How to make your home unsellable, by the Lib-Dems (WTF-UK pt.1)

Latest piece of moonbattery by the Fib-Dumboldtwats is to have an "energy mortgage".

In this scheme, home owners improve the property using some form of loan§ that remains with the property. The loan would pay for double glazing (read: ghastly, inappropriate, architecturally insensitive, potentially environmentally unfriendly* UPVC monstrosities that can often be draughtier than well maintained wooden sash windows), a new boiler or cavity wall insulation.

If there is one thing to put off a buyer is to have a legacy arrangement they have no control over. There is an existing and very simple way to fund improvements and link it to the physical property - that is by an equity-backed loan by one owner and to have that passed on to the next via the increased value of the property at time of sale. So simple. Anything else is likely to be at a higher cost or one that is subsidised by us taxpayers, yet totally out of our control. Ideal for the Liberals, it seems.

Of course this may never come about, as the Lib Dumbs are not going to win, but it might end up in the crazy head of one David Miliband, Environment Czar. First you have people voluntarily doing the work, then you enforce it by not permitting sale of houses not meeting the HIP standard, or, joy-of-joys for a grasping authoritarian goon, fining people heavily. It gets the lenders claws into somewhere or someone for the life of the loan. No escape. No release. No chance for the market to resolve inefficiencies or bad practice, e.g. people fleeing a costly lender. A Statist's and their greedy mates' dream.

The Lib Dems claim their proposals could save 31 million tonnes of CO2. Well, they could save us a few tons of horse-manure and stop dreaming up such nonsensical, over-complicated and basically hat-stand "ideas". They could benefit from cavity insulation, though, starting with that empty space behind the eyeballs.

However, the party's Climate Change Starts at Home package was welcomed by environmental groups including WWF-UK (though what faux wrestling has to do with it, I do not know).

Well, this package has been rejected by Roger's organisation, WTF-UK.



§insert scheme here to make finance companies rich or people lose money and the government bail one or both groups out when it all falls to pieces.

*has someone done a dust-to-dust on these things?