RECENT ANNOUNCEMENTS by John Prescoc of goverment rcencons to limit the right to buy' for council tenants in areas of housing shortage should be treated with scepticism. Such proposals in no way mean that the government has turned the comer in its attitude to providing affordable housing for working class people.
The move has rightly been criticised by housing campaign groups as too little too late in the face of more and more working people being priced out of the housing market.
Restrictions on the right to buy are no form of brave new initiative. Even the Tories in government limited right to buy when faced with housing shortages in attractive rural areas.
Conservative housing policy now includes the promise to extend the right to buy to one million housing association tenants. This policy would clearty be disastrous in terms of removing more and more homes from social housing and increasing homelessness.
We might expect Tories to have no concern for ordinary working people: but are New Labour any better?
In pretending that restrictions on right to buy will soive the housing crisis. Prescott is
issing the point. He is also ying to shift the blame for the current situation onto individuals who have bought or would like to buy their council properties.
The fact is that only a major programme of house-building by local authorities will change a situation where teachers, social workers and firefighters can't afford to live in the cities where they work.
In London, for example, over 11,000 council homes were sold between 2000 and 2001 and only 3,000 low-cost homes were built - the overwhelming majority by housing associations not local authorities.
Fewer omes are being built in England now than at any time since the great depression of the 1930s.
Successful mass campaigns across the country against stock transfer of council homes should have made it dear to the government that tenants don't want their housing privatised. They want the repairs and improvements that paying rent should entitle them to, without being blackmailed into accepting privatisation.
They know that the money is available but that the government is refusing to spend
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Editorial/home news POS soclalst resistance February 2003 3