Quote Originally Posted by joecity View Post
Blair's government are amongst the worst offenders in housing policy agreed. Governments have built homes before. I not going to believe that the private sector is going to fill the void. They won't. You know it, I know it. Government intervention is required. Who else is going to build affordable homes.
Labour failed on getting enough new homes built - but in other areas of housing policy the Blair/Brown government was light years ahead of what had come before (since the 1970s). The green paper in 2000 'Quality And Choice For All' was the first policy paper in over a generation that thought housing was about more than Right To Buy and interest rates. It set out to transform social rented housing (Choice Based Lettings, the Decent Homes programme and much more) and it also in its last couple of years freed up Councils to start building again (with the work on Self Financing Housing Revenue Accounts that went live under Cameron in 2010). Labour also produced the two housing ministers from the last four decades who cared about housing and knew what they were talking about - Nick Raynsford and John Healey. Governments since 2010 have rolled back to the pathetic stance of the Thatcher/Major years - using the financial crisis and cult of austerity as cover.