Iron Angle: Unsocial housing plan
Oct 22 2010 By Paul Dale
John Lines, Birmingham’s pugnacious Tory housing chief, was a picture of righteous indignation at the city council cabinet meeting as he railed against this newspaper for supposedly failing to give due recognition to his incredible achievements over the years.
But his mini-tantrum had the wind taken out of its sails somewhat when regeneration cabinet member Tim Huxtable piped up with a defence of the Birmingham Post, which he said had always treated him very fairly, adding that he’d never had any problem securing well-informed and accurate coverage.
At this point, Lines gathered his papers and abruptly left the meeting. The reason for his early departure, I gather, was a troublesome ear infection which has been bothering him for a while.
His pain is likely to be even worse following the Government’s Comprehensive Sending Review which reinforced the view of the modern Conservative Party that council housing should be available only as a last resort for families unable to afford to buy or rent from the private sector.
The coalition Government will be continuing a policy which requires local authorities to pitch council house rents at “fair” levels, only slightly below private sector rents.
This policy, as Coun Lines likes to remind us with great regularity, was fully embraced by the last Labour Government which ordered the cabinet member against his will to increase council house rents by four or five per cent when he really did not want to do so.
What Coun Lines does not readily admit is that the move towards ending heavily subsidised council house rents was begun by John Major’s Conservative administration in the mid-1990s.
Major’s initiative, latterly supported by Tony Blair and successive Labour housing ministers, has been taken on a pace by the new Government, which has decided to end the “council house for life” policy that has operated in this country since the end of the Second World War.
Council tenants in future will be expected to move out of social housing and into the private sector as soon as their personal circumstances improve, thereby freeing a house for someone more needy on the waiting list.
The impact of this over time will be significant, although perhaps not for the reasons the Government hopes.
Birmingham’s waiting list for council housing, currently standing at about 30,000, will fall quite sharply as more and more local authority houses become available. But where will the people forced to leave their council homes once they find a job move to?
Most families making the transition from public to private sector are unlikely to be able to afford a mortgage, with most banks now asking for a deposit of at least 15 per cent. They will be decanted into Birmingham’s rented private housing sector, where the standard of accommodation lags way behind that generally found in the city’s council housing stock.
