DaveO wrote:
The tenants paid rent. A reasonable one. If it was waived if they were unemployed or disabled the cost was negligible. You obviously prefer your taxes going towards housing benefit to subsidise the vastly higher rents private landlords charge and the huge housing benefit bill is of course "paid for by everyone else".
How stupid is that?
Its very stupid indeed.
As I've mentioned many times before in the early 1970s I began my career in the building industry and cut my teeth on many council and housing authority new builds and refurbs, I'm talking of thousands of houses spread from Yorkshire to Tyne & Wear, some of those sites were for 400 or so dwellings so we're probably talking about tens of thousands in the ten years I was in the industry.
We afforded this during at least one recession, a national steel shortage, and three day weeks - we had the balls to just get on and do it then and recognised the need for affordable houses for the working low paid under both Labour and Conservative governments.
I don't understand for one minute why the attitude change after just one generation, its too easy to blame the right to buy scheme - the complete lack of affordable (not market rent) rental accommodation but moreso the complete lack of any desire by any political party to learn from the 1970s policy of housing provision should be the one major issue that all party's have to answer to - but I doubt that it will ever be mentioned.