Wednesday 26 January 2011

Getting down to business the Uppal way

There's a smaller chamber in Parliament in which non-lawmaking debates are held - they can become occasions for the bores and nutters to sound off.

One of them is a certain Mr. Paul Uppal. In the debate on the housing market, he spoke up for the real victims of the minor fall in property prices: institutional investors, who - restrain your tears - have somehow been prevented from entering the residential market.

I have found that institutional investors often look for avenues through which they can get into the residential market, particularly from a letting perspective, and they have often approached Governments regarding the best way to do that. One area that is particularly talked about is the shared ownership vehicle. I do not know whether my hon. Friend, or the Minister later, will be able to comment on that, but I echo the sentiment of shared ownership as a way of solving the problem-not wholly, but certainly helping.

I know that if you're a young worker looking for a mortgage without joy (like me), you might feel that you're finding it harder than MPs who are multimillionaire commercial property developers, but that merely highlights the poverty of your economic thinking.

Even his own side find it ridiculously easy to bat aside his naked self-interest (though to give him some credit, he did actually admit his background this time):

I do not think that my hon. Friend's point, valid though it is, is relevant to that argument.

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