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Life after the end of "lockdown" 2.0

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DB

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Surely a lot of the problem with housing is simply that demand > supply, especially in areas like London and the home counties? Then there are various reasons why increasing supply is a problem, one of which being that in areas where there's space to do this more readily there aren't the jobs to go with them.

This has only been a problem in the last 20 years or so, for example my previous neighbour bought their house for (IIRC) £160k in about 1997, and sold it for £1.1m in 2016. That's ridiculous by any score, and no they didn't do much to it in the intervening time!

Prices are ridiculous In many areas - London us just the most extreme.

Possibly, depending on how popular home working proves long-term, thiscould reduce the pressure on housing hot spots, but a drop is needed across the board.
 
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bramling

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Possibly, depending on how popular home working proves long-term, thiscould reduce the pressure on housing hot spots, but a drop is needed across the board.

Ironically, thusfar the opposite seems to have happened - my town (very much traditional London commuter territory) has seen house prices surge this year, which I find hard to explain as like you say I'd have expected the opposite. There's a school of thought which suggests home working has encouraged people to move out of London itself, but who don't want to move properly into (what they would see as) the sticks.

It does seem our economy is structurally screwed, whichever way one looks at it we seem to come back to this.
 

brad465

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Prices are ridiculous In many areas - London us just the most extreme.

Possibly, depending on how popular home working proves long-term, this could reduce the pressure on housing hot spots, but a drop is needed across the board.

Ironically, thusfar the opposite seems to have happened - my town (very much traditional London commuter territory) has seen house prices surge this year, which I find hard to explain as like you say I'd have expected the opposite. There's a school of thought which suggests home working has encouraged people to move out of London itself, but who don't want to move properly into (what they would see as) the sticks.

It does seem our economy is structurally screwed, whichever way one looks at it we seem to come back to this.
The whole housing market is now a ponzi-scheme in an unsustainable economic system: foreign property investors have scooped up large amounts of London property to hide dirty money and/or are investment opportunities because the Bank of England won't have interest rates any higher, while the Quantitative easing policy inflates the value of assets, in turn the property market bubbles as a direct consequence.

The lockdown-induced change in working patterns and a number of job losses will cause more to move out of London, which might actually make the problem worse as more vacant property in London will just be scooped up even more for the aforementioned reasons. The whole Covid situation has been a disaster capitalist's blank dream.
 

bramling

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The whole Covid situation has been a disaster capitalist's blank dream.

Yes this is increasingly becoming very apparent. There's certainly going to be some rude awakenings over the next year or two. Not having to get up in the morning to travel to work might not seem to bad at all by comparison!
 

Reliablebeam

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Ironically, thusfar the opposite seems to have happened - my town (very much traditional London commuter territory) has seen house prices surge this year, which I find hard to explain as like you say I'd have expected the opposite. There's a school of thought which suggests home working has encouraged people to move out of London itself, but who don't want to move properly into (what they would see as) the sticks.

It does seem our economy is structurally screwed, whichever way one looks at it we seem to come back to this.

We've noticed the same down my way - no real let-up in house prices and developers still going gangbusters to get new houses built. I think the home working hypothesis is correct - wanting to move out of London itself but still be within reasonable distance for theatres, museums, galleries and the like when they do finally re-open. I think a lot of the London mob would be in for a nasty surprise if they did move into the 'sticks', and for friends of mine in this position there is a wariness and a desire to hedge their bets a bit...

As regards home-working, I'm still not sure what the long term for me holds. In my workplace, at 'Exec' level they are really pushing this as an opportunity to move forward on a green agenda and no doubt thinking about how office space, particularly in London, can be released long-term. Local level managers are keener to see us all back in, although they have shot themselves in the foot with the expansion of mask useage, which seems to have noticeably reduced the number of people coming in.....
 

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@Reliablebeam that's an interesting point but if we are to expand on that, it needs to be in the dedicated thread. I will reply to your post there shortly :)
 

Nicholas Lewis

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Surely a lot of the problem with housing is simply that demand > supply, especially in areas like London and the home counties? Then there are various reasons why increasing supply is a problem, one of which being that in areas where there's space to do this more readily there aren't the jobs to go with them.

This has only been a problem in the last 20 years or so, for example my previous neighbour bought their house for (IIRC) £160k in about 1997, and sold it for £1.1m in 2016. That's ridiculous by any score, and no they didn't do much to it in the intervening time!
Yes supply and demand plays its part but easy money and negligible interest rates have been the fuel for the sort of rise you refer to above
 

trainophile

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I wonder what will become of all the newly freed-up office accommodation. Not too easy to turn it into residential I guess, although perhaps hotel chains might be interested once tourism gets underway again.
 

DB

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I wonder what will become of all the newly freed-up office accommodation. Not too easy to turn it into residential I guess, although perhaps hotel chains might be interested once tourism gets underway again.

There have been a number of cases of suburban office blocks being converted into flats - probably not most people's first choice of where to live, but in places with a lack of affordable housing they will sell anyway.
 

yorksrob

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There have been a number of cases of suburban office blocks being converted into flats - probably not most people's first choice of where to live, but in places with a lack of affordable housing they will sell anyway.

The problem is, they will probably sell to speculative landlords, rather than people who need an affordable home.
 

DB

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I was thinking more of Canary Wharf type glass towers, which I wouldn't imagine many people would want to live in even if conversion was feasible.

Those are probably modular designs, so they could likely strip back to the concrete frame and re-clad with less glass if required.
 

Skimpot flyer

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Anyone who does not follow the restrictions, whether you believe in them or not, should have their right to free healthcare removed for anything COVID related. You don't follow the rules, you pay!

I don't 100% believe the risks, but I would still follow the rules.
Gott im himmel o_O

Agreed a big lack of research on the basic science, thankfully there is some good work being done internationally. Unfortunately as due to climatic variations not all of it may be directly applicable to the UK.

The basic government assumption at the beginning to have been assume what we know applies for flu until we learn other wise, unfortunately Covid has a higher proportion of airborne transmission (vs contact) than flu and they hugely emphasis hand washing early on at the expense of other potentially more useful measures. The still over emphasise contact e.g. "Hands, face, space" because it sounds good, it should probably be "space, space, hands, face" to reflect the evidence!

Until earlier this year airborne transmission assumptions for public health still used work done at Harvard's Engineering department in 1934, hence all the confusion about what distance for social distancing when new work started coming through with results the politicians didn't want to hear (MIT engineering and a group of Spanish universities separately coming to virtually the same conclusions).

Plenty of basic research to do and there needs to be funding to do it.

We also lose a huge number of working days to respiratory infections in the UK every year pre covid, reducing that a bit would be good for the economy - it could be simple measures like better ventilation and more automated door opening so less contact.
This is something I would like to see also, although presumably cannot be done to Fire Doors?
I just realised something about my workplace that hadn’t occurred to me before. When I stop to think about it, I have to pass through 4 sets of fire doors and 1 normal door in order to reach my locker, then 2 or 3 fire doors in order to get to the operational floor (depending on which route I take).
That is a lot of contact points every day !
 
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DB

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This is something I would like to see also, although presumably cannot be done to Fire Doors?
I just realised something about my workplace that hadn’t occurred to me before. When I stop to think about it, I have to pass through 4 sets of fire doors and 1 normal door in order to reach my locker, then 2 or 3 fire doors in order to get to the operational floor (depending on which route I take).
That is a lot of contact points every day !

Fire doors can be held open provided the devices which hold them open will automatically release when the alarm goes off. This can be as part part of the alarm system, or standalone battery-powered devices which attach to the door and are 'kicked' down to hold the door open. They can 'hear' the alarm and release the door. If the battery goes flat they won't hold the door open, so there's a failsafe.
 

philjo

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At our main office site the internal fire doors have been linked to the fire alarm so are now all open and close automatically if the alarm goes off. So n longer need to open the internal doors along the corridors. The external exits have a sensor inside so do not need to press any buttons to release the door. Just push against the door. To enter from outside a card swipe etc is still required for security. A Sanitiser dispenser is now fitted to the wall inside each entrance.
 
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MikeWM

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It seems "no vaccine no entry" has morphed into "no negative tests, no entry"


The quote that "this will allow someone to wander down the streets, and if someone else asks why they are not wearing a mask, they can show the card, letter or an App." is especially chilling

One time I hope our governments incompetence is a benefit and means it is impossible to get this off the ground

I wonder who they mean by 'someone else'? Random member of the public, 'Covid marshal', police, the army?

Apart from that part though, the only real surprise is that this 'creeped' so quickly from 'international travel' to 'walking down the street'. I expected them to go via public transport, shops, workplaces, etc. first.

I remind everyone that the idea of a 'freedom pass' (or as the PM called them, 'enabling tests') has been openly declared government policy since at least early September.

At some point we're going to have to decide what type of society we want to live in. And if we don't want to live in a Chinese-style social credit system where your freedom is entirely dependent on the say-so of the Government and an app on your phone - and I certainly don't - we need to make that *very* clear, and *very* soon, before we sleepwalk into exactly that.
 

yorksrob

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I think we've got the measure of the latest round of tier restrictions by now. Needless to say, another unjustified assault on the hospitality industry (not to mention single people who might need somewhere indoors to meet another human being).

There really needs to be some scrutiny of the line being peddled by the Government about how wonderfully effective tier 3 restrictions are, compared to the less onerous tier 2 ones.

Full marks to Andy Burnham for pointing out how damaging this will be. I wonder if the nationsl Labour leadership will develop a backbone over this.
 

Yew

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Needless to say, another unjustified assault on the hospitality industry (not to mention single people who might need somewhere indoors to meet another human being).
Nobody cares about the damage done to anyone unless it is done by a coronavirus. It is an unpleasant feeling knowing that the government and opposition is willing to sacrifice people like you to protect the prime minister's ego, and those already approaching the end of their natural life. Je suis dommage collatéral.
 

Tomp94

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So as I understand it then

No social mixing in private homes or in pubs or restaurants until the spring?

We are not allowed to meet even 1 or 2 friends, even our other halves, if none live alone, inside.

Pubs and Restaurants are open in name only, except when the virus takes a few days off over Christmas.
 

Mag_seven

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I think we've got the measure of the latest round of tier restrictions by now. Needless to say, another unjustified assault on the hospitality industry (not to mention single people who might need somewhere indoors to meet another human being).

There really needs to be some scrutiny of the line being peddled by the Government about how wonderfully effective tier 3 restrictions are, compared to the less onerous tier 2 ones.

Full marks to Andy Burnham for pointing out how damaging this will be. I wonder if the nationsl Labour leadership will develop a backbone over this.
I'm surprised that it has not dawned on some that if certain areas have to go back into Tier 3 then the four week national lockdown clearly hasn't worked in those areas!
 

yorksrob

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I'm surprised that it has not dawned on some that if certain areas have to go back into Tier 3 then the four week national lockdown clearly hasn't worked in those areas!

Indeed. We have some areas which have Tier 3, then lockdown and will no doubt be going into a new tier 3, which will be a lockdown in all but name. It means that the previous lockdowns haven't worked.
 

Yew

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Indeed. We have some areas which have Tier 3, then lockdown and will no doubt be going into a new tier 3, which will be a lockdown in all but name. It means that the previous lockdowns haven't worked.
Yet still, there are those who wish to torture people in their vain attempt to 'save lives'.
 

yorksrob

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Yet still, there are those who wish to torture people in their vain attempt to 'save lives'.

There just seems to be a complete disconnect between the stated aim of reducing transmission and the one action they seem prepared to take, which is locking down hospitality.

I'm afraid that I don't believe SAGE when they say that closing hospitality is so vital for saving lives, when there are clearly so many other areas of life where transmission is clearly happenning, but it isn't judged to be enough of a threat to actually do anything.

SAGE seem to think that it's acceptable to destroy the industry to get the numbers down a bit (how much of it it actually achieves is open to question) whereas I don't think that this is an acceptable compromise.
 

Bantamzen

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There just seems to be a complete disconnect between the stated aim of reducing transmission and the one action they seem prepared to take, which is locking down hospitality.

I'm afraid that I don't believe SAGE when they say that closing hospitality is so vital for saving lives, when there are clearly so many other areas of life where transmission is clearly happenning, but it isn't judged to be enough of a threat to actually do anything.

SAGE seem to think that it's acceptable to destroy the industry to get the numbers down a bit (how much of it it actually achieves is open to question) whereas I don't think that this is an acceptable compromise.
SAGE aren't interested in anything other than trying to make their flawed strategies and models seem right. I feel pretty certain they wouldn't even be in favour of relaxing restrictions even if every single bloody one of us had a vaccine. The government turned to them for a "fix" to the virus, and they have dug themselves in trying to figure one out.
 

DustyBin

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SAGE aren't interested in anything other than trying to make their flawed strategies and models seem right. I feel pretty certain they wouldn't even be in favour of relaxing restrictions even if every single bloody one of us had a vaccine. The government turned to them for a "fix" to the virus, and they have dug themselves in trying to figure one out.

Agreed. Unfortunately we have a toxic combination of scientists who are totally fixated on a single issue, and weak leadership from the government. I'm not sure who is actually running the country to be honest!
 

Bantamzen

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Agreed. Unfortunately we have a toxic combination of scientists who are totally fixated on a single issue, and weak leadership from the government. I'm not sure who is actually running the country to be honest!
Oh the answer to that is simple, none of them are running the country. We are the preverbal Titanic with the difference that we are aiming for not one but two icebergs.
 

greyman42

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Full marks to Andy Burnham for pointing out how damaging this will be. I wonder if the nationsl Labour leadership will develop a backbone over this.
Unfortunately Starmer is very pro lockdown and he will back Johnson to get these damaging restrictions through. I doubt that any labour MPs will have the backbone to go against him.
 
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