Anxiously awaiting reports of John Healey’s speech at the LGA conference
John Healey was due to give a speech today on the changes the government is proposing to make to council housing. The biggest one - as far as Wokingham is concerned - was flagged up yesterday by the BBC: letting councils keep all the money they get in rents from their tenants, instead of handing over about half of it to the government in the so-called “housing subsidy”.
The loss of this money is crippling councils’s ability to deliver a decent housing service - which is why an awful lot of people having been lobbying for it to be changed, including, to give him his due, David Lee, the Tory Leader of Wokingham Borough Council.
Could it be it is really going to happen? Will councils really be allowed to hang on to their rents and be able to use the money locally on social housing? If so, what’s the catch? (There’s always a catch).
On closer inspection I discovered that the government is NOT actually promising to let councils keep the money. It’s only promising to CONSULT on whether it should happen.
The devil is in the detail of course - which is why I am so anxiously waiting to find out exactly what John Healey has told the LGA…..
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Keep up the good work, Prue.
We’ve been actively in campaigning in Reading to see an to the unpopular “tenant tax” as outlined in your post, most recently persuading Labour-run Reading to join the Campaign for Fair Funding - a cross-party campaign by a number of local councils to reform housing finance.
I’m not holding my breath that the Labour government will do the right thing this side of an election though, more’s the pity.