On his blog for the BBC,
Michael Crick writes:
Rachel Smith, the wife of the Business Secretary, Vince Cable has attacked the coalition's plans to end life-long tenancies in social housing.
They would lead to a bureaucratic nightmare and solve nothing, she says in the new edition of the Liberal Democrat grassroots magazine Liberator.
"It is a seriously bad idea, though it tries to deal with a real problem," she says. "The review process every five years would be a nightmare. If you found yourself threatened with the loss of your home, wouldn't you make sure your household was at its biggest and poorest at the moment of review?"
I can see the practical problems, but I have some sympathy for
Tim Worstall's complaint:
we’ve this crazed system whereby if at one point in your life you need a housing subsidy then you get that subsidy for all your life.
Anyway, read more from
Liberator on the magazine's website.
The only real solution is to remove the need for council housing and housing benefits - that however requires such a re-working of the economy that its politically unpalatable to even consider the steps required.
ReplyDelete(look at how unlikely Land Value Tax is for example - even though its likely to be a step towards such a goal)