This is not intended to be a political post but a reality check on the provision of publicly-funded housing. H.
The theory behind Margaret Thatcher's sell-off of publicly funded council housing under the "right to buy" scheme was that poor people would buy their houses and then the structural factors keeping them poor would vanish in a puff of smoke, and the poor people would stop being poor (also, and as a completely unintentional side-effect, owning a home is correlated with voting for Tories and renting is correlated with voting Labour, but again, that was totally not what old Maggie was thinking, honestly).
The right-to-buy programme helped fuel the housing bubble in which quasi-state media like the BBC and Channel 4 ran dozens of hours of programming a week urging people to apply for credit, "do up" flats, and flip them to other people who'd applied for credit and wanted to "do up" the flat, because that couldn't possibly ever go wrong.
Today, 40% of that publicly built, publicly subsidised housing stock is in the hands of private landlords. Council housing schemes have been largely replaced by vouchers that poor people can use to pay their rents, and rents – uncontained by public subsidy – have soared, representing a wealth-transfer to landlord from both poor people and the taxpayers who fund the vouchers.
Landlords continue to snap up ex-council housing. Poverty in the UK is at levels unseen since the time of Dickens. Housing poverty is a major co-contributor to food poverty and other forms of dire privation. Moreover, the 40% figure is low, because many private landlords don't disclose that they're letting out their flats.
Continue reading
No comments:
Post a Comment