Young people ‘priced out’ of Pendle villages (From Lancashire Telegraph)

This is a very real problem and I wish I knew what the answer was.

Young peole face a very stark situation. Well paying jobs are few and far between, there is no longer mortgage-interest tax relief and the multiples of salary required for even a modest place are mind-numbing.

Moreover from what I can see some new build property offers exceedingly poor value for money.

Price is what you pay, value is what you get; and the modern new build approach is based on compactness and minimalism.

Very often the houses are packed onto a plot so that the amount of space you get is pitifully small. The structure is of the very minimum required to do the job: plasterboard walls, stapled roof supports etc.

Unfortunately property-mania has meant that some buyers seem to have been so desperate to get on to the 'proeprty ladder' - a term that I absolutely deplore - that they've been none too discerning about what they've got for their money.

The property market is cyclical. If a first-time buyer buys at the wrong part of the cycle they'll suffer very serious financial damage.

There is no shortage of housing in Pendle.

What has happened is that people do not want for whatever reasons to live in certain areas.

This therefore leads to over supply of houses in certain areas and a shortage in those areas in which more affluent, middle class people want to move into.

Nelson has over 1300 empty homes

Brirfield has over 300 empty homes

Colne has over 700 empty homes

If you ADD the more than 600 homes for sale, Semi detached, terraced and detached in all types of areas and towns.

Then you have to ask, WHAT shortage of housing?

I have not included in the above figure the LARGE number of social housing homes/flats which are available and empty NOW all over pendle.

NO more new housing for affluent, middle class people should be built in pendle.
There is ample supply already.

What are needed are NEW homes for rent by the MANY families who need them all over pendle.

Sadly these people are unable to shout the loudest and as usual it seems as though the chattering classes will get their new land for new homws in the countryside.

Coun Greaves build more family homes for rent which are neeeded by the people you purport to represent.

This has to be great failure on the part of the LIB DEM administration here in pendle to sort this "housing mess".

as it is Lord Coun Tony Greaves in charge of housing, need i say anymore...


Remember the ballot box next year and realise who are the creators of this mess.

You cannot blame them can you. Do you want all the drug users, and ASBO kids fetching down the price of your property?
Properly behaved people would be welcomed, and should be helped, perhaps by having the property shared on a 50/50 basis. But if I had a £500k house would I welcome an ASBO tribe living next door and running riot all night?
No thanks!!!

Why young people think they have an automatic entitlement to own a nice house in a nice place is beyond me.

Why councillors should pander to this pathetic way of thinking is also beyond me.


Get into the real world.

Sorry, life is tough.
Work hard. Get two jobs. Spend less on booze and fake designer tat.

Save up a deposit. It'll take years. It requires disciplione and hard work.

A 20-something coming from a nice town and a nice middle class family does have rights above and beyond anybody else.

God forbid a posh kid from whalley should have to move to clayton to buy a house. Oh, the disgrace!!!!

meant to say "does NOT have rights above and beyond anybody else"

bit of a truism written in error 'suppose

Too much class division in Pendle villages.
People are stuck up and have a " I am better than you" slant on life.
Especially so the "incomers" who have arrived in their hordes in te last 15 years.

No wonder our young people cannot find a property where they were born.

It is these the "immigrants" from outside who are the reason for this sorry state of affairs.

As for pendle Council, if Greaves is in charge of housing, we can expect a charade or a fiasco.

The man should be removed and in his place should be a person with social
conscience to address the needs of poor families who need a decent home to live in.

That is not asking too much, surely, in this land of plenty

How nice to be back. After a wonderful cruise around the carribean its good to be back to the incompetent and impotent shenanigans of Pendle BC. I see little Whippy is gone and now we have Lord Greasy and John the Impotent David in charge.

As for the housing issue, why doesnt Ann Kerrgian sell her house to these middle class young people on the cheap and start to feel good about her over zealous expense claims.

I also further suggest that you good people start to look at the funding of Pendle Leisure Trust - MAYBE MR STOREY CAN COME HERE AND ANSWER SOME OF THE QUESTIONS.

Lord Greasy I am just going through your expenses for 2008/09 and hope to put them on this thread soon and as for Mr Whippys well talk about now being paid what you are worth.

Ciao Pendajo

welcome back, smooth!

Lord Greaves refused to put on this site his expenses for the last 2 years, despite repeated requests from you.
The contempt shown for the ordinary people of pendle is despicable, in my opinion.

These requests were made BEFORE the MP's expenses scandal broke out.

Makes you think as to what does Lord Greaves of Pendle have that he feels reluctant to release details on this site for the people t see?

As regards pendle leisure trust again Lord Greaves and Phil Storey were requested to answer questions on this site for the people of pendle and AGAIN they REFUSED to do so.

Again what have they been attemting to hide from the ordinary taxpayers?

From a neighbouring authority

(perhaps Blackburn or Rossendale)

there isa CURRENT INVESTIAGTION under way as to how the councillors allowed Neighbourhood Working Fund (NWF) money to be used for croosing patrols and leisure facilities.

Maybe a similar investigtion is needed in pendle. Who will act on our behalf and request this?

Our public servants, the councillors where are you all hiding, today?

Parts of Pendle and Trawden aren't the only places where young people are priced out of housing, it has happened all over East Lancashire. Publicity wrongly continues about cheap houses in this area after making national news TV news some years ago. Wealthy absent landlords sprung up from all over the country and could afford to out price young starter buyers for financial gain in rents. Estate agents rubbed their grotty little mits at this cascade of outside cash coming through their front doors. Our own Rachman's were also at it with the result local terraced house prices went through the roof for local buyers in need of an affordable home . Even with today's so called financial problems I wonder how estate agents can still have High Street shops with more lights than Blackpool's illuminations, dolly birds and bosses driving expensive cars and they can still make a do. They must have made a good living in the past. Don't blame your council look at the people who buy and sell houses for profit they were and still are the villians of the day. Newspapers continue to use headlines "house prices are on the up" despite the recession which helps agents to maintain prices and in turn brings in advertising revenue for them.

I am convinced that when the history books of this period come to be written there will be a entire sub-section given over to property-mania.

A couple of points are worth making now. For most of the last decade house prices have risen at a faster rate than incomes and the gap was bridged by easy credit. So, while the market was driven by fundamentals this was amplified to a considerable extent by the availability of credit.

Secondly, the rate of increase in house prices was over-stated, though by what degree is difficult to determine. The plethora of city centre flats sold at a 'discount', 'cash-back' schemes and stamp duty paid by vendor etc. were an alternative way of reducing the price of property while maintaining the fiction that the full list price had been paid and thus maintaning the illsuion that oprices were rsiing more than they were. In short this This blatant manipulation was either unoticed by the media elites or ignored. Frankly I should not be surprised to learn that many in the media are into btl in a big way, which woukld explain their fixation with rising property prices.

Lastly, I saw a report last week titled: ‘Government encouraged housing credit binge’. A study by Professors Len Seabrooke at Mathew Watson at the University of Warwick says that the Labour Government encouraged people to invest in housing assets as a way of accumulating wealth and making them less reliant on public welfare when they reach retirement. The researchers were seeking to examine why we Brits allowed ourselves to get into higher levels of debt with no real safety net. They conclude: ‘The housing market has become particularly important as a primary route through which the process of asset accumulation takes place, but of course this does mean that the whole of the Government’s welfare policy becomes increasingly tied to the ability of the housing market to sustain continual prices increases.”

You will note that this study has not received coverage in the mainstream media, least of all by the Biased Broadcasting Corporation - the BBC.

Seabrooke and Watson's anlaysis and conclusion is, I think, worthy of consideration particularly when one remembers that many national politicians at Westminster were creating mini-property portfolios funded entirely by the taxpayer.

In other words they were happily making a mint by fleecing taxpayers while delivering our children into serfdom at the hands of the finnacial elites.

This is something that should give people cause to think.

Kevin, Colne,
You may remember the time when many of our building societies became banks. The old traditional building societies knew the true value and financial status of property and buyers then they were taken over, Burnley Building Society like many more was one of the unfortunates. Banks also bought out many estate agents and that was when the public started to be led into the property trap.
I know of one leading estate agent in East Lancashire who was paid £2.25 million for his business and that was in 1987. House prices soared and moving up the property ladder became a business.
Banks lent money without really going into a borrowers financial status with agents encouraging would be buyers to put down false information as regards income. Everyone was on the property bandwagon. Terraced houses in certain areas didn't rise in price and as old people died and their old fashioned properties were not of interest to the estate agents builders who could renovate those old houses were given the nod of a house for renovation and a good profit to be made by the builder. In Burnley Trafalgar flats were pulled down and the local council bought up terraced houses in which to put tenants. Some of those tenants were not of the good neighbourly type and the areas in which they were housed became undesirable. People who could afford to move away took advantage of easy mortgages... and so it went on until we have now reached the situation of which we write. Investors with money, not the get rich quick who now have their fingers burnt with rent to buy, are buying terraced house property as it can still be a good investment compared with other means and so our young people have to suffer. We are now back to pre-war days when most houses had landlords and being a tenant was quite a normal way of living, except the landlords were more local and not hidden behind a rent-collection agent.

Old Timer, hello!

I do remember when the building society movement was localised. I have posted earlier my experiences of this under Sir Bill Taylor's piece 'Recession' in the LT Comment area.

I recall vividly the rush to de-mutualise. Sadly the real arguments were crushed by the message to members: vote 'Yes' and you'll get £500. Those of us that voted 'No' were told that we were either out of touch with modern finance or stupid, and quite possibly both.

It is worth noting that every single building society that de-mutualised has hit the rocks, without exception.

As you say many banks bought estate agents. It was part of a strategy of diversfication. When one did it the rest followed. Corporations - both public and private - have a tendency to copy each other, and in this sense are best thought of as lemmings. The real skill in strategy is to know when to copy, and when to not.

As usual the banks made a complete hash of it. They bought into estate agencies close to, or at the the very peak of the property cycle and thus paid top-dollar for businesses that subsequently had to be sold at a fraction of the price that they'd paid for them when they realised that the intended strategy had failed. In any case, the estate agency business is highly cyclical and the barriers to entry are fairly low, so it's not worth paying top-dollar to own one. Of course the main ingedient in the business mix here is Chutzpah, so it's not hard to see why the banks thought they could be successful.

This, I think, was the start of the era of banking without brains, and it's continued ever since.

My fear is that the Government in bailing out the banks with taxpayers money have not only impoverished our children but virtually guaranteed that banking without brains will be here for some little while longer.

If you protect organisations - owners and leaders - from the folly of their actions then you will in time produce a set of coprorate dunces.

Your piece, if I may say so, touches on the real problem: the creation of coprorations that owe no allegiance to anyone except shareholders and that are managed by professionals, who have no real and eduring allegiance to the corporation. This, I believe, is the elephant in the room that the political class is simply not addressing.

I'm sorry for the long-winded reply but I thought your observations merited a fulsome response.

Best wishes

Kevin