Vicky Spratt
@Victoria_Spratt
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Housing correspondent @theipaper Writer @ all over Orwell Prize finalist 2023 & 2024 Author of TENANTS @ProfileBooks 2022 Please do get in touch with stories.
London, England
Joined July 2011
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Pinned Tweet
Extract from my book Tenants in today’s
@theipaper
- my grandparents were saved from poor housing conditions by their council flat in the 1950s. Today they wouldn’t be so lucky.
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We have a Housing Secretary who has lived in social housing.
The Rt Hon Angela Rayner MP
@AngelaRayner
has been appointed Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities
@luhc
.
She will also be Deputy Prime Minister.
#Reshuffle
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This pool, at Embassy Gardens in Nine Elms, cannot be accessed by those living in the shared ownership part of the development ....
Swimmers enjoy warm weather in London at the Sky Pool which is believed to be the world’s first transparent pool built between two skyscrapers
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The new Chancellor has a property empire via his family firm and sued tenants for unpaid rent during the pandemic, the Mirror reported last year
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Keir Starmer's Cabinet is the most state-educated in history. 87 per cent of Brits went to a state school but this is so rarely reflected in our politics. As someone who went to a comp but is often the only person not privately educated in certain rooms...I'd say this matters.
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Given the risk modelling, if this isn’t OK why is hormonal contraception? The risk of blood clots is higher with the pill?
Under-30s in UK to be offered alternative to Oxford-AstraZeneca Covid vaccine due to rare blood clot risk
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Who gets social housing? Quick fact check - 81 per cent of new social housing lets go to white British renters. 90 per cent go to UK nationals. Simply not true that immigrants "jump" the social housing queue.
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The supposed "outing" of Jess Brammar for left leaning views feels like new McCarthyism. There is also inherent hypocrisy here. How could the BBC employ Andrew Neil when he was chairman of the Spectator Group but not someone who dares to have an opinion that is not Conservative?
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New investigation
@theipaper
- homeless families are being housed “temporarily” in former office blocks (like one pictured below) because local councils don’t have enough social housing for permanent homes. This involved visiting some of the worst housing I’ve ever seen - a 🧵
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Imagine if we built this sort of social housing across the country?
New figures show that last year more new council homes were started in London than in any year since the 1970s.
This morning
@SadiqKhan
and I visited brand new council homes built by
@lb_southwark
. Beautifully designed family-size homes with gardens, funded by
@MayorofLondon
.
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Are we "helping young people get on the housing ladder" when we introduce low deposit mortgage products or are we making it easier to get credit to buy unaffordable housing, the price of which has increased beyond wages?
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Amid reports that the Tories want to give UK families higher priority for social housing, thought I would re-up this stat about who, exactly, gets social housing…90 per cent of new lets go to UK nationals. Waiting lists exist because there aren’t enough homes. No other reason.
Who gets social housing? Quick fact check - 81 per cent of new social housing lets go to white British renters. 90 per cent go to UK nationals. Simply not true that immigrants "jump" the social housing queue.
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The way landlords put rents up is out of line with other goods and services. I have a mobile phone. In my contract, there is a clause stating how any price increase will be calculated. Nothing like this in private rental contracts. Landlords can hike rents as much as they wish…
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Just in case you were wondering whether selling off social housing was good value for money...
High private rents mean the UK now spends more on housing benefit each year than on most government departments – today's
@NewStatesman
Chart of the Day.
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In the next week, you are going to hear a lot about “landlords’ needs” and “landlords’ rights” I suggest we change the language. What is a private landlord? They are a housing provider. Let’s call them housing providers and reframe the conversation.
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New & exclusive
@theipaper
for the first time, I have obtained data that links child deaths to homelessness and reveals a public health crisis for children forced into temporary accommodation. The data comes from a new report published by the
@TA_APPG
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Just to be v clear - Help to Buy doesn’t improve housing affordability. It helps buyers meet unaffordable house prices.
Rumour is that Sunak is considering a Help to Buy reboot...in some ways this feels inevitable - how else do you keep the housing market moving without a drastic price fall - but it won't solve the housing affordabilty crisis...my analysis
@theipaper
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As ever, this relates to housing costs - the average salary for a nursery worker is between £14.5k and £23k a year. Good luck finding somewhere you can afford to rent on that wage!
The manager of my son's nursery say they can't even get people to turn up to interviews, let alone hire them. Have no idea how Labour's childcare policy is going to work - who's staffing these 3,000 new nursery classes? AI? Robots? Giant Cocomelon screens 24/7??
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The social contract is the notion that people abide by certain rules in return for the state’s care. Asking 18 year olds to “give back” when affordable homes and free higher education has been taken from them breaks that contract. My newsletter
@theipaper
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Working on an investigation that requires me to get responses from multiple local councils. Many of them no longer have a phone number I can call. Ironic, because it's a story about people experiencing homelessness and being unable to speak to anyone at their council...
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🧵Mould and damp in rented homes. On BBC news just now to discuss the death of two-year old Awaab Ishak. The question “how could this happen?”keeps being asked. Well, if you went into some of the homes I visit for
@theipaper
you’d be asking “how does it not happen more often?”
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1% mortgages are being sold as a solution to Britain’s housing affordability crisis. They are not. They are a symptom of it.
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I don't buy the "what if landlords leave the market" argument. If a landlord sells, the home goes on the market. Someone else - another landlord or a homeowner - buys it (see post-2008). True, we need more social housing urgently to pick up slack but homes simply do not disappear
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2021 reminder that I commission for
@Refinery29UK
- I'm looking for reported features and strong first person pieces particularly on: internet culture, lifestyle trends, how political policy impacts young people's lives, LGBTQ+ issues, dating and relationships, women's health 💫
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Lots of readers asking me an interesting question over on TikTok: “isn’t it a conflict of interest for MPs who are landlords and make money from property to be allowed a say on renting reform?”
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There will be lots of talk of a "landlord exodus" due to private renting reform so here's a super quick economics lesson! Homes don't disappear when landlords sell them. They are bought by other landlords or people who will live in them. If landlords go, the homes remain!
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Everyone suddenly: how are people supposed to pay their mortgages? Government should step in!
Me: you know housing benefit has been frozen and hasn’t covered average rents for - checks notes - years!
(Article from last summer)
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"We remember Sarah by fighting to make sure that what happened to her never happens again. Justice takes all of us to build it"
@SistersUncut
for
@Refinery29UK
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Why are local councils being pushed to the brink of financial ruin by rising homelessness costs? It is a direct consequence of housing policy - or a lack thereof! Three reasons for the mess we are in:
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A Conservative Party spokesperson quoted here going to great lengths to insist that government policy is never influenced by the donations the party receives. Anyone who has ever worked in lobbying (me) knows that’s just not true
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Increasing the supply of new homes will not necessarily make homes more affordable. That is not to say we don't need to build. We do. But this shouldn't be a contentious thing to point out. Several variables make the relationship between new housing and affordability complex...
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Sadiq Khan has prioritised council housing, universal free school meals and ULEZ - a contentious environmental policy. If he wins a comfortable third term, the Conservatives must do some soul searching. Everything they stand for atm is basically the antithesis of Khan’s record…
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I do wonder if we just need…to make sure young people have affordable places to live. Most people would be “unhappy, unskilled and unmoored” if they’d been homeless, evicted or realised they can’t afford to move out of their parents house too…
👥 We have a major crisis among Britain’s young generation: they’re unhappy, unskilled and unmoored. It’s time to look at what a new Great British National Service would look like to reengage them with society.
Latest column for
@theipaper
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Average two year fixed-rate mortgage is back above 5 per cent. A year ago, this was major news. Funny how it’s been normalised even though the implications for homeowners and first-time buyers are still huge.
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The more I think about the Help to Buy scheme, the more I think that the government's decision to help people buy homes they couldn't really afford during a period of ultra-low interest rates was...probably not a good one.
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Members of my extended family (young people) have voted Reform. I asked if they knew this party was formerly the Brexit Party? They said no. Easy to sneer but too much political journalism assumes things are obvious which…to lots of people…aren’t
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A circle I cannot square, both personally while remortgaging and professionally while investigating mortgage prisoners: it’s hard to pass affordability when applying for a mortgage but banks are quite happy to put you into a rate they know you can’t afford once you have one 🤨
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Rents are not natural forces. They cannot swell or spike on their own. If they rise, it’s because landlords and lettings agents have put them up. This week’s newsletter
@theipaper
is all about the enormous problem of historically high private rents…
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Bit here where a landlord says they want to make “more homes available for people” is v dodgy economics. Every home bought up by a landlord is a home not available to a first-time buyer…this is partly how the private rented sector exploded in the 90s and 00s
I went to the landlord convention to find out how to fix the housing crisis
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Testing positive for Covid and going into isolation is possibly the worst Christmas gift I’ve ever had (I’m fine)- please be careful and smart everyone ❤️ don’t take any risks you don’t need to take
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Feel privileged to be an
@TheOrwellPrize
finalist alongside other brilliant journalists & writers. We've been covering homelessness in Britain by centring those experiencing it here
@theipaper
for several years. I'm so glad my work telling their stories can be recognised this way
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Yesterday, I was told about two private renters whose landlord hiked their rent but told them in person they'd waive the increase if the renters agreed to clean one of the landlord's other properties...I've been on holiday for two weeks and, apparently, returned to the 1200s...
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At 36, 15 years after I left university, I have paid off my student loan. This month, I'll see my full income after tax appear in my bank account for the first time. Some younger graduates may never be able to say the same as I wrote here
@theipaper
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I do wish journalists could be this enthusiastic about the fact that some people literally cannot afford to eat, feed their kids and pay their rent…
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There is a necessary difference between journalism and campaigning. Once again this week I was asked to go on a BBC current affairs programme as housing correspondent and then asked to give a “campaigner’s perspective” so I pulled out - here’s why the distinction matters…
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What drives obsessive, pernicious and aggressive online Meghan Markle anti-fandom? Today
@kidisalright
investigates for
@Refinery29UK
in this brilliant long-read
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This argument is intellectually inconsistent with support of the Right to Buy policy.
Sorry, but if you are in a top tax bracket, you should move out of your council house. That’s it, that’s the tweet.
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Whenever I read articles about private landlords “feeling the burden of being landlords” I try to imagine a similar headline about another essential service provider....”supermarkets feeling the burden of...selling their customers food”?
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🧵 Shocking (but not surprising) exclusive today
@theipaper
- for the first time, data is available confirming a link between child homelessness (living in temporary accommodation) and mortality. I obtained the data from
@TA_APPG
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Annual reminder: I'm open for pitches
@Refinery29UK
- I'm after well-researched & reported pieces on internet culture, sexuality, gender, lifestyle & how politics and policy impact young women/non-binary ppl plus really brilliant first person experience pieces. Pls email not DM.
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Interesting that ppl on the left are dunking on Kwajo - a social tenant and campaigner - who has done more for social housing residents in 18 months than anyone else has in years. His fronting of a DLUHC video to raise awareness about tenants' rights is a good thing.
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Also worth noting that the BBC's current Director General was, quite literally, chairman of a local branch of the Conservative Party. Impartiality works two ways. That's what it means.
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Reminder that in their 2019 manifesto, the Conservatives pledged to end rough sleeping by 2024.
Latest London rough sleeping stats show 2,283 people are rough sleeping for the first time. Up 34% from the same time last year. New rough sleepers make up 52% of the 4,389 people sleeping on London's streets. Believe this is almost the highest quarterly figure EVER recorded.
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This is good news but her original sentencing - which was against all expert advice - should never have been allowed to happen and, until abortion is decriminalised, it could legitimately and legally happen again...
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The role rising rents and mortgages will play in economic stagnation and recession isn’t talked about enough - the more people have to pay for housing, the less they have to spend on other stuff. Rents are historically expensive, so is buying a home.
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🏡Happy new year housing census data is here
🏡 Shows a decrease in social housing & a huge rise in private renting.
🏡 There are now 5m private renters. Up from 3.9m in 2011
🏡 Amid rising inflation, more & more ppl are stuck in unaffordable and unstable homes. Sounds good.
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Finally, the conversation is not about how women can limit their lives to stay safe - don’t wear headphones, go out at night - but men talking about what they can do to make them safer. This is crucial. Teach it in schools.
I live less than five minutes from where Sarah Everard went missing. Everyone is on high alert. Aside from giving as much space as possible on quieter streets and keeping face visible, is there anything else men can reasonably do to reduce the anxiety/spook factor?
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What is going on with driving tests? I can't get a test at my test centre within the next 8 months! Theory is going to expire. Can't plan lessons. £100s spent. Driving instructor told me I can buy a dodgy test for £300. How is anyone meant to make this work?
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🧵 Does the prime minister understand the housing market? This morning on Laura Kuenssberg’s BBC show she said: “ultimately interest rates are set by the Bank of England…they are a key factor in mortgage rates and are somewhat dependent on the global market”
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Just a thought … but … do we really want people’s pensions to be reliant on the volatile and exploitative business of rent extraction? Would that money be better invested elsewhere? Just a thought. Just thinking.
Exclusive: Pension funds believe Michael Gove’s proposed reforms of Britain’s “feudal” leasehold system will cost them in the region of £30bn if he proceeds next week with a £250 cap on ground rents and 20-year transition to peppercorn rates.
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Devestating to hear people have died in Valencia in a building fire where flammable cladding was involved. Britain could have set a precedent for the global building safety response after Grenfell - it chose not to
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🧵 We have a dangerous mould epidemic in private and socially rented homes 🏡 I spoke exclusively to Housing Secretary Michael Gove who admitted that poor housing conditions are a "public health issue"
@theipaper
. Here's where we are, what he said and what might happen next...
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Tonight Sunak said he wants everyone to feel how he felt when he got the keys to his first flat. While he was PM:
🏡 Renters’ reform blocked
🏡 Leasehold reform watered down
🏡 Housebuilding targets scrapped
🏡 No support for first-time buyers
🏡 Planning reform watered down
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But, what if the lack of public spending - e.g. on housing - is threatening the nation’s finances?
Labour is focused on economic stability, and "cannot and will not" let public spending needs, however important, threaten the nation's finances, Starmer said.
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Hmm - yes, rents are falling in some places but is it really cheaper to rent than to buy long-term? Over time, those who buy gain an asset. Renter’s don’t. And, without rent control, they have no say over how much their rent will cost in years to come
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Important graph - this is why high housing costs inhibit growth. The more of their income people have to spend on housing, the less they can spend on goods and services. Above all, this is bad for their quality of life but don't forget, it's bad for the economy too.
Housing costs crush poorer households living standards. The poorest families spend around 34% of their income on housing – twice as high as the 17% they spent in 1980
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HMT reportedly unhappy. Once again…pension funds don’t have to invest in freehold. Throughout history major reforms have inconvenienced the finances of some ppl. Doesn’t mean those reforms were wrong. Britain’s economy is too reliant on rent extraction and house price inflation
I'm told it was made clear PM sided with Gove and believed manifesto commitment must be delivered
It is true the final package is not what Gove intended.
But it seems it is the Treasury, rather than Gove's team, that is most unhappy this weekend with the compromise
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Once again asked to appear on a flagship news prog as a "campaigner" not a journalist...fascinates me every time as I'm not a campaigner? Problematic, too, because presenting me as such suggests data and examples I use in my reporting on e.g. the plight of renters are subjective?
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Exclusive
@Refinery29UK
people are having mortgage applications rejected because they have used Buy Now, Pay Later schemes such as Klarna even though they’ve never missed a payment
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Department of Levelling Up source tells me everyone is very worried about what this means for housing reform. There is, as I understand it, one minister left at the department responsible for housing. We...don't have a government...
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Seems the Renters’ Reform will not pass before election. 2019 manifesto promise to end no fault evictions will be broken. Months of work by stakeholders tossed aside. Delays caused by wrangling with backbenchers while evictions surged. More than 4m households left in precarity.
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Keeping Right to Buy but ending the policy which allows councils to keep 100% of their Right to Buy receipts at a time when *checks notes* there is a shortage of social housing in many places and councils’ finances are in dire straits seems…like a v bad decision.
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At the Conservative Conference the charity
@Shelter
have made their exhibition stall look like temporary accommodation to reflect the scale of the growing homelessness crisis
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On birth rates - as being able to afford buying a house has become a symbol of wealth I do wonder if, in my lifetime, being able to afford to have children will be too. Unless, of course, decent housing becomes easier to access, wages rise and childcare is made free...
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Am in touch with leaseholders in Hitchin who have received a 9000% ground rent rise! Gove wants a £250 cap but Treasury are, as I understand it, against this. Unlike service charges, ground rent not impacted by inflation so how could this be justified?!?
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Inside the sacking of Michael Gove
@theipaper
: insiders say pro-landlord members of the No 10 policy unit wanted "revenge" for his "interventionist" reforms which would give renters more power...
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Reading brilliant stuff about relationships written by women atm (Shon Faye,
@mlothianmclean
,
@annielord8
,
@RachelConnoll14
's newsletter). But, as ever, noticing how little I hear anything from men about what seems to be an intimacy/communication crisis for young(ish) adults
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Real wages are still below their 2008 peak. I repeat. Real wages are still below their 2008 peak. And house prices are still much, much higher.
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£500 a month for student loans..."It's not real debt," school advisors said when I applied for tuition fee loans to go to university. Well, let me tell you, it feels very real now! My latest column
@theipaper
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🧵 For some time now, I've been reporting on the potential consequences of historically high house prices over
@theipaper
🏡 as inflation & interest rates rise, those consequences have become very real for a lot of people. Here's how we got here and a look at what might happen...
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As we contemplate lockdown 3.0: reminder that the second temporary suspension of evictions is due to end on January 11th as things stand.
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Four years since tragedy occurred at Grenfell. Today should be dedicated to the memory of everyone who lost their life, a loved one, a home and has had to live with the aftershocks of what they witnessed. It’s also a moment to reflect on the need to make all buildings safe.
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Just a thought…but maybe the government should take a look at the growing body of research suggesting people are more and more anxious and depressed because they can’t afford their housing…just a thought…
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At Bright Blue event about the proposed regulation of landlords. Housing minister
@redditchrachel
says that her children all rent their homes and vote conservative - not all private renters “smoke weed” or are “bad people in gangs” she says. Conservatives rent their homes too….
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On cladding announcement: asking people who already have huge debts (mortgages and Help to Buy loans) and other expenses (rent in the case of shared ownership) to take out other loans to fix building defects they are not responsible for is...not the answer.
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Do you think the government can fulfil their 2019 manifesto promise to end rough sleeping by July 4th?
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New book from me
@4thEstateBooks
🌙We Were Promised The Moon🌙will be published next summer. It explores how the economics of the last 30 years have reshaped adulthood...
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You can use economic theory to argue that landlords won’t pass rising living costs onto their tenants BUT I have a friend who is a landlord. She hiked rent on one of her properties because she…decided to move to Panama and stop working. True. Story. So…they absolutely do it.
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In an interview with
@lewis_goodall
-
@jeremycorbyn
says that if he had become Prime Minister his first act would have been to end rough sleeping by funding councils to get people off the streets. No mean feat but not impossible. In Finland, it has been done.
“Today rough sleeping ends. There will be no more homeless people in this country.”
@jeremycorbyn
reveals what he would have said on the steps of No. 10 had he become PM in 2017.
Coming soon on
@GlobalPlayer
.
@lewis_goodall
|
@jeremycorbyn
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I'd say it matters if the prime minister doesn't use the NHS. Similarly, do often wonder if people who have never privately rented & seriously worried about money (or at least know people in that situation) can make informed decisions about how housing services ought to function
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This - around 5.8% of children in the UK currently attend private schools. That means 94.2% do not…yet, people from this state-educated majority are still under-represented in many areas of public life such as politics and journalism.
Context: the UK’s institutions and British society are dominated by those who have attended fee-paying schools. For example, the new cabinet is 60%+ private school (vs 7% of population). Private schoolers remain significantly over-represented at Oxford and Cambridge themselves.
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I don't understand the argument that the Renters' Reform Bill will harm student landlords. As a student, I had to sign up for 12-month tenancies when my academic year only ran from October - June. Why should a student sign on to rent a home for longer than they need?
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New investigation
@theipaper
- I’ve seen a lot in this job but I found this one particularly shocking. In recent weeks I’ve been meeting mums who are homeless and being told they have to move hundreds of miles to other parts of England in order to be housed…it’s heartbreaking.
Councils in England are “exporting” thousands of vulnerable homeless people around the country due to housing shortages
🏠 Here
@Victoria_Spratt
reveals how some are being offered accommodation hundreds of miles from their communities
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Remember - 6% mortgage rates today are equivalent in terms of pain and financial stress to double digit rates in the 80s because homes are more expensive and less affordable in relation to earnings than any time in history and people take out larger mortgages as a result.
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This 👇as I wrote here, in practice, tuition fees have acted as a covert increase in income tax for middle and high-income workers who went to university and don't have parents rich enough to pay their fees upfront:
A friendly reminder to anyone who started uni after 2012 to never check their student loan balance
Thanks to the current 7.8% rate, my interest is *double* my repayments and I have £8k more on my undergrad loan than I did two years ago...
Only 23 more years of repayments to go!
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🧵 I’ve been travelling around the UK a lot lately. In towns and cities I am noticing more and more tents lining the streets. They are symbols of a broken social contract and the people living in them have a story to tell…
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Thoughts with anyone affected by the New Providence Wharf fire - this building was covered in ACM cladding. That's the same cladding as Grenfell. The status quo - whereby an untold number of people still live in unsafe buildings with serious fire safety defects - is amoral
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Great to make the contraceptive pill more accessible in theory. But - what if you need to talk about side effects or want to discuss your options and can’t get an appointment with your GP or access a sexual health clinic because…so many of them have closed
We’re making oral contraception available direct from your pharmacy.
Almost half a million women will no longer need to speak to a practice nurse or GP to access oral contraception and will instead be able to get it through their local pharmacy.
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🧵 If you want to understand the devastating impact of rising living costs, spend a day in a housing court as I did just over a week ago. People are made homeless in just moments. This week’s
@theipaper
column
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You can read my full investigation here
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