"Revealed: How landlords receive more in benefits than someone with a salary of £85,000"

From The Daily Mail:

Britain's top 'private sector' landlords were paid on average more in handouts than someone earning over £85,000, it can be revealed.

Average Housing Benefit payments to some landlords were worth on average more than £1,100-a-week before a cap on payments was introduced.

Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith said he was determined to end the 'ludicrous situation' where Housing benefit recipients - many of whom acquired ex-council houses at undervalue under the Right To Buy scheme - had a higher income than the average wage of someone who goes out to work and pays the taxes to subsidise them.

The Housing Benefit cap is now set at around £200-a-week, or £10,000-a-year - chosen by ministers because it is close to the average pre-tax wage of someone in a Minimum Wage job.

More than 42,000 landlords have seen their Housing Benefit payments cut since the cap came into force in April last year. Until now the Department for Work and Pensions had only said that 96 landlords had been receiving more than £900-a-week.

Rent seeking

From The Law Society Gazette:

The lord chancellor is to be represented at tomorrow’s appeal challenging a Crown court judge’s decision to throw out a major fraud trial for want of defence counsel, the Gazette has learned.

At the last minute, Chris Grayling has sought, and been granted, leave to be represented as an interested party in R v Crawley and Others, a case arising out of the Operation Cotton investigation.

He will be represented by joint head of chambers at Blackstone Chambers Anthony Peto QC and Peter Woodall, who joined the Public Defender Service last month from Carmelite Chambers.

At Southwark Crown Court earlier this month, His Honour Judge Anthony Leonard stayed the prosecution against five defendants in relation to an alleged £4.5m land banking fraud. The five defendants were represented pro bono by the prime minister’s brother Alex Cameron QC, head of chambers at 3 Raymond Buildings.

Following the refusal by barristers to accept the most serious criminal cases after the government cut fees by 30% (barristers claim the sum is 44%), no advocates could be found to take the case.

Reminding us yet again that the UK's so-called 'justice' or 'legal' system is a complete and utter joke, and has got very little to do with 'justice;' or 'laws'.

For the self-selecting and largely 'upper class' people who are supposed to be running it, it is just an excuse to hand each other large piles of taxpayers' money. And dress up in silly outfits just to see if they can get away with it.

Barristers also boast about being like taxi drivers, just so that you can't say you weren't warned.

Town planning

Buildings on the edge of a cliff in the middle of Tbilisi, image from here.

Restores your faith in humanity, it does:

Eurovision Voting

From the BBC

The latest Eurovision figures have revealed the differences between the public phone vote and the jury vote at Saturday night's competition.

The UK phone vote gave Poland's Donatan and Cleo top marks but the jury thought they were the worst act of the night.

Their combined score meant Poland ended up with nil points from the British.

I'm thinking here that the public may not have been voting for the song

Conservationist Homeys

From Paul Cheshire at the LSE

One might argue that among the culprits, the conservation groups themselves have inadvertently played a leading role in getting us in to this mess. We desperately need land for housing. Thanks in large part to the misguided campaigns of conservation groups our planning system has been systematically not providing such land for two generations, pushing house prices and rents beyond the reach of young people.

Why does this mean that conservation groups share in the blame? Because not only have they been the most vocal and influential lobbyists against relaxing the planning restrictions on land release by one iota, but they have enthusiastically supported ‘building on brownfields’. Apart from being no solution to the housing land crisis, brownfield land is very frequently amenity-rich. The tragic irony is that the nightingales chose to breed on ex-MoD land (the Lodge Hill site on Medway’s HooPeninsula). So it is exactly the type of land the National Trusts and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds (RSPB) favour for development.
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The homies don't want any building anywhere, which is why they keep screaming "brownfield sites". They know the remaining brownfield won't be built on because it's not viable, but by pretending there's lots of it available can also preserve the greenbelt land.

Glasgow Declared New Scottish Capital in anticipation of September Liberation

Well, by the Guardian at least (they amended the web version) 

Fun Online Polls: EU Parliament elections & The rise in owner-occupation during the 20th century

The responses to last week's Fun Online Polls, on a very good turnout of 152, were as follows:

How do you intend to vote in the EU Parliament elections?

BNP - 3%
Conservatives - 1%
English Democrats - 0%
Greens - 2%
Labour - 5%
Liberal Democrats - 2%
No2EU - 2%
Pirate Party - 2%
UKIP - 74%
Undecided - 3%
I won't bother voting - 6%

That pretty much speaks for itself, I would have thought!
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This week's Fun Online Poll is something else which has been bugging me for years.

We Brits pride ourselves on the rapid increase in the number owner occupiers during the 20th century, and it is generally accepted in this country that owner-occupation is the best form of tenure (although it appears to reduce employment levels).

The most rapid increase was between 1950 and 1990, up from 30% to 68%. UK government housing policies during the bulk of the 20th century and for most of this period were quite the opposite of what we have been doing for the last twenty years, as a result of which, owner-occupation levels have started falling again.

In economist's terms, this is easy to explain, I'm just wondering whether people have forgotten what it was that we were doing?

So vote here or use the widget in the sidebar.

More Taxi Rent Seeking

On a recent post of Mark's, I commented that

The US is worse - you don't even have minicabs in some places, which is why Uber got created.

Turns out that Uber is also coming here, and guess who's not happy about it?

London black-cab drivers are planning to cause gridlock in the city to protest against car service Uber.

The Licensed Taxi Drivers Association complains that Uber's drivers are using a smartphone app to calculate fares despite it being illegal for private vehicles to be fitted with taximeters.

Transport for London has declined to intervene, because it disagrees that there has been a breach of the law.

LTDA now plans to force the issue by holding the action in early June.

"Transport for London not enforcing the Private Hire Vehicles Act is dangerous for Londoners," Steve McNamara, LTDA's general secretary, told the BBC.

The benefit that black cabs have (in any town) is that you know that you're reasonably well protected. The fare is regulated, they use clocks and so forth. Plus they can pick up (at places like stations) which makes it easier than trying to find a reliable minicab company.  I'm guessing that in general, locals use minicabs and people coming into towns and cities use black cabs.

With Uber, you get a guaranteed fare and can book with an app. It streamlines the process. If I'm travelling into London and need a taxi I could just use Uber from the train and book a car for when I arrive. That means I won't be using a black cab.

So, as people who've got through the high barriers to entry (expensive cars, "The Knowledge"*), they don't want new competitors working around those barriers.

* There's no such thing as The Knowledge with minicabs in Swindon. You give them an address, they punch it into the TomTom and get you to the address. I've had Poles and Nigerians find the right address every time.

UK's lowest-paid employees to be classed as 'not working enough'

One million people could be pushed to earn more – or have their benefits cut, says Department for Work and Pensions

Says the headline in the Guardian.

One million of Britain's lowest paid employees will be classed as "not working enough" and could find themselves pushed with the threat of sanctions to find more income under radical changes to benefits, the Department for Work and Pensions has said.

DWP internal documents seen by the Guardian reveal that people earning between £330 and around £950 a month – just under the rate of the national minimum wage for a 35-hour week – could be mandated to attend jobcentre meetings where their working habits will be examined as part of the universal credit programme.

Well, duh! Of course the alternative to having fewer people working more hours and thus more people unemployed, the situation that the New Speenhamland System, sorry, Working Families Tax Credits was designed to address, is having more people working fewer hours. I suppose the DWP is just going through the motions: everyone knows what the result of this new policy will be, but it is politically inexpedient to mention it. In fact, later in the article they go a way towards confirming this with a revealing quote,

The DWP said: "There isn't any real clear, definite plan as to how this [part] would work."

What can possibly go wrong?

Emailed in by MBK, from The Guardian:

A range of Help to Buy mortgages which combine financial assistance from the government with credit card-style "0%" introductory interest rates have been launched by Leeds building society…

The new mortgages from the Leeds are part of the first phase of Help to Buy, which allows buyers to take out a mortgage for as little as 75% of the cost of a new-build property, provided they can manage a 5% deposit, with the government providing an equity loan of up to 20%.

The deals, which are the result a link-up between the building society and home-builder Barratt, include three fixed-rate mortgages with an introductory 0% rate.

A 10-year deal offers borrowers three months at 0% before moving them to a rate of 5.16%, or six months at 0% and then 5.34%; the five-year deal offers three months at 0% and then 4.13%, or six months at 0% and then 4.4%; and the two-year version offers three months at 0% and then 2.88%.