Unfortunately Feeling Compelled To Be A 'Nimby'

For those unfamiliar with the term, 'nimby' comes from 'not in my back yard' referring to people complaining about developments in their area.  Such an attitude has caused immense problems for the UK and is one reason why we have a shortage of prisons, drug rehabilitation centres, social housing, wind farms and even graveyards.  UK residents despise change.  They do not like 'others' coming into their area.  This was noticeable in the new town, Milton Keynes, where I used to live.  The town is laid out on a grid pattern and one-by-one over the past four decades these grids are filled in with new housing.  The trouble is much of the housing is very middle class, fine for people who can afford it, but it has meant that shops like Tescos have to bus in lower-paid staff from Luton, 27 Km away as none of them can find affordable accommodation locally.  The sensible solution seemed to be to build social housing in one of the grids close to the large shopping centre in the South-East of the town.  This was too much for the residents of neighbouring grids who went and vandalised equipment on the building site in an attempt to stop social housing coming anywhere near their middle class enclaves.  It is fascinating how such residents portray the potential newcomers as feckless, drug addicts, alcoholics, noisy and dirty.  They do not connect them with the people who serve them their luxury delicatessen items in the supermarket or clean up when one of their offspring makes a mess.  The main concern for the residents was that the value of their houses is sliding as a result of these social housing areas.  There is no sense that if the supermarkets close for lack of staff then the price will fall anyway.  In Milton Keynes the districts are divided by dual-carriageway roads on which most of, cars travel at 70 mph, which is as good a ghetto forming barrier as any.

Having seen such a narrowly focused 'nimby' response and utterly despairing over the virulent attacks on wind farms in the place of nuclear or coal-fired power stations, I am always careful not to fall into that trap myself.  Yet, on a small scale, I find I have done and consequently feel like a hypocrite.  My own consolation seems to be that I am not actually stopping progress like most nimbys, but that I am trying to reduce a quite clear contribution to crime in my street.  I have moved the location of the computer in my house so that I now sit in a room facing out over the street.  Dead opposite the window is a detached house built in the 1920s.  It has been empty for over three weeks now.  It was split into two flats, both rented out by a local social housing company.  The residents moved out more than three weeks ago and a few days later all the windows were stripped from the house and the front door was left open.  We had assumed that the windows would be replaced.  However, as time has passed nothing as been done to the house, it has not even been boarded up.  Of course, this offered too much temptation to drunken men coming back from the pub and twice over the weekend they decided to simply walk into the property and trash it.

Despite the house being vacated a lot of things had been left behind including a vacuum cleaner, a fridge and the cardboard tubes from the interior of carpets.  These were distributed all over the street.  Inside the vandals did a pretty good job of stripping the plaster and breaking up interior fittings.  Naturally we rang the owners and they said they had no concern as the property is due to be demolished anyway to provide access to a new close that is going to be jammed in behind the current line of houses.  What this is going to do to the already congested street I live on, though for not much longer, I have no idea.  Of course, if cars went down it at the legal 30 mph, then it might be alright, but no-one seems capable of keeping their speed down that low or wait for people coming on to negotiate around the lines of parked cars down both sides of the road, leading to lots of incidents of shouting and horns hooting.

After the second occasion I telephoned the police on their non-emergency line.  Being a low crime area two officers arrived as fast as they would have done to an emergency in many towns.  The perpetrators had fled.  Despite this nothing has been done to the house, it still remains full of debris (we pushed the stuff that had been thrown into the street back into its front garden).  My concern is less with the damage to the value of the property, as we have already sold it, but the hazard such a derelict site makes.  Are companies not obliged to board up empty houses?  These days the average building site is surrounded by defensive fences and is usually covered in alarms, though I gather that is more to dissuade people from stealing the scaffolding than from discouraging people from trespassing.  I know that development and letting companies are powerful in any town, their kind of people tend to fill councils the length of the country.  However, I have been surprised that there is no legal requirement to make a derelict property secure especially when it is so close to inhabited properties.  The house will be a wonderful refuge for rats and a source of bricks and other debris for vandalism elsewhere; the police officers expressed concern that cars parked within metres of the house would be damaged.  My concern is that the property will be burnt down; perhaps that is what the company is hoping in order to save on demolition costs. Whilst it is detached house, one wall lies less than a metre from an inhabited house, ironically owned by the same letting company.

These circumstances have turned me into a reluctant nimby.  I hoped the police would put pressure on the company, but days passed without change.  I contacted the local forum which seems to be a one-man organisation for complaining about students.  However, the forum's chair welcomed my complaint and it seems he has the ear of at least a few councillors.  The matter has to be raised at committees and so I imagine I will be long gone and the house burnt to the ground before anything is done.  I know that David Cameron's 'Big Society' is simply a sham to explain away cuts in local services, but it is bitter that, in fact, it is so apparent that at a local level residents have absolutely no control even over things that will be a focus of crime.  Developers and property owners are, as they probably always have been, the true power in a town and it allows them to ignore complaints and to adopt an approach that costs them the least even to the extent on saving on buying some boards and nailing them to empty windowframes for a few weeks before they get round to knocking the house down.  People complain that health and safety regulations are too obsessive, but it seems, that they can simply be ignored if that is done by those with money and influence.  Many people opposed the building of the new houses, saying they could not be fitted in.  I accepted that there was nothing we could do to stop the construction, but I do feel that in the meantime the derelict house should be made safe and not a draw for rats and vandals.  However, clearly, even that attempt at nimbyism is a step too far too succeed.

Living With/As A Lodger

The year before last I was living in a guesthouse so that I could be near work.  In that context I noted that, with the economy moving in the directions it seemed to be; with it so difficult to move house in the UK due to the disparities in prices between different regions and the instability of the short contract work which is now so common across so much employment,  we would be see the return of forms of residence characteristic of the 19th and much of the 20th century. I felt I was living a kind of existence that Arnold Bennett may have featured in one of his stories.  See: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2009/12/living-in-guesthouse.html


With a government bent on turning British society back in time we are likely to see the reappearance very quickly of such dated forms of residence. Examples include people having to sleep on floors, cramped into houses with their extended families, sleeping rough, and possibly in time as it becomes so hard to get any workers who can live anywhere near where they are needed, more and more companies housing their workers whether in caravans in the car park or above a department store like in ‘The History of Mr. Polly’ by H.G. Wells (1910). Accommodation will become a perk of a job and allow employers to pay that little bit less and also to hold another threat over their workers to ensure compliance: if you are not subservient to me and do all that I say, then, well not only do you lose your job but your home too. I can see Cameron and his controllers relishing being able to crack this additional ‘whip’ over the workforce they feel had it too much their own way during the Blair years, perhaps even, given how extreme their views seem to be, during the Thatcher and Major years too.


One of these traditional forms of residence is as a lodger. For those unfamiliar with this term, it means someone who rents a room in a house, not as a tenant but as a kind of a member of the family. They share the bathroom and usually the kitchen; in some houses they have their meals cooked by the owner of the house and perhaps their laundry done too, in others they have to deal with these things themselves. I have both lived as a lodger and until recently had a lodger in my house. From the outset I must say it is a miserable existence for all concerned. People only let out rooms because they need the money; there are tax breaks in the UK for doing so.

There are some advantages for the lodger in that though there is a contract you usually can get out of it easier than renting a whole flat. In addition, generally you just pay the rent and do not have to get mixed up in things like utility charges and council tax. In theory being a lodger should be cheaper than being a tenant. However, in my experience, the rent part is often very little different you just save on the household bills and in this age of fixed-term tenancy contracts which mean you can be compelled to pay rent on a property months after you have left it, it is (generally, not always) easier to walk away from when work moves somewhere else than if you were the tenant.

Lodgers are generally seen as sad, lonely middle-aged men, but these days they come in both genders and all ages and I imagine that the diversity in lodgers will increase as the employment and housing situations in the UK continue to deteriorate. I will look first at what it is like being a lodger and then turn around and look at the perspective from the people renting out the rooms.

The first thing I learned about being a lodger is that anything that goes wrong in the house is your fault. Any breakage, any smell, any malfunction is the fault of the lodger even if they have had no contact with the item or location in question. There will always be an immediate assumption that anything missing has been stolen by you. In the UK, people are unlikely to make direct accusations, until what they see as your wrong behaviour builds up to a certain level and then they accuse you of everything that has gone wrong over the previous weeks or months. Partly I think this is simply to put you in your place and emphasise that you are not accepted into the house. I suffered this even though the son of the owner of the house was a drug addict and was arrested while I was living in the house for breaking into a shop. I could have complained about having my room searched at 3 a.m. by the police seeking where he had hidden stolen goods. I was fortunate that I was simply able to leave.

The second thing you learn is that British households are filled with a whole series of ridiculous rituals which you must adhere to precisely or be accused that you are odd or being rude or were raised in a bad way. You have to learn quickly where your shoes must be left, when you must rise and go to bed, who has priority in the bathroom or the kitchen, what you can or cannot eat in your bedroom or cook in the kitchen (I was accused of having cooked with garlic, when in fact that was not the case), usually you must stick to bland very high fat English food or packaged food, nothing more imaginative. You must never drink alcohol even outside the house. Effectively, by paying the owner some money every week they feel they can set down more regulations on your life than your parents would have done. In extreme cases I have had friends compelled to open and close the curtains in their rooms at specific times and to even carry a light bulb from room to room and screw it in place if they wanted lighting in that room. Another friend, when a lodger, though permitted to use the washing machine, found that the owner was turning it through the programmes because she was impatient for the washing to finish. This left his clothes improperly washed and in fact the woman was damaging her own washing machine as she had become obsessed with her own rules.

The problem is, that people who let out rooms really do not want to have lodgers and they resent you because you represent how much they need the money. However, most British people cannot accept anyone else’s view of how a house should be run and set rules on others that they could not adhere to themselves. Very often you see such hardened attitudes on the ‘right’ way to do things cause arguments between couples and among family members. It is no wonder that the lodger will always be in the wrong just by their very presence.


It is incredible how having lodgers makes people so mean spirited. I knew a recently married couple who not yet having children took in a lodger, a young woman, so as to help pay with the mortgage. I met her once and she seemed nice and clean, but my friends could never say a good word about her. They kept their lights dimmed and complained that she was always turning them up when she was doing her college work (she worked as a nanny and did a college course part-time). I pointed out that it was actually difficult to read anything in their house when the lights were dimmed. However, they could see no legitimate reason for her wanting more lighting even to read and saw some sinister motive, claiming she must want to waste their money. This shows how far my friends, who until then I had considered rational people, had stepped into being so mean spirited when they got a lodger. It is not pleasant to be a lodger, you have minimal privacy and are highly dependent on other people, no-one does it from choice and no-one has any desire to waste the house owner’s money.


My friends’ attitude continued saying that they often found the young woman on the telephone and they disbelieved her when she said it was people calling her. They had no problem with her using the phone for calls, it was that again they believed she was going out of her way to spend their money. I asked them if their phone bill had risen since she had arrived and whether there were lots of new numbers or an often repeated new number on the bill. Of course, the bill had not changed, the woman was telling the truth, she had no reason to lie when the owners would get evidence of any lie from the telephone company. Again my friends were letting their prejudice blind them to rational evidence. This is not surprising. People hate having strangers in their house, they quite often hate having their own family members there but feel obliged by family ties not to complain. The lodger as a stranger is not spared the irrational anger that stems from the owners feeling somehow violated at having this person in their house. It is unsurprising that in these situations lodgers do not stay long. Even when renting a room, you want the place to be a refuge and instead you find you have to creep around and adhere to more regulations than you do in the workplace, it makes your times of supposed rest very stressful.


Last year we had two lodgers in our house. This was compelled on us as I remained unemployed and we needed all the money we could get into the house to slow down the steps to repossession. The 16-year old Spanish girl I have mentioned before: She was clean and was out partying most of the time so impinged little on the house. Once we got her a mirror in her room she spent far less time in the bathroom so it was alright. In addition, her English was good so she understood the regulations and her mother told her to behave respectfully to us. Her successor was very different and much more like the classic style of lodger. He was 20 and came from Saudi Arabia. His level of English was very poor which made explaining anything very difficult.


One challenge with having lodgers from abroad, even from within the EU is that they find it very difficult to comprehend how expensive food and utilities are compared to their home country. Thus, even the Spanish lodger will be more wasteful than British people are/are becoming. Our house is in almost constant gloom due to the low wattage of the bulbs we have installed. We have sequential baths in the same bath water and no-one wastes food. The Spanish girl probably treated us as respectfully as she would some distant relative.


The Saudi man saw us simply as his servants. Clearly at home he is spoilt with family members or servants cooking for him at any hour he chooses to come in; cleaning up after him all the time, even switching off lights after him. He believed, despite being repeatedly told, that any item of food not locked away was free for him to eat. He would open new packets if he fancied them. He was cooked meals which would be left for him to reheat as never once did he come home at the time he said. This food he would either leave out to attract ants and flies or throw away when it could have been eaten by someone else in the house. The fact that no can of fizzy drink or packet of crisps could be brought into the house without him consuming meant it very difficult to shop. He insisted on four to five cans of coca cola per day and when he could not get these would begin drinking all the drinks bought for the nine year old boy who lives in our house. In the end all cans and snacks had to be locked away and he was given ‘sacrificial’ cans to keep him from seeking out others, though he would do this, stamping up and down the house trying to find our latest hiding place. This was despite him having sufficient cash to buy a brand new smartphone, expensive clothes, chocolates and other luxuries himself.


Of course, he could argue that he had paid for it so that he could do what he liked with it, but we hate to see waste. He never switched a light off. You could track his progress through the house by the lights left on. He would visit the toilet in the middle of the night and leave the light blazing (or dimly glowing given our bulbs, but for hours still) and he constantly had the light on in his room throughout the day and night. He insisted that the boy in my house switch the computer from the games he was playing to unsuitable rap videos on YouTube or video sequences of Saudi military manoeuvres. I recognise a cultural difference, back home presumably younger people have to comply with his wishes without complaint, but it is not how our house runs especially when the boy has access to games on the computer as a treat.


Having been a lodger myself, I was sensitive to the challenges of being in that position. However, I was never a lodger like he was. The pile of sweaty socks smelt out the first floor. We had to get into his room and seize them (we offered to wash all his clothes for free but he did not offer them up unless pressed) to wash them. The hawking and spitting down the toilet every morning was a cultural thing which we accepted despite the volume of this activity. From considering all food in the house to be his rightful possession, he turned to my clothing, taking my scarf when he felt cold and then tossing it aside. It then disappeared so I was compelled to buy a new one until I tracked it down bundled up in his room.


Of course, we complained, but his initial ignorance of English followed by his complete incomprehension about why the servants were making such fuss over things that were ‘nothing’ (as he referred to the cost of the cans of coca cola), meant we got nowhere. The woman in my house grew angrier and angrier until she began shouting at him and then felt phobic that he would take revenge on her so secured herself and her son in her room against the fear of his attack.


This deterioration in relations was probably extreme, exacerbated by utter lack of common language and a common basis for rules on living. We had thought it would be useful to have someone from a different culture in our house. I have often worked with Saudis and know this spoilt brat of a man is not representative, but it made us feel wretched that we had to accept someone so using into our house because we were desperate for the money.


What are my suggestions coming out of my bitter experiences of being a lodger and having lodgers in my house? Well, you have to accept that it is going to be a pretty wretched experience for all concerned. Few people are experienced or trained in having or being lodgers. We live very much in a ‘me first’ society and in contrast to say those used to being put up by others in the past, having to share bathrooms and eat what we were given, all of us these days from childhood onwards and tutored to demand what we want precisely the way we want it. As Britain is being driven back to the Victorian era, we will pass through phases that look like the 1950s and so many of us are going to have to get used to sharing and putting up with stuff that will ‘do’ rather than precisely matches our desires.


If you are going to be a lodger, expect to face totally irrational regulations and expect to move on after a few months at the most. Despite what you pay you will be perceived, whether sub-consciously or consciously, as an unwanted intruder in the house. If you are having lodgers, remember that they are only human and that their behaviour and assumptions are likely to be hugely different to yours. Do not let things build up, talk with your lodger regularly and try to see things from their perspective as much as possible as, naturally, you will default back to your own view of things very easily and this view will harden as time passes. Remember that if you had your grandmother/uncle/cousin, whoever, staying for a number of weeks, even if you had a close and shared experience before, you would soon find it very challenging living with them. As with a marriage, having a lodger can only even just scrape by with a lot of communication and effort.

The Steady Path to Repossession of Our House

Early on with me posting to this blog, way back in 2007, I wrote a lot about the agonies of being booted out of one house by a landlord and then buying another house quickly.  Now, almost three years on, I am in a position to see how much of a mistake that rapid house purchase was.  December 2007 was the worst time to move, with house prices and interest rates seeming to be going to rise inexorably, we felt lucky to get a fixed-rate mortgage at 6% and a 3-bedroomed house at less than £240,000 (€283,800; US$372,400).  Now, of course, with interest rates at almost zero for 18 months, such a high rate of mortgage seems insane, and the house, well, that is worth somewhere around £205-£210,000.  Saying that though, even with a £900 per month (€1,060; US$1,390) mortgage repayment, it was already below the rent for a house of the same size in my town and now, three years later, renting the same type of property locally would cost £1200 per month, so there were savings.  In addition, I was fortunate that after Newham Council had taken its £14,000 cut from the sale of my flat in their borough; HM Revenue and Customs £16,000 for capital gains tax as I had been unable to find work near my flat and so had been compelled to rent it out, and the estate agents sold the 2-bedroomed flat to a friend of theirs at a price you could have got a 1-bedroomed flat in the same area for, I had quite a bit of money to put into the house.  I reckon I will come away with around £30,000 of that, which means I have lost £20,000 (€23,600; US$31,000) in house purchasing since 2001 and am unlikely ever to be able to afford to buy any kind of house or flat again.

The main problem for me at the moment is selling the house before I run out of money to pay the mortgage repayments.  Having applied for 40 jobs in 16 weeks and attended 11 interviews without success, it looks like I am going to be unemployed for a pretty long time; structural unemployment, 1980s-style is back.  I have enough saved from my last redundancy package to pay two more months repayments.  Where money for deposit on a flat and rental payments will come from, I have no idea.  Knowing that I will soon default on the mortgage repayments I have contacted my lender twice in the past four months, first when I was made redundant and again now.  However, both times I have been told they can do nothing, I am not yet desperate enough.  I need to have only one month's repayment money left before they can even begin considering any options such as moving me to an interest-only payment scheme.  I have noticed that at the job centre (even though many of the staff at my local branch are in line for redundancy themselves come December), the building society and the estate agent's, people are still thinking that we are only experiencing frictional unemployment, i.e. people being out of work for three months or less as they move from position to position.  In fact, at a Back-To-Work session run by the job centre they said as much.  People need to wake up to the fact that certainly in public sector work and, I feel, more widely, we are now facing a pretty quick progression to mass, structural unemployment as seen in the 1980s.  The principles of the late 1990s and 2000s do not apply in such circumstances.

I applied for mortgage interest benefit.  I was advised by my job centre that, given that I have been unemployed for more than three months, I should apply for such help.  I did.  I was then told that because the woman in my house works more than 24 hours per week, I was not entitled to it.  To make matters worse I was also told that my jobseeker's allowance, which currently is paid to me on the basis of my contributions, will stop in December because the 'household income' must be too high because the woman in my house works more than 24 hours per week.  Given the current economic climate and the fact that she is self-employed she is working more than 40 hours per week to try to make more money.  She is angry that her business which usually turns a profit of £12,000 per year, i.e. little more than the £8,400 needed to pay just the mortgage (let alone utility bills and food costs) if she was paying it alone, impacts on what I can claim.  To make matters worse, she has been told that whilst she is a single parent, because I am part of the household, even though I have no income apart from my jobseeker's allowance (and even that will stop in less than three months). she is entitled to only £15 ( €17.70; US$23.27) per week in 'in-work' tax credits, i.e. payments for people working but on a low income who have children.  If I leave the house, this would apparently rise to £200 per week.  I have spoken before about the hazards of inadvertently becoming a family if you live with someone of the opposite sex: http://rooksmoor.blogspot.com/2008/05/i-now-pronounce-you-inadvertent-husband.html  Despite that, it is clear that it is much better to be living alone or just with a child if you want to claim benefits.

My efforts then to reduce the steady drain of my savings and the inevitable default on the mortgage has only one possible redemption, one which the building society keeps on talking about, which is to beg from your family.  This assumes that your family is richer than you and willing to bail you out.  I am estranged from my brother who lives abroad and the bulk of the family of the woman who lives in my house live overseas, the rest are in the same situation as her.  I persuaded my parents to pay the mortgage three months from now so the house is not repossessed before it can be sold and they would get that money back immediately from the sale price of the house.  However, they cannot do this indefinitely, and six months seems the maximum.  I am very grateful that I have that, most people would not.  Given how slow the market is, however, it seems very possible that come next summer, especially with more people having to sell up the way we are, the house will remain unsold and the building society will take it over.

Whether I lose the house to repossession or manage to sell it first, the experiment of being a property owner will be at an end and I will be back at the mercies of the unregulated rental sector, which under the current government is likely to be freed even further of its restrictions.  Given how I was kicked out of two houses at the whim of the landlord and had one intimidating myself and the woman and child that lived there, with no notice paid to that behaviour by the police, I have a very bleak view of my future in terms of finding a place to live.  In many ways I have been lucky and I am sure we are all going to hear more stories of people pushed from pillar to post as unemployment rises to new records and landlords/ladies exploit those people who have no choice but to come to them.

Property in the UK 12: Capital Gains Tax Shock

My ongoing saga that started in December 2006 with trying to find somewhere to live has filled many blog postings here.  To recap, back at the end of 2006 I was forced to leave one house by my landlord wanting the house back.  Then in May 2007 (though I did not leave until December) I was forced by the harrassment of the landlord and his defaulting on the mortgage to leave another house. Then there was the aspect of trying to sell my London flat, which I had left behind when I had found work in other areas and being charged £16,500 (€20460; US$26,070) by Newham Council for the privilege of owning a flat in their borough.


Back in June 2008 I embarked on what I hoped to be the final stage: finding out what the capital gains tax was on the sale of my flat. I had to pay capital gains tax as I had left the flat in 2001 to find work in Milton Keynes and so my flat stopped being a home and apparently became business premises. I was making good rent from it about £6-7000, before tax, per year (€7,440-8,680; US$9,840-11,060) though obviously the last couple of years' rent were entirely wiped out by paying off Newham Council's charges. The advice I had always received from bankers, estate agents, etc. was to keep hold of the property because it would rise in value and make me a good profit. No-one ever said to me that I would be hit by a huge capital gains tax bill when I sold it. As it was, I sold the flat at £131,000, probably £9,000 less than it was worth because I used David Daniels, the most conniving estate agents in East London. They tried to get me to sell it at £115,000 whereas similar flats were going for £155,000. I accepted a lower price, because, due to the pressure from the landlords mentioned above I needed to move fast and get out of the rental sector.


Anyway, when I became aware in June 2007, six months before I sold the flat, that I would be liable for capital gains tax (something I had never dealt with before), I contacted the Inland Revenue & Customs (as the tax office is now known in the UK) and they advised me that the charge would be around £6,600. I budgeted for that amount. I did, again encouraged by bankers, estate agents and family, buy into a house which was too expensive for me and had to borrow to the maximum. With hindsight that was a grave error. I should have abandoned the town I was living in as being too expensive and gone somewhere cheaper. However, staying in the area kept the 6-year old boy in the house at the school he had been at since starting aged 4, so there was a sentimental element there which mucked up the economic aspect. Yet, all along, the advice has been completely the opposite to what it should have been. I should have sold the flat back in 2001 and I should have budgeted for far higher capital gains tax.


After having been sent three incorrect forms I completed my capital gains tax form in July 2008 and sent it in. I telephoned every month to find out what the bill was. However, as I have noted before the Manchester office was backlogged because of the stupid policy of the tax office to cut the deadlines for self-assessed tax submissions from 31st January to 31st October leading to overload. This time I found out that all the phone conversations I had were wrong. The officials had assumed I was talking about the assessment of my income not of the capital gains and it was only this time that I finally got through to a specialist, more than three months since I started trying. I thought I had filled the form in correctly. I followed it very carefully, but apparently I had left some relevant boxes empty and so it had been put on one side and forgotten. This is my fault and is a warning to anyone who has not done a particular form before, do not rely on the guidance booklet, take it to the tax office and ask for step-by-step guidance, unless, unlike me, you can afford an accountant. Anyway today they filled in the bits which I had thought irrelevant and told me my bill which is £16,800, just less than double what my worst fears were. I have to pay this by 31st January 2009. I would put the house up for sale, but the market is always slow this time of year in the UK especially with the credit crunch so it is unlikely I can raise the money in time. The house has lost £25,000 anyway. I am going to have to beg around family and the banks otherwise I will be a tax defaulter and someone will end up with the house anyway.


The lessons I have learnt from this ongoing process is, ignore promises you receive about property, it is far less of a safe investment than people think, especially in some local authority areas which are poor where they will squeeze as much as they can from you. Do not rent out a property especially if you do not have another one to live in, sell it as quickly as you can. When you sell it, hold back about 15% of the sale price to pay off the taxes, do not put this into another property. Do not trust the tax office to give you the correct assessment of your tax until they send through the final bill. Do not bother talking to the tax office on the telephone, go into the physical office and ask to speak to specialists, not the frontline tax staff who know very little. I know that I hit all of this at the worst time, but I would have been in little better state three years ago. It seems apparent that from the moment I arrived in Milton Keynes in 2001 I was locked on a bad path towards losing lots of money and my house. No guidance I received through that time ever reduced the impact, in fact it made it far worse. Rental housing with its fixed-term contracts and minimal rights for tenants makes it very hard to control your life anyway, but it is depressing to think that for the past 7 years I have been on this path, seemingly unable to take a step off it. It is astounding how much little decisions impact on me. If I had been faster and got one or another flat in a different borough, if I had picked on a different house when I left Milton Keynes, then a lot of this could have been avoided. The woman in my house says I should not feel blighted or destined to fail, but with my inability to shake off demand after demand for money how can I feel any other way?

Property in the UK 11: Overload at the Tax Office

As I have commented before, financially my life is very much on hold at the moment. I expect to be made redundant in August 2009 and to have my house repossessed a couple of months after that. In the meantime I am waiting for a capital gains tax bill. This is because, foolishly, I got work outside London and so instead of selling my flat immediately, I rented it out. This brought huge charges (over £16,500) from Newham Council and so no profit on letting it out. It did rise in value which is one good thing and helped me to buy my current house which otherwise I would not have been able to afford, and so stopped me being constantly kicked out of houses by greedy landlords wanting to play the market by playing with people's lives (this happened to me twice in 2007 losing me thousands of pounds in moving twice and causing a lot of stress).

Selling my 'business' has left me with a capital gains tax bill. I have no real idea how much this might be, something between £3000-£8000, with the best estimate at £6,600 (€8,316; US$11,748) and I have saved up less than half that sum so far. I rang the Revenue & Customs's 'Time to Pay' helpline which simply had a woman telling me how foolish I was not to hold back more money from the sale and that going bankrupt was immoral. Anyway, I dare not buy or plan anything until I know exactly what the final bill is going to be and so whether I need to put the house on the market or try and beg another loan from the bank. So, I asked for all the relevant forms as soon as I could once the financial year ended in April. I was sent the wrong forms twice and on the third occasion the correct form but an out-of-date one, i.e. for 2006-07 rather than 2007-08 which is what I am dealing with. Anyway, after all that, I get my form completed and in at the end of July.

Now, anyone who deals with the Revenue and Customs, which is a lot of people these days since self-assessment for small business tax was introduced in, I think, 1997, anyway, the late 1990s, knows that this year they have reduced all the deadlines. Now you have to submit any paper-based assessment by 31st October and if you want the tax people to do the tax calculations, you must get it in by 30th September. You used to be able to submit up until the end of January and the end of October if you wanted to have it calculated (and for the bulk of us who cannot afford an accountant at £1,200 per month [€1,512; US$2,136,] this is a must; I never got more than £700 per month in rent on my flat and that was before maintenance charges). They are trying to cajole people to submit their forms online. If you do that you can have up until 31st January to do it. However, given the government's appalling record of losing our data, in recent months including information about millions of child benefit claimants, names of prison officers and police applicants amongst others, few of us trust these systems and prefer to stick to paper.

Six weeks having passed since I submitted my form, I rang Revenue and Customs to see if they could tell me my bill. They said that they should be able to, but the tax office that handles my account is totally snowed under with returns brought on by the shortened deadline and that they can give no indication of when the calculation will be complete. I was told also that if I had submitted the form after 30th September then they could not have provided the capital gains tax bill until March even though the due date for payment would be 31st January and as I have been repeatedly told there is no flexibility with that date. As the man pointed out quite blatantly this means I could have been expected to pay a bill before I even knew the sum I was being asked for! Apparently this is totally legal. The trouble is of course is that they assume we all have accountants who can give us a close estimate that we can pay on and top up if we are wrong. As the man indicated, if you pay insufficient, then you get penalty charges imposed, so you might as well clear out your accounts and send it all and I may be compelled to do that if I get no information.

The Revenue and Customs's plan has backfired and they have brought a crisis down on their own heads by cutting the deadline times. They have to recognise that many people distrust online submission of things. Often you encounter poorly designed websites that send you round in circles. Often websites give no indication if the information has gone through or been received so that you have to ring up anyway to check. Then there is the issue of data security which the British government and its civil service seems to have the worst record on in the world. As I have noted before because of debit card cloning, I, like many people in the UK have moved away from using electronic payments and gone back to cash or even cheques.

So, I sit here, hoping that in some office in Manchester they can get through the backlog of forms sent in and then tell me my bill in a reasonable time, so I can start finding out whether the house which I foolishly used this money to buy and is now worth £20,000 less than when I bought it in December 2008, needs to be put on sale in the weak housing market, whether I can borrow the sum needed or whether I have to take the 'immoral' option and go bankrupt. The not knowing, though, I think is the most stressful aspect, and I am angry with Revenue and Customs for them catching me up in the consequences of their misguided experiment.

Is 'Noah's Castle' on the Horizon?

This probably sounds like a Biblical posting, but in fact it refers to a novel, 'Noah's Castle' written by John Rowe Townsend and published in 1975 which was televised as a children's series in 1980 on ITV. People often look back nostalgically at the drama series produced for children on British television in the 1970s. Some of the series were incredibly serious and not that appealing, there was a bit too much Victorian dullness to them, but fantastical elements were also common producing programmes which are seared into the memory of people who saw them. If you search the internet for information about 'Noah's Castle' you will also find references from people in their 30s and 40s saying how chilling it was.

Looking back on that time I remember quite a few dramas worth a mention and would point you to 'The Changes' (broadcast 1975; based on Peter Dickinson's triology of novels: 'The Weathermonger' (1968), 'Heartsease' (1969) and 'The Devil's Children' (1970)), 'The Owl Service' (first broadcast 1969; based on Alan Garner's novel of the same name (1969) still very frightening) and 'A Traveller in Time' (broadcast 1978; based on Alison Uttley's (1884-1976) novel of the same name which I believe was published in 1934 and re-released in 1977). These were dramas aimed at 'older children' which had a fantastical elements, respectively a force making people destroy machines, a kind of animal spirit trying to dominate a house, and slipping back into Elizabethan times, but also addressed the issues in an adult way, often looking at responsibility, loyalty, dealing with danger, etc. I know some of these issues are tackled by even cartoon series these days, but these series needed commitment. I think that their descendant is the Harry Potter series which combines fantasy and the serious and is also tied into novels. So, perhaps the demand for these things has not entirely disappeared.

It is a shame, that despite so much 'retro' TV getting on to DVD that these series are not available. There was a 4-hour video of 'The Changes' but I have not seen the others. Given how well 'Mr. Benn', 'The Clangers' and 'Catweazle' have all gone down with the 6-year old in my house I was thinking that in a couple of years he might be ready for this kind of series, he can recite the Harry Potter films back word-for-word (very irritating if you are trying to watch them!).

Sorry, I have wandered right of track now in typical mid-life nostalgia. The reason why I have picked on 'Noah's Castle' out of all of these is because it is set in the near future and focuses on the UK experiencing a period of hyper-inflation. Even growing up in the 1970s when pictures from Northern Ireland of riot police and soldiers in armoured vehiclers, those full-face helmets, with baton guns and real guns fighting against protestors, were common to envisage such things in a street in the Home Counties, protecting food convoys was startling, I think to adults as well as child viewers. Of course we had been through inflation in the 1970s triggered by the sharp oil price rises from 1973 onwards so it seemed quite possible that things would go further. Of course Thatcher had come to power in 1979 and soon we moved from inflation to mass unemployment as being the great social divider (does any of this sound familiar in the current situation?) It is nearly 30 years since I saw the series and read the novel, but some things stand out. The hero in the series is Norman Mortimer, the Noah character. He runs a shoe shop and in one scene a man tries to buy a pair of children's shoes but they cost £320. Nessie, who if I remember correctly is the elder daughter and her boyfriend become involved in an increasingly radicalised movement which supplies food to elderly people, a bit like a revolutionary meals-on-wheels service and all they can bring to this one old person is a handful of potatoes.

The Mortimers, who have four children and a large detached house, effectively begin barricading themselves in. Thus like Noah in the ark they would weather the 'storm' of food shortages and come out into whatever world would come after. Norman Mortimer has been stockpiling food for months during the lead up to the real crisis and feels he and his family can survive keeping outsiders back. Of course his family is divided over this especially the two sons Barry and Geoff, one of whom supports his father, the other who increasingly contests his views. So, like all the best of these series, it combines broad sweeps of drama with family tensions too. The issue of a father on a mission trying to get his children to come along with him is a common but interesting them that many readers/viewers can relate to. In terms of the series I thought the way it appeared to be just into the future, not only in terms of the police (remember this was before the UK police force outside Northern Ireland had any riot equipment as was revealed in 1981 during the Brixton riot when they relied on shields improvised from dustbin lids, so it was more startling than today) but also in terms of fashions, which was a clever touch. The teenagers wore things that were high trends in 1980, but seemed to have become as normal as jeans by the period of the story. In some way, though we did not experience food riots in the 1980s, the series was echoed greatly in clashes between police and protestors during the Miners' Strike 1984-5 and the Poll Tax Riots of 1990. By then of course the police had the equipment they had been shown with in 'Noah's Castle'.

To some degree 'Noah's Castle' was almost a 'what if?'. One could envisage that if James Callaghan had held an election in Autumn 1978 when he was expected to and so scraped a victory before the widespread public sector strikes of Winter 1978/9 that by, say, 1982 you could have had a situation as shown in the book/series. This would have come about, if, there was another sharp oil price rise (as in fact happened following the Iranian Revolution of 1979) and pay had not been restrained by mass unemployment and to keep the economy going on a pseudo-Keynesian basis consumption was kept up by wage settlements leading to hyper-inflation. I do not know if Townsend was a monetarist but his novel could have easily been used to show up the potential dangers of an unrestricted flow of money through public spending and consumption that the monetarists sought to counter.

Are we coming back to an era when 'Noah's Castle' again appears feasible? Possibly. Interestingly, I do not remember if there was reference to fuel costs spiralling, though I think I remember power cuts in the series. This of course is the big burden on the British public alongside petrol and food costs. Back in the 1970s in the UK all power supplies and utilities like water and sewage were state-run which meant that there was far greater control over prices. Now they are all run by very greedy private companies which make vast profits, so this factor comes to the fore in a way Townsend could not have foreseen. Petrol has always been a major factor in inflation across the world and prices since the late 1960s have been driven up by both the countries producing the oil and by the multinational companies which move it around and refine it. Interestingly the British seem far happier rioting about petrol than they are about food. In the 20th century there were very few food riots in the UK, someone might correct me on this, but the last one was probably in Liverpool in 1911 when the whole city was effectively under a state of siege with a dock and railway strike meaning food was not getting into the city and armed police and soldiers patrolled the streets, protected food convoys and defended bakeries from attack. Contrast this with blockades and fuel protests against the increase in petrol prices and duty on petrol that we have seen throughout the 2000s. In addition, farms are being raided by people trying to get hold of 'red' diesel which is sold at a subsidised price to farmers and they even follow tankers around to see where the fuel is being delivered. People are increasingly processing used food fats and oils at home to make bio-fuel and now even chipshops are being broken into to get hold of their oil. I think a lot of this comes down to the British being more concerned more about their 'right to drive' than feeding their families.

To some extent the impact of inflation has been reduced by competition among UK shops. Whilst £1 in every £10 spent in the UK goes to Tescos, there are four (five now with the Co-op takeover of Somerfield) large supermarket chains that seem happy to reduce prices and compete sharply between them. Of course we have lost the small shops of the 1970s but in times of inflation they cannot keep up because they lack the economies of scale. UK supermarkets still have a profit margin wider than that of equivalents on continental Europe which is partly why food price inflation bites harder in the UK than it does elsewhere in the EU/ Due to climactic factors and demand food prices are rising globally but in the UK the price to the consumer is affected more by the cost of moving the food to the shop than the actual food price, bringing us back to petrol.

What we are seeing which is characteristic of the 1970s is the circle of price rises prompting demand for salary increases especially in the public sector and we are seeing strikes as in the 1970s by everyone from school caretakers to coastguards and even the police are demanding the right to strike something they have not done in the UK since 1918. Public sector pay has been kept down during the stable period of New Labour rule and even without the current difficulties it is likely there would be demands for increases. The interesting thing is people expect inflation to come from high demand and so assume that it will mean a high demand for workers. However, a lot of the inflationary factors have become detached from demand, well certainly local demand as much of the oil price rise comes from Chinese rather than US or European demand for oil. Similarly the food price inflation does not come from any shortage of food, the EU still produces more food than it needs, it comes from factors such as transport costs. So, unsurprisingly we are seeing rising unemployment too. Another difference to the 1970s is that in 1974, a year behind the USA, for the first time more economic activity in the UK came from service sector jobs rather than manufacturing. This shift was accelerated by the Thatcherite policies. Service work is more responsive to shifts in demand from the public and the sector which is seeing the fastest fall, housing, is showing the quickest rise in unemployment as seen by falls in building and estate agency employment.

Of course it is weird that the single greatest contributor to UK inflation, house prices, are falling fast, an average house has dropped £4000 (€5040; US$8000) in the past month. To some degree this is beneficial because it means that once other inflationary factors cool, then the UK will not be as so out of step with the rest of the EU as it usually is. In addition, it should cool the vicious speculatory pressure that has been going on in the UK with loads of money being pumped into high-value developments, buy-to-let, etc. which overheats the economy. In some ways though we have not seen an abrupt crash, we are almost coming to the end of an era of over-speculation in a way that the Wall Street Crash of 1929 did in terms of shares. It will very much hurt those people who took out mortgages for 90%-125% of the value of their property, but for most people they will be able to hang on (unless they get made unemployed and there is more payment insurance these days than 20 years ago). It will be tenants with rents already rising in some cities I have visited by £80 per month (about an 8% increase) and those who lose out when the landlord/lady defaults on the mortgage and the tenants are evicted with no rights to remain under current UK law.

I do not think we will see 'Noah's Castle' as a reality in the near future, partly because in contrast to France and Spain the British rarely riot about anything and are easily cowed by the police let alone the Army. They see no common interests with anyone else and actually what is liable to happen in the UK as inflation rises will be communities turning against themselves, seeking out local scapegoats rather than the people behind the difficulties. Of course immigrants and ethnic minorities are going to be attacked, so rather than the assaults of food convoys as portrayed in the series I can see police defending the homes of Polish workers in the UK from violent mobs. What is certain is the relative peace and stability of say 1994-2007 is now at an end. Even the most positive see the problem persisting at least until 2009. It took 1990-3 before the problems with the housing market collapse shook themselves out, some perhaps 2011 is a more accurate prediction. In the meantime we are going to have a nasty mix of 1970s-style inflation and shortages and 1980s-style mass unemployment which is not going to make the last quarter of the 2000s a nice time to live. Maybe I should be stockpiling tins of food and candles now.

Property in the UK 9: My First Steps to Losing My House

I suppose it was inevitable. I had expected house prices to begin falling this year, but I had not expected oil prices to rise. I had expected Iraq to stabilise and for more oil to be coming from there, I did not realise that Chinese consumption was going to step up so suddenly, forcing prices higher and higher and in turn both petrol and oil prices. Anyway, consequently with petrol having risen by 30p per litre in the past year and food costs for me by about 20% in the same period, I suddenly found this month that all my salary had been spent by the first week in May. Myself and the woman in the house sat down to see where we could all cut back. Her online business has collapsed as other people not only in the UK (she sells in Europe, USA and to expatriates in China) have stopped buying anything they see as frivolous. This means she will have to go out to work (something she loathes, she feels people despise her and patronise her when she is an employee which is why she always tries to be self-employed). She pointed out I was spending £32 (€40; US$62) per month on coffee at work. I have also stopped doing the lottery at £8 per month and cancelled both house contents and life insurance saving about another £80 (€100; US$156) per month. We also had a cleaner at £64 per month which we are laying off, so altogether we reckon we can save £183 per month which is enough to cover my petrol bill or about three-quarters of the monthly groceries. This means we do not have to sell the house we have been in for just under five months.

We have a fixed rate mortgage for five years, but got it when the interest rates were at their peak. House prices have slid constantly since then and we think we over-paid for this house anyway so if we sell we will have lost probably at least £20,000 (€25,200; US$39,200) on what we paid for it. Also British people dislike quirky decor in their houses so the Victorian style interiors that came with it (and of course we cannot afford to change now) will make it as hard for us to sell as it was for our predecessors here. Also the market is being flooded by people trying to dump houses that like us they can no longer afford to pay for. In addition, many people who bought buy-to-let properties are now dumping these even though they do not live in them. Repossessions by banks of houses on which people are no longer able to pay their mortgage have risen by 17% so far this year and the estimated figure is 45,000 in 2008 compared to 27,000 in 2007. We are not back to the level of the 1990s, the peak was over 80,000 reposessions in 1991, but there seems nothing to stop this climb. In addition, the mass year-on-year repossessions of the early 1990s put cheap property on to the market whereas since the early 2000s bank policies have changed and they keep repossessed property and set a high price and wait until the market rises back up to it so that they get more money back than auctioning off at a low price as they did in the 1990s.

For now, 'tightening our belts' should mean we do not get into danger over the mortgage. It does mean all luxuries have gone, no more meals out, no holidays (those we had, I realise now were foolish), no more DVDs or electrical goods. It is hard to explain to the 6-year old in our house why these things have stopp. My fear is that costs will rise further and that in the future having taken up all the slack in our finances there will be nothing left to economise on. We only need the car to go wrong or one of us to need dental treatment for it to soak up all the meagre savings we have left and us like an increasing number of house owners to begin the path to losing the house and all the money we put into it.

With hindsight we could have done things differently: bought a cheaper house, moved to a cheaper town (certainly one closer to where I work), continued renting, but of course our options were limited with two landlords in a row mistreating us, forcing us to move on as quickly as we could into what have turned out to be bad houses for us. My prediction is that by May 2009 I will have lost this house and with it all the money I saved and invested through the 2000s in that flat in London (where I was also shafted). In the UK of today you do not only have to be clever with money (which I am clearly not) but you have to be very, very lucky. I earn 50% per year more than the national average salary, so I am not losing my house just yet, but my contract expires in August 2009 and with people already being made redundant by my company it is clear I have no future there as they always simply do not renew the contracts of fixed-term staff like me. I have lived through the very nasty unemployment of the 1980s and the house fiasco of 1990-3 during which so many people suffered terribly and yet I managed to escape by being flexible and not investing in anything. As you get older though humans naturally crave stability, but in the UK though we are encouraged very hard to buy houses, doing that just makes you vulnerable to the economic turmoil that seems to buffet us so regularly and then the people who urged you to buy a house are totally unsympathetic when you are kicked out. The bulk of us are simply hard workers, not successful gamblers and yet we are forced by British society and its economy to constantly gamble with our future.

As I told the 6-year old, not getting some things he wants now may help his mother hang on to this house, but I think more likely is the outcome I threatened him with that in a few months he will no longer have a bedroom of his own, not have a garden and many of the electrical goods now in the house will have gone. That is his future and most likely the one of many hundreds of thousands of British families, just because greedy American bankers could not be content with the mortgage market they had.

Property in the UK 7: The Housing Market Begins to Collapse

I mentioned in the previous posting that this was a bad time to buy a house in the UK and now I am going to outline the reasons behind that. Earlier this year I predicted that house prices in the UK were far outstretching the average income we would soon hit a period when prices would have to fall. Estate agents were unconvinced by this, but I am now being proved correct. In the UK people get nervous when the rate of increase of house prices simply slows so you can imagine how worried they are if they start falling as they have done for the past 3 months. For some reason buying a house is a key status activity that was particularly encouraged during the 1980s to the extent that now some lawyers will not represent you if you are simply a tenant (I have experienced this when trying to employ a solicitor and being turned away not because I could not afford their fees but because I was not an owner-occupier of a house). So everyone tries to buy a house, meaning demand especially in regions where there is work, is very high and house prices just keep rising and rising. This is exacerbated by familes fragmenting, more people living alone and the birth rate of the UK middle class rising for some reason. This year they reached a level that the International Monetary Fund (IMF) felt was 40% over-priced. Of course because so many people invest so much money in their property about 4-5 times more than their counterparts in France, Belgium, Germany, etc., they cannot afford to see the price fall.

Despite all of these factors there is a limit how far house prices can keep rising. People for some reason ignore their pressure on inflation which is wrong as the cost of houses also influences the cost of rents, house insurance and many other house-related factors. To reduce inflationary pressures the Bank of England has used its only economic tool and has repeatedly raised interest rates this year. However, its governor feels inflation is still too high and so rates may have to rise further. For the first time in decades in the UK people have started looking beyond interest rates to manage the economy and there have been murmurs of other credit controls, and though for a couple of months some credit cards were restricted with the retail sector apparently weak, these have been lifted again. The threat of such controls is enough to unsettle consumers. All of this stuff has come far too late. If it had been introduced gradually after the last serious dip in the UK economy in 1993 or even when Labour came to power in 1997 it would all be well-established now, to bring it in now abruptly is just going to be a shock to the system.

So we have a situation of the worst of both worlds. Interest rates are rising making repayment of mortgages harder and yet house prices are dropping which means people cannot rely on selling their house at a hefty profit in order to cover the costs of the money they borrowed on it. You can see why I am personally worried. I have over-paid on my new house, under-sold my old house and have cleared out my savings just at the time when the market is turning to slump. Look forward to a nice blog of a man with negative equity (i.e. owning more on the property than the property is worth in itself). This happened all over the UK in 1990-3 and is clearly going to happen again, I guess in the next 12 months.

The UK's addiction to every rising house prices and the Major, Blair and Brown governments' lack of imagination in terms of economic tools and lack of courage in adopting and applying them is going to condemn the UK to a cycle like this at least every 15 years, maybe more regularly, depending on how far the upcoming slump takes prices down this time. It impinges on the middle class whose wealth and in turn their consumption is based on their property often rather than their incomes (which have been rising far slower) and so a crisis in housing will mean an immediate retail crisis as we may already be seeing as people tighten their belts (even at Christmas when they usually spend the most). It impinges on the working class as well, as those who own property will suffer like their middle class counterparts but also as landlords/ladies either raise rents to cover increased interest payments or sell off unprofitable rental property (as I have experienced) so reducing the availability and raising demand and so rents as well. In addition, those working in the retail and transportation sectors will suffer from retail lay-offs and reduction of business and those in the small-scale building tray, eventually from the decrease of people wanting work on house (though this may be balanced in the short-term by people improving their houses in an attempt to increase prices).

My advice is do not try to buy a house at the moment, wait for prices to fall next year. Pay off as much of your mortgage as you can (most now permit over-payments these days) and tighten up on Christmas gifts, especially those bought on credit. If we batten down now there may be some funds left to benefit from the post-slump recovery when you will be able to snap up reposessed houses (though banks these days tend to sit on them until they can be sold at a set level, often above the prevailing average price in the district - another aspect which has pushed prices upwards, rather than disposing of them cheaply as they did in the 1980s and 1990s). Though I could see the problem on the horizon, because of other human pressures I have been pushed right into the trap and am anticipating that it will be a couple of decades before I return to the level of prosperity I once had; I also anticipate I will not be an owner-occupier for long and that I will lose my house to repossession in about 2 years' time so will be back in an even more cutthroat rental sector very soon.

Property in the UK 6b: Lessons Learnt

I am currently holding my breath regarding the purchase of a house, only my second in my life, but a process that has dragged on now for five months. The key thing that I have learnt and I imagine that I share this realisation with many people is that I have absolutely no power and influence. The bulk of the UK population is prey to the whims of both the professionals such as solicitors (for non-UK readers these a low-level lawyers who deal with house sales, wills, etc.), doctors, teachers, to salespeople like estate agents, insurance companies, etc. and to skilled manual workers notably builders, gas/electricity/water/car repairmen and so on. You can spend thousands of pounds and yet you are treated as naive (which you often are about particular issues) and so worthy of being both patronised and ripped off. I have experienced all of these things despite spending over £5000 (€7150; US$10,350) on estate agent and solicitors fees.

I was ripped off £10-15,000 on the sale of my flat and a further £5000-10,000 on the house I am buying. Constantly I have been pressured by telephone and email as if all the problems along the housing chain were my fault alone. Everyone has more power than me, the buyer of my flat constantly demanded extra payments and reductions that the estate agent encouraged me to pay rather than resisting him. The people further up the chain keep saying we are dragging our feet, but when we are ready, suddenly they want to delay 10 days and we are told there is nothing we can do about it. The only thing I have left is anger. When I hire someone I expect them to act in my interest not someone else's but none of the four people I hired this time (despite them being recommended, I do wonder how much worse those people do not recommend are) have done this.

I think paying thousands of pounds earns me the right to be addressed as an adult not a teenager, but clearly not. I accept that I am no expert on the housing market so I want clear, truthful information and then not to be told I am stupid. The mortgage lender seem to be the most well intentioned of the people I have been using, but even they despite direct questions like 'how much actual money will I get in terms of a mortgage?' they have been really opaque and the figure being lent to me fell from £128,000 to £113,000 then to £96,000 without any fees falling. If I had known at the start that in fact I could only borrow £96,000 then I would not have put an offer in on the house I did. This is the worst time to be buying a house. I know you will say I should have been better informed and so on, but given that I have attended university and do a job which pays 50% higher than the national average, if I have found it so hard it must be even tougher for the population without my education and earnings. Obviously I was in a weak position because of my landlord causing so much difficulty for me and with more time and less pressure, maybe, just maybe I could have escaped some of this bad treatment. The housing market is rotten to the core. These people may not be committing crimes but they are bullying and misleading ordinary people.

All I have left (given that all my savings have been wiped out to pay the shortfall in the money lent to me) is anger. Housing is at the core of British society to an extent unrivalled across the world so it is something we cannot escape, but why do we have to be over-charged and go through so much to be humiliated in order to participate in this process? I do really hope I am dead before I have to move house again. My fear now is that with all the expense and my persistent bad luck the new house will collapse or be repossessed.

Property in the UK 6a: My Final Chapter?

Well, the challenges of trying to sell a flat (apartment) and buy a house seem to be continuing right down to the wire. This week, over 3 months since I accepted the offer on my flat it was finally sold. If you are ever going to get involved in property in East London you have to realise that things happen differently to anywhere else in the UK that I have experienced (it may be the same in other rough parts of major UK cities like Manchester, Birmingham, Newcastle, Glasgow, etc., but someone will have to let me know, I do not intend to try to buy a house in those places). The key problem is that having made an offer the buyers (and I had two, I switched from the first when he could not get sufficient funds together) push for what used to be termed 'squeeze', i.e. little extra bonuses. The first buyer, despite getting the flat at a very good price (more on that in a minute) insisted that I put in a whole new bathroom before he would buy it. The second buyer, well in fact the man representing the woman who was buying it, right at the last moment insisted that the furniture which was being sold with the flat (and had been listed with it from the start) be removed before he would exchange contracts, and he demanded £545 (€779; US$1100) from me to do it. I got it done for £100. He then claimed there were cockroaches in the flat. Cockroaches are not common in the UK especially in places which have not been deserted for a long time (and the flat had only been empty four weeks). He was permitted to go in and out of the flat by the estate agents. I went to the flat and whilst it was musty there was no sign of cockroaches. I refused his demand for the money and told him to sign or back off. On the day before the contracts were about to be exchanged removal men employed by the estate agents were in the flat taking out the unwanted furniture and miraculously the front door lock got broken. The estate agent's man supposed to organise fixing it went off sick and so it was up to me to get the lock entirely replaced at my expense before the solicitors would exchange contracts, at the cost of another £150, which really I had no choice but to pay or face the sale dragging on for more weeks. I am so glad to be rid of the flat, it turned out to be a burden on me rather than the money spinner people predicted when I moved out and put it up for rent. My message is: do not buy property in Newham.

Now I turn to the estate agents. I think it is time to name names. If you are in East London looking to sell a property do not use David Daniels Professional Property Services. My 2-bedroomed flat was finally sold for £26,000 (€37,180; US$52,520) less than any other 2-bedroomed flat they had for sale and that is despite mine going on the market 2 months before the slow down in house prices we have seen in the past 3 months. I accept that I might not have got something in the high £150,000s but I certainly would have expected a price closer to that. They entirely exploited me because I was calling them from outside London; clearly local influence has a big impact. This was despite the fact that I had earned them hundreds of pounds over the years as the letting agent for my flat on my behalf. Throughout it seems that they were working in the interests of someone else; though I was paying them a decent fee they seemed to not be benefiting me.

They initially encouraged me to take an offer of £115,000 for the flat despite that being £15,000 less than 1-bedroomed flats in the same street. When I refused this they said I was pricing myself out of the market. As it turns out everyone I met in the district, taxi drivers, the locksmith, shopkeepers said I had under-priced it. I was at a disadvantage dealing with them from scores of miles away but there is only so much pressure you can bring on a company. I clearly should have switched estate agent much sooner. Clearly it is not always possible to avoid selling a property at a distance especially when you have to move for work, but I would certainly recommend avoiding it or at least enlist a number of estate agents rather than rely on one even if you have worked with them before or they have been recommended. I might be naive when it comes to property and I might be insufficiently cunning or aggressive to cope with the modern property market, but when I pay people a couple of thousand pounds I expect better service than I received. It is the typical powerlessness, we can do nothing in the face of 'skilled' workers, they set the agenda not us even when they are spotty wide boys just out of their adolescence throwing their weight around.

Property in the UK 6: My Personal Housing Saga Drags On

I started making postings about housing and all the difficulties I have got into with being charged heavy charges by Newham Council for the flat I own in London and how the house I am currently renting is in line to be repossessed. Since the start of July I have been trying to sell the flat and buy a house close to where I now live. Four months have passed and still no progress. Newham Council took over a month to respond to a request from the potential buyer of my flat and the buyer (I am now on to my second as the first one's mortgage lender changed its mind about lending him money) is now trying to squeeze more money out of me, the seller. The first buyer tried this too. I will call this one Mr. A to avoid confusion. Well, after making an offer which was £5000 (€7150; US$10,500) less than the asking price but which I accepted as I was keen to be rid of the flat, Mr. A then started demanding that I totally refitted the bathroom, even though that had only been done two years before. Mr. B, the current buyer knew that the flat came with furniture and in the 3 months since he put in his offer, has not said anything about it, then suddenly this week just as the exchange of contracts seemed ready to happen, he demanded it was all removed and that I pay him £545 (€779; US$1145) to him so that he could do this. What has become apparent is that in East London (where Newham is located) not only do the council try to squeeze as much money out of home owners as they can, but anyone buying your property is going to prevaricate and demand extra bonuses as if you were trading in some Third World market.

Taking four months to sell a house makes it almost impossible to move for work. The only people who benefit are the lawyers who pick up fees on everything. Local authorities also seem eager to tap into the money swilling around in Britain's overheated property market (though for the past two months it has begum to cool, though not as much as the 40% that the International Monetary Fund claims British houses are over-priced by; the average house now costs 9 times the average salary in the UK, meaning most average people cannot afford anywhere big enough for them), that new charges are appearing. Many people in older towns are now being charged for the upkeep of medieval churches in their town no matter whether they are Christian or not. The government finally introduced the HIP (Home Information Pack) after one failed attempt because they had failed to train sufficient people to produce them. You have to buy one of these in order to sell any property with 3 or more bedrooms. They take a month to produce and cost another £3-400. However, many local authorities, are insisting that buyers (in some places sellers) also have to pay for a locally created pack on all properties (my buyer had to get one for my two-bedroomed flat) which again costs hundreds of pounds, the exact charge depending on where the property is. All of these things slow up the UK housing market even more and in fact bump up prices further to cover these costs.

You may say the UK housing market needs to slow down a bit. However, that hampers people trying to move to where work is (something the government usually encourages) and trying to get their children set up well in school (some schools now refuse to take pupils who arrive mid-year and they have to commute back to their old school, hardly beneficial for their education). Thus, soon it will be incredibly difficult to move house in less than half-a-year, something that is reinforced by the fixed 6- and 12-month contracts so many landlords/ladies are insisting on which make the rented sector as inflexible as the purchase one. The lawyers, the landlords and the local authorities all simply gain more money and the average person has to put their life on hold for months. The UK housing market needs adjustment and not simply in terms of prices. I curse the day I ever thought it was a good idea to buy a flat, I should have purchased a caravan instead.

1977 Anarchy in the UK; 2007 Bankruptcy in the UK

Today's news broadcasts are highlighting statistics from the Citizens' Advice Bureau that they are now getting 6,600 enquiries every day in the UK about problems with debt. Personal bankruptcy has reached an all time high. Whilst we have not returned to the thousands of repossessions of houses as experienced between 1990-3, the number is rising steadily. The house we are renting will be repossessed from the landlord when we leave, for non-payment of the mortgage. This time round this is not meaning cheaper houses coming on to the markets, instead banks sit on the reposessions until they reach a certain level and then sell them so that they do not reduce the ever rising price of houses. Back in the early 1990s at least those who could not afford a house had some chance getting a repossessed one at reduced rate and even that channel has now gone.

So what is to blame for such vast debt in the UK? Are we all simply spendthrift? Well, about a quarter of the problems stem from credit and store cards. The UK, seemingly in sharp contrast to its European neighbours, does seem to have got obsessed with constantly buying. Electrical goods, furniture and DVDs/music seem to be in high demand with people upgrading and upgrading. In France, almost all shops are closed on a Sunday, in Germany many still close at lunchtime on most Saturdays and do not reopen until Monday. In the UK shops are filled every Sunday with people shopping as a hobby. They are not out walking or playing football or sitting reading or even slumped in front of the television, they are walking around looking for things to buy. In Europe the UK is consumer society at its most extreme. Credit is easy to come by, you can get a string of credit cards and advertisements for loans fill the television, newspapers, the radio constantly.

In the UK you are defined by what you own. If you do not own a house you are treated as a second class citizen by letting agents and other people. There is immense pressure, going back to the 1980s on becoming an owner of property and then to start 'buying-to-let' as if it is right that everyone should strive to be a landlord. Of course both these trends keep pushing up house prices which have now not fallen in 15 years; the news media gets jumpy when there is a slow down in the increase, not a fall, as if the constant inflation of house prices is vital for the UK economy. This obsession with owning property and your status in society being defined by it is another unhealthy situation in the UK that adds to debt. It goes into things like cars. You can travel from the UK to France in 35 minutes these days and you see a sharp contrast. British roads are dominated by very large 4x4 cars (SUVs) in France there are very few. In Britain if you do not drive one you are made to feel you are letting down your children and on the road you are hassled by the people who own these vehicles as some kind of annoyance. They are expensive and terribly uneconomical to run and yet not owning one seems to mean you yield up any claim on respect whether actually in it or not.

All business people want to maximise profit, but in the UK it is greed, greed, greed, hence rents being pushed higher and higher. Utility bills make up a third of the sources of problems with debt. I have already commented on how water, sewage, gas, electricity and phone companies keep pressing prices up. Not only that but they lock you in to fixed contracts now (as do landlords) which means you cannot get out of them, are often paying for services in advance and you lose money each time you move house. A small rise in any utility price hits people hard especially when combined with the other rises they face. As I have often commented, I earn 50% higher than the national average salary for the UK, however, in my house we now cannot afford to flush the toilet because the water bills are so high. If any of us urinates we do not flush it as each flush uses 2 gallons (9 litres) and like most people we now have a water meter and we are charged once for that water by the water company and then 95% of the price again by the sewage company (in our town the water and sewage companies are separate, until this year the sewage company charged 108% of the water bill price). If we as a well-off household with two incomes cannot afford to flush our toilet, heaven help anyone poorer.

So consumption is a key problem whether it is voluntarily on luxuries or almost compulsory on rent/mortgage and utilities. (I have not even mentioned again very high train fares which contribute to some people's costs). The situation is exarcebated by the fixed contracts and payment in advance that so many companies insist on. However, all of this is compounded by government policy. The UK government only has one tool with which to manipulate the economy - changing the bank base rate. From this all interest rates are set. The government handed this control over to the independent Bank of England in 1997. No-one in the past forty years has ever bothered trying to alter terms of credit, for example, the minimum you have to pay back each month or to vary tax on items, nor really put effective pressure on utility companies to moderate prices and certainly not on landlords to keep raising rent. The government has not contested the attitude promoted in the Thatcher years (1979-91) that it is your civic obligation to own property and consume as much as you can. The government needs to start sending out very difficult signals about what is important and worthwhile in our society. You may say that is not the role of government but it is them who complains about crime and social problems and has to pick up the pieces. No-one in UK government or in its think-tanks or the civil service has any ideas of how to alter the UK economy and society in a more sustainable direction.

All of these factors mean that consequently the UK economy is constantly overheated with so many baseline costs for the bulk of the population rising all the time. This means that there is always a heavy inflationary pressure no matter what anyone does. Any minor fall in sales is seen as a recession and steps are taken to keep us consuming. The constant inflationary pressure means, as this year, the Bank of England (whose only concern is inflation, nothing about social issues) increases interest rates; in 2007 this has happened five times. This tool cannot reduce that inflationary pressure, only dent it a little, and in fact the heavy rain of this Summer has done a better job at doing that than the Bank of England. Interest rises means everyone pays more and it all comes at once, your rent, your utility bills, your food, all tends to go up together. No wonder so many people are sliding into bankruptcy. All statistics hide human misery and it is those at the bottom who suffer most. Why do people wonder why the drugs trade and armed crime are so high when we are pushing so many families and individuals into a situation where crime is the only way to survive and seems fine as you have no vested interest in a society which defines you simply by your possessions. I was shocked to see a map of the UK showing the highest concentrations of the so-called 'Exclusive Wealthy' apparently these are 'People with so much wealth that they can exclude themselves from the norms of society'. No-one should be permitted to be able to exclude themselves in that way.

Other countries in Europe have problems but they have not created a society that is rushing to burn itself out, that is so obsessed with possessions that no economic approach can succeed without also addressing people's outlook. The UK as a sick society is beginning to outstrip even the USA. The number of murders committed in the UK by children under the age of 10 exceeds even Iraq which is basically a warzone still. 2,840 crimes were committed by children under the age of 10 in 2006 (which is the age of criminal responsibility in the UK these days compared to 16 years old in Anglo-Saxon times) of these half were arson or criminal damage, 66 were sexual crimes committed by the child not to them.

We need to move to a society which values other things beside possessions. I was all for Sunday opening for shops but now I think they just fuel unhealthy consumption. Of course in the age of the internet you can shop all day and all night every day of the year. We need to encourage more hobbies than shopping which is the sole leisure activity of the bulk of the UK population. We need a government which does not adhere to the 'greed is good' rhetoric or at least actually condemns it rather than accepting it passively. We need to restrict utility and transport bill rises to tolerable levels and try to stop the constant pressure on rent and mortgage prices. The government needs some different economic tools and to not be afraid to get in there and interfere with the granting of so much credit. As many countries have demonstrated, you do not need a command economy to get the economy and so society (which is so driven by economic pressures) to move in a healthier direction. If we do not do this the UK will be the first to enter the Cyberpunk dystopia for real with people either beggars on the streets or behind fortified walls being driven from place to place in blacked out, armoured vehicles, with an attitude of 'must have' everything and status only defined by your latest purpose not any actual human attributes. However, I envisage as always the British public will simply keep consuming and fighting to consume freely so digging itself deeper into debt and segregating so much of society into the 'have nots' (always a majority), the 'haves' (who struggle to keep up with the next category) and the 'have-the-latests'.

Property in the UK 5c: A Twist in the Sale

In terms of my categories of blogging this probably straddles the anger management and the journal type as it outlines, briefly, the latest development in the hassle we have been receiving over the house we have been renting since February. It is astounding that we have reached the halfway mark of our 12-month contract, the pressure makes it feel like many weeks more. Anyway, I am currently on leave and was about to set off for a day in a lovely part of southern England when there was a ring at the doorbell. A late middle-aged man stood there and asked me if I was Mr _____, i.e. the landlord. I said I was the tenant, which surprised him, and in fact that the landlord was in the USA. He then outlined that the landlord was months behind in making his mortgage repayments. I do not know how I stand legally but I know in the past tenants would just be kicked out when the landlord defaulted and the house was repossessed. I am guessing that we have more rights than that these days and hopefully there are a few stages before the house is repossessed, especially as we are close to being able to move out anyway.

This bank representative asked to see my tenancy agreement. However, it takes me half a day to find any legal document I need. I cling tightly to everything that I am sent, and the more precious it is the more securely I keep it, hence my inability to locate it. As it turned out later, my housemate actually had it, so it was a good thing I did not look for it as I would never have found it among my things. In addition, I have no financial relationship with the bank and did not feel compelled to deal with this man. I sent him to the letting agent, fortunately located near to our house, as I assume he can put his hand on all the legal papers needed and anyway, that is his job, I am supposed to be on holiday.

I do not know if this is going to make our situation any easier or harder. I can see now why the landlord was unwilling to come out with any financial incentive for us to leave the property early, but I cannot understand why he simply did not sell the property before he left the UK. Our rent is £1000 (€1480, US$2003) per month (out of this he pays only 7% fees rather than the usual 13-16% because of the agent he uses) and his mortgage payments are £1400 (€2072; US$2842), I guessed he made up the gap from the extra pay he got from his promotion in his work and the posting to the USA which presumably came with relocation funds. It was certainly wrong for him to go ahead and rent out the house defaulting on the mortgage payments; luring us into a property that he did not intend to keep for the duration of our contracted tenancy and, in turn, exposing us to his father and his slimy ways of doing 'business'. Even more than before I feel as a tenant I have no protection, I am just a cash cow that can be slaughtered the moment it is convenient for the landlord.

Gordon Brown says he is going to do more for those who are first-time buyers, but he also needs to help secure the position of those millions of us who rent. We have far fewer rights than people the other side of the English Channel. It must come as a shock for those people coming from France and Poland to work here to find they can be exploited in this way within the EU. So, this is the anger management element as tonight I feel I have absolutely no control over a central part of my life and my future - where I live.