Says a true Labourite who is therefore now an Independent MP, in this letter to yesterday's Guardian:
Your report on the “shell-shocked” state of the private housebuilding sector (Persimmon cuts value of its land bank by £600m, October 28), followed by your online report (Home repossessions and arrears rise as borrowers struggle, October 28) demonstrate starkly how housing demand and affordable supply are chronically out of phase.
Yvette Cooper, the former minister for housing - now the friendly face of Treasury policy on helping the hard-pressed with hope over homes - regularly pops up all over the media pledging ministers are doing all they can. They are not.
Yesterday her Treasury colleague Dr Ian Pearson responded to my written questions asking the chancellor if he would make it his policy to take possession of homes on which mortgage-holders with Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley have defaulted and allocate the properties to those on the waiting list for social housing with the negative: “Northern Rock and Bradford & Bingley are run at arm’s length from the Government, on commercial principles.”
What is the benefit to taxpayers of keeping these banks alive, if they cannot be directed to helping people in dire housing difficulty? Dr Pearson added: “The Government have made increasing the provision of social housing a priority … In England, the Government are investing £8 billion over the next three years in affordable housing - a 50 per cent increase over the last three years.”
The situation is there are empty houses and flats and homeless people, which could be a win-win opportunity, but ministers refuse to require banks capitalised by taxpayers’ money to match the two together. Why not?
Dai Davies MP
Independent, Blaenau Gwent
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Surely if you repossess homes and reallocate them to homeless people, you just create the same number of homeless people.
ReplyDeleteIf you repossess a home to allocate it to homeless people, you have to evict the people living in the home. They will then, presumably, go on the social housing waiting list.
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