Corbyn Wobbling

Councils can build them. Lift the HRA borrowing cap like Germany and the Netherlands have. There's billions of pounds that can be accessed by allowing local authorities to raise finance against existing stock. Meanwhile the Tories have this week pulled all central government funding from affordable rented schemes to go with the reinvigorated Right to Buy and the requirement on councils to sell off all their high value stock to give to the treasury.

So who's the beneficiary of these changes? Private landlords who will fill the gap and house people of council waiting lists at market rents paid for by us through housing benefit. And where's the biggest increase in new private landlords? Investment banks and hedge funds. The transfer of wealth to the rich.

 

Lol very true!

What about a Soyuz rocket?

More scope there perhaps

 

Can't hang yourself in space, no gravity

 

Damn n Blast

 

You'll have watched the BR doc on BBC 4 tonight, then? In the 1980's, the British rail network was the second cheapest and the most efficient in Europe. Why do you think private investors coveted it like they did?

 

It was cheap because it was massively subsidised by the government.

 

So borrow more money? Councils have no infrastructure to build housing anymore, it would contracted to either house builders or large construction outfits like Kier, lend Lease and the like. Completely unaffordable without huge borrowing.

 

The clue's in the name. PUBLIC transport. Public transport should NOT be for profit, simple as that. Sure, pay the people that run it & work on it a decent salary, but plough any and all money raised over & above costs back into the infrastructure. Bring in a simple, fair pricing structure, where a ticket bought on the day of travel costs the same as one bought in advance - the rest of the world can do this, so why not the UK? Do this and people will use the trains in huge numbers. At the moment, people are put off by the labyrinthine pricing structure and the reliability of the service.

 

Its minimum risk borrowing against billion pound asset bases. And its not government debt. Councils are building. Some are building market housing too. The work is tendered out to contractors or through joint ventures. The delivery models are immaterial anyway, the point is there is a desperate need for new affordable housing and a mechanism to deliver it. This government just isn't interested though.

BTW do you think major contractors employ direct labor? They subcontract out everything. Some of the small to medium sized still have in house teams but not all of them.