The Right to Roam

I think it was Bill Connolly who originally made the quip that people who livein council houses in Hampstead have another council house in Wales, that they go to at the weekends. But under the latest Tory housing proposal, what started out as being pretty funny, could end up being completely ludicrous!

They are proposing a "Right to Move", similar to the original Thatcherite policy of "The Right to Buy". This, of course, being the cause of the decimation of social housing stocks in England for over a decade, as people bought their own homes and removed them from the available pool, while preventing Local Authorities from using the resulting revenue to plough back into building more houses.

Anyway, the Tory idea works like this [as far as I can work out: they freely admit that they haven't thought it through, and you can say that again!] You are unemployed and living in social/council/whatever housing in, say, Greater Manchester. You know there are jobs to be had for the taking in, ooh, let's say, Stevenage [leaving aside for the moment that the biggest depression since the 1930s seems to be clobbering all of the UK]. You can ask the local authority in Stevenage to provide you with social housing of equivalent stature and nature to allow you to uproot your family and wobble off on your bike, in the best traditions of Normo Tebbs, to start anew in Hertfordshire.

Fine, you say. And of course, there will be some spare social housing in Stevenage, right? No? OK, - er, will your new employer hang about while they build you some? And of course, there will be an equal and matching traffic of people wanting to move from Stevenage to take up social housing in Manchester, won't there? Er, no. Again, no.

If politicians are really that concerned about improving social mobility in the war against unemployment, as we are forced to tramp around the country looking for ever-scarcer jobs, perhaps they should start letting out their second and third homes rent-free, as hostels for those travelling on job-seekers' allowance.

If you had asked someone to come up with an unworkable policy that was obviously knocked up on the back of a fag packet in order to catch a passing bandwagon and provide a few soundbites, you could not have done better. All it lacks is that final touch which marks out any truly ingenious Tory policy de nos jours, rubber wheels.