Rachel Reeves boosts housing plan with £600m to train more brickies
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/rachel-reeves-boosts-housing-plan-34914315?utm_term=Autofeed&utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0rc6ZiikxjrZMMpdkJpPrmRU18uJja-totrjvnUaIKLzdAGF-GZpZLwgM_aem_PdUtj2ZfSTywjNYNU45n-Q#Echobox=1742745950
Posted by BelleAriel
20 Comments
Now, for once, this appears to be something positive. More of this, please. Less of the cutting. Thank you.
The fundamental issue is not how many new homes are being built, but of landlordism – sure we can train some new bricklayers to help increase housebuilding a bit. But if new homes are mostly bought up by private and corporate landlords then the problem of high rents continues.
Put it this way we spend £30 **billion** a year on housing benefits, a completely unnecessary transfer of wealth from productive workers to (unproductive) landlords – *previously*, impoverished tenants would have been in social housing, but we privatised most of the social housing stock and now have to pay billions of pounds a year in subsidies to rent homes which used to be… social housing! The rentiers win again ding ding ding.
Landlordism is parasitic on the economy, it diverts an increasing portion of the wages the workers earn into rent for landlords (unearned income) – but this means less money for consumer spending in the real economy. The economy will just grind to a halt if it gets worse, because consumer spending will just get strangled to the point where nearly all of your wage goes into renting.
So yes we need new homes, but we need lots of new social homes in particular (and to transform lots of the existing housing stock _back into_ social ownership)
“Look at me talking like one of them. Anyone seen my baccy? “
Great news, more houses more jobs and more people paying council tax…hopefully.
Imagine a world where a million new homes are built, and they are bought up entirely by “investors” and home scalpers.
One might ask what the fucking point is.
If Labour had any balls whatsoever they would change the law so that first time buyers **only** are allowed to purchase property of any kind within the first 5 weeks of it going on the market in the UK across the board. It doesn’t matter what the size or value is, first time buyers need to be made priority or this will all be for nothing other than more wealth transfer to the rich.
Sure, other people who already have property can still purchase and bid against each other after the 5 weeks if the property is unsold, however we can’t have a situation like the current one whereby we have enough homes but they are all in the hands of wealth extracting home scalpers with obscene incomes by turning other people into breadwinners so they don’t have to work.
As property prices fall, expect the investor class to get angry. Should have remembered that the value of your “investment” can go up and down…
TAX THE FUCKIN RICH.
As someone from a construction background I really want this to work, I just hope that they can get people signed up to these training schemes and that the training is done like a proper apprenticeship rather than a short-term training course that doesn’t impart sufficient skills to be really useful.
All being well the pipeline of work will exist beyond the existing government term as a proper training programme is going to take a while and those going through it will want to know that there are jobs at the end of it.
Pay them in cash and you could train twice as many.
wouldnt you ascertain the availability of certain professions before committing to build1.5M homes? Makes you wonder if Labour have even a sniff of what they are doing but I’m going to wager they will say they didnt know how few builders we actually had.
It’s really true. The US sneezes the UK catches a cold.
Odd storey, the best training brickie Ive ever met couldn’t pass the course. cscs or something. A written exam. I passed. Couldn’t lay a brick to save my life.
That’s pretty good, better than giving bailouts to the rich or tax cuts to landlords.
We should be building housing like they do in South Korea. It seems most of what’s built in the UK is suburban detached homes that are too expensive for most new buyers, why can’t we build various types of housing?
Great, when I’m made redundant from my job as a Civil Servant I can retrain to be a brickie.
£600m for brickies this week is £600m in coke dealers pockets next week.
This will be interesting. How many young people on here would be a bricklayer? Working outdoors in all sorts of weather, getting their hands mucky and bashed. Physically demanding work. Lots of work and long hours in the summer months but possibly getting laid off during the winter. And lets not forget the two year apprenticeship where you will be on very low pay
I’d rather the government give me a 300k 2 % interest mortgage instead of the greedy banks.
At least they make money this way compared to whatever shit they do that ends up being super overbudget and gets abused by many middle management…
Yes I’m sure this is also a stupid idea.
If you are a construction company, which situation benefits you most? Is it building lots of homes and flooding the market with properties, or is it building a limited number of homes and releasing them in batches so you can artificially limit demand, keep prices high, and maximise your profits?
We’re being stitched up by capitalist rationality as much as anything else.
We live in a country where it’s possible to generate income from letting out a mortgaged property and most of the MPs sat in parliament are landlords. It’s nothing short of a fucking disgrace and building more houses is like putting a plaster on a breaking dam. It’s nowhere near enough.
Good news for extensions, new builds use cladding and concrete though
that means we will have frew bricklayer course?would be in for it