Affordable homes shortage: Government to reveal plans

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I'm sorry, what? Run that buy me again? The tax payer is underwriting the mortgages people will be able to get with lower deposits if they fail to make payments.

Sorry, what? Have I woken up yet? Have I missed something there?

Apparently the conservative government has missed the last four [LIFTED] years.

Jon

What I don't get is the LibDems being buttf*cked into going along with all of these idiotic ideas.

Seriously, this is just mental. Another mental idea in a long list of mental ideas.

Insurance against buyers defaulting on mortgages that they'll need only 5% deposit for being "funded by the Government". No, not the Government, us FFS.

What is with this obsession about buying houses?

FFS, 5% deposit? AAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHH!!!! You thick sh!ts tory boys!

So, what with the planning laws being thrown out of the window are we to expect estates going up on green belt being underwritten by the taxpayer?

It makes no sense.

I'd love to buy a house. Have enough for a 10% deposit so this would be perfect. But I doubt I'd trust anything the Govt did.

What's crap is mates who qualified earlier than me were able to get houses with 10% deposits rather than 25-50% they expect now.

Just saw a clip on Sky News about the housing problem. Two married GPs complaining that they are still living with the in-laws as they can't raise the 10% / 25-30k they need for a deposit.

First, they'll have a pretty good combined income. Next they could rent. Lastly, you don't have to buy a 3-4 bed detached home as your first bloody house. Ok so if they decided on a cheaper house it isn't going to help those people competing with them at the same level, but there are people out there a lot worse off with fewer choices.

Maggie was a silly cow to sell off council houses at less than their market value as it meant councils had to spend more money than they received buying new ones.

This plan seems to have the same level of stupidity. Ie tax payers subsidising private buyers homes. It's not fair and it's a waste of cash especially in this day and age. It'll artificially keep prices higher as people will offer what they can afford, plus what the government will underwrite rather than just what they can afford.

Actually she was very smart. Council house dwellers tend to vote labour, home owners tend to vote tory more often. She was manipulative and self-serving, but then she was a politician, what do you expect?


As the saying goes 'Those who have not learned from the mistakes of the past are destined to repeat them'. Pity they're doing it with our sodding money.

Jon

That applies equally to every penis that keeps voting Tory.

Yes but a lot of it is to do with mortgage. My boss is married and has two kids. He earns something like five times my income and despite this, can only get a max mortgage of around £160k. Funnily enough, that's the most that I can get and his deposit is bigger than mine. His credit score is perfect too so feck knows why he can't get a decent house. What's even more silly is that when he moves to Norfolk, he'll be earning around three times more than he earns now. FWIW the area he is moving to has places to rent but not suitable for raising kids in, otherwise he'd have gone with that option and after a couple of years, he'd have been able to buy a house outright with no mortgage whatsoever.

No one wants to lend and so no one can buy.

Exactly. Right now, nobody can get a mortgage that's at all useful given the price of houses. The banks won't lend because they know that this time round, if they feck it up there's nobody left to bail them out - they burned through all their friends last time, there's simply no money there to do it again. They've got no free safety net, so if they lend and screw it up, it's their arses that are on the bacon slicer. And bankers are very happy to risk other people's livelihoods but they're much, much more reticent to actually gamble on their own. Once their nuts are actually on the block they suddenly become incredibly 'risk averse'.

What of course is the sensible thing to do is find some way to get house prices down to slightly less ludicrous levels where people can actually afford to buy a house with a mortgage they can be reasonably expect to have no problems paying back. Given that's the sensible thing, what Clueless Tory Boys Inc are doing is exactly the opposite.

Jon

It was the "at less than market value" part I had a problem with. I've no issue with people being allowed to buy the council house they've lived in for years.

Well quite. She was using government funds to indirectly buy votes. Clever but not in any sense ethical.

Jon

I don't believe for a second that two people on GP wages can't save 30k between them. My missus and I saved more than that. I was on a good wage (less than a GP though) and she was on a crap wage. We did it by not wasting money and renting a small house with cheap-ish rent.

My understanding was that most of the properties were so expensive to maintain and the rents so low, the government would have been financially better off just giving them away and building new ones than keeping them. Selling them cheap ensured most many of the tenants could afford to buy them and cease to be a long-term burden via subsidised housing.