What do you mean "spends billions" providing social housing?
By making one group of homeowner subsidise another group of homeowners you raise the price of housing for some and lower it for others. The only way to reduce the cost of housing for everyone is to build more housing.
You end up with more housing, private & social , if you can afford to buy, it shouldn't matter to you that the money made by the local authority was used to build housing for someone who needed social housing.
I don't agree with you.
No, it's not the only reason. The other reason is the insatiable demand for assets from the very rich. Rental housing is a lucrative asset because it has insufficient competition due to limited social housing. We can argue about which reason is bigger. But there's only one solution that addresses both at the same time.
Nope.
Yes, supply is constrained. But also demand is artificially inflated. The slope of the orange line is shallow. You need to come at the problem from both sides.
I think we're going to have to agree to disagree on this. I'm clear that we shouldn't be telling people they can't buy property. We should just build enough so everyone can have as much as they want.
Kristian Niemietz is an editorial director at the Institute of Economics Affairs which is a right-wing, free market think tank.
Yes, there's a myth that people who live in 'council' housing* get subsidised housing. One of the reasons it's cheaper is that any cost of borrowing has long since been paid off and, like you say, it now generates revenue.
I wouldn't say home loss payments of £6k are 'fairly generous'. By the time someone's paid removal costs, to temporary accommodation they've been decanted to, and back again, plus additional expenses of buying new flooring and curtains (because they're often different sizes), then most of that home loss payment will be spent.
I think they were bought for relatively small amounts. The ALMOs/new owners didn't take on any existing debt, because as explained previously, there's a myth about council housing being subsidised, but in actual fact, generally speaking, the costs of building had long since been paid off and council housing was now (at that time) revenue generating.Despite annoying councillorsI prefer Councils to run Council Housing - alas it is too late to reverse some of the changes that were made in the 1990s - some councils just transferred their stock to other housing providers - not sure how it worked financially - were they bought? or did the providers take on any debt ?
That's not how objections to planning applications work.
So that's why privatising utilities companies worked so well, then? Introducing competition and choice really does result in lower prices for the consumer, doesn't it? Except when it doesn't.
the thing is, if there was a plentiful supply of social housing the demand for purchasing dwellings would fall therefore lowering the price, so yes, build more... ...social housing.
She's just another anti-capitalist lefty, I'm afraid. Just because Thatcher used some of the same phrases as Lenin doesn't mean that they are in any way the same. It's a false equivalence. You can disprove most of her thinking through casual observation. Britain is a wonderfully prosperous country by most standards. And anyway it has nothing to do with housing in London and the South east.
We need both a planning system which takes account of a wider range of views (including people who might want to live there), and also a general change in attitude of most people to understand that more housing is good for society. Not objecting to a planning application is a good thing to do.
Of course I'm glad BT and British Airways don't have a monopoly, but you've confused privatisation with the free market, and strayed a little off the subject of housing in London and the South East.
She doesn't mention any of those things? Abby Innes is Associate Professor of Political Economy in the European Institute at the LSE. A liberal empiricist on the political centre.
