Housing: look at the small print! |
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Gordon Brown is trumpeting the question of housing as being one of the issues which distinguishes him from his predecessor Tony Blair. But when you examine the new Housing Green paper in more detail, what is promised does not go very far to meet the real housing needs of working people. The Green paper “Homes for the future, more affordable, more sustainable”, published in July, sets a target of 2 million new homes by 2016 and 3 million by 2020. But when it comes to defining what kinds of housing this will be, it is much more problematic. The talk is of “social housing” which conflates council housing, which is subject to a measure of democratic control, with housing association housing which is clearly not. Housing Associations may be called Registered Social Landlords in the jargon, but in reality they are more and more run on the basis of the profit motive. If you don’t believe me, ask anyone who works for one. In the meantime what has been happening under new Labour is that many council tenants have seen their homes hived off into PFI schemes and ALMOs - something the Green Paper does promise will stop in the future. Indeed its whole language is filled with the same ideas which are common to the neoliberal approach to education and health - that the role of local government today is to be a purchaser rather than a provider of services. So when we hear that at least £6.5 million more will be invested in social housing over the next 3 years and at least 45,000 new social homes a year by 2010-11, this unfortunately does not mean that Brown has turned his back on the destructive attacks on the welfare state carried out under Blair. In his introduction to the Defend Council Housing’s interim response to the Green Paper, Austin Mitchell MP puts it this way: “On the face of it goes a long way towards the “level playing field” (at least for new council housing) that our broad alliance... is calling for. “But the language and formulas are deliberately ambiguous. It is not clear how many council homes will be built, how much pressure will be put on councils to enter into public/private partnerships producing more expensive and less secure homes rather than building new council homes themselves.” Defend Council Housing has extensive support across both the tenants’ movement and the trade unions. That support needs to be mobilised between now at October 15 - the date consultation on the Green Paper ends - in support of a real future for public sector housing and in rejection of the illusions put forward by Gordon Brown www.defendcouncilhousing.org.uk |
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