The tenants paid rent. A reasonable one. If it was waived if they were unemployed or disabled the cost was negligible. You obviously prefer your taxes going towards housing benefit to subsidise the vastly higher rents private landlords charge and the huge housing benefit bill is of course "paid for by everyone else".

How stupid is that?

And then complain that taxes and benefits are too high. It's battery of the highest order.

Its very stupid indeed.

As I've mentioned many times before in the early 1970s I began my career in the building industry and cut my teeth on many council and housing authority new builds and refurbs, I'm talking of thousands of houses spread from Yorkshire to Tyne & Wear, some of those sites were for 400 or so dwellings so we're probably talking about tens of thousands in the ten years I was in the industry.

We afforded this during at least one recession, a national steel shortage, and three day weeks - we had the balls to just get on and do it then and recognised the need for affordable houses for the working low paid under both Labour and Conservative governments.

I don't understand for one minute why the attitude change after just one generation, its too easy to blame the right to buy scheme - the complete lack of affordable (not market rent) rental accommodation but moreso the complete lack of any desire by any political party to learn from the 1970s policy of housing provision should be the one major issue that all party's have to answer to - but I doubt that it will ever be mentioned.

Oh bless, it's so sweet that you scrabble around in the dark trying to work out what's what. I know, perhaps when your kids ask "dad, just why did you vote to sell the NHS to the chums of the Tories?" You can say it was dark in the polling station and couldn't see the voting form. It'll sound so much better than having to admit you were trying to be clever and failing spectacularly.

About as reasonable as paying a mortgage judging by the amount who bought them from the government. Still, as you once again fail to grasp what I'm saying, if you give someone a house that they pay rent on, a reasonable rent, but they can stay in it for ever AND then pass it on to a family member AND they're not responsible for the general upkeep of it then what's the point? Let them buy it, they were only going to stay in it anyway, look at poor, dead communist Bob Crowe, couldn't get him to pass on his council property to someone who may have actually benefited from it, still as long as he was alright, sod the poorest in society who he could have helped.

...all of which is representative of the current situation in social housing where annual contracts, market rents and "emergency accommodation" are its main purpose, at what point did the sea change occur and who was it that decreed that the only houses "to keep" would be the ones to buy and not rent ?

Not sure how we got onto rent and housing from the NHS, but anyway...



This bed blocking you speak of came about because of this coalition's cuts to local authorities, which are primarily responsible for social care outside of NHS hospitals.

The Tories can claim all they like that they increased NHS spending this parliament. It's probably true. But when the NHS relies on social care to look after patients after they leave hospital, if that social care is cut by local authorities because their budgets have been sliced by George Osbourne, this creates a backlog on the NHS as patients cannot be discharged because the have nowhere suitable to go.

The lies and spin comes that we need private healthcare companies to offload the burden on the public health service. Before you know it, healthcare in this country is completely in private hands, and we're all paying through the nose for private medical insurance.

It's funny, because that's exactly the reason Labour came up with when opening the doors to the private sector from 97-10.

Currently there's less than 10% of the NHS "in private hands" the pace of the sell off has slowed under the coalition.

From tomorrow the NHS will be responsible for checking the bona fides of anyone requiring treatment - all done in the cause of preventing "health tourism".

This so-called health tourism accounts for an infinitessimal percentage of the NHS budget but the worrying aspect is: The NHS now has the systems in place to charge for treatment. Only a complete idiot would think that wasn't at the heart of the exercise

Fairness, humanity and compassion are not in the right wing dictionary/thesaurus or vocabulary

The NHS has charged for treatment for decades. They were introduced by the Labour party, Bevan, the only Labour MP or Labour voter who appears to have any backbone, resigned over it.

Please don't conflate contributions to the cost of medicines (prescription charges) and charges for treatment. The latter has been the particular preserve of the tories: dental charges and eye tests spring immediately to mind

On the subject of health tourism, it appears that the tory rags may have got their banner headlines a little skewed.