Stephen Pound says local authorities had to sell off housing stock but were not allowed to spend the proceeds on replacing the lost homes.
Your report (Ministers could ban London councils ‘dumping’ homeless families miles away, 9 June) almost made me weep, just like I did when, as chair of housing at Ealing council in the early 1990s, I was challenged to go to Slough station at 6.30am to see 30 children in Ealing school uniforms trying to maintain a continuation of education while being housed around 15 miles from the home they’d known.
The sheer cruelty of a government that forced councils to sell off their housing stock at a huge discount, allowed them to keep only half of the proceeds and prevented them from spending even that on replacing the lost secure homes is up there in the hierarchy of horror that also saw our gas, water and electricity flogged off to spivs and distant hedge funds.
And almost worst of all was the closure of psychiatric hospitals from Banstead to Friern Barnet in the name of a spurious philosophy of “care in the community”, which allowed the disturbed and vulnerable to roam the streets as a danger to themselves and to that very community.
Needless to say, some made fortunes from the valuable real estate released by these closures.
Ealing is one of many councils desperately trying to provide safe, secure accommodation for those in desperate need, but anyone who supported the sell-off of the family silver back then should hang their head in shame and keep very quiet indeed as the nation faces the tragic consequences of these policies.
Stephen Pound London
