Where did Britain go wrong?

[Cheshire Rover]

A good place to start is wage stagnation, low productivity and declining fertility.

Perhaps why house prices are up from a multiple of 2.5 times a single wage in the early 1970's to around 10 times now.

 

[Bletchleyite]

Perhaps why house prices are up from a multiple of 2.5 times a single wage in the early 1970's to around 10 times now.

I'd blame that on two things. One - not enough houses for a growing population and one that increasingly lives alone (and flats, ideal for the latter, are usually rubbish, overpriced and with a feudal ownership system rather than a proper one like condominium ownership, well, everywhere bar Scotland whose tenement ownership system is better). Two - increased affordability (yes, really) due to most households having two incomes rather than one as was traditional.

 

[BrianW]

Three pages in, but we don't seem to have an agreed statement of what is wrong with the UK.

One cannot have a discussion on where it went wrong, if we haven't agreed on what is wrong, IMHO.

Au contraire, mon fraire. I see huge agreement- it's someone else!

Its our fault, including mine!
I want to be able to build an extension on my 'castle'; I want my neighbour to not be allowed his dormer window overlooking my garden.
I want more housing, but not in my back yard, or on Green Belt.
We 'won' WW (with help from USA?) then invested in rebuilding Germany!
Post-Attlee we had Macmillan's never had it so good.
Stop-go; the miners, unions, ... bankers, duck-houses, ... Brussels, immigrants, ...
My guaranteed pension, NHS care, triple-lock, bus pass, that my vote is craved ...
At least we have a government to vote in (or out) every so often.
And as many have observed, it's not a bad life here; and until recently we were living longer year on year.
And we can discuss and agree to disagree, with varying degrees of agreeability

 

[nw1]

I'd blame that on two things. One - not enough houses for a growing population and one that increasingly lives alone (and flats, ideal for the latter, are usually rubbish, overpriced and with a feudal ownership system rather than a proper one like condominium ownership, well, everywhere bar Scotland whose tenement ownership system is better). Two - increased affordability (yes, really) due to most households having two incomes rather than one as was traditional.

There certainly seems to be an increasingly silly divide between house prices and flat prices where I am.

A house on a very ordinary suburban road, not in an especially "posh" or "leafy" area and with some distinctly "gritty" areas just half a mile or so away, is incredibly selling for £514,000. Not sure how big it is, but I can't see it would be that big based on my knowledge of the area. By contrast, flats remain relatively affordable and don't seem to have gone up that much.

 

[Meerkat]

We're not talking about Britain now versus Country X now, though. We're talking about Britain now, versus Britain, say, 20 or 30 years ago. Or, for some, longer.

Then really you need to define 'gone wrong' before we can decide how it happened.

I'd blame that on two things. One - not enough houses for a growing population and one that increasingly lives alone (and flats, ideal for the latter, are usually rubbish, overpriced and with a feudal ownership system rather than a proper one like condominium ownership, well, everywhere bar Scotland whose tenement ownership system is better). Two - increased affordability (yes, really) due to most households having two incomes rather than one as was traditional.

House prices went up massively under Blair, who incidentally has made loads of money from property.
There aren't that many homeless, which would suggest that the major problem is people renting houses they would rather own. Need to massively reduce BTL - there is too much cash, particularly investment cash (low interest rates) chasing the limited supply of housing.

 

[Bletchleyite]

There aren't that many homeless, which would suggest that the major problem is people renting houses they would rather own. Need to massively reduce BTL - there is too much cash, particularly investment cash (low interest rates) chasing the limited supply of housing.

BTL is reducing anyway - the "next big thing" is build-to-let from corporate landlords. A lot of landlords are now selling up because rents in most cases aren't going up alongside mortgages on higher interest rates.

 

[Tetchytyke]

PPI, selling our gold, unrestricted movement (leading to Brexit), invading Iraq, Horizon and tbh any IT contract you care to mention

The gold was sold to protect a couple of big investment banks who’d gone short on it and stood to lose a lot of money. I’d have let them go bust, but there we are. Likewise with the 2008 crash, I’d have let the lot go bust.

Horizon was a Major government project.

Movement wasn’t unrestricted, but the right-wing media loved to misrepresent it. It’s not the bosses’ fault for paying poverty wages despite trousering millions in bonuses, it’s all the fault of those Romanians. Of course before the Romanians it was the Windrush migrants who were to blame, and before them it was the Irish who were ruining everything.

FWIW I don’t think Britain is any more broken now than it was 30 years ago.

 

[MikeWM]

There certainly seems to be an increasingly silly divide between house prices and flat prices where I am.

I suspect that is, at least in part, a side-effect of lockdowns. Given the politicans have refused to say 'never again', people are thinking where they would prefer to be if/when it all does happen again. And a house, with a garden (however small) is considerably better than a flat in that case.

I'd blame that on two things. One - not enough houses for a growing population and one that increasingly lives alone (and flats, ideal for the latter, are usually rubbish, overpriced and with a feudal ownership system rather than a proper one like condominium ownership, well, everywhere bar Scotland whose tenement ownership system is better). Two - increased affordability (yes, really) due to most households having two incomes rather than one as was traditional.

Both those factors too - certainly the leasehold/service charge thing was one of the major reasons I chose to buy a house rather than a flat.

And the two income thing is true too - though I think we've blundered into that, rather than really considering the societal implications of effectively *forcing* both parents to work in order to have enough money to survive once they have children. If both parents want to, good for them, but we should also be supporting those couples who would prefer one of the parents to raise their children themselves for the first few years of life, rather than handing them over to a stranger for most of the day. No political party appears to propose that view however, they're just currently outbidding each other as to who can throw more taxpayer money at childcare providers.