Housing Crisis - Council Housing Solution

Austin Mitchell the Chair of the Housing Group of MPs had this fine letter in "The Times" on Tuesday. Here is an extract -

".....your lead story (“Council homes for life ‘to be scrapped’ ”, Nov 10) isn’t a forecast of the Green Paper on social housing, but a last-ditch attempt by a tiny group of ideologically motivated barm-pots, some of them in Communities & Local Government, to achieve their longstanding aim of destroying council housing.....Yet....the idea..... foisted on an embarrassed Chartered Institute of Housing (not the other way round, as your article implied) in an attempt to push it on our new Housing Minister, Margaret Beckett.....won’t work. The Labour Party won’t wear it. Nor will the councils. Margaret is a Labour minister, not a Blairite, and she’ll give it the short shrift it deserves because she recognises, as we do, that the only answer to the acute shortage of public housing for rent is to build more. Indeed, the only way to get more housing built in a credit crisis is to finance the councils to put builders back to work and to regenerate estates so they’re not ghettos."

It is over to you Margaret.