Roskov book 22, p.17
Roskov, Book 22, page 17
I thanked the lady estate agent and we set off back to Leicester, but now with our Traffic Jam device issuing warnings.
Back in the old offices, I found David Hutton. ‘What’s happening with the idea of a London Traffic Jam centre?’
‘It’s moving ahead quickly, Met Police are keen, they have a building and it will mirror our building. They’ll have a call centre for registered users inside the M25, and links to the cameras for confirmation.’
‘Good, that may ease the traffic in London. And the motorway sensors?’
‘They’re still being installed, but they do cover almost half the motorways now, and they warn of slow traffic well enough. Cameras are being installed at most motorway junctions and we’ll have access to the feed.
‘All told we cover eighty percent of the UK now, and reports come in from minor rural roads as well. It’s seen as indispensable.’
‘And the devices?’
‘They have plans for a map display one day, and the computer software is popular, even for non-professional drivers. The Dutch group that copied us has paid a few million Euro and we now sell them our devices, and the Italians you know are going ahead, French want it soon. Italians think they can sell ten million devices in a month.’
‘It’s needed there, and it will have my name on it.’
I headed down to the Traffic Jam building, security there tight, and inside I met the senior men, the huge map board glanced at, a few nasty accidents highlighted down on the south coast.
‘South coast holiday traffic,’ I noted.
‘Yes, the Sunday drivers and the caravan idiots,’ they told me.
‘And the London copycat site?’
‘Be ready soon, some changes to the software and the set-up, just inside the M25 to be monitored, more for the benefit of the police than the drivers, but the drivers will get the messages.
‘When those drivers move beyond the M25 they get the usual service, same device, no added costs.’
‘And peak staff here?’ I asked.
‘It’s settled down, and we know how many ladies we need on Monday morning and Saturday night, and they trimmed it by three ladies. Men can step in if it’s busy.’
‘And the RAC and AA?’
‘They keep their members happy with the devices, hard not to be happy with them they save you an eight hour wait. Their van drivers accurately report accidents as well, that helps.’
‘Any false reports?’
‘Not a one, we check the drivers out, and then we wait verification of the accident usually. Got cameras in many places now, that helps. And the sensors warn us of issues before they become issues. And the weather men warn us of bad rain, or ice on the roads.’
‘So it all works well…’
‘Like a dream, it’s made a huge difference to motoring, they should give you a knighthood.’
I smiled. ‘It was not my idea, I just funded it.’ I chatted with many of the staff, plus the call centre ladies, and I listened into warnings issues, the Bournemouth area to be avoided today. And I was proud of this, a simple idea that helped the nation’s drivers.
At 10pm, after the Newsnight programme had aired, Blair called. ‘We watched Newsnight as a group, and … Gordon was in the room.’
I smiled widely. ‘Did he take the compliment?’
‘Not really, no, he’s not known for his sense of humour. And you just worried the markets and the media, a boom and bust of biblical proportions.’
‘It may do some good, since I want them worried about it.’
‘That they will be, yes, a return to Victorian times to worry about. But you got the point across, now comes the debate as to how we control house prices, should we even control them, and what could happen if they run away from us.’
‘If they run away from us … your kids will be renting for a long time after they leave college.’
‘Yes, they’ll be living at home till forty.’
‘Anything I said that you want to argue about?’
‘No, it’s what we discussed behind closed doors, and I want the debate out there anyway.’
Aftermath
In the morning I headed into the property business, but I did not call a meeting. I sat with Russel and my CFO. ‘You saw Newsnight?’
‘Yes, and laughed at your Gordon Brown comment.’
‘Anything wrong in what I said?’
‘No,’ Russel answered. ‘And if we’re not careful we’ll drive the car into the wall with the boom and bust. If prices rise sharply the funds do well, but then we can’t buy new properties - they’d all be too pigging expensive. We’d sit around playing cards all day.’
My CFO put in, ‘We’d certainly need less staff, a lot less – the market would go sideways, no gains to be made apart from rental income. So we need that gentle upwards slope, not to round over the top and fall – or go sideways.’
I told Russel, ‘Keep pushing the new housing estates, they make us good money and they expand the housing stock, and let’s build many more of those nice two-bed apartments.’
‘We have bids in for land in Derby, Coventry and Nottingham, nice two-bed apartments, all the same design. Also looking at Berkshire and Buckinghamshire, the commuter areas.’
My CFO put in, ‘How about more posh nursing homes? Build and sell and move on.’
‘How many are on the drawing board?’ I asked.
‘Only a few, the consortium planning them.’
I told him, ‘We can sell the Phase One apartments easily, not the nursing home apartments. If we were going to build and sell then it would be extra Phase Ones and Phase Zeros.’
‘Those free up housing stock,’ my CFO nudged.
‘They do, and it is a plan, or part of one, more Phase Ones around nearby nursing homes, lots more.’
Russell asked, ‘And the plan for Manchester ex-council houses?’
‘The council there has a waiting list, so many houses will go to those waiting, some to us, perhaps three thousand. We’d buy, renovate, and rent our many of them, sell the best prospects. We won’t get ten thousand ex-council houses in one go.’
‘You mentioned Manchester Docklands before, and I had a look, and the land is cheap enough, plans for many high-rise blocks.’
‘Bid for land and commission a few blocks, yes, then we’ll assess and see. But when it comes to new dockland developments … the more apartment blocks you build the better, the area looks better and the sale-price goes up. More the better.’
‘And coffee shops and wine bars,’ Russel put in. ‘Adds a quality to the place. And Manchester Council think that up to twelve thousand new apartments will be built.’
‘Spend some fund money, yes, the first two blocks, café on the ground floor.’
‘Our café, our wine bar, our convenience shop,’ Russel suggested.
I nodded. ‘Long term income.’
‘And at the new hospital here, a mini shopping centre?’ Russel posed.
‘Yes, for residents and visitors, so make it nice, a wine bar and a café and a some shops, a rain cover, space to let. There’ll be many walking sick people, many staff, and many visitors. Could see three hundred people head for some lunch all at the same time.’
‘A big café then,’ he quipped.
‘Plan for one, or better still four of them, but we’ll own and operate them all, from our warehouse here.’
‘A captive audience,’ he approved.
‘How’s your social life these days?’
My CFO smiled widely.
‘What?’ I puzzled.
Russel began, ‘I … told a girl in a bar that I run this place, billions invested, and … now I have a long list of local ladies after me.’
I smiled as I stood. ‘You have my permission to exaggerate, and to shag them all. You only live once, but use a condom or you’ll end up in my AIDS hospice.’
He gave me an embarrassed sheepish look before I left. At the old computer units I said hello, a few new members of staff, and I tried to chat to everyone. At the second-hand outlet I also tried to chat to everyone, and to make them feel part of the team – even if I was absent most of the time.
Up at the AIDS hospice I walked in on a meeting of the big-brained doctors and scientists, but they were now housed in the shiny new laboratories, a loud welcome issued to me. I sat on the edge of a table, many white coats worn in the room. ‘You lot earning your damn keep?’
‘Hard at it,’ the mad professor told me with a grin. ‘And we’ve made some progress, but with just the one patient. We cultured stem cells outside his body but using his DNA, all very clever stuff, and the clever Yanks we have here helped on that one.
‘We injected him with a drug that stimulates his bone marrow, and prior to that we had given the poor chap a fake disease to encourage more white blood cells.
‘But this chap was a few years away from falling sick, he was just starting to show symptoms, unlike most of the people here – who are quite sick and very sick and … terminal, as you know.
‘And this chap managed to knock back the disease, which we think changed from sixty percent to twenty percent, so a good decrease in infected cells. That’s what we’re now focused on.’
‘Good, some progress,’ I commended. ‘But don’t mention it to anyone yet, I don’t want any false hope out there. So this guy would live a few more years?’
‘Say … four years wiped off the run-up to the onset of symptoms. If we did that nationally then tens of thousands of people would avoid a hospital bed by four years perhaps.’
‘A good cost saving to the NHS, yes. But how tricky is the process?’
‘Tricky, yes, but we are refining it as we go.’
‘I don’t care about a cure, I’m interested in knocking back the disease a few years, time to work on a cure after that.’
They nodded.
‘When does the new hospital open?’ a lady asked me.
‘Could take eighteen months to build it, but I always speed up the builders, double shifts and simple designs. How are you lot coping with houses and apartments?’
‘Rents are rising fast,’ a lady complained.
‘And house prices with it,’ another man noted. ‘But I bought a place at just the right time, now worth a lot more, so I can’t complain. Wife is happy.’
I told them, ‘I’m rushing to build more nice apartments here and more housing estates, to level prices or even knock them down.’
‘Don’t knock them down,’ the same man complained, others laughing.
I wagged a finger at him. ‘When your fellow cancer medics get here they’ll need places to live, affordable ones. Four hundred families could move here. But I can build apartments for you on this land. Would anyone want them?’
‘Yes,’ came from several mouths.
‘I’ll have them look at that quickly, ten or twenty apartments here, we have the land.’
I pointed at the hot lady doctor. ‘Where are you living?’
‘In the High Street, fixed my rent for two years as well.’
‘You like coffee shops and shopping…’
‘Hell yes.’
They laughed.
The mad professor told me, ‘There are some parallels between our new technique and cancer, we could help with cancer – it’s all about damaged cells.’
‘Great, just wait a year and then surprise them with a treatment. But if I have to close that cancer hospital you’ll be assassinated.’
They laughed.
‘Not a cure, but it might help.’
Ten minutes later I met with the hospice manager, and he was busy trimming costs and working out bulk purchases, and he could see ways to shave a few pennies off our costs here and there.
The death rate was around three people a week, which was as expected, and he accepted new people as soon as the old rooms had been thoroughly cleaned and sterilized. The waiting list, however, had six thousand names on it.
The BBC news that evening detailed Pollock being arrested and questioned, but that during questioning he fainted, a stroke, and was now in hospital under guard.
BBC
The BBC had called, and the next day we drove down, my new apartment in London not getting much use.
At the studios the ladies attended my tanned face, which needed little done to it apart from deadening the shine, I cleaned my teeth, checked my grey suit, and on I went quietly after they had tested my mic.
‘With us now is Ricky Roskov. Ricky, you seem be suggesting that a housing crisis is around the corner…’
‘That corner will take two Labour terms in office to reach, so it’s not quite around the corner, it’s eight to ten years away, and we are planning ahead to prevent it.’
‘And the causes of that worry?’
‘Thatcher cut spending, we had a recession, so we’re starting from a low point, house prices have not climbed much in the past twenty years, just a steady increase – which is what we want to see ongoing.
‘Labour has infused a new optimism, we expect the jobs situation to improve, so we expect that national optimism will drive house prices higher – and we do have a national shortage of houses they report.
‘But the greatest single danger is the new gimmick mortgages, and the banks are being reckless in an effort to try and make more money. Do you own a house?’
‘Yes, most of it paid off.’
‘On that basis, the banks will hand you a buy-to-let mortgage so that you can buy another property with little or no deposit, and then rent it out, or hope to rent it out. You don’t need the wage income to afford both mortgages.
‘If everyone who owned a house did that … house prices would treble in a year, followed by a disastrous crash in house prices when no new buyers are found and few young couples can afford to buy.
‘At the moment, house prices outside of London are only two to three times higher than the average wages there, so people can afford to buy. If house prices become six times the average wage, only rich young people will be able to get on the property ladder.
‘So it’s important that we see the relationship between wages and house prices, and that the gap doesn’t widen to the point where the average person can’t afford to buy.
‘If the gap does widen, then we go back to Victorian times, where the rich are very rich and the poor are very poor, and the poor could never afford a house – we’d see a quarter of the nation renting after one generation, eventually half the nation renting.
‘If that happens, then it would just be people who already have a property swapping houses with similar people, there would be very few houses bought and sold compared to now, and there would be a tremendous strain on councils for council housing.
‘In effect, we’d be back in the 1950s - with the mad scramble to build council houses. Thatcher wanted those council house occupants to buy their own homes, which is great, but that was when the homes were affordable, not three times higher.
‘And not many new houses would be built … because young married couples could never afford one, only rich landlords could afford them. New young married couples would spend their lives renting not buying, and we’d see such a huge demand on the councils to assist with rent that we’d be broke as a nation.’
‘And the solution?’
‘To build more houses now, before house prices rise, more apartments, more fifty-percent mortgages issued, and to cut down on the banks inventing stupid gimmick mortgages. Those banks, they’re the ones that will be hurt when house sales plummet, so they need to consider what they’re doing with these new reckless mortgages.
‘What we need … is for the banks to sit down with the government and to plan a line on a chart which is steady, and one that keeps houses affordable. And we need to build many more new houses south of Birmingham.
‘My team have moved their emphasis towards more new houses and more large apartments, to ease the shortages seen in some areas south of Birmingham. We’ll build as many new houses as the local councils give us permission for, till we fill the shortage.’
‘And if house prices do climb too fast?’
‘Then I’ll spend a great deal of money on building more houses and apartments, and I’ll nudge the Government to raise interest rates and to increase regulation on the banks.’
‘Are the banks misbehaving?’
‘Some are being reckless. They see a chance to issue more mortgages yet they don’t have an eye on what the consequences could be a few years down the road.
‘And I’m actively trying hard to harm the chances of future landlords who want to get rich. I’ll end up with fifty thousand rental apartments nationally, rents kept low. Landlords could end up losing money if they buy houses in the hope of some good rental income.
‘And the thing is … rises in rental prices drive landlords towards buy-to-let mortgages, so I aim to keep rental prices reasonable. That landlord won’t be able to rent out his apartment if my apartment is much cheaper, for the same quality.’
‘You’ll compete with them head on?’
‘I will, most definitely. If there’s someone out there that wants to buy ten apartments, hike the rent and make a killing, he’ll be competing with me head on.’
‘You’ll be stifling fair competition?’
‘Yes, most definitely, because that competition will destroy this country if they succeed, as we all go back to Victorian times, home ownership for the rich folk only.’
‘Why has this come about?’
‘A new optimism, an end to the Thatcher years, which my experts think will push up house prices by five percent year-on-year.
‘That doesn’t sound like much, but in ten years it’s a sixty percent rise, and if rises are ten percent a year that’s moving towards houses costing three times as much as they do now.
‘So those small percentages matter over a ten year period, two Labour terms, two terms of planned spending increases, better pensions, and more optimism in the workforce.
