Mintball wrote:
We desperately need to tackle the housing crisis (I use that word deliberately) an then other things possibly become clearer and maybe even easier.
...and I've said it before and I'll say it again and again and again - from 1974 until 1985 when I left the industry I was employed by a large electrical contracting company (100+ employees in our Leeds office multiplied by offices all over the country) and during that time we never had anything less than ten (an arbitary number from my head but pretty much on the low side) house building or refurbishment projects on the go at any given time.
Some of those sites were for 300 to 500 dwellings, almost all were for local authority and housing associations and 100% of all of those were for rent.
Make a note of those years and check out which party(s) were in power - both Labour and Conservative is the correct answer and Wilson, Callaghan and even Thatcher were all committed to a continuous program of social house building and refurbishment in numbers that we can only dream of these days.
So what happened, was the country extremely wealthy during those 11 years, north sea oil income didn't really kick in until the end of the 70s so the answer is no, we had two recessions during that period, we had years and years of industrial unrest and a depressed economy, we had a steel strike one year that meant that our building trade ground to a halt - but still the housing program continued on a massive scale.
The only difference between then and now is political will, there was a need for social housing, low cost rental properties, even Thatcher saw that (initially), even her henchman Tebbit saw that if you wanted the unemployed to get on their bikes to find work, if you were closing steel and coal towns down then you'd better make sure that it was easy to source new social housing in another town when you told them to move on - even the most rabid of Tories understood that principal.
We could do it now, it would be private housing associations that did it, but we could do it right now, we could build hundreds of thousands of social housing units, we did it when the country was broke under Wilson and especially Callaghan, but we don't have the will to do it now, as a country we are so short sighted and morally bankrupt with greed that we don't even understand our own history.