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4 hours ago, TDYER63 said:

Is NO-ONE more than a little pissed off about this or are we a board of second and third home owners? 👀

As Orraloon said as unpalatable as it might be its probably more efficient to do it that way.  What got me though is the number of people who have actually got second homes. The article below suggests well over 500,000 households in UK have second homes.  Seems to be more and more of a thing compared to when I was growing up and I'm not sure its a good thing as with increasing house values it only widens the wealth gap.

Second homes are a gross injustice, yet the UK government encourages them | George Monbiot | The Guardian

 

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56 minutes ago, Orraloon said:

It's a universal benefit, as far as i can see. I am guessing that the this is the easiest and cheapest way to deliver it. As soon as you start to apply any kind of means testing you incur high costs which are often much more than any money saved. It looks like the energy companies are doing the admin for this. Not sure how much they are getting paid for that though?

It will be just like the fuel duty. Ordinary folk will hardly notice it, and somebody who already has loads of money will make even more money out of it.

 

23 minutes ago, Hertsscot said:

As Orraloon said as unpalatable as it might be its probably more efficient to do it that way.  What got me though is the number of people who have actually got second homes. The article below suggests well over 500,000 households in UK have second homes.  Seems to be more and more of a thing compared to when I was growing up and I'm not sure its a good thing as with increasing house values it only widens the wealth gap.

Second homes are a gross injustice, yet the UK government encourages them | George Monbiot | The Guardian

 

Its costing £120 million pounds to fund all the multiple home owners. The government knows absolutely  everything about us I cant see how difficult it would be with today’s technology to identify duplicate owners for a one off payment. Its not like its  going to be an ongoing logistical nightmare. 

I dont mind the energy allowance being universal, richer people are dealing with high energy bills too. However a multiple home owner cannot be in all their houses at the same time, and you would not expect them to be heating houses they are not living in. So why are they getting help with bills they are not incurring? 


 

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1 hour ago, Hertsscot said:

As Orraloon said as unpalatable as it might be its probably more efficient to do it that way.  What got me though is the number of people who have actually got second homes. The article below suggests well over 500,000 households in UK have second homes.  Seems to be more and more of a thing compared to when I was growing up and I'm not sure its a good thing as with increasing house values it only widens the wealth gap.

Second homes are a gross injustice, yet the UK government encourages them | George Monbiot | The Guardian

 

Same mentality as ticket scalpers

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1 hour ago, Hertsscot said:

As Orraloon said as unpalatable as it might be its probably more efficient to do it that way.  What got me though is the number of people who have actually got second homes. The article below suggests well over 500,000 households in UK have second homes.  Seems to be more and more of a thing compared to when I was growing up and I'm not sure its a good thing as with increasing house values it only widens the wealth gap.

Second homes are a gross injustice, yet the UK government encourages them | George Monbiot | The Guardian

 

500,000 is a large number, 0.75% is a very small number.  Both are different representations of the same thing, in the first case it’s the number of second homes, the second case is that expressed as a percentage of the population.

“500,000 Brits own second homes” versus “0.75% of the population own second homes” - which one has more emphasis?

 

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4 minutes ago, aaid said:

500,000 is a large number, 0.75% is a very small number.  Both are different representations of the same thing, in the first case it’s the number of second homes, the second case is that expressed as a percentage of the population.

“500,000 Brits own second homes” versus “0.75% of the population own second homes” - which one has more emphasis?

 

Its still 500,000 no matter how you disguise it. And its still £ 120 million being spent on people who don’t need the money. 

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4 minutes ago, TDYER63 said:

Its still 500,000 no matter how you disguise it. And its still £ 120 million being spent on people who don’t need the money. 

True, but that wasn’t really my point.  What’s 120 million out of the total budget of this exercise?

I think in this case what they are trying to do is to get a sum of money to as many people as possible as quickly as it is to do it.   You could do it through the benefits system, but you’d miss a lot of people who the benefits system don’t know about.  You could do it through tax rebates or reducing rates but it’d be too late and you’d miss people who don’t pay tax,ie, people who earn less than £12500 a year.  Council tax is probably the only thing that everyone pays and the “benefit” is to help people with the fuel costs for their home.

I’d give them some slack here as I can see what they’re trying to achieve and I’d much rather in circumstances like this that a small number of people get more than they should rather than people being missed out 

Not related directly to this topic but Nicola Sturgeon was talking similarly this week about people complaining about the SG spending £20 million on the referendum and expressing that as the - extremely - low percentage of the Scottish budget it represents.

 

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17 minutes ago, TDYER63 said:

Its still 500,000 no matter how you disguise it. And its still £ 120 million being spent on people who don’t need the money. 

With you 100% on this. Multiple home owners is something I can't stand. Nobody needs more than one house. For them to now get this payment, multiple times, boils my piss. God, we need a revolution. Capitalism sucks. 

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4 minutes ago, duncan II said:

With you 100% on this. Multiple home owners is something I can't stand. Nobody needs more than one house. For them to now get this payment, multiple times, boils my piss. God, we need a revolution. Capitalism sucks. 

Not all second homes are “holiday” homes.   Here’s an example.  A friend of mine who has a very well paid job in London has a small house in East London but his family home is in York where his wife is from, she lives there with the kids and he stays in London during the week when he’s at work.  What should he do?  Give up the job in London, rent somewhere in London - much more expensive - move the family to London, get a divorce?   That’s an unusual scenario, however I suspect that a large proportion of that 500,000 are people in similar situations. 

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8 minutes ago, aaid said:

True, but that wasn’t really my point.  What’s 120 million out of the total budget of this exercise?

I think in this case what they are trying to do is to get a sum of money to as many people as possible as quickly as it is to do it.   You could do it through the benefits system, but you’d miss a lot of people who the benefits system don’t know about.  You could do it through tax rebates or reducing rates but it’d be too late and you’d miss people who don’t pay tax,ie, people who earn less than £12500 a year.  Council tax is probably the only thing that everyone pays and the “benefit” is to help people with the fuel costs for their home.

I’d give them some slack here as I can see what they’re trying to achieve and I’d much rather in circumstances like this that a small number of people get more than they should rather than people being missed out 

Not related directly to this topic but Nicola Sturgeon was talking similarly this week about people complaining about the SG spending £20 million on the referendum and expressing that as the - extremely - low percentage of the Scottish budget it represents.

 

Bit in bold. I think we really are losing all sense of perspective, the UK is in so much debt we are talking about £120 mio like it is chicken feed. People are so glad to be getting something to help them they are ignoring the fookin waste that is happening.  

I understand what you mean about rather having a small amount of people get more than the needy not receiving anything but surely via the council tax system the government know exactly who has second homes ? It cannot cost £120mio to establish this. 

On the referendum money, if I wasnt pro indy I would probably be pissed off myself, however a referendum was in their manifesto so  they are really just fulfilling what they said they would do.  
 

 

 

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17 minutes ago, TDYER63 said:

Bit in bold. I think we really are losing all sense of perspective, the UK is in so much debt we are talking about £120 mio like it is chicken feed. People are so glad to be getting something to help them they are ignoring the fookin waste that is happening.  

I understand what you mean about rather having a small amount of people get more than the needy not receiving anything but surely via the council tax system the government know exactly who has second homes ? It cannot cost £120mio to establish this. 

On the referendum money, if I wasnt pro indy I would probably be pissed off myself, however a referendum was in their manifesto so  they are really just fulfilling what they said they would do.  
 

 

 

It is chicken feed though, or at least in the context of the overall budget it is.   If all the councils in the UK had to develop a system to tie up with UKG data - and that’s even assuming that they could do it - to identify people who own second homes, how much do you think that would cost?  I doubt there would be much change, if any, out of £120million and it wouldn’t be there tomorrow.

A good analogy here is free prescriptions in Scotland.  Every now and then I get involved in a conversation with someone down here about universal free prescriptions.   I point out to him that - similar to England - the vast majority of prescriptions that are written are for people who would be eligible for them free anyway and by not having to pay for a system which handles the payments - that’s how you can afford to have free prescriptions.  The downside of that is that you have people getting prescriptions for paracetamol that they could buy for pennies in Tesco and the bad headlines that comes from that, but that’s chicken feed in terms of the overall benefits. 

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12 minutes ago, aaid said:

It is chicken feed though, or at least in the context of the overall budget it is.   If all the councils in the UK had to develop a system to tie up with UKG data - and that’s even assuming that they could do it - to identify people who own second homes, how much do you think that would cost?  I doubt there would be much change, if any, out of £120million and it wouldn’t be there tomorrow.

A good analogy here is free prescriptions in Scotland.  Every now and then I get involved in a conversation with someone down here about universal free prescriptions.   I point out to him that - similar to England - the vast majority of prescriptions that are written are for people who would be eligible for them free anyway and by not having to pay for a system which handles the payments - that’s how you can afford to have free prescriptions.  The downside of that is that you have people getting prescriptions for paracetamol that they could buy for pennies in Tesco and the bad headlines that comes from that, but that’s chicken feed in terms of the overall benefits. 

I take your prescription analogy though people only get a prescription when they need it, they dont get double or treble what they are entitled to,  as is happening with the energy grant. 
It may be the case that the cost of identifying the second home owners is not worth the hassle, but how do we know there are x amount of second home owners if we dont who they are ? Do the council tax records not already identify this ? 
I know I sound like a dug with a bone on this but it really pisses me off that people are getting these grants when others  cannot afford to heat their homes. If I thought these home owners would donate the money to good causes / charity I wouldn’t feel so bad but I very much doubt that will happen. 

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48 minutes ago, aaid said:

Not all second homes are “holiday” homes.   Here’s an example.  A friend of mine who has a very well paid job in London has a small house in East London but his family home is in York where his wife is from, she lives there with the kids and he stays in London during the week when he’s at work.  What should he do?  Give up the job in London, rent somewhere in London - much more expensive - move the family to London, get a divorce?   That’s an unusual scenario, however I suspect that a large proportion of that 500,000 are people in similar situations. 

There is a graph on here showing where the second homes are. The biggest concentration  all look suspiciously like holiday homes areas to me. 

I will say no more on this though  🙂

 

https://www.nationalworld.com/news/politics/cost-of-living-energy-bill-rebate-second-homes-3711952

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7 minutes ago, TDYER63 said:

I take your prescription analogy though people only get a prescription when they need it, they dont get double or treble what they are entitled to,  as is happening with the energy grant. 
It may be the case that the cost of identifying the second home owners is not worth the hassle, but how do we know there are x amount of second home owners if we dont who they are ? Do the council tax records not already identify this ? 
I know I sound like a dug with a bone on this but it really pisses me off that people are getting these grants when others  cannot afford to heat their homes. If I thought these home owners would donate the money to good causes / charity I wouldn’t feel so bad but I very much doubt that will happen. 

They are entitled to it though, it's just that you have decided that they shouldn't be.

This is just the age old discussion about universal benefits. I have had umpteen discussions about this over the years and I often revisit my thinking, but I always come back to universal benefits being the logically sensible solution. Some folk would argue that ALL benefits should be universal.

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2 minutes ago, TDYER63 said:

I take your prescription analogy though people only get a prescription when they need it, they dont get double or treble what they are entitled to,  as is happening with the energy grant. 
It may be the case that the cost of identifying the second home owners is not worth the hassle, but how do we know there are x amount of second home owners if we dont who they are ? Do the council tax records not already identify this ? 

I got the first £400 grant that technically I didn’t need.  I’m lucky as - without any great foresight - I signed up for a fixed term detail for two years last February, so I’ve still got another 8 months on that rate which will no doubt rocket then but right now, I don’t need it.  I was pretty pissed off originally when it was a loan rather than a grant but if the government wants to give me money and doesn’t want it back that’s good for me.

I don’t believe that - certainly in England - you get any form of discount on a second home as a right from the council, it seems to be optional, so I doubt (m)any hold that data.   The numbers quoted I suspect are estimates, I don’t there’s any single place where that data is held.  The last time the UKG proposed trying to bring all the data about an individual in one place - or have it accessible by multiple agencies - it got scrapped because of raft of data protection problems. 
 

Remember this is supposed to be a one off system to solve a temporary problem.  If it was supposed to be permanent then you could spend the time designing a system that’s fairer as it is, you just have to leverage off what you have.

Look at furlough - credit where it’s due, they managed to pull that out the bag quickly and hit the vast majority of people impacted, they didn’t get everyone, there were gaps particularly around the self employed and there’ll have been massive fraud - it was far from a perfect system - but in the circumstances most people would look positively at it,,

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39 minutes ago, aaid said:

It is chicken feed though, or at least in the context of the overall budget it is.   If all the councils in the UK had to develop a system to tie up with UKG data - and that’s even assuming that they could do it - to identify people who own second homes, how much do you think that would cost?  I doubt there would be much change, if any, out of £120million and it wouldn’t be there tomorrow.

A good analogy here is free prescriptions in Scotland.  Every now and then I get involved in a conversation with someone down here about universal free prescriptions.   I point out to him that - similar to England - the vast majority of prescriptions that are written are for people who would be eligible for them free anyway and by not having to pay for a system which handles the payments - that’s how you can afford to have free prescriptions.  The downside of that is that you have people getting prescriptions for paracetamol that they could buy for pennies in Tesco and the bad headlines that comes from that, but that’s chicken feed in terms of the overall benefits. 

I am a wee bit surprised that they didn't take the opportunity to cash in on this once again. I wouldn't have put it past them to pay some Lady Moan type character a few hundred million to administer the system then folk would have something proper to mone about.

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4 hours ago, aaid said:

500,000 is a large number, 0.75% is a very small number.  Both are different representations of the same thing, in the first case it’s the number of second homes, the second case is that expressed as a percentage of the population.

“500,000 Brits own second homes” versus “0.75% of the population own second homes” - which one has more emphasis?

 

Fair point but the percentage is actually more than that. Last week Siobhan Mcdonagh stated there were over 772,000 households (not individuals) who had at least two properties (Sunak hadn't got a clue how many!)

I think there's about 28,000,000 households in the UK, so about 1 in 35 households (looks smaller when presented as a percentage 😀). Still strikes me as much more common than I would have imagined and I do wonder if it has risen and if it is contributing to growing wealth inequality

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8 minutes ago, Hertsscot said:

Fair point but the percentage is actually more than that. Last week Siobhan Mcdonagh stated there were over 772,000 households (not individuals) who had at least two properties (Sunak hadn't got a clue how many!)

I think there's about 28,000,000 households in the UK, so about 1 in 35 households (looks smaller when presented as a percentage 😀). Still strikes me as much more common than I would have imagined and I do wonder if it has risen and if it is contributing to growing wealth inequality

And that link that TDYER put up had the number as being in the region of 300000, so that’s three different numbers, take your pick depending on what you want to show I guess.  It’s still a fraction of the overall total - fair point on households though.

I suspect no-one really knows the exact number but it’s probably in the region of a few hundred thousand.  I suspect it’s probably fewer than the number of people who have a second property abroad though - not that they’ll be getting any grants for them obviously.

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Well, I am not sure I would be getting worked up based on anything George Monbiot writes.

I can't recall but it may have been Syria where he showed himself up badly. I mean really spouting full on neocon shite like it was gravy. 

I quoted him on here around 2014 on Land Reform and I regret that. 

This article is very much what he does. I'd take it all with massive pinch of salt.

 

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4 hours ago, aaid said:

Not all second homes are “holiday” homes.   Here’s an example.  A friend of mine who has a very well paid job in London has a small house in East London but his family home is in York where his wife is from, she lives there with the kids and he stays in London during the week when he’s at work.  What should he do?  Give up the job in London, rent somewhere in London - much more expensive - move the family to London, get a divorce?   That’s an unusual scenario, however I suspect that a large proportion of that 500,000 are people in similar situations. 

Not sure I have a HUGE amount of sympathy for your "very well paid" friend. 

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35 minutes ago, duncan II said:

Not sure I have a HUGE amount of sympathy for your "very well paid" friend. 

Maybe not, but he’s a working class guy, very intelligent and has worked hard to get where he is.  He also used to post on here, is a big Aberdeen fan and was in Armenia AFAIK.   Not what you expected I guess. 

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17 hours ago, Orraloon said:

They are entitled to it though, it's just that you have decided that they shouldn't be.

This is just the age old discussion about universal benefits. I have had umpteen discussions about this over the years and I often revisit my thinking, but I always come back to universal benefits being the logically sensible solution. Some folk would argue that ALL benefits should be universal.

Yes, they are entitled to it, bad wording. Its the fact they are actually entitled to it that I have a problem with. Sometimes ignorance is bliss. 

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12 hours ago, aaid said:

Maybe not, but he’s a working class guy, very intelligent and has worked hard to get where he is.  He also used to post on here, is a big Aberdeen fan and was in Armenia AFAIK.   Not what you expected I guess. 

Yours friends situation is actually an example where I think the 2 home grant is fair. People sometimes need to move away to get work and London is far too expensive for most people to buy a family home. They are genuinely heating 2 homes .

I dont think there are many examples like this but can see why it could be a headache  trying to determine individual situations. I think that probably excuses the multiple grants more than simply trying to identify those with more than one home. 

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2 hours ago, TDYER63 said:

Yours friends situation is actually an example where I think the 2 home grant is fair. People sometimes need to move away to get work and London is far too expensive for most people to buy a family home. They are genuinely heating 2 homes .

I dont think there are many examples like this but can see why it could be a headache  trying to determine individual situations. I think that probably excuses the multiple grants more than simply trying to identify those with more than one home. 

So, then you get to the problem of who decides what is fair and what isn't, and how much are they going to charge for deciding.

We could make you the Tzar of two home grants, but you wouldn't manage to do it all by yourself, so you would have to employ folk to help you do it. How many folk do you need, and how much are you going to pay them. You would need to train them up for doing a one off job and then make them all redundant. Hardly worth the bother. 

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53 minutes ago, Orraloon said:

So, then you get to the problem of who decides what is fair and what isn't, and how much are they going to charge for deciding.

We could make you the Tzar of two home grants, but you wouldn't manage to do it all by yourself, so you would have to employ folk to help you do it. How many folk do you need, and how much are you going to pay them. You would need to train them up for doing a one off job and then make them all redundant. Hardly worth the bother. 

Underestimate me at your peril !  ☠️
Within the benevolent society  I am not known as Tidy the Tremendous Tzar for nothing . I shall give my time for nothing, it will,, after-all,  be more productive than sitting on here talking shite for hours every day.
I am pretty sure I could entice Duncan to join me , and perhaps a few others. It will not be on one off job , I am fairly certain our skill set could be used for the next ‘ bung the better off’ government  funded project. Maybe Malcolm could donate his massive hoose for the task, we would bring our own blankets and flasks. 
If you are interested please PM me.

 

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