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

Um. Remembering my de Bono, can you dig it back to 595? (this may be a silly or impossible idea)

I forgot about "subject to Planning". Yep on that Boston one. Worth 15-20k once it has PP and the tenant has gone? Maybe?

Thinking about this particular point by @Sensus. Slight apples and oranges here. Of course any plot that does reach the open market will have at least Outlne PP, and at least part of that extra price is due to the reduced risk. While any Plot that is found for me will not have that priced in, subject to a "get me PP" condition, and I will have to pay Mr Sensus some significant amount of £££ plus potentially lunch for his services plus someone more £££ t o get me planning, and a barber to dye my new grey hairs the correct colour . The plot which I posted on the thread went for 22% or so below asking, which strikes me as relatively usual. Ferdinand

It won't be a void any more so you take the ventilation away / block it up and make sure it stays dry to prevent rot. There have been rather extensive discussions on this idea at the other place going back to about 2011, so I would suggest some reading over there, and quie a few houses done. @SteamyTea has a longer history than me there, and may have a better State of the Debate perspective. This is the most recent thread I can find but debates on GBF are a little like a querulous MENSA dinner in a pub sometimes, but very illuminating. You may want to read others too. http://www.greenbuildingforum.co.uk/newforum/comments.php?DiscussionID=13524&page=1 If it was me I would fill the insulation to the top or nearly the top probably with a liner if possible, blocked up the ventilation, put in a perimeter French drain at the bottom of a trench outside, filled the trench with LECA for coldspots (or gravel) and the top 6" with pea gravel, then loose lay 3'x2' Council Slabs on top as a path so I can get to it all if I needed to maintain it. Even better, combine it with EWI. The outside works could probably be done in bits. There would be a case for leaving a small void at the top for electric cables etc as they may degrade over decades in contact with polystyrene balls (I am told). I would first have checked that this was all above the water table all of the time. You also learn to be good with a minidigger by digging a trench 1" from your house all the way round without destroying it. Surprisingly easy to do. Ferdinand

I thought the other approach here was to line the void with a damp proof something to keep it dry and fill it entirely with polystyrene beads like a beanbag, then no need for PIR pfaffing. Possibly with a french drain added at foundation level outside to make sure it stayed dry. There are probably other details. I think that the approach proposed by Jayrock is quite normal but rather a lot of work, and you need to worry about doors, proportions, ceiling height etc. Ferdinand

It is interesting that a few years on the 2009 the GD IoW "TreeHouse" had mellowed quite a bit. These pics are late 2012. http://www.planetpropertyblog.co.uk/2012/11/13/grand-designs-treehouse-for-sale/ I like the face/edge plank mixture, but would prefer it to be vertical orientation. The Tower cladding is gorgeous. What does it look like after a light sandblasting? Ferdinand

Postage cost is £4. Those will either come folded or the service will vanish as that us below cost imo.

@oldkettle I would define it as the ability of the occupants to create their desired environment, but tempered by reasonableness / practicality.

Surely it is a BALANCE not a choice since get varying amounts of both. And the balance point needs to be adjustable e.g. Someone with asthma may prefer a different level of r.h. whilst someone with bad hay fever may want more heavily filtered air a la Saab. Superinsulation means we start from heating bills of say 100 £££ a year rather than 600 £££. Ferdinand

"If it works for your setup" covers many multitudes of sins. Ferdinand (who happens to have a 27" monitor, an A1 archive quality printer and an A1 trimmer in his study :-) )