Who Benefits?

David Cameron blustered and floundered away while failing to answer Dame Joan Ruddock's question about Housing Benefit. He cannot state the simple fact that the root of the problem is the sale of council housing. That policy compelled the State to make gifts of significant capital assets to people who were thus enabled to enter the property market ahead of private tenants who had saved for their deposits. And, as part of Thatcher’s invention of mass benefit dependency, it created the Housing Benefit racket, which is vastly more expensive than the maintenance of a stock of council housing.

I am a good Chestertonian in this as in most, though not quite all, matters. I would dearly love every household to have a base of real property from which to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty State. But within the practicalities of these things, there is also a very strong case that each locality should have a base of real property from which to resist both over-mighty commercial interests and an over-mighty centre.

Already, under New Labour, the powers that be apparently could not distinguish between the respectable working class and the characters from Shameless. So council and housing association tenants, whose rents will go up in April in line with the September inflation figure even though pensions and benefits will not, were to lose security of tenure in order that Shameless characters could be moved in next door to them, or even in place of them.

But New Labour is no more, at least outside the Coalition. Those in that actual or potential position should contact Ed Miliband without delay.