It will take a global pandemic to force us to finally embrace home working

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Around twenty years ago, almost to the month, I moved on from my first job after graduation and onto the next thing. It’s not uncommon for graduates to job-hop quite regularly in the years following graduation and I was no different, indeed, it’s very common in the IT industry. The job was no doubt a step up, there was no question of that. More responsibility, more money, cooler company, all that. But it came to me at a price.

My first job after graduation was around the corner from where I lived. This wasn’t an accident; the location of the job determined where I threw my hat when buying my first flat. So I bought it around the corner from the office. Why not? It was great, ten minute walk to and from the office each day, supermarket on the way home, no cost, no timetable, what’s not to like?

The next job, however, was much further away. Forty-five minutes in the car each way on a good day. An hour and a half on a bad one. No public transport options because, as cool as the converted sawmill in which the firm had established itself was, it was in the middle of nowhere.

Initially I didn’t mind. It was an exciting new job and and an exciting new chapter. But the long and frustrating commutes very soon started to wear thin, and I hankered for my old days of figuratively falling out of bed into my office. Most people have commutes in the order of 45 minutes to an hour, I realised that, but I had no idea how much of a drain on your quality of life they were until I actually had a proper one.

This is the thing with commutes: Nobody benefits from them.

  1. You don’t benefit from them: You lose more or less a working day per week of your own time to miserable soul-destroying journeys for which you’re forking-out over the odds anyway, whether that’s a train ticket or the costs of running a car. Even these days with fast mobile data connections you can’t really do anything in that time other than flick through your e-mails on your phone, and you certainly can’t do anything productive at all if you’re driving (I would hope not, anyway).
  2. Your employer doesn’t benefit from them: See the argument above about the severe limits to productivity even if you’re not fully engaged with controlling an automobile. Since commutes are often stressful this too can affect performance when actually at work. Train timetables also limit flexibility as to when you can leave and can often force tasks to remain unfinished at the end of the day.
  3. The transport systems don’t benefit from them: Both road and public transport systems are woefully inadequate for the population of the United Kingdom. They are extremely and often dangerously overcrowded and it doesn’t take much to make them grind to a complete halt. Quite often all it takes is rush hour, rather than something extraordinary like an accident or equipment failure. You have no control over this when it happens, and it means either you have to sacrifice even more of your time, or your employer has to sacrifice some time, or perhaps both, all depending on how understanding your employer is.
  4. The environment doesn’t benefit from them: All forms of transport use large amounts of energy, most of which is still non-renewable and produces harmful carbon emissions which are having a measurable effect on the global climate, as we are all too aware these days.

Around the same time I took my new job a revolution in home Internet connections was just starting. 2000 saw the introduction of the first consumer ADSL connections in homes, providing (normally) 512Kbps download speeds, around 10 times the speed of the previous dial-up technology, and it was always-on, meaning no metered call charges or connection time limits which were a common limitation of dial-up. It was, in effect, like having a cheap leased line in your house, since up until that point leased lines were the only means of obtaining and permanent and performant Internet connection.

With the roll-out of ADSL came another round of speculative news articles claiming that a home-working revolution was just around the corner because of it. I say another round, because it certainly wasn’t the first. The home-working revolution has been predicted as far back as the 1960s when Tomorrow’s World showed a man with a massive automatic typewriter next to his bed:

You can probably safely write-off the Tomorrow’s World segment as a pretty fanciful “what if?” possibility when broadcast at the time (the clue is in the name of the programme after all) and it did suggest that such technology would be preserve of the well-off rather than in widespread use – their example of someone requiring up to the minute stock prices using it would support this theory.

But regardless of how near and widespread the producers of the programme believed this new way of working was, it was at the very least the start of the idea. A utopia where many workers could do away with the grind of a commute and working in a fixed office, and enjoy the benefits of their home all the time whilst still being able to work and earn a living.

Over the following decades the predictions that home-working was coming resurged every now and then, with the introduction of things like fax machines, modem-based services such as Prestel, the eventual proliferation of the Internet outside of the military and academic worlds, dial-up Internet connections, faster dial-up Internet connections and ISDN if you were loaded. None delivered the home-working utopia. ADSL was no different, and right up until this year its successors (faster ADSL, fibre the cabinet, cable broadband, 4G, whatever) didn’t deliver it either.

But why?

Certainly, the proliferation of the Internet into the commercial world was enough to make a good start, even on dial-up connections. We still didn’t have video conferencing or voice over IP, but we could send and receive e-mails and documents attached to them. We also had access to company information and financial data, including those ever-important stock prices. It wasn’t perfect, and it was damned slow sometimes, but it was a far cry from Prestel or the man with the massive typewriter at the side of his bed.

The technology then only improved. Internet connections became faster, cheaper and more reliable. Wholly Internet-based companies started to appear, giving rise to the dotcom boom. Corporate, industry and financial data became instant. News became instantly accessible at any time. Can you really imagine a world now without online banking? Eventually all manner of video call and conferencing systems appeared – ropey at first, no doubt, but they too became dramatically better and did so very rapidly. Voice over IP now allows a corporate telephone system to be used pretty much anywhere, and even that’s a bit old-hat now with things like Microsoft Teams providing remarkable convergence and unification of e-mail, messaging, voice and video communication.

So where was our home-working utopia, despite all this? All we could see were the roads and the trains becoming ever-more crowded and ever-more expensive. Unless you were self-employed, everything pretty much remained the same.

The problem wasn’t technology. It was culture. And like with any cultural elements there were positives and negatives.

Let’s start with the positives. To do this I need to resume my original story of the earlier years of my career. I quit the job with the long commute sixteen months after starting it to set up on my own. As with most one-man bands, and fully-enabled with the blessing of ADSL, I began working from home. I evicted my flatmate and converted the second bedroom into a comfortable office. This arrangement persisted for three years, and partly enabled my move to Manchester, since the nature of my work and not being tied to an office meant that I could work from anywhere.

It was convenient, it was cheap, there was no commute, and it set me free in terms of where I could live – all clear and obvious benefits of working from home. But it wasn’t without its drawbacks. Although I admittedly was perhaps less disciplined in general in my younger years, I had no structure to my day. I would get up at 08:30 and make a cup of tea and then by 08:45 I was at my desk, very often still in my dressing gown. This of course meant I had to stop at some point during the morning and get washed and dressed properly, interrupting the working day. Then during the day there always seemed to be a long list of non-work todo items – shopping, things to do around the flat, household administration, whatever. All these things need to be done anyway, of course, but when you’re working from home they serve as a ready and inexhaustible source of procrastination. When you work in an office you can’t do those things until you leave. The afternoons and evenings often just blurred into one and I often found myself working at 22:00 and then having trouble sleeping because my brain was still going ten to the dozen – I have in more recent years discovered and enjoyed the benefits of “switching off” for a few hours before trying to sleep.

But these weren’t even the worst aspects. All of those were arguably easily solvable using a bit of maturity, structure and self-discipline, something which I did lack during the noughties. What was really missing from my working life was other people, that is, colleagues rather than customers or suppliers. So, we begin on the cultural negatives:

I had nobody to generally interact with. There was nobody to have a conversation with, bounce ideas off, or have check that whatever serious decisions you are making are even not batshit crazy, let alone correct and recommended. I didn’t learn from anyone, and nobody learned from me. I was a software engineer working on my own with no checks, balances or support, and, frankly, it really showed. I turned out some pretty terrible products during this time which I am not proud of. In my later career I have observed this in others, having taken on a project which was the result of someone having worked alone on it for many years. It’s every bit as a mess of the shit I turned out in the same circumstances, because they had no team or support structures in place to make sure that the decisions they were making were reasonable and that the output was appropriate.

I eventually resumed working in an office environment as part of a team, after a period of five years working alone. I can honestly say that doing so probably saved my professional career, and especially over the past decade I have absolutely thrived working as part of and then subsequently leading a team. We discuss, we challenge each other, we read each others’ code, we support each other when things go wrong, we learn from each others’ mistakes and the result of all this is not only greater skill, experience and wisdom, but also much better results. Right up until lockdown I could not imagine life any other way.

There are issues with corporate culture and home-working, however. Myself and my team are privileged – we enjoy what we do, having built careers out of hobbies. But we all know that not everybody has such passion in their jobs and a large proportion of people actively hate their jobs. The fear amongst corporate culture at large was that most people would be less productive and less disciplined if not working in an office environment. Management would be more difficult and, no, we simply can’t do this, no matter how good the technology has become, people simply cannot be trusted. We must stick with our ways, we must rent expensive offices, everyone must have a desk at which they must all sit between certain times fives days each week and they must be supervised to ensure they are not stealing time from the company. Meetings can only be face-to-face, we can’t really do proper business otherwise. You can’t be a team player and “feel the pain” when we’re busy if you’re not present in the bear-pit.

Without large-scale evidence to the contrary, these deep-rooted corporate beliefs, this corporate culture, endured. It probably would have endured forever. But then, that thing that happened this year, happened.

Within the space of less than a working week the majority of the UK’s white-collar office-based workforce had to change from attending the same office they had attended for years to working from home for the foreseeable future. It was seismic, and a huge undertaking, not least for the country’s IT departments (one of which is under my charge) who over the course of a matter of days had to produce vast numbers of extra laptops and scale-up resources such as remote desktop and VPN services. ISPs reported huge increases in traffic from their domestic customers and service providers such as Zoom and Microsoft Teams had to rapidly scale-up their infrastructure to meet an unprecedented increase in daily demand.

The graph below from YouGov shows the change in working arrangements for the UK workforce as a whole, whether they are offie workers, factory workers, care workers, whatever, so it underplays the more significant shift in arrangements specifically for office workers, which was far more seismic, but still illustrates nicely how the world was turned upside-down for many.

I absolutely hated it. I remained in the office for a long as I could, under the pretence that I still had more work to do to enable home-working for the company, but this ran dry only a few days after the company went home, and I too had to face the “new normal” (an insidious and sinister phrase which sends chills down my spine). The thought of not having that daily structure in my life and not being with my team every day, two things which I had utterly thrived upon during the last decade, filled me with dread. I remember the apathy, loneliness, procrastination, and indiscipline that working from home brought to my life previously and I most certainly did not want it back.

They say it takes a human being six to ten weeks to form a solid habit. This can be applied to pretty much anything – an exercise regime, an improvement in diet, a change in drinking or smoking habits; they all seem difficult, even insurmountable, at first, but if you can stick with it, or indeed if you are forced to stick with it, you become accustomed to it and it becomes a habit. Habits, once formed, are easy to stick to, although in fairness negative habits tend to be easier to stick to than positive habits.

Regardless, this is how it happened for me. I struggled in the first few weeks, made no better by the fact that I then caught Covid-19 at the tail end of April. But once I’d recovered from that and endured a few more weeks it all fell into place and I really found my rhythm and, sure enough, the habit was formed. In recent weeks I’ve been returning to the office in order to prepare it for socially-distanced re-opening, if that is what the company chooses to do (jury’s still out on that), and each trip, despite there not having been any significant traffic on the roads, has felt like a jolly great faff and inconvenience.

I’m not unique. I can’t speak for all firms, but the vast majority of our staff have adapted extremely well to the “new normal”. There have been a handful of exceptions, of course, nobody’s going to get a perfect record, but with those set aside the experience has been excellent and the company has not suffered. Indeed, at the end of May we completed on a deal which saw the whole group sold on to new investors, the preparations for which were almost all undertaken during lockdown. If we can sell our £200m company during lockdown then we can pretty much do anything. Not being in the office has made barely any difference to anyone’s productivity, even if it has destroyed all in-person social interaction.

With my team in particular I am fiercely proud of how they have adapted,. I feared that the lack of daily interaction would be detrimental to their mental wellbeing and their output, but none of that has happened. Ubiquitous technology has certainly helped in that regard. We’ve used software development collaboration tools to run the team for years, which proved to be even more important during lockdown, but the team also took to things like Microsoft Teams like ducks to water and use it extensively to stay in touch with each other all throughout the day, every day.

Would we have a challenge on-boarding a new member of staff during lockdown? Has the team only been able to succeed during lockdown because they were already a coherent and functional unit before it started? Absolutely, on both points. New team members always need a fair amount of training and hand-holding and we still believe that this would be extremely difficult for a new team member working on their own who’s never met their teammates and hasn’t built up those strong dynamics with them gained through working in the same physical space. But, as I will now move onto, I’m not saying that home-working is now appropriate for everyone, all of the time, moving forward.

So what does the future look like? Well, first, it’s important to acknowledge and accept that much of the “corporate culture” that held us back from widespread home-working in the past has been proven to be mostly bollocks. We’ve just had a massive global experiment to prove that it was bollocks. Fate has forced our hand and it has taken a global pandemic to make us face up to the fact that full-time office working for everyone is simply not necessary and is wasteful of corporate, personal and climatic resources. Hallelujah, an epiphany at last. We can no longer cling to our outdated corporate culture excuses, the genie is well and truly out of the bottle, the cat is well and truly out of the bag, and neither have any intention of re-entering either vessel.

I don’t see a future where we return to the world as it was before. Not now, not in three months, not after Christmas, never. It will never be the again because it does not need to be. Nor do I see I future where all office workers continue to work from home full-time either. Neither arrangement is ideal. What I see is a jolly great mashup of the two, which suits employers and employees alike.

The option to work from home from between one and five days per week will become the norm, and may even be enshrined as employment rights one day. Employers will be able to reduce their office space requirements by abolishing many full-time desks and replacing others with more “hot desks” which employees can use according to whichever rota they choose to manage the days on which they work in the office. Offices will become more like corporate hubs than full-time places of work.

Companies will find they are able to tap into a much wider (and potentially cheaper, in the case of those based in London) workforce since geographic location will be far less important. I, for example, would happily accept a position in a London-based company and travel to the office one day per week. Before lockdown such opportunities would have been out of reach to me because I do not want to live in London or its commuter belt. Families will have greater freedom to live wherever they want without fear of compromising employment opportunities. Towns and cities will enjoy less overcrowding as living close to places of work becomes less necessary. House prices in such areas will become more affordable as a result.

The provision of home working facilities, whether that’s computer equipment, broadband connections or furniture kits will become a standard offering. The latter is important since not everyone had a nice comfy home office during lockdown and many were stuck on dining room tables, far from ideal. The government could even allow employed home-workers to claim a portion of their rent and bills against tax if they have converted a room dedicated for home-working, much like self-employed people do already. Positions will be designed around a “remote working first” principle – they will have to be, because you can bet your bottom dollar this won’t be the last lockdown-inducing pandemic we’ll ever see, and to be unprepared for the next one after this experience would just be negligent.

Strain on the transport systems will be relieved. We’ve already seen the world as it could be on the roads and trains during lockdown. We can’t expect it to be that quiet forever, but we shouldn’t allow it to return to the ludicrous levels it was at previously. Less transport usage equals less energy usage equals fewer carbon emissions and indeed less pressure to build further transport infrastructure, although it is arguable that we are so far behind with that already we shouldn’t use this as an excuse to not improve it.

I genuinely think that all this will happen quite quickly. We’ve had the massive push we needed. It’s a pity that it took a global pandemic to get us there rather than any sort of rationale, but here we are. That third week in March 2020 was the last time you’ll ever see all your colleagues in the office at the same time. You didn’t know it at the time, but that was a watershed moment in corporate history.

I’m looking forward to this new world. From hating the mere idea of home working at the start of the year I have learned to take advantage of it, both for myself and my team, and I have to say that I am happier for it. Covid-19 will leave its mark on our world in many different ways, but this one will be positive.

It’s time to have a grown-up conversation about Thomas Cook

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I know lots of people are very upset for various reasons that Thomas Cook, the UK’s oldest tour operator, has ceased trading. However, as usual, it’s descended into hysteria, histrionics and finger-pointing on social media. Here are some facts, regardless of whether or not they fit your feelings or your narrative:

  1. Your holiday is irrelevant. It’s not what is at stake here. If you don’t have ATOL protection or travel insurance then you are foolish and shouldn’t be allowed to go on holiday anyway. Assuming you do have at least one of those things then you are going to be fine; your holiday may suffer some minor disruption but you will get home safely and it won’t be your last ever holiday. If you’ve not yet left, sad times, you won’t be, but you’ll get all your money back and you will book another holiday.
  2. What’s actually at stake here, and what is the most serious aspect of the collapse of this company, are the many thousands of jobs which have now been put at risk, both within Thomas Cook itself and with its various suppliers. This is what must be focussed upon, not your all-inclusive week in a concrete box that looks like a multi-storey car park in Mykonos.
  3. The only exception to the affected holidaymakers statement is those who have been mistreated by the hotel in Tunisia. There are many good reasons not to go on holiday to Tunisia, now you have another one. Stop doing it.
  4. Hotels which have engaged in such practises in the past few days need to be immediately blacklisted by all UK travel operators. Theirs is a business to business contract, and the vast majority of business to business contracts involve payment in arrears. Any arrangement which involves payment in arrears involves an element of risk undertaken by the beneficiary and such risk has to be evaluated and factored in to any business plan. The relationship between Thomas Cook and these hotels is no different and they have no right to pass this risk directly onto their guests, under any circumstances, and certainly not under unlawful detention by armed guards!
  5. “It’s Brexit’s fault!!!”. Ah, the B word, there it is. Let’s deal with this then shall we? While it is true that the collapse of Thomas Cook can be partially attributed to people delaying booking their holidays until after Brexit it is by no means the whole story. The irony is that it was your beloved European Union that is in part the reason why the government was unwilling to bail the company out. The EU in particular is keen to preserve a “level playing field” when it comes to European competition and state aid to firms granted by governments. Given that the UK’s relationship with the EU at the moment is precarious at best, to rock the boat in this regard would not be in our interests at this time. Had we left the EU when we were supposed to at the end of March then not only would it have been less likely (although by no means guaranteed) that Thomas Cook would have failed, but also the UK government would have been in a better position to bail it out, since we would no longer have had to obey EU “level playing field” preferences.
  6. The principal reason why Thomas Cook failed is that its offering was outdated and it could not cope with competition from online-only operators and indeed people like myself who just find and book their flights, accommodation, car hire and anything else they need directly themselves, often saving a few quid in doing so. It’s a classic “killed by the Internet/technology” story. It isn’t the first and it won’t be the last.
  7. If you still think that the Internet killing Thomas Cook is unjust ask yourself when was the last time YOU went into a high street branch of Thomas Cook instead of just Googling “OMG cheap holidays now”.
  8. It’s also important to remember that the likes of Thomas Cook were absolutely vilified in past decades for creating the package holiday model which killed off the once thriving British seaside industry. I’m not saying they deserved it, I’m saying that business is cyclical. Times change, consumer preferences change, technology changes and with all those changes business models must also change.
  9. Thomas Cook, alongside EasyJet, was named the world’s worst airline in a May 2019 ranking. Is it’s loss therefore really so lamentable?

Hopefully many of the at-risk jobs will be secured with other airlines, because that’s the most important issue right now. Nothing else really matters.

Boycott the 2022 FIFA World Cup

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A file picture taken on December 2, 2010 shows FIFA President Sepp Blatter holding up the name of Qatar during the official announcement of the 2022 World Cup host country at the FIFA headquarters in Zurich. AFP PHOTO / PHILIPPE DESMAZES / AFP / Getty Images ORIG FILE ID: 529809458

I don’t mind admitting that I’m enjoying this World Cup. The weather is perfect and England are doing tremendously well. Both factors remind me greatly of Italia ‘90 (with Pavarotti and everything), the first time I paid any proper attention to the World Cup. It’s great fun, from watching games in pubs to the themed office activities at work.

The 2022 FIFA World Cup, however, will be a completely different story. I will be boycotting it. I won’t follow it, I won’t watch any of the games, I won’t go to the pub and I will ignore the office activities.

Let’s put aside the allegations of corruption and how wholly unsuitable Qatar, accused of “buying” the World Cup, is to hold a football tournament, so unsuitable in fact that it has to be held in November in order to avoid the unbearable extreme heat. We’re going to look beyond this obvious practical absurdity, as painfully silly as it is.

What we need to absolutely focus on here is Qatar’s appalling and inexcusable record on LGBT rights. Homosexuality is illegal in Qatar — it is illegal to even be gay in the country. In deciding to host the tournament there in 2022 FIFA have effectively enacted the wholesale exclusion, by law, all LGBT fans and players from attending.

The current Qatari Penal Code stipulates imprisonment of up to seven years for sodomy between men. In 1995 an American citizen visiting Qatar was sentenced to six months and 420 lashes for homosexual activity. In the 1990s, Philippine Overseas Employment Administration informed Philippine workers that gay workers were prohibited in Qatar.

It hasn’t improved since. In September 2013, it was announced that all Gulf Cooperative Countries, of which Qatar is a member, had agreed to discuss a proposal to establish some form of, yet unknown, testing in order to ban gay foreigners from entering any of the countries.

The Dutch national team say they are planning to play in pink strips in protest. This is rubbish. The only effective protest against this ghastly decision will be to boycott the tournament, whether you are a fan, team or broadcaster. Both Qatar and FIFA need to be hit where it hurts for this serious lapse in judgment on FIFA’s part, and both parties love money, this is what all this is about.

“The beautiful game” already suffers from an image problem when it comes to its attitude towards gay people and this decision has done nothing but seriously compound it. It is contemptuous at best, and at worst an outright and deliberate public insult.

After next Sunday, as far I am concerned, there will be no FIFA World Cup for eight years. I invite you to join me and show your support for LGBT people and your disgust and outrage with Qatar and FIFA. Every advert you watch and every logo displayed on your television during a game puts money into FIFA’s pockets. Hit them where it hurts.

Seven years in Birmingham

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The view from my desk

It’s been seven years and a few weeks since I moved from Manchester to Birmingham. Why is this number significant? Because seven years is also the amount of time I spent in Manchester, from May 2003 to April 2010, and I want to now compare these two chapters in my life. As you get older time passes more quickly and so, needless to say, my seven years in Birmingham seem shorter than my seven years in Manchester, despite having achieved so much more in the same space of time.

I enjoyed my time in Manchester and I didn’t want to leave when I did. Circumstances at the time kind of forced my hand, however, having made a few poor choices during those years, both professionally and personally. I was out of work at the time of moving and living with a very good friend after I stopped being able to pay my mortgage. One day he turned to me and said that he was moving to Birmingham to work on a project. I was welcome to tag along if I wanted, but otherwise I’d have to sort myself out.

Nice-but-dull house in Sutton Coldfield

I wasn’t in much of a position to do anything but “tag along”, so, reluctantly, I did just that. I moved down to a shared house in Sutton Coldfield, and as nice as the house and the area was, it was very different to what I was used to; I went from city centre Manchester with all its life and convenience to a sleepy family-orientated suburb of a strange city which I did not know at all. I didn’t have my own transport and I felt very miserable and isolated from my friends and my life in Manchester.

Within three months of moving down I landed a job in the city centre. At the time this position felt like a huge step backward for me, and for the first nine months I saw it and treated it only as a stop-gap until something better came along, or a chance to move back to Manchester came my way. This negative attitude didn’t help me either perform particularly well at the job or start to build my new life in Birmingham; I convinced myself that it was all temporary and so I didn’t give it the care and attention that it deserved.

But then, in the spring of 2011, things started to change and get better for me. The company helped me deal with some issues and gave me more responsibility. I had also started to build a network through the company I worked for, both personal and professional, and I found it to be much warmer and more supportive than any previous network I had earlier in life. Manchester wasn’t unfriendly, but it was more ruthless, professionally and personally, and I never really flourished there in either regard. This time it felt different, and it was different.

Alpha Tower (my office is 2 floors down from the top)

It turned out that, in the end, this “stop-gap” of a job which I had so reluctantly taken after so reluctantly having moved, was the best thing that ever happened to me. I’m still working for that company, seven years later. I’m well-respected and I sit on its Board of Directors and I have roles in the parent company which bought it during 2016. None of this came overnight, certainly not, and nor should it have; it hasn’t come without lots of hard work and proving myself, but I’ve done it, and I’m happier than I have ever been before.

The company gave me structure, support, aspiration and challenge. I was lucky in that I was able to grow with the company. I was its 12th employee and now there are around 80 of us, and I think had I joined the company when it was 80-strong instead of 12 then I probably would have drowned.

But I didn’t drown. Instead, I grew, and I made a difference, both to the company and myself. Through this company I have met some of the most important people I have ever met or ever will meet in my life and the value of that is simple incalculable and not something I ever could have imagined I would be blessed with when I so reluctantly left my old life in Manchester behind.

View from apartment on New Street

In late 2011 I was able to move from Sutton Coldfield and into the city centre of Birmingham in a place of my own, back into a setting with which I was much more comfortable, and one which I at that point then fully embraced and appreciated, not only because Birmingham wasn’t strange to me any more by then, but also because I dearly missed city life whilst I was out in the suburbs and I wasn’t going to take it for granted any more. I was arguably a little spoilt in Manchester, in many respects, and didn’t realise or appreciate what I had.

Jewellery Quarter apartment building on Warstone Lane

In early 2014, after a couple of years of living on the convenient but noisy New Street, I then moved to the quieter and fashionable Jewellery Quarter area (ironically enough just down the road from the office I first worked in with my company) and I’ve been living here ever since. It’s a nice quiet area at night but still only a 15 minute walk to work and the city centre. It was a bit down-at-heal in 2010 when I worked here but has undergone significant gentrification in the years since. My plan is to spend another three years living in the same place before purchasing a suitable house somewhere, probably outside the city centre, but that will be on my terms and by then I will be ready for it! I know I can’t spend the rest of my life in the city centre.

One thing is for certain. I’ve spent longer in Birmingham now than I did in Manchester, but I have absolutely no intention of closing this chapter any time soon. I know and appreciate this city much better than I ever did Manchester. It and the people I have met here have given me the right opportunities and its helped me get me to where I want to be, with firm structure and plans for taking that even further.

It’s not just work, of course it’s not, and although work is responsible for facilitating many friendships I have made I’ve also built a life outside work. I’ve met new and amazing friends, with many of whom I celebrated my 40th birthday party in the Jewellery Quarter.

I’ve not mentioned any names in this post. It’s not that certain individuals aren’t important to me, they know all too well how important they are to me and they don’t need to be told, and so they don’t need to be named in public. Needless to say they have been instrumental in enriching my life over past the seven years, whether they act in personal, professional, or both those capacities.

I’ve also become physically fit, much fitter than I ever was during my 20s and 30s, something for which I failed to form the required habit for so long, something which I somewhat regret now (but not that much, I’m still enjoying it!). It’s not just about looking good, the fitness is a major contributing factor to my well-being, self-confidence and performance at work. I wish I had done it 20 years ago.

Even the country’s politics are going my way after being dominated the other way during my time in Manchester, what more could I ask for?!

Thank you for reading :)

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EBS and RDS snapshot management script for Amazon AWS

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NB: When I became IT Director at work this year my team of brainy software engineers, who are much cleverer than me, forced me to retire from coding after 30 years experience (20 of them commercial). It doesn’t mean I can’t code any more, obviously, but it isn’t my day job any more and so I can’t promise that I’m fully up-to-date with the best methods and techniques any more.

ebs-snapshot-repositoryWe run a number of workloads in Amazon AWS, which many do these days, and one of the common things you have to think about it snapshots for your Elastic Block Store (EBS) volumes and Relational Database Service (RDS) instances. You can create these manually through the console, which is obviously a painful ball-ache if you want to introduce any sort of schedule whatsoever, or you can automate it, since every action on AWS is operable through their awesome API.

For a couple of years we used a commercial EC2 appliance to do this for us. It cost $1,800 per year. It wasn’t particularly pretty but it was easy enough to use and it did the job. But all it did was consume the AWS API on a schedule; it didn’t do anything particularly clever and certainly nothing that I wasn’t capable of doing myself by consuming the API directly. So I’ve replaced with a script which I’ve grown myself and now I’ve been testing it for a month or so I’m happy that it works.

I thought perhaps that others might find this useful too, especially if they want to save $1,800 per year, so here it is:

It has Composer dependencies, so satisfy them and then create an AWS key/secret pair which has access to EC2 and RDS. Enter these credentials into credentials.json. Using the standard policies AWSEC2FullAccess and AWSRDSFullAccess achieve this although you might want to create a custom policy which only allows listing of volumes and instances and the creation and deletion of snapshots, up to you and how anal you are about the scope of your AWS keys.

Then you’ll need to edit the schedule, which is in the execute() method. If people want me to I’ll refactor the schedule definition out into a JSON file, but in the meantime you’ll need to get familiar with the PHP date() function. The default schedule is as follows:

// EBS snapshots

// every day at 8pm, 7 day retention
if (date('G') == 20) $this->snapshotEBS(7); 

// every sunday at midnight, 4 week retention
if (date('D') == 'Sun' && date('G') == 0) $this->snapshotEBS(28); 

// every month, 12 month retention
if (date('j') == 1 && date('G') == 0) $this->snapshotEBS(360); 

// RDS snapshots

// every two hours, 1 day retention
if (in_array(date('G'), [1,3,5,7,9,11,13,15,17,19,21,23])) $this->snapshotRDS(1);

// every day at 8pm, 7 day retention
if (date('G') == 20) $this->snapshotRDS(7); 

// every sunday at midnight, 4 week retention
if (date('D') == 'Sun' && date('G') == 0) $this->snapshotRDS(28); 

// every month, 12 month retention
if (date('j') == 1 && date('G') == 0) $this->snapshotRDS(360);

Run it every hour from the cron. Suggested crontab entry:

0 * * * * php /path/to/aws-snapshot-manager.php

It works properly and is reliable so long as cron doesn’t fall over and your AWS credentials don’t get rusty for some reason. However, its biggest weakness is that you won’t get told if it fails for any reason, which I guess would be the major improvement that it requires. It would need to be able to send alerts, by e-mail, SNS topic or SQS queue, in the event of a problem. So use at your own risk and periodically jump onto the AWS console to make sure your snapshots are up to date.

Don’t forget that AWS will charge you for snapshot storage space (EBS pricing, RDS pricing). Bear this in mind when defining your schedule and don’t wave your AWS bill in my face, I don’t want to see it.

PS: I realise that this is very boring to non-AWS people and I also realise that the AWS snapshot icon looks like a toilet.

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#OrlandoStrong #OrlandoUnited

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Context: This blog is an amalgamation and update of two previous Facebook posts. I was in Orlando, Florida on the day of the Orlando Pulse nightclub terrorist attack, but not involved. I did not want the posts to be lost in the firehose of social media.

I’ve only ever once experienced direct homophobia

When I was at university I was walking along the seafront one evening, hand-in-hand with boyfriend-du-jour. We passed a group of three lads, who went stony silent as they passed us. They waited until we were about 30 metres away before one of them yelled “QUEER BOYS!” at us. How original.

I was furious. University was my fresh start with my sexuality and I had always been open about it since arriving, having hidden it at Sixth Form (where I experienced indirect homophobia, almost always through ignorance rather than anything else), and this cunt violated that.

I started to run towards the one who I knew yelled it, the one with the biggest grin on his face. He broke away from his two friends and I chased him into the town. I caught up with him and I threw him to the ground. He put his arms up and said he was sorry and begged me to leave him alone, having very clearly underestimated me (bear in mind I was nowhere near as physically strong then as I am now). Which I did, after telling him what I thought of him at the top of my voice and instructed him in rather frank terms never to do such a thing again.

Why did I do this? Because what he did, even though it did not cause me or boyfriend any physical harm, was NOT FUCKING ACCEPTABLE, and I was not going to let him get away with it. I hope he never did it again and always thought twice about such idiocy and ignorance after that night.

(In hindsight it was a pretty stupid idea to abandon the boyfriend with the other two, but nothing else happened, I just have to chalk that one up to seeing red.)

Since then, some 20 years on, I have never suffered any sort of homophobic abuse. There are a couple of advantageous factors which have contributed to this, the first being that I “don’t look gay” (whatever that means) and the second being that I have lived in major cities for the majority of my years since university, which are generally considered to be safer for gay people.

But I realise that I am very lucky, and I also realise that it could happen to me, someone close to me or just any other gay person, known or unknown to me at any time. It scares me, and it isn’t right, and I still DO NOT FUCKING ACCEPT IT.

The attack in Orlando on 12th June was deliberately targeted at gay people. Again, it did not affect me directly. The reality is because I’m 40 and don’t go to nightclubs any more it would have never had a chance of affecting me personally. But it did affect 103 people with whom I share community, nearly half of which are now dead. And that is not fucking acceptable.

This will happen again if we don’t start to stand up to the plague of hate that we are suffering at the hands of extremists. This has nothing to do with guns, this was a hate attack, plain and simple, and it could have happened anywhere. I am sick of reading in the news about the plight of gay people in Muslim countries, and now not even that is good enough; now gay people in western countries are being targeted for public massacre. That is not fucking acceptable, and we cannot ignore it or make excuses for it.

Nobody should be in the least bit comfortable about what happened on that day and nobody should ever forget it. Homophobia in any form and from any source is never justifiable. This direct attack on our community, solidarity, hard-earned freedoms, rights, culture and way of life is way over the line, and we need to stand up to it and say that we will not fucking accept this bullshit any longer, regardless of who we may upset in the process.

When I came out to my parents, I told them I was frightened about what might happen to me because I’m gay. That fear upset them, especially my Mum. She’s long gone now, but it turns out that her upset wasn’t without merit. I need to show her that I’m not frightened, and I won’t fucking accept this.

I’m tired, it’s been a stressful day and I’ve been through a wide range of negative emotions, from anger and rage to frustration, disbelief, disgust, shock and of course grief and sadness. Thank you to all those who reached out to me today, it’s been very touching and it meant a lot to me, especially those whose care I arguably do not deserve.

Here’s the Orlando Eye, photographed the day after the attack. Many other buildings around the world were lit up in the rainbow colours in its wake.

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This could have happened to any of us

A man from Illinois makes white crosses for every victim after a mass shooting in the United States. Now it’s Orlando’s turn. He’s made 49 white crosses and drove 1,200 miles to Orlando Health Medical Centre, just a couple of blocks from Pulse nightclub. Most of the victims were taken to this hospital.

I went there one week after the atrocity against gay people in Orlando to see these beautiful crosses and to pay my respects to the victims. It’s the least I could do.

People were solemn, people were silent, people were private in their respect and grief. I watched an elderly Japanese man bow to every single one of the 49 crosses. All I could hear was the water from the waterfall and the wind in the trees. There was no traffic to speak of because of the road closures still in place.

I wrote on one of the crosses, that of Alejandro Martinez, who was only just born at the time I was coming out at university. The man from Illinois will, after a while, deliver each of the crosses to their respective families.

Rest in peace, my 49 brothers and sisters.

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Why I’m bowling for #brexit

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Tl;dr: Because economic myths, Turkey and migration.

It’s now been more than two months since the Prime Minister returned from his negotiations in Brussels and announced that there would be a legally binding in/out referendum on the United Kingdom’s membership of the European Union (EU). For most of those two months I’ve been genuinely undecided as to how I will vote on Thursday 23rd June, but I have now made up my mind, and in this post I’m going to tell you why I’ve made this decision.

As the title of the post suggests, I think the United Kingdom should secede from the EU. This decision is not, as many might assume, born out of some knee-jerk right wing reaction to foreigners; those who know me well enough will realise that there’s more to my political views than that. I have made this decision after carefully considering facts and arguments from both “sides” in this debate.

Firstly let’s talk about those “sides”, specifically the “Leave” campaign and the “Remain” campaign. Both have been an utter shambles in equal measure so far, which has played no small part in determining the amount of time I have needed to come to my decision. They’re both run by hysterical loonies who spout sensationalist nonsense instead of educating people on the real facts and the issues that actually matter. I don’t care if there will be more or less potholes/booze cruises/pubs/cheap holidays/mobile phone bills abroad (delete as appropriate). These things do not matter. They don’t matter to me and they shouldn’t matter to anyone else. The following issues, however, do matter:

Economy

The economy is my primary argument. There are other arguments as you will see later on, but the economic argument is twice as important as the rest of them combined.

It’s always about the economy. Any reasonable person knows that without a strong economy nobody can have nice things like hospitals and nurses, schools and teachers, police officers and firefighters, and, yes, state handouts, if that’s your thing. Everyone, working or otherwise, should be primarily concerned with the economy.

Trade

One of the major arguments from those who wish to remain is that the EU is [one of] our biggest trading partner[s]. The words and letter in the square brackets are sometimes included, sometimes they are not; it depends who you talk to. Regardless, the message here seems to be that the UK “needs” the EU for its economy to strive and, if the UK leaves the EU, suddenly all trade between the UK and the EU will cease. This would, obviously, put quite a sizeable hole in our economy, but it’s not going to happen. Why? Because it would put an even bigger hole in the remaining EU economy.

Here’s how it stacks up: The map below shows the top 20 countries to which the UK exported goods and services during 2014, both EU and otherwise. Check my maths if you want, but I make it £131.7bn of exports to EU countries. £131.7bn of stuff we made and sold in 2014 was sold to our EU neighbours.

UK exports 2014

Now let’s look at the other map. This shows the top 20 countries from which the UK imported during the same year, again, EU and otherwise. Check my maths again, but you should get to £201.2bn of imports from EU countries.

UK imports 2014

That means we import £69.5bn more from the EU than we export to the EU. Our net worth in terms of trade to the European Union was nearly seventy billion quid in 2014. Now, would someone please tell exactly who “needs” who here, and why this sort of flow of trade would suddenly cease if we were to leave the EU? It wouldn’t happen, of course it wouldn’t happen.

It’s absolutely absurd to say that we have to be in a political union with a bloc of countries in order to trade with them. We traded with them for centuries before the EU came along and it will be perfectly possible to trade with them again independently of political union. This is scaremongering at its worst.

Our economic world will not end if the UK cedes from the EU, despite what Barrack Obama and George Osborne would like us to believe, the claims from the latter of whom have been debunked so heavily and by practically everyone that I simply can’t ever trust a word that comes out of his mouth ever again. And really, Mr. President? “Back of the queue”? We’ll remind you of those words when you want help with starting another war to prop up your economy!

Contribution

This subject, although one of the more popular subjects bandied around by the Leave campaign, pales into comparison when compared to the trade argument and it’s not one of my high priority issues, but since it is so often a flag waved I need to cover it. The chart below shows the net contributors and net beneficiaries of EU membership.

uk-eu-net-contribution

So we’d save another £4.7bn in (net) contributions if we were to leave the EU. It’s better than a stab in the face, and just one year of this saving would, by way of a topical example, allow Tata Steel’s UK business to keep making a £1m per day loss for over 12 years. If that’s not issue-du-jour when you read this then let’s fall back on that old favourite of the Labour party: £4.7bn would pay for nearly 200,000 extra fully qualified NHS nurses every year.

Single currency

The United Kingdom didn’t join the european single currency (Euro), and it turns out that was one of the best decisions we ever made. We also wouldn’t ever be obliged to do so were we to remain in the EU, so the extent of my comment on this subject will be limited. Nonetheless, I believe the single currency to be a bad idea and it has caused extremely serious problems for the EU, which of course have had (albeit relatively limited) knock-on effects in the UK. The only way to maximise our distance from this basket-case of a currency union is to also leave the political union associated with it.

Turkey

For the past twenty years the European Union has continued to expand by admitting more and more states, with more planned and proposed for the future. Some recent additions have been very successful, most notably Poland, which enjoyed an average of 4.2% economic growth in the ten years since the nation acceded to the union. The country now sits in spectacular and extreme contrast to its years under communism and is without a doubt an EU success story.

But the formula which worked in Poland, much like the single currency, is not a universal, one-size-fits all formula. To assume that it will simply work as well with all new member states is foolish and naive. It worked in Poland because the Poles are a modern, hardworking, tolerant and outward-looking people who were willing to embrace the ideals of the western-European nations which welcomed the country out from behind the Iron Curtain and into the EU.

Turkey, on the other hand, is quite different. With a population of 70 million Muslims the country could barely be more misaligned with the ideals and culture of western Europe. I believe that a political union with Turkey is completely unacceptable. Yet, that is exactly what is proposed. There is an application and a roadmap in place for Turkey to accede to the European Union.

Here’s what bothers me the most:

  1. Islam has an infamous and well-documented problem with homosexuality, an issue which is of course very close to my heart. Turkey aren’t throwing gays off buildings, sure, but Turkey has a very long way to go with regards to its legislation and culture surrounding homosexuality before I will consider entering into any sort of union with them. Homosexuality is not illegal or punishable in Turkey, as it is in most other Islamic nations, however:
    1. No laws exist that protect LGBT people from discrimination in employment, education, housing, health care, public accommodations or credit.
    2. The Turkish military openly discriminates against passive homosexuals by barring them from serving in the military.
    3. LGBT persons in Turkey may face discrimination, harassment and even violence from their relatives, neighbors, co-workers, bosses, employees, teachers, and even members of the Turkish police.
    4. Homosexuality is widely a taboo subject in Turkey and the culture of honour killings can be observed in Turkish society families murdering members who engage in sexual or moral behaviours regarded as inappropriate.
    5. Turkey does not recognise same-sex marriages, civil unions or domestic partnership benefits.
    6. In 2015 police in Istanbul dispersed a Pride parade with tear gas and water cannon, after the parade was suddenly banned by the Governor’s office, citing that it was the month of Ramadan as the reason.
  2. In March 2016 the Turkish government seized the country’s largest newspaper, removed its dditor-in-chief and forced it to start printing pro-government propaganda. Then the government tear-gassed in the streets anybody who objected to this flagrant crackdown on media freedom.  No country in the EU has ever witnessed such brutal suppression and control of the media since the Second World War.
  3. In April 2016 the Turkish government then seized all the Christian churches in one city and declared them state property, citing urban regeneration as the reason. The seizure fits into a pattern in the Middle East, where Christians are systematically displaced and persecuted.
  4. Turkey’s record on human rights remains appalling and, despite them since 2005 being central to negotiations to them one day acceding to the EU have actually become worse. Despite this the EU remains hellbent on moving forward with this process (see more on this below).

Why are we even giving half a passing thought to joining in political union with this country?

The European Union is hellbent on admitting Turkey regardless of costs or disadvantages. At the moment this is being primarily fuelled by the migrant crisis, but it was not always the case and still isn’t the only issue. Only days before the referendum Turkey will be granted visa-free access to the European Union, a key condition in the shady, underhand deal Turkey has struck with the EU regarding the management of migrants from the Middle East. To think that such demands will end with this is naive; Turkey will continue to make demands and threats up to and after accession to further its own self-interests. Turkey has the European Union over a barrel and I am not impressed with their blackmail in the slightest.

Even the pro-Remain Home Secretary Theresa May admits that admitting Turkey and four other countries to the union would be dangerous for the United Kingdom. I firmly believe that this referendum is as much about a decision to be in a political union with Turkey as it is the UK being part of the EU. I’m going to vote against such a union.

Immigration and security

It’s not been a good twelve months for the EU. With two major terrorist attacks, one of which was on its own de-facto capital city, plus an overwhelming wave of migrants and numerous reports of problems with their integration, the most notable of which being the organised mass sexual assaults of women in Cologne, immigration is a public relations disaster for the EU at the moment and it’s only getting worse. Immigration has always been a hot-potato subject with regards to the EU and the current migrant crisis could not have come at a worse time for those who advocate EU expansion and open borders.

Although I do feel strongly about this issue I am not going to go into so much detail as I have with the other issues. This is chiefly because I am mindful of the hysteria which is so often prompted when discussing this subject, with most arguments very quickly deteriorating in accusations of racism. My main points are therefore as follows:

  1. I believe that Labour’s immigration policies implemented while they were in power were largely cynical and inappropriate.
  2. I believe that “multiculturalism” is a failed project, not just in the UK but across the EU, and there are many very serious and large-scale examples of how integration has failed.
  3. I am uncomfortable with the recent rise of extremism and terrorism in European countries and I believe that both will become worse if migration continues the way it is.
  4. I completely disagree with the European Union dictating to the United Kingdom what we do and do not do with regards to migration.
  5. I am aghast at our apparent inability to tackle these issues and stand up to those who would abuse this country in the name of political correctness.
  6. I am uncomfortable at the apparent blanket tolerance being afforded to migrants who follow one particular religion known for its extreme intolerance and I believe this will have an effect on my way of life in the future.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not completely against immigration in any form. There have been some notable success stories (I refer back to my reverence for Polish people). But these examples are dwarfed by large, serious and glaring failures. Positive immigration is what the United Kingdom needs, not mass, indiscriminate migration.

Dave’s Dodgy Deal

During the week before announcing the referendum David Cameron was in Brussels furiously negotiating a deal for the United Kingdom within a “reformed EU”. The key points of this are:

  1. An “emergency brake” on in-word benefits for immigrants from a particular state if there was immigration pressure from it. This would have to be approved on a state-by-state basis by the EU council. This falls short of what Cameron asked for, which is a bar on in-work benefits and social housing for all immigrants for four years, regardless.
  2. An agreement that British taxpayers’ money can never be liable to support the eurozone, a win for Cameron in broad terms.
  3. Less regulation and stronger commitment to the free flow of capital, goods and services, key for our trading relationships with EU states. Again, in-line with what Cameron asked for.
  4. A “red card” for national parliaments, enabling them to block unwanted EU legislation. A win for Cameron, the deal says that 55% of national EU parliaments can bloke EU legislation if they object to it.
  5. An opt-out of the commitment to an “ever closer union” enshrined in the treaty to which every country has to sign up. Cameron secured this, but only for the United Kingdom. The EU super-state dream will continue to apply to other member states.

So, some wins, some with watered-down conditions. But it’s all meaningless. It doesn’t matter what Cameron negotiated. He could have negotiated industrial monopolies for the UK and a brand new BMW for every British family for all I care. Why? Because it’s not legally binding.

The Vice President of the European Parliament has stated that Brussels “clearly went too far” during its negotiations with  Cameron and that “their agreement is in no way a document of the European Union, but a text of hybrid character, which is unspecified and not legally binding”.

Cameron’s deal is worthless, and there is no “reformed EU”. It was all just a show to convince the voters that he’s done something about our unfavourable position within the EU. He hasn’t.

Attitude to democracy

The European Union has a terrible attitude towards democracy and will act unilaterally when it thinks it can get away with it. They’re even quite open about the fact; during April a top “Eurocrat” said that “Referenda are becoming a huge problem for the EU” and that “Perhaps it is time for an EU ban on referenda!“. He’s just one man, I realise, but this was really eye-opening for me. He clearly has no problem expressing his opinion, but that doesn’t mean that he’s the only person within the organisation which holds the same opinion. What will they call for a ban on next? Elections? Where does that end?

Don Juncker, who is very upset that we no longer want his family’s friendship and protection, might give us a clue to where it might end. In May he complained that Prime Ministers listen too much to their voters instead of being “full time Europeans”. More of that pesky democracy stuff getting in the way of the master plan! But he’s just one man. In addition to that other man. I wonder how many more men like these there are in the corridors of power in Brussels.

Here are a few examples of when pesky democracy stuff got in the way of the correct result and of the contempt the EU treats democratic processes (referenda specifically):

Country Date Issues ‘No’ vote Outcome
Denmark 1992 Maastricht Treaty 51.7% Made to vote again
Ireland 2001 Nice Treaty 53.9% Made to vote again
France 2005 EU Constitution 54.9% Ignored
Netherlands 2005 EU Constitution 61.5% Ignored
Ireland 2008 Lisbon Treaty 53.2% Made to vote again
Greece 2015 Euro bailout 61.3% Ignored

Which way will it go?

It’s all very well declaring support for one side or the other, but coming out in support of one side doesn’t necessarily mean that it will prevail on polling day. I stand by my decision and opinions stated in this post, of course I do, but do I believe that the UK will leave the EU? No, I do not. I believe that the Remain campaign will be successful, not by a landslide, certainly, but they will win.

The thing is about referenda is that they are, in the United Kingdom and many other countries, entirely voluntary democratic processes enacted by the government in power at the time. Whether they are declared “legally binding” or not (this one is, but not all are) there is no mandatory compulsion to call them in the first place, regardless of whether or not they formed part of a party’s general election manifesto. General elections, by-elections, local elections, yes, they are all mandatory processes; governments must call them regularly whether they like it or not and whether they think they will go in their favour or not. Not so with referenda.

Therefore, governments will only ever risk calling a referendum on an issue if they are reasonably confident that the outcome will be in their favour. This was true of the Scottish Independence referendum in 2014 (which went the government’s way) and also of the Lisbon Treaty referendum in 2007. Don’t remember that one? No, you won’t, because when it became clear to the contemporary Labour government that they would lose it they cancelled it, despite having promised it two years earlier in their general election manifesto.

Referenda give voters the illusion of power, but it is just that, an illusion. You think you’re making a difference by partaking in them, but actually the decision’s already been made, and there’s nothing you can do about it. I’m extremely sceptical of them.

Her Majesty’s Government has come out in support of the United Kingdom remaining in the European Union, and so that is what we shall do.

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General election manifestos – A landlord’s guide

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Shortly before the 2015 General Election I was asked to comment on the manifestos of five of the parties involved. On the day of the election itself my comments were published on two property trade journal websites:

  1. Residential Landlord
  2. Property Reporter

I have reproduced it here:

 

As the general election looms, Stuart Ford from Glide Utilities gives his opinion on the main party housing policies and how they are likely to affect the property market.

Rent controls – Labour/Green

Rent control is never a good idea. The profound economic and social consequences of government intervention in a nation’s housing markets have been documented in study after study, over the past twenty-five years. In almost every case where rent control has been applied to a city or a nation it has inevitably led to a shortage of well-maintained rental properties. Landlords are left short of funds to maintain their properties and developers have no incentive to invest in new construction projects, since they are unlikely to be able to make rental business models work.

Labour state that they will cap rent increases to inflation, however, the 5 year inflation rate has been 10.8% whereas the 5 year cost price inflation rate has been 13.0%. The policy could very easily actually lead to massive rent increases rather than have the desired effect, especially if Labour’s economic policies were to have an adverse effect on inflation.

Long term tenancies – Conservative/Labour/Green

Tenants in short term lets often feel insecure about their accommodation. Even with normal twelve month tenancies, having to find a new home potentially on an annual basis is disruptive, stressful and expensive. This is not so much of a problem for student lets but is more of a problem with young couples nurturing new careers and possibly new families. Long-term tenancies should be promoted and encouraged, however, they should certainly not be enforced since this could not only be disadvantageous for landlords but also tenants.

Landlord checks – Conservative/Lib Dem/Green

Most landlords are professional and upstanding, however, we all know that there are a subset which are far from adequate. The introduction of greater checks on landlords and even a licensing scheme is something that most above-board landlords should not have a problem with complying with, assuming such schemes do not come at unreasonable cost to them, and should help tackle the problem of rogue landlords and ‘slumlords’. Certainly the opportunity should not be seen by letting agencies as a way to simply charge extra fees, these measures should be designed to protect tenants.

New home construction – All parties

There is cross-party consensus on the need to build more new homes in the United Kingdom. The housing shortage is longstanding and while the coalition government has made good efforts to tackle it more needs to be done. The “Green Belt” issue, which has plagued developers for decades, needs to be reviewed and the needs of the many put before the needs of the few who would be affected by construction.

A proportion of the demand for new housing comes from immigration and it would be not unreasonable to argue that building new homes treats the symptom rather than the cause of this issue. However, changes to immigration rules, even if they could ever be approved (since they are a social hot-potato), would take decades to make a difference on housing demand and we have this shortage here and now.

Regeneration – Conservative/UKIP

UKIP lead the way in this area with their pledges to reduce restrictions on the use of brownfield sites and bringing inexplicably empty homes back into use. Recycling is always a good thing and these measures should probably be considered before constructing new homes on Green Belt land if only to show to those who would be affected by Green Belt construction that all the boxes have been ticked.

However, the £1bn ‘regeneration fund’ from the Conservatives is unlikely to go very far. This needs to be a larger figure.

Economic controls – Green

Finally perhaps the most alarming policy put forward by the Greens in this area is to give the Bank of England power to curb excesses in the housing market. The housing market is driven by any other market, supply and demand, and to do this would be treating the symptom rather than the cause. The correct treatment is new home construction and regeneration in order to increase the supply of homes, rather than try to control the economics of existing property.

The Greens have also pledged to reverse the changes the coalition made to the spare room subsidy for those on housing benefit. This measure is known erroneously by some as the ‘Bedroom Tax’. The measure was introduced in order to encourage appropriate distribution of social housing stock among those who required it and plays an important part in reducing the shortage of housing in particular areas and across certain social groups.

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