Thing is, as Mr Chicken makes clear, it's not just Gidiot, is it? It's been successive governments since the 1980s.

The government may have other reasons for adhering to the orthodoxy, but ultimately it's simply a wider ideological issue of a belief that private is always better and preferable, and many of the public believe it too, because the bulk of the mainstream media has drip-fed them a diet of anti-public services stories for close on 30 years.

I think it would be almost impossible to go back to the 1970s/80s when every local authority had a properly funded housing department and many had their own direct works dept (they were in effect a building contractor), and politically it is completely off the menu for all three of the main parties.

But there is absolutely no reason why a government supported, even government funded program of low cost social housing cannot be provided and managed by private housing associations, there is a willingness for this both from the tenant and the landlords and the very, very limited supply of "forced by planning consents" social housing element to every new private house build project is always part-let, part-sold off-plan and its no coincidence that the "forced by planning" shared ownership part of every development is always built first.

What we need is the political will to fund these developments on a large scale just like their predecessors did - maybe they could search the archives to find out how it was funded ?

Again, spot on.



I suspect that few modern politicians care much for history. Wasn't it Tony Blair who (in)famously confessed that he wished he'd studied it? Yet even that subsequent admission provoked no admission that he had any regrets about Afghanistan or Iraq.

Indeed.
The Blair/Brown governments were terrified of appearing to be left wing, believing that the public would lose trust in them if they did, and, during the boom years, I guess the problem didn't appear to be as bad as it does now.
But sheer economics tells us it's desirable and do-able.

Sufficient public land is available for such projects and even if it isn't, all that would need to happen is local authorities buy agricultural land (cheap as chips) and grant themselves planning permission, Just like they did post-WW2.

Institutional investors such as pension funds and insurance companies would be queueing up to provide the funds for building costs. Rents could then be fixed to reflect costs and future contingencies, rather than to reflect "market rates". This would have the reverse effect on the housing market that we saw during the Right to Buy boom and would go a long way towards normalising the housing market.

Unfortunately the Blairites in Labour still attach a stigma to those who can only afford to rent or who simply have no wish to buy their own homes

...and now my children are struggling hard to fund an application to get into a home of their own, whether that be rented or purchased - they prefer to purchase or part purchase only because rents are ridiculously expensive (more than a mortgage would be) and they are potentially held to ransom by private landlords and letting agents (who they and I do not trust one inch) in a way that their grandmother who rented a local authority house for the whole of her life, never was.

Yes, paid per mile. But even with petrol costs covered, the overall expense of owning a car is making it unaffordable.

Joseph Heller wasn't too far wrong then?

[i"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that a concern for one's safety in the face of dangers that were real and immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he were sane he had to fly them. If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he was sane and had to."[/i

What about the personal allowance - that's a cost to "the taxpayer" (whoever he is) - should that be abolished?

As to employers paying a living wage, that is desirable but where do all those marginally profitable employers that employ a large percentage of the workforce get the money from?

And so we come back to the cost of housing.

That's the same argument that was put forward when the minimum wage was proposed.
The inherent problem with such a facile argument is that it only applies if and when ...
a) Those employers are competing with businesses that don't have to pay the living wage (and exporters, in general, pay way above that level)
or ...
b) The extra cost of increased wages makes the product so much more expensive that people stop buying it (and we didn't see that happen because the increase per unit was so small as to be almost immeasurable.)

Why should anyone get tax credits? It is costing billions.
Better to introduce a living wage which EMPLOYERS have to pay.
The tax take would be greater.

The personal allowance and its annual increase is a tiny cost compared to tax credits which is sucking the life out of the economy.
Paying a living wage should not be desirable but imperative in producing a high earning tax paying economy.
The more earnings the more spending an economy has. We are in a recession because nothing is going into the tills - then employers complain!

There is a very simple and credible reason why tax credits work better than an increase in personal allowances.

Much was made by the coalition that they had "lifted 3 million people out of tax". The reality was that most of those people would also have benefitted from working tax credits. Those that did, saw that although their tax at source reduced, so did their working tax credits. The greatest number of those benefitting from the increase in personal allowance was the group of people below the 40% tax threshold but who did not qualify for working tax credits.

Increasing the personal allowance may be seen as a benefit but the poorest decile gain relatively no benefit at all