Mastodawn

Emeritus Prof. Christopher May

Andy Burnham is casting round for ideas for how to fund a major increase of spending on social housing, within the current (albeit modified) fiscal rules set by Rachel Reeves;

A while ago, I proposed a social hosing bond (not unlike a war bond) that would direct savings & investment towards the sector from people looking for stable investments (and who perhaps want to see a rise in social housing).

While not fully developed you'll get the idea.

#housing #politics
https://northwestbylines.co.uk/politics/opinion/could-social-housing-bonds-be-part-of-the-answer-to-the-housing-crisis/

Could social housing bonds be part of the answer to the housing crisis?

Funding needed for social housing is massive, and this article offers a novel approach, to be known as national social housing bonds

North West Bylines | Powerful Citizen Journalism

TC Won't Give In To Lies Jun 6

It's a brilliant idea - and would provide wonderful competition to the private equity and property developers who currently control housing supply.

Emeritus Prof. Christopher May Jun 6

thanks; much appreciated

Estarriol, Terrorist Dragon Jun 6

call it A class housing and remove Apple and Amazons ability to evade full corporation tax.

@ChrisMayLA6 Glasgow city council are using a similar vehicle to fund Net Zero investments. First million-pound bond last year provided funding to save £160k pa in electricity costs. Administered by a company called Abundance Investments:

https://www.glasgowtimes.co.uk/news/25512394.glasgow-city-council-launch-new-green-investment-scheme/

@Mschatelaine @ChrisMayLA6 I've got a few quid in Abundance so can vouch for this.

There are also already similar sites for housebuilding, so the model is there for councils to use.

Emeritus Prof. Christopher May Jun 6

Interesting; thanks & boosted

Walrus 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿Jun 6

So Burnham is another one that doesn't understand how governments fund things?

I am so tired of ambitious people who don't know the basics of how countries work getting power.

Claire McNab Jun 6

@Walrus That's 'cos of the gutting of local democracy.

In late 19th century, local authorities in Britain managed large capital projects. Not just magnificent municipal buildings, but roads, water, sanitation, energy, transport, hospitals.

This continued into 20th c. E.g. 1930s Bradford invested heavily in huge new reservoirs. Post-war, it was housing.

But no more. Power has been privatised or sent to quangos. Local govt is infantilised, and so are politicians and parties.

@2legged @Walrus @ChrisMayLA6 on Scotland councils aren't allowed the competence to make such investments, which is a problem. The alternative problem is that instead of investing in infrastructure, councils in England have played Monopoly with office building developments and bankrupted themselves. I think that councils need that competence but there should be firm rules around what may and may not be built with it. PFIs should be abolished and the parasitical influence of lenders removed.

Claire McNab Jun 6

@Mschatelaine In Scotland and England, LA powers were vastly diminished in the 20th century & 21st. Councils are now local agents of centrally-designed services, not independent designers of big projects.

The bankruptcy crisis is 'cos Osborne slashed LA funding, told LAs to be properly speculators. They had no experience of this, so inevitably crashed & burned.

But the underlying problem is that LAs have been infantilised; politics no longer selects for those skills.

@Walrus @ChrisMayLA6

Don Thompson Jun 6

@2legged @Walrus @ChrisMayLA6
Listening to R6Music’s Radcliffe & Maconie, today, as they talked about ad-hoc rules/versions of Monopoly play.
I thought, what excellent ideas.
Players should begin the game with full hotel & house ‘capitalisation’, a new set of Chance & Community Chest cards that reflect realistic, present challenges (costs). Objective: maintain portfolio WHILE staying legal!

Claire McNab Jun 6

@guardeddon IMRHO, "staying legal" misses the whole point of the game of #Monopoly. The game is designed to simulate the avarice and venality of capitalism, so play is all about cheating without getting caught.

So, yes, dish out all the property at the start. Then slyly cheat like hell. That's real capitalism.

@Mschatelaine @Walrus @ChrisMayLA6

@ChrisMayLA6 in Scotland our councils are busy building thousands of new council houses, funded by borrowing from the treasury at a margin over gilts, paid back out of rents, all helped by having binned right-to-buy years ago. There's usually a small contribution from Scot Gov, again effectively funded by gilts.

There's no need for Burnham to reinvent the wheel, just let English councils borrow and build again.

Donald Roy Jun 6

@jbenjamint @ChrisMayLA6 #labour had started doing the same in #wandsworth. Not sure if this will continue though!

The Penguin of Evil Jun 6

@jbenjamint @ChrisMayLA6 You need to drag "right to buy" out to a dark crossroads and burn it so it never comes back for this to work. Scotland and Wales have done so, which is the critical bit to make it work.

Kim Spence-Jones 🇬🇧😷Jun 6

@etchedpixels @jbenjamint @ChrisMayLA6
Absolutely this! ☝️

No amount of council building makes sense when it’s just subsidising tenants who can take low-cost loans to buy their property at a massive discount on what it cost the council to build it.

Jonathan Schofield Jun 6

@etchedpixels @jbenjamint @ChrisMayLA6

Just to add variety into the possibilities of how to structure an equitable housing sector:

I heard today that in Cuba 96% of people own their own home and for the remaining 4%, the proportion of their income that they are allowed to be charged in rent is 6%.

1h:6m in here https://www.patreon.com/posts/rise-and-fall-of-159401405

LillyLyle/Count Melancholia Jun 6

@urlyman
What about the land their homes sit on? Is it owned by them, or "leased" in some fashion?
As long as there still is private landownership, the inequalities will return. Land = patriarchal power.

@jbenjamint @ChrisMayLA6

The Penguin of Evil Jun 6

@LillyHerself @urlyman @jbenjamint @ChrisMayLA6 Land reform, particularly breaking and removing ownership of vast tracts of land and destroying the giant (mostly foreign) landholders was pretty much the core of the cuban revolution. That's why the USA spent 70 odd years trying to destroy Cuba.

Simon Brooke Jun 7

@LillyHerself @urlyman @etchedpixels @jbenjamint @ChrisMayLA6 Strong agree here.

If you have heritable ownership of land and a market economy, over time the land is inevitably concentrated under the ownership of the richest.

People need security of tenure of their homes, but only for their lifetimes. Heritable property is not something a democratic society can tolerate.

Jonathan Schofield Jun 7

@simon_brooke @LillyHerself @etchedpixels @jbenjamint @ChrisMayLA6

Fwiw I agree (as a home owner!)

The Penguin of Evil Jun 7

@simon_brooke @LillyHerself @urlyman @jbenjamint @ChrisMayLA6 depends if you want too see any long term investment, or farms survive when they need 50+ year plans and nobody who can't pass it on will care. Plus how you evict the children living there and so much more.
Large scale rentier ownership is a problem but not general ownership with sufficient inheritance taxation

Simon Brooke Jun 7

@etchedpixels @LillyHerself @urlyman @jbenjamint @ChrisMayLA6

You don't necessarily evict children. They too have a right of lifetime tenure to some home somewhere, and the home in which they reside at the time of their parents' death is as good a candidate as any. They just must not have an automatic right to it.

If land is managed by a local community, that community has a generational interest in its good management.

https://www.journeyman.cc/blog/posts-output/2022-02-17-manifesto-for-a-good-society/

Manifesto for a good society

This essay grows out of a quite minor Twitter thread, which is here.Scotland now provides period products for free, to everyone who needs them.That's an incredibly powerful thing. The fact that Scotland does it — the fact that Scotland is the first nation in the world to do it — makes me proud to be Scots. It is a seed from which the good society can grow.

The Fool on the Hill

LillyLyle/Count Melancholia Jun 7

@etchedpixels That's a patriarchal mindset, my friend.

In matriarchies, land (and indeed, children!) are collectively loved and cared for, and nature is venerated.

Tending the land and the creatures in and on it, and caring for each other, is natural - only a patriarchal society insists that the fruits of such labour can only be passed on to (male) blood relatives.

Patriarchy underpins capitalism.

We are all family, let's act like it.

@simon_brooke @urlyman @jbenjamint @ChrisMayLA6

LillyLyle/Count Melancholia Jun 7

@simon_brooke Private landownership also leads to militarism, because the "owners" become focussed on "defending" that land, keeping others off it.

It also leads to patriarchal religion, which was invented to endorse - via authority granted by a mythological god entity - the right of male land "owners" to repress the rights of women, in order to (at least in theory) guarantee succession based on bloodlines.

@urlyman @etchedpixels @jbenjamint @ChrisMayLA6

@jbenjamint @ChrisMayLA6 right to buy needs to die.

Mark Burton Jun 6

@jbenjamint @ChrisMayLA6
He certainly should learn from Scotland and Wales, rather than doing what's happened in Greater Manchester, a massive building programme that largely relies on the developers to deliver social housing (ha ha), while trashing green space for suburban anomie and building unsustainably to the clouds in the urban core.

GhostOnTheHalfShell Jun 7

@jbenjamint @ChrisMayLA6

It’s so funny though because the central government could simply grant the money. It prints money when it writes checks that’s how our currency sovereign works. The money that’s added to the country is removed by sending checks to the treasury. Paying your taxes delete money.

Now let’s discuss who should really be paying taxes if all it does is delete money and it doesn’t pay for anything

Dr Susi Arnott Jun 6

@ChrisMayLA6 Would love this; but did anybody else here lose any savings in the Equfund scandal? #socialhousing #Liverpool #FSAfailure

Don Thompson Jun 6

@ChrisMayLA6
Thank you for re-upping (?) the idea. It’s been my foremost thought during this most recent Labour debacle that radically invigorating/accelerating construction of social housing is the one thing that could put space between Labour & the rest.
Had a heated discussion only this morning with acquaintances whose mindset is stuck in 80’s Thatcherland (I won!)

Emeritus Prof. Christopher May Jun 6

Thanks; good to hear.... especially winning the argument against the Thatcher-follower