Tendring Topics…….on line
Britain’s Housing Situation
The Problem:
I have just been listening to a tv interview in which the Housing Minister expounded the thoughts of the Coalition Government on the country’s housing problems, and told us about the ground-breaking new solutions that they have in mind to solve them.
It appears that they have discovered that local authorities have long ‘waiting lists’ of applicants for housing accommodation from homeless, overcrowded or otherwise unsatisfactorily or inadequately housed residents in their areas – and that not enough is being done to shorten them.
Regular readers of this blog could have told him that the main reason for this is the Right to Buy legislation introduced by the Thatcher government in 1980. This compelled local authorities, but not private landlords (the then-government needed their votes!), to sell off the houses, bungalows and flats that they owned, at bargain prices, to sitting tenants. Local authorities were no longer to be providers of new homes but facilitators, permitted to encourage Housing Associations and private developers to build ‘affordable homes’. To add insult to injury, local authorities still had a duty to provide shelter for the homeless, particularly families with children.
Possible Solutions:
The above is, needless to say, not the Coalition Government’s preferred explanation, nor is their preferred solution the obvious one; the repeal of ‘right to buy’ and encouragement of local authorities to build houses for letting as they had done successfully for the previous hundred years. They do have two ‘brilliant’ ideas though which, I have little doubt, they fondly imagine had never before occurred to anyone.
It must, I think, have been reflecting on the success of a mantra of the Thatcher/Blair years ‘No-one can expect to have a job for life’ that produced the idea that ‘No-one can expect to have a Council house tenancy for life’. Instead of being offered, as at present, a secure tenancy for as long as the rent was paid and the conditions of the tenancy observed, tenants could be offered a five or perhaps a ten-year lease, the situation to be reviewed at the end of that period.
If the family income had risen substantially when the lease expired, the tenant would be informed that he was now in a position to buy a home and was no longer eligible for Council accommodation. If the financial situation was unchanged but members of the family had left home, the tenant might be told that he was no longer eligible for a three bed-roomed house but might be offered a five or ten year lease on a one or two bed-roomed one.
There are two obvious disadvantages to this idea. However soon it were to be introduced it couldn’t possibly have any effect on the Housing Waiting Lists for many years to come. The other snag is that a householder who knows that his occupancy is strictly limited isn’t going to spend either money or energy on internal decoration and improvement or on maintaining and improving the garden. Most tenants by now will have been persuaded of the merits of the Blair/Thatcher philosophy of the Market Economy – Take as much as you can get, for as little as you can get away with!
The other brilliant idea of the Government is that there should be a central tenancy exchange agency. A council tenant in, say Liverpool, who would like to exchange with one in Clacton would get in touch with the agency. Perhaps there would be someone here who wanted to go to Liverpool for a job or to be nearer mum and the family. The two local authorities would be required by law to permit the exchange.
‘There is no new thing under the sun’ (Ecclesiastes 1:9)
The Housing Minister may be astonished to learn that in the early 1970s, both these ideas (but without either the element of compulsion, or the extra layer of bureaucracy that would be involved with a central exchange agency) were being practised in Clacton-on-Sea without any fuss, any protests, or any news headlines and, as far as I can recall, without any central Government encouragement.
Clacton Urban District Council was predominately Conservative but believed very strongly that they should not sell their Council Houses. They regarded them as a trust bequeathed to them by their far-sighted predecessors to solve the town’s contemporary and future housing problems.
Existing tenants who could afford to do so were encouraged, but not compelled, to relinquish their tenancies and buy their own homes. In the days before run-away house price inflation, home ownership was a desirable and not unachievable goal. Many did buy their homes, leaving their council houses available for letting. My wife Heather and I were among them.
The Council house in Thorpe-le-Soken where Heather and I lived for a year and where our younger son was born. We subsequently lived for six months in a Council house in Holland-on-Sea, before buying the bungalow in which I am still living today.
Council accommodation was not just for the helpless and hopeless. It was also for the ambitious and aspiring. As a result there was an economic and social mix of residents on Council housing estates. They were not being allowed to develop into ‘benefit ghettoes’. This was surely desirable.
During the time that I was Clacton’s Housing Manager, the Council encouraged tenants whose families had grown up and left home, to move into smaller, perhaps ground-floor, flats or bungalows, usually at a lower rent. Many gladly did so. Bungalows were particularly popular with the elderly. Being old myself, and living in a bungalow, I know why!
Exchanges of tenancy were also arranged without the need for any outside agency. A Clacton tenant wishing to move to Liverpool, or Leeds or London, perhaps for employment or any other reason, would insert an advert offering an exchange in a local paper at his preferred destination. He or she could usually find someone there who would like to move ‘to the seaside’. By agreement with the other authority concerned and provided the incoming tenant had a good rent payment record, the exchange would take place.
We did, of course, have a ‘waiting list’ of applicants for Council accommodation, but during my period of office no family was ever left, even for one night, ‘without a roof over their heads’. Nor did we ever have to resort to using bed-and-breakfast accommodation to solve a problem of temporary homelessness.
Afghanistan
Few places can be more remote from our Essex Coast, both geographically and in history and culture, than Afghanistan. Yet it is constantly being forced on our attention by the almost daily death toll of young soldiers, killed in gunfights, by snipers or – most frequently – by improvised land mines laid by Taliban insurgents.
After years of conflict we seem no nearer to achieving the original objectives of the war which were to stamp out the El Quaida terrorists responsible for ‘9/11’ and other acts of terror world-wide, and to kill or capture their leader Osama Bin Laden. Nor have we defeated El Quaida’s allies, the Taliban. Occupying Kabul and ousting the Taliban government was the easy bit. Fighting a guerrilla army, whose members know every inch of its territory, wear no uniform and are either supported or feared by much of the local population, is another matter. Those who are convinced that to fall in battle against the infidel is an instant passport to Paradise are unlikely to fear death. How are we to know when, or whether, they have been defeated? Widely scattered armed bands can bury their weapons and their members can become innocent townsmen and villagers overnight. Who would wish (or dare) to betray them?
The war is increasingly politically unpopular in the west. Will the Afghan national army be ready and willing to take on the Taliban within the next few years, thus allowing us to make a dignified withdrawal? Perhaps, but if I were an Afghan who had been converted by the allies to the benefits of parliamentary democracy, universal education and women’s rights, I would by now be seeking ways of escape. Within days of the Soviet Army’s withdrawal there was a little publicised bloodbath as those deemed to have been collaborators were hunted down and slaughtered. Why should those who collaborated with NATO expect different treatment?
A week or so ago, we heard the news that two American servicemen had been captured by the Taliban. Since then there has been silence. Are urgent negotiations currently going on ‘behind the scenes’ about the payment of a ransom for their release? A few months ago on Channel 4tv there was a programme about the final months of the Soviet occupation that included surprisingly frank interviews with Russian soldiers at a remote mountain outpost. They spoke chillingly about the fate of any of their number captured the insurgents. ‘We always keep one round of ammunition for ourselves if there’s a risk of capture’, one said. He echoed the words of Rudyard Kipling who, one hundred and fifty years earlier, had ended his poem of advice for The Young British Soldier with this verse:
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains –
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Soldier of the Queen!
I doubt if the Afghan insurgents have become more humane than they were 150 - or 20 - years ago. They may have become more susceptible to bribery though, and their current opponents more ready to offer them bribes
I certainly hope so.
The Value of Friendship
A fortnight ago I mentioned in this column that I was shortly to have day-surgery on a cancerous condition affecting my right ear. My left ear had received similar surgical treatment two years earlier. As, this time, the treatment was considered to be urgent, I was to have the operation at Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford rather than, as previously, at the day-surgery unit of Colchester General.
I wasn’t particularly anxious about it. I had, as they say ‘already been there; read the book; got the tee-shirt!’ However, I was now two years older (and there’s quite a difference between 87 and 89!) and it was much further to go for the operation in an unfamiliar hospital.
I travelled to Chelmsford and had the operation on Tuesday of last week (3rd August). Now, as the Consultant had promised, I have two ‘matching ears’, both a little smaller, both scarred and both slightly misshapen! The ordeal was immeasurably lightened by the kindness of a friend who drove me from Clacton to Chelmsford, escorted me through the maze of corridors in Broomfield Hospital, waited with me until I was summoned for my operation, continued to wait for the hour that I was in the operating theatre, and then drove me home again.
It was not the first time that that friend had supported me in this way – but never before had I been quite so pleased to see a friendly, welcoming and reassuring smile as I returned to the waiting room, and never before been so grateful for congenial companionship both on the journey to Chelmsford and on the drive home.
I have learned several lessons during the four years that have elapsed since my wife’s life came to an end after sixty years of marriage; an ever-present loss that still overwhelms me from time to time. I think that the most important of those lessons has been that of the value and importance of friendship. He, or she, who has no friends is bereft indeed.
Britain’s Housing Situation
The Problem:
I have just been listening to a tv interview in which the Housing Minister expounded the thoughts of the Coalition Government on the country’s housing problems, and told us about the ground-breaking new solutions that they have in mind to solve them.
It appears that they have discovered that local authorities have long ‘waiting lists’ of applicants for housing accommodation from homeless, overcrowded or otherwise unsatisfactorily or inadequately housed residents in their areas – and that not enough is being done to shorten them.
Regular readers of this blog could have told him that the main reason for this is the Right to Buy legislation introduced by the Thatcher government in 1980. This compelled local authorities, but not private landlords (the then-government needed their votes!), to sell off the houses, bungalows and flats that they owned, at bargain prices, to sitting tenants. Local authorities were no longer to be providers of new homes but facilitators, permitted to encourage Housing Associations and private developers to build ‘affordable homes’. To add insult to injury, local authorities still had a duty to provide shelter for the homeless, particularly families with children.
Possible Solutions:
The above is, needless to say, not the Coalition Government’s preferred explanation, nor is their preferred solution the obvious one; the repeal of ‘right to buy’ and encouragement of local authorities to build houses for letting as they had done successfully for the previous hundred years. They do have two ‘brilliant’ ideas though which, I have little doubt, they fondly imagine had never before occurred to anyone.
It must, I think, have been reflecting on the success of a mantra of the Thatcher/Blair years ‘No-one can expect to have a job for life’ that produced the idea that ‘No-one can expect to have a Council house tenancy for life’. Instead of being offered, as at present, a secure tenancy for as long as the rent was paid and the conditions of the tenancy observed, tenants could be offered a five or perhaps a ten-year lease, the situation to be reviewed at the end of that period.
If the family income had risen substantially when the lease expired, the tenant would be informed that he was now in a position to buy a home and was no longer eligible for Council accommodation. If the financial situation was unchanged but members of the family had left home, the tenant might be told that he was no longer eligible for a three bed-roomed house but might be offered a five or ten year lease on a one or two bed-roomed one.
There are two obvious disadvantages to this idea. However soon it were to be introduced it couldn’t possibly have any effect on the Housing Waiting Lists for many years to come. The other snag is that a householder who knows that his occupancy is strictly limited isn’t going to spend either money or energy on internal decoration and improvement or on maintaining and improving the garden. Most tenants by now will have been persuaded of the merits of the Blair/Thatcher philosophy of the Market Economy – Take as much as you can get, for as little as you can get away with!
The other brilliant idea of the Government is that there should be a central tenancy exchange agency. A council tenant in, say Liverpool, who would like to exchange with one in Clacton would get in touch with the agency. Perhaps there would be someone here who wanted to go to Liverpool for a job or to be nearer mum and the family. The two local authorities would be required by law to permit the exchange.
‘There is no new thing under the sun’ (Ecclesiastes 1:9)
The Housing Minister may be astonished to learn that in the early 1970s, both these ideas (but without either the element of compulsion, or the extra layer of bureaucracy that would be involved with a central exchange agency) were being practised in Clacton-on-Sea without any fuss, any protests, or any news headlines and, as far as I can recall, without any central Government encouragement.
Clacton Urban District Council was predominately Conservative but believed very strongly that they should not sell their Council Houses. They regarded them as a trust bequeathed to them by their far-sighted predecessors to solve the town’s contemporary and future housing problems.
Existing tenants who could afford to do so were encouraged, but not compelled, to relinquish their tenancies and buy their own homes. In the days before run-away house price inflation, home ownership was a desirable and not unachievable goal. Many did buy their homes, leaving their council houses available for letting. My wife Heather and I were among them.
The Council house in Thorpe-le-Soken where Heather and I lived for a year and where our younger son was born. We subsequently lived for six months in a Council house in Holland-on-Sea, before buying the bungalow in which I am still living today.
Council accommodation was not just for the helpless and hopeless. It was also for the ambitious and aspiring. As a result there was an economic and social mix of residents on Council housing estates. They were not being allowed to develop into ‘benefit ghettoes’. This was surely desirable.
During the time that I was Clacton’s Housing Manager, the Council encouraged tenants whose families had grown up and left home, to move into smaller, perhaps ground-floor, flats or bungalows, usually at a lower rent. Many gladly did so. Bungalows were particularly popular with the elderly. Being old myself, and living in a bungalow, I know why!
Exchanges of tenancy were also arranged without the need for any outside agency. A Clacton tenant wishing to move to Liverpool, or Leeds or London, perhaps for employment or any other reason, would insert an advert offering an exchange in a local paper at his preferred destination. He or she could usually find someone there who would like to move ‘to the seaside’. By agreement with the other authority concerned and provided the incoming tenant had a good rent payment record, the exchange would take place.
We did, of course, have a ‘waiting list’ of applicants for Council accommodation, but during my period of office no family was ever left, even for one night, ‘without a roof over their heads’. Nor did we ever have to resort to using bed-and-breakfast accommodation to solve a problem of temporary homelessness.
Afghanistan
Few places can be more remote from our Essex Coast, both geographically and in history and culture, than Afghanistan. Yet it is constantly being forced on our attention by the almost daily death toll of young soldiers, killed in gunfights, by snipers or – most frequently – by improvised land mines laid by Taliban insurgents.
After years of conflict we seem no nearer to achieving the original objectives of the war which were to stamp out the El Quaida terrorists responsible for ‘9/11’ and other acts of terror world-wide, and to kill or capture their leader Osama Bin Laden. Nor have we defeated El Quaida’s allies, the Taliban. Occupying Kabul and ousting the Taliban government was the easy bit. Fighting a guerrilla army, whose members know every inch of its territory, wear no uniform and are either supported or feared by much of the local population, is another matter. Those who are convinced that to fall in battle against the infidel is an instant passport to Paradise are unlikely to fear death. How are we to know when, or whether, they have been defeated? Widely scattered armed bands can bury their weapons and their members can become innocent townsmen and villagers overnight. Who would wish (or dare) to betray them?
The war is increasingly politically unpopular in the west. Will the Afghan national army be ready and willing to take on the Taliban within the next few years, thus allowing us to make a dignified withdrawal? Perhaps, but if I were an Afghan who had been converted by the allies to the benefits of parliamentary democracy, universal education and women’s rights, I would by now be seeking ways of escape. Within days of the Soviet Army’s withdrawal there was a little publicised bloodbath as those deemed to have been collaborators were hunted down and slaughtered. Why should those who collaborated with NATO expect different treatment?
A week or so ago, we heard the news that two American servicemen had been captured by the Taliban. Since then there has been silence. Are urgent negotiations currently going on ‘behind the scenes’ about the payment of a ransom for their release? A few months ago on Channel 4tv there was a programme about the final months of the Soviet occupation that included surprisingly frank interviews with Russian soldiers at a remote mountain outpost. They spoke chillingly about the fate of any of their number captured the insurgents. ‘We always keep one round of ammunition for ourselves if there’s a risk of capture’, one said. He echoed the words of Rudyard Kipling who, one hundred and fifty years earlier, had ended his poem of advice for The Young British Soldier with this verse:
When you’re wounded and left on Afghanistan’s plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains –
An’ go to your Gawd like a soldier.
Soldier of the Queen!
I doubt if the Afghan insurgents have become more humane than they were 150 - or 20 - years ago. They may have become more susceptible to bribery though, and their current opponents more ready to offer them bribes
I certainly hope so.
The Value of Friendship
A fortnight ago I mentioned in this column that I was shortly to have day-surgery on a cancerous condition affecting my right ear. My left ear had received similar surgical treatment two years earlier. As, this time, the treatment was considered to be urgent, I was to have the operation at Broomfield Hospital in Chelmsford rather than, as previously, at the day-surgery unit of Colchester General.
I wasn’t particularly anxious about it. I had, as they say ‘already been there; read the book; got the tee-shirt!’ However, I was now two years older (and there’s quite a difference between 87 and 89!) and it was much further to go for the operation in an unfamiliar hospital.
I travelled to Chelmsford and had the operation on Tuesday of last week (3rd August). Now, as the Consultant had promised, I have two ‘matching ears’, both a little smaller, both scarred and both slightly misshapen! The ordeal was immeasurably lightened by the kindness of a friend who drove me from Clacton to Chelmsford, escorted me through the maze of corridors in Broomfield Hospital, waited with me until I was summoned for my operation, continued to wait for the hour that I was in the operating theatre, and then drove me home again.
It was not the first time that that friend had supported me in this way – but never before had I been quite so pleased to see a friendly, welcoming and reassuring smile as I returned to the waiting room, and never before been so grateful for congenial companionship both on the journey to Chelmsford and on the drive home.
I have learned several lessons during the four years that have elapsed since my wife’s life came to an end after sixty years of marriage; an ever-present loss that still overwhelms me from time to time. I think that the most important of those lessons has been that of the value and importance of friendship. He, or she, who has no friends is bereft indeed.
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