
Conservative MP Iain Duncan Smith has done a lot since he lost the leadership of his party a few years ago. He has carved out a very clear interest in, and concern for, inequality and has set up a think-tank called the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) that focuses on it. I respect Mr Duncan Smith's commitment to the issues he is now working on, but unfortunately, I believe too often he tries to make problems fit his right-wing outlook instead of challenging whether his beliefs would actually make a difference to the problem.
As an example of this, yesterday the CSJ
published a report arguing that the key to lifting council tenants out of poverty is a greater incentive to buy their home. This is exactly the same idea that the Conservatives implemented nearly 30 years ago when they came up with their Right to Buy council homes plan.
The intervening years have shown that while Right to Buy was a popular policy and for some provided a means of upward mobility, it has caused many more problems than it has solved.
Today's CSJ report claims that right-to-buy stops estates becoming ghettos. In fact, right to buy has actually made estates ghettos. That's because so many of those who bought then moved out and let out their homes on mainly short-term lets. The result was that the community collapsed: new tenants move in and out every six months to a year or so; those who occupy the properties care far less about the environment they live in because they'll only be here for a few months, and those who haven't bought their homes find it far harder to get an appropriate property because the council housing stock has been decimated.
And what also makes estates ghettos is the lack of pride landlords take in maintaining their properties. Both Wandsworth Council and many buy-to-let homeowners are failing in that responsibility resulting in shabby estates and run-down homes.
So what Iain Duncan Smith has done is recycle a totemic 30 year-old policy and ignore the subsequent three decades of practical experience of it not working as the Tories originally hoped. Instead he should, surely, have challenged his belief in that policy and at least acknowledged that it has had drawbacks as well as successes?
At the root of the Tory approach to housing is a completely misguided belief that it is housing tenure that makes a difference to one's life chances. By repeatedly insisting that home owners are somehow more worthy, virtuous and successful than tenants, they have only stigmatised one perfectly valid, very large group of people. They do precisely the same thing in respect of marriage when they preach that anyone unmarried is unworthy to raise children.
The issue is not whether someone owns or rents their home - in fact it is utterly irrelevant - it is whether they have a decent job, got a good education, were raised in a supportive, structured family and have decent, loyal friends. For Conservatives, that just doesn't compute: they have a single idea: ever more home ownership and if it doesn't work, it's simply because it hasn't been implemented radically enough. Well, nowhere has right to buy been pursued as radically - and rabidly - as Wandsworth and the housing problem here is worse than in any neighbouring borough.
Unless the Conservatives learn from the mistakes they have made in Wandsworth, they will be doomed to repeat them. The problem with today's Tory report is that they have things backwards and have failed to learn a thing.
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