Grainger and the Selling of Social Housing
I have recently discovered the galloping inroads being made by the private contractor Grainger in the new and expanding build to rent market. They seem able to bypass local authorities. For instance, in Sheffield, which they see as a key target city, they have just bought a tract of land from the city council for thirty two million.
In these schemes, returns are sought for investors and provided for shareholders. Grainger are not providing social homes. They talk of flexible tenancies but there is no comfort zone for times of unemployment and hardship. Unlike investors, the community needs in house local authority council house building, precisely because it responds to personal circumstances. Housing applications should be needs based not at the mercy of the bidding system we’ve had for twenty years.
To protect recognisable features of viable communities and where possible lay the foundations for future industrial revival, lifelong tenancies should return with hand over policies for another generation of families. Like the banks and their Tory supporters Grainger Homes want control, but are against any form of public involvement. It is the vested interest of banks to control every facet of the over valued housing market. For those wanting a roof over their head, impossible benchmarks are being set.
Crucially, in todays charged climate, it is viable working talking communities which are sacrificed.
Ian Wilson Yorkshire and Humberside SLP http://www.hl.co.uk/shares/stock-market-news/company–news/archive/grainger-to-forward- fundandacquire-a-build-to-rent-scheme-in-sheffield
Neither Borrower nor Lender Be…
Time for a Two Tiered Economy. For the past thirty years there has been a train of thought that the majority of humans would, through endeavour, attain a mythical style of life appropriate to their needs, the so called modern work ethic. However, as populations increase and long term industrial employment has declined, social mobility has slowed. On the back of Thatcher’s right to buy’, large swathes of the population have entered the false arena of property profit borrowing, a mobility engineered by finance corporations. As a result, those that do not borrow on the back of false property inflation are caught in a vacuum, locked into the world of unsecured debt which has now reached dangerous levels.
With credit beginning to run out, corporations are still lending on the back of inflated, unrealistic property prices. Borrowers who own property are falsely empowered, enjoying a sense of financial well being over which in reality they have no control. What has been created is a two-tier class system those who own property and those who do not. Here in the UK we are approaching the American sub prime lending model. As a matter of urgency we must break from the creeping power of the middle classes and the top university halls that, geared for dominance and control of the most vulnerable, in favour of corporate interests.
In housing and social welfare generally corporate control is near established. Where it concerns everyday matters affecting the poorest people from zero hours contracts to the use of housing as a form of social engineering, there are no champions speaking out. An overlooked but vital element in creating a more equal society is the deflation of property prices. 30th September 2018
Homes Before Profit
We now have more than a million households living in dire poverty if not destitution. The reasons are many and varied but why is society not challenging this imbalance. We see thousands upon thousands of new builds all over the land developed in areas where the industry that kept lives and traditional families stable year on year has been lost.
Where are the incomes coming from for these outrageously priced homes which are strangely occupied in months, no questions asked? The UK should take back control by re-opening and nationalising industries such as mining and steel and subsidiaries. For the working class heartlands nothing short of a socialist revolution will light the flame. For the moment please let us alter the trajectory of home building beginning with a national council home building programme supported by stable, long term employment contracts. 10th December 2018
It’s Communities We Need
Not Development. The Commons Library Briefing (December 2018) estimates that between 240,000 and 340,000 new houses will need to be built each year to meet the country’s current accommodation needs. However, the continuous expansion in the building accommodation, without adequate growth in industry and employment will simply create Dorma-towns or pockets of deprivation. Town planning needs to consider a sense of community, that is to say, people need to be drawn together for some common purpose and an economic heartbeat is required for such a community to thrive. The death of community or the construction of heartless and unfocused building schemes has contributed to the fact that more than 9 million people in this country express continuous feelings of loneliness https://www.campaigntoendloneliness.org/loneliness-research/
We Desperately Need More Houses.
But more importantly we need more communities. Furthermore, we need communities who care. For example, I read with interest the government’s Green Paper on Social Housing (A New Deal for Social Housing August 2018 ) but noted that whilst measures to ensure more effective systems of complaint were frequently mentioned and strategies to help people buy their houses were listed.
There was not one word written about how to prevent homelessness or how to support individuals with disabilities to access suitable accommodation. Nor was there any reflection that along with houses, we need communities with schools, workplaces, local and accessible health services and all the things that make a thriving community. As the new year marches forward, I ask that housing planners consider building communities rather than building more and more alcoves of isolation.
Where Are the Socialists? Never mind Corbyn and the political elite at Westminster, where are those Socialists who can see the reality of the need for council housing and proper working communities, not those built on the price of property speculation and borrowing from the criminal banks and others.
Only Socialists will look at realistic ways of reopening coal mines and subsidiary industry. Only those who believe in trading with the world will get free of the fixation with Europe as a saviour. We need new, real Socialist councillors, to tackle the political establishment at its sources, which is the feed from the public schools. With its almost divine right to a career all the way to Parliament. Based on the direction of our politics we have a generation to change this before the thoughts, fears and concerns of regular citizens are no longer any part of society. 31st January 2019
Work is Not Enough.
Moving people into work will not answer the underlying problem of poverty. Today work is more likely to be accompanied by zero hours contracts, low pay, diabolical private landlords, dodgy employers and of course the lack of real industries that once provided job security.
Under Thatcher the North died, the boarded up homes, never renovated, were large enough and more suitable than the space box new flats that replaced them. The Department of Work and Pensions must be transparent and accountable to the public for the damage it has done especially where deaths have occurred, more than a thousand since the rollout of universal credit.
In Praise of Activists
Today no one listens to activists; in dismissing them as troublemakers, media ‘blanks’ their views. In truth when it comes to what is happening in the lives of the poor, disabled and disadvantaged in our country and the world they are often the holders of key information not known to the public. Blanking works no differently to what happens in a Police State. If it wasn’t for activists most of the hardcore social issues, bedroom tax, universal credit, etc, would never be addressed.
As I have done for the last thirty years activists should profile themselves regularly in letters to the editors of local newspapers where immediate issues in people’s lives can be heard. It’s time for decent journalists to listen to the unpaid activists, with no axe to grind, the only true friends of those without voice. 14th February 2019
Social Security Time to Turn Back the Clock
After reading an article concerning more people going onto universal credit and trying to manage without funds during the payment delay, I see another article about charities giving cash to universal credit claimants during the switchover. Is social security being replaced? Who will reimburse the charity which presumably will be contributing more than a tenner? Will it be the government?
We must restore social security to its original role as safety and protection; the principled the aim of the welfare state today is being eroded by the neoliberal elite leaving formerly tenable communities gated, deprived and rotting. The result will be more police intervention and neighbourhood spying.
The Housing Bidding System is Unfair
The current bidding system for council or housing association accommodation is a farce. The local connection criteria is unfair when often people are moving to take a job or look for work or as a result of family breakdown. The bidding system requires major overhaul from it’s core, returning to the old system when local councillors were involved in harmonizing prospective tenants to the areas of allocation. If new tenants taking jobs are not accommodated, they are forced into high rent private tenancies which then cancel out benefits or reduce by proxy the wages of the worker. There are too many penalty points and barriers in social housing applications when a job seeker obtains a position in a new area. 28th February 2019
Council Tax: the Uncontrollable Monster
In spite of minor changes, since 1990 the coffers of local authority revenues have been swollen by thousands of house and flat complexes and building schemes. They publish the pie charts so we can look at what this subversive monster tax is paying for. In population we are bulging at the seams with green space eaten up, like a giant hungry tortoise. The subsidized private building eats it’s way through towns and villages. The new flats and houses are not tied to viable industries, making us travel and leading to road congestion. Central government withdraws funding to the region’s local authorities left struggling to bridge the gap on essential services, roads, social care, mental health. A million or more homes in need of restitution are abandoned along with industrial plants mothballed. How does this make sense? How many public consultations have there been?
We are seeing right now how puppet masters in London are willing to subvert the peoples will as we saw in the 1980s the Tories destroy the industries that formed the core of working class identity and community. Like the farmworkers before them, the miners and those who were carrying out the hardest work, were paid not of their true value, and they are workers that were targeted most.
We must not be sidetracked or subverted by class based political control administered from London. Restoration of regional control is essential for council tax to be used prudently and resources directed to those in greatest need. Not building for vanity or profit and running down economically viable communities, this is the basis of real regeneration.
30th April 2019
The Political Class in Collapse A 27th July 2019 Letter.
I think it is time just to reflect on the past three years of politics in this country. I am going to do this in eight points.
1: Cameron is heckled by his Eurosceptic back-benchers and cabinet members. He thinks he knows the minds of the people so calls a public referendum on leaving the EU, a populist action.
He does not get the result he wanted. In fact, the result is a mess, with one nation in the UK voting to stay, two, marginally, voting to leave and one voting to leave, even though it shares a border with one of the most pro-EU nations (and has a history of bloody conflict with this nation). Cameron leaves.
2: May is appointed by the Tory elite. They want a powerful female similar to Maggie Thatcher and, indeed, Theresa’s portrait appeared in very Thatcherite poses and costumes, shortly after she took power. They also want a touch of the Merkel … someone who looks after the country rather like a mother. In Germany Angela Merkel is known as Mutti Merkel. However, despite the caricature, May is hampered by her own party’s reluctance to agree on a deal Cameron having failed to get rid of the hard line Euro sceptics and the opposition sees her as weak and refuses to agree anything with her.
4: The situation of negotiating a deal goes on for two and a half years. However, although it is debated frequently in parliament, the topic of who wants to stay and who wants to leave is more hotly and intensely debated on social media; the leave brigade reforms as the Brexit Party and targets the popular vote. Theresa May, who never acquires a popular nick name, is seen as a weaker and weaker figure and the deafening, but empty, rhetoric of the Brexiteers masks as strength.
5: Trump enters the scene. It is the D Day Remembrance, recalling a time when British and US forces took on the mess in Europe; the Queen shakes the President’s hand. Donald openly praises his lookalike and soundalike clone, Boris and trade deals are mentioned. No-one mentions the fact that these deals often take a minimum of 10 years to put in place, by which time….
6: Someone tries to sabotage the Special Needs Relationship. The true opinion of the British Ambassador to the US is revealed. Trump, being a dignitary, becomes indignant and launches a very personal and undignified attack on the UK (but not the Queen) on Twitter. I think the ambassador called him fickle and impetuous. The ambassador resigns and Boris is elected.
7: Boris does exactly what Trump has done; he targets popular sentiments. Dude, we are going to energise the country is a strange phrase to come from an old Etonian, but it is what people want to hear. Apparently, Britain is going the have the biggest trade deal in history with the US (perhaps in a decade when Trump has gone and Bo Jo is out of office) We do not need the EU is that why we have not even spent the money they gave us to help poor children?. No-one has matched the pluck and courage of this country, a country that is showing weakness of conviction, weakness in leadership, weakness of morals and weakness in simple common sense.
We will tackle crime by having more police but we won’t tackle the root causes of crime: poverty, unemployment, dysfunction. We will have faster trains and so on. This is the rhetoric that most of these things will happen if we vote for Boris in a general election that may or may not happen.
8: The No Deal Brexit will be juxtaposed in every news article with the big deal with the US. However, there is no simple correlation. No deal means all relations with the EU stop and have to be renegotiated, if they can be negotiated at all. It means they stop there and then. All concessions, all funding and free trading and so on. The big deal with the US is Trump’s rhetoric and has no substance. It is just like the plans for Brexit prior to the referendum empty words. If a deal was proposed, it would take a decade to put in place.
So, whilst I really do believe that public opinion should be sought, the public should not be misled by the ‘soundbites’ of rich, self seeking politicians who may be marginally affected by the catastrophe of Johnson and Trumps’ popular politics and the devastation that will come with a no deal exit from the EU.