Labour's plan to build 1.5m homes – can it be delivered?

Labour hopes its grand housebuilding push will reduce prices – something sorely needed for many young people who cannot afford to buy or rent. Relative to annual earnings, housing has not been this expensive in England and Wales for well over a century. Meanwhile, planning approvals are at the lowest number since records began in 1979.

“The number of houses that are constructed is much more closely aligned with GDP than it is with the wishes of politicians to get them built,” says Peter Bill, a housing author and journalist.

“The complex and unpredictable planning system, together with the limitations of speculative private development, is responsible for the persistent under delivery of new homes,” it concluded after a one-year study into whether the big housebuilders control the market.

“The only way you’re going to get anywhere near 1.5m homes is by pouring billions of pounds into the construction of homes for poorer people,” argues Mr Bill.

For most of the 20th Century, councils played a big role in building housing, delivering up to 80% of homes in some years, but between the 1980s and 2000s social housing delivery plummeted as governments opted for privatisation.

It seems we will have to endure 5 years of id10t errors

Sir Keir Starmer told reporters last night that Labour officials going to the US to campaign are “doing it as volunteers, they’re staying I think with other volunteers over there”.

Who is payimg their expenses?

Warning for "tepid" civil servants

Too many in Whitehall, he said, were "comfortable in the tepid bath of managed decline".
"Make no mistake, this plan will land on desks across Whitehall with the heavy thud of the gauntlet being laid down."

Time will tell.

Can't find where the main thread is for the UK Post Office financial scandal...

But has this not been a long game of politics kicking the can down through the DECADES?...


'Dozens' being investigated over Post Office Scandal
wrote:

Police investigating crimes linked to the Post Office Horizon IT scandal are looking at "dozens" of potential suspects, but don't expect trials to begin until 2027.

Police are investigating possible crimes by Post Office and Fujitsu employees and external lawyers, following the wrongful prosecution of hundreds of subpostmasters...

Will the Post Office directors and bosses all get a "Get Out of Jail" Scot free card on the lame excuses of retirement and legal time limits?...

Meanwhile, the lives of many people have been blighted and destroyed.


All in our deadly greedy world...
Martin

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See new freedom: Mageia Linux
Take a look for yourself: Linux Format
The Future is what We all make IT (GPLv3)

The controversy over young Andy and his spy buddy leads to links with Theresa May and David Cameron.

The Duke and ‘the spy’: Espionage crisis engulfs palace.

The photo shows two middle-aged men politely smiling for the camera at a business event.

It could not, superficially, be a duller image, but it is one that has rocked Buckingham Palace.

The shot shows Prince Andrew with Yang Tengbo, who used the name Christopher Yang, a man who was, for years, a “close confidant” of the royal.

Yang has since been outed as an alleged Chinese spy who managed to infiltrate not only the royal inner sanctum, but also cosied up to former British prime ministers Theresa May and David Cameron.

It’s a growing crisis and massive embarrassment that threatens to engulf the Palace and which has brought down fresh scrutiny on the duke’s mysterious finances, with spy agency MI5 now investigating links between Chinese cash and the royal’s business ventures.

Now, the heat on King Charles’ brother is being dialled up.......

It's been an "interesting" few days for those looking at the UK political scene. Rows about numbers of members parties have, or haven't; the usual bickering about the leader of <insert party name> scandal/finances...
But the top prize of incompetence must got to Hugh Stammer who is looking to the regulators of public and private services for ideas on how to stimulate growth. He's only been in office a few months and has already run out of ideas - his first few having been described by some as "inept" by some in his own party (that's a polite transliteration rather than the actual words used (never mind what the affected people and other political parties have said).

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Bob Smith
Member of Seti PIPPS (Pluto is a Planet Protest Society)
Somewhere in the (un)known Universe?