• 0 Posts
  • 16 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
Cake day: June 17th, 2023
  • GuStJaR@lemmy.worldtoUK Politics@feddit.uk•UK rail minister got engineer sacked for raising safety concerns
    6·
    1 month ago

    I love how Hendy’s (the UK rail minister) wiki page has already been updated. He now has two controversial incidents…

    "In 2013, Peter Hendy, who was then the Commissioner of Transport for London, was accused of engaging in a nine-month extramarital affair with a call girl. She alleged that Hendy provided her with several Oyster cards loaded with £10 as gifts.[18]

    In 2024, Hendy faced significant criticism after a letter, released under a Freedom of Information request, revealed he pressured SYSTRA to dismiss an employee, rail engineer Gareth Dennis, for publicly voicing safety concerns regarding overcrowding at London’s Euston station"

  • GuStJaR@lemmy.worldtoUK Politics@feddit.uk•Labour unveils plan to fix rental crisis and immediately axe no-fault evictions
    41·
    4 months ago

    Not sure how they would manage this.

    A landlord with a BTL interest only mortgage may be on a rate of ~2% today which in 18 months comes to term and they will need to remortgage on a rate of e.g ~4%. Their repayment will essentially double (that’s a simplification but fine for the example). They will also likely be required to show that the income of the property meets a certain % threshold of the repayment. They will therefore need to increase the rent. The tenent won’t be able to afford it, and it’s likely others won’t either. If you can’t afford to buy a house, you’re not going to be able to go from £1500 a month to £3k.

    The landlord won’t be able to remortgage so they will have to sell. When this hits the BTL market, we will have an increase in properties needing to be sold which will reduce prices and for some, a loss for the landlord or lender.

    The government needs to do something that will help first time buyers (owner occupiers) get a mortgage reducing the current dependancy on landlords, and banks need to do more to avoid the scenario I lay out here (reduce IO, reduce the number of properties someone can own via BTL etc).

    Stamp duty is an obvious one. I’ve paid tax on my income, why should I pay tax to buy my first home. Or even my 2nd home (I don’t mean having a 2nd home I mean the 2nd house I move to and live in as my sole property). Also, with property prices always rising (I realise that prices decrease as well but over time they will always be higher) stamp duty increases. In fact, I think the current plan is to reduce the thresholds in 2025 so this will make things even worse.

    Get rid of stamp duty below properties of e.g £5m.

  • GuStJaR@lemmy.worldtoUK Politics@feddit.uk•Where Labour and the Tories got their money from in 2023
    7·
    7 months ago

    Of the £44.5m in cash received by the Conservatives last year, more than £20m came from two sources: John Sainsbury and Frank Hester, an IT entrepreneur from Leeds who has given £5m personally and another £5m through his firm, The Phoenix Partnership. Hester’s firm has profited from public sector contracts and his ties with the party are under heightened scrutiny following the publication of an investigation by the Guardian that revealed he had said former Labour MP Diane Abbott made him “want to hate all black women” and should be shot.

    A further £11.3m came from five individuals:

    Mohamed Mansour, Egyptian-born billionaire who controls the behemoth conglomerate Mansour Group, which has interests in real estate, finance, retail and tech: £5m
Graham Edwards, co-founder of one of the largest private companies in the UK, Telereal Trillium, which owns thousands of properties and approximately 60 million square feet of land: £2m
Amit Lohia, son of billionaire petrochemical and fertiliser tycoon Sri Prakash Lohia, chair of Indorama: £2m
Christopher Barry Wood, founder of biotech firm Medannex: £1.3m
Alan Howard, hedge fund manager who co-founded Jersey-based Brevan Howard and has significant interests in crypto-currency: £1m