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Monday 20 August 2012

by Tony Patey

True-blue Tory class hatred reared its ugly head again yesterday as the fast-buck jockeys embraced a brazen right-wing gimmick to hammer council-house dwellers.

Conservatives dropped their sanctimonious masks to slaver over a bizarre idea to sell off the most expensive council houses and use the dosh to build more, cheaper ones - a guaranteed ghetto maker.

Policy Exchange - once described as the largest and most influential think tank on the right - said in a report that selling top homes when they become vacant would raise £4.5 billion a year.

That's enough to build up to 170,000 new social homes and at the same time provide building jobs, the think tank claimed.

Social tenants deserve a roof over their heads but not one that is better than most people can afford, added the think tank cofounded in 2002 by Michael Gove, now Education Secretary, and Francis "Jerry Can" Maude.

Policy Exchange director Neil O'Brien told the BBC that social housing would still exist in very expensive areas under their proposal, but there would just be "less of it.

"I don't believe anybody has a right to live in the most expensive part of town. People do have a right to get housed but just not to be housed in the most expensive areas."

Housing Minister Grant Shapps said the ideas were "blindingly obvious" and that only "a perverse kind of left-wing dogma" was discouraging local authorities from implementing them.

But the National Housing Federation - the "voice of housing associations" - said the idea was "fundamentally flawed."

Chief executive David Orr said: "It could effectively cleanse many towns of hard-working people who can't afford to buy or rent privately."

And Defend Council Housing said the proposals were based on "false assumptions which fail to disguise the real intent - allowing developers to grab public homes and land."

Chairwoman Eileen Short said: "Tenants will make sure councillors reject this nonsense. Council housing has been paid for several times over by our rents.

"With 4.5 million people on housing waiting lists, homelessness soaring and with millions more trapped in insecure and inadequate housing we need investment in a new generation of council housing."

Construction union Ucatt general secretary Steve Murphy called the proposals "truly frightening" and said they wouldn't work.

"They would lead to ghettoisation, with social housing tenants forced to live on the cheaper outskirts of towns and cities.

"We should be increasing mixed developments, in order to break down social segregation, not reducing them.

"Selling off existing homes is morally wrong and will not generate significant investment."

The REAL Scottish Defence League

Tuesday, 21 August 2012