"Theresa May says people should be proud of their council houses and council housing should not be stigmatised is the prime political (non Brexit) news story of the day. It also includes £2bn of new social housing funding.
What a crock of sh*t!!
I was thinking of a more professional phrase but hey let’s call a spade a spade which was the phrase used by the Tories Housing Minister Grant Shapps in 2012 when he said let’s call social housing what it is and rename it as “taxpayer funded housing” in an opinion piece in the Daily Torygraph!
shapps stigma
Now where could social housing have got such stigma from reader?
It couldn’t be that Thatcher’s 1980 Right to Buy of council houses made merely renting a second-class and non-aspirational cultural phenomenon could it and has led UK housing policy for the last 38 years? Ahem!
Oh Joe stop being negative what about the new £2 billion funding!? Oh okay then let’s do that.
£2 billion of funding for … the six-year period 2022 to 2028 is £0.33 billion per year.
A bit of a (further) cut to the £8.4bn over 5 years the Tories inherited in 2010 and which they cut to £4.5bn over 4 years and £1.125bn per year under the very same Grant Shapps mentioned above and now this new funding is one quarter of that amount and at £333 million per year is just 20% of the £1.68bn housing funding the Tories inherited from Labour in 2010!
I use the word “inherited” here very deliberately as this announcement is a political trick from the Tories. The funding runs from 2022/23 to 2028/29 which is … the NEXT parliament and is a huge political trick from the Tories as if Labour gets in and wants to run its much higher percentage of social housing policy the Tories will say but the spending review only has £2bn so where is the money coming from for your social housing policy!
Now let’s look at the spin the BBC (and others) put on this Theresa May announcement and we are told the Prime Minister will say:
“Some residents feel marginalised and overlooked, and are ashamed to share the fact that their home belongs to a housing association or local authority. On the outside, many people in society – including too many politicians – continue to look down on social housing and, by extension, the people who call it their home. “We should never see social housing as something that need simply be ‘good enough’, nor think that the people who live in it should be grateful for their safety net and expect no better,”
Theresa May thinks and more importantly wants you to believe that social housing IS a safety net yet it is not. The term ‘social housing’ means council and housing associations yet HAs are not part of any safety net at all and never have been as they have no obligation to house or re-house anyone including those who are homeless because HAs are not part of the public sector and therefore cannot have any mandated public duties.
Housing associations are correctly termed private registered providers (my emphasis) and they account for around two in every three social housing properties. Put simply, the safety net only applies to one third of all social housing and a small minority of it.
I leave you with some questions
Since when has any government announcement of how much will be spent four years ahead of it being spent become newsworthy?
When did the national media stop considering the content of such announcements which sees the government of the day announce a funding level that is just 20% of what they inherited 8 years ago and which is not in the hugely biased BBC article?
How the hell can the Tories aim to double the new housing output they have achieved to date of 150,000 per year up to 300,000 per year by drastically slashing the funding to make that happen?
Ah you see why this story is being spun on stigma don’t you reader?
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PS The number of #ukhousing people who have welcomed this risible funding level with its massive cut tells you all you need to know about the innumerate sycophants that run housing associations and their lobbies. From the same BBC article:
David Orr, chief executive of the National Housing Federation, said the prime minister’s announcement was “extremely welcome”.
“This represents a total step change. For years, the way that money was allocated meant housing associations couldn’t be sure of long-term funding to build much-needed affordable housing,” he said.
He said that by changing the way the funding was allocated, ministers had given “long-term confidence and confirmed that we are trusted partners in solving the housing crisis, building new homes and communities”.
If this is how the housing association sector reacts to this massive cut in funding … FFS!!!"