Real Estate

Failure to get to grips with UK’s housing crisis | Letters


Setting up a housing commission to make public spaces more beautiful is an odd choice of priorities by a government in the midst of a housing crisis that highlights the lack of provision for the human need for shelter in the UK (Tory cronyism: a seemingly endless source of bigotry, 8 November). It is typical of this government’s talent for seeing only the surface of human needs and failure to see poverty from the point of view of impoverished people. There are ever-increasing numbers of homeless families and individuals. A commission to increase the number of truly affordable homes, immediately address the housing crisis and so improve public health, would have been the right choice. For the health and wellbeing of men, women and children, the minimum household income must be enough to fund a healthy diet, water, fuel, clothes, transport and other necessities, after the rent, council and income taxes are paid in all truly affordable homes, beautiful or not.
Rev Paul Nicolson
Taxpayers Against Poverty

It is an oversimplification to say that accommodation for asylum seekers and refugees is provided by Serco, G4S and Clearsprings Ready Homes (Report, 8 November). In the north-east G4S has sub-contracted some of the provision to Jomast, about whose performance there is local concern, with suggestions, among others, that unlike G4S unrelated tenants are required to share bedrooms. There is little evidence that the government takes “the wellbeing of asylum seekers and the communities in which they live extremely seriously”.
Jeremy Beecham
Labour, House of Lords

I enjoyed Aditya Chakrabortty’s piece about Persimmon (Opinion, 9 November) but the situation is even worse than he states. Although the people at the top of the company receive ludicrously high remuneration, those at the bottom (cleaners, security guards and catering staff) are paid so poorly they are on universal credit. So not only does the taxpayer pay for most of Persimmon’s profits, they subsidise the payroll as well.
Jerry Hodgkinson
London

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