How the Budget will affect ordinary people
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Chancellor
of the Exchequer Philip Hammond is not of this world. His budget
delivered to a noisy House of Commons on Wednesday, presented the
usual give away to landlords in the form of tax
breaks
for those who offer
longer-term secure tenancies,
an additional £3 billion for Brexit planners, a
change to the
“millennial travel
card”
extending
the 30% discount to those under 31,
an immediate £350 million to the NHS for this winter followed by
£1.6bn more next year, and the
immediate abolition
of
stamp duty for first-time buyers on properties worth up to £300,000.
The observer may be excused for believing that Hammond had presented
a budget where everyone in the country was a winner and that all was
rosy within the United Kingdom economy as the conservative benches erupted into baying and shouting "Hear, Hear, Hear" or
"Yea, Yea, Yea" and other incoherent babel after each of Hammond's sentences if not every phrase.
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The
reality of course is that this much trumpeted budget, hyped as the
Conservative party getting back onto the front foot in British
politics with new initiatives and programmes for the NHS, Education,
Universal Credits, Growth
in the economy and not least of all, housing. However, as is the
usual case with conservative governments interested only in their own
positions and the vested interests of those they represent in
business and finance, the budget promised mountains but delivered
only molehill's and very small molehill's at that. Of course, with
the fractured and splintered cabinet, we may wonder how this
Chancellor ever managed to produce a budget at all. Indeed, on the
night before the budget speech, Hammond was summoned to a meeting at
10 Downing Street, where a small cabal of the cabinet and Theresa May
herself, rewrote huge chunks of the Chancellors speech which, from
any person with an ounce of honour and backbone, would have produced
an immediate response "OK. Present the budget yourselves as I am
resigning with immediate effect and will not be in the House
tomorrow". However, backbone and honour are not to be found on
the front benches of this government nor in the cabinet.
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To
select just one element of the budget proposals, we should direct our
attention towards housing. The housing crisis in this country, is
amongst the most pressing problems we face,
with thousands of families being unable to afford to purchase a house
or rent a home, where ever increasing prices coupled with relentless
pressures on earnings continue to push the price of a home beyond the
means of the majority of people. Prime Minister May, pledged to take
"personal charge" for government plans to fix the UK’s
“broken” housing market
and to build 300,000 new homes every year.
The
way in which this Conservative "miracle" is to be achieved
consists almost entirely of a council tax "premium" on
empty properties, new money for a "home builders" fund, a
"small sites" fund, financial grantees to support private
house building, urban
regeneration, training of construction workers, Oliver Letwin MP to
Chair a new body to look at ways to speed up planning permissions and
an immediate cut in Stamp Duty for first time buyers on properties
worth up to £300,000 (The average price of a home in London and
South is currently in excess
of
£500,00).
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Even
a cursory
glance
across Hammond's housing proposal's alone, reveal that the Chancellor
does not fully understand, if at all, the reality of the United
Kingdom's housing crisis.
Tinkering at the edges and producing rhetoric for public consumption
and to pacify the baying mob on Conservative back benches, (who were
particularly abusive and ignorant on Wednesday) does not cement one
brick with another to build a new home. Removing the starting rate of
Stamp Duty, provides very few first time buyers with the opportunity
to purchase a home particularly in those areas of the country where
demand and the resultant price level is at its highest. Councils
and builders throughout the country have no incentive or
encouragement
to build homes
for rent to relieve the chronic shortage of rented accommodation and
the
proposal for the
"privatisation" of Housing Associations is
only to
make
"the governments books look better" and give the private
sector another avenue of opportunity in their quest to make even more
profits from the housing crisis and its victims.
The
thousands of families desperately seeking homes have been betrayed
by empty words and gestures which do nothing but grab the headlines
of the Express or Mail or other news media of similar political
persuasion.
The first time buyers struggling to save enough money to put down a
deposit even on a "low cost home" have been duped by
rhetoric and deceit. The homeless on our streets have been abandoned
by a government which
pays lip service to an outrageous scandal, but does nothing to
address the underlying causes because Hammond and May and the rest of
this wretched government do not live in the real world.
The
world where people are important and where decent housing is a right
for all not a grudging gift from the
privileged few.
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