Pathfinder – Karen Buck blasts back
March 4th, 2010
UPDATE: 3/2/13 On reflection I disagree with Karen Buck, I don’t think that demolishing perfectly good houses was a good idea, and it has left a swathe of dereliction across parts of the North while failing to help the housing situation. https://www.bigissueinthenorth.com/2013/02/fencing-contest/7356
During the housing debate Karen Buck MP stepped in to deal with an objection from Justine Greening MP that the Pathfinder scheme had demolished 16,000 houses and only built 4,000 in their place. As usual Karen Buck’s eloquent reply and acute grasp of the situation came to the fore:-
Is not one of the key points we’re discussing housing in London where we have had an excess of demand over supply for as long as I can remember now reaching critical proportions and actually when the Pathfinder projects were starting they were dealing with the problem of excess supply and indeed many areas being blighted with huge numbers of homes that they could not rent or sell so although circumstances changed very quickly in fact that was a perfectly rational response to a totally different problem to the one we face in the capital.
https://news.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/hi/house_of_commons/newsid_8544000/8544005.stm
Camden housing – Frank Dobson
March 4th, 2010
During the Westminster Hall housing debate kindly linked to by Chris Underwood Frank Dobson had a few words to say about the situation in Camden which includes the Maiden Lane estate under threat:-
In Camden which I jointly represent with my good friend the member for Hampstead and Highgate the council is actually selling off flats and houses which become vacant and I have to say with the enthusiastic support of the Liberal Democrats with whom they are in coalition in Camden and this is against a situation where there are 18,000 people on the housing waiting list and it’s a bizarre response to a waiting list of 18,000 to actually reduce the stock that’s available. I take this personally because when I was leader of the council we actually bought up 6,000 properties from the private sector to give security of tenure to people and also to be able to let people off the waiting list into the vacant flats and all I can say is if some people think that being in social housing is unpopular I did not receive during that time one single communication by any means from anyone saying they did not want to become a council tenant.
https://news.bbc.co.uk/democracylive/hi/house_of_commons/
This related article from RedBrick
Councils used to buy up private houses to let
Frank Dobson obituary from the Guardian