Property News · February 25, 2020

The acute social housing crisis and what Scotland can teach us | Letters


The sale of public land to private developers must be stopped, says Rev Paul Nicolson, while Kate Macintosh says the problem is not a lack of housing but affordabilitySuzanne Moore got everything else right about the housing crisis but left out land (I’m on the housing ladder but I can’t cheer the rising prices, Journal, 22 February). Throughout the UK, truly affordable council housing was built on public land. The price of borrowing to build and maintain council estates and their communities was recovered over, say, 50 years by low earners paying low rents, which did not include the ever-increasing value of land. Councils are now using the high value of public land to finance developers to demolish council estates and build private housing, which council tenants cannot afford. Hence the 79% increase in homeless families in England to 86,000, including 127,000 children since 2010, some for up to and over 10 years, 1.1 million households on council waiting lists and 4,700 single adults sleeping rough each night.The New Economics Foundation recently reported that the government sold enough public land for developers to build 131,000 homes, but only 2.6% will be for social rent. There is an urgent need for legislation that forbids the sale of public land and requires it to be used for affordable social housing.Rev Paul NicolsonTaxpayers Against Poverty Continue reading…

Source : theguardian.com
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