From the BBC. This is the clearly wrong part:
David Cameron is to pledge to boost the "right to buy" scheme established by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. He will announce proposals to increase discounts offered to tenants in England who want to buy their council house...
This part seems right but isn't:
The government's aim is to build one new home - to be let at up to 80% of the market rent - for each property sold.
Selling off council housing for cheap is the easy part, but what are the chances that they won't get round to building any new stuff? Fairly high. In any event, it would make far more sense just to allow more new stuff to be built, and if people want to move out of council housing and buy themselves a new house, well great, that's a better result for all concerned.
Sunday 2 October 2011
Half wrong half right
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9 comments:
I wonder why the gov't are doing this. History tells us that owner-occupiers no more automatically vote Tory than council house tenants vote Labour. Perhaps it's simply to try and halt the decline in the proportion of OOs caused by ridiculously high house prices.
Mind you, I have a brilliant idea to achieve this aim: extend the right to buy to anyone in receipt of housing benefit.
B: "extend the right to buy to anyone in receipt of housing benefit."
Good call, and can we give them the same discount as for those in social housing? No doubt most landlords will then stop renting to people on HB, so rents will fall markedly, for claimants and non-claimants alike.
Wasn't there a scheme in the 1960s(?) where the government gave the right to buy land from private owners? I don't know any of the details but I recall reading or hearing about an Oxford college that had been hammered by it because it had owned half the city or half the prime land just outside or something.
B: "extend the right to buy to anyone in receipt of housing benefit."
What about all the young working people in private (often shared) rents who have never received any benefit? Ultimately they have a stake, via the taxes they pay, in council housing. So why should they accept them being sold off at a discount when they are also deprived of opportunities to buy?
Another alternative: say they are proposing to sell the council houses at 80% market value and say the average council house is worth £100,000. Why not offer every current council house tenant £20,000 on condition that they move out of social housing?
Are there any desirable council houses left? All the social housing round here is housing trust owned & managed, a few council blocks of flats remain but no one wants to live there, still less buy one. so in Kent it won't make a lot of difference anyway. All the decent houses were bought years ago.
QP, I think you missed the point a bit.
J, that's my understanding. Not a problem, Dave will just have to offer even bigger discounts.
What with Nick Boles proposing an LVT-lite,and Cameron coming up with this stupid scheme, it looks like the Tories have finally rumbled that their trust-the developer housing policy does n't work.
Ahem!
there are a million empty homes in the UK.
How will building more homes make any difference?
I'm astonished at how you continue with this dissonance?
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