The desperate search for shrinking votes has pushed Iain Duncan Smith into yet another spectacular own goal. His latest pet idea is to extend the Right to Buy to Britain’s 2.5m housing association tenants. However, whilst social homes are owned by Councils, this latest Tory brainwave means selling off housing association assets which are private property […]
Posts Tagged ‘Rents’
Tories make tenants and homeless pay for social housing give away as election bribe
Apr 15th, 2015 by Michael Meacher.35,000 low-cost homes lost last year by government’s open market policies
Aug 7th, 2014 by Michael Meacher.The government’s latest housing policy is to force social landlords who receive government funding to build new homes to convert a proportion of their existing social rented homes into the Tories’ new ‘affordable rent’ tenure. ‘Affordable rent’ in government-speak actually means the opposite. It means pricing rents at up to 80% of local average open […]
Ed’s speech and the elephant in the audience
Feb 14th, 2013 by Jon Lansman.Ed Miliband’s speech today is absolutely right to place the emphasis on living standards. The economy is central both to Britain’s recovery and Labour’s political strategy, and it is in their living standards that our people are feeling the impact of the failures of neoliberalism and austerity. The restoration of the 10p tax rate and imposition of […]
When social housing turned into a money spinner
Dec 13th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.The bedroom tax and the housing benefit cap which will hit tenants next April are now being joined by another, more insidious destroyer of housing security. The social housing sector, which originally was intended as an alternative supplier of affordable housing in place of local authorities, has now been turned into a pure market operator […]
Cameron’s extremism is inviting an explosion on the streets
Jun 25th, 2012 by Michael Meacher.No-one forgets that the poll tax was the trigger that brought down Thatcher. Then a Tory government was pushing its ideology to extremes – a flat-rate tax system, a brutal destruction of manufacturing industry, defenestration of the trade unions, a blindness to community and altruism in favour of selfishness and individualism, a deliberate huge wedge […]