Paul

The housing secretary says he, like the PM, is getting on with the job & then boasts hes reforming right to buy Tweaks not change. They shouldn't be reforming RTB, they should be scrapping it. Along with introducing rent controls & a massive program of council house building

The Kings Speech shows why Starmer must go. What a wasted opportunity! Where’s the urgent transformative programme to redistribute wealth, tackle the nature & climate crisis, bring water into public hands, & introduce rent controls & wealth taxes? No hope, no story, no vision

Billionaire nepo baby in a bejewelled crown on a glittering gold throne in an unelected House of Cronies promises working people a fair deal. Welcome to Britain’s Disney democracy.

Starmer’s incrementalism strikes again. Leaseholders, instead of gaining control of your rip-off service charges, a right to petition at the feet of your freeholder master for permission to get an internet connection! The government is laughing at you: “let them eat cake”.

LEASEHOLDERS SCREWED BY STARMER’S SECOND KING’S SPEECH: STATEMENT FROM FREE LEASEHOLDERS 13/5/26 To save his premiership, on Monday Keir Starmer lambasted the politics of incrementalism, yet the Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill announced in today’s King’s Speech is infected with the status quo. This is more talk big, act small politics from the Starmer government. It is an insult to the millions of leaseholders being looted in their homes that a Labour government has walked back its manifesto promise to “end” the feudal leasehold system, instead serving up sham “reform” designed to keep Big Money interests happy. Astonishingly, the only new measure appears to be little more than a right for leaseholders to petition at the feet of their freeholder masters for permission to get an internet connection. It is the modern-day equivalent of telling the peasants to eat cake. The inclusion of this pro-leasehold measure comes just days after the main freeholder lobby group held a cosy conference with a PR firm and government civil servants, seeking to reposition themselves as Net Zero delivery partners to gain control over even more of captive leaseholders’ hard-earned money under the guise of essential block “improvements”. Our supporters are trapped in their homes, unable to sell or remortgage and suffering negative equity, while Hamptons has found that 37% of leasehold flats now have service charges in excess of 1% of the property value, which lenders increasingly refuse to back. Right to Manage, for those lucky enough to perform the legal somersaults required to qualify, already shows that leaseholders can take a chainsaw to wasteful spending, with our supporters achieving average service charge savings of 20–30% by removing extractive freeholders and choosing local contractors. Yet this Bill fails to slash the red tape and introduce a universal Right to Manage, despite the Law Commission’s 2020 blueprint and its inclusion in the Labour manifesto and the first King’s Speech. With this Commonhold and Leasehold Reform Bill, the government is propping up the service charge racket and the property mafia who benefit. Instead of giving leaseholders rightful control of their homes, money, and lives in a cost of living emergency, Starmer and his ministers have sided with vested interests, which is killing the housing market. It would be particularly cruel to bring forward amendments to the 2024 Act while still leaving leaseholders in financial servitude to their freeholders because they cannot afford to buy out their freehold due to uncapped development value. This is despite the Law Commission’s recommendation to restrict development value, and a previous Conservative promise that was ultimately dropped under lobbying pressure before the 2024 legislation was passed. Under Starmer’s Labour, leaseholders are doomed as corporate capture of policymaking continues in the post-Mandelson era.

No world in which this should be accepted It’s just obscene Full stop.

The UK personal allowance has been frozen at £12,570 since April 2021. That's the bit of your salary you keep before HMRC starts taking 20% off everything above it. In 2021, £12,570 was a reasonable tax-free bracket. Inflation since then has been roughly 25% cumulative, and the price of basically everything you actually spend money on has gone up — energy, rent, food, council tax, fuel. If the personal allowance had simply tracked inflation, it would now be closer to £15,700. Instead, the threshold sits exactly where it did when Sunak set it five years ago, and is locked there until 2030. The cost shows up everywhere except on your payslip. Every shop, every bill, every bit of your monthly budget feels tighter — while the threshold that's supposed to protect the first slice of your wages from tax just sits there at 2021 levels. The official line is that they 'haven't raised taxes.' They haven't needed to. Inflation does the job for them, every single year, until 2030.