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Affordable Housing


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The problems with houses on the isles is the cost of the ferry, when I went up to Yell for the show, the ferry cost £24. So say you lived in yell and had a job in or around town, you will be paying £24 plus around £10 in fuel (depending what sort of car you have) So that's roughly a £34 spend per day to leave Yell. Will probably be double that if you live on Unst.

 

Check your costing.

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You must have been in a commercial vehicle rather than a car. Cars are £13.30, and down to £8.70 with a 10 journey ticket. Either that or there were two other adults in the car.

 

Afaiaa, travel on the unst ferry is free if you travel on the yell ferry on the same day (or the other way round perhaps), so the cost wouldn't double.

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The problem with housing is that half of the Shetland population are buying a spare house or two to rent out, and to use as a retirement nest egg, to the other half who can't afford to buy.  This is putting the prices up.

 

As far as allocation of social housing goes, you get allocated a house based on need, not your accent.

 

There would be a lot to be said for depopulating Skerries, Papa Stour and Foula.  These communities are a massive financial drain per capita on the rest of Shetland.  There are no councillors with the gonads to make these things happen though.  Although I have to admit we get many more difficult decisions made with the increase in soothmoothers we have seen with thier hands on the reigns in the Town Hall.

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Well that's what it cost £24 for the yell ferry. £10 is just a rough guess for fuel, so that comes to £34 per day.

 

£6 return or thereabouts for Toft to Lerwick on the bus with a discount card, so travel as a foot passenger on the ferry for about a fiver return?  Cycle or walk back and forth from the ferry?

Edited by BigMouth
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As far as allocation of social housing goes, you get allocated a house based on need, not your accent.

 

The trouble with 'need' though is it tends to be subjective and relative. Plus, folk are quite adept at manufacturing circumstances for themelves that align with whatever definition of 'need' is in force at any one given time.

 

What doesn't help social housing is the Scots Govt 'no homeless on the street' mantra, and the fact that many have interpreted this, and been allowed to interpret it as a 'right to housing on demand'.

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The problem with housing is that half of the Shetland population are buying a spare house or two to rent out, and to use as a retirement nest egg, to the other half who can't afford to buy.  This is putting the prices up.

 

As far as allocation of social housing goes, you get allocated a house based on need, not your accent.

 

There would be a lot to be said for depopulating Skerries, Papa Stour and Foula.  These communities are a massive financial drain per capita on the rest of Shetland.  There are no councillors with the gonads to make these things happen though.  Although I have to admit we get many more difficult decisions made with the increase in soothmoothers we have seen with thier hands on the reigns in the Town Hall.

Why stop there BigMouth, why not "depopulate", via forced relocation (nothing Stalinist about that!), the islands of Fair Isle, Fetlar, Unst, Yell, Whalsay and Bressay... in fact no, Bressay is close to Lerwick so they can stay. Then we can all live in utopia on the Mainland! That is until Holyrood decides we are a drain and Shetland would be more useful covered in wind turbines and relocates us all to Glasgow. 

 

In all seriousness though what a disrespectful view towards these communities. I had the "gonads" to stand as a Councillor in order to fight to save fragile communities, not preside over their destruction. 

 

While Shetlanders squabble about which communities deserve support and which don't, we carry on to contribute vastly more to the national economy than we ever receive back. That is the real injustice and if rectified could solve all of our financial problems, including housing.

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Presumably, in your rosy world I could buy one of the uninhabited islands, and expect a full set of services at the cost of everyone else on Shetland. Run a ferry back and forth to me, perhaps a plane could drop in a few times a week. A bridge or a tunnel would be nice, quick before the LPA hear about it. Everything first class please.

 

The poverty is greater in the isles and it is never going to move to there in any great amount. People on the Shetland mainland have every opportunity to buy empty houses on the isles, modernise them and rent them out at social housing rent levels. They don't because they are looking after themselves, and that is what we do in capitalist societies rightly or wrongly. In the meantime the rest of us pay to subsidise everything else for you.

 

When the soothmoothers joined the council they brought a dose of realism. You wouldn't run a household budget the way the council up to then were running theirs, for the want of the courage to close a few schools. Skerries school closed and this has had a negative effect on the place, although there were other factors around available employment too. Through natural wastage the population will deplete, but the hardy will hang on at great cost to the rest of us as they demand their services.

 

Depopulating some of the smaller islands would reduce the poverty of many of those on them and lower the costs for the rest of us.

 

My drive sits unadorned with an Aston Martin. I don't expect any of you to buy one for me.

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As far as allocation of social housing goes, you get allocated a house based on need, not your accent.

 

 

The trouble with 'need' though is it tends to be subjective and relative. Plus, folk are quite adept at manufacturing circumstances for themelves that align with whatever definition of 'need' is in force at any one given time.

 

What doesn't help social housing is the Scots Govt 'no homeless on the street' mantra, and the fact that many have interpreted this, and been allowed to interpret it as a 'right to housing on demand'.

If the efforts that are put into narrowing down who can have a social housing property were put into reducing tax avoidance, there would be plenty of money to build social housing and house all of those on the waiting list. Meantime we have people like Branson asking for handouts for the rebuilding of the Virgin Islands, devastated in recent hurricanes, a place that is dripping with cash that is hidden offshore. Bear in mind this is a man who was able to shelter in his concrete wine cellar, and whose companies like to sue when they don't get public sector contracts.

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Presumably, in your rosy world I could buy one of the uninhabited islands, and expect a full set of services at the cost of everyone else on Shetland. Run a ferry back and forth to me, perhaps a plane could drop in a few times a week. A bridge or a tunnel would be nice, quick before the LPA hear about it. Everything first class please.

 

The poverty is greater in the isles and it is never going to move to there in any great amount. People on the Shetland mainland have every opportunity to buy empty houses on the isles, modernise them and rent them out at social housing rent levels. They don't because they are looking after themselves, and that is what we do in capitalist societies rightly or wrongly. In the meantime the rest of us pay to subsidise everything else for you.

 

When the soothmoothers joined the council they brought a dose of realism. You wouldn't run a household budget the way the council up to then were running theirs, for the want of the courage to close a few schools. Skerries school closed and this has had a negative effect on the place, although there were other factors around available employment too. Through natural wastage the population will deplete, but the hardy will hang on at great cost to the rest of us as they demand their services.

 

Depopulating some of the smaller islands would reduce the poverty of many of those on them and lower the costs for the rest of us.

 

My drive sits unadorned with an Aston Martin. I don't expect any of you to buy one for me.

"In the meantime the rest of us pay to subsidise everything else for you." Really? What part of Shetland are you from?

 

The seafood industry is worth £584m to the Shetland economy, 70% of that is generated DIRECTLY from the North Isles (41.6%) and the North Mainland (28.3%). Rural Shetland, these two areas in particular, is the engine that drives the Shetland economy. Without the industry of the North Shetland would be a very different, and poorer, place. The North Isles are NOT a burden and should never be treated as such.

 

The cultural, social and historical value of these communities to Shetland as a whole is another factor which cannot be ignored.

 

As for your revelations about us living in a capitalist society, that is all well and good but you have lost sight of one vital point - the Government is not a business. It's function is not to make profits, it's function is (supposedly) to govern and provide services for the population. 

 

Regarding your assertions about "soothmoothers" and the Council, I find it very disrespectful to the Councillors and Officials who achieved a difficult task and balanced the books during the last 5 year period. I do not agree with every decision they made but it cannot be argued that they displayed sound financial management on the whole in the face of challenging circumstances. I know for a fact that this is not all down to "soothmoothers" as you bizarrely claim.

 

You seem to possess a warped view of Shetland and an incredible theory that if we simply dumped all the residents from the outer isles onto the mainland it would solve the housing problem. Not only is this an over-simplification of the problem it is a callous, incorrect and distasteful view towards your fellow Shetlanders who live on these islands.

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