Quite the class warrior aren't you. You lost. Get over it.

Well I must admit I have come back to this thread fairly late but I have to say BobbyD your economic ineptitude never fails to disappoint.



The point is you house the population. Without it costing them an arm and a leg and without them being in debt to bankers. For those who can't afford a mortgage the "point" is they are housed.

It also means house prices do not rise at stupid rates way beyond inflation. It doesn't preclude home ownership if that is what you want. On the contrary it makes home ownership cheaper as a large relatively cheap rental market keeps house price inflation in check.

As to Bob Crow the worst thing a government ever did was to start means testing applicants for council housing (Labour govt mistake by the way). That meant council house estates became ghettos for the poor and the unemployed which before the great council house sell off instigated by that idiot Thatcher they never were. You used to get a mix and society (tough concept for you to grasp admittedly) was better off for it.

The bottom line is we have a not insignificant percentage of people in this country who can't afford to put a roof over their heads and because council housing has been sold off over the decades we have a simple choice. House them in private rented accommodation (including B&B's for Gods sake) or leave them homeless. If we house them it costs a fortune as private rents are so high. Who's fault is that? The Tories. No one else. And you pay for it through your taxes which could be better spent elsewhere.

This government and others before it have borrowed money to pay housing benefits, if only they'd invested the same amount of money in building truly affordable homes for rent, we'd at least have an asset that would continue to yield an income. Instead they have pi[iss[/ied it against the wall of private landlords

I must admit the rise of the private landlord vs the fall of council or housing association properties is one of the more worrying aspects simply because its obvious to all that the private landlord has no concern over the area, nor often over the tenants in their properties.

The Ch4 program "Britains Benefit Tenants" showed an example of this last week, a tenant in a back-to-back two bed terrace house in a part of Leeds that I knew in the 1960s as being a working class family area owned and operated almost totally by Leeds City Council, the program followed an agent who managed the property for an absentee landlord who was based in London, had bought a handful of similar properties in Leeds at auctions because they were so much cheaper than in London, and then handed the stock over to an agent to manage, he was happy to admit that he had not been to Leeds for at least a year.

The tenant thought the house was fantastic, it was the first time he'd lived in accomodation that wasn't shared and his housing benefit covered the rent - problem was that he had a problem with the local gangs who eventually drove him out of the house, the presence of the TV crew persuaded the landlord to come up to Leeds to meet the agents and look at his property but all he was concerned about was tarting it back up and getting another benefits tenant in ASAP, no concern for the previous tenant (who had to go to shared accommodation) and absolutely no concern for what had caused the problem in the first place.

That in a nutshell is the problem, for no single landlord is big enough to tackle troublesome tenants, the whole of that area is now in the hands of dozens if not hundreds of private landlords who don't know each other and care little for the area at all and who are happy to take a hit of £500 for clean-up fees once a year if they can draw £800 a month in rent (which is what he was getting) for a house that he probably paid £40k for (if that).

Plenty of money to be made as long as you don't give a damn about how your tenants have to live.

The Welfare State has always operated on a ponzi scheme basis, even the mythical Maggie and her magical axe never actually managed to cut total public spending, what she actually managed was to slow down the growth of public spending for a time. You've paid your stamp but it's already been spent on somebody else, I'm in the same boat, possibly worse if some people get their way and people of my age ultimately end up getting no state pension despite a full contribution history.

Maybe we should yearn for the good old days before the sun set on the Empire, when Britannia ruled the waves, the shipyards kept her afloat and the coal mines powered the collosus? The market had a very different dynamic then, although many economic historians would argue the costs were actually higher, at least thous communities you mention thrived after a fashion?