The electorate's already being taxed if you could be see it once you take your blinkers off, as well as losing money through tax revenues being lost, which are having to then be made up from other sources. Can you not see that?
The Treasury is losing £5Bn a year in tax relief on buy to let mortgages (JRF) - that shortfall has to come from elsewhere
Council's in the UK spend £1.9Bn a year rehousing vulnerable people who've been squeezed out of the market
London's 50,000 group (consortia made up of businesses) estimate that it's costing them £5.4Bn a year in "unnecessary" inflated wages
£2.7Bn is lost to the London economy in consumer spend foregone in hosuing costs (Treasury loses an additional 20% in VAT receipts)
The loss of consumer expenditure is estimated to have cost London 11,000 new jobs (London has been surveyed more extensively than any other location as clearly the problems are more acute there) but they also exist in other parts of the country which we can only try and estimate. Oxford was in the spot light last week of course and is now suffering from recruitment issues as people can't afford to live and work there
The figure for housing benefit supplemments, working family tax credits, and people taken out of bottom rate tax because they simply can't afford to pay now because of crippling housing related costs is harder to estimate given that you're trying to extract attributable additionality, or attributable tax revneues lost. No one disputes that it runs to billions though. Again, this is being met by the tax payer already. You can possibly glean an indicator as to its scale from the fact that London businesses estimate they expect to supplement housing rents to the tune of £6.1Bn by the end of the decade. It seems like a conseravtiev estimate to suggest that the welfare and tax system is doing at least the same.
To suggest that you don't want the tax payer to subsidise housing is plain bonkers - guess what Clive - they're already doing it. Further more, they will continue doing so, and they're getting nothing back for it. Dead money. They don't get an assest, and they don't even get the income stream. Society doesn't even benefit with what would also be quite well paid jobs and tax revenues that would flow from that employment. The only real winner is the private sector landlord, who isn't really that productive to the economy anyway.
The only argument I can see in favour of this structure is that property investments are likely concealing black holes in pension funds.
You say you're in favour of building new homes, and then prescribe a solution that won't deliver it (and hasn't done so since it was adopted). Muddled.
When the coalition came to power one of the first things they did was scrap the RDA's and repalce with them private sector led LEP's. There were house building commitments in the relevant RES's (which admittedly were falling behind target, but at least they were there and being delivered eventually). Greg Clark was told that when LA's were forced to adopt Eric Pickles "'Localism Bill' these commitments would be shelved. He ignored that advice clinging desperately to a misplaced idea that people wanted their children to have affordable homes and wouldn't block them. Sadly Clark was divorced from reality (classic case of theoretical policy spinds ok, but on the ground disconnect ensures the theory never translates). People might want their children to have affordable homes, but they aren't bothered about other people's children having them. They were never going to equate new build in their backyard with the unlikely outcome for their own children moving into one such unidentified unit in X years time. Within 6 months of adopting this new policy therefore, 250,000 new build houses were scrapped. That was dogmatic sabotage. New build proposals continued to fall all over the country as a result of this act. It's only in the last 12 months that the Secretary of State has been ruling against local community objections. We've lost about five years therefore of chronically missed targets when we could ill afford to
You can point to survey work that is periodically conducted amongst developers that blames the planning system. This isn't new. Developers have always blamed the planning system, (and always will do). What they want of course is unregulated approvals to simply move in, build, and leave. That's why we have section 106 agreements so as to ensure that the developer picks up the bill for infrastructure needs associated with their developments that would otherwise fall on the taxpayer again. The number of developers blaming the planning system hasn't massively altered, but we have seen more objections rising in areas like Nimbyism and land banking (personally I'd include Nimbyism as being a component of the planning system myself as the Localism Act built it into the approval process)
The developers who you're saying would do it for free and should be empowered, haven't done so. The evidence of the last decade strongly points to developers not wanting to build affordable homes because they get a lower yield on them (remember the gallant hero Russell Brand saving a community from an American developer who wanted to evict them in favour of upper end redevelopment - I seem to recall you applauded Brand?).
Developers also possess an incentive to ensure that supply lags demand in order to reduce risk (risk is something that the industry hates above all else). In other words Clive, they cherry pick by location and developement type. It's classic market failure territory. You have to incentivise them with tax payer subsidies, or find another mechanism.
More recently we've even seen some right wing think tank suggetsing that we purpose build slums, as the solution! what an indictment (personally I think they were just after a headline)
So all the time you're wasting fiddling around and doing nothing, the pressure continues to ratchet upward. The people being penalised are amongst the most vulnerable in society, the working poor. As I think we've demonstrated, other countries (and you cherry picked the comparators not me) provide this sector with higher quality stock that typically takes anywhere between 10% and 15% less of someone's income. The European country that our provision most closely resembles is Spain
The Treasury is losing £5Bn a year in tax relief on buy to let mortgages (JRF) - that shortfall has to come from elsewhere
Council's in the UK spend £1.9Bn a year rehousing vulnerable people who've been squeezed out of the market
London's 50,000 group (consortia made up of businesses) estimate that it's costing them £5.4Bn a year in "unnecessary" inflated wages
£2.7Bn is lost to the London economy in consumer spend foregone in hosuing costs (Treasury loses an additional 20% in VAT receipts)
The loss of consumer expenditure is estimated to have cost London 11,000 new jobs (London has been surveyed more extensively than any other location as clearly the problems are more acute there) but they also exist in other parts of the country which we can only try and estimate. Oxford was in the spot light last week of course and is now suffering from recruitment issues as people can't afford to live and work there
The figure for housing benefit supplemments, working family tax credits, and people taken out of bottom rate tax because they simply can't afford to pay now because of crippling housing related costs is harder to estimate given that you're trying to extract attributable additionality, or attributable tax revneues lost. No one disputes that it runs to billions though. Again, this is being met by the tax payer already. You can possibly glean an indicator as to its scale from the fact that London businesses estimate they expect to supplement housing rents to the tune of £6.1Bn by the end of the decade. It seems like a conseravtiev estimate to suggest that the welfare and tax system is doing at least the same.
To suggest that you don't want the tax payer to subsidise housing is plain bonkers - guess what Clive - they're already doing it. Further more, they will continue doing so, and they're getting nothing back for it. Dead money. They don't get an assest, and they don't even get the income stream. Society doesn't even benefit with what would also be quite well paid jobs and tax revenues that would flow from that employment. The only real winner is the private sector landlord, who isn't really that productive to the economy anyway.
The only argument I can see in favour of this structure is that property investments are likely concealing black holes in pension funds.
You say you're in favour of building new homes, and then prescribe a solution that won't deliver it (and hasn't done so since it was adopted). Muddled.
When the coalition came to power one of the first things they did was scrap the RDA's and repalce with them private sector led LEP's. There were house building commitments in the relevant RES's (which admittedly were falling behind target, but at least they were there and being delivered eventually). Greg Clark was told that when LA's were forced to adopt Eric Pickles "'Localism Bill' these commitments would be shelved. He ignored that advice clinging desperately to a misplaced idea that people wanted their children to have affordable homes and wouldn't block them. Sadly Clark was divorced from reality (classic case of theoretical policy spinds ok, but on the ground disconnect ensures the theory never translates). People might want their children to have affordable homes, but they aren't bothered about other people's children having them. They were never going to equate new build in their backyard with the unlikely outcome for their own children moving into one such unidentified unit in X years time. Within 6 months of adopting this new policy therefore, 250,000 new build houses were scrapped. That was dogmatic sabotage. New build proposals continued to fall all over the country as a result of this act. It's only in the last 12 months that the Secretary of State has been ruling against local community objections. We've lost about five years therefore of chronically missed targets when we could ill afford to
You can point to survey work that is periodically conducted amongst developers that blames the planning system. This isn't new. Developers have always blamed the planning system, (and always will do). What they want of course is unregulated approvals to simply move in, build, and leave. That's why we have section 106 agreements so as to ensure that the developer picks up the bill for infrastructure needs associated with their developments that would otherwise fall on the taxpayer again. The number of developers blaming the planning system hasn't massively altered, but we have seen more objections rising in areas like Nimbyism and land banking (personally I'd include Nimbyism as being a component of the planning system myself as the Localism Act built it into the approval process)
The developers who you're saying would do it for free and should be empowered, haven't done so. The evidence of the last decade strongly points to developers not wanting to build affordable homes because they get a lower yield on them (remember the gallant hero Russell Brand saving a community from an American developer who wanted to evict them in favour of upper end redevelopment - I seem to recall you applauded Brand?).
Developers also possess an incentive to ensure that supply lags demand in order to reduce risk (risk is something that the industry hates above all else). In other words Clive, they cherry pick by location and developement type. It's classic market failure territory. You have to incentivise them with tax payer subsidies, or find another mechanism.
More recently we've even seen some right wing think tank suggetsing that we purpose build slums, as the solution! what an indictment (personally I think they were just after a headline)
So all the time you're wasting fiddling around and doing nothing, the pressure continues to ratchet upward. The people being penalised are amongst the most vulnerable in society, the working poor. As I think we've demonstrated, other countries (and you cherry picked the comparators not me) provide this sector with higher quality stock that typically takes anywhere between 10% and 15% less of someone's income. The European country that our provision most closely resembles is Spain
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