to think that just because I can't afford to live in the most expensive part of town....

[CogitoErgoSometimes]

... I have not been 'socially cleansed' and do not live in a ghetto? Proposal today to sell off expensive social housing and replace with a higher quantity of newly-built, cheaper social housing article here seems to make a lot of sense. Why the emotive language?

Just to put things into perspective. I have friends who live in HA street properties in the LB of Westminster, similar properties to rent in the same and adjoining streets are very expensive to rent (and this isn't even one of the posh bits of Westminster).

Two bedroom flats start at £300 per week and go up to £500+. That is between £15600 and £26000 per annum before bills and council tax. How many families can afford those sorts of amounts. If there was no social housing in the area then how many ordinary working families would be left, it would become an area of young professionals and the like.

i don't think they have thought about that, they just want to sell off social housing and remove people who are not paying enough in rent or mortgage. i guess they expect ordinary families to commute in from out of london.

janey agreed that it covers all councils. The really valuable properties are often the street properties (i.e. acquired not purpose built) in high value areas. These will exist in other towns and cities too but the most valuable ones are the ones in Central London just simply because property prices are so high in London. It is these properties that often spark the Daily Fail Headlines e.g. Scandal - Immigrant family live in £2m council house in Fulham etc.

I was correctly someone upthread who posted that the think tank was only referring to a small number of councils.

Janey I understand. but what I think creighton was getting at is that the most valuable properties are in those council areas and those are the ones that everyone thinks of when this issue is raised. It may have a potential impact on all councils but given the very high property prices in London and the relatively high number of street properties I think people expect the proposal to have a disproportionate impact in London.

Maybe it would have a disproportionate impact in London, but then London also has a good transport system.

I agree with creighton I don't think they've really thought this through. It's just yet another of this govt's talking points to get people at each other's throats rather than asking them what they plan to do with a stagnant economy.

I don't know why I got so hung up about key workers. If people, any people, are paying a fair rent for council housing that's great. It frees money for them to spend on other things that will drive the economy.

I noticed upthread that someone dragged up Bob Crow again and his £150,000 salary and how he could afford to live somewhere else.

We have subsidised education in this country. There are never any articles and govt attacks on people who could afford to pay for private education but choose to use the State system and spend their surplus money elsewhere.

That's just as true as with private v State housing. But people would be outraged at the idea that they are being parasites because most people still use State schools even if they'd like to go private.

Someone I know breathed a sigh of relief at the prospect of his third and last child turning 18 and applying for university.

Up until then he'd been paying fees of just under £30,000 a year per child. To him, £9,000 a year was an absolute bargain and he was talking about spending the spare money on more ski-ing, a house in rural France to go with his flat in Paris and another Ferrari.

I have no problem with him. I like him very much. If only he and his wife would adopt me. But he could easily afford a foreign university with a bit of financial sacrifice.

By choosing to use a subsidised English university for his child he's depriving a more needy child of that place.

So is he a parasite too?

ps I think that's another good thing about ordinary people rubbing shoulders with the super rich in Central London. We can keep tabs on them and report back.

I think it is a silly idea and you only have to look at examples like Paris to know where it could lead. People on lower incomes cannot afford to travel across London and therefore we been areas of mixed incomes to ensure that all of our needs are met whether it is someone to clean our hospitals, look after our children or provide care.

On a lesser note I have never ever understood the attitude which I luckily only ever see on MN, that people less worthy should have a lesser lifestyle than me. I am lucky enough to have a nice home and lifestyle ( it has not always been that way) and I want as many other people to have a similar lifestyle.

Most of my extended family live in social housing , some of them have worked far harder than I ever have as a teacher . If anything, using MN logic they deserve to live in much better housing than me.

I havent seen any logical argument against this idea

Housing lists, if you have an empty house and 100 families on a waiting list you can house a family and have 99 on a waiting list. If you sell it (if you can find a buyer) and build three new homes the waiting list will just get longer.

What about people who live near families / friends? Maybe granny picks up dc from school so mum and dad can both work, if you move them out one may not be able to work.

Where are these houses going to be built?

Adapted / special needs accomodation is like hens teeth, are you going to sell an adapted house? When you next have a person who needs adaptions you will have to re adapt, and pick up the bill.

'move them out'? No one is going to be moved out .

Two words

Byker Wall

Where we live used to be a rough area, some bits still are, but you get that everywhere. It had a really bad name.
Then The town council and the community got together and with help from the police who built their new headquarters on the estate, our neighbourhood has become a thriving, family oriented part of town.

We might not have delis and outdoor seating cafes (unless you count the old men drinking special brew outside the Spar haha) but its a safe area which has had a lot of love and time poured into it
It's lovely to see people around during the day unlike in a lot of exclusive, 'executive' estates where you don't see another soul, and kids here can bike and scooter and play without being told off.
Our mortgage here is less than half what it was when we lived in the centre of town.
Ive never understood the thrall that London has over people. I'd be glad to get out of it, given Any opportunity.

Limitedperiod - your analogy only makes sense if I can choose a council house instead of our current crippling mortgage, and I'm pretty sure I won't be able to get one - but correct me if I'm wrong. I'm a SAHM to an 8mo (we're trying for a second since this morning ) and DH earns about 40k. Our mortgage on a v rundown 2-bed terrace in the SE is £1200 pcm. We are skinty mskint.

HoopDePoop I agree that you won't be able to get a council house because if local authorities are still building them you won't amass enough points.

I was saying that we never should have got rid of them. I don't know if a big public housing building programme is possible now but it strikes me that it wouldn't be a bad way to kick start the economy. Unless this govt has any other ideas up it's sleeve, that is.

However, you would qualify if LAs were still building them. Unfortunately under Right-To-Buy legislation in the early 80s LAs were specifically forbidden to plough back the proceeds of council house sales into any building programme to replace them.

That was a spiteful, politically-motivated act by a government that wanted to destroy public housing and people's reliance on it for ideological reasons without spelling out the consequences.

"nfortunately under Right-To-Buy legislation in the early 80s LAs were specifically forbidden to plough back the proceeds of council house sales into any building programme to replace them"

I googled this as i had believed the proceeds were ringfenced for housing for the first five years - it turns out they had to be used to clear LA housing debt first.

that 'housing debt' was the debt incurred building the housing in the first place...and it seems in actual fact the last government moved it even further away from being returned to local authority for HA house-building in 2004/2005 whilst still spending more on 'housing' than it got in receipts (though this includes more generic housing schemes including private sector ventures).

very complex issue to assess - i don't think any government has driven council house (or any kind of house) building at all since the 70's.

Another thing that did happen under the last government: tighter planning and building regulation that further restricted the amount of housing that got built.

I remember this edgar because at the time I was on a paper straddling the first and second most deprived London boroughs and dealt with countless calls from bewildered and angry people who'd lived there for years and couldn't understand why their children couldn't get a council flat round the corner so they could help out with childcare when the babies came along. Or just see each other.

Those boroughs were Tower Hamlets and Newham at the time when Canary Wharf was going up under the special planning regulations of the London Docklands Development Corporation that were like an occupation by a foreign power.

I really didn't know what to say except for: 'Poor you.'

Never mind. There are a lot of £million+ flats going there now.

Councils were only allowed to keep 28% of capital receipts. Unfortunately, much of the debt they were paying was from the fifties and sixties.

Edger when you talk about 'last govt' which one are you talking about?

I'm talking about the govt of '79-83 and onwards to '97.

The '97 wasn't great on public projects but at least they showed a little more willing apart from the LDDC, motorways and out-of-town housing estates and retail parks.

If councils stopped paying salaries for full time union officials who do no work for the council and stopped paying more than SSP to folks on the sick they'd have more money for services for the people.

Limited - interesting. Sounds like council houses used to be for a much wider cross section of society than they are nowadays. I am friends with lots of skint people, people in casual work, lower end professional people, most people I know struggle to make it to the end of the month. But I still don't know anyone who lives in a council house. To me it seems like a cultural divide - it's just not something that would ever be available no matter how hard times me and my friends fell upon. Cos we're middle class? Or can move back in with our parents, crash on a friend's sofa maybe? Interesting though. I just said to DH that we might have once upon a time been able to have a council house and he was . He's got this wk off on summer hols and we're spending it basically trying not to spend anything while doing various expensive and necessary work to the house.