Housing Market Broken, Ministers Say Ahead Of White Paper

[mikey4444]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-38884601

At last ! The Tories get the message.

We need more housing.... a case of the bleeding obvious if ever there I saw one.

[Peter Pedant]

// Mikey, how do you suggest that the council properties you propose be maintained? //

councils historically

shared ownership ( and owner ) the occupier

I would be surprised if the costs of maintainance exceeded the rent
it is just if you subsidize rent/housing some one has to pay and that is usually the tax payer

none of this is rocker science and had been well known for fifty or so years ....

[paddyk]

Well explained Hellboy. PP, Noami, Baldrick - please take note of this argument - which I was trying to explain ever so inarticulately ( now I sound like Mark D'Arcy in the first Bridget Jones movie)

[naomi24]

hellboy66, // If it WAS Labour had sold off the housing stock, they would have REINVESTED the proceeds in new council housing.//

I think Labour supporters live in some sort of dream world. Labour continued to sell off council houses – just as the Tories had - and like the Tories they didn’t reinvest the proceeds into building new council housing.

[naomi24]

This might be of interest:

Tom Copley said: //“As a Labour politician one of the things that really galls me is that there’s this statistic that more council homes were built in the last year of Thatcher’s government than were built in the 13 years of Labour government, and that’s something I think as a Labour Party we need to apologise for.” Official figures show only 6,330 council houses were completed from 1998 to 2010, compared with 17,710 in 1990 alone, which was Baroness Thatcher’s final year as prime minister. In one Labour year, 2004, the number fell to just 130 council homes completed.//

http://www.standard.co.uk/news/politics/labour-should-apologise-for-social-housing-failure-8932797.html

When are Labour supporters going to wake up to the fact that Labour is not the party of the working man?

[beegeebee]

Having been in the Construction industry virtually all my life, everyone, including all politicians of All colours have use the Industry as tap to turn on & off at will, to either expand or contract the economy. because the industry uses a huge and I mean HUGE pool of labour, lots of unskilled with a modicum of artisans. The artisans left the industry and found work in factories where the weather did not affect their take home pay. Unions didn't pick up the challenge to fund apprenticeships and builders went down the road of high rise and primarily semi-skilled workforce.

[Peter Pedant]

//Because the proceeds from the sales of council housing had already been squandered by the Tories on tax cuts for the high earners. For labour to undertake a massive social housing programme, they would have had to impose a lot of new taxes//

I think this is the nub of Hell boys argument which I went back and read as instructed

and it is an obvious non sequitur
I am not even sure if council house sales proceeds went to central govt to squander on tax cuts.....

so you have raised money with house sales and you need to raise taxes in order to er raise money to build houses

there is to my mind an obvious and gla ring flaw in the argument