A Home of One’s Own
Yes, it’s Manifesto Week! Buy one policy, get one free! Hard-working family? We’ve got something for you! Pensioner? We’ve got something for you too! School-leaver? Er… Anyway, hurry while stocks last! Offer only available until May 7!
Yesterday, the Tories unveiled the latest social demographic they seek to woo – those unfortunate enough not to own their own home. Haven’t we been here before? One early pointer to Margaret Thatcher’s social and economic revolution was the introduction of the ‘Right to Buy’ scheme way back in 1980, a law enabling council tenants to buy their homes and a policy that was to ‘liberate’ Joe Public by wrestling ownership of his home away from the hands of nasty (most likely left-wing) councils, thus beginning the mania for property ownership that was to reach its apogee at the turn of the twenty-first century, when houses ceased to be viewed as homes and became little more than cattle to be fattened-up and sold at an inflated price, resulting in a quick profit that would then be spent on another cash-cow that could repeat the process. Of course, this policy consequently reduced the number of council properties available for those of no fixed abode, properties that were already in short supply due to the large-scale building programmes of the 60s and 70s having dried up.
Prior to this change, council housing didn’t have the stigma attached to it that it does today, and the so-called ‘sink estates’ were relatively few in number. The council houses that remained in council hands thereafter tended to become landfill sites for ‘problem families’, and the council house tenant regarded as something akin to a social pariah. But Thatcher’s dubious genius lay in persuading the people this was being done for their benefit; that many who had purchased their council houses eventually struggled to keep up with their mortgage payments and suffered the ignominy of having their homes repossessed was naturally not given much coverage in the Tory press. Besides, the banking industry did well out of this arrangement, and that was more important in the Brave New World that was poised to emerge in the middle of the 1980s.
As far as the alleged beneficiaries of these policies were concerned, Mrs Thatcher was taking power away from the state and putting it in the hands of the people, and after more than a decade of state-run industries being beset by turmoil courtesy of bolshie unions – with the public suffering an endless sequence of disruptions and inconveniences as a result – this was viewed as a Good Thing. 2015 is not 1980, however; the housing market is a different animal today than the one it was thirty-five years ago.
The new scheme is a dangling carrot for tenants who rent properties owned by housing associations; the assumption is not only that these tenants actually want to be burdened with owning their home (or, to be more precise, leasing it from a building society), but that they actually have the money to buy it. And is there an additional plan in place to build new housing association properties to replace the ones purchased by tenants? Ah, yes, that old standby – ‘Affordable Housing’, which translates as barely affordable newly built houses with rooms designed to the specifications of railway carriages. Have you ever set foot in a newly built Affordable House? Not only do such houses resemble properties in Trumpton on the outside, but the claustrophobic scale of the interiors would result in even Windy Miller banging his head on the low ceilings. The whole concept taps into the ludicrous snobbery of the home-owner when confronted by the renter, something that has become a uniquely British characteristic many foreign visitors to these shores find utterly perplexing and mystifying.
Away from parental property, I’ve spent all my adult life in rented accommodation. Its pluses as far as I have been able to discern are as follows…
Any repairs need doing, there’s no cost; no plumber or joiner or electrician to be tracked down in the Yellow Pages; the landlord or letting agents usually dispatch someone free of charge within twenty-four hours. Any trouble with fellow tenants and the trouble-causers are given a series of warnings ignored at their peril, unless eviction is something they think they’re immune to. If one’s fellow tenants are easy-going types who aren’t permanently at the door on the cadge, there can be a genuinely harmonious household that evokes something of a community spirit and makes for friendly chats on the doorstep. There’s none of the isolation and detachment from one’s neighbours that can characterise so many residential neighbourhoods. True, rent isn’t cheap, but it’s a hell of a lot cheaper than a mortgage; and when I move to the next place, I won’t still be paying for the previous one.
When I think of the endless financial headaches endured by home-owning friends, the more the hollow status symbol of a home of one’s own seems to be. Many who call themselves home-owners won’t actually ever truly own their home; it took my own mother forty years to achieve actual ownership, but who stays in one house for forty years these days? The mortgage is a millstone that will remain around the necks of today’s so-called home-owners with all the clinging persistence of a bluebottle lovingly lingering over a summer turd.
The astronomical cost of a house in Britain today – even in parts of the country where ‘Des Res’ is more likely to be the name of your friendly neighbourhood drug-dealer – should, in theory, serve to the curb the mania for home ownership; but it doesn’t appear to be doing so. The idea of owning your own home is now so entrenched in the British psyche that common sense in terms of what is and isn’t within one’s budget simply doesn’t apply. No wonder the Tories have latched onto those stigmatised as second-class residents of the rented sector; what greater incentive to vote for Cameron than the reward of joining the home-owning set? Cameron and his post-Blair ilk may like to talk about a Classless Society, but one set of divisions merely supersede another; the class divide today is between those who own and those who rent.
Of course, buying a house has always been a pricey business; we may marvel at how cheap the ones our parents (or we, depending on one’s age) bought back in the 60s or 70s, but then we have to measure the cost in relation to the average wage of the time. That said, the gulf between what we earn and what we can afford to buy has expanded considerably over the past twenty-odd years. Cameron and Clegg’s Hard Working Families of Alarm Clock Britain can be up at the crack of dawn five days a week to put in far more hours at the office or the factory (or the call-centre they built on the old factory site) than their parents’ generation did, yet they still struggle to own a home at the end of their endeavours. Does that sound like a fair deal to you?
From the premiership of Harold Macmillan to that of Harold Wilson, a knock ‘em down and build ’em up boom was underway in this country that swept away thousands of slums leftover from the previous century – admittedly, as well as many good solid Victorian and Edwardian houses that merely required a few repairs; first came the new-towns, then the tower blocks, and then the new housing estates. Yet, the building of new homes, whether one holds the Greenbelt lobby responsible or not, has slowed down considerably since then; and the more rented properties fall into the ownership of ex-tenants, the greater the need to build extensively will be. Can the coffers of the Treasury spare the change? While ever your vote is required, yes. Not so sure if this will be the case from May 8 onwards.
Petunia Winegum
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April 15, 2015 at 9:20 am -
I was born and raised in a ‘slum’, one of those mercilessly cleared in the 1960s: a two-bedroom, no-bathroom, back-to-back, owner-occupied terrace in a northern industrial town – a proud working-class culture, if lacking in wealth and amenities. A dozen parallel streets were replaced by a number of low-rise council flat blocks, which quickly became home to very low-rise tenants.
These same flats are themselves currently being demolished, a mere 50 years after the last demolition. To be replaced by, you’ve guessed it, rows of ‘modern, brick-built town-houses’, virtually indistinguishable in layout from the solid, stone, family houses previously on the site – it’s progress, Jim, but not as we know it. -
April 15, 2015 at 9:25 am -
The most important thing to remember is that Council House sales began under Jim Callaghan’s Labour government. I know this because after years of my mum telling me that whatever else the bitch had done, she had at least allowed them to buy their own house, I got a look at the deeds and discovered mum and dad had entered into the purchase before Maggie ever came to the throne. I think what Thatcher did was to stop local councils BLOCKING the right, which many still did.
Granted my folk’s memories were demonstrably faulty so I’m not sure how much we should depend on the reason they give for why their local council was willing to sell even before they had a right to buy; but they say it was because the council wanted to get rid of housing stock because by then it was approaching fifteen years old and needed a lot of maintenance and by flogging off the housing the council hoped to save a lot of money and let the people do it for themselves.
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April 15, 2015 at 10:25 am -
The eagerness with which all the ‘political’ parties compete to outspend their competitors, AND, spend voters’ money, indicates none of them should be trusted attempting to viably run a corner shop.
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April 15, 2015 at 10:26 am -
or build houses…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ch5VorymiL4
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April 15, 2015 at 10:30 am -
Can someone explain all this to me (or provide links)?
I understand “right to buy” as it applies to public assets (i.e. council houses). But I’ve also been hearing stuff about how it applies to housing association tenants, and “may” be extended to tenants in privately owned dwellings!?
I thought that even though the tenants may be placed by the council and the rent paid/part paid by the council, the house/flat was the property (the privately owned property) of the owners of the housing association. Are they talking about compulsory purchases?
Maybe I’ve just misread / been mislead.
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April 15, 2015 at 11:07 am -
April 15, 2015 at 11:10 am -
Justin, the spectacle of an ostensibly-Conservative PM declaring his intention to abrogate property rights should tell you just how far down the left-wing road Cameron’s rabble has gone…
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April 15, 2015 at 11:35 am -
The right to acquire perhaps.
The Right to Acquire initiative is very similar to the Right to Buy scheme. The only difference is it applies to housing association tenants as opposed to council tenants. It was developed in 1996 but was updated in the Housing Act 2004. It gives tenants the right to buy their property at a reduced cost.
http://www.affordablehomeadvice.co.uk/what-is-a-right-to-aquire-scheme.html
“The Right to acquire scheme is available to all housing association or social landlord tenants so long as the landlord is taking part in the scheme.”I would guess that Housing Associations would be as happy to see themselves relieved of maintenance costs in the long term as local councils are. Most such Associations are charities so this is all part of their ethos anyway. I cannot see where it applies to private property, although tenants rights, and thus inability to live in your own property if someone else is a sitting tenant, has a long history.
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April 15, 2015 at 10:38 am -
The real reason they want people to “own” their own homes is to take them back off them as they are ‘served notice’ on their time on earth.
Case in point: My paternal grandparents never bought their own house – they had enough money to, but Grandad was indoctrinated with ‘socialism’ and didn’t believe in ‘property’. So they filled their successive council houses with clutter, pacifying my wanton grandmother with more furniture, more trinkets & 20 years of ‘more children’. She is still alive at 86 and living well in monetary terms, but his (not inconsiderable) end-of-life nursing & care was paid for by the state.
My maternal grandparents lived relatively frugally, and in 1978 had saved enough to buy a new semi-detached house. They were in their mid-50s and approaching retirement, and saw the house as reward for 40 years of hard work. Nan passed away of cancer in 2004 at 80 in a nursing home (a horrible undignified end I wouldn’t wish on anybody), Grandad soldiered on gamely until late 2012, but had succumbed to dementia with lewy bodies alongside a non-aggressive prostate cancer for the last 4 years – after a lifetime of good health. The only practical way to manage this was for him to live in a local nursing home – one of our choice, granted, and ‘home’ to him as drifted in and out of lucidity, but these places are not the Ritz. A charge by the council was put on the ‘retirement apparentment’ they ‘traded up’ to in 1996 but that took 5 years to sell at a vastly reduced price (the Baby Boomers aren’t so keen on such places it would seem) – the end result was his £100K property (sold, eventually, for not much more than half that) and his savings went mostly back to ‘the state’ and my mother and her brother were left with approximately £17K between them.So, little wonder they want to grant us proles the “right to buy” once again.
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April 15, 2015 at 5:31 pm -
The same point I was going to make: my two paternal uncles – both married but childless – initially lived in Council houses but, while Uncle Ant and his wife decided to buy theirs and allocated much of their earnings to the mortgage, Uncle and Aunt Grasshopper (in rather better-paid jobs) continued to rent and spent to the hilt on foreign holidays and a plethora of expensive hobbies.
Both uncles lived to around ninety, widowed by then, and required nursing care for several years before dying. Uncle Grasshopper, with no assets, was placed by the local authority in an upmarket nursing home at public expense while Uncle Ant, in a similar home run by the same company, was billed over £1000 a week from day 1 – he almost lived long enough to see the money from the sale of his house reduced to the £23,000 threshold under which the state would have started to help out.
It is, perhaps, significant, given the topic under discussion, that a source at one care home admitted (off the record) that self-funded patients were charged over the odds to compensate for a shortfall in Council funding.
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April 15, 2015 at 5:45 pm -
Renting in the “private sector” is as, or more expensive than a mortgage might be for a comparable property. I knew someone who did a buy to rent and the renter paid more than she was paying on the mortgage. Her tenants generally involved corporate lets, where a company was paying and just offset the costs against tax payable, and one of her longer lets was to a police high-up on secondment – all expenses paid. She had decided not to get involved with the DHSS market.
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April 15, 2015 at 6:02 pm -
Fortunately for Uncle Grasshopper, he was a Council tenant throughout – and a public sector employee, as was the wife he married in his fifties – living in a tiny prefab at minimal rent; the house was condemned and demolished not long after he moved out.
With a certain irony, his step-granddaughter is apparently now living with her two children at public expense (no sign of either father) in a 3-bedroom new-build Council house almost on the exact site of the old prefabs.
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April 15, 2015 at 10:43 am -
Since when was there no stigma in England attached to being in a council house? My 1960s childhood was spent in a tiny (privately-rented) bungalow because my hard-up parents would not dream of applying to move to a (bigger, newer, cheaper) council house due to the shame, oh the shame.
I do remember a schoolfriend telling me how to find his house on a council estate of identikit dwellings: “Ours is the one with the black door and the net curtains.” Hardly conducive to pride of occupancy, let alone ownership. Maybe that’s why you don’t see the same level of vandalism on private estates.
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April 15, 2015 at 11:06 am -
The stigma is more pronounced now than it ever was. I don’t remember it being as bad when I was a kid and most people I knew lived it council houses.
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April 15, 2015 at 11:26 am -
I’m not so sure that ‘stigma’ is going to last much longer – it’s a relic from the times when working people could aspire to and afford their own home. From the days when most working people would look at the Jeremy Kyle Show and be horrified. We’re not in times where home ownership has been pushed out of the reach of factory workers, call centre workers, warehousemen etc etc – those days disappeared with the magic “boom” of the late 90s. Here in the grim North, a private semi that struggled to sell in 2000 for £48K was suddenly worth £70K by 2002, and £120K by 2010 – currently prices are around the £150K for the same house. The person who could push to a £50K mortgage in 2000 will not be on three times the wage they were in 2000. In real terms, most wages have fallen – leaving the first time buyer of 2015 (no doubt already saddled with debt, not least from tuition fees) priced well out of the market – the market they then have to subvert and manipulation with heavily subsidised deals on new-builds (making the old houses harder to sell) and ‘shared-ownership’ mortgages etc.
The demise of the ‘individual’ will see to any widespread stigma of council estates in the long term, but then again they dress these things up, call them something else and everyone marvels at society’s polished turds.
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April 15, 2015 at 11:12 am -
Roderick, the problem is, you are now starting to see the same level of vandalism. It occurs when people buy to let. They aren’t living there themselves, so what do they care what their tenants do, so long as the rent is paid?
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April 15, 2015 at 3:03 pm -
There are also plenty of landlords who avoid spending a penny on maintenance if they can help it. In those circumstances, tenants come to believe that they may not live there long term and are hardly likely to go out of their way to do general upkeep either. An area starts to look more and more shabby, the people then most likely to put up with living there are recent immigrants densely-packed in flats which were once barely large enough for a small family. They don’t envisage living there long term either so the decline continues.
A small private road I know has gone from having no rental properties 20 years ago to having a large majority of rentals now, all with absentee landlords reluctant to spend anything, including on the increasingly pot-holed communal road. Most are multiple occupancy and there are only 2 properties left housing people who were UK born. When they go, I expect the trend to continue until the land is so relatively cheap that several once-desirable houses are demolished and a block of tiny “executive” flats take their place.-
April 15, 2015 at 3:43 pm -
In 2010, an old school friend (who I’d not seen for years and who now lived the other end of the M62) introduced me to his father – who was a right character. He had just made a miraculous recovery from double pneumonia, caused by a mixture of long-term lifestyle problems (bipolar chainsmoking alcoholic) and the damp in the ground-floor flat in which he lived – which was slap-bang in a street of 4-bedroom Victorian terraces that, in refurbished state would be valued at circa £200K. The agents weren’t interested, so I took it upon myself to contact the relevant authorities, who classed the entire ground floor as unfit for inhabitation. Pete got a nice council bungalow, but his old falt remained unrepaired for another 4 years, with the 1st floor flats still rented out. The owner of the building – a Yossi Ives of London – seemingly didn’t give a toss that his investment was going to rack and ruin, yet it would have been £200K if it was restored to its former glory…. and imagine living nextdoor to such a dump
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April 15, 2015 at 3:47 pm -
I live in a largely student area where many fine old houses have been converted to multi-occupancy dwellings, and the results do vary. Some are an absolute disgrace – yards overflowing with rubbish, infested with rats etc. whereas others are lived in by people who aren’t ‘slumming it’ (as many of the students temporarily exiled from the Home Counties view their domestic set up), and consequently have a fairly harmonious relationship with other tenants and the landlord/letting agents.
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April 15, 2015 at 5:11 pm -
* Some are an absolute disgrace – yards overflowing with rubbish, infested with rats etc. whereas others are lived in by people who aren’t ‘slumming it’ *
That description sounds just like my mum’s council estate now and what I remember when I was growing up. My granny used to remark that you could put some folk in Buckhingham Palace and they’d turn it into a pigsty. In the old days of course Ena and Minnie would be out on their knees scrubbing the step on the terrace.
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April 15, 2015 at 5:15 pm -
Ah, yes – now THAT’s a lost art, step-scrubbing.
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April 15, 2015 at 8:01 pm -
Don’t forget the white-stone edging too.
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April 15, 2015 at 10:44 am -
After WWII, when things started to “pick up”, young couples planning to get married often contemplated living with one set of parents, while they either saved up a deposit to buy a place of their own or got their names onto the council waiting list . When they finally managed to move out, they were usually quite content to do so with very little in the way of furniture and fittings. Time moved on, and we eventually reached a point where it became almost expected for a newlywed couple to move into a new home complete with all mod cons. Then the bubble burst and we are now back to the old situation, but somehow it’s worse.
There’s a new development of 40 houses being built near me. It comprises two bedroom “starter homes” at £224,000 up to 5 bedroom “luxury homes” at £450,000. And as sure as eggs are eggs they will all be lived in before next Christmas.
I don’t understand the need for all these new houses. Why do we need them? The government has been telling us for years that the population remains virtually static at 65 million. Of course I think that’s horse shit, my own estimation would be nearer 90 million. It’s a bit like the crap they feed us about exam results. Every year the results get better and yet the CBI keep telling us that job applicants are almost illiterate and innumerate – surely they cannot both be right?
Regarding council housing, I think I’m right in saying it used to be means tested. Then something changed, and people who were earning enough to buy their own homes were able to get a council house. I know my dad used to work with people who were earning quite a bit more than he was, and they were living in council houses. He used to joke about driving round the local council estate to see what sort of car he’d be able to buy second hand in ten years’ time.-
April 15, 2015 at 10:56 am -
The thing that changed was the ability for ordinary folk to get a mortgage. My ma and pa wanted to buy a house in about 1966. £2,000. They worked out they could afford the payments, but could not afford the deposit. Nobody back then had the £200 in readies they needed to put down the 10% deposit. banking regulations and prudent lending dontcha know… that should keep the proles down and out of the capitalist hegemony.
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April 15, 2015 at 10:57 am -
Take Hull (well, some people already have!) as an example.
Between the 30s & 80s there was massive amount of new Council Estates built by the Labour council on green field to account for the ‘slum clearances’. In the 1990’s they began to deal with ‘social problems’ by “regeneration” – now Hull was heavily bombed in WW2 as the Germans randomly disposed of their undropped bombs over the nondescript port, but the damage was nothing compared to the demolition of the past 20 years. The bad estates went first, replaced years later by big PFI-funded “public buildings”, and then the decent estates – the excuses being the likes of it being “uneconomical” to replace underfloor heating systems in 40 year-old brick-built homes – the post-WW2 prefab bungalows last longer than these ‘permanent communities’.
Currently being ‘regenerated’ are areas of unloved Victorian terraced houses, many of which were snapped up by anonymous ‘investors’ 15/20 years ago for circa £15K and left to rack & ruin, before being ‘compulsory purchased’ by the council for circa £75K each.But, as it happens, – and I’m sure it’s just a coincidence – members of the Prescott family have directorships in several ‘key’ demolition and construction firms who keep “winning” the lucrative contracts. Socialism, eh….
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April 15, 2015 at 2:46 pm -
It’s that running joke that Hull’s town planners finished the Luftwaffe’s job for them, given that the latter managed to damage 95% of all residential buildings in one way or another. Just after I was born, my family moved from what I now assume was a rented property off Willerby Road to the Ghost Estate, which was obviously one of the parallel private green belt builds. In 1973 we moved “next door” to the new Haworth Park estate, with my Dad copping a real bargain because the price for the house had been set a couple of years previously, in which time property values rose, so he actually made a profit on selling the previous smaller house!
Despite living in lower middle class suburbia, my middle school was St John Fisher (it was only being Catholic that subsequently got us out of falling within the catchment of Sir Henry Cooper School!), on the west side of Orchard Park, many bits of which were clearly past there best, even then. I know that some of the tower block on Orchard Park have been demolished, and one wonders how the low-rise stock will fair. In contrast, the solid properties on the North Hull Estate has lasted 90 years, and will probably continue to do so.
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April 15, 2015 at 3:45 pm -
Having taken photographs of the ‘OPE’ blocks being pulled down, I recently got hold of some picture of taken as they were being constructed – email me if you’d like copies Peter
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April 15, 2015 at 3:53 pm -
The demolition was also covered in an epsiode of Channel 4’s Demolition Detectives series, a copy of which I may just have lying around….
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April 15, 2015 at 4:00 pm -
Used to be able to see ‘the flats’ from the lane near my house – the last one (Highcourt) came down last month. A shame as structurally they were fine, and I bet the views were superb.
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April 15, 2015 at 11:20 am -
I think that a change has been taking place and I’m not convinced that I would buy now instead of renting.
As far as people buying and failing to keep up with the payments. It is hardly Maggies fault that happened. It has happened since mortgages started. People bite off more than they can chew every day.
When Labour get in next month they will continue to destroy the country, at least till the SNP, get what they want at which point many houses will have been repossesed, ex council or not and rent prices will stabilise. Until Maggie 2 gets us back on our feet.
Life is going around in circles.
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April 15, 2015 at 11:31 am -
Many a house bought in brighter times for an affordable amount was subsequently lost down the line as ‘equity release’ was promoted as a problem-solver to the masses for their unsecured consumer debt, allowing people to increase their mortgage to unmanageable levels. Allowing the American sup-prime lenders to set root in the UK was another of the Bliar-Brown masterstrokes.
The New Labour Years gave us so much didn’t they?
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April 15, 2015 at 11:41 am -
Whys does everybody want to own their own home? If you look at the statistics for home ownership, Germany and Switzerland have a lower ownership rate that the UK, and the country with the highest is, of all places, Romania!
What we lack are acceptable properties for rent. We would love to be able to sell up, and rent a similar quality home where someone else takes the responsibility for maintenance, etc. I’m fed up with having to find workmen and at my age would love to be able to just phone the landlord and get him to organise the work. We might then also be able to pass some of the capital on to my daughters while we’re still around! But where I am, tiny serviced apartments cost more than the value of my 4 bedroom house, so unless I’m prepared to move miles from my family, I’m stuck.
Why is it that the majority of German’s are happy renting? Can it be that their landlords don’t see that property owning is a “get rich quick” scheme.-
April 15, 2015 at 11:50 am -
* Why is it that the majority of German’s are happy renting? Can it be that their landlords don’t see that property owning is a “get rich quick” scheme. *
If you give £apital to your children, they have to pay income tax on it. Maybe the Germans don’t have such a rule?
The only way I could gift my children large sums of money without the tax-man getting his snout in, was to to give it to them to as a deposit on their own home. One problem with the housing market for the British is the “Hyacinth Bucket” syndrome. I have relatives who lived “cramped” in a three-bedroom house as their two kids grew up. As they then retired and their kids left home they bought a five bedroom house because they “could afford it”. Quite, quite mad, but they felt it was the best way to invest their money… “and the kids will have it all when we die”… Therein that last might lie a rub or two, although another of cameroon’s promises is that houses worth under a million will no longer attract death duties or whatever taxes we have to pay when we are dead..My granny always said she’d rather give with a warm hand…
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April 15, 2015 at 3:13 pm -
As hinted at by Chris’s post, we can probably add end-of-life care funding to “death duties or whatever taxes we have to pay when we are dead,” or at least, just before death.
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April 15, 2015 at 11:46 am -
I was going to boil on about changes brought about by Westminster to rapidly increase the population over recent years, but nothing’s going to change, is it?
Instead, how about the process of housing provision?
At the lowest tier of local government, communities are now producing something called a Neighbourhood Plan which identifies locally where & how much development will be accepted. It costs £tens of thousands and many hours of work by unpaid councillors & volunteers. Communities vote on this plan, which has to be approved before it is put in place, and it should be taken into account when considering developers proposals. If we don’t do it we lose that influence & some ‘community infrastructure levy funds’.
Fine, but if the same f***wits in Westminster who introduced these plans are dedicated against any kind of controls at the front (or back) door, what’s the point? We’ll never get housing sorted out, barring a bout of The Black Death.
I’m undecided about the issue of selling on social housing; I’m not even thinking about the latest proposals. They really switched me off with the paid volunteering idea. I’ll have no trouble voting against them, good MP or not. -
April 15, 2015 at 11:53 am -
Surely the reason ‘right to buy’ is proposed for housing association properties is that in many areas they are the owners of ‘council’ houses, the local authority having transferred ownership to them.
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April 15, 2015 at 12:03 pm -
Firstly, many council estates were built cheaply on cheap land, and rented at non-economic prices. Selling them off at a stroke rids the council of maintenance costs, returns far more capital than was committed originally, and puts the council in a position of a lucky developer. Like all statist concerns, this is unlikely to be profitable because of the many blood-sucking employees hung onto it – but it should be profitable in principle.
If the council is prevented from re-investing the capital in more houses, they’ll be like any developer who stops trading, so even though I approved of Thatcher, this meant that no more council houses would be built with that money, and eventually it would get spent on something else.
Many councils moved their remaining stock into housing associations to evade the right to buy legislation – but, some housing associations had already joined in the selling business. As a matter of record, there were originally 2 types of housing association: one where the properties were for rent, and one that was in effect a help to buy (‘co-ownership’) scheme.
One bit of nonesense is that it reduces the housing stock – well only if new owners knock them down – but it does reduce the number of properties where some of us subsidise the tenants. In the private sector, rents exceed the mortgage repayment cost, and so if you can get the deposit together, and if you can afford the repayments (mortgage Co rules – you can if you are already paying the rent!), you end up with something to show for the money. On retirement – downsize. You know it makes sense.
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April 15, 2015 at 12:22 pm -
Fair enough rant in many respects, but there are a couple of things I cannot agree to:
“the landlord or letting agents usually dispatch someone free of charge within twenty-four hours.” This is surely a reference to the magic money tree so beloved of (inter alia) the SNP. If you think you’re NOT paying for this through the rent, you’re not really thinking: your landlord is not a philanthropist – or at least, not first and foremost.
“the more rented properties fall into the ownership of ex-tenants, the greater the need to build extensively will be.”
Why? Every rented property bought by its tenants is a family that no longer needs a rental property. One off the demand, one off the supply. The number stays the same.-
April 15, 2015 at 1:06 pm -
Well yes, Andrew, but as a landlord I have two incentives to do the repairs. One is generous tax relief on maintenance of the property and the other is my wish to keep my excellent tenants happy and laughing. At the medium and top end of the market I agree with Petunia: the system isn’t working too badly for tenants and landlords alike. No one would buy my property now as a rental investment because its value has risen hugely. Its currently providing a youngish, ambitious, couple the chance to enjoy themselves for a few years in a fairly central location they couldn’t buy into. They seem content enough: me too.
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April 15, 2015 at 3:38 pm -
I’m aware maintanence on the property is part of my rent, but were I paying a mortgage I’d also have to fork out for someone to come and do the repairs on top of the mortgage. As for the other point, surely if say fifty housing association tenants each bought the properties they were renting, that’s fifty rented properties no longer available for those on a waiting list?
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April 15, 2015 at 5:47 pm -
If the original teants stay tenants they aren’t available, either. There’s the same number of houses total.
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April 15, 2015 at 12:23 pm -
Well, I feel smugger than a brace of retired Civil Service cats who have just inherited a Creamery.
I rent a council bungalow. £315.00 per month. Lovely little place, just 50 yards from glorious dog walking country with an abundance of well maintained footpaths. Immaculate condition, gas central heating, double glazed, plenty of parking……..on the day I moved in the boiler was serviced and a new heat exchanger fitted. I wonder what that would have cost a private home owner?
A hollow square of twelve of them on the periphery of a proper little village in deepest Suffolk. The residents are 50% retired, 50% employed. Not a feckless scrote to be seen. I would bet my pension that none of them would be remotely interested in buying their place. The deal is just too good as it stands. Guaranteed long term tenancy but the benefit of only giving one month notice should you wish to move out.
Apparently these sort of places are not in demand as most applicants what to be in a town or city. Not me, I was offered it after just three weeks on the list – six others had rejected it apparently. I was not means tested, I was not a vulnerable disabled lesbian single parent of colour. I had been living on my little wooden boat for several years and getting a bit old for it. So, in their estimation I guess I was virtually homeless.
As for stigma. So what? I tell everybody – including very posh old money friends – I live in a Council House and have received nothing but, what appears to be, genuine admiration.
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April 15, 2015 at 12:35 pm -
Rent or buy should be a rational decision based on personal circumstances. Many would be better sinking their capital (and their bank’s) into a business and leaving the home buying until later. People moving from renting to buying doesn’t decrease supply though. Not sure of your economics when you say it will lead to a greater need to build than already exists.
Also there are some splendid affordable housing units. A friend of mine bought one which is nicer and roomier than my unaffordable one nearby. The scheme devised by the local authority is so stupid that there’s no constraint on immediate open market resale for a profit of c. £200,000! The basement parking houses the Bentleys and Porsches of the smart people who realised that and used their entire extended families to buy one after another. I was tempted to do it myself but the desire to die with a clear conscience prevailed.
Most people in this country are “bored” by economics. The first thing such people need is an employer who isn’t. The second is gratitude to him or her for sparing them life’s hard details. Sadly politicians – local and national – are either just as bored by the dismal science or think – like Frau Merkel – that politics should come before it. That’s like saying the desire to fly should take precedence over gravity!
The main problem in housing is the absurd notion that it’s a good, unlike apples or eggs, that makes people richer if it’s more expensive. It’s mostly a cost of living and therefore the cheaper the better. Government constrains supply through the planning system to please existing homeowners speculating on property values instead of enjoying their shelter. They are therefore themselves to blame for their children having less chance of a decent home. That government then nicks up to 40% of the artificially inflated value on transfer to said abused children doesn’t incentivise it correctly either! Remove planning controls, land would find its highest and best use over time and housing supply would eventually meet demand. Most producers of anything make far more from mass market sales than those to the limited number of rich people so once supply and demand matched, the next priority for house builders would be to compete on affordability in the true sense of the word.
If government wants to help, it should supply the infrastructure to allow London and other cities in housing crisis to be as densely occupied as Paris. In other words, do its job rather than bribe its favoured interest groups.
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April 15, 2015 at 1:27 pm -
I think Petunia means that a unit available for long term rent will disappear, and will be hard to replace. In the past scheme of things this was part of the Housing Association portfolio and at some point in the future would be available for reletting to some other punter looking for a secure tenancy, and paying a rent which over the years covered the construction costs. At least, that is how the HAs own lenders see it.
Selling at a discount removes the property from the rental market for good: well, sometimes, these ex council homes often end up as private tenancies on commercial rents, but those usually have a different clientele from that of the housing associations. Family A benefits and there is no immediate loss of a ‘home’, but future families B and C who might later rent the property lose out, unless more building is done.
I think there will be a gap in the market and those most likely to fall into it are precisely the hard working families that Cameron is always
banging on about.
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April 15, 2015 at 12:54 pm -
I think this must be the most misconceived election bribe ever. Over on the Mail some commenters are asking why housing association renters get a subsidy when hard working private tenants do not. Good question. Also if you are going to force some independent bodies i.e. housing associations to sell at a discount why not have a pop at the Grosvenor estate too? I think I know the answer to that one too.
Over at the Guardian they are worrying about the supply of accomodation at social – affordable in real terms- rents. There will be a net loss because building costs go up continually, and land in some areas is increasing unafordable: there is no way that Peabody could replace their charitably funded buildings in city centres now. All the stuff about reclaiming and developing brownfield sites is just pie in the sky. For some of that land the cleaning costs make no economic sense whatsoever and even if it’s worth it the timescale for doing it is years if not decades.
The Conservatives will just have to hope the grey Telegraph vote will hold up on the day.
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April 15, 2015 at 5:31 pm -
Aha! The Grosvenor Estate! I knew something was nagging at me!
“Grosvenor’s London holdings include Eaton Square in Belgravia, which is one of the city’s smartest addresses. The estate still owns the freeholds of most of its Mayfair and Belgravia properties, despite legislation passed in 1993 giving residents of blocks of flats the right to buy their freeholds. The Duke of Westminster resigned from the Conservative Party over this law change.
To date, Grosvenor has sold only 185 freeholds, although it says its approach to requests to enfranchise has changed. “We just get on with it,” says a spokesman.
http://www.standard.co.uk/home/who-owns-london-6308427.htmlI think there’s been some legal shenanigans since.
1993! Almost Thatcher time…
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April 15, 2015 at 1:16 pm -
In addition to it being all a bit “Something must be done”, I don’t really get the main point of this article. We all know that the housing market has been totally skewed by mindless political meddling with the financial levers on the demand side. This article seems to imply that the relatively minor supply side forcings from sales of council properties (minor with respect to the effect of planning restrictions on supply, that is) somehow creates a kind of monopolistic effect, pushing prices in the opposite direction to that which would be typically expected from expanding supply. (i.e. up instead of down)
Even if we were to conceed that there is some price damping effect in subsidised housing, we are looking only at the immediate effects. Bastiat addressed this short sighted approach to economics two hundred years ago:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mg9y5-4CQnsOn what level is subsidised housing a social good, in and of itself? It is merely getting one person to pay for somebody elses accomodation.
The attempt to slant this as a party political issue is disingenuous at best, given that the Tories are additionally subsidising mortgages upto £600k.
The whole shebang is an exercise in staged crisis management, lest we ever fall into thinking that we can run our own affairs.
– inflate prices by nailing the interest rate to the floor
– inflate demand by increasing population (bonus prize – replace the pesky electorate as a side effect!)
– reduce supply via Byzantine bureaucracy
– inflate prices by subsidising rent (via housing benefits, etc.)Which all goes towards fostering a sense that housing yourself and your family is a right that is owed, rather than a duty on one’s self.
Which further begs the question – is that a notional right (natural, god given), a citizens right (entitlement), or human (universal) right.
We are not presently allowed to discuss grown up things like that, however.
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April 15, 2015 at 5:52 pm -
I can’t comment on the economic theory, Paul.
‘-reduce supply by Byzantine bureaucracy’..
Maybe, & I’m no apologist for the Westminster’s requirements for planning authorities to have so many rules & regulations; and let’s put the Nimbys aside for a moment too.
Much housing growth is simply tacked on the edge of existing settlements that were built in the days of the horse & cart; settlements that weren’t bombed to dust by the Germans or ripped up by Prescott when he was given the box of toys to play with. Problems of a lack of infrastructure, schools & doctors are not the developer’s concern; the effect on existing traffic & air pollution is always claimed to be ‘marginal’, and that’s a local authority problem anyway.
I have the view that when we buy a plot we buy the entitlement to ‘quiet enjoyment’, but we don’t buy the view or the right to say what happens next door. And while work’s going on, there might be some dust & noise.
Free market housing development is I think about exploiting as easily & profitably as possible the understandable desire to live somewhere ‘nice’, and often means somewhere without local work opportunities. It is not about addressing housing need, and only under duress are social homes part of the plan.
Developers will always moan about restrictions on their activities, but after hearing of the thousands of unexercised permissions in my own planning authority area, I’m unconvinced.-
April 15, 2015 at 6:35 pm -
“Problems of a lack of infrastructure, schools & doctors are not the developer’s concern”
It is my contention that these are not affairs that the state should concern itself with either. Alas, that is the way we have been conditioned to think nowadays. The assumption now is that if you are against state education, you are against education. If you are against state healthcare, you are against healthcare. Likewise with roads, etc. The simple fact that most or all of these things owe their existence to, or have their origins in private enterprise is of little relevance, apparently.“Free market housing development is I think about exploiting as easily & profitably as possible the understandable desire to live somewhere ‘nice’, ”
So it should ideally be done as difficultly and unprofitably as possible? You know, “exploit” is a word that probably means something very different to you and I & is my favourite example of lefty newspeak. One of its dictionary definitions is “to make the best use of”. I rarely use it out of that context.“It is not about addressing housing need”
…and who, then, is the best arbiter of what my needs are? Am I best served by following my own interests, using my own money to buy or build my dwelling where I see fit, untrained amateur that I am in such logistical planning, or would I be better served by a ministry for low carbon commuting to allot the time I should be allowed to spend travelling between my rural idyll and chosen place of work, or re-allocate me to work in a location best fitted.There is a reason that developments tend to be in the wrong place – red tape. In a free market, people dont build houses where nobody wants to live & stay in profit for very long.
“only under duress are social homes part of the plan.”
Quite right! What are social homes, anyway? Do I live in an anti-social home? One of the points in the article addressed the poky dimensions of “affordable homes”, which it strikes me fall under that umbrella term. What other transactions would you expect to have a piggy backed “social” counterpart with little or no duress? Would you expect your barista to provide a proportion of “social” coffee subsidised by every private sector cup that gets sold? Should my local garage be expected to provide “Social” vehicles, that I ultimately end up paying for when I buy a new car? How about “social” trousers, or “social” camembert?-
April 15, 2015 at 8:19 pm -
The problem is, of course, it’s not a free market. Firstly, housing developers are not free to build where they want to build or where they think there is a customer-base. Infrastructure is almost all market-averse – if schools, doctors etc, had to exist in a free market, you can bet your bottom dollar they would provide the services wherever people wanted them, but the dead hand of the State and vested interests ensure that can never happen. It may be a market but it’s sure not a free one.
In the world of housing, ‘affordable’ is just a euphemism for cheap, but that’s OK – there is a need for cheap homes, so there should be some available, even of Wendy-house dimensions. However, what people forget is that private housing is actually a ladder – if a developer builds a £1m mansion, that will be bought by someone currently in a £750k detached, which will be sold to someone previously in a smaller £500k property etc. At the bottom of this food-chain is a ‘cheap’ property, perhaps a vacated rental property, which will probably then become occupied by someone on Housing Benefit. So, perversely, the Tory habit of only building ‘posh houses’ by posh builders for their posh mates results in almost a one-for-one increase in claims for Housing Benefit – funny old world, ain’t it ?
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April 15, 2015 at 8:41 pm -
All housing is affordable housing. If it aint – nobody’s gunna buy it, are they?
The question is more whether all (politicised) mortgage loans are repayable mortgage loans…
Affordable Housing is another “newspeak” term, suggesting that in a society of equals, those who can afford unaffordable housing should somehow be less equal (in terms of their rights) than than others.
I dont quite follow your chain of reasoning regarding the housing chain though. If more posh houses leads to a greater supply of cheap houses at the bottom of the ladder, one would expect a dampening effect on prices at the bottom.
Why would that increase the total number of people claiming housing benefit?
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April 15, 2015 at 8:51 pm -
The problem is the overall excess of demand over supply – all the ‘liberated’ homes at the bottom of the food-chain will have a long queue of folk wanting them, whether benefit funded or not, hence no diminishing of the prices there.
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April 15, 2015 at 9:25 pm -
Paul,
I don’t particularly disagree with your views in an ideal & perhaps insulated environment.
And as one now more than half a century out of his teens I’d be mightily offended to be thought of as having ‘lefty’ leanings, so no disagreement about ‘to exploit’.
The point is though that this is the world we inhabit. Nobody is going to dismantle it or introduce major reform, even if they may claim to. The fact that centuries ago roads, rail & canals were developed by private enterprise, though not without resistance from entrenched interests is of little relevance to us now. No matter our cynicism, & I’ve plenty, we have to make the present work, or at least try.
My own possibly poorly informed opinion is that our politicians are committed to actions which make things worse, while binding the limbs of those having to deliver anything ever tighter.
& for me that’s about it.
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April 15, 2015 at 2:06 pm -
A personal note. In this month in 1999 I sold my lovely cottage. I had my reasons: I was traveling long distance most weekends to see my then beloved, I was away a lot during the week because I had moved jobs and in fact had a small service flat as well in Leeds, and I had had a couple of break ins. I was told it was not feasible to rent it out. So, I sold it. I still remember walking round it, the bare house stripped of possessions, apart from a few things I had missed. My possessions were to remain in storage for a long time…
I don’t mind admitting I cried. Looking back now, I can see that my sixth sense, that gut instinct that we should all tune into, was yelling at me: NO! NO! NO!
I moved into my service flat full time and continued my commuting. And within a year the house prices boomed. I was dithering with my affairs and relationship, unsure of where I stood. Within a what seemed the blink of an eye the house I had bought for a reasonable price and had loved living in was way out of my budget, and had doubled in value. I felt crushed. Much more has happened since, a great deal of it unfortunate, and now it is suffice to say no I don’t see any way back onto the housing ladder without a miracle of Lottery style proportions. What the future holds, I don’t know. I shall just hang on in there and take comfort in Petunia’s words of the advantages of renting.-
April 15, 2015 at 5:01 pm -
Buy a boat. And cheer up.
It is all going to end badly for everybody involved (and everybody uninvolved, for that matter) if that is any consolation. We are up by about half a million on our property, but that will be scant consolation when the financial collapse eventually happens, with marauding bands of cannibals running the streets. Besides, there is no housing ladder. Even with that amount of equity, we could barely afford to move next door. Stamp duty, agents & lawyers fees, mortgage costs, etc would cost around £60-70k, which is about twice my salary. To move into a decent family sized house would require us to add another quarter of a million squids onto the mortgage. The property ladder – such as it exists, only has one direction for the majority of people; down and out. That is where we will most likely be going – out of London.
Besides, aren’t monks supposed to believe in miracles anyway? Probably where you are going wrong – the lottery is the devils work.
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April 15, 2015 at 7:27 pm -
I agree with a lot of that Paul. I too think it’s going to end in tears. A boat sounds lovely! In fact you are right in your last point too, a little more faith would be in order. I am working on it
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April 15, 2015 at 8:45 pm -
The thief comes only in order to steal and kill and destroy. I came that they may have and enjoy life, and have it in abundance (to the full, till it overflows)
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April 15, 2015 at 2:39 pm -
If we accept that the decision whether to rent or buy is a personal one, often driven by family habits or circumstance, the real issue in the UK property game is too much population chasing too few homes. As any economist will tell, that’s a standard recipe for price inflation where demand exceeds supply, affecting both purchase and rental pricing.
And yet, the tame idiot Nick Clegg is even proposing offering deposit-loans to enable ‘trapped’ young folk to leave the parental home in order to start renting – simply adding to that supply/demand problem – the parents won’t move out to vacate their now-underoccupied family home, so that adds just another home needed. And that’s without 300,000 net immigrants per annum !
Add to that a nation of Daily Fail Nimby-types who are happy for new building to happen anywhere, except where they live, so you can’t build your way out of the problem even if you wanted to.Right-to-Buy makes no difference to overall availability, it’s just a political football – an ironic one when you realise that Nicola ‘Krankie’ Sturgeon is so vehemently opposed to it, yet her own parents bought their council house in the Thatcher years. It’s almost like Ed ‘Brotherly Love’ Millipede complaining that some cunning folk ‘engineer’ the Inheritance Tax on their parents’ houses…… You couldn’t make it up.
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April 15, 2015 at 5:07 pm -
Speaking of the Krankies… A few years ago I read of some “Council Houses” being built in Scotland – land of the brave. The article was very proud and emphasised that these were the first council house to be built in many years anywhere in the UK. They quoted the costs of this fantastic project and how many houses they had built. I did the math and worked out that each house had COST £200,000 to build, which is completely ludicrous. A jobbing builder next to me bought an old house for about that. He knocked that one down and built two and sold themon and covered all his costs with the sale of just one of the two houses. He then had his house for free. “Council Economics” like “NHS Economics” are the arithmetic of the incompetently insane.
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April 15, 2015 at 6:48 pm -
Natalie Bennett is going to build us some nice sustainable plywood social eco homes – 500,000 of them for £2.7bn. Or for £60k each or whatever.
What’s with the reductionist math, anyway? Shouldn’t your sums be more inclusive? Are you Patriarchy or sommat…?
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April 15, 2015 at 8:24 pm -
I fear the muddle-headed, Putin-funded, Ms Bennett failed to factor in the cost of the land – even round where I live in the depressed post-industrial North, that starts at £100k a plot, more if you want more than a hankie of garden with it – and certainly no room for your compulsory token windmill.
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April 15, 2015 at 8:32 pm -
Putin funded? Tell me more…
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April 15, 2015 at 9:00 pm -
If you trace back the origins of the Greens/Ecology nuts far enough back, you will find much personal commonality with the Greenham Common group, the earlier CND protestors and now stretching forward into the ‘instant pop-up’ anti-fracking lobby – the one thing they all have in common is that their objectives work against the UK and to the sole advantage of far-eastern Europe, whether USSR or Putin’s Russia – same bear, different name.
Some call them ‘useful idiots’, some call them ‘sleepers’, but the origin of their command and funding is clear. As ‘Deep Throat’ advised at Watergate, “Follow the money”.-
April 16, 2015 at 12:57 pm -
So, not actually “Putin-funded” in any real current sense, then?
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April 16, 2015 at 1:04 pm -
Er, yes – the message is that the USSR/Russian system has consistently provided support to all those ‘useful idiot’ groups in pursuit of its ends – only the label changes.
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April 15, 2015 at 8:33 pm -
Up until the late 90s prices for the three houses we bought were always around 3 times my husband’s salary which was quite good but nothing spectacular, £30,000 in 1996. By 2007, just before the crash the house value had leapt to £225,000 from £68,000 in 1996 which even as a beneficiary I thought was ridiculous. unfortunately I didn’t manage to complete a sale before the crash and as I was moving I let it. Never, ever again it was my home, in excellent order, newly decorated and new carpets. Two years later it cost me £5,000 to put it in saleable order, it’s always bad landlords but there are some dreadful tenants too. I really dont know how people get started these days. It’s the huge discounts and short time of the tenancy I don’t understand. Should be at least five years for a small discount and on a sliding scale thereafter. No doubt the vultures will be out again to persuade people who can’t really afford it to buy but maybe some lessons will be learned this time.
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April 16, 2015 at 12:27 am -
When I started working in Borehamwood, 1975, I found some of my co-workers were getting good wages, and so were their sons and daughters, all living in the same council house, because there was no mechanism (ahem) of encouraging them to move on, once they were “prosperous”. So selling these houses to their sitters was a good way of generating more capital to build more council housing, no? What actually happened?
My family and my wife’s family had bad experiences with local councils: too whit, too whoo
My grandmother owned two houses in Whalley Range, plus a lot behind one of them. The lot was compulsory purchased by Manchester City Council, as they wanted to put an electricity substation on it; they assured her she couldn’t sell it for building, or build a house on it. The substation was about 6′ X 3′ X 2′ and sat in one corner of the lot. Google Earth now shows a house on the same lot. My grandmother died in 1967, and my mother sold the house in front of the lot for 2000 GBP. The area was home to hookers, and our other house was the subject of some attempted break ins, so in 1971, my mother & sister moved to Altrincham. According to a website recording house prices since around 2000, the house my mother sold for 2000 GBP sold for 1.1 M GBP. No, I can’t believe it either.
My wife is from Beverley in Yorkshire, and her father’s family owned about 20 acres close to the railway station; it was a small holding his aunt lived on. It too, was compulsory purchased and nothing was done with it for many years – now there’s a lot of houses on it.
But in Moss Side, which was knocked down in the mid-late 60’s there was a lot of compulsory purchase of freehold properties, and I remember a lot of letters in the Manchester Evening News from people saying, basically, they’d been screwed over. A lot of them, like a school friend of mine, wound up in Woodhouse Park, which is not a place you would want to visit.
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April 16, 2015 at 4:31 am -
Actually I believe the main drivers of both the increased demand for housing, the rising price of properties and the dearth of council/housing association properties have been the massively increased ease of ‘buy to let’ for the select few, housing benefit, and the ‘right’ of housing any young lady with the increase in divorce rate and /or the massively increased single parent numbers (often, at least it appears to be here locally, a ‘lifestyle choice’).
Here in rural northern city house prices were, and still are, driven up when buy-to-let-landlords (coincidentally the majority of which all appear to be ex-council senior ‘workers’) compete for properties. They can, will, and do (and always did) receive considerably larger mortgage amounts on the same property due to their ‘guaranteed’ income. An example? A terraced four bedroomed Edwardian house offered for $250000 was competed over by two families and three landlords. The landlords drove the price up to £375000 based solely on the fact they would, and did, divide the property into eight let rooms with income guaranteed to be the housing benefit minimum. Every single house, down to ‘one bedroomed/bedsit starter’ homes is competed for thus driving the family looking for a home to ….. let the very house they could have afforded.
Why don’t they approach the housing associations/council? Well because every property locally has been allocated to single mothers (entire streets consist of teenage mothers, multiple kids and multiple transient partners).
Me? I’m a believer in the free market. Remove .gov from what is no longer a market at all and prices ‘would’ drop. Locally the lowest a ‘room in a shared house’ is £75 per week, as that is what benefits will support. Remove the automatic benefit prop and landlords incomes would not support their special-interest income and houses would become available at more reasonable prices. Then of course there may be the knock-on effect of making some young ladies think twice about “I got pregnant at school so’s to be able to get a house, get away from my mum and never have to work” – a direct quote that could have been taken from the majority here.
Why doesn’t the council build more? Well because the overwhelming proportions of its housing budget are spent on providing specialist ‘custom built, paid for and staffed’ homes for all those ‘allowed (ie. Kicked out) due to ‘care in the community’ (and incidentally providing many thousands of ‘jobs’ for all those young single ladies to work, less than 16 hours a week so it doesn’t affect their full benefits, that take up the bulk of housing association properties). Well that and ‘the immigrants/travellers/etc.’ who ‘must be a priority’ as they have ‘no local family/ties/support network (well except for their family/friends/neighbours they brought with them who are also likewise a priority)’.
The only groups who suffer with all this are the normal working families, who can’t ever imagine affording even a starter home, and the young, white, British males who are the lowest/last on the points-score for housing and so either still live at home or in their hundreds on the street since of seven homeless shelters provided here only one was for males, and that was closed and transferred to a temporary accommodation for young single women with children until their new houses become available.
Right to buy? Yes, OK but only if you stop all the subsidies, tax-breaks and special interest meddling to allow some degree of fairness in all this social engineering idiocy. I won’t hold my breath.
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April 16, 2015 at 6:46 pm -
I think this sums it all up in a jolly little ditty?..
https://chascmusic.wordpress.com/2015/04/15/politicians-unplugged/
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April 18, 2015 at 12:29 am -
You say that the right to buy policy “consequently reduced the number of council properties available for those of no fixed abode”… no, not really… the number of council properties available for those of no fixed abode was already limited by the fact that the council properties were occupied by families that, by and large, had absolutely no intention of moving on anway. A ‘right to buy’ purchaser of a council property has exactly the same effect on council house supply as a tenant family with a perpetual right, and an intention to match, to occupy that council house.
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