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Austin Mitchell, Chair - Council Housing Group of MPs
5th February Midday
Has Flint Flipped?
Caroline flint’s silly proposals to make tenants of public rented housing actively seek work as a condition of being housed are wrong, damaging to Labour, impossible to implement and counterproductive so far as our housing drive is concerned.
They would have been better left unsaid rather than being dredged up from the graveyard of dead ideas in the basement of the Department of Communities and Local Government and set out on the front page of The Guardian,(‘If you want a council house; find a job’) and given in a speech to the Fabian Society’s social housing conference.
A year ago Ruth Kelly set out less extreme proposals to turn social housing into a transit camp for the poor. They were promptly rejected in the Hills report which wanted housing estates to be mixed communities, and disavowed by Gordon Brown.
So it’s worrying to see them coming back from the dead in this deeply divisive way.
Caroline’s assumption is that social housing reduces the will to work. Numbers not in work are higher in public housing because people have retired, housing has been given to single parent families and Government policy has damaged them by selling off so much of the stock, by using the estates as a social dumping ground and by allowing unscrupulous landlords to buy up repossessed Right to Buy houses and put less desirable tenants in.
All this has broken down what were mixed communities but as the Hills report shows, the aim should be to rebuild them, not treat them as ghettos or weed out the unemployed.
As a new Minister, Caroline hasn’t realised that she can’t implement any of it. She’d have to end both “secure” and “assured” tenancies, limit access to public rented housing to those prepared to sign a new “seeking work” contract and force councils to provide expensive bed and breakfast accommodation for families evicted for not seeking work.
Can’t be done. This does nothing to accelerate either big building programmes or the regeneration of the estates Britain needs. It just indicates dangerous and over-simplistic thinking which must be disavowed quickly.
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