We need social housing!
It’s been fun going through my old blog, but also frustrating. So many politicians promising to fix things, which should have been fixed decades before. The lack of affordable housing is one of the most frustrating.
Originally posted to my Blog in February 2014 – About 500 words
With increasing numbers of people in minimum pay jobs we need social housing more than ever. Not with rents at 80% of the market rate, or where people get thrown out if they’re suddenly too rich, or too poor to live in them, but long term family homes; secure homes. Homes where people feel their kids are secure, have a decent local school and they can put down roots.
The Tories are ideologically incapable these days of building them, Cameron’s head would explode at the concept. Labour went through three terms of government and turned a deaf ear to the subject. Not difficult to understand why! They build social housing and along come the next lot of Tories who sell it off cheap to buy votes.
Very good at selling off what doesn’t belong to them are the Tories!
So we had twenty years or so where no one really built anywhere near the number of houses for rent that were needed.
You might think that with all the left wing think tanks someone would have thought of a way to finance social housing in a way that would keep the grubby fingers of the Tories off it. But despite lots of nice words, by the time Gordon Brown left No10, Labour had built……… well bugger all to be honest!
People on minimum wages aren’t going to get a mortgage; they’re unlikely to be able to afford the rent in most London boroughs. But I know a few Tories who are feeling uncomfortable about the simple fact that.
Every family needs somewhere safe to live!
We’ve all seen the problems of ‘sink estates’, where no one wants to even walk through the place, much less live there. I won’t name the most infamous, but it’s worth pointing out that Thatcher and her right to buy created most of the problems. The best were sold off; let’s face it no one is going to buy the worst housing stock. So councils were left with the worst houses and because they had less to offer and growing housing lists….councils ended up with problem tenants in already dilapidated housing.
Gone were the working families with 2.4 kids and a Mondeo to go out in on Sundays, they’d all sold their council house and moved to the south coast on the profits.
Problem families by their very nature came top on the need for housing, so the housing that was left after the great Tory housing theft was filled with them….. Sink estates were born.
We can’t carry on like this! Labour needs to work out how to build ‘Tory Proof’ social housing and they need to commit to building on a huge scale.
Every family needs somewhere safe to live!
© Ed Cowling ~ February 2014
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