What do we want? Low cost housing. When do we want it? Now!

According to Labour members polled by You.Gov on behalf of Jon Cruddas, affordable housing should be at the top of the party's new agenda.

An overwhelming 82% believe "funding should be available to local councils to build low-cost council housing on the same basis as housing associations". The Treasury has opposed this on the basis that it will breach government borrowing rules, since arm's length bodies need not count against government borrowing. Will we some movement on this in the first few months of a Brown led government? I certainly hope so.

Comments

[Stan Rosenthal]

Absolutely right, Mike. Affordable housing will provide the key to No. 10 for decades.

[swatantra nandanwar]

Agree. But lets get the simple things like free bus passes for the 60+s and integrated,ie connected, transport right, before we tackle the really difficult issue of releasimg more land from the Green Belt. Unless we redraw the Green Belt, these low cost houses won't be worth living in; they will be the ghetto's of the C21st.
I like the idea of 5 New Towns. But please lets learn the lessons from Basildon New Town and design out crime and build more integrated communities.

[Andy Ray]

Possibly I'm going to say something non-PC and unfashionable, but at times I wonder whether, by providing affordable houses to key workers, we're unwittingly locking them up into a sort of asset-serfdom? If society does acknowledge that they are key/essential, then free market economics -- which Gordon Brown tends to promote a la his native guru Adam Smith -- should pay them commensurate salary to buy houses that suit their social, cultural, geographic etc needs like the rest of us. If key investment bankers can afford it, why shouldn't key police or teachers or nurses??? And this scheme may be rather easily implemented if, for example, a la the Inner London weighting, a teacher in London's Belgravia demands a commensurate top-up to his/her basic national salary. David Ricardo called it "economic rent" -- like the extra price we'd pay if we shopped in Knightsbridge, London.

I think affordable/council housing was the right emergency response to the War devastation, but may be a bit anachronistic thinking on our part after 60 years. Let's try thinking outside the box at least.