Comments by "Tony L" (@tlangdon12) on "The UK’s housing costs are sucking life out of our economy" video.

  1. As someone who has been aware of the option to self-build for a long time, I would agree. However, the issue is more to do with the cost of labout - the brickies need to pay their rent, so with high housing (and food and energy) costs, labour costs are through the roof.
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  2.  @stevehiggins1263  My daughter has done the same in Denmark.
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  3. Expensive to buy and to heat! You might not mind paying so much for a new house if it meant that your energy bills were going to drop massively compared to your old rented property.
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  4. There are a whole load of financial issues that prevent people getting a home. Problems finding the first month's rent, the security deposit, guaranteeing the rent, lack of transport to get children to school, etc. All of these problems are solvable with money, but it needs some leadership to start fixing them.
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  5. It wasn't 17% all the time. My mortgage rate varied from 8% to 15% over a 17 year period.
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  6.  @sarahjaneross2918  I agree we have plenty of space - you only have to fly over the UK to see the vast areas of green space. Only 13% of UK land is occupied by housing, roads, industry and commercial buildings!
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  7. We didn't have much information about the consequences of our behaviours, but I'm fairly sure that even if we had had the Internet and someone like Richard Murphey telling us what would happen, we still would have done exactly what we did! All we can do now, is try to do the right thing to improve the situation for all the younger generations, not just our own children.
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  8. @ I believe the UK is extremely resilient and that we will succeed in spite of poor government.
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  9. Talk about extracting the wealth. It's not surprising that many enterprising parents have bought houses where the son/daughter is attending university to reduce the cost for their child. Once the other rooms are rented out, the exercise is reasonably profitable, especially for the government that gets the CGT on the increase on the price of the house.
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  10. I would argue that there is an other answer that we should look at. If Capital Gains Tax were levied on the increase in value of ALL houses (i.e. stop the primary residence relief) and CGT was payable at a rate of 100% based on the value of the property on a specific date according to the Nationwide House Price Index, then any sale after that date would result in ALL profit going straight to the government. This would make it pointless to sell your house for more than it is worth on that date. Such a change could be implemented for a limited period - say until we hit the mean for housing costs compared with other OECD countries - at that point the CGT rate could come down to 98% - effectively allowing house prices to rise only at the same rate as a sustainable amount of inflation.
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  11.  @physiocrat7143  We have a problem with empty homes in the UK. Improving the speed at which we bring disused or unoccpied homes back into use would have to be part of the solution for the UK. Ultimately we are not going to be able to do much about underoccupied homes (that people own), because their ownership of the home should give them the right to occupy it as they wish (so long as they do actually live there).
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  12. It would be easier just to stop the tax releif on ISA and Pensions and use the extra tax to build more social housing.
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  13. I love how YouTube offers to Translate your comment to English!
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  14. I agree with your essential premise, but I would argue that not allowing Housing Associations to unnecessary. I think that, providing Housing Associations have to be a charity, have to be non-profit making and have to have the aim of providing affordable housing enshrined in its constitution, then they are an acceptable alternative and allow for some innovation in housing provision, e.g. shared ownership arrangements where capital returned to HA by the purchaser is used to build more affordable housing.
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  15.  @seanroberts2404  There is nothing inherent in the production process for building material that requiring more of them would increase the unit cost. Equally, there is no reason why other countries need to increase their pricess. 10% profit on 2million bricks is more than 10% profit on 1million bricks.
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  16.  @billB101  I think Richard's idea is to accelerate this. If 25% of all pension investments were made into the UK HOusing Stock, we would have the problem fixed by 2030!
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