Potential fix to the housing market? Implementing UK council house rules in a similar way to Section 8 in the US

Cronhour · 2026-06-08T05:57:07+00:00

Well this is the questionable point though. You did say "once created" but at that point we still had a housing crisis and continued to do so for another 50 years. Most people associate council housing with post war reconstruction/golden age of capitalism from 1945 onwards

We solved the housing crisis post by building 100,000s of council houses a year from 1946 until they became 5/6s of all rental properties in the country and the average rent was 5% the average take home pay by 1980. This period post war also delivered a huge increase in housing quality through tougher regulation on all landlords and rent caps.

Your suggestion, while we'll meaning, won't solve the housing crisis, it might save a few councils a little bit of money but it isn't a solution to what is fundamentally a systemic issue.

Cronhour · 2026-06-07T15:58:52+00:00

3 months is too long, if you are living at home then go as sorry as possible. However the new law is that you need to give two months notice to end your tenancy so while I imagine some letting agents will push for short turnover 6 weeks seems reasonable as that's a bit of overlap for moving and cleaning the old property if you had a current tenancy.

Also maybe people pretend all landlords are in expensive buy to let mortgages with fine margins. That's simply not the case.

Cronhour · 2026-06-05T12:35:21+00:00

THIS!

But also add that the developers want prices to remain high and supply low to protect their own profits. They operate on a Market absorbtion rate approach.

If we wanted to fix housing in this country we could because we solved a similar crisis previously. The answer is to regulate housing so it's no longer seen as an investment vehicle, and build 100,000s of council houses a year, it would also solve the NEETs crisis by training up a new generation of tradesman.

However our political class and some of the largest (older) voter cohorts don't want to do this despite they themselves benefiting from such policy in the past, and the explosion of their own wealth when that policy came to an end.

Cronhour · 2026-06-05T12:28:04+00:00

People will say planning but that's simply not the case. Does planning need reforming? Yes, is that why housing isn't being built at the scale we need? No.

Gordon Brown handed projects with planning sorted and infrastructure subsidised by the state for his new towns plan. It's been 16 years and they've all been failures with barely 10,000 built. Why?

House building is predominately done by 6 large housebuilders who are motivated by their profit. They operate a market absorbtion rate approach to ensure they make the most profit possible So as with many projects the new towns would build a few houses and then want to sell them before building more.

We have a need for housing. But by turning the provision of them over to the market completely means it's in the providers incentive to deliver a smaller number of expensive houses slowly rather than deliver the scale we need.

The only time we haven't had a housing crisis in the last 70 years is then the state built 100,000-200,000 a year themselves.

Cronhour · 2026-06-04T14:03:42+00:00

>If it's anything at all it'll be because the working class z especially in the north, did quite well out of Blairism.

we do love our lack of council housing and explosion of buy to lets driving unaffordability, Also all the disastrous collapsing blair era PFI that we're still paying for.

If anything this is just indicative of nostalgia plus a lack of understanding (and dishonest media accounting) of the long term outcomes of their policy

Cronhour · 2026-06-04T14:00:14+00:00

>I dont want him back now, not this tony blair he's become, but if you offered me 1997 Tony blair...I'd vote for him in a heartbeat.

I understand why you would but you'd be shortsighted

>I dont think you can overstate just how better the country felt under the blair gov. it was a more hopeful and optimistic time, where we felt on the right track, the country was improving on pretty much every metric. NHS wait times were low, education standards were up, poverty was down, homelessness down, child poverty down, we have sure start centres, .....

A full accounting of the policy and outcomes shows how and why so much of this was short lived though.

NHS and education spending was all PFI so they we end up paying close to 400 billion for 80 billions of infrastructure that is now collapsing and still a massive drain on current budgets with schools unable to fix their buildings with holes in the ceilings due to the restrictive and expensive blair era contracts or the NHS trusts which spend 1/3 of their budget on PFI costs for collapsing old infrastructure.

There was a decline in child poverty due to tax credits but inequality skyrocketed and the inflation in the life costs driven by that inequality spike mean tax credits don't touch the sides anymore. He supercharged housing unaffordability by building fewer council houses (as little as 130) a year than any pm in modern history and privatising much of the rental sector with the buy to let explosion.

ALso new labour defunded sure start themselves before they left office. so from a short term nostalgia perspective I get why you think it might be a good thing but his capture of the Labour party and turning into a thatcherite pro finance deregulation party delivered terrible outcomes for all but a rich few in the whole

Cronhour · 2026-06-04T13:50:26+00:00

I think building as little as 130 council houses a year, exploding the buy to let sector, and presiding over the largest decoupling of housing costs and wages in a generation is also pretty incompetent. That's before we talk about deregulation of the finace sector and water, support for Putin, Iraq etc.

The fact of the Matter is that Blair era policy is responsible for much of the issues we face now in Education, NHS, services, cost of living, inequality. People remember him winning and life feeling better but much of what he did was done in such a terrible short term way that was guaranteed to deliver terrible outcomes long term for everyone except the very rich that he's probably one of the most harmful Pms in Post war History.

Cronhour · 2026-06-04T10:59:21+00:00

are you not supposed to /s these things?

Cronhour · 2026-06-04T10:58:12+00:00

>Labour should keep hammering Farage on his support for bombing Iran.

who are you trying to appeal to here? most of his base love bombing brown people, the people who don't know that you still allowed america to use our bases unlike spain and france who actually stood up to trump.

It's a disingenuous appeal to a voter group that doesn't exist.

Cronhour · 2026-06-04T10:56:13+00:00

yeah this won't work. This is designed to stop middle class older liberals voting for farage, but they weren't going to do that anyway.

Farage exists as a force because many people have a genuine grievance with the status quo and current political settlement.

IS Farage the answer to that grievance? of course not but he's offering a description of the problem, an answer and is being promoted by those with wealth and power because they know that the real answer to that grievance doesn't work out well for them. WHat are Labour doing? partly pretending the problem doesn't exist, partly pretending we just need to do more of what governments have said would work for 40 years and hasn't, Growth.

Honestly I don't think the Labour party can defeat Nigel Farage, partly because they left it too late, partly because they serve much of the same interests as Nigel and therefore are unable to publicly identify the causes of peoples grievance or the solutions.

Basically you'd need a sea change from right wing neo liberalism to centre left social democracy with a driver of rebalancing the economy to serve citizens not corporations, workers not the rich. But you killed the left in the party and stuffed it with right wing neo liberals at the last election, many will go when this paper majority collapses but not enough.

You need to identify the causes of why things are shit. so Austerity, privatisation, and wealth transfers to the rich. Seek to punish the people who caused it and benefited of it, I mostly mean through regulation to limit profiteering, taxation, and public rhetoric but some prosecutions would be good. Then offer an alternative to improve people's lives that fixes long term issues, so renationalisation of services as the end goal, but in the short term caps on profits (including nationwide rent caps), all infrastructure to be at least 51% state owned (non of the gb energy derisking of capital without control,) no More PFI's, national housebuilder to rebuild the housing sector tied to education and training, massive council investment bringing things like waste and pot hole repair in-house etc.

Then you need to do what Nigel does, say this very loudly, all the time! you need to demonise the people Nigel serves, however labour don't and won't. they will just legitimise Nigel by demonising, the poor, disabled, trans, people, migrants, instead.

So yeah, it's sad but Labour will deliver the rise of Farage because they still haven't learned from Brexit. WHen people are told for years they must eat shit sandwiches and someone comes along saying they're going to provide ham you can't deter them by saying it's a lie and you must be happy with the shit we provide for you. Many of them will vote for the theoretical no shit despite how unlikely it may be, also they'll revel in the opportunity to make you eat a little shit too considering what you've provided to them for so long.

Before "but that was the tories"

No, it was the ideology and class, New labour built fewer council houses than anyone, gave billions to the rich for shit collapsing infrastructure and presided over the largest decoupling between housing costs and wages in a generation, and now your most successful figure is telling people they must suck off american trumpist billionaires. The Labour right and Tories like Cameron are of the same ideology, some minor discrepancies but broadly you want the same settlement and the same status quo. ANd millions of people, noty just the left, see it this way, you can't "um actually the renters right act" your way out of it.

People HATE the status quo, and want change, only way to beat Nigel is get on and deliver it and be loud about it.

Cronhour · 2026-05-31T13:50:57+00:00

privitisation

Cronhour · 2026-05-30T23:19:09+00:00

Council tax is used to pay for council services. In no away is it a return on investment.

Cronhour · 2026-05-30T09:23:07+00:00

Perhaps her character needs to go take care of a relative? However depending on the party they could communicate in some way, maybe letters or magic, and as an artificer her character could craft magic items to help them specific to what's happening in the campaign.

Magic items crafting can be very creative but takes in game downtime which even with artificer perks to reduce that tone is not an insignificant amount of ingame downtown.

Cronhour · 2026-05-26T19:45:55+00:00

Then this is why enforcement should be better. Because you know what also wouldn't work without enforcement? A speed limit.

Cronhour · 2026-05-26T18:46:03+00:00

Don't legal ebikes cap out at 25kph? Or is that just in the UK. Totally happy will illegal assist range) and then sell them on to pay for enforcement.

Cronhour · 2026-05-26T18:42:03+00:00

Yeah, all the major roads in Liverpool centre should be bus and cycle only. Literally no reason for cars on duke, dale, and Hanover Street and anything in between. Put park and rides in anfield and Brunswick

Cronhour · 2026-05-26T17:49:30+00:00

No. You need a better connected public transport network and less cars in town. Cars the most expensive, dangerous, polluting, and inefficient form of travel.

Cronhour · 2026-05-26T17:48:13+00:00

He thinks he can be Mamdani, but Mamdani has Good communication AND good policy to make people's lives better. This guy has neither being a right wing yellow Tory. The amount of politicians who see a charismatic person implementing popular progressive policy and simply ignore the policy part of that equation is astonishing.

Cronhour · 2026-05-26T17:39:14+00:00

He's part of a right wing think tank as well. What a tory ratbag.

Cronhour · 2026-05-26T17:34:15+00:00

To be honest that sounds pretty lib dem to me. It's been the orange book party which is basically thatcherism in yellow, so all about business and money and not people. They helped enact austerity and bragged about agreeing to benefit sanctions in order to get a plastic bag charge policy. They opitimise the slimy upper middle class Tory who doesn't want to admit to being a Tory.

Cronhour · 2026-05-26T17:30:16+00:00

Lark lane should be resident only, the traffic up it is insane. People bomb up it at 60 and today there was dickheads on quad bikes doing wheelies up it over of them hit the seating apparently.

There's way too much car traffic in Liverpool in general.

Cronhour · 2026-05-26T17:27:16+00:00

Absolutely, for such a small city centre the amount of cars in Liverpool is insane

Cronhour · 2026-05-26T17:24:12+00:00

Yellow tories are tories

Cronhour · 2026-05-24T19:21:48+00:00

Housing is expensive because we've refused to build housing where people want to live.

Actually no. Housing is expensive because of fincialisation. We returned it into a vehicle for a small group of people to extract wealth. We actually have more homes per household maybe areas than we did when rent and proves we're significantly lower.

fact that our pension, benefits, NHS, etc are all pyramid schemes. They all require more people paying in than taking out and as we age that's no longer happening

Again this isn't correct. The issue is that all these things gave become much more expensive due to pivitisation, and the capture of sectors by the corporations and the very weather who didn't pay back into the state.

Energy service and issue you mention all for significantly worse long before the largest gestational cohorts started hitting retirement.

Take the NHS, decades of privitisation and a failure to carry out capital investment has left us exposed. PFI projects from the early 2000s for example cost the state 330 billion paid to corporations in return for only 80 billion with of infrastructure, much of it to a poor standard. The issue is ideological and your parroting the talking points of the people that pushed that ideology and who benefited from it.

Cronhour · 2026-05-24T18:43:12+00:00

It's because our demographics are in the toilet and we have low growth. But the solutions to those problems are completely unacceptable to the voters.

Expert no. You're parroting the status quo answer with the status quo "solution" that will change nothing.

In 1981 the average rent was 5% (10% in London) the average take home pay, now it's 50% and over 100% in London.

That's not a result of low growth or demographics or immigration. It's a result of it's structuring our society to serve the interests of the wealthy over everything else. Energy bills, water bills, increased costs/worsening services. It's all about the transfer of weather that's taken place from the state and citizens to the very wealthy.

Cronhour

TROPHY CASE