Keir Starmer has pledged to build 1.5 million new homes. But if, as expected, most are flats, chances are that very few will want to buy them. Why? Because people are at last waking up to the fact that the leaseholds under which such flats are typically ‘owned’ are almost worthless.
The notion of getting onto the property ladder has a powerful hold on the British psyche. So much so, that it may be some time before anyone accepts the logic of what I am about to argue. The Renters Rights Bill begins its Committee stage tomorrow, with Labour anxious to speed it through. Once that Bill becomes law, I believe it will be the final straw that breaks the leasehold camel’s back. The market for buying flats in England and Wales will wither and die.
Let me explain. People have traditionally scrimped and saved to buy that first flat for two reasons.
The first is security. Renters have always been at the mercy of a landlord suddenly slipping a Section 21 notice under the door, giving them eight weeks to be gone. Or jacking up the rent massively when their one-year tenancy runs out. The new law will remove both these threats. There will be no more fixed term tenancies. And only a small number of reasons you can be evicted, all of which will require a court order. Renting will be more secure than it has ever been.
The second reason for flat buying was always money, of course. If you rented, you were throwing the stuff “down the drain”, month after month. If you bought, you could count – until now – on your equity ratcheting up year by year. When you needed to move on, you could sell the lease on your flat at a nice profit and take the next step up the property ladder.
But flat dwellers can no longer count on selling their leases for a profit – or indeed at all. The Financial Times wrote last month: “Flat prices have underperformed all other property types in the U.K. over the past five years.” The FT blames this on a number of factors. Working from home has enabled people to move away from the cities. Buy-to-let landlords, once big investors in the flats market, are trying to get out – another consequence of ‘renters rights’.
Grenfell has had a huge impact of course, opening our eyes to the truly awful quality of some modern build. Thousands of residential high rises remain without repair, making them un-mortgageable and therefore unsellable.
But the FT piece fails to mention the most damaging factor of all. Tenure. It is slowly dawning on the buyers of flats that they do not actually own anything at all. They have simply bought the right to occupy their properties for a set – and diminishing – number of years. They, just like the short term renters, have landlords. And the leases they have all signed allow those landlords to dip into their pockets at will, with shocking consequences.
There are annual ground rents which are a charge for nothing at all, and which in many cases double every 10 years or rise with RPI. This used not to be a problem, but once the banks got jittery about one aspect of flat security – fire safety – it was inevitable those jitters would spread. Now many lenders have also begun refusing mortgages on flats with doubling or RPI-linked ground rents, so they are unsellable too.
Then there’s the cost of maintenance and repairs. If you rent short term, repairs are the landlord’s responsibility. Most local authorities nowadays back this up with strict licensing schemes and regular property inspections, to make sure properties are in habitable nick.
Leaseholders, on the other hand, must pay for all maintenance and repairs, yet have zero control over what those works cost, the choice of contractor or how the work is carried out. In some cases, it never actually is. Leaseholders also pay for the insurance of a building they don’t own, but don’t get to choose the insurer or control the policy or its cost. And on top of these regular service charges, leaseholders can find themselves lumbered with Section 20 Major Works Orders to repair big ticket items like lifts or chillers, costing each lessee in a building thousands of pounds at a time.
So while the short term renter knows what his or her housing costs are and can budget for them, the leaseholder cannot. One flat buyer after another has put it to me the same way: “When I bought this flat, I never realised I’d be opening my wallet for my landlord to dip into whenever he chooses, for however much he chooses. I have lost control of my bank account.”
And now lenders are waking up to this danger too. How can they be sure, with all these uncontrolled costs, that their borrowers can actually afford the mortgage? Some banks are starting to refuse loans on leaseholds with high and escalating service charges. More unsellable flats!
Two really alarming bits of news on this in just the last few months. First, a couple of my acquaintance decided they wanted to buy a country place and would use their London flat as security for a mortgage. Both in the couple are high earning professionals without children. The perfect customers for any lender, you’d have thought. To their horror their bank’s valuer refused their application, on the grounds their flat was actually worth zero because their service charges were so high.
Then some friends in another supposedly up-market development tried to sell. There were few viewings. But eventually a couple liked the flat and the location. They were about to make an offer, when they discovered the service charges. In desperation, my friends offered to pay the next ten years worth of charges themselves and drop the price of the flat. Even that did not persuade the prospective buyers who pulled out. Several local agents are refusing to handle the building at all.
These are extreme examples, but as a campaigner for leasehold abolition, I have met people up and down the country whose lives have ground to a halt because they cannot sell flats they sunk their life’s savings into. They can’t take new jobs, or marry, or start families, or retire. They are in limbo. And under the terms of their leases, they cannot stop paying whatever costs their landlord demands, for fear of forfeiting their properties altogether. What they have is, after all, just another tenancy agreement. It can be torn up and they can be evicted, without a penny in compensation, with their mortgages still hanging round their necks.
The public are not stupid. They are becoming aware of all these horror stories. So if, as seems likely, most of Keir Starmer’s 1.5 million new homes turn out to be flats, and if there is no fundamental reform of tenure, then he may build them – but will anybody come?
Margaret Rothwell is a pseudonym. The author is a member of the campaign group, Free Leaseholders.
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And on and on the charade of the last 3 years goes. Wake me up when the show trials start.
I’m with you…which is precisely why I’m interested in the new chess rules which go into effect in 2030. In particular rule no.4 looks intriguing…
https://newworldhumor.substack.com/p/changes-to-chess-in-the-new-world
Thanks, that’s bloody hilarious.
Excellent, many thanks
I would propose an addition to rule 5 – “whose numbers shall increase exponentially in reverse proportion to declining numbers of players”.
Andre Bridgen MP could raise this in the HOC , oh Hang on,
Andrew ! Butter fingers
“one could reasonably expect these [unvaccinated] individuals to have been more likely to have exhibited higher risk-taking behavior [than the vaccinated].”
Or just possibly, less risk-taking :O
Typical normy view of us. Anyone not following establishment expert advice must be cavalier irresponsible speeding risk takers, probably like guns, Trump/Brexit, hate black people, gays the environment and ‘Science’ (TM).
(Ok Guns, Trump & Brexit is a high correlation probs).
Anyway, Just get the jab.
“We still have a lot to learn about protection from COVID-19 vaccination…..” It says. I suggest that a robust “no thanks” approach is an effective tactic, then you are protected from it.
Behold, the pandemic of the boosted.
This is literally the definition of iatrogenic!
FFS. The original none mRNA spike is bad enough (although it seems even it was engineered/had additions at Wuhan) – but the mRNA jabs are far worse.
In simple terms it trashes your immune system.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9318917/
And
https://dpbh.nv.gov/uploadedFiles/dpbhnvgov/content/Boards/BOH/Meetings/2021/SENEFF~1.PDF
Why do those in charge don’t/won’t see it?
Even I’m starting to think that there just might be something sinister going on
Eventually Sforzesca you will join the likes of myself, Mogwai, Aethelred and a few others.
I have the utmost faith in the honesty, wisdom and integrity of both bigpharma and those who govern us.
Do four people (so far) not recognise blatant irony?
Poe’s Law?
Well, what a shock! Real world observation has been showing this for months. The only people I know who have had covid more than once are multiple “vaccinated”. And I have lost count of the number of people getting covid immediately after the jab…
Once again, a study defines COVID as positive PCR test result and once again, it finds that the immune system of the body is no antiviral AA artillery capable of taking down approaching viruses before they ever enter the body but only works against pathogens which have already infected it. How many more repetitions of this lame running gag do we need, Mr Jones? This is no study and the authors are no scientists. They could as well have studied statistical correlations between gun crimes and the birth rate of polar bears. There are bound to be some.
‘… no antiviral AA artillery capable of taking down approaching viruses before they ever enter the body…’
Agreed. But are you saying the pseudo- vaccines have?
’… studied statistical correlations between gun crimes and the birth rate of polar bears.’
You are quoting the wrong study there, it was… ‘ between SUVs driven by Soccer Moms and the birth rate of polar bears.’ Yikes! Climate change.
My opinion on COVID quacksination is that it’s exceedingly unlikely that anybody who got it hadn’t already been exposed to Sars-CoV2 before and thus, became infected and eventually recovered (or died). Sars-CoV2 is an airborne virus, hence, in order to control its movements, one would have needed to control the movement of air and not people. A positive effect of COVID quacksination, if it has any, cannot be determined because by the time it became available, everybody already had naturally acquired immunity.
The people who developed this medicine certainly knew this and hence, the whole point of the charade (in the so-called west) was to keep the illusion of a dangerous pandemic alive until Big Pharma had a supposed remedy for sale. Some of the people who had already helped to halt the swine flu hoax also came out against Covimania but this time, the would-be peddlers of miracle cures for imaginary ailments were prepared for them. Eg, one of them openly condemned the useless medical experiments the government of Israel (composers of the international 2021 number one hit Keep on boosting!) was conducting on the population of Israel. He was quickly smeared as an antisemite and thus, effectively silenced.
Who would have thought that repeatedly challenging our immune systems with an injected antigen stimulant would actually reduce our immunity!
Oh wait, that’s what happens with sensitisation injections!
The study defines COVID as positive NAAT (Nucleic Acid Amplification Test), ie, a positive PCR test for presence of Sars-CoV2 RNA (fragments). That’s already meaningless nonsense as a diagnosis (heavily employed during the bullshit epidemic of healthy pupils testing positive in summer 2021). It’s completely ludicrous when trying to gauge effectiveness of the immune response to an infection with a pathogen as the infection must always have happened before the immune response could commence.
Fair overall point on the potential misuse of PCR tests in defining infection.
But doesn’t the validity of a PCR test depend in part on the cycle threshold? At a low cycle threshold isn’t this indeed indicative (not definitive) of actual infection? I haven’t got time to read the original papers, but does anyone know if the threshold for defining infections here is quoted?
I didn’t read enough of it to know this because there’s no point in wasting one’s time with junk. A PCR test result is completely valid to detect an infection. But that’s an entirely pointless exercise because we all keep getting infected and reinfected with endemic pathogens all the time. The usual case is that this causes mild or no symptoms for a fairly short period of time and which again vanish when the immune system has again cleared it up. The PCR test misuse happens when infection is redefined as something else, ie, a (serious) COVID case warranting …
In the context of the question implied in this article, positive NAAT is just pointless nonsense: The immune system cannot act on pathogens which haven’t infected the body first. It’s really just as meaningful as correlating gun crimes and the birth rate of polar bears, except that there hasn’t been a multi-year, $$$ propaganda campaign teaching everyone that there’s surely a mysterious (and thus – per xenophobia – dangerous) cause-and-effect relation between both.
Yes, I see your points and I think you raise legitimate concerns.
It’s difficult for me to comment directly as I haven’t read the original paper, so I don’t know how they defined an ‘infection’. By my understanding, symptoms plus a suitably low-cycle PCR +ve should do it, but I stand to be corrected.
I think you raise very good point about getting infected continually at a low level – if I understand it correctly, breathing in viral particles which don’t really get anywhere and thus don’t cause symptoms. I’ve long wondered whether that sort of very-low level infection does actually help build up immunity. I suspect it does.
Compared to a virus or even a few millions viruses, the human is insanely huge (its estimated to contain about 30 trillion cells). These viral particles do get somewhere but for the normal case, this doesn’t cause noticable symptoms before the immune system has again cleared them out, or it just causes the everyday symptoms of a mild cold everybody routinely ignores: Runny or blocked nose, slightly swollen and minimally hurting tonsils, passing muscle aches, short bouts of diarrhoea and stuff like that. Everytime this occurs and goes away again, the body has gone through another phase of sickness induced by a virus and again healed itself. This is happening to all of us all of the time.
Infection (with something or half a dozen different somethings causing different slight troubles in different parts of the body) is the normal state of affairs and the claim that this would be otherwise is one of the most devious COVID lies, especially as it was made knowingly. A recent example of that would be (paraphrase from memory) Two years of COVID and still haven’t gotten seriously sick? Are you a super-dodger?
suggesting to healthy people who presumably went through at least 5 – 6 rounds of COVID without ever noticing this and who are thus perfectly (as perfectly as possible) immune to it that – by some miracle – they must have evaded it all the time and that it still lies in waiting to get them and then, all bets will be off. Time to get vaccinated once again, you wouldn’t want that to happen after having been so incredibly lucky for such a long time!
These people are lying whenever they open their mouths. They wouldn’t tell anyone the correct time of day out of principle.
Yes, this is pretty well how I’ve understood it. In particular, you can’t avoid breathing in various viral particles, some of these will take root, and in almost all cases will be swiftly dealt with by the immune system, with or without symptoms.
Part of the reason for the mess we’re in is the refusal of the vast majority of people to think clearly.
As a society at large, we’re still not clear on what an ‘infection’ actually means.
And has a name: Vaccine Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome.
Or V-AIDS for short.
“Covid Infection Risk Increases With Number of Vaccine Doses…”
I knew that. I’ve known that since the summer of 2021, long before Omicron, when the medical, political and mainstream media establishment were telling us the opposite. It’s good to have it confirmed by studies like this, which people will take seriously, but it has been very obvious for more than a year, simply by looking at the stats and the graphs for each country on a website such as worldometer:
In every highly vaccinated country in the world, cases have massively soared after mass vaccination, but have not soared in countries where vaccination is very low.
And not just cases, in many of these highly vaccinated countries – such as Germany, Denmark, Norway, Finland, South Korea, Japan, Vietnam, Australia, New Zealand, and many many more – Covid deaths have soared after mass vaccination, compared with before.
Excuses were made for each country, different excuses for different countries – to try to deny the obvious – but they can’t all be explained away, it’s not plausible.
Correlation is not causation, but when Covid cases massively soar in every highly vaccinated country, and Covid deaths soar in most highly vaccinated countries, AFTER mass vaccination, and it doesn’t happen in countries with low vaccination, then it doesn’t take much common sense to add 2 and 2 together.
And it is what Geert Vanden Bossche, at the beginning of 2021, predicted would happen, though not quite as lethally as he feared, thanks to Omicron apparently.
If Covid has been causing people to die (rather than people dying with Covid, not of Covid) and the vaccines are greatly increasing the number of Covid infections, as this study has found, then the vaccines are causing people to die in this way, in addition to deaths caused by adverse reactions to the vaccines.
‘Correlation is not causation…’. It is when supported by external data. That data being what happens in the control group – the unvaccinated – and what happens between the different dose regimes.
I look forward to seeing this as the main news item on the BBC or the main headline in the Telegraph (… 10 years later ….) .
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Just like the numerous previous studies.