Property News · November 7, 2025

Why Labour lacks credibility when it comes to housing | Letters


Kate Macintosh calls for a cessation of right to buy and highlights hypocrisy within the governmentPhil Tate (Letters, 30 October) calls for the ramping up of the supply of social housing to reduce the housing benefit bill. Housing benefit represents a constant leakage of public finances into the pockets of private landlords, and the UK carries approximately double the burden of the EU average as a proportion of GDP. Such an appeal is doomed to failure unless there is a cessation of right to buy, which, as Andy Burnham has neatly put it, presents local authorities with an impossible task comparable with trying to fill a bath without a plug.An illustration of this no-win situation is the social-housing development Goldsmith Street, Norwich, which was built by the city council in 2019 and won the RIBA Stirling prize for architecture the same year. This scheme created a carefully designed community of ultra-low-energy Passivhaus homes. It was announced last spring that seven residents want to buy their homes under the right-to-buy scheme and there is nothing Norwich city council can do to stop this. The number of social homes being lost continues to outnumber those being built. Continue reading…

Source : theguardian.com
Read more…Why Labour lacks credibility when it comes to housing | Letters

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