The Gas Safety Trust instructed OnePoll to conduct an online survey of some 2,000 people to ascertain whether property owners and tenants had any idea of the dangers of gas equipment. The results were fairly disturbing…
To read the whole article, click here.
Category: Green Issues
Controversial report by the RIBA highlights that 80% of school buildings should not be in use and threatens Green Belt land
A recent report carried out by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) has indicated that 80% of current school buildings should no longer be operational. The same report controversially suggests that building must begin on the green belt to solve the housing crisis…
To read the whole article, click here.
Wind Turbine Increases
It has been reported over the last month that the number of wind turbines in Britain has dramatically risen to around 30,000 after increasing by some 13% last year.
Regardless, a number of indicators are indicating a decline in the popularity of such schemes and questions are being asked about what might replace wind in the coming years as the country’s go-to ‘green energy’ type…
To read the whole article, click here.
Building on Floodplains – Can this continue?
With much of the South West underwater, flooding has once again become a hot-topic. We look in one of our monthly articles at the huge range of questions the Government and its agencies much ask themselves if flooding is ever to be nullified as an issue of great concern for British homeowners…
Here’s a few questions we raise:
Britain has a substantial housing shortage – so where do we build? On green belt protected land? Urban sprawl across our green and pleasant land? That wasn’t well received when Nick Boles proposed to relax green belt regulations.
Should innovation be encouraged to create houses that are watertight up to first floor level? Should it be made a planning condition for developments on flood plains with a flood in the last 10 years to construct watertight houses up to a certain standard? What about a government competition for architects and building product designers to come up with the best solution?
Read the whole article and join the debate here.
Half the families in some estates can’t afford to heat their homes
birminghamsurveyors.com - MORE than half the families in some estates can’t afford to heat their homes, a poll reveals.
54 per cent of households are reportedly too skint to stay warm at Humber and Trent Towers in worst-hit Nechells, Birmingham. Jobless labourer Michael Simpson, 45, lives there on £63 a week — and a quarter of that goes on fuel.
The city’s Wye Cliff Road area has 53.5 per cent of families facing a similar crisis. Nottingham was third on the list, with 52.9 per cent shivering at two high-rise blocks in the Lenton area.
As Energy prices rise more than 10%, can they be justified and what is the solution? Depends on who you ask…
Consumers have in recent weeks been hit by price rises of up to 11.1 per cent – equating to between £100-200 extra per year on the typical household’s fuel bill. A number of the “Big Six†energy firms have claimed that the increases are because of rising wholesale prices, but recent data doesn’t support this.
Statistics released from Ofgem, the energy regulator, suggests that wholesale prices rose by only 1.7 per cent over the last year – a mere fraction of the levels energy companies are attempting to justify. The figures will undoubtedly prompt fury across the country as homeowners prepare for winter and questions are aksed as to what the real reason is for these rises?
We look into the issues, the real reasons and potential solutios here…
Foxes, hares and rabbits all in decline – but deers boom
Despite frequent tales of the deviance and destruction wrought by urban foxes and a strong media presence concerned with explaining, educating and protecting against their impact, a new study in the European Journal of Wildlife Research has shown that numbers in the UK are actually down by 20% in the last two decades.
This is despite the hunting ban of 2004 . Deer numbers, on the other hand, are exploding – with 181% growth for Reeve’s muntjac and 89% for fallow deer.
A Property Owning Democracy?
What was Thatcher’s True Property Legacy?
On the day of her public funeral, we issued a special, single-article edition of our newsletter, analysing through editorial comment the legacy the late Baroness Thatcher leaves to the UK property market.
Baroness Margaret Thatcher’s death has prompted vigorous debate on the matter of her controversial political legacy. In the wake of the passing of a woman described as “the most admired, most hated, most idolised and most vilified public figure of the second half of the 20th centuryâ€, we analyse the indelible mark she left on the British property market…
Read the rest of this popular article at this link.
Mold development put on hold by flood risk assessment
moldsurveyors.co.uk – A long delay in assessing the flood risk of a reservoir in Greenfield, near Mold, is claimed by a local property developer to be putting homes and lives at risk.
The flooding risk of Flour Mill Reservoir must be determined, before work on eight new townhouses can begin. The Environment Agency instructed Flintshire County Council to complete an inundation map, but this has still not been done, despite a deadline of December 31, 2012.
If you are a developer in the Mold area, or elsewhere in England and Wales, contact your local surveyor to help navigate these difficult issues and ask them about how they can help elsewhere in the development.
Wind Farms Revealed Officially to Reduce Property Prices
Property Surveying – The Valuation Agency Office (VAO), a subsidiery of Revenue & Customs, has recently revealed that it has down-graded council tax bands for a number of homes situated near clusters of wind farms. The reason is that the values of these homes have been forced markedly down by the presence of the turbines, in some cases, for example at Fullabrook Down in North Devon, by as much as a quarter of the total value even as far as 650 yards away from the installation.
A Halifax survey, however, found that the most prolific reducer of value is actualy noisy neighbours, with 17 per cent of homeowners affected by this issue to the tune of an average £31,000 reduction.
For advice on your property’s value, find your local surveyor here.