How's this for "freedom"?
this dependency encouraging move
by the property snatcher, the "snapper":Nicola Sturgeon, the Scottish health minister, said right to buy has “had its day” and blamed a shortage of affordable rented housing in Scotland for her decision to scrap it.
In a speech to the SNP conference in Inverness, she said the move would mean 18,000 fewer council and social housing tenants buying their homes over the next decade.
But the Conservatives said it was a sad day for thousands of Scots who want to better themselves by realising their dream of home ownership.
Since its introduction by Margaret Thatcher’s Government in 1980, the right-to-buy policy has proved hugely popular in Scotland.
About 450,000 families have taken advantage of the scheme to purchase their homes at a discounted rate from their local council or social landlord.
Freedom for who exactly?
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4 comments:
Never having run a business, the crypto-communist SNP lady is of course unable to understand what the word "stock" actually means. It means something which is available. The good lady happily believes that all those homes which will now not be sold to their sitting tenants will immediately become available for people on waiting lists - errrr? No.
The clue is in the phrase, "sitting tenant". There is a tenant in the home already, they might buy, with a discount, or they might not. Either way they will stay in the home and it will not come available for anybody else.
At least if they buy, you can extract the money from the property and use it to buy or build another, which will be empty and available for somebody else. But the lefties just don't get that, do they?
Why don't they just campaign for the state ownership of housing for everybody! Look how sucessful it was in the USSR!
A few points:
- Once a home is sold, it is lost to future generations of tenants.
- Houses are sold to the tenant at a substantial discount, then sold on by the buyer at a later stage at significant profit.
- Housing associations cannot possibly afford to build a replacement home for the money they receive when houses are sold at less than market value under the right to buy; the pool of available housing therefore shrinks.
- Lots of people who bought houses under right to buy then couldn't afford the maintenance of the property. When renting, this cost would have been borne by the housing association. This leads to properties falling into severe disrepair, often to the point of dereliction.
- As a business model, right to buy undermines housing associations. How would it work if a retailer was forced to sell their products at less than the market value to their most loyal customers? Think about it.
Not sure anyone mentioned the word 'Freedom' TB (I think you just shoe-horned it in to get a finishing one-liner).
Most of the half-meg who bought the houses (and good for them I say) would agree that social housing should remain. But after thirty years, it has been proved comprehensively that you can't have both.
Right-to-buy (as part of the Thatcherite centralizing agenda) destroyed the building of new housing stock by local authorities. It assumed that private sector knew best, with no justification.
There certainly needs to be change, but to argue that banning Right to Buy will increase, or even stop the decrease, in the stock of Social Housing is simply wrong.
For suggestions as to how to change, see below!
https://www.localis.org.uk/images/Localis%20Principles%20for%20Social%20Housing%20Reform%20WEB.pdf