The Indy‘s City editor (and he is very much a City editor, none of that “business” page nonsense) Anthony Hilton has joined the clamour for the simple plan to save the world! Some of the larger associations are tapping into the aforesaid retail bond market, with Raglan, for example, raising £50m in September with an…
Read More Anthony Hilton joins the Simple Plan!Everyone’s talking about the coming housing disaster again, after this Polly Toynbee column. Here’s the thread at Jamie Kenny’s in which we predicted how this would all turn out way back in July 2011, and here are the StabPrin posts from October 2010, including this valuable collection of links. Here’s some more early warning. Anyway,…
Read More A simple plan to save the world and win the electionsNow if you read this blog, you probably know I was briefly known for proposing that councils borrow against the stream of Local Housing Allowance payments and use this to buy up a lot of rental property. I called it the Simple Plan; it would simultaneously do something for the housing crisis, let the buy-to-let…
Read More A simple, terrible planThe world is in turmoil. Trump. Brexit. Marine Le Pen. And as very often when this is so, it’s in turmoil about macro-economic policy although this is often less obvious than you might think. MLP, for example, wants to recreate the franc, redenominate the French national debt, presumably devalue/inflate a great chunk of it away,…
Read More An even simpler plan nobody wantsA bit of Simple Plan news. I was out on the March for Homes at the weekend, and I’m afraid nobody had a SIMPLE PLAN NOW banner, mainly because I didn’t make one, although some Germans did ask me if I was an “expert on the housing crisis”. That said, it was a pretty decent…
Read More #simpleplan: two news itemsA bit of #SimplePlan in action. Enfield set up a wholly owned private company called Housing Gateway this year. Officials have viewed 122 properties, made offers on 77 and had 48 accepted. The company currently owns 22 homes and has tenants in five of them. Oykener said he ensured tenants in those homes would not…
Read More #simpleplan begins to scale upMore progress from here. In comments, we have an explanation of the PoCA 1906 vs. BA 2010 issue. It’s actually much simpler than I imagined. Basically, the old Act was in force at the time of the crime, and it’s not clear whether the new one is operational yet in the absence of the Ministry…
Read More simpleIf you’re looking for some TV that speaks to typical TYR preoccupations, 54 Hours might be it. This BBC/WDR coproduction retells the utterly berserk story of the 1988 hostage-taking in Gladbeck, West Germany, and successive police forces’ Keystonesque efforts to end it. I liked how it was recognizably a film noir without using any of…
Read More TV recommendation: 54 HoursIt looks like everyone’s favourite Tory thinktank has a plan to solve the housing crisis, and it’s pretty simple! It said acquisition of the land would be financed by a private-public joint venture, with the government contributing 49 per cent – about £3.1bn a year – alongside institutional investors. It would represent the largest government…
Read More Policy Exchange plagiarised me…and I loved itI just got the statements from the various people who want to be the Labour candidate for mayor of London. The good news is that candidates Christian Wolmar, Diane Abbott, and David Lammy all seem to be supporting some version of the simple plan. Wolmar wants to set up a London Housing Development Agency. Abbott…
Read More MAYOR!