No, the housing crisis is not the result of too much social rented housing
Do we even need to say that? Yes, it transpires. Plus: what the transition to gas boilers tells us about our efforts to transition away from them.
The long read: who lives in social housing and how is it funded?
A comment piece in The Daily Telegraph this weekend came to a bold conclusion about the causes of London’s housing crisis: too much social housing.
The piece, titled The Housing Crisis No One Dares To Talk About, imagined a young graduate who wanted to move to London, warning she would be held back from buying a house in the city by “progressive policy on immigration and social housing”.
“The proportion of London social housing occupied by people born overseas is close to 50%, up from 40% ten years ago. Meanwhile, only 56% of working age social housing residents in London are economically active,” it said.
“In other words, our young graduate’s tax revenue is not only being spent on housing hundreds of thousands of unemployed foreign nationals in some of the most expensive postcodes in the world, it is also being used to reduce the supply of private housing available to her, thus driving up prices even further.”
There are several things here worth rebutting.
First - the statistics it uses are applied misleadingly.
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