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Star Comment: Madness of empty homes

NEWS that over a million houses in Britain lie empty while chronic overcrowding affects hundreds of thousands of others illustrates the madness at the heart of our economic system.

The damning figures from the Office for National Statistics relate to a 25 per cent increase in overcrowded and empty homes between 2001 and 2011, but Britain’s housing crisis has only got worse in the years since.

The Con-Dem coalition talks tough on housing, but — as noted by economist Michael Burke — wheezes like help to buy merely inflate sky-high house prices and encourage the sort of property speculation which leaves homes empty in the first place.

It’s the same sort of speculation that blew up in the faces of the big banks in 2007-8. 

That plunged the West into the financial crisis this government has cynically used to impose crippling “austerity” on the public who stepped in to rescue the banks while allowing the well-heeled elite who caused the crash to walk away with their mouths stuffed with gold.

The ballooning wealth of the wealthiest in the austerity epoch — as the Sunday Times rich list revealed earlier this month, Britain’s 1,000 richest individuals increased their hoards by 15.4 per cent in the last year alone to £519 billion — show us why the Tories aren’t worried about causing another crash. 

It worked the first time.

And this sordid excess is amassed, as ever, at enormous human cost. Research by charity Crisis and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation revealed at the end of last year that homelessness has increased by a shocking 34 per cent since the coalition came to power.

Key causes include Iain Duncan Smith’s bedroom tax, a cruel assault on some of the poorest families in the country which has forced increasing numbers into rent arrears.

Ironically Mr Duncan Smith claimed this vicious policy was designed to reduce overcrowding by allowing larger families to move into the homes of the victims.

The reality is, of course, that there are simply not enough smaller houses in the social housing sector for the 660,000 households affected by the tax to move into.

As with the Work and Pensions Secretary’s other hobby of putting the boot in to people his government has chucked on the dole, the tax doesn’t “solve” anything and doesn’t even save public money. 

It’s simply the Tories punishing the poor for being poor.

Mr Duncan Smith’s arbitrary benefit cap, imposed regardless of a family’s size or needs, will only worsen the problem of overcrowding.

As Mr Burke points out, the only way to deal with the crisis is to build new, affordable — and social — housing.

Labour’s promise to build 200,000 houses a year by 2020 is, in this context, depressingly unambitious.

Building on this scale will not keep pace with demand, meaning prices will be forced even further skywards since Mr Miliband’s pledge did not include detail on affordability.

And those homes lying empty need to be brought back into the equation too. 

The “empty terraces” Lewisham People Before Profit refers to in northern England reflect the disastrous impact of successive governments’ attacks on British industry. 

A proper industrial policy would reduce London’s domination of the national economy, revive regional economic hubs and ease pressure on housing in the capital into the bargain.

We’re waiting, Mr Miliband.

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