Policies create housing crisis

From: Coun Peter Gruen, Scrutiny Chair for Public Health, Leeds Council.

GOOD to see a real debate taking place about the housing crisis nationally and therefore locally.

I recently contributed to this by setting out how we should massively increase public social housing; both to buy and to rent.

Two Government policies could be scrapped immediately to help: first, the give-away 70 per cent ‘discount’ on the best council properties has exacerbated an already well acknowledged shortage with, in many cases, these houses finding their way into the pockets of private landlords; and secondly the pandering to ‘volume’ housebuilders by preventing councils’ from including a reasonable number of affordable homes in planning decisions.

Now the National Housing Federation’s study adds further qualitative evidence by telling us what we long suspected: it costs £21 a week more to house a family in a private-rented property than in a social home.

And the take by landlords in housing benefit has exploded from £4.6bn in 2008 to £9.3bn this year. They also confirm that it takes the proceeds from three forced sell-off of great social homes to replace just one property.

What conclusion can you possibly draw? The deliberate Government policy is to increase the demand by suppressing the supply of good quality public housing so that vast profits can be made by individual s at the expense of everyone seeking their own home for the first time.