Guardian, 21 November 2011:
David Cameron and Nick Clegg will on Monday unveil a £400m initiative to build up to 16,000 new homes by allowing an acceleration of investment in "ready-to-go" construction sites where work has stalled. The prime minister and his deputy will hail the initiative, which involves new money and could see the start of building work next July, as a sign of the coalition's determination to reverse the slow rate of house building...
Guardian, 6 December 2011:
The government is considering clawing back a benefit designed to help unemployed people meet their mortgage commitments, a move which could have "disastrous consequences" for families... Lord Freud said: "The current system of SMI payments does not encourage people to get on top of their own finances. It is also not sustainable. Even with today's low interest rates it costs government £400m a year."
Hat tip, Anon in the comments to an earlier post.
It's a crowded field
3 hours ago
7 comments:
That seems par for the course: Let's take £400M from the unemployed, who we don't like as they are a bunch of scroungers who vote Labour anyway and give it to property developers, who we like because they are hard working chaps who give donations to the to the Tory Party.
B, ahem.
On Planet Homey, SMI is not paid to "the unemployed" as such but to "honest hard pressed homeowners who are going through a difficult period but have paid their taxes" etc.
And property developers aren't "hard working chaps" they are thieving scum and despoilers of The Hallowed Green Belt For Future Generations who just build "rabbit hutches" and "shoe boxes" which "spoil the character of the area and place pressure on local resources" etc.
So Trad Tory beats Neo-tory Homeownerist on this one, then?
For a glimpse of the Land of Lost Content,i.e, pre-Homeownerist Britain, Google: New Clause(Exemption from Schedule a for Owner Occupiers) 2nd July 1957 where proto Homeownerists bent on reducing Schedule A for the sole purpose of encouraging homeownership are sent packing in debate by tough nuts like Enoch Powell who say it will lose a lot of revenue while somebody else says it will put up house prices.
I am looking for the quote from EP when Schedule A was abolished in 1963 and he accused his own side of misfeasance.
B, yup. It's difficult to say which is worse.
DBC, nice one, but you really must learn how to insert hyperlinks!
From Hansard:
Mr Wade: I beg to move, That the Clause be read a Second time.
The purpose of this new Clause is to encourage home ownership. It is one of a number of proposals which we want to put with a view to spreading ownership as widely as possible...
Twat. A Citizen's Income funded from LVT (or Schedule A) would have done much more to spread ownership, for the simple fact that it DOES spread ownership, in economic terms at least.
Anyway, owner occupiers were in a minority until about 1970, so politically these sort of Homey subsidy grabs weren't a winner until the 1970s or 1980s. Nowadays they are a shoo-in.
Noted think tank announces that after a prolonged study they have concluded that .... "is it quite obviously the case that every "special scheme" of this type has the same outcome and always has and always will" ...
First-time buyers may be the losers in shared equity scheme : Property developers have been ones to gain from government scheme aimed at buyers on low incomes, claims thinktank
http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2011/dec/28/firsttimebuyers-property
Anon 18.24, it's very strange what happened to some think tanks after the change from Labour to Lib-Con government.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies has drifted left and the IPPR has drifted right. At the moment, they have more or less converged.
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