The National Grid Operational Forum revealed that 5 wind farms in Scotland were paid £890,000 to turn off their generating turbines for one night as the system was not able to absorb the amount of electricity being produced.
To read the whole article, click here.
With the introduction of various Government incentives to turn your home ‘green’, including Feed-in-Tariffs introduced on 1 April 2010 and Renewable Heat Grants on 1 August this year, we are taking a look at the different options available to homeowners to produce their own energy and reduce their bills.
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Government figures have been released today, indicating that the level of additional dwellings supplied in England in the year to April 2011 was 121,200, 6% down on the year before and 42% down on 2007-08.
That figure constitutes a number of new build homes provided at 117,700 compared to more than 200,000 in 2007-08 and 124,200 last year.
London saw the largest decrease in net additional homes, falling from 24,340 in 2009-10 to 17,830 in 10-11.
Net additions comprise the total of new build homes plus new home conversions plus new homes from change of use less homes lost through demolition.
A greater overview of the property market can be found on our monthly market fact file, here.
The highest number of £1,000,000+  property sales since 2007 were recorded in the first half of this year, underlining the strength of the property market at the upper end, fuelled partly by foreign money.
To read the whole article, click here.
For all kinds of professional work including; building surveys, structural surveys, home buyer reports and property valuations. We also do expert witness reports, party wall surveys and all other professional building surveyor work in and around the Cardiff area.
Tel: 029 2193 2193
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The Government backed ‘Leasehold Advisory Service’ has recently released an advice note detailing the law relating to shared ownership leases. In light of this, we have created a short document to act as your guide to the subject.
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Dale Farm travellers set for eviction won an ‘11th hour’ reprieve on Monday 19th September after the High Court granted them an emergency injunction to delay Basildon Council from clearing structures on the site. But how did the travellers win a last minute legal victory?
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A new hotel near Paris, France, offers residents a unique take on a ‘room with a view’. The establishment provides clients with a dual experience: a night of lavish comfort and a view of the stars through the ceiling of their room, but with the atosphere inherent in the so called ‘City of Love’, perhaps transparent walls and absent curtains aren’t a great idea…
To read the whole article, click here.
As part of the Government’s wider initiative to combat the empty homes problem in the UK, a problem to the tune of reputedly 700,000 ‘void’ properties, the Department for Communities and Local Government released two online toolkits to help local communities and councils better identify empty homes and bring them back into use.
The first is the Geographical Information System (GIS) Empty Homes Mapping Toolkit, which plots the location of long-term empty homes in private ownership across the country. This has been developed to allow councils to pinpoint empty homes ‘hot spots’ in their area, and work with the landlords and local community to bring the derelict properties back into use.
The second is the Empty Homes Knowledge Toolkit, which is designed as a ‘one-stop shop’, giving local authorities, housing associations, empty property owners, landlords and the wider community access to everything they need to know about bringing properties back into use, including the legislative frameworks, partnership building and investment mechanisms.
Andrew Stunell MP commented:
“Long term empty properties easily fall into disrepair, attracting squatters, vandalism and anti-social behaviour, bringing down the neighbourhood and causing misery for neighbours.
“Local communities hold the keys to bringing these empty homes back into use and I hope these new toolkits encourage councils to work with them and the landlords to end the scandal of empty homes.
“They will sit alongside the new £100 million fund we have announced for refurbishing properties, and our commitment to match the council tax raised for every empty property brought back into use for six years. Together these are powerful incentives to encourage local areas to bring more properties back into use, and create new homes for thousands of families.”
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John Cridland, speaking at the CBI (Confederation of British Industry) North East annual dinner as Director General, called upon the chancellor to introduce measures to assist first-time buyers and those wanting to progress up the property ladder. These included an expansion upon the shared ownership programme and a scheme by which first time buyers could get finance by accessing savings in their personal pension pots via a loan back system, involving borrowing money from their pensions and paying it back through their salary.
“I want to see the chancellor use his autumn statement on 29 November to jump start the housing market,†he stated.
Read more about his speech here.
