Owning your own home

Bollocks- a more lengthy reply to come.

The other obvious question is why Oliver is living in London.

I live here because I like cities. I don't want to live in a rural area. However, for many people it is the opposite and they actively prefer living in smaller places, and not just when they're retired, but they can't because the economic activity isn't where they want to live. Many people have active preferences for very particular areas, e.g. where they grew up (acknowledging that many hate where they grew up).

Surely if if he believes this so strongly he should be leading by example?

If I moved out of the city, I'd be doing something I don't want to do. I don't want others to have to do things they don't have to do. As before, many people actually want to move out of the city but feel they can't because of the perverse way in which the economy is run.

Or is moving out of London just for other people as you allude to?

Just for those who want to. That would be plenty. Many people live in small places who'd rather live in a city, too, of course, but some of those at least would want to continue living in smaller places if the civic infrastructure was still there, e.g. the high street wasn't full of empty shops, the library wasn't closed, etc.

Totally forgot, somehow, that my sister works for a Mortgage Advisory firm back home. Turns out they cover whole of UK and will work with Halifax. They normally charge but getting family discount of "free". Speaking to the senior chap from there on Monday.

Right, what Oliver is doing is looking at this problem:

1. Jobs are centred in and around cities
   
2. Certain jobs are only available in the largest cities, and a subset of those jobs are only available in London
   
3. These conditions lead to the supply of jobs being centred in London, and extending to the South-East as a whole, and then to the larger conurbations in the other regions of the UK
   
   

This is an immediate problem with regards to housing - demand outstrips supply and this drives price increases.

An answer to this, leaving the existing economy as it is, would be to build more housing.

Olivers answer is to change, entirely, how the economy functions, which would then mean that people could find whatever job they wanted, anywhere in the UK that they wanted to live, and presumably some beneficent side-effect of the total economic change would relocate their family and friends to be near them through some currently undefined mechanism.

The problem here is that Olivers point is correct - if you totally change the system then the system is totally different, and therefore you can't argue with that.

However, and this is the kindest I can be here, Olivers plan to achieve this would see him ejected from the Dragons Den in 5% of the time that they would give to the Underpant Gnomes.

Advancing an impossible (without revolution) truism as the "fix" for housing scarcity and associated prices is literally a waste of the electrons that you have used to present it.

Entertainingly Rishi Sunak is going to try to make Olivers vision a reality using Freeports - these normally function (i.e. make a margin from) arbitrage of tariff rates, the oddity that the inputs of a product can have different tariffs from the outputs, and therefore if one converts one to the other before paying required duties then a profit can be made. The reality is that in the UK the published tariff schedules don't work for this, so you have to look at what else a Freeport allows - and that's regulation. For example, employment laws could be changed to reflect those of America, which would be extremely attractive to Amazon who could flex staff up and down with no reference to working hours, and also no reference to minimum wage, NI, pensions etc.

Plonk a Freeport in a deprived area and you can, using the taxation and regulation levers available, relocate (not generate, note) a business that is located elsewhere. This would attract jobs to an area (Amazon warehouses employ a lot of people at times of peak demand), and it would do it in a way that doesn't fall foul of EU rules on state-aid (to which the whole UK is subject via the Withdrawal Agreement, despite the current caterwauling over LPF requirements in the UK-EU FTA).

However, this is robbing Peter to pay Paul, and requires central management lest (say) Lancashire declares the entire county to be a Freeport.

TL:DR, Olivers argument is a truism that doesn't help, and until he can come back with something that is both practical and achievable we have to deal with the hand we have.

Can't this thing be summed up as building more homes as a strategy is flawed, but doing it as a short - medium term tactic is broadly fine.

That would also work, but I quite like the image of Rishi Schick.

I'm a Suffolk boy and always found excuses to avoid Ipswich. There are some nice villages west of it though. Sailing at Alton Water or on the rivers around there is good (grew up doing it!)

Yes, but, well, not quite. London's (the LCC area's, which was much smaller than the GLC/GLA area's) pre-war was about 8.5 million

It’s almost as if I posted a supporting link that described that very issue to back up the point I was making ;-)

@ChasnotRobert - there seems to be some harsh reviews of Ipswich going on so I will throw in that I love the place. I don't live there though. Moved to an idyllic Suffolk village at the start of the year and Ipswich not so far away. And is by far the most international and colourful town I have spent time in. Can't wait to get back there as only a short train ride away. just got to wait for this virus to fuck off

This is a great idea.

thanks - good to get some balance!

which idyllic village are you in?

The elephant in the room is that London is a global city, which in turn invites global competition. Whatever numbers you want to attach to it, a huge portion of UK GDP is created by London. That wealth exists by virtue of London being London.

There is lots that can be devolved or improved about the rest of the country, but it's impossible to remove the distortion of arguably one of the best cities in the world in a country this size without removing it.

FWIW I do think that investment outside of London and moving decision making would be a good idea to achieve some of what Oliver is trying to get at.

What are the lanes like?
For those who might want a garden.

Ixworth. So nearer Bury St Edmunds. but only 4 miles from Thurston which is on the local line to Ipswich.

lanes are quiet and are plentiful. but there is one major problem - no hills whatsoever. i have sought out the hardest hill in Suffolk and it was depressingly short and not even that steep. but i am slowly building up enough local knowledge to keep it interesting. and am getting variety by using different bikes and surfaces.

the missus was really worried that the cycling might be a little boring around here. but i said wherever we moved after two years it would get boring. so am sucking it up.

on the plus side we have three pretty big gardens.

Yeah the lack of substantial gradients is putting me off. But the opportunity to throw each child in their own substantial garden is not putting me off.

My dad grew up in Ipswich (and Southwold, and Felixstowe) and I've been a few times, more so when I was much younger, but also every other week for a few years to watch the finest football team the world has ever seen. Until Roy Keane made it his mission to make them terrible.

I never got the impression that the town itself was up to much - and my dad always lived in the worst bits of it - but the countryside around it, and some of the coast, are really nice.

Felixstowe was amazing as a child - WW2 stuff, the port, fish and chips, the bumper boats thing by the beach - but I haven't been back since so it might just be like Southend but smaller and actually on the sea.

FWIW I do think that investment outside of London and moving decision making would be a good idea to achieve some of what Oliver is trying to get at.

I agree, and I do think that moving to a truly federal state, with equal say for Wales NI and Scotland would be the only way to save the Union - but that ship has sailed.

We have an electorate that will continue to vote for an authoritarian, nationalist party - who will continue to centralise power and will do precisely nothing to upset their core voter, who already owns their house and has done very well from the status quo.

If young people voted then this would change - but they don't, so it won't, and they'll continue to get what they're given as power continues to be retained by an increasingly geriatric block of society.

Moving the HoL to Hull, and massive investment in the regions that is controlled by the regions would be a desirable change, but what will happen instead is a whole bunch of Freeport's to move Southern businesses North, and more centralisation of power along with the standard Tory investment strategy of rewarding success and starving failure.

Entertainingly Rishi Sunak is going to try to make Olivers vision a reality

I was up in Sunak's constituency last week.

It is a beautiful and often incredibly peaceful place so in some ways I'd love to live there, but it's also surprisingly hard to eat out past 8pm, full of tories and you can't get a decent flat white anywhere.

This is what I mean by it not just being about economics.

@ChasnotRobert I grew up in Bury St Edmunds and Ipswich is somewhere I’d actively avoid. I spent a fair chunk of time there through skateboarding & the music scene when I was younger and having been back To visit relatives there isn’t much to sell it other than the waterfront area. For me BSE and surrounding villages or even the Suffolk coast are far more pleasant but suffer from terrible train links into London (changing at either Cambridge or Ipswich).

Is that Hartest Hill? A few bumps round there and Glemsford way.
Always quite liked cycling out in the Newmarket direction, there are a few hills out near Denham that you can turn into a nice loop

If I had an unmodernised mid terrace London house, what should I expect to pay for rear extension, loft conversion, rewire, re-plumb, new kitchen, new bathroom/s, add downstairs toilet, decorating. The works, to a fairly good standard, going from 1000 sq foot to 1600. Wouldn't go full £40k kitchen baller, but wouldn't be far off.

£250 - £300k is my hunch. Am I off?

@Dammit - did you view that property?

@Howard - dependant on glazing and finishes etc, about £300k. A mate has just done this to a semi in Hackney. I nearly cried for him when he told me the final bill.

Too much