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How affordable homes push up prices of other properties
• WILL someone please explain why our MP, Emily Thornberry, is so obsessed with providing more affordable housing?
She is, of course, exaggerating the position by imprecise wording. In her latest leaflet she almost implies that the council is building luxury flats. The council is one of the few in the country that is building more council homes.
The council’s waiting list has been at 13,000 for about six years. The council approved planning permission for well over 4,000 new homes in the past few years and is doing well against Labour Mayor Ken Livingstone’s own London Plan.
I don’t think she has a good case for more affordable housing. Islington is the most densely crowded borough in London. We have almost 50 per cent social housing as it is. We are the eighth-most- deprived local authority in the country so we have a very large proportion of deprived families.
If we are to have a balanced community with a mixed economy and a mixture of people to support local (especially retail) businesses then we probably need more people with larger disposable incomes rather than those who survive on benefits.
More affordable housing means that every time a new development is approved a developer is obliged to subsidise the affordable homes by increasing the costs of the homes for sale. In other words, the more affordable homes that are demanded the greater the price inflation on homes for sale – the ones most people buy.
The Labour government’s poor management of the economy and the credit crunch mean that many are now facing a tough time to keep up with mortgage repayments. The Labour government is more responsible than anyone else for the massive increase in the cost of home ownership over the past 10 years. Ms Thornberry expects a Liberal Democrat council to solve her own government’s incompetency.
Shared equity – one of the more common forms of affordable housing, where you pay some rent and some mortgage – is not cheap, although it does get you a foot on the housing ladder.
Experts are now predicting that many of these units will be the first to be repossessed because this is where people have taken the bigger risks in desperation to get a home and have taken on big commitments which they won’t be able to maintain.
It is very likely that many of the so-called affordable homes will be empty and waiting new occupants soon. I suspect Ms Thornberry is playing a very political game because she believes that traditional Labour voters live on council estates, where they are often overcrowded.
Does she believe that a meaningless message, with nothing that she has to promise, will keep Labour supporters happy.
This is the mistake she made before the last election when she made outrageous and undeliverable demands for leaseholders.
Four years on we are all a great deal more wise about her cynical tactics, and we won’t be so gullible this time.
SIMON HARRIS
Packington Street, N1
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