Ferdinand

If they detect it then obviously the camouflage and defences are inadequate!!

Fire or Beard of the Year award risk excepted, I guess.

Pah. Was hoping for an RCD. But it is certainly a tool. Temples and I have about 6 Aldis very close. Thanks Add: Temples? I am sure I said tempting.

Bend up the edges and make a 4 person sledge. Did that once with a van roof. Superb. Or repurpose it as a workshop door. Or retractable lid for something. Or the base for eg a mint bed or bamboo enclosure. If you like mint of bamboo. Or root barrier cut into strips. If you have a neighbour you dislike, paint a mural of Homer Simpson mooning, *then* put it their side with a note that painting it will be criminal damage.

Welcome.

@AliG What are your standing charges? My current tariffs are from First Energy Electric: Unit rate 11.016p per kWh Standing charge 14.42p per day Gas Unit rate 2.307p per kWh Standing charge 14.42p per day Tariff Comparison Rates (= attempt at overall rate given certain assumption are Electric: 12.71p per kWh Gas: 2.73p per kWh Assumed usage in that calc (on which I think the monthly payment is based) Electric: 3100 kWh Gas: 12500 kWh Area = 190 sqm (ish) Energy per sqm = 82.1 kWh per sqm per year (Largely meaningless) Energy Usage figure from 2010 EPC = 156 kWh/m² per year According to the MSE Cheap Energy Club I am within £10 of the best tariff I could currently get. Ferdinand

No, as far as I am aware. But the LL may have some sort of liability for tenant actions if they do not enforce on the contract in some cases. eg The Coucil may have something to say if the T brings in enough people to live there which makes it an HMO, and the LL does not have the appropriate license if required, and does not deal with the situation swiftly. At that point the Landlord will be at risk of losing their License, or prosecution. In Scotland 2 unrelated people living together is defined as an HMO iirc eg Hinge and Brackett. A similar process would be applied to Anti-Social Behaviour, and Councils are now starting to require landlords to have enforcement procedures in rental contracts as a condition of licenses (as do Housing Associations at present). See, for example, this "Fit and Proper Person" document from Burnley: http://www.burnley.gov.uk/sites/default/files/selective licensing Appendix 3 Fit and Proper.pdf Standard 4 on page 5 may be requiring Landlords to do things that are criminal under law (common law right to quiet enjoyment, Protection from Eviction Act 1977 etc), and there is loads of similar stuff. But stopping Councils doing unlawful things is almost impossible, as we all know. (Last rental post on this thread from me - if more is needed start a different topic.) Ferdinand

On Free Boilers, it is quite interesting and complicated. Example of a real situation with which I am familiar. Person with dependent child who receives Income Support is eligible for insulation grants and replacement of poor boiler under various schemes. However, it needs the same person to have parental responsibility for child under 18 or in FTE in addition to being on Income Support, and child to be living there. Sounds fair enough, but if a T has a child of partner who qualifies and will live there (partner does not receive income support), but not parental responsibility yet since it is partner's child and they have not been together long enough to decide to do it, they are not eligible. In this case the T also has their own child, who ordinarily lives with former partner :-). And it falls down the cracks. Which then kicks off an examination of the varying criteria of all the schemes to see if one is slightly different! I can understand why it is like that for enforcement reasons. But ... but ... the complications. Ferdinand

It sounds to me as if your friend needs to go on a Landlord Training Course, which will only cost around £100-200. I like the RLA, but NLA and similar bodies are OK. NLA tends to be the one that Local Councils accredit. If he wants to do it properly and manage his own, then the silver standard is probably the NFoPP Technical Award, which is aimed mainly at letting agents. https://www.nfopp-awardingbody.co.uk/qualifications/residential-letting-property-management/england-wales-qcf-level-3-technical-award/ Fireproof labels on furniture are absolutely basic; and - to be fair - functional new furniture is very cheap, And you stick to cheap-but-robust because the Deposit rules write its value down to zero after a small number of years, so you won't be able to recover damages against something with zero value as its value cannot be reduced. And there are oodles and oodles of laws. For a forum I recommend http://www.landlordzone.co.uk/ and the forum there, where I used to post extensively as midlandslandlord. For property type queries rather than How to Landlord, I would recommend https://www.property118.com/, which hosted the campaign that overturned the West Bromwich BS mortgage decision. Ferdinand

I haven't been that thorough in my recording :-). It isn't just a buildup of credit since the switch was only a few months ago. I will see if I can find some numbers off bills. F

The energy company (I use First Energy because they are large but with non-awful customer service) have just reduced my monthly payment for gas / elec to £65 from £80 of their own accord (which probably means a smaller reduction than is actually needed). That means that within a year it has shrunk from £120 to £65, or £660 per year. The only change we have made is to install a stonking 10kWP solar array in January, which is East/West and still rather shaded, and to switch suppliers - which reduced the payment from £120 to £80. Don't underestimate the power of switching and competition. The house is a refurbed 4 bed chalet bungalow at just under 2000sqft with 2 people, which is generally good but we aren't obsessive. I am sure that others have done as well or better, and we still can, and I wanted to record the numbers. Solar energy generated is going to be about 5500kWh (=another £600 in subsidy) for the year, which hints at how shaded our installation was and still is. Ferdinand

For rental properties you can opt out or in for making the rent Vatable, but there are complications and I do not know if the option is related to VAT on build etc. I do not know the details, business / residential etc.

You are fortunate. She could have said Compo ! Will be a good winter wood store.

Needs a test. Would the scorched boards run onto the others in the rain? How would that look? That could be as bad as rain stain runoff on badly detailed concrete walls.

For the record my policy mix would involve (on top of current measures): 1 Some planning reform. Simplify. 2 Restart rural development in existing communities. 3 Some ultra high density development e.g. THamesmead as is done elsewhere in the world where space is tight. 4 Policy driven locally but make development to be done by Housing Associations not Local Authorities. 5 Review rental regulation in England which is currently as nutty as the excess stakeholders in the planning process. 6 Develop measures to slow down or reverse falls in houshold sizes. E.g. Half council tax for two pensioners or singles sharing. 7 Some relaxations of green belt. 8 Much stronger regional policy to move activity north and west. I am not sure how to address the NIMBY problem, which is crippling. Also not sure about the housing target regime. And not sure how to handle a regional policy in SNiW. Ferdinand

@daiking No particular politics ... just attempting to interrogate the implications of your proposed Right to Housing wrt the numbers. Supply, demand and how to build that supply are relevant. So is demand management but if it is to be a genuine Right to Housing then demand management is mainly moot. There are two main drivers of the houses you are going to have to build, which are net immigration and household size falling. Others would be for example restrictions on HMOs and the numbers of students living away from home as University attendance has gone from 10% or so to 40% or so. We need to look at demographics because e.g. more one person households will be adding perhaps 100k-200k+ a year to the demand for some sort of Housing. Do they have a Right to Housing? What sort of Housing? Who decides? We need to talk about immigration because the main element of demand for more houses is population increase, and in the period 2000-2015 Uk population is up by around 5m and approx 70-75% (estimate but roughly right ) of that increase is net immigration (I make it about 3.7m net immigration). This is a report from the Govt on household formation in England published in 2010 looking at the period 2008-2033 https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/6395/1780763.pdf Reported in summary by the Beeboids here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-15400477 That came up with a number of new households of 6-7 million between 2008 and 2015. Add another million for SNiW. THese numbers were reduced from the previous 2006 report. Their high projection for immigration was 217k a year. In fact since 2004 to now the average is around 250k, and we may be heading for more like 9-10 million than 8 million new households. Ironically Brexit may help. That is an extra 40%, so pro rata 1.4-1.5 million new households in London for example. And then we need the local authorities who have been trying to build fewer houses than requested by a strong central policy for a decade to pretty much double their allocations, under your proposal for a 'local service'. How would that work? Would you abolish eg the Planning Inspectorate as an unwelcome central body? (There is also the question of LPA competence and politics. When we applied for our Housing Estate PP there were councillors on the Planning Committee - this in a DC with a 100k population- who did not know where the community development boundary was.) Not trying to go in too hard on you here, but we have had too many years of non-joined up policy ideas. Since we are slightly of topic too suggest we wrap this up quite soon. I have 2 lofts to insulate this w/e. Ferdinand

THere's nothing stopping someone doing a HIt and Miss double wall. Ferdinand

Yep. I'd admit that this is a bit of a bee in my bonnet. I think that a lot of measures are already in place quite successfully. One question is what is the minimum level which can be achieved? It is not zero - like unemployment because there is always some friction. My suspicion is that we may be quite near the minimum figure, but whether it is 100000 long term empties or 150000 or 50k I am not sure. Does it include slow sellers? There will also be some dependency with private rental regulation, and I think that say 6-12 month contract workers abroad may be inclined to leave it empty rather than engage with items such as identity checking or the eviction bureaucracy. It is being professionalised by bureaucratisation. But ... back to topic. Ferdinand

I am familiar with the numbers on that and we have done very very well - we actually have very few. In England it is down by 35% on 2004. Currently housing-shouters are struggling to generate outrage from an England (getting UK figures is a sod since devolved) long term empties (>6 months) figure of a little over 200k homes. London has 20915 (2015) out of a stock of 3.4 million. That is about 0.6%. See table 615: https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/live-tables-on-dwelling-stock-including-vacants London is down by more than half since 2004, England by 35-40%. Quite a remarkable performance, but there are still people trying to generate equivalent outrage from a far smaler problem, so the claims need to be ever-more extreme (see by analogy Greenpeace and climate change). eg here is the Groaniad translating a figure of 22,000 into a headline of "Tens of Thousands": https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/feb/21/tens-thousands-london-homes-deemed-long-term-vacant Here is a piece from 2014 comparing the UK with Germany, France, Italy and Spain. This includes short term empties. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/feb/23/europe-11m-empty-properties-enough-house-homeless-continent-twice UK: 700k Portugal: 735k France: 2.4m Italy: 2.4m Germany: 1.8m Spain: 3.4m That is one reason why it *may* be a sensible policy for Germany to invite 1m refugees, while being a silly idea for the UK, if you ignore handing a million people over to traffickers and 2500 drowning in the sea, and the 93bn Euro Merkel has budgeted for expenditure in Germany over 5 years compared to perhaps 2bn Euro for the ME where 95% of the refugees continue to exist. Graphic: Ferdinand

1 - Agree that more rural housing is a good idea. I don't see why the population of our countryside couldn't increase by a few million. Especially in eg Scotland and other aras of low density. But we need to get beyond the idea of the countryside as a rural museum and tackle "sustainability" head on. My preference would be for the default for communities to be allowed to increase by 0.8-1% a year. The chokehold on rural development is quite recent; Derbyshire is full of villages with 1950s small council estates and 50s/60s bungalows. 2 - I think you are mistaken with not reflecting on this more: The impact of demographics is massive. Between 2001 and 2011, for example, the average household size moved from 2.4 to 2.3. Take a population of 60 million and that is a demand for an extra 1.1 million units from that trend alone. That single factor will absorb approx 65% of the houses built between 2001 and 2011 (estimated at 150k a year which is about right). Suspect that effect is understated since there has been an upsurge of rented-by-room HMOs in the last 15 years. If you factor in a population of 65 million (was 64 million in 2013), still at 2.3 household size, then the extra number of housing units needed would be approx 3 million. In fact we built under 2.5 million in the period. I'm ignoring shenanigans such as Councils A-rating individual bedrooms in HMOs and calling them a Housing Unit to get the government bonus. This is one reason why I would support angling benefits and taxes to encourage people to stay together. 3 - I think we need figures for developable land to get a better impression on that. Cornwall has more hills, whereas Buckinghamshire has more Golf Courses. Are there numbers available? Ferdinand

@Daiking In my personal opinion that is a right and that is something that lies with the government. None of this shoulder shrugging hand wringing about not interfering in the market despite all the other govt interference that freaks it up. Housebuilding is a local service not an international. they should be knocking up houses everywhere they are needed so taxpayers can lead happy productive lives not farmed in worse conditions than livestock for the benefit of landowners. I think those statements are not very meaningful. What do you *mean*? Who has a right to a house and what do they have a right to? Do I get a house if I just came in from Poland? What about if I am 21 and pregnant or single with a child? What about if my GF is 21 and pregnant and we split up? And so on. Without precise policies we can't work out the impact, and it is just a feelgood handwaving competition, And are you happy with the consequences of such a "just do it" policy? And how will you ensure decent house that people want to live in? How do you ensure they are efficiently built? What happens if the govt CPO your house and build a small block of flats on it? You won't get much chance because under your suggestion the people who build or commission it it will be the same people who give themselves Planning Permission. Still happy? That is the massive conflict of interest that exists in such circs and is why I am vigorously opposed to substantial local political control over housebuilding / management - Housing Associations are OK, ALMOs sometimes, Council Estates under direct political control: No. I'll get on to the numbers implied and the problems of gormless politicians later, maybe. (Taster: Our Housing Cabinet member here's main claim to fame is appearing in a photo next to Ed Milliband wearing a "dance on Thatcher's Grave" teeshirt.) Ferdinand

One further observation I would like to make. Two reasons for loss of innovation and trying out ideas are imo that: 1 - Local and regional developers have been decimated. There are not developers building say between 25 and 500 houses per year. There are some left, but it is tough. The site I sold is for about 100 houses. I would eventually have found someone to buy a 50 plot site, but much below that and it cannot support the sales / marketing infrastructure needed by a large developer. There are not many developers out there able to take on a normal site (ie one without a killer benefit such as getting it nearly free or getting very high prices) of say 10-40 plots and having a profitable "normal" project with "normal" houses on it. By "normal" I mean houses of perhaps 900->1800 sqft. Such builders would be able to do trial innovation in collaboration with eg small research organisations, or to be places where eccentric inventors could find space to make a living as well as indulging their imaginations around the edges. More variety would be an additional benefit. If they are acre plots with gin palaces that sell at 1m each that has more leeway, but it is like the tighter control needed to make a supermini to sell at 12k vs a Jag to sell at £70k. But that is not where we need new ideas. 2 - Such profitable niches have gradually been eroded. One reason is that the full panoply of planning gain has been applied to smaller developer in most places. Think for example that Segal started with a small bungalow in his back garden while he built his house, and Span Developments (Eric Lyons) only built around 2000 houses in nearly 20 years, with an average development size of around 30 (2134 houses / 73 developments). What we have left at the lower end are builders doing developments at a couple or a few houses a year on plots as they come up. That is too small. I would like to see some Planning Gain only kick in at say 12 houses. IIRC it used to be 15 in most places. The overhead of reports and phalanx of oar-inserters is now many times what it was only 20 years ago. Are TV programmes the main drivers of innovation now? Ferdinand https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Span_Developments

Thanks all. I will also need pipe insulation because one boiler is in the attic with about 10m run of uninsulated hot pipes. But they are in a sort of mounting plate which holds them close together and parallel so it will probably be the normal not thick stuff. The insulation plus the pipes plus an insluted loft hatch should knock 25% off the energy bills, however. Ferdinand

I would concur. It is a filler not a seal. Unless there is a special sort. Ferdinand

A quick one. I am insulating or extra-insulating three lofts between now and Christmas. Unfortunately none of them qualify for the freebies, so I need to obtain rockwool insulaiton. Where is the current best price? I reckon I need about 100-120 sqm of the 100mm under-stuff, and perhaps 200 sqm of the top layer, which could be 170mm unless I skimp and I hate skimping on basics like this unless the expense is eyewatering. Can anyone recommend a supplier, or a half price / opening / closing down / seasonal offer? At Wickes it will be a little over £1000 I estimate with 4 for 3s and a Trade Card and 5% cashback on the Amex. I hope to do better than that. Ferdinand