In some London boroughs it can take 70 years of waiting before your name comes up for a council home. So the call this week from homelessness charity Shelter to suspend council house sales recognises the fact that many feel the right to buy needs rethinking.

The council housing equation is clearly unbalanced. Since Margaret Thatcher made it possible 22 years ago for council tenants to buy their homes, nearly 1.5 million of them have been sold. In a similar period, not even half of them have been replaced with new affordable homes for rent. For every home sold for an average of £28,000, says Shelter, it costs £50,000 to build another one.

Housing minister Tony McNulty says that home ownership is one of today's inalienable rights. And certainly the political consequences of halting sales would appear to be unpalatable. When the headlines constantly scream of soaring house prices, it seems unfair to deny council tenants their first step onto the housing ladder.

Even if there is no hope of a full U-turn, there is surely an argument for fine-tuning the policy to reflect the economics of different parts of the country. In an interview this week, local government minister Nick Raynsford hints that his department has to take a more regional approach to housing policy. Does this open the door to the Scottish approach, which involves suspending the right to buy until 2011 and extending the qualifying period to five years? Also, many in the sector think it is high time that the dead hand on capital receipts is relaxed and the money ploughed back into bricks and mortar.

These are not easy issues for the government to tackle. But ministers might recall how impossible it once seemed to withdraw mortgage tax relief.

Can you provide very high-density housing without creating high-rise slums? Yes, says the London Housing Federation, which has published a study this week setting out the ground rules for this type of successful urban development (see pages 26-27). Unsurprisingly, it finds that harmonious communities are only created in tight spaces if the schemes contain a balanced mix of the young and the old, are of high-quality design and come with reasonable public facilities. In fact, the kind of neighbourhood that developers have been selling to yuppies and dinkys at a premium for years. It also dispels the myth that high density means high rise – but is likely to come with a higher price tag.

Source

Housing Today