There was not enuff ElfSlang™ in dat last wun! 😉

Oh whell.

Thing is though, what any £100k+ earners who actually do live in council housing (and I don’t imagine there are all that many of them tbh..) are doing is perfectly legal, regardless of any ‘moral’ argument.

Just like all those bankers and chaps like Philip Green then. I presume you don’t have any problem with what they’ve done then, elf?

Quite happy to lump this fat waste of space in with them too:

Frank Dobson – Not a Member
I couldn’t [rent] – not very easily. Market rents in our area are phenomenal. I wouldn’t be able to afford it.

I think the RTB was about far more than raising money and giving people ‘pride of ownership’. It was about preparing the country for the situation we are in now, more people taking from the system than putting into it.

If you didn’t give people a RTB their council house they would stay in it until they die. Not only does the government have to pay for the house they also pay for the pension and any care needed. If you let people buy their home they then have an asset to fund their old age. It was a win, win situation for the governemt. Why do you think they didn’t allow any funds raised to be used towards more social housing?

You also can’t ignore migration to the uk as a major factor in the increased cost of buying a house or renting. Legal Non EU migration is always the figure used but this is a small number compared to legal EU migration, illegal non eu migration and students. The vast majority will also rent, feeding demand and pushing up rents. It’s not a case of ‘blame the immigrants’, it’s a fact which can’t be ignored when it comes to the cost of housing.

Elfinsafety – Member

Here we go. Blame the ‘immigrants’. Ignore the enormous contribution they’ve made to the UK economy…
the discussion is around housing issues, increase the population significantly and you put pressure on housing (and lots of other services). Service provision will always lag behind such rapid changes in population. Do you deny that increasing the population by 1 million + rapidly has any measurable impact on the issue of housing?

Anyway they’re all going back home now. Net migration to the UK is dropping quite rapidly. At this rate we’ll be seeing net emigration, not immigration in just a few years

I would love to see where you are getting those figures/ forecasts from, care to illuminate us?

assuming your proposition is correct “net emigration”….
house prices will fall, rents will drop and council housing will be easier to get hold of as net demand has reduced. All those plans to increase the nations housing stock can be shelved as well.

Elfinsafety – Member

But I also strongly believe that a person should be free to live where they choose, regardless of wealth

Great, I’ll move into one of the big houses up the road then, I’m sure they won’t mind.

big_n_daft – Member

I would love to see where you are getting those figures/ forecasts from, care to illuminate us?

Net migration hit its high back in 2004 and has been trending downwards since. Though not consistently, so it’d be a brave person who decided to extrapolate a future trend from it.

Ironically, one of the major cuts in immigration is going to be student visas, which the current idiots have decided to cut by 25%. Foreign students are basically a cash-crop for the UK so it’s pretty much an act of unbridled idiocy, but the government thinks putting a dent in migration figures will play well in the press even though it’s hugely damaging for the UK’s universities.

I reckon it’d probably cost the government more the write the macro to sort this out than it would save.

Must say this is something of an inverse deserving and undeserving poor discussion. Presumably the people who now earn 100k and live in council houses have struggled to ‘better’ themselves, and are now the bogeymen despite doing what a lot of people who rant about benefits want them to do…