Ruth Alexander
speaker
4,250 appearances
120 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2011
last heard Aug 2018
Ruth Alexander’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
The head of one housing association in London told us that to get the required mortgage for many properties, you'd need to be earning at least £50,000.
Well, the Conservatives say they'd fund this by getting local authorities to sell off their most expensive properties when they become vacant.
These are council properties.
And this, they say, would raise a big pot of money, £4.5 billion, to solve the housing crisis, pretty much.
But it has to pay for a lot, this pot.
Firstly, they promised to replace any property sold one for one with cheaper, affordable housing.
So that would take a big chunk of money from the pot.
Then a billion pounds would go on cleaning up brownfield sites that the Conservatives hope would lead to the building of hundreds of thousands of new homes.
Also, some councils would have borrowed money against these council houses, which would need repaying.
And the Conservative think tank Policy Exchange have suggested that could be about 20% of any money raised, so nearly another £1 billion.
And then a final substantial chunk would go on paying for the big discount for right to buy.
And remember, this might be huge.
Just 15,000 people buying their homes could cost £1 billion.
And the manifesto plan is to extend the guarantee to 1.3 million families.
Well, a lot of experts are sceptical about the whole idea.
And we can look at David Cameron's record on one of the key aspects of this policy.
Last time Right to Buy was given a boost three years ago, they basically made the discount, people could get bigger.
The coalition government said that one new home would be built for every additional property sold under the scheme as a result of the bigger discounts.
About 15,000 extra houses were sold when the discount got bigger, but only 3,000 houses got built with the money.
But to be fair to the Conservatives, the big problem underlying all this is that we're not building enough houses and we haven't done for decades a situation the Labour Party has presided over too and so has to share some responsibility for.
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