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Never go to Party Conferences to look for exciting new ideas on housing. You’d be better employed in Disneyland. Conferences are now top down affairs, not bubbling debates from the bottom. Leaders posture before followers, and problems are left behind in Whitehall cupboards, not brought to the seaside. Lots of new initiatives (usually old ones dusted down) are announced but the rank and file, particularly councillors who know what`s happening on the ground, have to sit and mutter incredulously, while being forced to applaud because it`s all on camera.
So neither party did much for Housing. At Blackpool John Prescott announced a “step change” in housing, already promised in July, to be unveiled in the New Year. Or sometime. He attacked “unscrupulous landlords”, as the new Rachmans turning deprived areas of the North into social dumping grounds, and criticised a “Right to Buy” which denies tenants the right to social housing in areas of shortage while saying Labour would keep it.
The Tories, they stumbled across something they hope will repeat their success of 1979: extending the right to buy to housing associations, while holding out the prospect of doing the same damage to private social housing as they already have to the public version.
All particularly depressing because behind the rhetoric the real crisis gets worse and neither party promises the only things which can make any real impact: money and land. Arguing about ownership and spewing out still more initiatives is like changing the name of the Titanic as the iceberg looms. Look at the scale of the problems and weep.
• House prices are shooting up in a bubble certain to burst into repossessions, negative equity, and all the familiar misery, largely because we ignore the laws of supply and demand. Demands grows as households multiply. Total build last year was the lowest for 77 years.
• House builders forecast a shortage of one and a half million homes eighteen years ahead unless more land is made available and planning procedures speeded up.
• The government’s Decent Homes target won`t be met. Fewer than half English authorities have set a target and many of those who have don’t expect to hit it. The £19 billion backlog of repairs won’t be eliminated.
• The Association for London Government calculates that meeting London’s housing need backlog in ten years requires the Housing Asociations’ current programme to be trebled.
• Government’s strategy of depriving councils of the funds necessary to repair and renovate their stock to force them into large scale voluntary transfers is now coming home to roost all over the land as councils break it to tenants that thay can’t afford to do the repairs, the better to teach them the virtues of privatisation,
• Regional planning guidance targets don’t include unmet housing need so Ken Livingstone’s housing commission says 224,000 affordable houses are necessary, but net affordable capacity is only 75,000.
• Treasury is still determined (look at the row over whether flagship hospitals can raise money) that public bodies should not borrow to build or repair. The “blue skies” “open to all ideas” review is stymied before it starts.
• John Prescott’s July targets for new housing and brownfield development in the South East can’t be met.
• Provision for affordable housing for key workers is a mere flea bite compared to the scale of the problem. In London there’ll be a mere 4600 over the next two years.
• Mayoral population projections suggest a London increase of 700,000 in fifteen years. No chance of providing homes for that within London.
• More resources diverted to London means less for the rest of us.
It’s a gloomy prospect which will get gloomier quickly. Yet none of this was discussed or even mentioned at the Party conferences and John Prescott looks to be back into his old box: lots of good intentions, endless initiatives. No brass. Result: Failure.
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