(12 years, 5 months ago)
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I agree entirely. Perhaps we would like to see a gesture from leader of the National Union of Rail, Maritime and Transport Workers as to what he will do in future.
We need to use our social housing stock better, which is why I welcome the Prime Minister’s announcement on enhancing the right to buy. We have to stop seeing our social housing stock as ghettos that we create. When I first moved to London, into the housing development that I mentioned, as ever, the housing developer built the required proportion of affordable housing at the end of a cul-de-sac; there were two rows of cheaper housing. It became ghettoised and stigmatised, as is always the case. We need to move beyond that and to think of social housing as a resource for the use of the community, not areas of a town or village that are regarded as somehow less worthy. That has always been my concern about the social engineering aspect of housing policy, which many Labour Members seem to want to create—communities that they can somehow control. That strategy is desperately wrong.