Anna Clarke

Full details of what the Government is proposing to speed up property transactions now out - www.gov.uk/government/c...

The reasons for tackling this problem are pretty clear:

The problem with the previous efforts - if I remember rightly - were that lenders weren't happy with the seller having appointed the surveyor, so insisted that buyers got their own survey done anyway, so defeating the point. Need to work with lenders to ensure they have confidence in them this time

Landlords would exit the market much faster than that if they enacted all these policies. And I'd be impressed if they allocated £30bn a year to the social housing budget.

Big changes are needed to fix the housing and homelessness crisis, but obliterating private landlords would make things much, much worse - not better - for the people who rely on the private rented sector for a home.

I'm not sure there are any easy solutions to that one. These proposals look to be more about
- reducing the time spent waiting for solicitors to sort out the sale, and
- reducing the number of chains that collapse at a late stage when a buyer pulls out (eg because a survey reveals something)

Government backed mortgages already exist and can't work if the tenants cannot afford the repayments.. And "specific funding" would need to be around £400bn, which seems unlikely.

The large majority of tenants can't afford to buy the property they live in. And giving councils the right to buy them only works if they have the money to do so.

The detail has a lot on how they would drive private landlords out the market - which would be quite easy to do with the policies their proposing, and devastating for tenants. Nothing at all here on how they would replace the lost rental homes with social housing.

Some of it does sound a bit like those - though they weren't a bad idea and quite possibly worth another go at, easier in a more digital age. Plus a bit of effort to get solicitors working faster, which is new and good to see.

Thanks - will have a read

Getting the number of empty homes down much is unlikely IMO. There are a few things worth trying (like today's announcement on speeding up the sales process) but it's not a viable alternative to the level of new supply needed.

I haven't seen the full detail. Purchasing homes requires just the budget (no issues with construction sector capacity or land obviously). Though not building any new housing means increasing pressure on the existing stock, so private rents and prices would rise.

I do agree that spending more on social housing is a good thing - but need to be realistic about the huge (and valuable) role of private landlords play in housing tenants currently. Many of whom are happy renting privately or would choose that over social renting.

You wouldn't save any of that upfront though. And you wouldn't save most of it ever (because people in council housing also claim housing benefit/UC).

Doesn't work like that unfortunately - not enough capacity in the construction sector. And they'd need to allocate a lot more land for housing - you certainly couldn't do it on brownfield only. (£400bn is also more than the entire NHS budget....)

Homebuyers to save money and time under new proposals Housing Secretary Steve Reed said the reforms would ‘fix a broken system’ to make property purchases more straightforward.

These sound like sensible reforms to help the housing market - reduced time on searches and buyers being able to see solicitors' track record should help chains to move faster. www.independent.co.uk/money/steve-...

If you spent ten times the current budget on building social housing (ie increase it from 4bn to 40bn a year), you could build around 200,000 a year. So after 25 years you might have enough to replace the 4.4m private rentals.

So it turns out the main council expenditure *wasn't* in fact the Diversity and Inclusion training budget?

Thanks

What's the social care announcement? Think I missed that one.

I think that's fair. Though I think it's more that the C of E has moved left/away from tradition and left some of the right behind it, than the left have suddenly become pro-establishment.

The large amount of unbuilt land in Scotland can be seen from both government stats and satellites!

Would imagine that's an inbuilt issue with the methodology - which is an interesting one, using satellite imagery. I don't know enough about satellite imagery to know what other things it might misinterpret.

Most of them do appear to be. But nobody quotes Scotland when trying to make points about loss of land for development (because the proportion lost is much lower if you look just at Scotland)

Publications – Green to Grey Green to Grey is a pioneering collaboration between journalists and scientists counting every green space lost in Europe between January 2018 and December 2023.

They do. But later on they say the UK was 5th in absolute terms, which seems a bit of a coincidence to me so I looked up the fuller study (more details here greentogrey.eu/publications/)

The Guardian also appears to have got its facts wrong - claims the UK is 5th highest for its land size, but it's actually 5th in absolute terms (because it's a big country!) and ranks very low per capita (from the same study, www.lemonde.fr/en/les-decod...)

Pwc offers apprenticeships that are a potential route to that role.

Accountants earn top salaries!

That's interesting. Though it reads to me that they're defining "more advantaged" as "not disadvantaged", which is a wide range (possibly just kids who weren't in free school meals?) and doesn't tell you where kids from private schools are talking apprenticeships or not.

I think you're over-simplifying the difference between degrees and apprenticeships. They're different learning styles, different life experiences. For some jobs (accountancy, nursing, etc) either route can lead into the same career.