Right to buy replacement costs
April 8th, 2015
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Labour: End the right to buy!
April 5th, 2015
UN Report on UK Housing – Raquel Rolnik
September 12th, 2013
UPDATE: The report has now been released or download it directly here
“The right to housing is not about a roof anywhere, at any cost, without any social ties. It is not about reshuffling people according to a snapshot of the number of bedrooms at a given night. It is about enabling environments for people to maintain their family and community bonds, their local schools, work places and health services allowing them to exercise all other rights, like education, work, food or health.”
This ought to be burned into the front door of the Government department responsible for housing, with a blowtorch, in order to remind them every day as they come to work of their responsibility to all the residents of the United Kingdom.
Forty years of UK housing in one graph
March 7th, 2013
The Guardian published a selection of results from the General Household Survey and the graph below caught my eye showing as it does the fall in council housing occupancy over 40 years.
Woodberry Down – Koos Couvée
November 2nd, 2012
http://www.flickr.com/photos/nicohogg/164474440/sizes/m/in/set-72157600403732490/
Woodberry Down has slipped under my radar in the sense that despite having lived just up the road for over a year, at Stamford Hill, in the 1970s, I have never walked around it or given it much thought. However, a recent article that came to my notice this week is above average and a wonderful description of the goings on there so I think it deserves a mention here.
Subsidy – misuse of the word
October 2nd, 2012
One of the words used by right wing politicians with no interest in housing anyone who can’t afford to buy a house or pay ever increasing private rent, is the word subsidy. It is almost always used in a perjorative way to suggest that the supposed beneficiary is in receipt of some favour, advantage, or benefit bestowed upon them by a benevolent society when there is no such thing as a subsidy being granted, only misuse of the word.
Right to Buy 2.0 by David Davis and Frank Field January 2012
September 28th, 2012
Right to Buy 2.0 by David Davis and Frank Field January 2012
This briefing written by Frank Field and David Davis is a poor and ill considered response to the crying need for housing in this small country of ours, England. Scotland and Wales have their own solutions. England deserves better than this mean spirited and narrow minded set of suggested policies to the lack of housing for those unable to afford to buy a house.
My strongest criticism of the briefing is that it lacks objectivity, it does not start from a level playing field, it is written from a point of view that takes several right wing prejudices as gospel and then attempts to find a solution to the housing problem based on these prejudices.
Right to buy – Frank Field vs Keren Suchecki
September 22nd, 2012
UPDATE: 11/10/17 This article summarises my position. The housing crisis will only get worse until England scraps right to buy
Jon Snow speaking at the Guardian Open Weekend
March 30th, 2012
I have rarely heard so much truth about the present housing situation spoken in so few words, in one place. I wasn’t there but transcribed this from the Guardian video.
The housing crisis is personal to me because the first job I had after University was to work in a day centre for homeless and vulnerable young people sort of 16 to 21, and I’m still the chairman of the project now, 40 years on.
There’s far more sleeping in doorways in London and in Manchester and in Birmingham than I can remember, we’re back somewhere in the late 1960s.
Hammersmith & Fulham council – Great lies of our time
November 25th, 2011
Hammersmith & Fulham (H&F) Council today welcomes the return of Right to Buy, but says that local authorities should have the freedom to be able to retain all of the proceeds from the scheme so that they can build more affordable homes.
http://www.lbhf.gov.uk/Directory/News/Councils_should_retain_all_the_proceeds_from_Right_to_Buy.asp
Next week on the evening of November 30th there will be a planning meeting http://www.saveourskyline.co.uk/index.php for a scheme that will include NO affordable homes.