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Let’s not forget the homeless this Yule
AS families celebrate Christmas, a festival for children, it is a sad thought that in Britain and abroad we are recreating child homelessness at a rate unseen for many years.
As worrying as wars and natural disasters, especially tragic here, is the plight of homeless children whose parents can’t afford to provide a home.
Not drug addicts or alcoholics, many simply can’t earn the money to house themselves and their children. Despite changed conditions, the impact of this terrible quandary on today’s children can be as bad as in Victorian times.
After World War II, faced with the greatest ever destruction of housing stock in our history, the old-Labour government launched a massive programme of council house-building, so successful and popular that despite some acknowledged failures (including now-demolished tower blocks), political and social consensus kept programmes running under Labour and Conservative governments into the 1980s.
Margaret Thatcher changed all that, introducing the ‘Right to Buy’ but not rent or just be housed.
Council houses were sold off. Councils were prevented from building, under the pretence that housing associations could and would take over the role of ‘social housing’, government resources were channelled away from councils to ‘social housing providers’. As council house-building declined, homelessness rose.
Blair’s government, instead of building houses for people in need, intensified Thatcher’s policy, preventing local councils from building, even, as we saw in Camden, withholding money for improvements because tenants refused to be bullied into approving his management-privatistion policy.
Now Camden’s new Liberal Democrat/Conservative council is planning to hand over its housing estates to housing associations but associations are selling off homes too!
Even less chance of the poor and needy being housed!
Government, pretending the market can be persuaded to provide adequate quantities of social housing, focuses instead on promoting gambling directly and indirectly, leading to further poverty and homelessness.
Directly, under the guise of strengthening what it calls the ‘gaming industry’, it encourages casino-building and promotes a new scourge, internet gambling. Allied with its lack of a socialist vision, some of its indirect policies may be even more dangerous.
All government propaganda is directed towards persuading people that property is not a social need to be met or service to be provided but an asset from which to reap profit – playing down the fact that all investments are a gamble.
Day after day, television pours out an endless stream of programmes aimed at persuading people to increase the value of that asset; home makeovers, garden upgrades, property auctions, buy-to-let, together, abroad, the variety and ingenuity are staggering.
House price increases are boosted by constant underlying messages: “Not enough houses” – “buy now or miss getting onto the property ladder” – “housing is a guaranteed, fail-safe investment”.
Remember negative equity? People lucky enough to have owned their homes for a long time are considered to have made a ‘windfall profit’ from the rise in value.
Equity release encourages homeowners to borrow against enhanced property values. It is no coincidence that consumer debt in Britain now exceeds one trillion pounds, much secured, though debtors don’t realise it until the bailiffs arrive, against their homes.
Under Blair house prices have risen more or less steadily. Yet, as our government’s role model, the USA, shows and as many have warned for years, growth is finite.
House prices in America are down on average five per cent over the past year, a clear indication their property boom is over.
The dramatic rise in mortgage foreclosures and home repossessions, to levels unseen since the early 1990s, ought to be taken as presaging similar drops here but government warnings of housing shortage keep prices up.
Recently heralded 50-year mortgages with lending multiples up to six times borrowers’ earnings look ominous.
Similar moves in Japan in the 1980s led to a property price collapse and several bank failures. What is our government doing to prevent that happening here? Nothing! It is courting the same disaster!
We have sold off council housing stock and not replaced it. Many who bought to speculate – gamble – find themselves unable to afford the upkeep.
Nobody told them a house isn’t only an asset, it’s a liability. When they have to meet the cost of new floors, roofs, heating or plumbing systems themselves, it can be beyond their means.
Forty years ago Ken Loach’s ‘Cathy Come Home’ illustrated graphically how easily a young family could slide into homelessness.
The BBC’s recent Homelessness series highlights that the needs exposed then have not gone away, portraying heart-rending scenes, children still being shunted house to house, room to room, into bed and breakfast, then into care, when the family’s original problem was only lack of money.
Homelessness then destroys families.
Many people fear an imminent housing market crash. For the poor and homeless, that crash has already occurred. They have the wounds to show it.
So, let us not forget, Christmas was the story of a young, homeless family and their first child. Over 2,000 years later that tragedy is relived daily.
I wish for everyone a Merry Christmas and Happy New Year in a safe and secure home of their own. |
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