Raise the voting age!

Typical. Comments on a point he hopes has been made rather than the one that was.

There are lots of jobs around many won't do for any likely increase in the rate for them. And if you reduce the work force - as you want to - there will be even fewer wanting to do those sort of jobs.

Means testing creates that life-style choice. As soon as you spend your day working for no money, or sometimes less, it tends to focus such choices.

Maybe not, but if we create a system incorporting means testing, the choice of lifestyle becomes inherent.

For many the national minimum wage is a mockery of how much you actually end up with in your pocket working vs benefits.

In article snipped-for-privacy@davenoise.co.uk>, "Dave Plowman (News)" snipped-for-privacy@davenoise.co.uk> writes

That was precisely the point you made.

And you make it again.

There is always a source of labour from elsewhere, witness the amount of immigrants wishing to enter the UK.

And I thought one of the main reasons many voted Brexit was to reduce immigration?

Mainly the likes of Bert who think they get a house, smart phone and flat screen TV etc for free the second they set foot on our soil.

Hardly a fiddle, more an example of where unearned income is taxed at a lower rate than earned. Where payments reflect the flexibility of the contractor and the down-time of an employee.

Have you always worked as an employee?

There are quite a few of those, solicitors, barristers, doctors, architects, electricians, plumbers to name a few.

I think it has:

Those are the most recent figures I can find and I would expect less EU immigration post January 2021.

I sincerely doubt Bert thinks that. If he does then I would accept he is a fool.

Then you must love all those in front of the microphone and camera. There is very little which is more competitive.

What money would councils used to build council houses in an alternative reality where the RTB hadn't existed?

Whatever it was, the RTB rules didn't apply to it.

That is a general view within the social housing sector.

So what money were council houses originally built with?

And quite right too.

All powers possessed by local authorities, statutory authorities and QUANGOs were granted by, and exist at the pleasure of, Parliament.

Councils don't have some sort of inalienable right to even exist, let alone do as they like.

Up to a point.

At the turn of the twentieth century, a vast majority of households rented their homes (90% or more) and there were hardly any council properties. That started to change by 1920. Nowadays, around two-thirds of homes are owner-occupied with the rest split between market renting and subsidised renting (the availability of housing benefit being a separate issue).

All those grid pattern streets you see in any British town or city were built speculatively by private enterprise for rent. They were built to the standards then seen as desirable and though much of the stock was ageing by 1900, current expected standards had changed and recognisable modern facilities were by then the norm for new-build houses, whether for rent or purchase. Even older houses weren't always substandard. When I was a small boy, the family lived in a large (rented) Georgian house in what is now referred to as the "Knowledge Quarter" of Liverpool. The house had a garden (of sorts), two kitchens and two bathrooms. It was eventually demolished simply because the re-purposed use of the land (as part of a professorial car-park within the science faculty of the city's ever-expanding university) was somehow seen as preferable. Otherwise, people could still be living in that house today, when it would be around 200 years old.

One of the stumbling blocks for improvement (and to some extent, repair) of the older and substandard stock was that rents were not always sufficient to finance them. This was addressed to some extent by the availability of local authority grants to help with the installation of bathrooms, better kitchens, inside toilets, etc. But a frequent response from local authorities on application was something along the lines: "Nowt doin'. We'll be CP-ing and demolishing that street in 19xx".

I'm never sure about their target market.

Unfortunately they didn't quite think that through with devolution.

What was that? Where did it come from?

The Treasury *still* dispenses massive largesse every year in the form of grants to housing associations.

Again, from the taxpayer?

And councils had to buy "slum" housing from its owners. It wasn't free. Almost, but not quite.

There is a disconnect between those two ideas.

The suggestion that the reason why councils don't build many council properties is that they aren't allowed to use the revenue from council house sales is a ludicrous argument.

It could never have been a source of capital for building council houses in the first place.

Apparently not, because there are those who insist that the money raised from private buyers of council property (the former tenants) should be used too (instead of using it to reduce public debt).

Has that source of capital been stopped up?

If so, when?

And if so, why? Especially when housing associations are *still* building?

It obviously has nothing to do with the sales of council property or the proceeds therefrom.

I am aware of that. If you sold your house, would you expect the mortgage on it to be kept running?

Of course you wouldn't. Everyone would expect you to pay it off with (at least part of) the proceeds of sale. Whether that debt lay with the council or the Treasury is unimportant. the point is that the money isn't for spending until the account is debt-free.

I (and plenty of others) have explained that.

When councils and the Treasury are debt free, that'll be the time to spend the proceeds of sales. In the meantime, they should be used to reduce debt.

Sophistry.

Possibly because they have a better reputation for maintenance and management than councils have.

But HA tenants don't have the right to buy, which is disgraceful.

Explained already.

Wrong.

Council house building is "funded" (a weasel word meaning "paid for") by people like me, by the simple process of incurring debt on which *I* (and people like me) each have to pay part of the interest.

It is plainly in our interest to have that debt extinguished as soon as possible, and that means when capital becomes available on the sale of the property.

They were still paid for (not "funded") by loans raised upon the backs of taxpayers.

Wrong.

Wrong again. There is *huge* public debt.

How many times are you going to repeat that falsehood?

Sophistry is usually a truth dressed up so as to be interpreted as something it is not. That's what the word means. Your statement was sophistry.