Can someone explain to me how being a leaseholder is different than being a renter (I’m an American)?
Its technically the same as renting, but there’s a lot of stupid historical reasons that make it awkward. You could be a leaseholder with a 1000 year contract costing a few pennies per year. Which makes you, for all intents and purposes, an owner of the property.
Leasehold is basically buying a property without actually truly owning it.
You “buy” a flat, but you’re actually only buying the lease to live there. Not that any single person ever lives long enough for this to happen, but technically if you lived there 99 years it would then revert to belonging to the freeholder and you’d be left with nothing.
In reality, anything below 80 years is seen as problematic and you have to renew the lease before then, at great cost.
If a lease does fall below 80 years, the costs for renewal get increasingly absurd.
So is the "common hold " they talk about more like the condominiums we have here in the u.s. eg. You own your unit, and you pay an HOA or some organization for building maintenance and amenities?
Good to see, but a shame that the plans only apply to new housing developments, and they’re being very vague about anything after that. Seems to take an extremely long time to do anything on this issue despite the changes apparently having wide support
Now scrap existing leases on private houses.
Far beyond time for this to be in the bin, I think there is one other country in the world that allows it. Hopefully the day will come when renters are placed on the same footing too, even if its clearly not going to be any time soon.
Also on Groves reforms just happening to include ways for landowners to undermine the entire system while superficially looking good, thats not some accident.
It’s good sure, but if only they put so much work into reforming fptp voting…
There was a vote in 2011 to change the voting system that the idiots of the UK voted against changing. I was a kid then and that was the first time I voted but even as someone who has almost zero interest in politics I could see that moving away from fptp was the (what I thought) obvious choice.
Apparently not.
After the absolute farce that was brexit as well I don’t believe the the population of the UK are able to make a good decision that benefits the country and general populace. The majority of the population aren’t able to employ critical thinking and are just easily lead towards shitty decisions.
I don’t believe that even if we did get another vote to change this terrible system that it would actually pass unfortunately. I have no faith in the ability of this population to make good decisions.
The majority of the population aren’t able to employ critical thinking and are just easily lead towards shitty decisions.
But… but… democracy!
/s
The problem with that referendum was that unless you can confidently and clearly explain why a change is better than the status quo then people tend to stick with what they know.
The offer in that vote didn’t clearly show an improvement to FPTP. The question wasn’t “should we enact proportional representation or not?”. The question wasn’t “Of these five voting systems which would you prefer?”
The question was “At present, the UK uses the “first past the post” system to elect MPs to the House of Commons. Should the “alternative vote” system be used instead?”
The alternative vote system doesn’t really have any obviously huge advantages over FPTP. It doesn’t offer proportional representation.
This short video explains it well:
Obviously, any improvement is better than no improvement but people tend not to like change so you have to very clearly state what they will gain from changing. And that didn’t happen.
This playlist has a few videos explaining voting systems if you’d like to learn more:
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLqs5ohhass_RN57KWlJKLOc5xdD9_ktRg
That and it was the Brexit pre-cursor.
Would you like this dying child to get a ventilator, or an alternative voting system?
Turns out, you’ll have neither.
Thanks for the additional info. I am generally not super knowledgeable on politics so I will go check out your links :)
