‘I’ve met seven housing ministers (one of them twice)’

‘I’ve met seven housing ministers, one of them twice’ - peter denton, chief executive of homes england.

'yeah, they don't last long do they.' - horsemouth.

how long has been in this job? since 2021. 

ah housing policy - thy name is comedy. 

this may not be an actual quote (and it is almost certainly not what he meant by it) but it has the ring of truth about it. that  the man who leads the government’s housing delivery body typically only gets to meet each housing minister once. 

wage growth has slowed to its slowest for two years (and this in an average skewed by people with high wage rise figures).

adjusting for inflation, wages rose by 1.6%, so after years of below inflation wage rises  workers will experience no real improvement in their standard of living from this. (elsewhere food price inflation remains high). 

more potential workers are becoming economically inactive often due to ill-health, caring responsibilities or (horsemouth would suggest) just because the wage economy is a rigged poker game and anybody who can get out will get out. 

horsemouth is feeling angsty. 

example: he just spent some time trying to figure out a metric for how to divide the money available for the communal endeavour's decarbonisation strategy (stage one - get all the properties to an EPC C) over the properties that need to be got up to an EPC C. the properties contain differing numbers of people and are different EPC scores away from EPC C so dividing it up equally between all the properties is unfair. but how unfair is it really? 

you could work out some kind of metric (number needed to make the EPC score up to a hundred multiplied by the number of people in the house) but then you would have to explain it. 

(really he's just farting about until the reports are in). 

here it is about to rain. horsemouth is tempted to go for a walk. 

ok he's just been out for a 45 minute womble round the common (two women and a dog and some strange farm machinery noise that seemed to vanish as soon as he was actually  up there).

tomorrow (or today as he will soon be calling it) he will be raking off more of the cut vegetation from off the banking. hopefully if it does succeed in raining this will save him having to water the garden. some blackbirds are raiding the last of the berries. 

he has finished installing the book-boxes. 

this is what they look like. when he gets some more book-boxes here he can raise this up some more. he has been thinking about getting his folding shelves here (gaffer tapped to his wheelie trolley) - he thinks it would work. further he has been loading his books into 'bags for life' ready for any move. 

it really was doing an astonishing job of trying not to rain out there ladies and gentlemen. but now it is the morning and the rain and drizzle are here. later today walk some eggs round to some neighbours and later on walk the bins down the drive. the rain replaces the need for horsemouth to water the garden. last night beetroot and peas from the garden for dinner (along with other things). 

this was an almost entirely written yesterday blogpost.