Housing benefit cuts are on the way

[Cyclone]

could this not have been in peoples minds when things were good and the future looking bright ?then all of a sudden the **** hits the fan no job,no savings and only benefit to survive on .then along comes the condems to take even more money off them putting them down even more ?

 

Yeah, maybe. Let her answer for herself though, I suspect that the answer will be different.

[mossdog]

sometimes i wish i was listening to the bile you come out with peace man

I don't do bile "man" I leave that to left whingers!...............I just come out with good old common sense,ever heard of it?

[ricgem2002]

I don't do bile "man" I leave that to left whingers!...............I just come out with good old common sense,ever heard of it?

yea pity you havent

[Wildcat]

Is this your excuse for Brown allowing house price inflation to run rampant? It's not even an excuse really, you just ask what someone else would have done different, as if that excuses his incompetence.

 

If there is a valid criticism in this regard it would only make sense if it was coming from someone that had consistently advocated the expansion of social housing.... ie the Left in the Labour party.

 

Gordon Brown got plenty wrong in my opinion, but the mudslinging at him from Tories that would have done nothing different is cheap, stupid and hypocritical.

[Cyclone]

the government can no longer afford to pay their rents either.

 

Why are rents so high? Is that because house prices are ridiculously out of kilter with average wages perchance?

 

 

What the Tories might have done differently, isn't to build more social housing, but might have been to stop the rampant house price inflation. Maybe by not creating the CPI and deliberately cutting mortgage repayments out of the inflation measure in order to pretend that everything was okay with the economy when it clearly was not. Using RPI would have shown high inflation, and interest rates would have been raised to reign it in. Houses would be affordable today, the whole collapse of the banking sector might have even been avoided as liar loans would have had little incentive to exist.

But don't worry, it's just mud slinging, and I'm sure you can use it as an excuse for criticising the hard decisions that have to be taken now.

[Wildcat]

What the Tories might have done differently, isn't to build more social housing, but might have been to stop the rampant house price inflation. Maybe by not creating the CPI and deliberately cutting mortgage repayments out of the inflation measure in order to pretend that everything was okay with the economy when it clearly was not. Using RPI would have shown high inflation, and interest rates would have been raised to reign it in. Houses would be affordable today, the whole collapse of the banking sector might have even been avoided as liar loans would have had little incentive to exist.

But don't worry, it's just mud slinging, and I'm sure you can use it as an excuse for criticising the hard decisions that have to be taken now.

 

The CPI was created in 1996 under the Tories and since interest rates are set by the Bank of England any criticism of those rates is more properly directed at them rather than Gordon Brown.

 

The main reports on the subject like the Barker report and the Calcutt review make no mention of any problems to do with CPI. If they would have ignored those reports to focus instead on fiddling about with interest rates then they would have totally missed the point, which is the lack of decent affordable housing. It is the basics of supply and demand.

[Cyclone]

I agree it's all about supply and demand. But the demand only existed because of irresponsible lending. Without that lending the market could not have overheated to the extent it did, without the ability to borrow a desire to own a house is not a demand from an economic perspective.

 

If RPI had continued to be used as a measure of inflation then as house prices increased the BoE would have raised interest rates to cool the economy and borrowing would have become more expensive, restraining the ability to borrow and thus reducing demand by stopping people borrowing.

 

Either way, the labour government failed to deliver on their statement about not allowing house prices to massively inflate, and ultimately plunged us into the recession we are slowly emerging from, and simultaneously spent all the surplus of the boom years leaving us broke.

[Bedders]

Not everyone has precognition.

 

I DO! I said to a lot of my friends & family during the time of the millenium onwards, that the amounts the banks were lending idiots who couldn't afford their mortagages would all end in tears. Everyone laughed at me as they continued with their 100% mortgages & 5x & 6x salary. What happened to the good old days of saving up a bit first & showing that you were capable of budgeting? The "everyone can have everything NOW!" had to have a price! Even in at the height of communism in USSR, not everyone was equal, so how the hell did everyone here expect that we could have it all now without there being a price to pay?

 

And when I say 'idiots' I use the term loosely with interest rates as low as they are....but in planning couldyou afford the payments if they were back at 13% like the 80s? That's responsible planning!

 

Back on topic....we are paying for this excess now.

[Bedders]

could this not have been in peoples minds when things were good and the future looking bright ?then all of a sudden the **** hits the fan no job,no savings and only benefit to survive on .then along comes the condems to take even more money off them putting them down even more ?

 

Can you tell me when things were good because i think i must have been in a coma! This country has been in serious debt since 1945 & budgets never get spend on what they should do. Consequence is a rubbish country that is plugging holes in the dycke when they appear!

 

You'll be telling me next that you HONESTLY believed that we were going to win the World Cup? Don't believe the HYPE with regard to anything connected to the country. It's all rhetoric. And before anyone accuses me of not been patriotic, I'm as much as the next person but choose to believe a bigger picture rather than one with a positive spin!

[Cyclone]

If you look at the long term debt it has steadily reduced from 1945 and has been a cyclical deficit for some time. Most modern countries run a cyclical deficit, it's nothing to be concerned about. The mistake labour have made is to continue to increase the deficit through the boom and risk turning it structural.