Right to buy 2 damaging policy
Following David Cameron's seemingly back-of-an-envelope announcement that he's bringing back right-to-buy with a vengeance, the lack of policy underpinning it is becoming clear.
Within hours of the announcement, Eric Pickles: the cabinet minister responsible for the policy was unable to say how much would be bunged to this undeserving but incredibly lucky generation. And Conservatives have never been able to explain why some council tenants deserve this taxpayer bung but not others, let alone home owners or private renters. It's bad enough the government is asset stripping our housing - that they haven't worked out how much it will cost us or why this particular generation is so deserving of a one off taxpayer-funded bung is absurd.
Today, Putney Tory MP Justine Greening made the policy even more nonsensical when she explained that the like-for-like replacement the government has promised will only be built "where local communities want to see it built”.
I don't expect Justine to see the stupidity of her own comment: she's not the brightest star in the constellation. But this claim is either unworkable: middle class communities aren't queuing up to say "more council homes here please"; or a recipe for Shirley Porter-style gerrymandering. Sell off a council flat in a marginal ward, build one in a Labour ward. Hardly far fetched: it's just the legalisation of what Wandsworth and Westminster Conservatives spent the 1980s and 1990s doing.
Right to buy was a disastrous policy and the fact Ed Miliband singled it out as the one thing he could come up with that Margaret Thatcher did right shows how unfit to be a Labour leader - let alone prime minister - he is.
His political analysis is correct: the way Labour opposed right to buy inflicted huge damage on the Labour opposition at the time, and imposed a moral cowardice that is still impeding the party from saying or doing anything to address the housing crisis that I believe is second only to the economic crisis the country needs to resolve. But that doesn't make right-to-buy right.
The better way to give council tenants the ability to own their own homes - should they so wish - is through schemes we came late to in government: helping them buy existing private sector homes while preserving the council housing stock.
The consequence of right to buy has been the decline of council estates: it hasn't been their salvation; it's created a sink of deprivation - because to qualify for a vastly diminished pool of council homes you have to be vastly more needy. Meanwhile the majority of those who bought their homes have sold-up, cashed-in and sodded-off, leaving in their wake buy-to-lets occupied for a year or even six months by those who could care less about their environment. In Roehampton, for example, buy to lets are occupied by either disruptive students or disengaged migrant workers from eastern Europe.
And the very few leaseholders who chose to stay around are crippled by debilitating, exorbitant council service charges I had to invest huge amounts of time whittling down when I was a councillor. The entryphone system that came in costed at £1,000 a property. Roof repairs that require remortgaging to cover. Pumps necessary to boost water power to the top of blocks on the top of hills: all the liability of leaseholders. Sold a pup by the Tories and then fleeced to financial insecurity by them: not what most right to buyers imagined they were letting themselves in for.
As well as the fact the Conservatives don't even seem to know the ins and outs of their own policy there's also the reality that the best properties have already been snagged: there remain very few council houses (as opposed to flats) that weren't bought up in the first wave of R2B. It's not just that Labour rightly reduced the taxpayer bung to R2Buyers: it's that there is much less attraction to buy a flat on the 12th floor of a tower block than a nice 2-up, 2-down cottage in a garden village estate. Reinstating that unfair, unjustified bung isn't going to resolve that problem.
The reality is the current problems are about supply of affordable homes - not the tenure of their occupants. We need vastly more affordable public homes built: not 1 for 1 but more like 5 to 1 just to redress the catastrophic loss of council homes and spiralling waiting lists R2B1 created. And we need to be undoing some of the damage done by an earlier Housing Act: Labour's 1978 Housing Act, to ensure mixed estates become thriving communities, not crime-infested, vandalism-blighted, sinks of deprivation.
Once upon a time, Labour would have understood that: it would have been instinctive and self-evident. Just another sign of how removed from what used to be Labour's core support the party's elitist Westminster bubble leadership has become.
Adam Gray
http://adamgraysjournal.blogspot.com/2011/10/right-to-buy-2-damaging-policy.html
