The Tory decision to charge people £86,000 up-front for social care casts a new perspective on the Conservative Party’s policy on housing from the 1970s onward.
Margaret Thatcher’s government was very hot on giving us all the “right to buy” our homes, including council houses, thereby reducing the amount of social housing available and increasing homelessness.
The buyers were told the purchases would be investments that they could pass on to their successors.
Thatcher’s – and successive – Conservative governments were also opposed to state-run social care. They passed it into private hands with a series of increasingly-inadequate funding agreements that have led to the plan in the Health and Care Bill.
So it seems the plan has always been to fool working-class people into spending their money on houses that would be taken away from them again in their old age; if these dwellings had remained as council housing, it would not have been possible to demand them as payment.
And now we are seeing messages like this.
My Dad was a working class Tory his entire life until he got Alzheimer's and is now too ill to vote, the party he voted for has now taken his only asset to pay for his care, there's a lesson there somewhere, unfortunately he'll never understand it.
— 🇵🇸Sir Norman of Nowhere, KBE, CSE.💚🏴☠️ (@Normanjam671) November 24, 2021
How many millions of people like Sir Norman of Nowhere’s Dad are there, out in the United Kingdom right now, ignoring the fact that their own political decisions will ruin their retirements (or earlier life, depending on whether they need social care before then)?
What a breathtakingly evil long-term plan.
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Extra cash for MPs who rent: it’s not exactly a backhander because it’s in line with Parliamentary rules – but the practice certainly shouldn’t be.
Do Tory MPs receive a manual on election, entitled Tories On The Take: How To Do It?
Here’s the latest:
17 MPs claim rent on a London home they own while renting another in London to live in, analysis by Indy shows https://t.co/GhFR00cK5C This is not against the rules and IPSA, which makes them, was warned it would happen says Times which counts 14 https://t.co/1JqA4uGq6l
The Independent, which lists 16 of the accused MPs, states:
Over the past five years, 16 MPs have claimed over £1.3m in taxpayer-funded rent while collecting thousands rent letting out properties in the capital, according to submissions published by the Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) and the register of members’ interests.
Claims for rent are permitted under Ipsa rules, which state that MPs can receive taxpayer funding for “rental payments and associated costs”. An Ipsa document in 2017 conceded that some arrangements could be controversial – but advised against any change to the rules.
“We recognise that there can be a perception of personal gain if an MP receives rental income from their own property while living in an Ipsa-funded flat,” it said. “However … We do not want to judge an MP’s private arrangements and whether or not they should live in a property they own.”
That may be about to change.
If a member of Parliament is able to carry out their work from their own home, but rent accommodation and charge it to the public purse while taking rent income from their own property – and the rental income means they profit from the arrangement, then they are running an expenses scam and it should stop.
That’s how members of the public are likely to see it.
They may have a good point, I think.
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A second application has been lodged for permission to appeal against a decision not to allow a second inquest into the death of Jodey Whiting.
Mother Joy Dove has made the application after an earlier attempt was refused by the High Court on October 11.
The High Court had previously found that new evidence that had been discovered since the first inquest did not require a fresh inquest to be held in the interests of justice.
Ms Whiting died in February 2017 after the DWP withdrew her benefits for not attending a Work Capability Assessment.
At the time of the assessment, she was housebound with pneumonia after having been in hospital, and had found out that she had a cyst on the brain.
The permission to appeal application is brought on the grounds the High Court was wrong in that finding, and that it was also wrong to find that Article 2 of the Human Rights Act, the right to life, was not engaged by the circumstances of Ms Whiting’s death.
Ms Dove said:
“It seems to me that there were obvious failings in the way the DWP treated Jodey, which were proved and documented by the Independent Case Examiner, and it is ridiculous that this has not been fully and publicly investigated.
“How can lessons be learned, and future tragedies prevented, if no one examines this properly?”
Merry Varney, of law firm Leigh Day added:
“The possible link between the DWP making repeated errors in the handling of Jodey’s welfare benefits claim shortly before her death, which left her without income, housing benefit and council tax benefit, and her death has never been publicly investigated.
“Having obtained the Attorney-General’s permission to apply to the High Court for a second inquest, it is disappointing the High Court rejected our client’s application on all grounds and we hope the Court of Appeal will allow her the opportunity to overturn this decision.”
Ms Whiting took her own life on February 21, 2017, after being told that her Employment and Support Allowance payments would stop, along with associated Housing Benefit and Council Tax benefit payments, because she had not attended a work capability assessment.
Ms Varney, commenting on the case earlier, had said: “Jodey had requested a home visit for the WCA as she rarely left the house because of her severely poor health. She suffered multiple physical and mental health difficulties, took 23 tablets a day and was entirely dependent on welfare benefits.
“She had made in clear in her request for a home WCA that she had “suicidal thoughts a lot of the time and could not cope with work or looking for work”.
“After Jodey’s death, an inquest was held three months later, 24 May, 2017, which lasted less than an hour. The coroner declined to consider the potential role of the DWP and their acts or omissions in Jodey’s death. Jodey’s family were unrepresented and were unaware that they may have been entitled to publicly funded legal representation.
“After the inquest a report by an Independent Case Examiner concluded that the DWP had made multiple significant errors in how it treated Jodey. Some of the failings had not been known to Jodey’s family, who were horrified to learn how many failings had occurred in the handling of Jodey’s benefits.
“The opinion of an independent Consultant psychiatrist, sought by Jodey’s family, confirmed that the DWP’s failings would probably have had a substantial effect on Jodey’s mental state at the time she took her own life.
“Joy argues that the manner in which Jodey was treated by the DWP, and in particular the withdrawal of her ESA, caused or materially contributed to her death and that, had this not occurred, Jodey’s death would not have occurred when it did.”
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Activists from Insulate Britain have rekindled their campaign for better home insulation by supergluing themselves to roads in Liverpool Street, Limehouse Causeway, Bishopsgate and Upper Thames Street.
What a nuisance, right?
Wrong. Well, it’s wrong if you love your relatives and friends, anyway.
And it seems people are getting it – because members of the public reportedly told the protesters they were “doing a good job”.
It seems the organisation has gained a lot of ground since a London mother tried to run over members in a Range Rover because she wanted to drive her son to school:
🎥 Footage has emerged of the shocking moment a raging mum drove into Insulate Britain protestors who were blocking the road in her Range Rover 👇 pic.twitter.com/KOvIHICcSk
We are aware of footage relating to an incident during a protest in Stonehouse Lane, Purfleet on 13 October. We have identified those believed to be involved and our enquiries are ongoing.
… so This Writer is sure we’ll hear more about that incident in due course.
But what is Insulate Britain all about? And what does insulation have to do with disrupting road traffic?
Vox Political had a chance to find out when This Writer interviewed Insulate Britain’s Steve Gower – appropriately enough, on a road. I recorded the chat, so you can hear it right here:
If you are deaf, please find a text version of the interview below:
Who are you? That’s a good start, isn’t it?
Yeah. I’m Steve Gower. I’m a volunteer advocate for the homeless, I’m currently unemployed, and I’m working – working! – I’m also a member of Insulate Britain.
Right. So what is Insulate Britain?
Insulate Britain is a group of individuals and a campaign that have made a demand to the government to insulate all the council and social housing properties in this country and to provide a meaningful statement to prove that they are serious about reducing the amount of CO2 in the environment [in accordance with] the Paris Agreement of 2015 that they’ve signed up to, by 2025.
How are you doing it?
By completing non-violent direct action around the M25 and surrounding areas.
Why around the M25?
Because unless a financial crisis happens as in disruption to the Capital, the government will not listen.
That’s the important point, I think, because we see it on the news – well, we do; you go and do it – and there’s a kind of disconnect, I suppose, because of the way it’s reported. We need to know what the necessity is. People need to find out why you are doing the things you are doing.
I agree with you there. We made a statement – I personally posted a written statement to the government in August, where our demands were exactly that – the insulation and retrofit of all council and social properties to be completed. Not just talked about, because we’ve been promised this before.
Over 20 years ago, the government of the day recognised that 50,000 people in the UK were losing their lives through the cold in their own homes. 20 years on, nothing substantial has changed. We have got the leakiest homes, not only in the whole of the UK, but in Europe as well.
Would it be spectacularly expensive for them to do? Is there any financial disincentive for them to do it?
It’s not going to be cheap – but my personal answer to that is [to ask] how much value you put on the life of your child, the life of your grandchild, or the life of your grandmother or grandfather.
In financial terms every house is different, but it has been estimated between £500 billion and £1 trillion or £1.1 trillion over a 10-year period.
Okay, but against that you balance the lives that are saved, and of course if you wanted to put it in money terms, a life has a huge economic value. So the economic argument doesn’t work anyway because it’s the equivalent of cutting off your nose to spite your face.
The other figure is that for every pound that is spent retrofitting and installing insulation into people’s properties, you will gain £3.20 back.
Yes, there you go.
But I’m not in it for the money. I’m in it for my children and my children’s children.
Quite, but I think it is worth putting out there: there is no economic argument for it anyway.
If there was an economic argument about this, because we’ve put ourselves in debt, this country has been in debt since 1690. We have found money when we needed it in the past 3- or 400 years, for disasters or even wars. This is a humanitarian crisis on our island.
That’s right, because the UK of course is the home of the magic money tree.
[Laughter] You said that, not me!
I’ve been saying it for a while now. So you’ve been doing these demonstrations on the M25, these acts to disrupt, I suppose-
And for this conversation. You’re only talking to me now because of the fact that we’ve been on the roads for the last [few] weeks.
That’s exactly right.
I’ve been a ground worker in my past life. I’ve built houses in that lifetime. Those houses are not fit for purpose; they are as leaky as the ones I’ve mentioned before – we’ve got the leakiest properties in Europe. New properties today are within that scope as well. They will need retrofitting in the future. They are today not fit for purpose.
Strangely enough I was hearing something on the radio about that, only the other day. The idea is that they put plans up for approval based on how a place will look and then they try to put everything into it afterwards. It’s always many years behind the times.
There are houses today – built – that are eco-friendly and have zero carbon emissions. Every house, by law, has to be rated from A to G. My personal property is a one-bedroom flat, category E. I don’t drive – I can’t afford to drive, unfortunately. But if you drive, a family car emits less CO2 than my flat over the course of a year.
Wow!
Also, as I mentioned before, I’ve built properties – as the boys and the girls are doing now in the construction industry – that are not fit for purpose. With this – what we’re asking for – are proper insulation and retrofit, which will mean quality jobs, valuable jobs, and houses that will be fit for purpose, for not only the next 10 or 20 years but possibly into the next century.
How proud we would be of that! How proud a job, and significant, that you are building not only a house, and a home, for a family, but saving the planet as well.
Right. That’s what you’ve been doing; those are your reasons. What has the response been from the authorities?
We’ve had no response other than a mention in the Tory Party conference from Boris himself, calling us this, that and the other…
What an honour!
What an honour, yeah, it has been! I, and many of my comrades and friends on this campaign, may – probably will – end up in jail for our actions: non-violent, direct action.
But we are just the messengers. The real traitor in this episode is our government. They are traitors to our country by knowingly allowing people to die prematurely this winter, as they have done for the last 20 or 30 years.
There are estimates of tens of thousands of people living in fuel poverty who won’t be alive this time next year and we are the ones who will probably end up in the dock and in jail. That just tells you what sort of country we are in today.
And that’s the treachery of it as well, of course, that instead of taking you seriously, they are punishing you for doing something – for drawing attention to something that they should have been doing anyway.
They’ve got one job. For the safety and the well-being of the people.
Yeah, but they’re not very good at it…
Do you have a message for people out there who might be a bit confused about what’s going on?
We’ve got [a few] days now for the government to make up its mind what it’s going to do with our actions and the reasons behind them. It’s also an opportunity for the population of this country to find out exactly what we’re asking for.
We’ve had accusations of not letting ambulances through. There’s footage – I’m in one of the clips actually, where we let an ambulance through. That is the policy of Insulate Britain – to let any blue light through our barricade.
So you’ve got propaganda against you as well, then.
We apologise for temporarily halting the lives of individuals getting to school, getting to work and what have you; I have been, in the last 20 years, obviously, a parent; I have worked all the hours God sent on a construction site and had injury at work as well, and still gone back to work.
Where it has got me is where I’ve built houses that aren’t fit for purpose. I’ve built schools that I couldn’t afford to send my son to. And I’ve built shopping malls that I couldn’t afford to shop at.
You are looking at Christmas Future. I don’t want you to have the same future that I am living today. When I left school there was one job to every 10 individuals. They wrote a song about it.
Today the tables are turned. The people and the workforce, the working class, have got more power today than they’ve ever had because of the circumstances – what’s gone on for the past two years. They shouldn’t be rushing to work. They should be given a decent wage and decent working rights. That needs to be told as well.
This will not only provide quality jobs, but we demand that we want quality products as well.
Four years ago an incident shook the country, most of Europe and the world, and that was Grenfell. The materials that go on our houses tomorrow have got to be fit for purpose and not substandard. That is also what is on the agenda here.
How they do it – and this is my personal belief but I think there’s a lot of support for it – is we look after our own – we get local craftsmen, local jobs, local workers, local builders to do our work for us. We don’t want the corporates involved, and that includes the materials as well.
They’ve got to be sustainable materials, and certainly not the ones we’ve seen – unfortunately – in Grenfell.
Absolutely right. Okay?
Thank you.
That’s cool.
AFTERWORD:
Over 50 Insulate Britain activists have been arrested after peaceful protests in the City and Canary Wharf. No investment bankers have ever been arrested for laundering money for Mexican cocaine cartels or fixing interest rates.
Trying to save many thousands of lives – and attack climate change – by improving home insulation=BAD. Actually aiding drug and financial crime=GOOD. That’s apparently according to the people who guard the law.
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Michael Gove: he has taken a lot of money from property developers and now he is Housing Secretary. But we should not shout “corruption” until there is actual evidence of it.
This Site is all in favour of accusing Tory ministers of corruption when they do something wrong.
But we need to give them a chance to actually commit an offence before we start criticising them.
Michael Gove is a deeply dodgy character for many reasons – some of which have been discussed in detail on This Site.
And it is true that in the run-up to the announcement that he would become the new Housing Secretary in Boris Johnson’s Cabinet reshuffle, he took £120,000 in donations from property developers. That amounts to 87 per cent of the donations he has taken in 2021 so far.
Some people have claimed that this creates a conflict of interest, and it certainly does make it possible.
However:
Gove’s first act in his new job has been to suspend work on controversial planning reforms that were accused of giving “too much power to developers”.
Try as I might, I can’t fit that into any narrative that puts him at their beck and call.
Of course, suspension is not rejection, and if he reinstates the scheme, or comes up with one that offers more opportunities for the businesspeople to make cash, then he will deserve all the brickbats we can throw at him.
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Jenrick and Johnson: both had personal connections with property developer Richard Desmond. It has been suggested that Jenrick only stayed in his post after the Westferry scandal broke because Johnson also had a hand in the decision.
Robert Jenrick, the Tory Housing Secretary best-known for fiddling an inner-London development in order to deprive the local council of a huge fee, has been kicked out of Boris Johnson’s Cabinet – and not a moment too soon.
Not only did he override both the local planning authority and the Independent Planning Inspectorate to grant planning permission for Richard Desmond’s controversial Westferry development, despite it having been found not to meet acceptable planning standards…
… but he did it to allow the developer to avoid paying a £45 million levy to Tower Hamlets Council that he had decided should not apply – and then used that as his reason for granting the application.
Text messages between Desmond and Jenrick show the former Express newspaper owner and pornographer pressured the minister to grant planning permission, saying: “We don’t want to give Marxists loads of doe [sic] for nothing!”
He broke Covid-19 lockdown rules to travel between his three homes – and then insisted that young people should adhere to restricts, even though there was no evidence to suggest they did not.
He corruptly induced a fellow MP to approve a grant for his constituency totalling £237 per person recently – but negotiated Covid-19 support for the people of Manchester down to £7.95 per person.
So it is undoubtedly good that Boris Johnson has finally had the guts to kick Jenrick out of the Cabinet.
The only question is, why did it take so long?
Was it because Johnson himself was also involved in helping Desmond? I guess we may never know.
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Stop evictions: this was a protest in 2016 – before Covid, furloughs, and eviction bans. The question is: will the Tories do anything to stop evictions in 2021? My guess is they won’t.
The short-sightedness of the voting public can be astonishing.
As a result of the Covid-19 furlough scheme that asked people to live on 80 per cent of their normal income, families – that’s right, families – are facing eviction from their private-sector rented homes when the eviction ban ends at the end of this month.
According to Citizens Advice, half a million private renters were behind with their rent in January. That figure is only likely to have increased.
Average debt is £730, but the total amount of arrears is said to be £370 million, and around 150,000 people are likely to face eviction after the end of the month.
More than 2,000 possession orders were made between October and December last year – and those tenants are likely to be forced out of their homes in June.
They had a stay of execution (of those orders) because of the eviction ban that stops landlords from sending in the bailiffs and obliges them to give six months’ notice of court action.
Of course, all that ends on May 31, meaning hundreds of thousands of people could be homeless by June 2.
They are typically in insecure jobs, often on zero-hours contracts, and in industries that have suffered disproportionately over the past year.
Strange, isn’t it? Back in, say, the 1970s, an entire family could afford to mortgage a house, cover their living expenses and enjoy a decent holiday, all on the earnings of just one parent.
Now, most people can’t afford to rent a home, even with both parents and all the children (who can legally do so) working.
That’s 40 years of Tory – or fake-Tory – government for you.
And last week, I’m willing to bet, a significant proportion of those facing eviction voted for the party that put them in danger of it – the Tories.
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Construction site: enjoy the photograph because you won’t be seeing many of these under Tory rule!
More than 1.1 million houses for which planning permission was granted since the Tories retook power in 2010 have not been built.
They just can’t get developers to put these houses up, despite promise after promise that they would.
The Local Government Association says only by building more council homes can the housing crisis be tackled and the government’s housebuilding target be met.
It is calling for councils to be given the powers to kickstart a social housebuilding programme of 100,000 homes a year.
Polling by the association has found that 80 per cent of MPs and 88 per cent of peers think councils should have more financial freedoms and powers to build new homes.
Here in Wales, one of the Tory local election promises was to build 100,000 houses over the next decade, including 40,000 social homes – and somebody must have believed them because they won 16 seats – five more than last time.
But if they haven’t built a million homes in the last 11 years across the whole of the UK, why should we believe they’ll build 100,000, just in Wales, in the next 10?
We shouldn’t.
It’s just another Tory con. It’s past time we stopped believing them.
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Houses: are their mortgages competitive or will buyers become ‘mortgage prisoners’ because of decisions made, not by them, but by the Tory government?
Is this part of that “bonfire of red tape” that David Cameron and his cronies were trumpeting a few years ago?
I wonder how many of the quarter-of-a-million so-called “mortgage prisoners” merrily voted Tory in the belief that this meant they would find it easier to switch lenders.
And I wonder how they feel, now they know that the opposite is the case.
The salt in their wound, of course, is the fact that it is the Tory government itself that sold their mortgages to unregulated lenders – and is now blocking a change in the law that would help them.
Tougher affordability checks have made it hard to change lenders if a home owner’s mortgage is large compared to the price of their house, if they are close to retirement or have bad credit.
While many lenders are able to switch to different deals with the same lenders, that have lower interest rates, around 250,000 are blocked from doing this because the lenders to whom the Treasury sold their mortgages don’t offer such deals.
The upshot is that they are stuck forking out two or three times what they would pay in a competitive mortgage.
The House of Lords has passed an amendment to the Financial Services Act to cap rates for borrowers in that position, but government whips are instructing Conservative MPs to vote against the amendment on Monday.
Chancellor Rishi Sunak reckons capping the interest rate would be “unfair” on other borrowers.
I don’t see why. How is it unfair to let these people have the same deal as everybody else?
Or does Sunak mean it would be unfair on the lenders to deprive them of one- or two-thirds of their profits?
Should we perhaps be asking questions about how the Treasury chose these particular firms to receive these particular mortgages?
Is this another aspect of the lobbying scandal that we have yet to grasp?
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Rent strike: students are permanently penniless. When you see how much this year’s alumni have had to pay – for NOTHING – you’ll understand why they’re raging.
Those Tories really are selective about who they help with the costs of Covid-19, aren’t they?
I remember being a student. Most of the time, I hardly had two pennies to rub together. The rented accommodation available to us was – mostly – diabolical. And expensive.
One place was damp. It gave me bronchitis.
But at least I got to live in it!
Since the Covid crisis started, according to a survey, the
average student has so far paid £1,621 in rent for unrefunded empty rooms.
In total, according to advice website Save the Student,
university students have wasted nearly £1bn on empty rooms in flat shares and halls of residence that they have been unable to use because of coronavirus restrictions this academic year.
The website estimates rents are so high that they take up three-quarters of their maintenance loans at an average of £146 per week, so it’s no wonder that
Students’ anger with high rents… boiled over on UK campuses this term as students launched the largest rent strike in 40 years.
There has been a patchy response from universities, private halls of residence and landlords, with some refusing discounts while others have offered full rebates.
I have a lot of sympathy for the universities, and for the landlords – as well as for the students themselves.
It is unfair for the accommodation providers to foot the bill for thousands of empty rooms when the situation was thrust on them by the government – albeit admittedly in response to a nationwide pandemic.
It just happens to be even more unfair for them to demand that students pay the bill, rather than the government. This is loaned money, remember – they have to pay it back, plus interest, over a period of decades to come.
Businesses – especially the bigger ones – have received huge subsidies, and employees have had 80 per cent of their wages paid by a government “furlough” scheme. Why weren’t students added to that, at the very least?
The Guardian story tells us the government has provided students with £70 million in hardship funding, which seems to fall quite a long way short of what they’ve had to shell out.
Considering the billions given to Tory cronies and their – let’s be honest – fake firms for nonexistent or inadequate Covid-related services, this is an insult to the next generation of the UK’s movers and shakers.
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