Gerri Ellis

@vulpine2020 Because all the wonderful mansions provided by Taylor Wimpey and Barratt, finished in highly flammable cladding, faulty fire doors & damp & mould problems are so wonderful???

This is wrong: the state shouldn’t build houses. They will be dreadful quality and in the wrong places. But it can’t anyway because it faces the same planning constraints all house building does. Let the market build houses.

@ClausVistesen Not even enforced? Most councils bring the full force of the law down on council tax defaulters!

Hot take on Polanski's boat council tax: I don't care, and I doubt many people do. Let him fall on the basis of his politics (he will IMHO), not some obscure technicality that, as far as I can see, isn't even enforced.

Please retweet.

@jcreedy @mtpennycook To be fair neither he nor anyone else in Govt has said that they can't. But it is taking longer than most people expected.

@mtpennycook Maybe promising to end leasehold, and then saying that you can't end leasehold, rubbed a few people up the wrong way, Matthew.

After last week’s election results, business as usual isn’t an option. If we don’t change, we will not be able to deliver on our promise to renew and rebuild our country. But recklessly triggering a formal challenge against the Prime Minister risks a descent into chaos.

@WasOnceLoved @SamCoatesSky @cathynewman I actually bought & read her book, All in, to find out her reasons for supporting Brexit. But I'm still none the wiser!

@SamCoatesSky @cathynewman Well she’s wrong. And that trite line will have to change. The debate was never settled and the referendum was not a democratic excersize. Those most affected were denied a vote. Leave won on a campaign of lies. When you make a mistake you change direction, you don’t press on.

EXC: Lisa Nandy tells @cathynewman there will be no return to single market or free movement with the EU (raising the question of how far Keir Starmer's EU reset announced this AM can actually go) “I don't think anyone in this country wants to reopen the Brexit debate. We had a referendum. That referendum was won by leave. "The majority of people voted for it…. there's no appetite, either from the government, from Europe, or from the public, I think, to start getting into renegotiating things like free movement, single market access. "We went around that track for years during the Brexit wars. This country doesn't need any more division."

@54JohnBull @Peston Most phones already have facial recognition software, and most apps & websites are allowed to place intrusive cookies that send our usage habits to advertisers. Why is this different?

@Peston So she wants to register and put intrusive software on every single phone in the country. No thank you. Usual socialist overreach and interference in the lives of all adults.

This from Jess Phillips’s resignation letter is devastating for the prime minister “Over a year ago I presented solutions, long worked on by brilliant civil servants that would end the ability for children in the UK to take naked images of themselves. 91% of online child sex abuse is self-generated by children groomed, tricked and exploited in to abuse. The technology exists to stop children being able to take naked images of themselves. We could make this possible on every phone and device in the country. We could stop this abuse. It has taken me a year to get you to agree to even threaten to legislate in this space. Not legislate, just threaten. This is the definition of incremental change. Nothing bold about it. The announcement was meant to be in March, I'm still on a promise this will happen in June, I've given up believing it. How many children were left without a safety net in the time we dilly dallied and worried about tech bosses? This is just one example.”

Good for the Obsever for leading on this.

Leasehold is a relationship between a leaseholder and a freeholder. In too many cases it's coercive with an unequal power balance. When you replace that relationship with commonhold you end both of those roles.

@Kwajotweneboa To be fair it's not easy to build new homes when almost all the land once publicly owned was sold off by Thatcher. Now it's owned by private landlords who pocket the best part of a LA's housing budget in exchange for poor quality, overpriced, short-term accommodation

It’s like talking to a wall. Some have been screaming this since the last general election…

HELLO @UKLabour

Making tribunals fairer is a good example of a simple reform that would make a big difference - without waiting for the outcome of lengthy legal wrangles over ground rents. Another would be scrapping forfeiture & marriage value & capping service charges

@Coleman48J The asymmetry of resources between leaseholders and freeholders makes going to FTTs a hazardous venture for the former.

WATCH: Asked Nigel Farage last night abt his £5m gift from Christopher Harborne. Why did he not just declare? Does he regret that? What’s his response to those who argue it looks dodgy? He said my Qs were a “waste of space" & was clearly annoyed in what became a tense exchange

Politics will occupy the main stage this week, but really, Britain's problems are policy problems...

@ClausVistesen LL should set the price based on running costs & market rates. Then stick to it. And choose tenants based on referencing & income. Not rocket science.

So many issues with this, which will be fixed once the rubber hits the road. The most baffling is the ban on bidding wars and "discrimination" ... how do you think LLs will allocate their tenancies if they can't do so on price offered? Lottery? This combined with the difficulty to get rid of bad tenants for the first 12-16 months mean that some tenant groups will find it extremely difficult to get a tenancy.

Search is full of ads and wrong answers. Every other email is an ad. Prime Video charges you and shows ads. Paramount? Ads. Peacock? YouTube? Hulu? Ads followed by more ads. Netflix full of ads. Meta and X, every other thing is an ad. Pinterest is nothing but ads. AI is in everything. AI finishes sentences incorrectly and won’t stop. AI reads your email and search history to target you with more ads. Every time you open an app or visit a site there’s an update making it worse. In a hurry? First, click here to agree to terms you don’t have time to read and must accept. You need an account to do that. Change your temporary password. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email and enter that code. Now use a passkey. Your password is too simple to remember. Change it. No, not like that. Now log on. Enter your 2FA code. Check your email for a code… Welcome back! We’ve updated our terms of service and privacy policy (you have none). Subscribe to the site. Subscribe to Netflix. Subscribe to toilet paper. Subscribe to these groceries. Pay a membership fee for the right to subscribe then tip your driver who delivers the subscriptions your membership lets you subscribe to. Time to work? We’ve got to update your laptop and will slow down everything you do until you agree to update. But first, click here to agree. Update installed — your laptop’s broken now. It doesn’t matter, since your boss just replaced you with AI. Go to your phone to complain on social media. Wait, your phone needs an update so we can add more AI. Click here. Oh sorry, your phone can’t handle this update. Now it’s useless. Go get the newest phone. Here’s a text from a friend, an email, a voice mail they left three days ago but you didn’t see until now because of sync problems with the cloud. It’s their GoFundMe. Their MLM. Their Patreon. Never mind, you didn’t respond to their text within 9 minutes and now you’re no longer friends. They blocked you. Make new friends. Download this app to find people in your area. In your neighborhood. On your street. Two doors down from you. Do you know this person yet, we think you’d get along. You need an account to use this app. That username is taken. Enter a password. Not that one, you used it on another site. You need to be connected to WiFi to download the app. Allow the app to connect to other devices on your network. Allow the app to access your contacts, know your precise location, store your credit card details. Oops, sorry, we got hacked now all that info is available on the web. There’s a class action suit. You can join. It’ll take a decade to get your $3.73 share of the ten billion settlement. We’ll send it via PayPal or deposit it to your bank, just tell us those details. Oh no, another hack. That info is circulating now, too. Here’s a spam call, a spam email, a spam text. Why are you angry? Why are you talking about getting rid of your phone? Why don’t you like AI, it lets us make all of this easier? Do you know how ridiculous that sounds? This is progress. You’ll be left behind. Do you want to be left behind? Do you???

@mtpennycook @instituteforgov But there is low-hanging fruit in terms of small fixes that would make a big difference - eg ban forfeiture, scrap marriage value, cap service charges to inflation (tribunal permission needed for exemption). And require any new leases to be zero GR & 999yrs.

The outright abolition of leasehold overnight is almost certainly impossible and we won’t pretend otherwise. But this Labour government is bringing the feudal leasehold system to an orderly end in this Parliament. My @instituteforgov keynote speech 👇🏻 gov.uk/government/spe…

@JohnSmi39624798 @moving_charlie Good! But with 100+ flats, and especially where some flats are sublet and the leaseholder is difficult to contact, it's a lot to do on a voluntary basis. Reforms that provide easier routes to enfranchisement are long overdue

@eastender99 @moving_charlie I lived in a building with 10 flats and we successfully did it. I dont know the stats on the rest of the market.

This is what happens when people without relevant experience intervene in complex markets.

@JohnSmi39624798 @moving_charlie Nonsense. Most leaseholders can NOT buy the freehold. They need 50% of their neighbours to be in favour & to have the available cash to do so. The bigger the building the harder this is to achieve. Leases below 80yrs incur marriage value - a cost barrier that rises year on year

@moving_charlie Never thought I'd say it but for once I think Gov is correct here. Leasehold system is absurd and draconian. Anyone finding it difficult to sell their bs leasehold property can do what many others inc me did. Buy the freehold. The tools to do so are there.

After almost 2 years delay, perhaps as campaigners we need to set out some interim demands - eg scrap forfeiture & marriage value, cap service charges at RPI ..

We also need the abuses of the leasehold system curbed ASAP, & the whole form of tenure eventually replaced with commonhold.