2 New policies

Rent

New legislation should be put in to cover the following

1) If a person is renting a property and has a deposit in deposit protection scheme then the deposit should be deemed to be ok for a new property rental if the tenant wants to move.  This would negate the trapping of tenants into rents which they cannot get out of due to not having deposit money for a new property.  This occurs due to the return of deposits from an old rental agreement taking time (even when done under the new agreement) and new rental agreements needing deposits prior to moving in.

2) Understand the risk that the old deposit may get used to cover issues in the old property it would put the condition that any short falls in deposits caused by these events would be made up or the rental agreement (new) terminated.

3) landlords are not allowed to demand more than normal rent up front.  I.e. you only can ask for the month ahead (as per normal payments) not 2 or 3 months rent in advance.

This should help a lot of people without any major inconvenience to anyone in the market

Loans

The banking sector is in such a mess that stupid decisions are being made along the lines of:

a) Person has a debt of x at percentage interest % very high

b) Person x goes to the bank and shows that they have been making repayments in full on time

c) Person x asks bank to take out a loan to reduce the cost of debt advertised at 2/3rds % very high

d) Bank says no, you cannot afford a loan at that rate and you must stay with your more expensive debt

This has happened now both scenarios where the new loan request is with both a new bank and with the old bank holding the current expensive debt.

So, new law.

If a person with debt of any form who can demonstrate a good repayment history comes to any organisation offering a loan of any form at a lower % rate then it will be illegal to refuse that debt on the grounds of affordability.

I.e. if a you have a loan of £10,000 at 17% and the bank offers loans at 12% for the same amount that bank cannot refuse you the cheaper loan.  This should apply to mortgages, loans, credit cards etc.  

The only condition is that the loan is used to shut down the old loan and not as well as.

 

inflation indexes took into account actual money.

This is a simple issue.  Inflation and indexes like RPI work as %.  The issue with % is that the absolute numbers are ignored in the reality of our day to day lives.  If you are a multi-millionaire and get a 0.2% rise in income that is an amount that means you can buy a new car every month instead of every other month.

If you are on minimum wage a 0.2% increase won't even amount to a postage stamp.

So growth rates and inflation may well be looked at by economists to make important decisions but the impacts on the poor are disproportional.  2% growth is great but 2% of nothing is still nothing.

Printers

Would the world be a better place if the cost of replacing the ink cartridges in a printer was not more expensive than buying a brand new printer complete with ink.

Driving up education standards

There is no doubt at all that there are two problems which society faces.

1) That keeping young people in education is hard.  But the benefits are clear.  Especially when there are few jobs for the young.

2) That car insurance is going up and up and up and especially for young people.

It is interesting that given that nearly everybody learns to drive, the one thing that is not part of the curriculum is driving.  Why is that?

Why would you not offer all A Level students free driving lessons as part of the course.  In the last year of A Levels you would be given free weekly driving lessons.  By doing it for free then more lessons (and perhaps go beyond minimum driving standards for the test) could be undertaken by the student leaving them more experienced.  Thus reducing the number of accidents, thus reducing the insurance costs.

we all thought about what would make the world better?

Welcome to my new blog.  I have written a lot of entries in my normal blog but I wanted to focus on a single theme.  I want to look at ideas around making the world a better place.  What does that mean?  Well even the concept of 'better place' is difficult to define.  Over what timeframe, is better down to just better for me, for me and my friends and family, in the UK, the world, just humans, applied to the planet etc etc.  Its hard.  And part of the focus will be looking at ideas and trying to understand if there are real benefits.

A consequentialist angle may also need to be applied but that in itself is a difficult thing to deal with (motivation vs outcome is difficult to reconcile).

I have no idea if this concept will work but I am going to give it a try and see where this goes.