Compare the government's attitude to controlling waste charges to controlling mortgage rates

Brendan Burgess

Brendan Burgess

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I don't understand why the government has got stuck into the waste management companies and yet adopted a completely hands off approach to mortgage rates?

Many people can't switch lenders and so are at the mercy of their lender.

In Dublin at least, I have a choice of a few suppliers and can switch very easily. Not sure if it's the same elsewhere.

What are the average waste charges per year? €300 per household. The average mortgage interest per household with a mortgage: €6,000?

Brendan
 
It's not that the silent majority are to blame for it, it's because for the silent majority it has no direct impact on their lives. Bin charge rises would cost me a couple of hundred euros a year but PTSB not reducing their variable rates doesn't make one blind bit of difference to the balance of my bank account as I have a tracker with a different bank. Sorry if that sounds selfish but that's what it is.
 
Brendan Burgess said:
I don't understand why the government has got stuck into the waste management companies and yet adopted a completely hands off approach to mortgage rates?
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Because we don't want politicians, who have made an utter mess of bin charges on top of everything else, interfering in commercial banking and making an even worse mess of that too?
 
Bin charges are the topic du jour for the media and it's easy to fix (I would think). And even then they come out with a proposal to kick the can down 12 months.

To fix mortgages would require some backbone and hard decisions. Our governments (pretty much all of them) don't seem to fit that criteria.
Pretty much anything the government puts its fingers on to interfere with seems to have an opposite effect (e.g. rent price controls introduced last year, that seemed to have the effect of putting a lot of rents up in a short period of time).
 
I was just about to make a new post about this topic. Government has sprung into action and said will put a cap in. Its a quick win for them and it doesn't cause too many financial ripples for anybody to have to clean up. It does prove that they can ultimately do what they want in a short space of time.

The governor of the central bank, both past and present have pretty much refused to do anything. The teachers and hucksters hiding in the dail take the the word of somebody with a PhD very seriously and are scared of the consequences.
 
If the govt put in place a 2% over ECB rate cap on all mortgages (excl fixed/trackers) and agreed to reviewing the reprocession rules, there would be uproar from the banks, but it would have been accepted as being reasonable and life would move on and everyone suffering from the current svr fleecing would benefit.
This would give the banks and customers certainty for the future.

So far we have seen water charges and now bin charges capped, but the largest expense (a multiple of the other two combined) is left to the banks (who were bailed out at the expense of the whole population) to make super profits.
 
INALLFAIRNESS said:
If the govt put in place a 2% over ECB rate cap on all mortgages (excl fixed/trackers) and agreed to reviewing the reprocession rules, there would be uproar from the banks, but it would have been accepted as being reasonable and life would move on and everyone suffering from the current svr fleecing would benefit.
This would give the banks and customers certainty for the future.

So far we have seen water charges and now bin charges capped, but the largest expense (a multiple of the other two combined) is left to the banks (who were bailed out at the expense of the whole population) to make super profits.
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Hi IN ALL FAIRNESS, couldn't agree more with you. The everything for free brigade have latched onto the bin and water charge debates big time because they get their support from the people these affect most, the working class. If they knew they were getting decent support from the people affected by the SVR issue I'm sure they'd help co-ordinate a public campaign on our issue too. Of course they don't as you say want to upset the banks profits before sales of them and as todo says earlier in this thread the silent majority ARE to blame also, not just central bank and government inaction. Just to let anyone who is saying oh tonymacs a member of a party or an activist I'm not.
 
Brendan Burgess said:
I don't understand why the government has got stuck into the waste management companies and yet adopted a completely hands off approach to mortgage rates?
Click to expand...

The banks claim that mortgage rates are so high because repossession is so difficult.

The fix for high mortgage rates is to make repossession quicker and easier - you have said this yourself.

Making thousands of hard-working families who have been robbed by developers / banks / foreign vulture funds homeless is unlikely to be as popular as forcing the waste management companies to not completely take advantage of a change in pricing to gouge the same hard-working families.

This is of course the Joe Duffy version ;-)
 
Whatever happened to FF's bill to cap the standard variable rate?

I thought it had passed in principle. Just waiting for the politicians to return after the summer.

If they all went on holidays then why are they still able to work on the bin charges?
 
The FF Bill won't cap mortgage rates - it proposes to empower the Central Bank to fix rates.

It's a very long way from becoming law.

I really don't see any comparison between introducing price fixing in the mortgage market and effectively postponing the introduction of a new charging structure for waste collection to allow for a more appropriate roll-out of that new charging structure.
 
Yes they are able. To do everything except lower SVR rates. At the drop of a hat they jump in on water charges, bins, mortgage rates for those who get the council mortgages but nothing for the rest of us because theyre all for the banks. I don't agree that we've done nothing about this. Many couldn't go to meetings CU's we have to work. Nothing we can do about that
 
Banking, with its multiplicity of products sold by the same Organisations, is in no way comparable to standalone products such as Waste or Water
 
Brendan Burgess said:
I don't understand why the government has got stuck into the waste management companies and yet adopted a completely hands off approach to mortgage rates?
Click to expand...

I can.

It is an easy issue to ignore.

When did SVR customers take to the streets in protest?

According to a lot of AAM posters, they are not aggrieved enough to take time off work to protest or even attend public meetings.

Indeed, had you not highlighted the issue, there would be little or nothing about the matter.
 
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