Labour is returning council houses to their proper purpose
After more than four decades, Labour is returning council houses to their proper purpose.
But you wouldn’t know it from the BBC News website: “Tenants may not be able to buy new council homes” warns the dour headline – misleading the reader, in fact, because tenants should not be able to buy council homes at all!
They are social housing that should be passed between families that need them.
It should be obvious to most people by now that Margaret Thatcher’s plan to sell council houses was not a good idea. Homelessness has rocketed, partly because cheap-to-rent council houses are no longer readily available, and partly because those that were sold have passed to private landlords whose rents are sky-high.
So This Writer welcomes the announcement that Angela Rayner wants to put a stop to the Right to Buy scheme.
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Quite right to do so
I saw it come and I saw it go. It was ended in Scotland in 2016 and not a moment too soon. The older, and often elderly, bought their houses at maximum discount back in the 80s after many years on the list to get the home they were in. They’d probably waited 25 years to get the house with three rooms and a garden they’d needed 20 years before! But, once they were there, they would never move to a smaller place – nor would any other tenant. The very best of the housing stock was sold off (who’d buy the damp and decrepit flats they had?) leaving awful housing for the rest and not even enough of that! The building boom decades earlier for council homes was in response to the scandal of slum landlords like Rachman. Now, 40 years on from RTB, we are right back there again. Even if the councils had been allowed to keep the small amounts these properties sold for they MIGHT have been able to maintain the rest of their stock, perhaps even build a few as well!
The quality of ex council homes has plummeted as they went from original owners into the hands of the new slum landlords. Nice areas went down due to lack of maintenance and landlords’ unwillingness to remove problem tenants. It brought money direct to the treasury to the detriment of the most deprived areas. A truly Thatcherite way of thinking..
Which was stopped in Scotland in 2016, not being hampered by Tories.