an odious policy if I’ve ever seen one.
The current crises in my LA is that tenants are staying longer in our stock – turnover has ground to a halt because of supply in the private sector contracting and putting up rents or/and a growth in zero hours contracts and lower pay. The more generous and voter friendly RTB policy of the Tories has seen council stock haemorrhaging since 2010 – my LA has lost over 1500 homes since 2010 to that policy and you don’t get enough out of the receipt to build a new one. You need to sell two to build one!! Stupid but deliberate too. Funding through Homes England Affordable Housing Grant for new housing is simply not enough – topping out at £55K and much lower normally. And then they want you to do market rent conversions – where old target rent properties have to be let to 80% market – as part of the funding.
A morass in housing? Definitely. It’s been an area of policy failure for years. The late Alan Holmans was telling us that we were not building enough housing for the right level of need from the 1980’s when more market drivers were introduced. I wonder what Alan would be saying now?
Thanks PSR
I thought you would have something to say on this one
Hi Pilgrim
Last year you mentioned reading Michael Hudson’s Destiny of Civilisation . If I recall correctly he cites 19th century economists who advocated taxing away ‘economic rent’ -so housing isn’t an alternative means to a pension-and keeping down rents. Lower rents means that workers can be paid less without loss and keep down production costs.
As I am sure you have pointed out, inflated housing costs suck purchasing power out of the economy.
Our present policies are for the good of the few; not the nation as a whole.
Hi Ian
I’m not sure what point you are making to be honest.
Every buy to let landlord I know has gone into landlordism because the income it provides is better than any pension on its own and can/did add to income. That was their incentive – to make money OK? They also use the income addition to have more mortgages if possible. Again, if pensions were more generous and maybe if we’d not seen such a precipitous reduction in pay and an industrial policy providing well paid jobs, people would not need feel that they should become landlords?
Aided and abetting this are no rent controls, insecure tenancies and almost negative over sight of standards.
My brother in law is retired, lives out of the country so many months of the year to reduce tax, uses his home as a business (holiday lets) with the tax benefits of that – all done by leveraging himself to the max through the 1990’s and watching the value of what he’d bought go up and then selling it off at a profit at the right time whilst doing high paid jobs in IT which he hated.
And look at it from the landlord or buyer’s side. It’s an extremely risky business getting one mortgage, let alone two or three. But you are Ian, working for yourself aren’t you even though there is a risk of over-leveraging and being more exposed to risk (what if you became ill?).
People are taught in our media how to buy a house, do it up, then charge and make a profit from it, and then go onto the next project. It’s all around you. I see a lot of landlords in my town – they’re the ones in Costa having self-satisfied cup of coffee at anytime of the day.
The main point is how property has become the main driver of our economy because of its asset value over it use value. I think this is unsatisfactory because it serves investment behaviour and capacity, not labour’s behaviour and capacity which is disadvantaged. And your house becomes your main store of wealth and access to spending power (credit/debt) – not your wages or pensions. But now, that’s if you can buy your own house!!
Don’t lose sight Ian of how variedly society interprets and puts policy to use.
Low rents leading to low wages? You may have a point. But that is not the case in 2023 is it? Private sector rents are higher than council housing rents; council housing rents are either 80% of market rents or the older social/lower target rent (the former is now becoming more dominant over time).
You know about Universal Credit don’t you? Well, the housing portion of that combined benefit is still being reduced under austerity as a means to ‘nudge’ people into work – low paying work. So even this idea of low rents being for workers has been broken by the free market fundamentalism we’ve had in housing. The British benefits system also traditionally withdraws benefit when earned income comes into play too rapidly – the taper should be longer and less steep – it just causes hardship. A sharp indication of this is London, where rents have got higher and pushed essential workers further away from the centre – the hive of economic activity. Added to this, the expense of transport – itself just a cash cow for capitalism – and you have a perfect storm where nothing seems to add up anymore.
It’s nothing more than markets cancelling each other out. There’s no joined up thinking. Sectors are ruled by their own narrow minded financial objectives.
Guess what I saw the Tories help to buy policy achieve for a friend’s newly divorced son who worked in banking, had who had sent all his kids to private schools and had property abroad? It gave him a discount on a brand new 4 bed executive home on the outskirts of London whilst people still slept on the streets? That’s the truth!
I heard about public housing in Singapore today. I did a comparative housing module at Uni during my degree but that was all about how tenants in state owned ex-soviet era blocks flats had to become owner-occupiers during Russian shock therapy as their landlord melted away overnight. Singapore’s housing system might be typically south east Asian in that the state decided to intervene in markets with a particular policy aim (like China does). So, with a more controlled housing system, over leveraging and debt problems are avoided, market inefficiency is controlled or negated and you are cancelling out a potential form inflation of wages and prices that might be deemed unhelpful for your industrial policy? The thing is, people get housed and there is a recognition of the ‘externalities’ of this as a contribution to GDP. Joined up thinking. Marvellous.
I’d love to see such a system or variation here in the UK because the housing market here is simply FUBAR/SNAFU. The elite above us and the abusers in our banks who provide our mortgages all thrive on chaos and the fear of being left behind and high rents – I think that in the EU British rents are some of the highest around. Our housing costs are very high.
Anyhow, I’ll leave it at that for now.
Thanks PSR
Basically i was backing up your point and indicating Hudson has written along those lines.
I am now retired but as a counsellor I saw a number of people who administered LA housing-and learnt about ALMOs and being tupied etc. Also when Housing Depts. became ALMOs managers from the private sector would be appointed who said the former LA people didn’t know about the real world so they gradually left. Then they would ask the last man standing what they used to do as they weren’t sure.
It angers me as well that a few make a lot of money while the system falls apart.
Thanks for your insight.
How do we get decent, affordable housing? Well, “I wouldn’t be starting from here” is probably the appropriate response.
For housing to become affordable prices must fall and, Richard, you are right, this almost certainly means a recession. But, if we run interest rate (and other) policies to preserve current house prices in order to stave off recession then we will not get affordable housing. What to do?
The danger of “falling house prices” is a danger of falling NOMINAL prices (negative equity, expectation of further falls reinforces the trend and cuts mobility etc.) ; the affordability issue is about REAL prices. So, let’s have a bit of inflation and raise wages while trying to preserve nominal house price stability.
Interestingly, RBNZ (who pioneered inflation targeting among Central Banks) DO (since March 2021) explicitly take house prices into account when determining monetary policy.
I really struggled to limit this to 3 options only.
Also you missed an important option, which is for the Government to invest in the country outside the South East to spread the demand around a bit.
Sorry….
These things are written incredibly quickly
I only make the point about investing outside of the South East because I never see it mentioned in all the discussions about house prices.
But it seems to me like it would make a massive difference.
I have read the Germans have regional caps on both rents and land prices. This helps keep a lid on both markets. It more of a cultural thing, I can’t see us Brits accepting it,but we should.
Danny Dorling has come up with some every interesting stuff on Housing and I would suggest reading The Property Lobby by Bob Colenutt.
Even the Right Wing Tory Pressure Group, The Bow Group has proposed setting a target for average house prices of 4x earnings and in the past has come up with some impassioned calls for sanity in the market.
Going back though to when I – and I suggest many of us bought our first homes, firstly there were strict limits on how much you could borrow and very limited finance available for ‘buy to let’ second homes etc.
I suggest
1. Bring back controls on mortgage lending, especially
2. For ‘non owner occupied’ property.
3. Compulsory registration for all ‘let’ property be it holiday lets or residential, and
4. Planning controls on ‘non owner occupied’ property eg second homes, empty property (of all description)
5. In addition to Compulsory Purchase which ties up Local Authorities and needs funding what about adding ‘Compulsory Sale’ as has been proposed in Scotland. This is particularly helpful for ‘commercial’ land and buildings where the market is not so liquid.
https://www.landcommission.gov.scot/downloads/5dd6a16d88752_CSO-Proposal-final.pdf
6. Restrict the ownership of land and property in the UK to UK Residents
Serendipity: Paul Dimoldenberg’s “Building the New Jerusalem” is next on my reading pile!
The housing situation is possibly as bad as after the Blitz. My brickie father was one of those builders of the New Jerusalem. In lieu of a précis of my unread book, I offer some practical thoughts from his experiences.
1. Begin to price land-banks out of the assets of the big construction companies:
Either develop land or pay non-deductable council tax *as if it was developed at maximum density but unoccupied*.
2. Control building matériel:
Any builder *must* build 1 social housing unit at cost for every 10 homes for purchase – or no access to raw materials. See post-war reconstruction regulations under both Parties – Labour had no private housing allowed at first, Tory Housing Minister ?Macmillan? later relaxed the ratio.
3. Train the workers:
Every company building more than 100 units a year must have a registered and regulated Apprentice scheme.
And my own thoughts, tempered by Private Eye reporting:
4. Abolish BtL mortgages:
A putative landlord must buy outright.
5. Register landlords for HMRC and regular inspections.
If the populace is scrabbling for its basics of food, water, shelter (Maslow) I hold no hope for any New Jerusalem, though. There’s too much money to be made from property for those with no access to the wealth of even “the rich”. (Which is why owning property is so important – allegedly – to future survival in old age.
A broken society.
Thanks
Thinking about it a bit more, its interesting to go back and look at ancient Jewish/Christian/Muslim thought which was against making money out of nothing, usury and speculation, now if we could start using some of those ideas again we might get somewhere
In addition to a huge programme to improve insulation of the housing stock, and raise minimum standards for new buildings …
For tenants, there should be an end to no-fault evictions, rent controls, and enforcement of standards for housing conditions. But the key to make this all effective should be to give tenants the right to appoint their own choice of managing agent for the tenancy, similar to the right leasees now have to appoint a managing agent for a lease. That would take control away from the landlord, who would be passed on the rent, net of maintenance and admin costs, by the managing agent. For the tenant, the risk of being stuck with a bad landlord goes away; appointing a good managing agent is something they can control. For the landlord, profits would generally be lower, but the amount of hassle involved in being a landlord would be massively reduced.
For new building, the planning system needs to work top-down. Local authorities should start by estimating how much housing, of what sizes and types, will be required at a social rent, how much at a genuinely affordable (i.e. 1/3 of after-tax income) rents, how much so-called “affordable” (i.e. 80% of market rent) rents, and so on; and then planning permission should only be granted consistently with the plan. If not enough planning applications are being made to build the housing required (and I would not expect the private sector to build housing for social rents), or if permission is applied for but then the building doesn’t happen, then the LA should compulsorily purchase empty or underused sites, and do the building itself. This would ideally be funded by central government lending money for this purpose to LAs, at a small mark-up (not more than 1%) on the government’s own cost of borrowing. But failing that, LAs often have large pension funds for their employees, part of which could be used to fund new housing; this is the kind of long-term, slow-but-steady, effectively index-linked investment which is very suitable for pension funds.
And I forgot to say:
Give private rented sector tenants the right a buy – not for a discounted price, but the right to have an independent valuation made, and then to buy their home for that valuation. So the landlord can’t refuse to sell or haggle about the price. Have the same RTB for social housing, i.e. with no discounted price.
As usual, the UK is sleep walking towards disaster on this issue. We clearly have a housing crisis on so many levels, yet for the politicians it is not a priority. Both the Tories and Labour recently came up with their priorities, each a list of five. Housing, affordable or otherwise, was nowhere to be seen. I suppose because the people it effects probably won’t or don’t vote. Homeowners do.
The economic and social problems caused by the worship of the free market answer to housing can be seen in the failures of the last 43 years. I don’t see a desire for real change from Tory or Labour.
The Tories are the architects of that failed policy, but for them it has been successful. They prioritised home ownership. They saw social housing as the failure. They sold it off and chose not to replace it in sufficient numbers. They adore house price inflation and see it as part of the wealth of the nation. A wealth that homeowners, landlords and property speculators can share in. House price inflation, seen as an asset, was never part of the CPI number, yet benefited enormously from the low IR policy that flowed from it. A disaster waiting to happen (we are seeing it now as mortgage repayments go through the roof for many, especially those that stretched their finances to get get on the ladder, as IR’s go up).
What if you rent or are forced to rent? Tough. The Tories will come up with the occasional scheme to get you on the ladder, but these schemes only ever really prop up higher prices. They don’t talk of “affordable” housing. It doesn’t exist in the Tory world. The Tories really don’t care about you if you are a renter. You are there to fill the pockets of landlords, most of which I suspect vote Tory.
And the Tories are all talk when it comes to building more housing. They have never delivered and they are quitely dropping their current commitments – again.
The Guardian reports, New homes at risk as English local authorities cut housebuilding plans
https://www.theguardian.com/society/2023/jan/15/new-homes-at-risk-as-english-local-authorities-cut-housebuilding-plans
What about Labour? I’m afraid they have swallowed the Tory blue pill on this one. They do talk about how difficult it is to get on the ladder today and how more housing is needed. However, affordable housing in the form of building more social housing to rent is hardly mentioned. Labour has forgot its roots on this one. Labour’s Shadow Housing Secretary, Lucy Powell talks about giving power back to communities to build more affordable housing. Trouble is, nimbyism is rife in many parts of this green and pleasant land. I doubt Labour will challenge it. The last time with John Prescott as Housing Minister it was a total failure.
https://labour.org.uk/press/labour-announces-tough-new-powers-for-communities-to-tackle-housing-crisis-and-give-first-time-buyers-first-dibs-on-new-developments/
Labour would do well to read some of the comments here. There are many things they could do. The status quo needs to be challenged when it comes to housing. I have no confidence that Labour will do it. Some nice words, but when the going gets tough they will do what every Government since 1978 has done. Nothing.
As Private Fraser in Dads Army use to say, “we’re doomed!”.
Spent yesterday helping my brother empty a flat in Glasgow, owner passed away and he’s her next of Kin.
The building is ex social housing built in the late 30’s.
Purchased from the council under the tenant purchase scheme, £13k. The recorded rent was £4 a week. That was 20 years ago.
Around the area there are currently 12 similar flats for sale, £120k freehold.
Near my brother a recent buy to let sold for £120k and has been refurbished, on the rental market at £200 a week.
The £4 a week was inclusive of Rates, current one is not.
The housing issue is a big problem.
As someone trying to support UK food production – in particular the production of good-quality raw ingredients for sale to the public rather than the unhealthy rubbish coming out of factories – I’d put in a plea for changes to the planning regs to allow small farmers to live on their farms, as long as they really ARE farming.
So many young people can’t get a start in this essential industry because they can’t find land, or afford to live on agricultural wages.
So many farms are huge, inefficient in food production & only profitable because of land price inflation.
Most allotments produce more food per sq meter than most farms.
Sorry, rant over!
Good rant
Good goal
The regulations that control the Private Rented Sector need to be significantly improved and enforced, as the Scottish Government have done (not perfectly, but it would be a start).
Either –
a) stop selling off council housing, as per Scotland;
b) or build new social housing before any more are sold.
The recent BBC programme on renting made it clear that a sizeable part of the stock that was sold off ended up in the hands of private landlords. An example being a small house that was converted into 6 tiny flats. The state of ‘repair’ of the properties they looked at was abysmal.
The thing you will hear from Neo-lib driven policy makers is that council housing is a ‘monopoly’ but nothing about why it came into being in the first place to bring to end the monopoly of capital that existed before it and its downsides.
The worst of it is is that we known that all the Neo-libs are doing is removing one (accountable) monopoly to replace it with another – approved by the Neo-liberals of course and more unaccountable.
Many housing associations are now in hock to major banks for their development loans – this was done by the Tories who initially provided up to 100% development grants (called Housing Association Grants) – a teaser rate that got them to become developers and then government gradually reduced the grant rates so that going to the private banking sector became increasingly necessary.
So, what you got by the back door was private investment in affordable housing development. And the banks wield tremendous power over housing associations – that is why staffing levels and staffing pay has dropped and service levels cut as all the rent income is focussed on paying down development loans. CEO pay BTW has gone up.
An example: My district council sold their housing stock to what was essentially a management buy out of its own ex-housing department (an LSVT – a large scale voluntary stock transfer). The money – a £60 million valuation on all the stock – came in the form of a loan from a bank. What do you think happened in the ensuing years? Well, local housing offices were closed, staffing levels reduced and then what was a ‘local housing company’ then has to get bought out by a larger housing association and become part of a group to contain costs so that they can pay down the loan. So much for the argument that HAs were smaller and better at customer services than councils as part of the Tories use of HAs to develop new housing!
How do I know this – well, I worked at that district council and left in disgust to work for an ALMO.
The ALMO I worked for was an ex housing department of a local authority (LA) turned into a private company by the LA to access New Labour’s Decent Homes funding (note: privatisation and separation was a condition of the deal for a ‘Labour’ government). The LA had invested in local housing offices etc to restore the services but now had a lot of stock becoming non-decent – poor heating, insulation, life expired. So, we got that programme done successfully with state money – but not all of the stock was covered.
The ALMO is just a management company – the stock still belongs to the Council – but the ALMO can also own stock.
Now, after 13 years or so of austerity, not only has the stock not covered in the early 2000s got worse, but the stock we updated is now coming up for further updating and we now have a low carbon on the agenda. The Tories low carbon investment is no where near what it needs to be in terms of funding and there seems to be no funding for any other refurbishments (Tories expect councils to stump up half the cash for low carbon!!). So, it’s either off to the private banks because rent surpluses in the HRA are also having to fund newbuild!!! Or, Councils face having to sell selected stock off to fund the remainder or divest themselves completely of their stock altogether.
In the meantime then, the ALMO has been losing income due to RTB, closing local offices and reducing staff pay and we’re providing less of a service. It has also succumbed to the British industrial disease of being top heavy with directors and senior management teams paid well over the odds, emulating the private sector. We can’t retain staff.
RTB receipts which LAs’ were not stupidly allowed to reinvest by both Tory and New Labour governments from its inception when development was cheaper have only recently been allowed to be used in new development (or otherwise be sent to the treasury if they are not used). Stupid government rules like we are not allowed to use RTB funds AND Social Housing Grant (SHG) from Homes England together making development very expensive for us and eating into surpluses as development costs are currently running at 5-8% higher than before in our region. It might not sound like much but some of our schemes are over £1million and even 5% is a lot on such sums.
On top of that the Treasury still interferes with what are supposed locally ran housing revenue accounts – it will suppress our rent increases when we need to keep them in line with inflation; it will interfere on the internal rate of return we charge for loans to the housing revenue account by telling us to raise them (increasing costs). And its supposed to be the council’s money!!
In the end it all seems designed to break the system – just like the NHS. The terminus of all of this is LAs selling off their stock to the private sector eventually. We have a graph used in our regular meetings and our surpluses are going to get eaten up over the next 20 years to the point where development will have to stop and income will just have to keep the stock in some sort of decent condition. And there will be redundancies, more office closures blah blah etc., and another housing stock condition crisis for the country.
This is why I can use the word ‘hate’ when I talk about politicians in general because I can see – others too – where this is going.
What we’re seeing is a complete political negation of whatever we agreed to do with socially progressive policies after WWII: it’s all being treated as a big mistake, an aberration. Clara Mattei’s book ‘ The Capital Order’ also shows me that even when the decisions were made to fight the 5 Giants, austerity was right there too and began chipping away immediately after the ‘Welfare State’ was created. It was doomed from day one.
So, the sons and daughters and grand children of those who fought for freedom and laid their lives down for their country in two world wars (the first a very stupid war; the latter – essential) are going to be betrayed by today’s politicians as not worthy of a decent country or a system of help.
Incredible eh? What a way to treat people?
Any politician (Tory, Labour, Lib-Dem etc.,) who supports the destruction of the social security gains we made is to me on a personal level nothing more than a mortal enemy of me, mine and those I know. These ‘politicians’ are nothing but traitors – and worse.
Thanks
An important post in itself with some excellent comments from the likes of PSR.
Yet neither the post itself nor any of the comments (so far), takes into account the facts that *the human biosphere is dreadfully damaged* and is rapidly *heading for ruin*.
First, CO2 emissions need to be cut *directly* (in addition to renewable generation).
Second, we know that the manufacture of bricks, concrete, steel, aluminium etc consumes vast quantities of fossil fuels – and the construction process is energy intensive.
Third, wealthy countries like ours already have far more than their share of structures. (There are more bedrooms per person in Britain now than there have ever been.)
Fourth, Bill McGuire, Professor Emeritus of Geophysical and Climate Hazards at University College, London has said, ‘We are understating some major potential risks and tipping points. Parts of the world, for example, will experience combinations of high temperatures and humidity so severe that sweating becomes impossible, the body overheats, and you die within six hours or so. Such conditions have already been recorded way ahead of projections and they could cause hundreds of millions of people to migrate to survive.’
McGuire went on ‘There are up to 1.4 trillion tonnes of methane – a supercharged greenhouse gas – locked up beneath seabed permafrost in Siberia. It’s now thawing rapidly, and methane is leaking out in ever greater quantities. If this process reaches a tipping point, huge volumes of the gas could explode into the atmosphere, radically speeding up global heating.’
He added: ‘A major potential tipping point is the Gulf Stream which keeps the UK and northern Europe much warmer than it would otherwise be. The current is now almost completely unstable. It could shut down with little warning. This would cause dramatic cooling across the UK and Europe.’ [YOUTUBE video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxLpoPKF7lw Kiri Meets Bill Climate Science Translated]
*Time* is against us. In some cases, existing properties could be divided. In any case, housing needs to be allocated fairly as ‘homes’.
Either, those with more than their share will have to submit to some kind of reallocation to others – and, of course, that will be politically excruciating and emotionally demanding.
Or, we can wait to have housing ‘redesigned’(!) – perhaps by a wind (as it was by the tornado in Mississippi last week) or maybe by fire (as in East London – Wennington fire: Villagers brought together by disaster 18 August 2022 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-london-62589576). It could be floods (Three million properties shown to be at risk of flash flooding in England https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/dec/12/three-million-properties-at-risk-flash-flooding 12 Dec 2013).
Does our society want pain and difficulty by choice?
Or would we prefer an easier life for most in the short term while letting the greedy oil companies, billionaires and bankers – the fossil fuel fools – destroy the future for themselves – as well as our children?
Thanks
You are right
And we are miles from this
Everything except the increase in council tax but I was only allow 3. This is a case of “do everything”
Nothing to do with rent controls and making housing fit for human habitation will get through this parliament or the next. There are too many MPs who are landlords, particularly tory MPs.
It does look like you and the Bank of England were wrong last year when forecasting a technical but not very deep recession.
No I wasn’t
We’e had a recession
We still have
We just also have a boom in corporate profits
Kirsty Lang’s interview on radio 4 today with Toby Lloyd, former head of housing policy at Shelter, was interesting. He suggested that treating housing as an economic asset/investment is incompatible with the provision of homes for all. He holds that countries across the world with good housing provision all have tightly controlled land ownership and house rental markets. Building more houses, he says, is not enough if they are all bought by landlords for letting and investment. His interview is at 7:06 on Rental Health:Solutions, Singapore.
There may well be flaws in his argument but I am unable to see any. I’d be interested in others’ opinions.
I think he is on the right lines
A shout out to Henry George’s ‘Progress and Poverty’ (1879) and to Fred Harrison on UK land/housing matters.
Michael Hudson’s analysis in Australian focussed ‘Real Estate for Ransom’ documentary (40 mins)
‘The largest asset in every economy is land, followed by buildings, followed by public infrastructure. So what people imagine are industrial economies have remained basically land economies.’.A free market to Adam Smith and the Physiocrats and John Stuart Mill, was a market free of rentier income and today’s neo-liberals say a free market is free for predators. It’s free for monopolists, free for land speculators, free for bankers to extract as much income from wages and industry as possible. Today a free market means an extractive economy in which wealth flows from the bottom of the pyramid to the top of the economic pyramid…You tax the free lunch. You tax land rent, subsoil mineral rent, monopoly rent and all returns to privilege.’
A concept he also came up with that may be useful is the Productive Economy vs the FIRE economy (Finance, Insurance and Real Estate). ‘Wealth is generated…in the FIRE Economy from economic rents and capital gains generated asset price inflation without an increase in value.’
Interesting to see that The Welsh Assembly has put controls on the use of residential property for non residential use and made it possible to significantly raise Council Tax for second homes and holiday lets.
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2023/apr/01/tougher-second-homes-regulations-come-into-force-in-wales
I sometimes get the feeling that The Welsh Assembly is getting on with the job of governing far better that Scotland
Quietly….and with a radicalism helped by PC