‘ Nice of you to ask Gordon, but with it being the bank holiday I thought I’d spend a few quiet days at my second home in the country.’
‘Now that would be, don’t tell me, in Worcestershire, the town where the main industry used to be pins and needles and where Enfield motorbikes used to be made. Isn’t it now a centre for the prison industry?’ Must go Jackie, got a U -Tube thing to do.’
Meanwhile back in Redditch, the lounge has been really well tidied up, the children are wondering if this will be the time that mummy takes them back home with her, leaving behind the verdant pastures and sun soaked valleys of what has become more of a way of life for them, rather than a holiday.
Somewhere on the M4 near Swindon, Rupert is passing the time while stuck in a tail back by raising the question of whether they should still be bothering with their hideaway second home. Once they were part of the ‘zonely’ brigade. ‘Darling, you must visit one weekend, its zonely 2 hours drive from the Hammersmith fly-over.’
‘Jocasta? I suppose we really need to keep the cottage on? What with the capital gains tax implications, the need to get the holiday lets booked up, the business rates now we let it from Easter through to November, and the continuous increases in the contents and buildings insurance? Not to mention inheritance tax. It was so much better when we could afford to leave it empty for most of the year.
‘No Rupert!, the children love our occasional weekends there and besides, if things get any worse at County and Ripoff Securities, we may really need to use it as a hideaway. Especially when the depositors and shareholders realize we’ve been having ‘bank’ holidays on them for years.
Rupert looks very depressed. ‘Well darling, we already have one home, surely that’s enough. It’s not as though we have any connection with the place or actually know anyone, let alone do things in the community. Think of all those people out there with only very tiny homes, or the few with no homes at all. There must be a way round it. Of course! Working for the community! I’ll stand for Parliament! The present old boy is retiring, going to the House of Lords for services to blustering or something. We could leave the kids in the cottage with a nanny. Things would be so much simpler.’
Jocasta’s’ eyes light up, ‘And we could sell the Putney house before values fall any lower and move in with my sister and get one of those allowance thing- a- me- jigs for the cottage. Perfect!.’
Meanwhile, in a Bed and Breakfast, in nearby Swindon, the homeless persons legislation is getting good nights sleep.
Dacier
( See my earlier item in response to Mark Thomas and his Peoples Manifesto. A slightly more detailed analysis of the second homes debate will follow shortly.)
Wednesday, 29 April 2009
Tuesday, 28 April 2009
A National Income Limit and Better Property Use
I have just heard about the Peoples Manifesto which Mark Thomas is promoting in his current tour. You might like to see what he is doing by going to www.markthomasinfo.com/ where you will also find a useful card you might like to carry if you are young, out late at night and experience the exercise of a power to stop and search. This is not to say that if you are not young you wont be stopped but the statistics seem to show you are unlikely to attract the attention of the police.
Among the policies you will find is the suggestion that if properties are left unoccupoied for more than five years, ownership will lapse and they can be used for public housing. This would have a considerable impact on properties in urban areas but there are many properties in the countryside which would already qualify. One of the big irritations to local families is that their younsters would like to base their lives in their own community but property prices and the non-existence of social housing makes this practically impossible.
When visiting Devonshire and Cornish resorts in years gone by it was always a source of sadness tainted by amusement that the hovels near the quayside, which previously would have been occupied by the fishermen, were now tidy little second homes or holiday lets which once September had passed stood empty until Easter. At the top of the vilage would be a housing estate provided by the old Rural District Council where all the latter day fishermen and other trades now lived. Today, local people don't even have that option unless a housing trust can be persuaded to set up shop. Even families with a plot of land will often find their plans rejected when they want to build a home for the next generation.
In France the 'dessertification' of the countryside becomes obvious when you pass by unoccupied farm buildings ripe for development as holiday homes, usually for Brits, with little idea what they are taking on. Here in the UK if you travel in most parts of holiday Britain after September you will find deserted villages where schools, shops, pubs and post offices have all passed into local memory. This is most ovious in East Anglia andCornwall but they are not alone. I had often wondered how a 'Chelsea by the Sea' came about, but having learnt in recent years how huge City bonuses can be, I suppose it has to be spent on something. More on such things later.
Dacier
Among the policies you will find is the suggestion that if properties are left unoccupoied for more than five years, ownership will lapse and they can be used for public housing. This would have a considerable impact on properties in urban areas but there are many properties in the countryside which would already qualify. One of the big irritations to local families is that their younsters would like to base their lives in their own community but property prices and the non-existence of social housing makes this practically impossible.
When visiting Devonshire and Cornish resorts in years gone by it was always a source of sadness tainted by amusement that the hovels near the quayside, which previously would have been occupied by the fishermen, were now tidy little second homes or holiday lets which once September had passed stood empty until Easter. At the top of the vilage would be a housing estate provided by the old Rural District Council where all the latter day fishermen and other trades now lived. Today, local people don't even have that option unless a housing trust can be persuaded to set up shop. Even families with a plot of land will often find their plans rejected when they want to build a home for the next generation.
In France the 'dessertification' of the countryside becomes obvious when you pass by unoccupied farm buildings ripe for development as holiday homes, usually for Brits, with little idea what they are taking on. Here in the UK if you travel in most parts of holiday Britain after September you will find deserted villages where schools, shops, pubs and post offices have all passed into local memory. This is most ovious in East Anglia andCornwall but they are not alone. I had often wondered how a 'Chelsea by the Sea' came about, but having learnt in recent years how huge City bonuses can be, I suppose it has to be spent on something. More on such things later.
Dacier
Monday, 27 April 2009
Where compassion quotients run out
Having just returned from a short trip to Birmingham, where my daughter set up this site for us, I thought we had better get started. Over the weekend much was made in the papers of the Times Rich List, the motivation for which seems to be found somewhere in a combination of envy, prurience and the celebrity culture. Of course the dastardly plans of the Chancellor to bring in a draconian rate of 50p in the pound for earnings over £150,000 also featured, along with the recession’s ( when does ‘depression’ become the correct term?) effect on the capital values of rich peoples assets.
I cannot say I felt any sorrow for the less rich , and talk of such people leaving the country led me to feel that perhaps if they are that fickle with regard to their residence then perhaps we should do without them anyway. One commentator claimed that, ‘… you do not make the poor richer by making the rich poorer'. Surely, it should have been ‘…by making the rich less rich’. As a mere amateur and a fully paid up citizen perhaps I should have been stunned into silence by the utterance of a professional ( some journalists, you may have noticed, despise the rise of the amateur commentator by means of a blog) but in hard times I cant help feeling that those with loads of money should be expected to pull their weight like the rest of us, as the new age of austerity bites. At least the rich will not be out of a job or out of a home.
Although the view persists among some quarters that the rural communities are littered with rich farmers and minor aristocracy, the truth is that per capita incomes are generally low. Take for example the report in the Independent back in 1999 (27/4), where Ben Gill of the National Farmers Union was reported as saying that hill farmer’s incomes were likely to be no more than £5300 per annum. Things certainly haven’t got better and the drift out of the industry continues. ( listen to BBC radio 4 Farming Today for this continuing theme) Farming is a tough life which has to be conducted against everything nature can throw at you including the inevitable outbreaks of disease. The foot and mouth outbreak has left permanent damage, and TB continues to cost the tax payer millions. Sooner or later our upland areas will start to decline as the industry which formed and maintained it will have gone. Visual amenity will not be the only thing lost. So those of you out there not on the Rich List (national average income of £ 521 per week for men and £412 for women: National Statistics 2008) might be tempted to cast your eyes up to the hills and to heights of riches, and ponder.
We could of course phase out livestock farming, but that is a theme which will be returned to if I manage to keep turning on the computer.
Dacier
Having just returned from a short trip to Birmingham, where my daughter set up this site for us, I thought we had better get started. Over the weekend much was made in the papers of the Times Rich List, the motivation for which seems to be found somewhere in a combination of envy, prurience and the celebrity culture. Of course the dastardly plans of the Chancellor to bring in a draconian rate of 50p in the pound for earnings over £150,000 also featured, along with the recession’s ( when does ‘depression’ become the correct term?) effect on the capital values of rich peoples assets.
I cannot say I felt any sorrow for the less rich , and talk of such people leaving the country led me to feel that perhaps if they are that fickle with regard to their residence then perhaps we should do without them anyway. One commentator claimed that, ‘… you do not make the poor richer by making the rich poorer'. Surely, it should have been ‘…by making the rich less rich’. As a mere amateur and a fully paid up citizen perhaps I should have been stunned into silence by the utterance of a professional ( some journalists, you may have noticed, despise the rise of the amateur commentator by means of a blog) but in hard times I cant help feeling that those with loads of money should be expected to pull their weight like the rest of us, as the new age of austerity bites. At least the rich will not be out of a job or out of a home.
Although the view persists among some quarters that the rural communities are littered with rich farmers and minor aristocracy, the truth is that per capita incomes are generally low. Take for example the report in the Independent back in 1999 (27/4), where Ben Gill of the National Farmers Union was reported as saying that hill farmer’s incomes were likely to be no more than £5300 per annum. Things certainly haven’t got better and the drift out of the industry continues. ( listen to BBC radio 4 Farming Today for this continuing theme) Farming is a tough life which has to be conducted against everything nature can throw at you including the inevitable outbreaks of disease. The foot and mouth outbreak has left permanent damage, and TB continues to cost the tax payer millions. Sooner or later our upland areas will start to decline as the industry which formed and maintained it will have gone. Visual amenity will not be the only thing lost. So those of you out there not on the Rich List (national average income of £ 521 per week for men and £412 for women: National Statistics 2008) might be tempted to cast your eyes up to the hills and to heights of riches, and ponder.
We could of course phase out livestock farming, but that is a theme which will be returned to if I manage to keep turning on the computer.
Dacier
Sunday, 26 April 2009
First post from Tales from under Black Hill
You have arrived at our site which will attempt to see the world from a slightly remote location. Free from the daily grind of commuting through traffic jams, by train (regularly delayed or cancelled) and free of the pressures of the work place, Tales from under the Black Hill will cover a variety topics. These will include commentaries on rural life and the political and environmental issues in the wider world that can be observed from a hillside location. Perhaps, of more importance, and put bluntly, what someone, at one step removed from urban England’ thinks of what is going on out there, down there and around the world.
As a failed hippy and an inheritor of the ‘Good Life’ approach of the nineteen seventies you can expect a bit of ‘make do and mend’, brushes with the new bureaucracy of the Blair years and a great deal of reasoned sounding off. That’s if there is enough personal energy available to turn the computer on and enough money in the bank to pay for the energy from the national grid. Oh, and by the way, there might be time to let you know how the banjo playing is coming along after forty years of neglecting that noble art.
As a failed hippy and an inheritor of the ‘Good Life’ approach of the nineteen seventies you can expect a bit of ‘make do and mend’, brushes with the new bureaucracy of the Blair years and a great deal of reasoned sounding off. That’s if there is enough personal energy available to turn the computer on and enough money in the bank to pay for the energy from the national grid. Oh, and by the way, there might be time to let you know how the banjo playing is coming along after forty years of neglecting that noble art.
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