Uber Has Lost

[Scoobos]

Its funny that social housing has people living in large houses because its "their home" yet its impossible to move them so a young family can use it. We give council houses to poor people then they get a pay rise and we don't raise their rent or reconsider their entitlement.

What decade are you living in? When do "we GIVE council houses to poor people?" , the early 90's gvt made a good job of offloading all that stuff.

People live in hell hole flats in tenancies ran by housing associations now. Council housing is a very small entity now.

[Whorty]

Good news! Zero hours contracts and the gig economy have managed to roll back about 50 years of advances in employment rights in the space of a few years. If this doesn't get knocked on the head now, it will only get worse.

On another note, any sort of pay that leaves you still requiring and eligible for benefits is too low. The minimum wage should be high enough to live on, as a bare minimum. It isn't, and the taxpayer ends up making up the difference through benefits, which to me is nothing short of corporate welfare. So what if it means we pay a little more in the supermarket, or for our deliveries? Nobody in their right mind can object to somebody that is providing us with a service being paid a fair wage for their efforts.

+1

[cojak]

This has definitely been done.

Joel Spolsky wrote about how any metric you bring in to measure coding performance, coders just game the system. Lines of code, number of commits, even number of bugs found/fixed.

Yodel probably do these kind of metrics already...

[Smartie]

No, I don't think we should be chucking granny out of her home, but we do need to think about how we can incentivise a better use of our housing resource. Maybe a land value tax, or building more pensioner friendly properties, who knows? A lot of older people would probably much prefer to live in a smaller place, preferably on one level - less heating to pay for etc. Our current incentives all run in the opposite direction, a lot of it because of the way primary residences are treated under tax law.

Supply/demand of houses is far from the only factor that affects prices, and certainly has little to do with the boom we've seen since about 2000. That's got much more to do with the supply and price of credit. We've let it get so bad in this country that there are no easy solutions any more; people will get hurt if prices stay the same or crash. Decimation of public housing is a big part of the problem as well, right to buy basically put paid to that.

Absolutely right on supply/demand being only a small part of the problem - just google something like does building more housing reduce prices. Loads of articles
Building more houses cannot solve the housing crisis | UCL Grand Challenges - UCL – University College London
Demand based on cheap credit/existing capital from existing landlords and foreign buyers will simply suck up all the new build and people who need the housing will still be renting.

Social housing has been decimated and the remaining stock is often of poor quality - if we want cleaners, bus drivers etc. in areas of otherwise high incomes and we want them to live in decent housing, we need more social housing.
However, someone mentioned earlier that once people have a council house, they keep it. In fact in some cases it's passed on to their kids. That blocks up the supply for people who don't need social housing anymore.
Australia has a system where your rent increases as your income does until you're paying market rate. This moves people out into the private sector and frees up housing for those who really need it. That's a good system.

[SueEllen]

Problem with "brown field sites" , is that they are brown field sites for a reason.

Same for flood plains etc.

Odd...

On my actual road a developer changed a pub and it's garden into houses and flats.

A developer changed a disused shop and it's surrounding land into houses and flats

Behind a railway line where I use to live, the land was owned by Thames Water. They built houses on one parcel and on another parcel they build a supermarket and flats.

There are other brown field sites within 10 miles where developers have brought and build homes on.

[ladymuck]

Odd...

On my actual road a developer changed a pub and it's garden into houses and flats.

A developer changed a disused shop and it's surrounding land into houses and flats

Behind a railway line where I use to live, the land was owned by Thames Water. They built houses on one parcel and on another parcel they build a supermarket and flats.

There are other brown field sites within 10 miles where developers have brought and build homes on.

There's a whole register of brownfield sites that are suitable for residential development

Brownfield land registers - GOV.UK

[mattster]

What decade are you living in? When do "we GIVE council houses to poor people?" , the early 90's gvt made a good job of offloading all that stuff.

People live in hell hole flats in tenancies ran by housing associations now. Council housing is a very small entity now.

The true madness is that it probably costs more in the long run to pay housing benefit towards insecure, low quality private sector rentals than it would to run a proper public housing service.

[edison]

I actually don't think they are. Amazon pay more than enough per a shift to meet minimum wage. The issue the poorer drivers seem to have is that they don't get enough shifts to pay for the van they hire on a weekly basis.

5 shifts a week and there isn't a problem. 2 shifts a week and the rent on the van that they need to pay destroys their income.

And that's the same the world over (America, India, UK and all across Europe).

What we may see is Amazon sorting out the vans themselves and dropping rates slightly to cover that cost. Either way it's not going to impact amazon that much.

That's already the plan. They've entered into an arrangement to buy 100,000 vans over the next decade.

[SueEllen]

The true madness is that it probably costs more in the long run to pay housing benefit towards insecure, low quality private sector rentals than it would to run a proper public housing service.

It does cost more.

Council houses and flats - where they are any - because the majority were built before 1980 the only cost to the council's who own them their maintenance costs. The rents are very low (lower than housing association properties) so in theory there is scope to increase their rents to pay for this maintenance if needed.

[vetran]

What decade are you living in? When do "we GIVE council houses to poor people?" , the early 90's gvt made a good job of offloading all that stuff.

People live in hell hole flats in tenancies ran by housing associations now. Council housing is a very small entity now.

Oh you think 1.5 million dwellings in England owned by councils in 2020 is offloaded then yep we have hardly any.
Local authority housing statistics data returns for 2019 to 2020 - GOV.UK


it is obviously a small fraction of the 2.4 million dwellings owned by housing associations. - Who taught you maths - Dianne Abbot?

Focus on: Housing associations - Beyond charities | NCVO Publications

| NCVO

The number of households renting through housing associations has increased

The number of households living in housing association properties has increased from 2m in 2008/09^[2] to 2.4m in 2017/18. Over the same time period, the number of those living in council-owned properties has declined from 1.9m in 2008/09 to 1.6m in 2017/18.

The evolution of stock transfer housing associations | JRF

Since the transfer process began in earnest in the late 1980s, more than 870,000 (tenanted) homes have been passed from state ownership (local authorities, new town development corporations or Scottish Homes) to housing associations (and, in a few cases, non-registered housing companies).

The more need you are in the more likely you are to get a council house, it would make sense to reassess need over the tenancy and ease out people who no longer need either council or housing association help. We don't.

Hell whole flats? Before Maggie's 1985 act you could pack as many tenants in housing as you wanted, now there are strict limits. Before housing associations decided they wouldn't put up with bad tenants, ASBO cases didn't result in you losing your home your neighbours just suffered your bad behaviour.

I knew people in council dwellings in the 80s and onwards I have also known people in housing association properties. If were homeless I doubt I would want a council house despite them being cheaper over a decent housing association. I would prefer to rent from a housing association over a private landlord, my friends with broken windows & fire equipment are in private rentals not housing association.


Housing associations are policed uniformly so a conservative council doesn't get a soft ride from a conservative government (and vice versa) there is political benefit in pursuing a bad housing association both as an MP & a local council.

Latest Fire Prosecutions in the UK for May 2019