A recipe for ghettoisation
http://www.morningstaronline.co.uk/news/content/view/full/122898
Monday 20 August 2012
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Tories are obsessed with council housing - not searching for ways to improve it but on the constant lookout to run it down.
Housing Minister Grant Shapps suggested earlier this year increasing the incentive to council tenants to buy their homes and reduce the availability of council housing for homeless people.
Nick Boles MP is the latest comfortably off ex-public schoolboy to dream up a scheme to degrade what remains of council housing.
Needless to say, he's never lived in a council house, having grown up on the family farm in Devon before being educated at Winchester and Oxford and advising post-Yeltsin-coup Russia on the privatisation of state assets.
Doubtless this stood him in good stead for his latest project, fronting his Policy Exchange report Ending Expensive Social Tenancies, which advocates selling all publicly owned properties valued at more than the area average house price.
Not that he's opposed to all public funding of real human need. Boles felt justified in claiming £678 for Hebrew lessons to converse better with his Israeli partner.
Enough of Boles and on to Policy Exchange report author Alex Morton, who tells us: "Social housing tenants deserve a roof over their heads but not one better than most people can afford, particularly as expensive social housing means less social housing and so longer waiting lists for most people in need."
Quite how he comes to this conclusion is baffling since the reasons for a shortage of council housing are twofold - too much is being sold and too little built.
The report posits that selling off above-average-price housing - about 20 per cent of the total - would enable £4.5 billion to be raised each year to build new cheaper homes.
However, the government has told local councils that if they spend money on new-build housing they must raise rents to 80 per cent of the market rate and limit tenancies to five years.
As construction union Ucatt points out this is a recipe for ghettoisation, "with social housing tenants forced to live on the cheaper outskirts of towns and cities."
One of the most positive aspects of the Labour government's post-World War II council house-building programme was that council homes were not restricted to the poorest areas but spread across towns and cities, reducing social segregation.
The conservative coalition is intent on reversing this process by cutting housing benefit for private tenants to drive poor people out of better-off areas and even to relocate large numbers from London boroughs to the Midlands and north of England.
The Policy Exchange proposal is the other side of the same coin, reducing the overall value of public investment in housing and undermining tenants' choice of where to live.
The growing proportion of the population who cannot afford to buy their own home in the private housing market are under constant attack by the government and its private landlord allies, with private rents rising at double the rate of wages.
Housing charity Shelter reported at the weekend that the private sector has forced up rents to new record highs every month, causing families to "to cut back further on food and other essentials."
The problem lies with treating housing as a market rather than a service to meet need, which would be best resolved by a government-led and financed mass council house-building drive similar to that launched after the war.
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