Sunday 6th October

When I was much younger and an active member of the Labour Party I met, among many others, a really interesting old Socialist.  At that time there was talk of nationalising the banks (if only) and raising the higher rates of Income Tax to 75% from the measly rate of 60%.  But instead of all that stuff, my old Socialist friend said the only thing that really mattered was housing.  He insisted that this was and always had been not only the biggest problem facing poor people, but the root cause of inequality and working class crime.   If only people were assured of decent affordable housing the other problems would largely sort themselves out.  At that time councils were busy building loads of housing, but this tended to be blocks of flats on huge estates, which ended up rapidly becoming new urban slums.

Then along came Thatcher and she encouraged councils to sell all their council housing.  Great for those individuals who made a profit by buying at a discount; the problem is that every profit results in some-one else’s loss.  In this case the next generation of young couples trying to start a family.  While house prices were quite low and inflation wiped away huge chunks of your mortgage this worked.  But now we have the situation where people can languish on council waiting lists for years, or aspiring home-owners spend a fortune on ever-increasing rents and see their hopes of ever owning disappearing fast.

The Tories latest wheeze, to guarantee 20% of the property price, will not solve the problem.  For a lucky few who get in quick maybe, but long-term it will just push up prices far higher.  It also does nothing for those too poor to ever be able to buy.

The answer is to build and build and build houses.  Encourage the big housebuilders to build as there will still need to be more private houses.  Stop any further sales of council property.  Pump billions into the Housing Associations, provided they build lots of reasonable rented houses.   The down-side will be that like all interventions this will affect the price of houses.  Hopefully stopping them rising so fast, but also no great drop either.

It really isn’t fair for our (my) generation to have lots of assets at the expense of the next one.  And the practice of private landlords buying cheap and renting high should also be controlled.  After a few years of high owner-occupation we have slipped back to the sixties where only the wealthy had houses.  Only difference is there is precious little decent cheap rental property around.  Thankyou Mrs Thatcher.