Very non-specific so its difficult to say much here.
Basically the Conservatives got rid of housing targets, so lots of places went "yay, we don't want development, so no target means we can't be forced to build!"
A more YIMBY attitude has to be a good thing -
the Conservatives blocked TfL building apartment on a car park adjacent to a Tube station.
The number of young people voting Conservative has fallen dramatically - given there's a strong link between owning your own home and voting Conservative.
The first part sounds fine, maybe......except......the last part sound terrible.............It sounds like more sprawl and less countryside.
The term being suggested is "grey belt" - land that is green belt but is brownfield or very low quality.
"This new category will include "poor-quality scrubland, mothballed on the outskirts of town" like a disused petrol station in Tottenham currently designated as green belt"
Annoyingly there's several Tube stations in London where housing without building on agricultural land/parks are possible - but currently being used by scrappy industry etc. But it's green belt.
Thiis sounds ok............though the second part will be interesting...........what's the plan, an attestation that you're going to live in the home? What's the penalty if you don't?
The Mayor of London has already done this in London with a voluntary scheme - basically getting developers to offer new homes to UK buyers first, rather than selling off plan investments in Hong Kong/Singapore etc. And yeah, the tax regime already allows benefits for first time buyers over other purchasers.
That sounds like demand stimulus, which in the absence of new supply will simply drive prices up.
Yep, agreed. Having just bought a place (woooop!) the issue was saving up for the bloody deposit (10% of £450,000 is a lot!), not the monthly cost of the mortgage. That is about as much as we were paying in rent (just over £2k a month)
This I need to hear more about, can you elaborate on what the issue is here?
Ugh, what a mess. Freehold – You own the property and the land it's built on for as long as you want. Leasehold – You own the property for a set period, but not the land it's built on.
For a leasehold apartment, you may own it for 999 years, but the freehold land of the building is owned by someone. You may pay them "ground rent" for zero benefit other than they own the land (we pay £400 a year) - this is completely unregulated and people have been caught in things where the cost of ground rent triples in cost and they can't challenge it.
Older leasehold places may have had shorter leases (e.g. 99 years) and people trying to negotiate a new lease have found the "landlord" charging outrageous prices for it, sometimes more than the value of the property.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cw00j4x5nnyo Conservatives did pass half a bill, but landlord and pension funds managed to cut the "worst" of the bill - i.e. caps on how much they could charge people.
So there's no rent control now?
Nope!
http://Leasehold reforms become law without ground rent cap
www.theguardian.com
