We now have a new housing minister, Margaret Beckett, having returned to the backbenches and her predecessor, Caroline Flint (she of the transparent brief about home ownership crisis), also resigned but with rather more to say about the treatment of women in the cabinet. The new guy – yes, it’s a man – is John Healey according to the BBC website, who appears to have had a previous interest in housing, having written a chapter with Ed Balls in a rather dubious collection published by the Smith Institute, Affordable Housing; their chapter is called “Housing and the UK economy – Building a progressive consensus”, to which all I can … Read the full post
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In a time when the shortage of social housing is at something of a crisis point, the housing minister has some thinking to share with us. Unfortunately, it is this. (Also BBC news page and the Guardian).
Let us make the rash assumption that this proposal to eject work-shy malingerers from their council tenancies is not an empty piece of vote catching cynicism, in fact let us go so far as to assume she might actually mean it. What we are then left with is something very silly indeed, lacking as it does both carrot and stick for those subject to this return of the un/deserving poor distinction.… Read the full post
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