So, apparently, if you release a report claiming that older people are contributing to the housing shortage by living in homes that are too big for them, some of those older people get quite annoyed. If you were inclined to be cynical, you might even wonder if controversy was exactly what the author – or [...]
Mathew Bell’s interview with Lord Tebbit, in yesterday’s Independent on Sunday, predictably touched upon immigration. “When he steps off the train into London” the interview asks, “doesn’t he see an exciting and creative powerhouse, fuelled in part by the injection of foreign blood and money?” No, he says, he worries that Londoners are being pushed [...]
Today’s comprehensive spending review delivered long-predicted cuts to welfare and housing. Even poor old EMA, bless her, got the chop. But perhaps the deepest cuts have been to journalists’ vocabularies. Plenty of column inches over the coming months and years will be devoted to the government’s harshest measures. But if I hear one more journalist [...]
Over the next three weeks I will be taking an in-depth look at the problems and some of the proposed solutions to what I sincerely believe is one of the most pressing yet under-discussed issues of today: namely, social housing policy. As the title suggests, I do realise that not many people flick through the [...]
It was quietly announced last week that the Minister for Culture, Andy Burnham MP, is to uphold English Heritage’s initial recommendation that the Robin Hood Gardens estate in Poplar, East London, should not be listed. Robin Hood Gardens means little to those who don’t live there and is, alas, held in even less regard by [...]
