Stephen Murphy

'British justice' is bullshit. Laws are designed by the rich to protect the rich. 72 dead at Grenfell and it's not even talked about!!!

Latest progress toward 1.5m homes target by July 2029: 40 months to go, 1,158,000 homes to be built. A run rate of just under 29,000 a month. Total in the 18 months between July 2024 and March 2026 is 342,000. A run rate of 19,000 per month - er…from today.

If anyone has watched the Netflix documentary on Grenfell and is looking for further reading, I've made all my posts on summarising the inquiry report free to read. Links in the thread below:

Justice delayed is justice denied. Rather than introducing appalling plans to reduce access to jury trials, the Government should be increasing capacity in our courts so that the victims of crime aren't forced to put their lives on hold. My question to the Justice Secretary 👇

Well here's an update on the situation... Mortgage paid off. Security not included. I live in a flat I 'own'. I pay high service charges for a very modest home. No mortgage. No bank. No lender breathing down my neck. And yet by the end of April, I’m expected to find £9,000 immediately - with another ~£4,000 due in September. Not for something new. Not for something optional. But for historic costs tied to a building I bought in good faith - assuming it was structurally sound, properly converted, and fit to live in. I tried to be reasonable. I offered a repayment plan. £50 a month. ON TOP of £425 service charge for an unsaleable equity shedding cupboard in Bolton. £50 a month? Not perfect - but real. Sustainable. Honest. The response? A flat rejection. Pun intended. Not adjusted. Not discussed. Not negotiated. Rejected. Because the lease says payment is due “forthwith” - immediately - and anything else simply doesn’t fit the system. And then comes the part that really tells you everything. I’m told they can’t offer a repayment plan because: • They’re not authorised to provide credit • And doing so would breach their charitable aims Read that again. Helping someone spread payments over time - to avoid financial collapse - would somehow conflict with being a charitable organisation. So instead, the "charitable" approach is: • Demand the full amount immediately • Reject any realistic repayment proposal • Proceed with debt recovery if unpaid • And ultimately threaten forfeiture of the lease Debt Collection first. Then ultimately Yep - forfeiture, they've mentioned we'd be in breach of the lease. So yes they can do that. The legal mechanism where you can lose your home entirely. A home you’ve already paid for. There’s even a quiet warning built in. Interest at 3% above base rate hasn’t been applied yet…but might be from April if the balance isn’t cleared. So the pressure isn’t just financial. It’s escalating. Timed. Engineered to close in. And this is all happening within a system where service charges are only supposed to be payable if they are “reasonably incurred.” Well, That’s the theory. The reality? Years after major works. After tribunal proceedings. After residents have already stretched themselves to breaking point… We’re still here. Surviving from week to week - just. Still paying. Still absorbing the consequences of decisions we never made. These are leaseholders who had to wait til pay day to find £100 towards our legal defence. This is the part people don’t understand about leasehold until they live it. You don’t really own your home. You carry the liability. You absorb the risk. You fund the failures. But control? That sits somewhere else entirely. And you feel it flex. It reduces every week to a fight or flight response. Right now, the cost of simply remaining in my so-called mortgage-free flat is pushing towards the equivalent of a second mortgage. Except unlike a mortgage: • No negotiation. • No flexibility. • No safety net. Just a demand. • £9,000 by April. • £4,000 by September. Mortgage: paid. Security: none. If you want to see how detached decision-making can become from real human impact… Try being a leaseholder.

If you've ever tried to buy or sell a home, you've heard of Stamp Duty. It's a terrible tax, which makes it harder for people to buy their first home, relocate, and downsize. We should stop punishing people for doing the right thing, and abolish it. Here's why. 'Stamp Duty' was originally a tax on stamps, as the name suggests. It was expanded over the centuries to cover all sorts of other goods. Eventually, it was extended to 'conveyances of sale', including transfers of land, property, and shares. Nowadays, 'Stamp Duty' has nothing to do with stamps. When you hear 'Stamp Duty', think 'tax on moving house'. Whenever you buy property or land over a certain price, you have to pay Stamp Duty. For residential property, the threshold at which you start paying Stamp Duty is £125,000. For non-residential land, it's £150,000. And if you're a first time buyer, it's £300,000 on properties with a total value of less than £500,000. The amount that you pay depends on the total value of the property. The more expensive the property, the more you'll pay. It sounds straightforward, but the real-world consequences are terrible. Back in 1992, 37% of properties were subject to Stamp Duty. Today, because of rising house prices, the majority of homes in the UK are subject to Stamp Duty. So if you want to move home, it's more likely than not that you'll get slapped with this extra cost. As of March 2026, the average asking price for a home in the UK was £371,042. Let's imagine that you're a first-time buyer, looking to buy a house at that price. You'll be paying an extra £3,552, all for the privilege of moving house. You've worked hard, saved up despite high rents - and you still need to pay thousands of pounds, just to get onto the property ladder. Stamp Duty imposes a delay on younger people who want to get onto the property ladder. If this were the only downside, it would be bad enough. But Stamp Duty doesn't just bite once. Imagine that you're a young family, getting ready to have children. You've already bought property, but now you need to scale up, so that your children can have their own rooms. You might expect to pay a little more than average for a three-bedroom house - say £450,000. For a house like that, you can expect to pay an extra £12,500 in Stamp Duty. That extra cost might delay your decision to move, or even your decision to have children. If you're struggling to save, you might choose to convert one of your existing rooms instead of scaling up, meaning that your children will have less space. And your decision to stay where you are means that there are fewer starter homes for younger people looking to get onto the property ladder. Stamp Duty doesn't just drive up the cost of moving house for you - it also drives up the cost of moving house for people who want to move to the kind of house that you now live in. Which is exactly what happens at the older end of the market too. A lot of older people still live in large family homes, which have more bedrooms than they need. They'll be paying more council tax, and higher heating bills, than they actually need to be. As a result, they might want to downsize, to somewhere more manageable. If they were able to do that, it would mean more family homes on the market - lowering the cost for young families. And when those young families move out of their starter homes, they free up space for first-time buyers. But those older people have to pay Stamp Duty too. If they wanted to move into a £371,042 house, they'd be paying £8,552 upfront. So they might delay that decision, and stay where they are instead. At every stage of life, Stamp Duty throttles the housing market, and stops people from making the decisions that allow our housing market to work. It can be difficult to save up the lump sum payment to cover the cost of Stamp Duty, even if you're able to afford a deposit. It can mean that people have to push back the decision to move house by years. It makes it more expensive for people to get onto the property ladder, and makes it harder for people to move around in order to account for changing circumstances. Stamp Duty is a tax which punishes people for working hard, saving, and doing the right thing. Kemi is absolutely right. We should abolish it.

Sometimes I wonder what a large housing association would be like if it were a person. The personality you see in the marketing is very clear. Smiling families. Big ceremonial keys handed over in photographs. Language about communities, opportunity and helping people onto the housing ladder. But the personality you encounter when serious financial issues arise feels very different. There isn’t much warmth or understanding in those moments. The tone is much closer to: this is the amount, this is the deadline, deal with it. Housing associations present themselves as organisations rooted in social purpose. Yet when leaseholders face major works bills or service charge pressures, the conversation rarely centres on affordability or the real financial position of the people involved. Instead everything is framed through process, liability and what the legal framework allows, and that gives them the necessary distance and disconnect they put between themselves and the leaseholders. It creates a strange dissonance. Go to court and notice that they won't even look you in the eye. The public image is one of support and opportunity, complete with photo opportunities and ceremonial keys. The lived experience, when things become difficult, can feel much more like dealing with a distant property manager whose main concern is protecting the balance sheet. Perhaps the most unsettling part is how normal this has become. An organisation can speak constantly about community and affordability, while the people actually living in those homes are left to navigate financial demands that bear little relation to what ordinary residents can realistically sustain. The photographs show people smiling with the keys to their new homes. What they rarely show is what happens years later when the bills arrive with an infeasibly crushing timeline for repayment. Threats of debt collection and lease forfeiture. Leasehold is a disproportionate liability passed onto the narrowest shoulders to maintain someone else’s asset - often used to excuse pre-existing problems, historic neglect, and avoidable structural failure.

Companies House has put out a statement confirming that, for five months, every company in the UK was vulnerable to the simple exploit we identified on Friday. It enabled anyone in the world to view and change their company details.

🚨 HMRC has now FAILED its audit for more than 20 years. The National Audit Office has again qualified HMRC’s accounts because of material levels of fraud and error. They have not been able to pass their audit cleanly since tax credits were introduced in 2003/04 due to material levels of fraud and error. Look at the state of our public sector: ❌ HMRC has failed audit for 20+ years ❌ DWP has failed audit for 37 years ❌ The Cabinet Office can’t provide evidence for £7 BILLION of spending. These are the institutions that take your money, spend your money and tell you there isn’t enough of it. If any normal organisation failed its audit year after year, there would be consequences. In government, it just carries on. And then they tell you taxes need to go up.

Scotland could be the big winner here. Introduce a low flat rate tax.. say 15%.. and we would be rich in no time.