Another 'empty Married Quarters/ useless MoD thread.

[Al R]

If it wasn't such an appalling debacle, you'd want to laugh at this incompetence.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7280153.stm

[The Helpful Stacker]

Would you want some civvy pikey living in a house next to you on married quarters?

Some of the MQs at RAF Stafford were sold off a few years back and students started moving in three or four to a house. Now students and service personnel didn't exactly mix all that well in town and many problems were reported.

[VinRouge]

AIDU, Better watch out old chap; some are predicting falls of 30% in the UK housing market!!! (Smug git! :})

[noregrets]

AIDU, you should give a stuff - those are your hard-earned taxes that the MOD is frittering away on this appalling and long-running saga of mismanagement. Just think how much more quickly you'd have been able to pay off that mortgage with the taxes that the MOD has pi$$ed up against the wall with this fiasco!

[Al R]

No Regrets,

Its pointless paying off a mortgage when % rates and savings rates are dropping. Why the rush to stop reaping the benefits? Far wiser to keep the mortgage on the boil and throw the money instead at a pension plan to get the benefits of tax relief.

[VinRouge]

Al R, Point is, with LIBOR up through the roof, interest rates are due to rise massively over the next few years. Just because the BOE have dropped the base rate dont mean those drops will get passed on the the mortgage customer. They dont call it a credit crunch for nothing!

As regards the above article, devil you do devil you dont. If they sell on too many quarters, what happens if the demand goes back up?

This piece stinks a little of MOD being given a reason to offload loads of quarters for the government to sell on as part of their 2 million extra homes by 2019.

THe flip side is the MOD pay massively punitative civil rent when people get posted to these areas and there is no SFA.

[Al R]

Sorry No Regrets. I was a tadge confused. AIDU is on my 'ignore' list and I don't see or read his missives. As a consequence, it wasn't immediately clear (in my haste), that you were replying to him.

[Al R]

VR,

LIBOR will fall before summer. We have had 2 sets of bad GDP figures on the go now and market pressure is building.

I accept what you're saying, but the MoD surely isn't a property developer now?

[VinRouge]

Al R, I would disagree. DHE is there to provide a service to Serving military personel, and if that cost money that costs money I am afraid. Perhaps the Tory government should have thought of this before selling all MOD property for a bargain to annington homes. I suppose it depends on your perspective, whether you live in SFA etc.

An as for LIBOR, I wouldnt bet your bottom dollar on LIBOR coming down; the bond market is about to go into meltdown. As long as the banks dont trust each other, it will stay high and go higher. Just watch what happens when we lose another mid-sized British bank this year. Cash is king I am afraid for the forseeable imo.

As I said earlier couldn't give a stuff. Equity, equity equity and lots of it.:ok:

As I said earlier, Smug git! ;)

[Al R]

Everything is built on quicksand at the moment, and the banks need hard cash. Gearing figures for Investment Trusts continue to go through the roof, so either someone is throwing a crafty stash of money about or there's a momentous game of bluff being played out. I can see another bank getting into serious trouble, but more likely a Building Society? Best options are NSI.

Ref: the housing, who is going to move into them? In the past, the MoD has quite happily stuck families into rented houses, and lets face it. The numbers of service families needing accom won't be rocketing up anytime soon. If they could say with any degree of certainty that these house were or weren't going to be used, I could inderstand it. But they can't. Instead, they've been allowed to rot away and scores of them have been empty for over a decade. And we're talking not about an estate for a few units, but 2,500 houses scattered across the country. That doesn't smack of forward planning, that smacks on someone not knowing what they're doing.

Those 48 flats in south London for instance, have been empty for 5 years. The windows are open, several doors to the communal areas are not locked and generally, they are in rag order. If thats estate management, I'm a Chinaman. So they're not spending money on them at all.. they're allowing them to get to the point where they're uninhabitable, and then of course, they can sell the land to a developer with a view to rebuilding expensive housing at a vast profit.

With regards to the equity quote, I'd rather have the money in a fat pension than equity in a house that isn't appreciating in value.. who needs equity when % rates are so low?

[peppermint_jam]

AIDU

Whilst I don't usually get dragged into slagging matches on pprune, I feel i must post here. The fact that you are even registered on this site means you currently have, or have had an involvement of some form with the Forces. The "Don't give a stuff" attitude you posted on this thread is exactly what is wrong with our forces at the moment. I for one am fiercly proud to wear the uniform i do every day. Hell, I even wear it out in Peterborough every now and then. Reading stories like this saddens me, just like a Station closing or a Squadron disbanding or an Aircraft type being retired saddens me.

Also, I have met Al R and I can assure you that you're wrong there also.