http://www.theguardian.com/politics/201 ... d-disabled

Wonder how long they've been sitting on that story... The Tories are actually arrogant enough to try and implement it though.

Also getting rid of statutory maternity pay :S

To be fair, labour supported the bill that brought in the total benefit spending cap that has forced the DWP staffers to come up with the list of proposals. So they're all [LIFTED], basically.

How??
Where are you going to put 200k houses per year?
If cutting housing benefit fraud was that easy, surely it would have been done before/by them?

I love phantom budgeting, they're all a load of creative financiers!!

The devil's in the detail. The fraud and overpayment bit is really an IT issue that any administration can do equally well or equally badly.

But building 200,000 homes a year is probably something Labour can achieve more easily than the Tories because the sane way to do it is by relaxing the green belt restrictions that force up prices for land where houses are needed. The Tories have a massive NIMBY problem in those green belt constituencies, whereas Labour have relatively few seats to lose or gain either way.

Tackling rip-off rents isn't much of an issue if housing supply increases faster than demand. But if you front load it with direct rent control or contracts that squeeze landlords incomes too hard, that inevitably throttles investment and lots of potential houses don't get built. The public sector can only fill so much of the gap. Too many £billions spent building government housing in London in particular would cause problems and imbalances.

I heard someone say they were all merchant bankers. At least, I think that's what they said...

The problem with building houses isn't the houses themselves, it's the infrastructure to support them. For example....
There's an application near us for 400 new homes. There's no plan to add new roads getting from this estate to the major through roads, no plan to build a school, doctors etc when all the existing ones are already full. To make things look better they did traffic surveys during the school and university holidays to make it look like the roads could handle the extra traffic when they can't.

Building companies want maximum profit with minimum investment. While that happens, locals will object. You wouldn't get half the objections if applications were properly and responsibly planned out.

The estate that my sister and brother bought a house on is 1500 homes with one road in and out. It's the worst kind of rabbit run you can imagine and the entire place grinds to a halt when everyone leaves in the morning and when everyone gets home in the evening. Just sticking up another 200k houses a year without properly thinking it through is not an answer, I wonder how long it would take for there to be no green left in these green and pleasant lands apart from cultivated parks?

There's a lot of derelict buildings in cities which can be converted.
There's also the big elephant that noone talks about that there's a lot of semis and terraces converted into rubbish 2/3 flats when if they were bought, torn down and a decent block of purpose flats rebuilt, there'd be more flats of a decent quality for everyone to live in.

When you develop a housing project in most of Europe, the taxes paid are to the local council and help pay for new roads etc. In the UK, the local authority only gets paid if they sold the land. Which is why you see school fields sold off but big plots of nearby wasteland left undeveloped. It wouldn't be hard to implement the same system here.

Here, you have to pay for the road as part of owning the house. Once the road has been laid, the council has to pay for the up-keep, unless the road's layout has to change, then you have to pay for your part of the road. The same for paths.

Ah, with the 400 near us, they're just over the boundary. So the council that will get the tax revenue isn't the one that will need to provide school place etc.