General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Here's why 52% of British voted to leave [View all]Denzil_DC
(7,222 posts)Generally, Conservative voters owned their houses while Labour voters rented social (a.k.a. council) housing. So a big sell-off was instigated. It was social engineering on a grand scale: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-14380936
The council houses sold at knockdown prices to the tenants - so low that people would have had to be crazy or very principled indeed not to snap them up - were not replaced with new stock. Hell, councils weren't even allowed to spend the money from the sales on repairs to the remaining council house stock, they had to use it to pay down borrowing instead.
It's suited successive governments since to stimulate a housing shortage, by going slow on new private house building and making relatively little social housing provision, because a lot of people became very invested in owning their own houses rather than renting, partly for status reasons, but mainly hooked on the idea of easy money because they could just pay a mortgage and the property they lived in would appreciate in value at an alarming rate. Alleviating that housing shortage would drive prices down, so it's seldom been any sort of priority because the new aspirant middle class wouldn't like that. Until it periodically becomes such a crisis that it can't be ignored: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/sep/27/the-guardian-view-on-housing-policy-britain-must-face-home-truths
Now, having identified some of the root causes, maybe you could explain what "migrants" are allowed to jump social housing allocation lists? I mean, you must have a source for that, right? I couldn't get a council house myself when I could have used one years ago because there just weren't any available unless you had existing family ties to the area, and I was in effect an immigrant, though not a visually identifiable one.