No to selling of housing association properties

Micheline Mason writes.

Last week David Cameron announced the latest of a long list of terrible policies aimed at wooing people to vote for their party on the 7th of May 2015, Election day. He wants to force providers of social housing, mostly Housing Associations, to sell off their most expensive properties to their tenants under an extension of the ‘Right to Buy’ legislation. I live in such a property and want to say why this is a dreadful idea.Food and shelter are two of the most basic human needs and both have become unaffordable luxuries for some of us under this profit-driven, elitist and eugenicist Coalition Government. Let me explain. Not everyone has the earning power to buy their own home especially if they were born into a poor family, live in areas of high unemployment or, like me, are disabled. Some Housing Associations provide supported housing for people with learning difficulties, young care-leavers, or young LBGTQ people escaping harassment and oppression.

Most social housing, after the last big sell off of Council Houses, is now run by not-for-profit Housing Associations who cater for people with additional needs like mine, and are able to charge reasonable rents because they do not need to make a profit for their shareholders.

Some of these properties are specially adapted for people who use powered wheelchairs and other equipment such as hoists. Housing Associations can apply for grants to do this. Because of this provision severely disabled people do not have to go and live in segregated institutions which are more costly to the public purse and destroy our independence and well being.

Even if we still need to claim Housing Benefit it is at something like a third of the cost of rents on the private market, thus keeping down the ‘Welfare’ bill (Housing Benefit is the largest item of social security spending after the State Pension because of the extortionate rents people are being charged coupled with the low wages people are able to earn).

But here’s the thing – with the ideological attack on social housing, begun by Maggie Thatcher but continued by all mainstream parties, very few adapted premises are being built. They are like gold dust. The Private sector do not want to let their properties to poor people on benefits and with wheelchairs scratching their walls and furniture. They are not interested in filling a housing need but only in making money.

In practice this means that younger disabled people, like my own daughter, when made homeless by a landlord fed up with her inability to earn enough to pay his nearly £2000 a month rent, was told that there were no suitable properties for her to be rehoused in. She would have to go on a waiting list for maybe years and guess what! – the only place she could find refuge from the streets is my specially adapted social housing flat David Cameron is urging Housing Associations to sell off. It seems my generation (over 60’s) will be the last to have access to a suitable home like mine. It can only be a fool who cannot see what a disaster such policy will be if ever implemented. Instead we need to build many, many more council houses which are not only affordable in a real sense, but are designed to meet the housing needs of our most vulnerable people.

The ‘Right to Buy’ housing policy should be stopped, not extended.

Micheline’s blog is at michelinemason.wordpress.com