What caught my eye this week.
Last week’s inheritance tax and pension alchemy from Monevator contributor Finumus was rounded off with an excellent thread of comments from readers.
Check out the nearly 90 responses if you haven’t. There’s plenty of extra pension and inheritance tax knowledge to be gleaned from the Monevator masses. (Yes, we’re all surprised at the turns our lives have taken that means learning more about taxes and pensions is an exciting prospect. And yet here we are…)
The comment thread also includes a by-turns intriguing and befuddling discussion about what the phrase ‘middle class’ really means these days.
I don’t intend to resurrect that debate. What was frustrating about it to me though was that some people’s conception of middle-class – and for the sake of peace, I’ll concede ‘middle-class’ was a cheeky if not provocative classifier to use in the title – led to off-base missives about how Monevator was becoming the parish circular for the Downton Abbey set.
(Regarding the same article, I just now deleted a short content-less comment bemoaning that Finumus’ useful advice was cluttered up with “left-wing claptrap”. You see the challenge?)
Anyway nobody, not even Finumus (at least not in this article) was denying that – with a household income of £360,000 a year and millions of pounds of assets – the coupled that he featured weren’t minted, even by the standards of London’s gilded postcodes.
My argument will always be that I want people to know how and why people with money do what they do. We can learn something from them. (Including that they often do dumb things, like pamper their egos by investing in expensive market-lagging active funds.)
Alternatively, you could try the opposite approach of hanging around with the Socialist Worker crowd in a south London pub on a Friday night.
You’ll certainly learn something. But I’m confident it won’t be how to make, keep, and invest your money.
Knowing your place
The point is that I fully agree the couple were very well-off, of course. And while from his vantage point in a helicopter headed to the Home Counties for the weekend Finumus may move in more rarefied air, even he bemoans that most people earn so little, rather than being ignorant of it.
In fact I often find myself explaining to friends whose careers are kicking into their peak earning years that their incomes would sound magical (if not faintly criminal) to much of the populace.
Yet even I’m still mildly surprised when I’m confronted with statistics like the dissection of the latest household income figures in This Is Money this week:
Official figures show that 8.8 million people in Britain had an income above £1,000 a week in the year to March 2022 – which would equate to £52,000 a year and put them in the higher rate tax bracket.
However, the average median real-terms household income before housing costs was £565 a week in the period, equating to around £29,500 a year.
That nearly nine million people have been dragged into paying higher-rate income tax is shocking. In 1990 just 1.7 million paid the 40% tax rate. Even by the time Tony Blair was elected in 1997 it had only risen to a little over two million.
This is of course all grist to the ‘squeezed middle’ line of political thinking.
But – much more dispiriting – just look at the thin gruel down below:
Britain’s real problem
As I’ve said before in our political debates, Britain is a relatively poor country among its peers – on a per capita basis – that unfortunately thinks it’s rich enough to indulge in self-harming fantasies.
It wouldn’t be so bad if we had more affordable housing, like Germany, Spain, or (ex-Paris) France.
But our expensive property puts the boot in.
Anyway go check out all the graphs in the This Is Money article, there’s plenty to gawp at. (I couldn’t locate the original graphs from the Department of Work and Pensions website. If you have a link please pop it in the comments below).
But I must confess that it left me in a gloomy frame of mind.
One visual metaphor for wealth generation and distribution in the UK in recent years is the helicopters evacuating a few lucky thousands in the Fall of Saigon in 1975, with a handful more clinging to the landing gear and the rest falling back into a doomed mob left behind.
Maybe I should buy the Socialist Worker bloke a pint, after all?
The new competition
Okay, I’m kidding, for rhetorical effect. Been down that road 30 years ago, literally got the T-shirt.
But capitalism must do better, especially with yet another workplace revolution – instigated by AI – seemingly at our door.
On that note, I’ve included a new AI links section below. Things are moving so fast, and unlike with crypto real-world use cases already abound. Every week there’s something new to flag. Watch this space, and those links.
And have a great weekend!
From Monevator
SIPPs vs ISAs: which is the best tax shelter for your investments? – Monevator
FIRE-side chat: Fat FIRE, with family in mind – Monevator
From the archive-ator: How to run your portfolio like a hedge fund – Monevator
News
Note: Some links are Google search results – in PC/desktop view click through to read the article. Try privacy/incognito mode to avoid cookies. Consider subscribing to sites you visit a lot.
Delay on bringing forward rise in state pension age to 68 confirmed – Guardian
ONS: mortgage approvals up for first time since Mini Budget – This Is Money
Manchester’s £1 a night tourist tax comes into force – Guardian
UK is global equity markets ‘backwater’, Nick Train warns [Search result] – FT
Financial planning in an uncertain world – The Uncertainty of It All
Products and services
Shawbrook Bank’s Best Buy 4.04% fixed rate bond has unusual nine-month term – This Is Money
Apple finally launches [US] Buy Now, Pay Later service: Apple Pay Later – Apple
Pre-order Amazon’s first own-brand TVs priced at a 30% discount – Amazon
Open a SIPP with Interactive Investor and pay no SIPP fee for six months. Terms apply – Interactive Investor
Buying a car online: what to watch out for – Which
Open an account with low-cost platform InvestEngine via our link and get £25 when you invest at least £100 (T&Cs apply. Capital at risk) – InvestEngine
Where next for fee-free share dealing? Freetrade founder Adam Dodds – This Is Money
Homes for sale in or near High Streets, in pictures – Guardian
Comment and opinion
Markets make you feel bad all the time – A Wealth of Common Sense
Re-imagining index funds [Search result] – FT
10 years on, what did the Help To Buy scheme really achieve? – Guardian
Tax cliff edges: how a 1p pay raise could cost someone £20,000 – This Is Money
Memory and probability – Verdad
Why do we retire? – The Long Run
How to build generational wealth – Of Dollars and Data
A higher tax burden is upon us, and it’s mainly by stealth – David Smith
Is owning your home still cheaper in the UK than renting? – Which
When average isn’t enough – Abnormal Returns [on The Age of Average]
Highlights from a chat between Charlie Munger and Todd Combs – Neckar
Naughty corner: Active antics
The commonalities of super-investors – Investment Talk
Markel: playing the long game [Podcast] – Business Breakdowns
Traders are betting on a US commercial property credit crunch – Axios
David Einhorn on value investing [Podcast] – Invest Like The Best
Debunking the myth of market efficiency – CFA Institute
Kindle book bargains
Banking On It: How I Disrupted an Industry by Anne Boden – £0.99 on Kindle
Bank of Dave by Dave Fishwick – £0.99 on Kindle
Never Go Broke by Lee Boyce and Jesse McClure – £0.99 on Kindle
Green Living Made Easy: Hacks to Save Time and Money by Nancy Birtwhistle – £0.99 on Kindle
Environmental factors
Buy. Return. Repeat. What happens when we send back clothes? – Guardian
Government’s air passenger tax cut spurs double CO2 output vs trains – Which
300-year-old letters reveal hurricanes’ long-term rise – Hakai
What ESG news matters most the market? [Research] – CFA Institute
Robot overlord roundup
Now that ChatGPT is plugged in, things could get weird – Wired
AI chatbots making it harder to spot phishing emails – Guardian
“My kids played D&D with ChatGPT4 as the DM” – via Medium
300 million jobs could be affected by latest AI wave, says Goldman Sachs – CNN
A.I. is sucking the Internet in. Here’s a tool to extract yourself out – Slate
ChatGPT: keep talking and nobody explodes – ETF Trends
Off our beat
Are coincidences real? – Aeon
Destitute by design: trapped in the UK’s immigration system – Prospect
Why China’s population is shrinking [Video] – Vox
Mental liquidity – Morgan Housel
Life is worse for older people, post-Covid – The Atlantic via MSN
What’s the point? – Tom Morgan
Taking on the crack-up capitalists… – Prospect
…talking of which, Twitter is dying – TechCrunch
And finally…
“There’s nothing duller than hearing people talk about indescribable, deeply personal revelatory experiences, things like the LSD experience, the ayahuasca retreat, the delights of music that bores you to death, and the ineffable joys of kids.”
– Ermine, Simple Living in Somerset
Like these links? Subscribe to get them every Friday. Note this article includes affiliate links, such as from Amazon and Interactive Investor.
As requested, TI…DWP stats link:
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/households-below-average-income-for-financial-years-ending-1995-to-2022
As it’s the 1st of the month a lot of the Kindle book deals have been reset, so the books in the article at 99p are now a higher price. I know this as early each month I check for new deals.
Complacency and dated attitudes to earnings is one of the biggest roadblocks to the UK masses in achieving a good standard of living. It seems to be our national pastime to take shit salaries and complain rather than demanding more.
I’m in perhaps the top 2 percentiles in terms of PAYE income, but with a modest house in London and ambitions to start a family it’s simply not enough.
Despite private second wage growth of 5-6%/yr being reported in the media my employer didn’t see fit to uptick my base salary and my total compensation for 2022/23 landed lower than 2021/22. My salary will now now flat from late 2021 to mid 2024? No thanks. Time to hustle and jump ship. I’m nodding and smiling at my manager in our “one to ones” while preparing for interviews every night and weekend.
I’m always wary of the ‘equivalised’ part of these household income stats. I wonder how many readers skip over that part and misinterpret them as simple household income?
There are some interesting ONS wealth figures available on pensions. They show that for individuals 45-54, with pensions not yet in payment, a 75th percentile DC pot is 73k. Among DB holders of the same age, the 75th percentile value is 328k. Both types show a huge difference in value between the median and 75th percentile. One way for those with decent pension pots to better appreciate what they have.
Ah the “Rich”,the “Poor” and the “Bourgeoisie”
The arguments and graphs go on forever and really nothing seems to change despite the best efforts of left and right
Is it always going to be the status quo?-probably!
We currently are back once again from maybe the last of our many overseas travels -to Morocco this time
Once again it makes you appreciate where you luckily managed to be born and raised
The gap between rich and poor is so stark in so many countries from Morocco to Cuba
Sadder in Arab countries that are money rich in oil and gas
Our better off types “the Rich ”- seem to be happy to pay the bulk of our countries tax as they should -an attitude seemingly sadly lacking in the elites/leaders/Rich of so many other countries-doubly sad when the countries are in fact quite well off
Is it cultural ? Will attitudes change in time? Who knows
Being poor is also obviously a relative term
No easy answers and money is not the solution but changing attitudes is a long hard slog and very hard work and should it even be tried with current fashionable attitudes of all cultures being treated as equals
Interesting-an argument that is set to run and run
xxd09
Fwiw, I found the Finimus piece a great read, per usual. Always learn something interesting, even if I can’t always use it myself.
The London bubble world is a fascinating one. Back when I was working in London but living in Norfolk it was always highly illuminating how differently folk saw things. And how often they didn’t realise they were in different world to most people. What seems reasonable or ‘normal’ depends hugely on who you hang around with!
Btw – a huge thumbs up to the new AI section – I’ve been diving into this recently and it’s truly amazingly powerful change the world stuff. It’s all too easy to see how many industries are going to have their own Kodak moments if they don’t keep up.
And as if we haven’t got enough hassle at the moment, I hear that Wikipedia is planning to change its name to Wokepedia. Just go to their site and type in the date!
I’m one of the lower income masses who live north of London. The UK needs a more Scandinavian approach to improve wealth and opportunities for more of the population, which in turn would help the country as a whole (both rich and poor).
P.S. @the investor, I noticed in one of your recent pieces you felt your messages may be heard more by middle classes or above rather than the lower working class. I see myself in this category and I’ve learned a lot over the years, even though I’ll never retire early this site has definitely helped me to improve my financial situation. Keep going guys and all those who contribute.
Great Post!
It’s made me think about the dragging effect of higher tax boundaries (in Scotland, the SNP come after you for 42% income tax at £43k a year!, so count yourselves lucky)
Surely the name the game is to learn the rules of the HMRC tax game and avoid the most punitive of taxes?
If you are feeling poor then punch down on those on benefits or bemoan those better off?
Personally, I’ve never paid higher rate tax (I avoided it by one way or another) but saved/invested to 7-figures.
Achieving the same feat in a HCOL area and with albatross student loans – its a very different prospect.
Life is a lot easier when you have passed your “how much do I need” point long before your “I can’t go on”.
Off subject but I wondered on thoughts towards the following:
A couple of years ago I had a small lump sum which I dripfednd into a Vanguard SIPP using their Target retirement 2035 fund and their global all cap fund to raise the equity level to around 80%. I did this as an approach so I could avoid keep checking it each month, leave it to it’s own devices and just look to rebalance the all cap bit if things got out of whack. I’ve recently thought about possibly changing to using VLS80 but also going a bit active and paring it with the sustainable 60/70 active fund. Reason being the active fund seems to keep up with LS80 performance but also has a history of a lower negative side along with giving a perceived lower risk. So I could look more towards a 70/30 portfolio instead of my current 80/20 but aiming for a similar performance (when also calculating the rise in fee). I realise one negative to this is a rise in cost however I wondered whether people would trade a smallish increase in fees for the positives? I know the only real control we have is over selecting lower cost funds and talking about an active fund may get quite a few negative responses however I wondered if my logic seemed sound or was there a flaw I haven’t seen. I’ve realised I check the portfolio quarterly anyway even if I keep my paws off tinkering. Any thought please.
Left-wing claptrap 😉 aside, I do see the challenge of defining the Middle Class these days. I quite like this old article (written before Ed’s unfortunate bacon sandwich incident that cost him an election)
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-25744526
The way I see it, part of the issue is that the purchasing power is subjective, and in the age of smart phones and instagram influencers it is (ok, mostly fake, but also) very much in your face all the time. One used to be middle class if one had household help. Now every London young professional flatshare has a cleaner, but the people who live there can’t afford a house till well into their 30s unless their parents are rich. Almost everybody is middle class if measured by spending, but very few are middle class if measured by wealth. Because: house price inflation and the demise of final salary pension schemes. You san make enough money to afford the lifestyle, but only if you continue renting your abode and plan to work ’till you die. That might not be so bad — you might enjoy your work. I don’t enjoy mine.
Also, because wealth is, by definition invisible until spent, nobody knows how much everybody else has, stats are hard to interpret — it’s like asking how much money one needs to be happy, or how much your house has to be worth for you to enjoy living there.
How do the tax figures compare to percentage of population who are net contributors? Wasn’t there a recent stat indicating less than 50% actually contribute? Could be more i forget.
@Jim, I am not sure trying to identify “net contributors” is a helpful way to discuss taxation – it is a concept that is only likely to muddy the waters.
For example, last year I had some significant medical treatment, so for all I know might have been overall a net beneficiary from public finances. But who checks the numbers to that detail? Most years I am a net contributor to insurance companies, but that doesn’t give me any special virtue.
We are all beneficiaries of public expenditure, and to different extents at different points in our lives – and most of us acknowledge that is one side of a contract of which the other side is paying tax due.
A few weeks ago I went round to a flat belonging to a friend of my daughter. I had volunteered to fix her dripping kitchen tap after she gave up asking her landlord to do it. It is a nice flat, 1 bedroom but spacious by modern standards. Post 2nd World war council built block of 9 1 bed flats, in attractive communal grounds. Wandsworth council still own the freehold and manage the property. No doubt the flats were built for working class Londoners, but now all are in private hands and mostly rented out.
My daughter’s friend is surely middle class as a reasonably well paid junior doctor. But she says that she cannot afford to buy a flat like the one she rents, which would cost about £400k, which is cheap for Wandsworth. I don’t know what rents she pays, but would imagine it was over £1k per month.
What struck me about this is that my generation, maybe a little older, have taken ownership of large amounts of council property and jacked the rent up. We have also failed to deliver an adequate supply of property to rent or buy, hence sky high living costs. If I was a 20 something without a bank of mum and dad to help out I would be quite angry about this.
It must surely be in everyone’s interest, except maybe those who now let property, to sort this out. Instead, when we do have property built a lot of it seems to be totally irrelevant to most young people working in London, such as the largely empty huge towers that have been built along the Thames between Vauxhall Bridge and Battersea Park.
I don’t blame those who bought their council homes and nor do I blame BTLers for taking advantage of opportunities that are society offers them. Both parties have acted entirely rationally, but the outcome has been detrimental to the majority of the population.
I thought the “When average isn’t enough” link was a bit vacuous. Got to the end and then thought is that it?
The point the author appears to have failed to grasp is that with index investing you do not get average returns. You get BETTER than average returns, which is one of the the primary reasons to do it.
The other thing index investing guarantees is that you can never significantly underperform the market, something you most certainly can do with active investing.
Accept market returns, minus a few bps, with index investing. Or go for better than market returns with a very small chance of success and a very large chance of failure over the long haul. That is the choice most investors face.
@Naeclue
From your description I would *guess* about £1,600+ per month.
It’s ridiculous, yes. I had no BoMaD and I had to turn myself into a mini Warren Buffett to buy in the end, albeit I had missed opportunities to buy a lot more cheaply earlier on in my life (and chose not to pursue a lucrative career) so I certainly have to shoulder the responsibility in my case.
But anyway, I’m halfway over the hill. Most of today’s 20-somethings aren’t going to buy in London for two decades without the BoMaD, absent say, high wage inflation and a static market for the best part of a decade. (Which actually doesn’t seem entirely impossible? But not the base case.)
@TI “high wage inflation and a static market for the best part of a decade.”
It has happened before. The house we bought in 1986 we sold in 1993 for the same price (Slightly more, but we had added central heating, etc). During that period there was a lot of wage inflation.
When property prices fall, people can enter a mindset of not wanting to buy as prices might be cheaper next year, perpetuating the downward spiral. Very painful for those who bought in near the peak and it could happen again.
@TI “From your description I would *guess* about £1,600+ per month.”
Really? 5% rental yield? Maybe this BTL lark is worth looking into after all.
I am joking by the way. Last thing I want is to have to suffer complaints about leaking taps 😉
> when we do have property built a lot of it seems to be totally irrelevant to most young people working in London
Yeah, it’s all “executive whatevers” nowadays. There was a very good reason why the councils built housing back in the day when ordinary folk didn’t suffer the indignity that is housing now. The essential problem is that people who rent are too poor to buy, which si why they rent. I presume that councils made a loss on the capital assigned and/or there was redistribution either from the rates or from central government such that they could do this loss-making activity as a social service.
They didn’t get it all right, people used to bitch about council housing back in the day because they had not seen the horrors that the free market would visit upon their great-grandchildren. And there were some appalling mistakes in the designs of tower blocks and estates.
You were at a disadvantage if you were young and single, you would wait a very long time to get a council house. That wasn’t so bad in those days, because the Second World War had killed off a fair number of men so single people could relatively easily rent a room with a landlady, that thinned out over the years and was gone by the mid 1970s. Half the kids at my London grammar school lived in council house, that included a fair few who lived by their wits not their hands.
Then Thatcher took the wrecking ball to that, and the results are in after four decades. Basically result misery, unless you are a landlord. First the more desirable council houses were bought, and what was left tended to deteriorate into sink estates after a decade or so.
Exactly why Tony Blair’s administration thought it was a good idea in the 1990s to allow BTL mortgages, permitting landlords to front-run first time buyers, with a tax-privilege on the interest if you please, still beats me. The results are now in: even more misery. At least Peter Rachman actually owned his dumps, the requirement to actually own the place outright to become a landlord placed a natural limit on Britain’s army of amateur landlords.
@Ermine
BTL mortgages arrived in the fag-end of the Major years: https://www.paragonbank.co.uk/resources/paragonbank/documents/mortgages/buy-to-let/25-years-of-btl-report
But, yes, why Labour didn’t kill them off at birth is a mystery. If one were to be charitable then it could be said the full horror of what was to unfold wasn’t readily apparent in May 1997 onwards.
@Curlew – ta for the update, my bad. But OMG that slidepack
@Ermine
Eek! That is dreadful. I didn’t get that far with reading the article.
I don’t have a problem with BTL as such; it’s the lack of social housing built to replace the RTB sell-off that’s a key component of the current housing issue/crisis. But then any government that, say, post-1996, had tried to undertake the requisite building programme – of necessity including greenfield sites – would have been unlikely to have survived their current term of office.
@ermine, “Yeah, it’s all “executive whatevers” nowadays.”
For those huge Thames developments I think of it as being mainly for foreign tax dodgers and money launderers.
As part of the developments, there is supposed to be “affordable” housing built, but builders always seem to find ways to avoid providing that.
@bal
Comparing performance of slightly different portfolio allocations over one relatively short recent time period has no predictive effect…
It’s very tempting to feel one must do something and tweak a portfolio, it’s pointless, costs money, if a change turns out to bring a slight profit/loss it’s most likely pure chance…
It’s a mistake to let perfect become the enemy of good.
Interested in the sharpness of the upturn on high income here’s data from the HMRC showing top percentile – it’s even sharper. Maybe need 1/10th percentiles to resolve the high end better……..
https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/percentile-points-from-1-to-99-for-total-income-before-and-after-tax
@ermine
https://www.centreforcities.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/the-housebuilding-crisis.pdf
This interesting study suggests the roots of the UK housing crisis are in 1947’s Town and Country Planning Act, which granted local authorities discretionary powers over development. So instead of developers having automatic rights to build within a zoning framework, they could be blocked for any number of reasons. This led to an immediate decline in housebuilding rates – if rates had continued at the level of other comparable countries, the authors estimate that we’d have built 4.3 million more houses. Right To Buy exacerbated the problem rather than being the root cause.
@ermine – It seems little known that it was Labour who first proposed Right To Buy in their 1959 manifesto under Hugh Gaitskell
“Labour’s plan is that, with reasonable exceptions, local councils shall take over houses which were rent-controlled before 1 January, 1956, and are still tenanted. They will repair and modernise these houses and let them at fair rents. This is a big job which will take time and its speed will vary according to local conditions. Every tenant, however, will have a chance first to buy from the Council the house he lives in.”
@hariseldon – thank you for your wise words, it’s much appreciated. Yes, I can now see I was being my own worst enemy and thinking about tinkering. It’s been going fine for 2 years and as you rightly say tweaking may not achieve any improvement (maybe the opposite) and I know it would increase costs. I’ll continue to stay the current course and avoid tinkering. As you say ‘good is good enough’. Thanks again for injecting some common sense
@countzero I kind of struggle with the centreforcities reasoning. They have quite a specific agenda. Take, for example, their reasonins
Well yes, but I’ve seen photos of what Nurnberg looked like just after the war. While the Luftwaffe did do a right number on London and Coventry and I played in some of the London bombsites still left 25 years afterwards I would say that other European countries probably did have to build more homes prorata for a good reason. I’m not saying planning is ideal in the UK, but for all the people who say it’s terrible, compare the US cities of Los Angeles, Denver and New York. Los Angeles and Denver is what you get with a much less restricted planning environment, New York was restricted by being constructed largely before motor travel. The USA has the great advantage of having a lot more land per head, so they can get away with that, you don’t have to live in such nightmares unless you want to.
And while the two hypotheses on page 7 in the first case argue a historical time series to pin the blame on the T&C planning act and the second decides to invoke a European contrast for post 1980, that looks disingenuous to me.
I would say that casual inspection of the charts in this would show that something pretty bad happened to UK housing around 1980, and indeed that 1963 to 1973 would seem to be the high-water mark of housing starts, the five years from ’64 in particular running twice the level of anything ever since 1980, despite being thoroughly hamstrung by the devilish TCPA given the CfC thesis. As for the assertion that total housebuilding fell after 1947, again it probably should do, given that a certain Mr A. Hitler wasn’t bombing the living crap out of the housing stock 😉 It’s always tough to separate your variables in things to do with humans but the sleight of hand shifting from time series to geographical contrast smacks of pushing an agenda and is the sort of thing that gives statistics a bad rap along with lies, and damn lies. That isn’t to say there are no issues with planning in Britain but their hypothesis that this is the biggest issue isn’t carried for me.
@platformer I’m not sure that RTB couldn’t be done right, but Thatcher giving 30% off to buy votes shat on a lot of other people, even if most of them hadn’t been born. It pissed me right off at the time, where was Thatcher giving me my bung of 30% free money to go buy a house for starters?
Council houses tended to be designed for families, arguably discriminating against single people and the child-free. It wasn’t a perfect solution, but compared to what we have now it was a lot better, particularly for people who want to have children but can’t afford to buy a house. 40% of the former RTB properties are now in the hands of private landlords with current tenants paying more than they do to a council, for a precarious tenancy at the whim of a BTLer. That’s nice for the BTLers, particularly when they could jump in front of first-time buyers trying to buy a house with a mortgage who had to pay tax on the earned money to pay the interest, because BTLers claimed this was a business and therefore the interest was a business loan. Interest rates were much higher in those days, so that was a serious advantage.
There has been a series of Radio 4 programmes recently on the subject ‘Rental Health’. It’s interesting to hear the view from other countries about their housing policies. Compared to places like Vienna, Barcelona and even Singapore we (as in the UK) seem to be on a downward spiral of depravation. Last night’s Simon Reeves ‘Cornwall update’ (BBC 2) reduced me to tears.
@Nimbus Singapore housing policy may work for the average 40+ yo Singaporean, but it’s the capitalist nightmare writ large for anyone else (expats, the young, singles etc). The Housing Development Board (which controls access to “council housing”) faces the same challenges in kind if not in degree to the UK – decades of policy written for the benefit of older, conservative voters (emphasis on last). New buy-to-own flats are expensive, smaller, and impossible to finance on one income.
Also the usual caveats (city state vs midsize country, one party rule) apply to anything Singaporean. It just ain’t a good model for the UK as a whole (perhaps for London).
It’s almost as if adding 9 million people to the population of the country over a 15 year period wouldn’t push down wages and push up house prices. That pesky law of supply & demand…. Who’d ah thunk it, eh?
Yeah, and those who voted for Brexit from an, ahem, blood and soil viewpoint deffo don’t seem to have got what they thought they were voting for.
OTOH there’s some hope because the baby boomers are starting to die off and most should be retirees in the next five years. The evidence for wage depression isn’t being supported now, perhaps for that reason.