Originally published January 2021. In 1929, when an American congressman compared England’s longest river unfavourably with the Mississippi, the MP for Battersea, John Burns, quipped: “The Mississippi is muddy water, but the Thames is liquid history.” Burns was not one for hyperbole. The Thames, which flows from the Cotswolds in the west to the North […]
Blair and Brown presided over unprecedented growth in our banking sector with their ‘light touch’ regulations. The result was the creation of mammoth banks, systemically critical, but fundamentally flawed. When the credit crunch hit in 2008, there was no option but to bail out these same banks. They went about this task by taking them […]
In 1862 we got the Gettysburg Address, in 1941 it was Roosevelt’s Day of Infamy and in 1983 it was Ronald Reagan’s Evil Empire speech. This year it appears we’ll have to settle for Greta Thunberg’s “Blah, blah, blah!” keynote speech at the youth climate summit in Milan. As bad as it was on the merits, it certainly suffers from bad timing. […]
It worsens the housing crisis – but there is a fix. The UK’s housing crisis hardly requires an introduction. It affects people across the housing spectrum – from leaseholders stuck with flammable cladding to tenants in overcrowded housing. The past decade has seen a 141% increase in rough sleeping. And the National Housing Federation puts the estimate for council housing waiting lists at 3.8 million […]
These words are written soon after the end of the UK’s work protecting – what many claim was a ‘true’ job data distorting – furlough scheme. They come in the midst of a considerable spike in the price of gas and hikes across more general products. A time, too, of a shortfall in petrol and […]
The vast majority of the British public thinks that affordability is one of the big issues in the housing market, with half rating it is the single most important issue. Those are the results of an exclusive poll for The Property Chronicle by Electoral Calculus and pollster Find Out Now. We interviewed a representative sample […]
Originally published March 2021. Plus, reassessing the relationship between UK interest rates and REITs. This article was originally published in June 2019. The perceived wisdom has always been that reducing, and indeed low, UK interest rates are good for real estate in general. Equally, UK real estate investment trusts (REITs) (with their high dividend pay-out […]
We take it for granted that we can go to a supermarket and buy all the food we need or get it delivered. However, as we look forward, that may not always be the case. The UK currently imports 40% of all food needs. This is likely to soon exceed 50%, because of population growth, […]
A trade deal between the UK and the US was once counted as a great potential prize of Brexit. But now those plans have been delayed, with no clear timetable in sight. Downplaying expectations of an agreement between the two countries before he met with the US president on 21 September, British prime minister Boris Johnson […]
The case of the London and Paris office markets. While the global framework of the Paris Accord is gradually being incorporated into national laws in Europe, incentives for property investors to take part in the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions are growing. Non-compliance with the new regulations represents a risk for investors to see their […]
