How does the 2014 Autumn Statement affect you?

The prices reflect what the majority of people can borrow, not what they can afford. The more they are allowed to borrow, the more they bid to compete with each other. Prices rise higher, and people have to stretch themselves further and further. Auctioneers and estate agents exhort people to bid a bit more or regret it forever after. Lenders are forced to offer more and more unreasonable income multiples.

As far as moving (exchanging one residence with another) is concerned, the legal professions (solicitors, accountants, estate agents, independent financial advisors) have failed the public by ratcheting up the uncertainties and stress involved more every year.

The cuts were not targeted on services, but on the numbers of public servants, a huge proportion of which are not employed on front-line delivery. There is massive scope to streamline the provision of public services, both at national and local government level. As an example – take local roads, the responsibility for which falls to the Highways Departments of County Councils. They have armies of people sat in offices all day absorbing huge sums of public funding – from Council Tax and from Central Government Grants, but little of it results in maintaining our local roads to a decent standard. This example can be repeated across a whole raft of services, where so little of the funding we provide actually ends up in what we need.

It is not possible to finance public services from taxes on easily identifiable small groups with few votes but lots of money. A general increase in income or expenditure taxation would result in less economic activity, and so the tax take falls, and with it public services. Income tax was once over 30% and purchase tax the same.

Financial penalties alter people’s behaviour — that is why fines are often an effective punishment and preventative of undesirable behaviour.

The only solution is more efficient public services, and fortunately technology advances can help with this.

For example, genomic medicine can cut the expenditure on prescription medicines by a significant amount, and this will get phased in over the next couple of decades, or even sooner if the political will is there. (Knowing someone’s genome enables doctors to be sure whether a particular medicine will work.) Effective pharmacology will cut back on the need for surgery and hospitals. A health service needs to help as many perfect strangers as possible. Pharmacology enables doctors to help far more people than expensive operations which can only help one at a time.

The application of science rather than crowd gut reaction has the potential to reduce crime. Imprisonment is very expensive and again affects individuals one at a time. Alternative and more effective methods will reduce costs.

The application of ever increasing computing power should replace the enormous waste of resources by legal administration. I don’t know what the gross income of the legal professions (solicitors, accountants, estate agents, IFAs, insurance people etc) as a whole are, but it doesn’t bring the same benefits as housing or infrastructure, and whatever benefits it does bring affects individuals one at a time and are not long lasting. Remove this inefficiency and society as a whole benefits.

I agree with AQ on the need to carry on cutting back the excessive spending of public authorities. So long as our local councils carry on delivering soppy magazines full of self-congratulatory guff about doing what they’re there for I shall not take any notice of their carping and bleating about reduced government funding. They should look at the size and cost of their public relations department before they pare another penny off the social care budget.

And I also agree about the inefficiencies of highways maintenance. When I lived in London I used to wonder why there needed to be thirty-three different organisations responsible for lighting the streets, with 33 different arrangements of lantern, column, spacing, and lux values. At least in shire counties there is a degree of standardisation within each county but I am sure savings could still be made by unifying the management and administrations across whole regions. I suspect that even today, notwithstanding the recent cuts, there are still some untouchable fiefdoms that need to be tackled with a scythe not a grapefruit knife.

Hi Kevin, since the launch of our Play Fair on Ticket Fees campaign more than 50,000 people have signed our petition. We managed to make ticketing companies show their fees upfront. When it comes to the level of fees, major players failed to change. We have therefore taken your support and our findings over to the CMA.

You can read more about it here: http://www.which.co.uk/campaigns/ticket-fees/deadline-cma-ticketmaster-seetickets–17072014/

A cap on rents was tried before, and it stops the supply of rented housing, unfortunately. The only real solution is a cap on new people, but this has also been tried before (in China) and has been very difficult and the method there has not really worked.

Humanity cannot grow in numbers forever, particularly if space colonisation remains a pipe dream.

Another problem is that people are not taught as to how to live together, or even encouraged to maintain their marriages. Hence there is a growing demand for low cost single person housing for people impoverished by divorce litigation. “Starter homes” are often “homes for the failed”.

Agree entirely with Jinnii. Unfortunately, stamp duty is simply just another source of tax income – but certainly very unfair to those who are not moving upmarket, but merely having to pay more because of location. There are lots of unfair taxes – the trick is to find alternatives to replace them with something that makes more sense. Or better still, seek ways of reducing government expenditure (and Local authorities’) so that less taxation is needed.