Council Tenants

And therein lies the problem @clueless1 - it is simple. Nothing our government does is done simply. And they spend an absolute fortune doing next to sod all. Apparently HS2 has cost us £2bn already, and there isn't as much as a stone laid, and it has cost £14m in planning and consultations here in London for the 'Garden Bridge' which the Mayor (rightly) has ordered a review into. £14m should be the price tag for the whole thing!

As for HS2 - I have heard figures of £50-£60bn bandied about as being the overall cost. Surely we could spend less, build more 'normal' railway lines and put the remainder of the cash to housing and health?

How many houses around your way would £14m buy? Then think how many £20bn would buy?

We are being ruled by people who know the price of all sorts, and the value of nothing, and there is a hell of a lot of people making shed loads of money consulting, planning and generally faffing about. It is this sort of ignorance that I believe was one of the driving forces behind the Brexit vote - the ordinary people have had enough!

 

I don't know anything about council housing really. Why are people on good salaries in council houses at all?! Shouldn't the stock be used for those on low or no income?

 

The trouble is @Loofah that there are very (very) few Council houses left thanks to Maggie, so even those who are on a low or no income cannot get one; this means that those who are on a good salary find themselves being milked by private landlords, and at the same time the councils are paying private landlords through the nose to rent properties to those on low or no incomes.

This has a number of different effects:

- Councils can house less people for the amount of money that they have (if they owned their own properties, there would be no landlord profiting from them), and this continues to get worse as rents rise, whilst more and more people pour into the country

- Those on decent salaries that are caught in the private rent loop cannot get out as they have no way to save a deposit, and house prices are just stupid in many parts of the country.

- Those on decent incomes have considerably less disposable income than their counterparts would have had in decades gone by, therefore spend less, therefore less revenue is raised in taxation

- Private landlords and in particular banks, get richer and richer and this in turn helps to fuel the continual rise in house prices, perpetuating the problem.

Something has to give, and inevitably something will - we are already at the point where ordinary people cannot afford to buy and are struggling to afford rent in some areas. It starts with those who work in jobs like shopworkers, refuse collectors, bus drivers, nurses etc - - these are not the sort of jobs that you can (or would) live in a cheaper area and commute to the more affluent area to work. Can you imagine it - a bloke living in Bedford and commuting to Twickenham where he works as a dustman? Not going to happen.

So, they are priced out of the area and one of two things then happen - - the jobs are taken by immigrants who live in mass houses (between 5 and 10 people in a house is not uncommon) who stick that out for two or three years sending as much cash as they can back home before bailing out, OR the moo poo piles up in the street uncollected and the buses stay in the garage. But hey, the rich folk won't care coz they will dump their rubbish elsewhere and use their Range Rover instead of the bus.

 

Christ. What a mess :(

 

I'm afraid so. I see quite a lot of it in my industry - both the people who are moving away because they cannot afford to live around here any longer, and the new recruits who are either young, single and living with parents, or are fairly new to the country looking to make enough to set themselves up in their home country before going back. It's not good.

 

That was precisely what happened in the 'New Town' where I worked (and lived for ten years). It was certainly a 'working class' town where the majority of people had been moved out of the slum and run down areas of London. A large proportion of them took the opportunity, when offered, to buy their council houses at a big discount (who wouldn't? )

Where Mrs Thatcher went horrendously wrong was by not allowing the councils to use the money to build more houses. The council had the land (and the ability, at that time) to build new housing for even less than they had received for the 'discounted' houses, but weren't allowed to use it.

It was a terribly flawed policy that should have worked if they had done it correctly. People were living in their council houses, bought them and still lived there (no change except for ownership). The money should have been used to build more council houses for those that needed them and the housing stock would have increased, more people homed and the price of houses would have stayed fairly low.

Of course, that wasn't the real intent of the sell off. The government restricted the use of the funds for building and then told the councils that their subsidy from the government will be reduced because they had so much money in the bank!

That didn't stop the residents from being happy with their lot. They now had moved from being very poorly paid workers in the worst parts of London to being home owners. This was seen quite clearly with the change in the constituency voting. The town had been a Labour stronghold, with them polling double the amount that the Conservatives did, but changed over to Conservative for three successive elections. It eventually changed back to Labour for three consecutive elections but the Labour government managed to work their magic by the time of the 2010 election and the Conservatives have had a massive majority ever since.

At the last election UKIP managed to get over 16% of the vote but the Conservatives ended up with an even bigger majority than ever.

There is still a big feeling amongst the residents that the sale of the council housing helped them considerably, but they do blame Maggie for messing everything else up.

 

They did, and let the ones that followed them get shafted instead.

 

Agreed, but at the time they didn't know that the restrictions put on by the government would make it almost impossible for others to benefit later. They/we all thought that the circle of building and buying would continue.

We were in the fortunate situation of being offered a council house (before the Maggie era) at exactly the same time that a house came up for sale that we could just about afford. Otherwise we would have been council tenants and probably would have bought the house when the opportunity arose.

It certainly meant we would have to struggle and I had to sell my car and we cancelled our holiday to raise sufficient deposit for us to be acceptable to the building society. We then lived for the first six months with no furniture (apart from a bed donated to us), no kitchen appliances ( apart from a very temperamental cooker left in the house - it got condemned when the gas man came to check for a leak) and, horror of horrors , no television.

Our first furniture was a three piece suite that had been on display at the Ideal Home Exhibition and then on display in a shop window for a year. We got it for 15% of the retail price as they wanted to get rid of it . Over the next few years we really struggled but, suddenly, Mrs S. got offered a job that gave a subsidised mortgage and we could then get on our feet properly - we even bought a TV and got a phone .