Thought Id start this one going because its rather dead on this board at the moment and I suppose all my usual muckers are either at the Stella tennis event watching Dim Tim (lose again) or at Henly Regatta eating cucumber sandwiches (they wish,...NOT).

Anyway please feel free to just talk to yourself blast away and let it go on any company or subject you wish. Just wish Id thought of this one before.

cheers GF.

sticky - using the same argument then, if it - the tax loophole - is there to be used then use it to your advantage ..... similar argument surely

btw, the young couple in my "cheap" property assuredly receive some benefits, but then i'ld certainly class them in the "needy" category - won't bore you with the detail
incidentally, the "maximum 16 hour work rule" also comes into play with them

Cyners I think housing benefit comes too easy to landlords. Hardly any regulation, just a starting agreement between you and the tenant plus an official rent book and then safety checks each year which Im told 80% dont bother with. Its dead easy to start up in.

This paying it every month and to the tenant is totaly barmy aswel.

IDS is looking for trouble and will get it in buckets.

You mark my words.

Economic forecasters call for measures to cool down London's property market

EY Item Club says combination of strong demand for luxury property in capital and lack of supply is leading to a worrying bubble



Rupert Neate


The Guardian, Sunday 2 February 2014 19.24 GMT


Wealthy foreign buyers' desire for high-end London property is creating a real risk of a housing bubble in the capital, a highly-regarded group of economic forecasters has warned as it calls for measures to cool down the market.

In a special report published on Monday into the impact of rising house prices, the EY Item Club said the influx of super wealthy buyers has created bubble-like conditions in London.

The EY Item Club's senior economic adviser, Andrew Goodwin, said: "House prices across most of the country remain well below their pre-crisis peaks and there seems little danger of a bubble developing.

"But London, which is suffering from a combination of strong demand and a lack of supply, is increasingly giving us cause for concern."

The Item Club's warning is important because it is the only independent economic group to use the same forecasting model as the Treasury. Item stands for Independent Treasury Economic Model.

Estate agents, politicians and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors have all raised fears that the UK is risking a repeat of the 2008 property crash.

The business secretary, Vince Cable, has repeatedly warned of the dangers of another housing bubble. Last week he said: "We cannot risk another property-linked boom-bust cycle which has done so much damage before, notably in the financial crash in 2008."

The Bank of England governor, Mark Carney, has played down fears of a bubble. He said that while prices are rising quickly the acceleration is "from quite a low level".

The Item Club study shows average UK house prices are rising at a rate of 8.4% this year, and predicted them to rise by 7.3% next year and about 5.5% a year thereafter.

Prices are growing even faster in London. Office for National Statistics data shows average prices in the capital increased by 11% in the year to November 2013. This increases dragged the national average up from 3.5% to 5.4%.



more: http://www.theguardian.com/business/2014/feb/02/london-property-market-bubble-cool-down-ey-item-club

Boom and bust again?

sticky - are you an acolyte of fossy's for you too don't answer the questions posed :-)

Cyners your an hard man to follow......What tax loophole?????.

MAX,

Post 36179

Second half of post should appeal to the Fascist wing of the con party, UKIP and BNP.

Could be half the manifesto of those 3 groups and appeal to the little Englanders.

Things coming:






Hazy happy days are here again!

Should be quite a list to put into the manifestos at the time of the next election when some of the results are more apparent to the electorate.

Elections are lost not won and Miliband has to just sit back and watch the coalition implode blaming Cameron and Osborne for their weakness.

sticky - there are lots of tax loopholes which are utilised by the prudent or more sophisticated - you and others have been whinging regularly about this - but that's a secondary issue

try addressing the first!

.

Cynic, keep telling you my pro bodies which I subscribe to each year (white collar unions) would string me up by the balls if I did anything unpro and Im not prepared to risk it.

Id be kicked out.....simple as that.

Fred.

The super rich are not driving the average London property price hikes, they make up a tiny % (altho lots of money involved)


I suspect it's the "help to buy" thingy that's driving the market.

Mind you, it is capped at £600,000, so well within the average Londoners means.

THE MYTH OF THE DEFICIT................

Labour really must refute constant Tory canard that Labour’s profligate spending caused the recession
February 2nd, 2014

Once more in this last week Cameron and Osborne have been at it again saying all Britain’s current troubles come from ‘profligate’ expenditure by the last Labour government. It is a straightforward lie. In Labour’s years in office before the financial crash in 2008 the highest deficit in real terms was 3.3% of GDP in 2004-5. If this is supposed to be a mark of ‘profligate expenditure’, why on earth doesn’t Labour point out every time this is raised that by that measure Tory governments have been much more profligate than the Labour government ever was. During the Thatcher/Major Tory years the deficit actually exceeded 3.3% of GDP in 10 out of those 18 years! If this is the measure of economic competence, then Labour comes out incomparably better than the Tories. Moreover, whilst Thatcher/Major ran deficits in 16 years out of their 18 and produced minor surpluses in only 2 years, Blair/Brown produced 4 years of surpluses. Nor are these facts just an academic matter. The Tory lies, ignoring these facts, are part of a relentless propaganda campaign to persuade the electorate that Labour wrecked the economy and is therefore ultimately responsible for all the austerity being imposed on the British people. It is not too much to say that if this enormous canard isn’t forcefully refuted, Labour could lose the election on a lie.
So if Labour didn’t wreck the economy, what did? It is too readily assumed it was the bankers’ bailout. In fact the buying of stakes in the banks (to the tune of £68bn) did not directly have an impact on the revenue budget and the deficit. What did have a huge impact on these was the dramatic drop in public tax revenues which was a direct result of the global financial crash and the consequent recession. In the 5-6 years leading up to 2007-8 there was a remarkably consistent straight line trend in public revenues of about 6% a year, i.e. real growth plus inflation. That public income in 2007-8 was £549bn. Based on this trend, any reasonable forecast would have predicted further increases in income in the next 2 years, leading to a predicted income of about £620bn in 2009-10. But as a direct result of the global financial crash and the consequent recession, actual public income was only £512bn in 2009-10.
That massive loss of public tax revenues of around £110bn was the key cause of the deficit, not excessive expenditure. The Tory sound-bites about ‘profligate expenditure’ before the crash are just fanciful inventions designed to undermine Labour’e economic credibility. A simple examination of the deficit figures each year in the decade to 2007-8 exposes them for what they are – a Goebbels-sized lie which needs to be stamped on and eradicated by every Labour spokesman, especially Ed Balls.

HAYS HAYS HAYS.......argue against that then above.

Mind something Ive known for years.

gf
Those repairs are just the normal repairs that private Tennant's have. Long term private Tennant's also have building repairs, roof, repainting the structure with scaffolding. These are often via a sure of costs or service charge and usually both. Council Tennant's should be the same as long term leaseholders.

Britain cannot offer flood protection to both town and countryside from the kind of "extraordinary" weather it has endured in the past two months and so would have to choose between the two, the head of the Environment Agency has warned.


Lord Smith said some properties and land in low-lying rural areas would always be vulnerable to flooding, even if all the measures for which flood victims have been campaigning were implemented, including dredging rivers in the stricken Somerset Levels.


Writing in the Daily Telegraph, Smith defended the agency's "proud" record in defending more than 1m homes from flooding this winter. And he suggested it was right to prioritise "front rooms" over farmland after budget cuts to the agency.


Lord Smith, a former Labour cabinet minister, wrote: "Yes, agricultural land matters and we do whatever we can with what we have to make sure it is protected. Rules from successive governments give the highest priority to lives and homes; and I think most people would agree that this is the right approach.


"But this involves tricky issues of policy and priority: town or country, front rooms or farmland?"


He warned that resources for flood protection were limited. His agency is facing 1,400 job cuts after a 10% reduction to the budget of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) in the last spending round.


"Flood defences cost money," Lord Smith wrote, "and how much should the taxpayer be prepared to spend on different places, communities and livelihoods – in Somerset, Lincolnshire, Yorkshire, or East Anglia?


"There's no bottomless purse, and we need to make difficult but sensible choices about where and what we try to protect. We need to make difficult but sensible choices about where and what we try to protect."


Smith also repeated the agency's wary approach to dredging rivers in the Somerset Levels in the face of continued calls from marooned communities for better river maintenance. He said dredging would provide only "some benefit", adding that there were "no quick fixes in the face of this kind of extreme rainfall".

Two-thirds of Britons think benefits system is 'unfit for purpose' and should be scrapped, new poll reveals

YouGov research suggests majority want tough new rules on benefits
More than half of Britons think £208million-a-year welfare state is broken
Three quarters also want tougher rules on immigrants claiming benefits

Two out of three people think the current benefits system in Britain is 'unfit for purpose' and should be replaced by tougher regulations, a new poll has revealed.

The survey of more than 1,800 people suggested the majority of Britons think the £208million-a-year welfare state is broken and should be scrapped in favour of new rules about who can claim benefits.

The YouGov poll, commissioned by Channel 5, also revealed that 76 per cent oppose immigrants being allowed benefits in their first year of residency.

sticky - 36191 is a nonsense ...... there is the world of difference between acceptable and sensible tax avoidance which even HMRC would not dream of challenging, and "aggressive" schemes which are almost asking for trouble ..... so you don't answer that secondary issue that i raised

more to the point, you have still not come near to addressing the initial question asked

Something in yesterdays papers about HMRC clamping down on tax avoidance cyners.