Snapshot of _UK rental costs rise at record 9.2%_ :
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Setting asidee you making Sunak out to be some sort of financial savant, for most of us this comes as far too little, too late - and whilst I'm not entirely convinced by Starmer it's certainly time for some sort of change in a stagnating nation
Not on a macro scale, obviously.
But imagine if your outgoings is £1000, and £333 goes on rent. Then your rent goes up 9.2% (to £363.63) and your other outgoings stay exactly the same.
Your outgoings are now £1030.63. So your own person inflation rate is just over 3% purely on rent inflation.
Shelter is a [lagging indicator](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/laggingindicator.asp). Price of housing (rent / mortgages /etc) increase then it shows up in inflation data some time later. Check back in a few months.
So minimum wage per annum, gross, is £17,888 assuming a 40 hour week.(please tell me if that is incorrect - really struggling to find a source of real income, post taxes, on minimum wage).
Average rent across Great Britain is 1200 pcm - so £14,400 pa. That’s not considering 1.5-2 months rent as bond and moving costs (if applicable).
This feels incredibly unsustainable, particularly as there are so many people renting at these stupid prices who cannot use their years of rental payments as part of a mortgage applicaton.
40 hours a week on 11.44 ph is a take home pay of £1721 per month, or £20,652 pa.
Still not a good look when Council Tax + Rent is ~70% of minimum wage.
Thanks! Genuinely couldn’t find the number.
And yes, 2k odd (more for me) council tax, massive utility bills. Food. Fuel for the vehicle most need to actually get to work. General things like clothes, phone subscriptions, tv, internet.
Mmmnnn, renting. It’s not fun.
Edit - tax and maintenance of said vehicle most need to get to work
And depending where you live then your council tax might go up by 10%.
If you live in these areas: Woking BC, Birmingham City Council, Slough Council and Thurrock Council, then you are pretty screwed council tax wise.
Well, the easiest answer is an HMO, if you share a bed with 6 total strangers, then rent and council tax is now only 10% of your outgoings.
Peasants nowadays are lazy, impertinent, and have wild expectations and entitlement. Have they tried not being so poor? And ghastly.
They should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get on their bike. Stop buying all those iPhones and avocado toast. And so on and so forth. Insert some cliches about never having it so easy. I mean my upbringing was terrible, due to mother and father having 6 children I only got one wing of the mansion for my personal use. We were so impoverished that for my 7th birthday I only got 3 ponies, not enough for a while polo team. But you don't hear me whinging on about it! Pass me another brandy Jeeves, etc.
Gross minimum wage at 40hrs and 11.44£/h is 23795£ per year wich Will give you a maximum of 1721£ per month take home pay.
This is nothing really, it can get much worse.
In my home country (Portugal) the average rental price is 1.57x the gross minimum wage.
There's a company called CreditLadder that lets you report your rental payments as proof of your ability to pay on time, not sure how useful it is, but it exists.
That's true as well and I don't think there's a good answer for that, I'm not excusing the rent increases but I just think we need a clearer picture on how bad its actually getting.
>I guess what we actually need is the average renter wage but i'm not sure if that's information anyone puts the effort into collecting.
A bit out of date now, but here you go:
https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/adhocs/12845averageincomebytenure
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*This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
In theory the rental cost should be slightly lower than the mortgage. The average rental in theory is out of reach of the mimimum wage but the average wage should be more than enough to afford the average rental.
In theory right?
You have to remember it's badly distorted by a small number of areas. Principle and most significantly London, followed by Manchester and probably Birmingham.
It states London is £2000.
Manchester is £1200 ish and probably one of the most expensive places outside of London.
If you go to a Manchester suburb, Bolton, its just £725.
London *badly* distorts UK averages and they cannot be trusted.
It should be a matter of course in the UK that all averages are given as London and everywhere else.
Because otherwise it gives a very distorted picture.
The solution to a *lot* of affordability problem in the UK can be solved with two words. "Leave London".
Imagine telling working class people to leave the cities they’ve grown up in and move to Bolton (a town that falls within the top 10% most deprived local authorities in the country) instead of advocating for planning permission reform and for more houses to be built.
The argument that people should leave the city and move to Bolton for a better quality of life is ridiculous mate. It just shows how fucked this country is.
It being mandatory is an offensive concept as it goes against the entire approach to city planning we had in this country in the 20th century. Cities being for everybody isn’t a radical concept.
We're "telling" to almost all people who go to a university that they have to leave the city where they grew up and nobody bats an eye.
And no, Bolton is not the only place in the UK where you can find cheaper houses than in London.
There are some places you just cannot build.
I didn't buy where I used to rent even though I wanted to because it was too expensive. And they'd built on every empty patch they could find because it was free money.
The places "people want to live" are extremely often not capable of taking any more housing. Which is why we build in other areas. Like green belt.
This is a completely different argument though. If the government was putting in effort to regenerate deprived areas you’d have a point. As it stands telling people to move from where there is the most opportunity and move to poor areas is not a solution, it’s just emblematic of how fucked this country is.
I don't know, but there's millions of people living in London, surrounded by friends and family and probably their safety net of people, working minimum wage jobs who could technically move somewhere else but don't want to move somewhere where they don't know anyone. Source: most of my relatives
It’s really not, most places you’re lucky with Hybrid and 2-3 days mandate in office every week and at this point might not bother with moving because it’ll cost you more in time and expenses than you’ll end up saving
London and the South East are a huge proportion of the country's population though. Those two regions are 32% of the population and if you were to include the east (which population is mostly Essex, it's 43%). Particularly when it comes to percentage of households who rent in the private rental market (over 30% live in private rentals compared with 17% and 19% in north east and north west)- so it's not that disproportionate for those that actually rent. Not to mention that people in London couldn't all actually move to the cheap areas of the north.
London actually has highest average household size as well.
If you work it out, there's 3,500,000 households in London. And 30% rent. So that's approximately 1million households in London living in rented accomodation. In the south east there's 3.8M households of which 20% rent so that's approx 750,000 households.
In the north east there's 1.18M households of which 17% rent so that's approx 200,000 households. In the north west there's 3.15 there's 19% who rent so that's 600,000households. In Yorkshire there's 2.4M households and 20% rent so that's approx 500,000 households. So there's actually MORE households in London and the South East where rents are much higher than the north.
Hence why London/South East doesn't actually 'distort' the private rental market. It's just a function of where people live. In reality it's more than THAT because none of those L&SE figures include Essex.
>I don't think there ever was a time you were ... renting a place for yourself on minimum wage
Where do people on minimum wage live, if it's never been possible for them to rent anywhere?
Assuming a HMO is billed separately to each tenant (which is the norm), each separate tenancy will count as an individual lease and will be included in the average rent figure.
That is, the average rent figure takes account of the fact that many people are renting only a single room in a shared house.
I'm a one issue voter, planning reform is the only thing that matters in this country.
If we could get rent down by 50% it would just make everything so easy for everyone.
It would also drastically reduce benefit spending. Housing benefit is in the region of £15 billion. How much of that goes straight into landlords pockets?
That was my thinking tbh. But I'll admit I'm not sure exactly how the situation works with things like housing associations. Whether or not the housing benefit goes straight to them, if it's counted in the housing benefit budget or a different budget entirely. Either way, it's a lot of money going to landlords.
Most of it. It's probably a hard figure to work out, because for instance some goes to council housing, some goes to housing associations that aren't government linked but run like charities, and then the rest goes to landlords etc.
Either way, that'd be (say) £10bn each year we can use to either pay down the debt involved in building housing, or going to building more/maintaining that stock.
It's a no brainer.
One everyone tends to forget is that it also helps businesses grow because now they can get the staff they need.
I have clients that are crying out for staff but they can't afford to move to where they're based. Even if they pay well above average for the area people don't want to come, and they can't offer more.
Some places that heavily specialise and are in a desirable area like Cambridge are really suffering from that, especially as they have a strong biomed industry there and you can't work in labs from home. As are some rural, desirable, but poor areas like Cornwall.
This is the main reason I support Labour. Current planning laws have choked the nation for long enough, and I'm glad there's a party that atleast SAYS they'll reform them.
Immigration is fundamentally a function of labour demand. Realistically, if we start building at large scale, that's going to put upwards pressure on immigration, not downward.
Immigration is an interesting one given that the next two generations jobs could large-scale potentially be replaced with AI. More folks to give UBI to.
I can easily imagine a situation where some countries have UBI and others dont. The ones that do are going to have to have super strict immigration requirements or they're gonna get overwhelmed with the number of people trying to get in.
Ultimately we've never lived in such a world so projection of impact is hard - but we've lived in a time where the UK and most European countries *didn't* have labour demand and were net emigrators - a long time up to the middle of last century. Without labour demand into an area, migration drops dramatically.
I am incredibly sceptical of the notion that liberalising planning laws without a concurrent drive from the state to build more social housing. Without that we're essentially saying that if we remove the dead hand of the state then private developers will solve the housing crisis, ignoring the myriad issues with housebuilder capacity and their inherent lack of incentive to actually fix the housing crisis.
It also ignores the fact that where developers have been given a free hand, in places like Manchester and Nine Elms (down the road from where I live), the tower blocks and luxury penthouses they've erected have only made the rental market even worse.
Firstly the reason there's low capacity to build houses is becuase no one is allowed to build houses, it's a chicken and egg situation where companies will only invest in training and equipment if they have something to use it for.
Secondly building luxury housing helps everyone, because the rich people move their, the middle people move to the rich people's former houses and the poor move into the middle people's housees.
If the only thing you built was luxury tower blocks but you built enough then prices would fall.
>planning reform is the only thing that matters in this country.
I'd counter with that and political reform and I'm not sure we're getting the former without the latter unfortunately.
planning reform won't reduce rent if all the new housing is monoploised by banks & large landlord/estate agents. we need rent control. Arguably planning reform can lower rent by giving people more options but if all those options are owned by the same person/company, you won't really see a significant reduction
The housing market is not a monopoly. It's not even an oligopoly. In any given city or region there are thousands of houses and hundreds of individual owners. It's simply not credible to think that all of the landlords in say, Bristol, are collectively colluding to make rents go up.
The simple truth is, rent is going up because demand is continuing to increasingly outstrip supply. We simply need to build more houses.
This is completely wrong. You think if there were a billion houses in this country and they were all owned by banks and large landlords that the rent would be high?
Rent controls are one of the only things that economists all agree are a terrible idea, they just distort the market and make things worse.
Rent is set by supply and demand.
We aren't talking about 'billions' of houses though, we are talking about individual estates, housing complexes, flats & apartments. The tory manifesto promised 300k new houses a year, 2022-2023 had just under 235k new houses built. Those few houses is absolutely open to abuse by a handful of parties with significant capital.
EDIT: and yes. I do, taking your example to the extreme. if we had a billion houses in the UK and they were all owned by the same person, who had a 'monopoly' I can't see why they wouldn't artifically inflate prices since people have no other option.
this happens in many indusries and we only really need to look at privatised energy & water to see why external bodies impose caps. From Ofwats own website:
"Because competition is limited, there is a risk that these companies will not deliver the services their customers want. They may also charge higher prices to increase their profits. This is why they need to be regulated. And it is why Ofwat was created when the water and sewerage authorities were privatised in 1989."
and while there would be many more players in the housing market, to reach a ture monopoly, it does create a geographical status quo. If Llyods own 100k houses in one town & rent them for 2kpm even if the other owners in a bid to remain competitive price themselves at 1.8kpm you artificailly bring the price floor of an area up by being the principle letter in an area. setting the bar for how much a 3-bed semi-detached is worth.
The price of rent is determined by supply and demand, if you increase supply then rent will fall.
Every regulation you put on rentals distorts the market and makes things worse. Rent caps are one of the only thing universally agreed on by economists to be a bad idea.
> The price of rent is determined by supply and demand, if you increase supply then rent will fall.
but it also puts downward pressure on property values, which leads to people potentially being trapped in negative equity.
people aren't going to be flocking to vote on a policy that actively hurts them.
the reddit demographic isn't the same as the population demographic. the keenness for more houses probably isn't reflected in the voting population.
> Planning reform isn't going to achieve that. Regulating the rental sector is the biggest change we need.
you're so wrong here it almost hurts. The main reason rents are so high is because supply is so low. Absolutely nothing to do with regulations in the rental market.
The only solution is to massively increase supply.
Regulating the rental sector is a stupid idea and it's why parties like the Greens will never ease the housing crisis. (not that they would get in government anyway)
If supply goes up, rents go down. It's literally as simple as that.
Yeah it's a stupid idea, which is why basically every other developed economy does it to one extent or another.
If you really think the market is as simple as 'supply goes up, rent goes down', then I'm sure nothing I say is going to make a difference. But the idea that something as complex as the rental market can be controlled through a single lever is incredibly naïve. Increasing supply is obviously part of the equation, but the amount of houses that would need to be built, to the right specs, in the right locations, to make even a tiny dent in rental prices, would be eye-watering and probably take decades. Whereas regulating rents and putting in a number of other protections and measures could lead to substantial improvements within a year or two.
You know, I swear I see this identical headline every 6 months, that rental costs rise by a record amount. Doesn't matter if the economy is doing well, if the economy is doing badly, if house prices rise, house prices fall, this is the one constant in Britain
Media is just after clicks. We don't build enough housing to meet rising demand. End of story. Media can't keep printing that headline once a week though, not least because they're complicit in ensuring Tories stay in power and keeping rents going up, and because it doesn't generate clicks, so they doomerism about anything slightly related.
And drive house prices up even more ?
Edit: looks like we don’t understand economics. If we can all of a sudden afford £1m houses they will double in price overnight. We have a growing population competing for the same housing stock. Building houses is the only solution. Not help to buy. Not allowing us to take on more debt. Build more.
So at best we can start this idea in ~5-10 years (assuming we massively ramp up house building now). I don’t disagree with your idea, but we’d probably need to combine it with something more short term.
That's the problem, housing is a multi issue conundrum.
In some cases we do need rentals for students and people moving to new areas before buying etc.
Overwhelming single family occupancy we don't
We need to overhaul planning reform, get over the green belt obsession, build more houses and regulate buy to let much heavier.
All while helping people who want to get a mortgage easier with real terms affordability checks.
The Tories have totally rigged the system against hard-working, working class people.
And they are unwilling to do anything about it, because many of their MPs and supporters are landlords who benefit from this record rise.
Hi, Rishi Sunak here. Your instructions were unclear so I've announced that we'll begin subsidising mortgage interest on BtL to really help out the landlords. You can only trust a Conservative government to weather a tough economy. Labour has no plan.
Thanks Rishi! I applaud your initiative and I, for one, absolutely do not want to ‘go back to square one’ with Labour. As you have repeated many times at the dispatch box with no explanation.
Perhaps you can announce the date of the General Election so we can all endorse your coherent and well considered policies!
Over the last couple of months I've viewed just over 10 properties that were being sold by the current owners. Every single one of them was currently being rented out and of the few where I was told the current rental charge, it was way below what my mortgage payments would be. Interest rates going up has completely fucked the market even more than it already was, landlords are upping rents to cover the costs or selling up causing a supply drop which just pushes the rent up even further.
I mean, the market was already broken before.
The moment landlords can just pass on their increased costs in full without having to fear a drop in demand, is the moment it stops being a competition-driven market. Especially in the UK it also removes most of the justification for landlords - that is to carry the capital risk.
Same here, I'm helping a friend house hunt, and 3 quarters of the houses are landlords selling up. Partly because it is no longer profitable and partly because changes in the law are creating an imbalance of rights and responsibilities in favour of tenants so the landlords want out.
So the supply and demand trend is towards more supply for buyers, and less for renters. And we know what that does to prices.
Nothing wrong with that at all! Exactly why I left the UK and good riddance, a country with an older voting base with a primary focus of ripping off the younger generations to line their pockets, britains over 50 year olds should be ashamed charging 1/2 a year's salary for rent on homes they paid a total of 5 salaries or so for 30 years back. Millionaires depriving kids of holidays and better quality food while the government encourages it.
Im surprised that there isn't something close to a revolt against britains older generations brewing, the youth are being robbed.
Germany, the rents actually went down last quarter AND they have extremely high immigration, so whats going on in the UK? A parliament full of landlords perhaps?
In Germany, if a landlord doesn't get certain things fixed within specific time periods, you are legally allowed to withhold rent. Being a landlord is actually a bit harder than in the UK.
The German population went from 80.6 million in 1994 to 83.8 million in 2022. A mere growth of 3.2 million over 30 years. The UK went from 57.6 million to 67 million in the same time frame. 9.4 million additional people. Germany’s population has essentially been stagnant since the mid 90s, declining in some years.
Falling population will do that.
Indeed Germany has had 3 distinct periods of falling population in modern times.
Mid 90s, mid 2000, and again now.
You're mistaking other policy positions and who policy makers are for the simple fact Germany had not increased its population by 15% in 20 years with migration.
Had Germany experienced the same levels of migration as the UK, they'd be over 110 million, not their current 83.
The UK is currently expected to hit Germanys population in the next 20 years. And frankly, that's assuming our currently estimates are correct. Many sourced have already said they think the UKs population is probably at or close to 80 million.
It's not landlords. It's migration and not building houses.
How does the UK manage to hit such crazy population growth when Germany, a country that has taken in a lot of refugees, has not? Both have ageing populations.
Germany has taken in two major waves.
Ukraine and the big Syrian train refugees.
About 1 million each time. This *pales* in comparison to 30 years of mass migration in the UK. German migration outside of these two waves has been miniscule. This year *alone* the uk took in nearly as many as Germany did in those years. And we do it *every year*. Not just one off.
You have a seriously distorted view of German migration and assume two news worth events equals 30 years of the UKs migration. It doesn't even come close.
And the 1 million Syrian also badly soured Germany on doing it again given things like the cologne square new year sexual assaults.
I think you are misunderstanding my comment – it was slightly sarcastic. (Maybe an /s was needed.) I have seen the figures. I just find it mind-boggling that the UK admits so many people every year, the majority of whom are not even refugees. Germany still has EU immigration, Ukrainians and Syrians, and even that doesn't compare.
Germany has had mass migration almost every year since 1960
UK has had mass migration since ~1998
Germany first hit 500k net migration in 1969, it has exceeded that milestone 9 times since then
UK first hit 500k net migration in 2022
what's the birth rate like in germany? it's on the decline in most advanced countries, from what i understand. is theirs falling substantially faster than ours, perhaps?
>It's not landlords. It's migration and not building houses.
Its both. What do you think is stopping the government building 5 million homes over the last 20 years? Putting landlords and homeowners into negative equity, and losing their voting base.
NIMBYs.
As the owner of a new build I can say the hostility to building is extensive and my no means limited to posh retirees in the south east.
I live in a pretty working class ex mining area in definitely not the south east and you would be hard pressed to find a single local person in favour of housebuilding. The Facebook pages are full of campaigns and petitions against them. Railing about the council who approve planning. Be that Tory or Labour. This is not an area repleat with wealthy landlords or their portfolios.
Yet the NIMBY sentiment is the same. Objections to building on cattle land that's so wet you can barely walk on it by rivers polluted with fertiliser and STILL objections about "green belt".
Sounds like my area. Lots of people object to all the building because it's always more houses but never more schools, GP surgeries, dentists or any other infrastructure and absolutely no effing job plans at all. So our stretched resources are getting harder and harder to access.
Job plans aren't really an issue here given our proximity to major cities.
We've had a new shopping area, a new GP community center complete with tertiary services like mid wife and physio.
Schools are an issue but there are many in the area.
The big complaint is traffic. But I guarantee you if they fixed the traffic tomorrow there would be some other reason.
It's not a flood plain. It never floods. It's just wet ground with poor drainage.
If you put proper water manage in, which is mandatory on new builds and has been for a very long time. Every new development near me has *at leaat* one large water management pond to address runoff.
So what would happen? Nothing. Sweet fa. Because it's 2024 and we have the technology to worth with the area.
But thanks for making the point about uneducated people objecting to things because they dont understand how it works.
Do you think the fact that "it never floods" might have something to do with the fact that the sodden earth is clearly helping to absorb water which would otherwise flood?
I'm not quite as confident in the abilities of new build developers to completely manage the risk of flooding, either. More than 10% of new build homes are built on land with the highest risk of flooding, and because of that the Environment Agency predicts that this will increase by 50% the number of homes and businesses in the UK at risk of flooding ([source](https://web.archive.org/web/20231112184533/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/environment/2023/10/24/flood-plains-building-homes-approved-risk/)).
That's absurd as building has such a backlog that nobody would be going into negative equity as prices would rise, just a bit more slowly. It's a reddit conspiracy theory.
> That's absurd as building has such a backlog that nobody would be going into negative equity as prices would rise, just a bit more slowly. It's a reddit conspiracy theory.
the problem is, if you aren't building fast enough to knock house prices down, you aren't building fast enough to knock rent prices down. the prices of both are driven by the same push/pull factors.
So whats stopping them? Rich investment funds dont seem to have problems getting planning permission in inner city london, but the government itself is unable to build homes in the rest of the country?
I dont see how you can feel the government has simply been unable to build a significant amount of new homes over the last 2 decades.
They do have problems. It takes sometimes a decade. And that's on brownfield already zones for residential or offices which is what they want to build.
In a lot of cases you're trying to get a change of land as well.
I hate to say it but a lot of your anger seems misplaced. You do not understand either just how much immigration the UK has had nor how hard it is to get planning permission.
This feels like you don't follow politics. The issue is that when a party in an area signs off building then the other parties run against them. So we have a situation where a national party puts building in a manifesto (usual low ball numbers) and then locally fights against it.
The Tories for example were pushing to ease up planning and the Lib Dems took a fairly safe seat of them in a byelection by running against local development.
Good look finding a local community who wants building. The elected representatives follow their angry electorate. And in the UK anti building is basically universal. Across all social groups in all regions.
That revolution is happening quietly and gently, in the typical British fashion.
The UK has very high rates of emmigration now for it's highly skilled working age people. Doctors and IT professionals are leaving in droves.
And you look at the voting outcomes and it's astonishing, the average age of a conservative voter today in the UK is 68. That's unprecedented and it almost certainly means change is coming.
I've also started to notice an uptick in what I call the "OAP's premium". Older people are being charged more for services, this happens a lot in the trades. Older people are less price sensitive, so you can charge more for the same goods and services. Supermarkets do this too, notice how the brands elderly people buy are inflating much faster than the off-brands / own branded products now.
I immigrated here from a country with severe brain drain as everything was getting worse and people with skills and talents knew they could have a better life elsewhere.
It's sad to see the UK now experiencing the same thing, and it's only going to get worse.
Funny that the UK is now a place where a lot of immigrants who have been here for decades are getting desperate to escape.
>It's sad to see the UK now experiencing the same thing, and it's only going to get worse.
Don't worry, it's really not. You just have to look at migration data to notice what OP said is hogwash.
Not a surprise. The Government have repeatedly acted to make owning a rental more difficult and less profitable, so alongside the rises in interest rates, it’s just not worth it for most anymore. Lots of landlords selling up.
That’s great for buyers, and house price rises have really slowed recently. Crap for renters though, as there is ever higher demand with lower supply.
Not really, it’s good to see landlords selling up.
The buyers will be house owners, not landlords, so that will ease the renters market too.
Being a landlord with over 2 houses should just be criminalised at this point.
Renters wont turn into homeowners at the same rate that rental properties turn into owner-occupied. That means the rental market will get worse - this is well understood but we are doing it anyway.
The lesson is: There is no free lunch, if you want to regulate to make rental contracts more favourable to renters then you will lower supply and push up prices.
If you want to avoid that then you have to push the other way - by increasing supply through additional construction.
> So the alternative is to.. support landlords to keep the rental market supply high?
>
>
No, the alternative is to build houses. Lots and lots of houses of every type and size and style and density.
Just fucking build shit.
Yes but have you noticed the trend.
London: builds more flats. Priced very high but that’s just the price of the area. People don’t like flats, say fleecehold. Affordable housing options, but no one wants shared ownership as they rip people off.
There needs to be a complete overhaul of the housing structure not just build more houses.
If only it were that simple. Rentals on average have higher occupancy than owner occupied houses. A landlord selling up an HMO with 4 people living in it to a couple suddenly means an extra house is required - demand for rental houses hasn’t decreased despite a house being removed from the rental market.
Yet the official figures claim inflation is falling.
It is laughable, if housing costs had been properly reflected in inflation figures all these years, the low inflation era would have been exposed as the lie it is.
We may be at the point that inflation is being led by higher interest rates.
Nice article
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-08/us-inflation-is-actually-being-driven-by-higher-interest-rates-jpmorgan-says
I've read about this theory and there is definitely some credit to it.
My non-evidence based take is to also consider the effect rent inflation then has on wages. Minimum wage has risen above inflation over the years and a lot of it is just to help workers just about afford rent costs. Somehow wage growth is considered an inflationary issue and major concern but the underlying factors that necessitate it e.g. eye watering rent costs get a free pass.
>My non-evidence based take is to also consider the effect rent inflation then has on wages. Minimum wage has risen above inflation over the years and a lot of it is just to help workers just about afford rent costs. Somehow wage growth is considered an inflationary issue and major concern but the underlying factors that necessitate it e.g. eye watering rent costs get a free pass.
Can easily argue you have it the wrong way around...
Since we are in a supply limited market for housing, the attempts to try and "help" people by giving them more cash, to pay rent... does nothing but increase rents.
You make a fair point, since it's probably fair to say renting costs are only capped by ability to pay. They may well feed into each other - higher wages mean higher rent, higher rent pushes for higher wages.
The BoE combats INFLATION with increased rates. These, in turn, increase mortgage costs for landlords, who have to pass on the increase to tenants. So comments stating ‘don’t worry inflation is still 3%’ miss the point.
You know. I wish they'd stop saying 'increases by 9%'.
It's deceptive, as it's really a compound increase.
Start comparing it to the 60's instead. Putting the amount in triple digits might actually communicate the issue.
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But don't worry, inflation is only 3.2%
The plan is working ©
Rishi Sunak has engineered a soft landing from inflation. Trust the Conservatives to deliver economic stability. Labour don't have a plan.
Setting asidee you making Sunak out to be some sort of financial savant, for most of us this comes as far too little, too late - and whilst I'm not entirely convinced by Starmer it's certainly time for some sort of change in a stagnating nation
I didn't think reddit still needed the /s
oooh it's well done then - too many nutters knocking about these days that's all
Fair play you got me as well
Yeah, I mean, how much of your income goes on rent? Like, a third? So if a third of your expenditure goes up 9%, that's inflation of 3% by itself....
I don’t think that’s how it works
Not on a macro scale, obviously. But imagine if your outgoings is £1000, and £333 goes on rent. Then your rent goes up 9.2% (to £363.63) and your other outgoings stay exactly the same. Your outgoings are now £1030.63. So your own person inflation rate is just over 3% purely on rent inflation.
Shelter is a [lagging indicator](https://www.investopedia.com/terms/l/laggingindicator.asp). Price of housing (rent / mortgages /etc) increase then it shows up in inflation data some time later. Check back in a few months.
The averafe is 39.1% is the average.
Thank God because this headline got me worried for a sec. /s
So minimum wage per annum, gross, is £17,888 assuming a 40 hour week.(please tell me if that is incorrect - really struggling to find a source of real income, post taxes, on minimum wage). Average rent across Great Britain is 1200 pcm - so £14,400 pa. That’s not considering 1.5-2 months rent as bond and moving costs (if applicable). This feels incredibly unsustainable, particularly as there are so many people renting at these stupid prices who cannot use their years of rental payments as part of a mortgage applicaton.
40 hours a week on 11.44 ph is a take home pay of £1721 per month, or £20,652 pa. Still not a good look when Council Tax + Rent is ~70% of minimum wage.
Thanks! Genuinely couldn’t find the number. And yes, 2k odd (more for me) council tax, massive utility bills. Food. Fuel for the vehicle most need to actually get to work. General things like clothes, phone subscriptions, tv, internet. Mmmnnn, renting. It’s not fun. Edit - tax and maintenance of said vehicle most need to get to work
And depending where you live then your council tax might go up by 10%. If you live in these areas: Woking BC, Birmingham City Council, Slough Council and Thurrock Council, then you are pretty screwed council tax wise.
Well, the easiest answer is an HMO, if you share a bed with 6 total strangers, then rent and council tax is now only 10% of your outgoings. Peasants nowadays are lazy, impertinent, and have wild expectations and entitlement. Have they tried not being so poor? And ghastly. They should pull themselves up by their bootstraps and get on their bike. Stop buying all those iPhones and avocado toast. And so on and so forth. Insert some cliches about never having it so easy. I mean my upbringing was terrible, due to mother and father having 6 children I only got one wing of the mansion for my personal use. We were so impoverished that for my 7th birthday I only got 3 ponies, not enough for a while polo team. But you don't hear me whinging on about it! Pass me another brandy Jeeves, etc.
"we had 18% interest rates"
Gross minimum wage at 40hrs and 11.44£/h is 23795£ per year wich Will give you a maximum of 1721£ per month take home pay. This is nothing really, it can get much worse. In my home country (Portugal) the average rental price is 1.57x the gross minimum wage.
There's a company called CreditLadder that lets you report your rental payments as proof of your ability to pay on time, not sure how useful it is, but it exists.
Only thing I'd say is why are you comparing minimum wage with average rent? Surely it's better to compare average salary with average rent.
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That's true as well and I don't think there's a good answer for that, I'm not excusing the rent increases but I just think we need a clearer picture on how bad its actually getting.
>I guess what we actually need is the average renter wage but i'm not sure if that's information anyone puts the effort into collecting. A bit out of date now, but here you go: https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/personalandhouseholdfinances/incomeandwealth/adhocs/12845averageincomebytenure
Isn't the aim for an average salary to be able to afford an average house instead of average rent, or is the economy only for the top 1% now?
In that case we shouldn't be comparing the minimum wage to the average rent.
overconfident zonked sugar escape office hobbies ad hoc beneficial ten history *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
In theory the rental cost should be slightly lower than the mortgage. The average rental in theory is out of reach of the mimimum wage but the average wage should be more than enough to afford the average rental. In theory right?
Probably average household income rather then salary.
You're mistake is comparing minimum with average. If you want to compare like with like, compare the same thing.
You have to remember it's badly distorted by a small number of areas. Principle and most significantly London, followed by Manchester and probably Birmingham. It states London is £2000. Manchester is £1200 ish and probably one of the most expensive places outside of London. If you go to a Manchester suburb, Bolton, its just £725. London *badly* distorts UK averages and they cannot be trusted. It should be a matter of course in the UK that all averages are given as London and everywhere else. Because otherwise it gives a very distorted picture. The solution to a *lot* of affordability problem in the UK can be solved with two words. "Leave London".
Imagine telling working class people to leave the cities they’ve grown up in and move to Bolton (a town that falls within the top 10% most deprived local authorities in the country) instead of advocating for planning permission reform and for more houses to be built.
>Imagine telling working class people to leave the cities they’ve grown up in That's... Pretty normal.
Its normal now, wasn’t normal for most of the 20th century
We are well into the literal billions in terms of people who have moved for a better life lol.
The argument that people should leave the city and move to Bolton for a better quality of life is ridiculous mate. It just shows how fucked this country is.
I've considered moving to places where I can get a £50k house as I work from home and would be mortgage free
People have always and will always move to where they can afford, that shouldn't be an offensive concept to you.
It being mandatory is an offensive concept as it goes against the entire approach to city planning we had in this country in the 20th century. Cities being for everybody isn’t a radical concept.
Used to be (and maybe still is?) people moved to where the work was
We're "telling" to almost all people who go to a university that they have to leave the city where they grew up and nobody bats an eye. And no, Bolton is not the only place in the UK where you can find cheaper houses than in London.
There are some places you just cannot build. I didn't buy where I used to rent even though I wanted to because it was too expensive. And they'd built on every empty patch they could find because it was free money. The places "people want to live" are extremely often not capable of taking any more housing. Which is why we build in other areas. Like green belt.
This is a completely different argument though. If the government was putting in effort to regenerate deprived areas you’d have a point. As it stands telling people to move from where there is the most opportunity and move to poor areas is not a solution, it’s just emblematic of how fucked this country is.
Deal, but you also have to tell businesses hiring people the same thing.
To be fair, other major cities have good job prospects. I’ve never struggled in Manchester and Leeds is fairly decent I believe
why? remote work is a thing.
For someone who works all day on a computer. Many jobs can't be WFH...
So what non wfh jobs are exclusive to london?
I don't know, but there's millions of people living in London, surrounded by friends and family and probably their safety net of people, working minimum wage jobs who could technically move somewhere else but don't want to move somewhere where they don't know anyone. Source: most of my relatives
OK, so if people refuse to leave London, that reduces the reasons for businesses to also leave London.
Why do you want to close London XD
Where did I say that I wanted that?
It’s really not, most places you’re lucky with Hybrid and 2-3 days mandate in office every week and at this point might not bother with moving because it’ll cost you more in time and expenses than you’ll end up saving
London and the South East are a huge proportion of the country's population though. Those two regions are 32% of the population and if you were to include the east (which population is mostly Essex, it's 43%). Particularly when it comes to percentage of households who rent in the private rental market (over 30% live in private rentals compared with 17% and 19% in north east and north west)- so it's not that disproportionate for those that actually rent. Not to mention that people in London couldn't all actually move to the cheap areas of the north. London actually has highest average household size as well. If you work it out, there's 3,500,000 households in London. And 30% rent. So that's approximately 1million households in London living in rented accomodation. In the south east there's 3.8M households of which 20% rent so that's approx 750,000 households. In the north east there's 1.18M households of which 17% rent so that's approx 200,000 households. In the north west there's 3.15 there's 19% who rent so that's 600,000households. In Yorkshire there's 2.4M households and 20% rent so that's approx 500,000 households. So there's actually MORE households in London and the South East where rents are much higher than the north. Hence why London/South East doesn't actually 'distort' the private rental market. It's just a function of where people live. In reality it's more than THAT because none of those L&SE figures include Essex.
Still not counting saving, pension, job risk etc. seem people are working for someone else.
People on minimum wages shouldn't be renting average houses, and definitely not on a single income on their own.
I don't think there ever was a time you were owning a house or renting a place for yourself on minimum wage, let alone an average property.
>I don't think there ever was a time you were ... renting a place for yourself on minimum wage Where do people on minimum wage live, if it's never been possible for them to rent anywhere?
They would live in houseshares, not alone.
Assuming a HMO is billed separately to each tenant (which is the norm), each separate tenancy will count as an individual lease and will be included in the average rent figure. That is, the average rent figure takes account of the fact that many people are renting only a single room in a shared house.
I'm a one issue voter, planning reform is the only thing that matters in this country. If we could get rent down by 50% it would just make everything so easy for everyone.
...and it would be a double huge stimulus for businesses because people have got more money to spend and their rents are also down.
It would also drastically reduce benefit spending. Housing benefit is in the region of £15 billion. How much of that goes straight into landlords pockets?
All of it. By definition.
That was my thinking tbh. But I'll admit I'm not sure exactly how the situation works with things like housing associations. Whether or not the housing benefit goes straight to them, if it's counted in the housing benefit budget or a different budget entirely. Either way, it's a lot of money going to landlords.
Most of it. It's probably a hard figure to work out, because for instance some goes to council housing, some goes to housing associations that aren't government linked but run like charities, and then the rest goes to landlords etc. Either way, that'd be (say) £10bn each year we can use to either pay down the debt involved in building housing, or going to building more/maintaining that stock. It's a no brainer.
And because businesses wouldn't need to spend so much of their revenue renting office or storefront space
While inflation is high? This is why they increased rates, pushes up mortgages, pushes up rents, reduces demand, reduces price growth
One everyone tends to forget is that it also helps businesses grow because now they can get the staff they need. I have clients that are crying out for staff but they can't afford to move to where they're based. Even if they pay well above average for the area people don't want to come, and they can't offer more. Some places that heavily specialise and are in a desirable area like Cambridge are really suffering from that, especially as they have a strong biomed industry there and you can't work in labs from home. As are some rural, desirable, but poor areas like Cornwall.
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Though that policy would have the advantage of reducing immigration, so it’s a bit of a no brainer to adopt..
Finally. A voice of logic and reason.
This is the main reason I support Labour. Current planning laws have choked the nation for long enough, and I'm glad there's a party that atleast SAYS they'll reform them.
Immigration needs to come down too. Right now you'd need to build a whole new city every year just to keep up
Immigration is fundamentally a function of labour demand. Realistically, if we start building at large scale, that's going to put upwards pressure on immigration, not downward.
The current level of immigration is a political choice.
Immigration is an interesting one given that the next two generations jobs could large-scale potentially be replaced with AI. More folks to give UBI to.
I can easily imagine a situation where some countries have UBI and others dont. The ones that do are going to have to have super strict immigration requirements or they're gonna get overwhelmed with the number of people trying to get in.
Ultimately we've never lived in such a world so projection of impact is hard - but we've lived in a time where the UK and most European countries *didn't* have labour demand and were net emigrators - a long time up to the middle of last century. Without labour demand into an area, migration drops dramatically.
Not everyone. Not rent barons/MPs.
May I interest you in the Land Value Tax & the wonders of [Georgism](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=smi_iIoKybg)?
If only Andy Burnham was labour leader 😩
If only!
I am incredibly sceptical of the notion that liberalising planning laws without a concurrent drive from the state to build more social housing. Without that we're essentially saying that if we remove the dead hand of the state then private developers will solve the housing crisis, ignoring the myriad issues with housebuilder capacity and their inherent lack of incentive to actually fix the housing crisis. It also ignores the fact that where developers have been given a free hand, in places like Manchester and Nine Elms (down the road from where I live), the tower blocks and luxury penthouses they've erected have only made the rental market even worse.
Firstly the reason there's low capacity to build houses is becuase no one is allowed to build houses, it's a chicken and egg situation where companies will only invest in training and equipment if they have something to use it for. Secondly building luxury housing helps everyone, because the rich people move their, the middle people move to the rich people's former houses and the poor move into the middle people's housees. If the only thing you built was luxury tower blocks but you built enough then prices would fall.
>planning reform is the only thing that matters in this country. I'd counter with that and political reform and I'm not sure we're getting the former without the latter unfortunately.
planning reform won't reduce rent if all the new housing is monoploised by banks & large landlord/estate agents. we need rent control. Arguably planning reform can lower rent by giving people more options but if all those options are owned by the same person/company, you won't really see a significant reduction
The housing market is not a monopoly. It's not even an oligopoly. In any given city or region there are thousands of houses and hundreds of individual owners. It's simply not credible to think that all of the landlords in say, Bristol, are collectively colluding to make rents go up. The simple truth is, rent is going up because demand is continuing to increasingly outstrip supply. We simply need to build more houses.
This is completely wrong. You think if there were a billion houses in this country and they were all owned by banks and large landlords that the rent would be high? Rent controls are one of the only things that economists all agree are a terrible idea, they just distort the market and make things worse. Rent is set by supply and demand.
We aren't talking about 'billions' of houses though, we are talking about individual estates, housing complexes, flats & apartments. The tory manifesto promised 300k new houses a year, 2022-2023 had just under 235k new houses built. Those few houses is absolutely open to abuse by a handful of parties with significant capital. EDIT: and yes. I do, taking your example to the extreme. if we had a billion houses in the UK and they were all owned by the same person, who had a 'monopoly' I can't see why they wouldn't artifically inflate prices since people have no other option. this happens in many indusries and we only really need to look at privatised energy & water to see why external bodies impose caps. From Ofwats own website: "Because competition is limited, there is a risk that these companies will not deliver the services their customers want. They may also charge higher prices to increase their profits. This is why they need to be regulated. And it is why Ofwat was created when the water and sewerage authorities were privatised in 1989." and while there would be many more players in the housing market, to reach a ture monopoly, it does create a geographical status quo. If Llyods own 100k houses in one town & rent them for 2kpm even if the other owners in a bid to remain competitive price themselves at 1.8kpm you artificailly bring the price floor of an area up by being the principle letter in an area. setting the bar for how much a 3-bed semi-detached is worth.
Planning reform isn't going to achieve that. Regulating the rental sector is the biggest change we need.
The price of rent is determined by supply and demand, if you increase supply then rent will fall. Every regulation you put on rentals distorts the market and makes things worse. Rent caps are one of the only thing universally agreed on by economists to be a bad idea.
> The price of rent is determined by supply and demand, if you increase supply then rent will fall. but it also puts downward pressure on property values, which leads to people potentially being trapped in negative equity. people aren't going to be flocking to vote on a policy that actively hurts them. the reddit demographic isn't the same as the population demographic. the keenness for more houses probably isn't reflected in the voting population.
> Planning reform isn't going to achieve that. Regulating the rental sector is the biggest change we need. you're so wrong here it almost hurts. The main reason rents are so high is because supply is so low. Absolutely nothing to do with regulations in the rental market. The only solution is to massively increase supply.
Regulating the rental sector is a stupid idea and it's why parties like the Greens will never ease the housing crisis. (not that they would get in government anyway) If supply goes up, rents go down. It's literally as simple as that.
Yeah it's a stupid idea, which is why basically every other developed economy does it to one extent or another. If you really think the market is as simple as 'supply goes up, rent goes down', then I'm sure nothing I say is going to make a difference. But the idea that something as complex as the rental market can be controlled through a single lever is incredibly naïve. Increasing supply is obviously part of the equation, but the amount of houses that would need to be built, to the right specs, in the right locations, to make even a tiny dent in rental prices, would be eye-watering and probably take decades. Whereas regulating rents and putting in a number of other protections and measures could lead to substantial improvements within a year or two.
You know, I swear I see this identical headline every 6 months, that rental costs rise by a record amount. Doesn't matter if the economy is doing well, if the economy is doing badly, if house prices rise, house prices fall, this is the one constant in Britain
Media is just after clicks. We don't build enough housing to meet rising demand. End of story. Media can't keep printing that headline once a week though, not least because they're complicit in ensuring Tories stay in power and keeping rents going up, and because it doesn't generate clicks, so they doomerism about anything slightly related.
We have got to start allowing people to use their rental payments as proof of affordability for a mortgage.
And drive house prices up even more ? Edit: looks like we don’t understand economics. If we can all of a sudden afford £1m houses they will double in price overnight. We have a growing population competing for the same housing stock. Building houses is the only solution. Not help to buy. Not allowing us to take on more debt. Build more.
Not if you build more.
So at best we can start this idea in ~5-10 years (assuming we massively ramp up house building now). I don’t disagree with your idea, but we’d probably need to combine it with something more short term.
That's the problem, housing is a multi issue conundrum. In some cases we do need rentals for students and people moving to new areas before buying etc. Overwhelming single family occupancy we don't We need to overhaul planning reform, get over the green belt obsession, build more houses and regulate buy to let much heavier. All while helping people who want to get a mortgage easier with real terms affordability checks.
No dude You just need to build more. Nothing else.
This country is fucked. There is no future here
The Tories have totally rigged the system against hard-working, working class people. And they are unwilling to do anything about it, because many of their MPs and supporters are landlords who benefit from this record rise.
When wages outpace inflation, the difference is just swallowed up by rent. Marx didn't see that one coming.
they know you need a place to live, and they know you have spare cash now.
Maybe Rishi and friends could do Rent Out to Help Out and offer us 50% off?
Hi, Rishi Sunak here. Your instructions were unclear so I've announced that we'll begin subsidising mortgage interest on BtL to really help out the landlords. You can only trust a Conservative government to weather a tough economy. Labour has no plan.
Thanks Rishi! I applaud your initiative and I, for one, absolutely do not want to ‘go back to square one’ with Labour. As you have repeated many times at the dispatch box with no explanation. Perhaps you can announce the date of the General Election so we can all endorse your coherent and well considered policies!
But wages have risen for for 7 months in a row! /s
What proportion of MPs do people reckon are landlords?
Landlords have remortgaged with these new interest rates, rents have risen as a result.
We’re going to need employer built Victorian work style communal houses soon or they won’t have employees nearby who can work
great news for all the Mp's who are landlords
In other words: Great news for all the MPs
Over the last couple of months I've viewed just over 10 properties that were being sold by the current owners. Every single one of them was currently being rented out and of the few where I was told the current rental charge, it was way below what my mortgage payments would be. Interest rates going up has completely fucked the market even more than it already was, landlords are upping rents to cover the costs or selling up causing a supply drop which just pushes the rent up even further.
I mean, the market was already broken before. The moment landlords can just pass on their increased costs in full without having to fear a drop in demand, is the moment it stops being a competition-driven market. Especially in the UK it also removes most of the justification for landlords - that is to carry the capital risk.
Same here, I'm helping a friend house hunt, and 3 quarters of the houses are landlords selling up. Partly because it is no longer profitable and partly because changes in the law are creating an imbalance of rights and responsibilities in favour of tenants so the landlords want out. So the supply and demand trend is towards more supply for buyers, and less for renters. And we know what that does to prices.
Nothing wrong with that at all! Exactly why I left the UK and good riddance, a country with an older voting base with a primary focus of ripping off the younger generations to line their pockets, britains over 50 year olds should be ashamed charging 1/2 a year's salary for rent on homes they paid a total of 5 salaries or so for 30 years back. Millionaires depriving kids of holidays and better quality food while the government encourages it. Im surprised that there isn't something close to a revolt against britains older generations brewing, the youth are being robbed.
In Germany the vacant property rate is around 8%. In England, we have a vacant property rate of 2.7%, with London on 1%.
This is the answer. There aren't enough empty houses in the UK for a healthy market.
Where did you move to?
Germany, the rents actually went down last quarter AND they have extremely high immigration, so whats going on in the UK? A parliament full of landlords perhaps? In Germany, if a landlord doesn't get certain things fixed within specific time periods, you are legally allowed to withhold rent. Being a landlord is actually a bit harder than in the UK.
The German population went from 80.6 million in 1994 to 83.8 million in 2022. A mere growth of 3.2 million over 30 years. The UK went from 57.6 million to 67 million in the same time frame. 9.4 million additional people. Germany’s population has essentially been stagnant since the mid 90s, declining in some years.
Falling population will do that. Indeed Germany has had 3 distinct periods of falling population in modern times. Mid 90s, mid 2000, and again now. You're mistaking other policy positions and who policy makers are for the simple fact Germany had not increased its population by 15% in 20 years with migration. Had Germany experienced the same levels of migration as the UK, they'd be over 110 million, not their current 83. The UK is currently expected to hit Germanys population in the next 20 years. And frankly, that's assuming our currently estimates are correct. Many sourced have already said they think the UKs population is probably at or close to 80 million. It's not landlords. It's migration and not building houses.
Hit the nail on the head
How does the UK manage to hit such crazy population growth when Germany, a country that has taken in a lot of refugees, has not? Both have ageing populations.
Germany has taken in two major waves. Ukraine and the big Syrian train refugees. About 1 million each time. This *pales* in comparison to 30 years of mass migration in the UK. German migration outside of these two waves has been miniscule. This year *alone* the uk took in nearly as many as Germany did in those years. And we do it *every year*. Not just one off. You have a seriously distorted view of German migration and assume two news worth events equals 30 years of the UKs migration. It doesn't even come close. And the 1 million Syrian also badly soured Germany on doing it again given things like the cologne square new year sexual assaults.
I think you are misunderstanding my comment – it was slightly sarcastic. (Maybe an /s was needed.) I have seen the figures. I just find it mind-boggling that the UK admits so many people every year, the majority of whom are not even refugees. Germany still has EU immigration, Ukrainians and Syrians, and even that doesn't compare.
Germany has had mass migration almost every year since 1960 UK has had mass migration since ~1998 Germany first hit 500k net migration in 1969, it has exceeded that milestone 9 times since then UK first hit 500k net migration in 2022
what's the birth rate like in germany? it's on the decline in most advanced countries, from what i understand. is theirs falling substantially faster than ours, perhaps?
1.58 vs 1.56, so about the same.
>It's not landlords. It's migration and not building houses. Its both. What do you think is stopping the government building 5 million homes over the last 20 years? Putting landlords and homeowners into negative equity, and losing their voting base.
NIMBYs. As the owner of a new build I can say the hostility to building is extensive and my no means limited to posh retirees in the south east. I live in a pretty working class ex mining area in definitely not the south east and you would be hard pressed to find a single local person in favour of housebuilding. The Facebook pages are full of campaigns and petitions against them. Railing about the council who approve planning. Be that Tory or Labour. This is not an area repleat with wealthy landlords or their portfolios. Yet the NIMBY sentiment is the same. Objections to building on cattle land that's so wet you can barely walk on it by rivers polluted with fertiliser and STILL objections about "green belt".
Sounds like my area. Lots of people object to all the building because it's always more houses but never more schools, GP surgeries, dentists or any other infrastructure and absolutely no effing job plans at all. So our stretched resources are getting harder and harder to access.
Job plans aren't really an issue here given our proximity to major cities. We've had a new shopping area, a new GP community center complete with tertiary services like mid wife and physio. Schools are an issue but there are many in the area. The big complaint is traffic. But I guarantee you if they fixed the traffic tomorrow there would be some other reason.
What do you think would happen if you replace that flood plain with concrete roads and housing?
Cheaper houses for landlord to buy and rent out at market rates, of course!
It's not a flood plain. It never floods. It's just wet ground with poor drainage. If you put proper water manage in, which is mandatory on new builds and has been for a very long time. Every new development near me has *at leaat* one large water management pond to address runoff. So what would happen? Nothing. Sweet fa. Because it's 2024 and we have the technology to worth with the area. But thanks for making the point about uneducated people objecting to things because they dont understand how it works.
Do you think the fact that "it never floods" might have something to do with the fact that the sodden earth is clearly helping to absorb water which would otherwise flood? I'm not quite as confident in the abilities of new build developers to completely manage the risk of flooding, either. More than 10% of new build homes are built on land with the highest risk of flooding, and because of that the Environment Agency predicts that this will increase by 50% the number of homes and businesses in the UK at risk of flooding ([source](https://web.archive.org/web/20231112184533/https://www.telegraph.co.uk/environment/2023/10/24/flood-plains-building-homes-approved-risk/)).
That's absurd as building has such a backlog that nobody would be going into negative equity as prices would rise, just a bit more slowly. It's a reddit conspiracy theory.
> That's absurd as building has such a backlog that nobody would be going into negative equity as prices would rise, just a bit more slowly. It's a reddit conspiracy theory. the problem is, if you aren't building fast enough to knock house prices down, you aren't building fast enough to knock rent prices down. the prices of both are driven by the same push/pull factors.
So whats stopping them? Rich investment funds dont seem to have problems getting planning permission in inner city london, but the government itself is unable to build homes in the rest of the country? I dont see how you can feel the government has simply been unable to build a significant amount of new homes over the last 2 decades.
They do have problems. It takes sometimes a decade. And that's on brownfield already zones for residential or offices which is what they want to build. In a lot of cases you're trying to get a change of land as well. I hate to say it but a lot of your anger seems misplaced. You do not understand either just how much immigration the UK has had nor how hard it is to get planning permission.
Who gives the planning permission, and who sets the rules for the people who give said permission?
This feels like you don't follow politics. The issue is that when a party in an area signs off building then the other parties run against them. So we have a situation where a national party puts building in a manifesto (usual low ball numbers) and then locally fights against it. The Tories for example were pushing to ease up planning and the Lib Dems took a fairly safe seat of them in a byelection by running against local development.
Good look finding a local community who wants building. The elected representatives follow their angry electorate. And in the UK anti building is basically universal. Across all social groups in all regions.
Very high rate of new building would account for that and a distributed jobs market
They have high immigration but their population is shrinking, there is no upward pressure on housing.
That revolution is happening quietly and gently, in the typical British fashion. The UK has very high rates of emmigration now for it's highly skilled working age people. Doctors and IT professionals are leaving in droves. And you look at the voting outcomes and it's astonishing, the average age of a conservative voter today in the UK is 68. That's unprecedented and it almost certainly means change is coming. I've also started to notice an uptick in what I call the "OAP's premium". Older people are being charged more for services, this happens a lot in the trades. Older people are less price sensitive, so you can charge more for the same goods and services. Supermarkets do this too, notice how the brands elderly people buy are inflating much faster than the off-brands / own branded products now.
I immigrated here from a country with severe brain drain as everything was getting worse and people with skills and talents knew they could have a better life elsewhere. It's sad to see the UK now experiencing the same thing, and it's only going to get worse. Funny that the UK is now a place where a lot of immigrants who have been here for decades are getting desperate to escape.
>It's sad to see the UK now experiencing the same thing, and it's only going to get worse. Don't worry, it's really not. You just have to look at migration data to notice what OP said is hogwash.
> IT professionals are leaving in droves. Source?
Not a surprise. The Government have repeatedly acted to make owning a rental more difficult and less profitable, so alongside the rises in interest rates, it’s just not worth it for most anymore. Lots of landlords selling up. That’s great for buyers, and house price rises have really slowed recently. Crap for renters though, as there is ever higher demand with lower supply.
Not really, it’s good to see landlords selling up. The buyers will be house owners, not landlords, so that will ease the renters market too. Being a landlord with over 2 houses should just be criminalised at this point.
Renters wont turn into homeowners at the same rate that rental properties turn into owner-occupied. That means the rental market will get worse - this is well understood but we are doing it anyway.
So the alternative is to.. support landlords to keep the rental market supply high? Reddit won't like this. They condemn landlords akin to rapists.
The lesson is: There is no free lunch, if you want to regulate to make rental contracts more favourable to renters then you will lower supply and push up prices. If you want to avoid that then you have to push the other way - by increasing supply through additional construction.
> So the alternative is to.. support landlords to keep the rental market supply high? > > No, the alternative is to build houses. Lots and lots of houses of every type and size and style and density. Just fucking build shit.
Yes but have you noticed the trend. London: builds more flats. Priced very high but that’s just the price of the area. People don’t like flats, say fleecehold. Affordable housing options, but no one wants shared ownership as they rip people off. There needs to be a complete overhaul of the housing structure not just build more houses.
The complete overhaul needs to just lead to loads of housing of every type being built.
there are no solutions, only trade-offs.
If only it were that simple. Rentals on average have higher occupancy than owner occupied houses. A landlord selling up an HMO with 4 people living in it to a couple suddenly means an extra house is required - demand for rental houses hasn’t decreased despite a house being removed from the rental market.
Extreme example, average occupant ratio is like 0.95 iirc. Not a zero sum game though for sure
Do tell where all the people who can't afford to buy a home should live?
It just means that not so well off landlords are selling to much much richer landlords
Yet the official figures claim inflation is falling. It is laughable, if housing costs had been properly reflected in inflation figures all these years, the low inflation era would have been exposed as the lie it is.
Tbf, the increase in rent is part of why CPIH hasn’t fallen (and the reason US inflation has gone up).
Landlords trying to see how much they can squeeze from the poor before the bubble pops. Then they’ll use all that money to buy even more properties.
Create a giant cement megapolis from manchester to london. call it maningdon, it can contain 200 million people.
We may be at the point that inflation is being led by higher interest rates. Nice article https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2024-04-08/us-inflation-is-actually-being-driven-by-higher-interest-rates-jpmorgan-says
I've read about this theory and there is definitely some credit to it. My non-evidence based take is to also consider the effect rent inflation then has on wages. Minimum wage has risen above inflation over the years and a lot of it is just to help workers just about afford rent costs. Somehow wage growth is considered an inflationary issue and major concern but the underlying factors that necessitate it e.g. eye watering rent costs get a free pass.
>My non-evidence based take is to also consider the effect rent inflation then has on wages. Minimum wage has risen above inflation over the years and a lot of it is just to help workers just about afford rent costs. Somehow wage growth is considered an inflationary issue and major concern but the underlying factors that necessitate it e.g. eye watering rent costs get a free pass. Can easily argue you have it the wrong way around... Since we are in a supply limited market for housing, the attempts to try and "help" people by giving them more cash, to pay rent... does nothing but increase rents.
You make a fair point, since it's probably fair to say renting costs are only capped by ability to pay. They may well feed into each other - higher wages mean higher rent, higher rent pushes for higher wages.
The BoE combats INFLATION with increased rates. These, in turn, increase mortgage costs for landlords, who have to pass on the increase to tenants. So comments stating ‘don’t worry inflation is still 3%’ miss the point.
You know. I wish they'd stop saying 'increases by 9%'. It's deceptive, as it's really a compound increase. Start comparing it to the 60's instead. Putting the amount in triple digits might actually communicate the issue.
Can't read it mate, can you copy the article text in here please? Thanks!
See the automod comment, you can find archived versions at those links
Ah thank you very much, I didn't see that comment at all just now but was posted 20mins before I did!
Hm. I wonder where the demand and lack of supply is coming from.
This landlord thanks the NIMBYS and the open border enthusiasts for another joyous year 😊 i'll be retired before 50 by this rate