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Perhaps the view is that there are fewer people needing social housing in London, going forward, or to cap it as it is rather than increasing it. We already see the demographic changing. -
But actually, replacing council housing, or more accurately adding to housing stock and doing so via expanding council estates was precisely what we should have been doing, financed by selling off old housing stock. As the population grows adding to housing built by councils is surely the right thing to do, and financing it through sales is a good model, it's the one commercial house builders follow for instance. In the end the issue is about having the right volumes of the appropriate sort of housing to meet national needs. Thatcher stopped that by forbidding councils to use sales revenues to increase housing stock. That was the error. -
By Jenijenjen · Posted
Had council stock not been sold off then it wouldn't have needed replacing. Whilst I agree that the prohibition on spending revenue from sales on new council housing was a contributory factor, where, in places where building land is scarce and expensive such as London, would these replacement homes have been built. Don't mention infill land! The whole right to buy issue made me so angry when it was introduced and I'm still fuming 40 odd years later. If I could see it was just creating problems for the future, how come Thatcher didn't. I suspect though she did, was more interested in buying votes, and just didn't care about a scarcity of housing impacting the next generations. -
Actually I don't think so. What caused the problem was the ban on councils using the revenues from sales to build more houses. Had councils been able to reinvest in more housing then we would have had a boom in building. And councils would have been relieved, through the sales, of the cost of maintaining old housing stock. Thatcher believed that council tenants didn't vote Conservative, and home owners did. Which may have been, at the time a correct assumption. But it was the ban on councils building more from the sales revenues which was the real killer here. Not the sales themselves.
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