12th August 2010
Congratulations to Yeovil Town FC on their first win of the season, in their first match on Saturday 7th August. It is always good to have the first points on the board, and three points is better still. Best wishes to all the management, players and wider team at Huish Park for the season to come. We have been doing very well to compete in League One, when so many of the other teams have much bigger crowds and much bigger budgets with which to attract players. We cannot just sit back and expect success to fall into our laps – we are having to be smarter and sharper to offset the disadvantages of being one of the smaller clubs in the League.
Last week Parliament wasn’t sitting, and that gave me a chance to catch up on local issues and to hold a variety of meetings – including with Rupert Cox of the Somerset Chamber of Commerce.
I also held two Advice Centres – one in Yeovil on Thursday 5th August and one in Chard on the morning of Friday 6th August. Both Advice Centres were very busy, and as usual there were a lot of people who wanted to see me about housing and tax credits – which have probably been the two biggest issues in my Advice Centres for every one of the last 9 years!
Housing is an interesting issue, and it is a very high priority for millions of people across the country, yet it rarely seems to get much attention at a national level – in Westminster and elsewhere. There are, I think, a number of reasons for this – including the complexity of some of the policy issues concerned, and the fact that Britain has a very split attitude to housing issues.
On the one hand, there are many property owners in Britain, and they often see rising house prices as a “good thing”. This view is encouraged by most of the media, which presents higher house prices as good news, and falling house prices as bad news. This may not be how things feel for those people trying to get on the first rung of the property ladder!
In addition, those people who are already housed often give high priority to keeping green space “green”. I am often struck by how often people in brand new houses on the edge of towns will complain about plans for additional housing development near them, forgetting that their houses were also once regarded by others near by as representing an undesirable “blight” on the landscape.
Our planning laws in Britain are very restrictive compared with many countries, and new development is often limited to just a few sites – this makes land expensive, and it often snares new housing up in long delays. The result is that new housing building, not least new social house building, often falls way behind the levels necessary just to keep pace with demand. And demand is rising not just because of rising population but because the average household size is falling – so we need more houses for a given size of population.
Recently David Cameron and his housing minister, Grant Shapps, have been talking about ways of getting better value from existing social housing. Sometimes subsidized social housing is being used by people, they point out, on higher incomes – who arguably should not need social housing. And sometimes social housing is seriously “under-occupied” – as children move out, you can find situations where one or two adults are taking up a scarce four bedroom house.
These issues do need looking at, but the answers are not easy. If we take social housing away from those who get decent jobs, we are creating unbalanced communities and giving a big disincentive to people to find work (something which the Department of Work and Pensions is trying to address). And even where homes are under-occupied, it can be very difficult to insist on taking back a home which someone may have lived in for 40 or 50 years, and in which they may have invested time, money and a lot of emotional commitment.
One good idea, however, is to enable people to move more easily around the country, with a national data-base for switching social rented homes. That is long overdue, and uncontroversial.
David.