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Plug this homes gap
• MOST working tenants in council and social housing schemes are not living in subsidised housing, as they pay their full rents and council tax. The current Mayor of London was wrong to downgrade Ken Livingstone’s moderate demand for 50 per cent affordable housing in developments, as now there is an even stronger demand for affordable housing for working people.
This is now reaching a crisis point, due to the astronomical housing inflation over the past 30 years. The banks loaned money recklessly on self-certified mortgages and totally disregarded the 3.5-times-income formula. Banks have now decided to lend more responsibly but people just can’t get on the property ladder as the loan would never secure even a quarter of the price.
Council housing waiting lists will soon increase rapidly. The effects of the recession have not fully bitten as people are paying their mortgages and rents with redundancy payoffs. When it’s all spent, what do they do? Interest rates are rock bottom, but there will be a time when they start to rise and then there is going to be real trouble, with people defaulting on mortgages and putting even greater pressure on housing waiting lists.
There should be an urgent parliamentary debate on restructuring the whole of the housing market to make housing more accessible for working people. The best way of ratcheting up the standard of living of people in this country is to regulate the biggest cost in their lives – housing. There are scientific methods available to ensure everyone can be housed comfortably without having to bust their guts. It’s time to go forward not backwards.
M STILL
N5
• TWO years ago, with huge fanfare and headlines in the local press, MP Emily Thornberry and her sidekick, Councillor James Murray, boasted that the Labour Party’s Housing Green Paper would ensure thousands of new “affordable homes” for Islington. Nationally, 70,000 new “affordable” homes were to be built, with 45,000 of them social rented, for each year between 2008 and 2011.
Since then, Labour has nicked £1.5billion from other housing budgets, which were intended for improving existing council homes, in an attempt to meet a revised and more than 20 per cent reduced 55,000 “affordable” homes target.
The vast majority of them will be “intermediate” (shared ownership) homes, which as Cllr Murray points out in his letter (Boris fails homes test, July 31), are simply not affordable. The social rented target has had a decimating 70 per cent cut to 13,500 (around the same number of households languishing on Islington’s waiting list alone and hardly able to scratch the surface of the 1.7million-plus nationally).
Cllr Murray’s statement that “only Islington Labour will deliver the affordable homes that people need” really couldn’t be more ridiculous or insulting to the intelligence of Islington’s electorate, particularly the ever-growing number of working-class families desperately needing genuinely affordable homes.
SHARON HAYWARD
Independent Working Class Association
WC1
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