Burning of Margaret Hodge Effigy

It is interesting the amount of people still living rough on the streets of Britain, surely the first priority is to house and care for these people before opening up our borders to new economic migrants. Also additional people in Britain (the main growth in people is down to migrants and their off-spring) is having a bad impact on the environment with the building of homes and infrastructure to cope with this.

The end result will be a Britain that is concreted from one end to the other in houses and roads. You cannot have it both ways, an open door policy to refugees and a green and pleasant land with an abundance of wildlife. Choices choices ??

There are plenty of empty houses that can be brought back into use and house the homeless of Britain. However the supply-side economics policy of new labour means that they will encourage new developments regardless of need. This includes building office blocks, new houses and centres that remain empty and un-used. This includes the bottlencks of the South East where we are told that there is an increase in demand on housing and offices because of the increase in population. However at the same time the housing that is being built is 'luxury apartments' which are small 'units' that are cobbled together, are massively overpriced and are sold for rental market or rather the market in which owners buy them, allow them to remain empty to allow the price to appreciate and then sell them at a profit. The developers have a commitment to provide 30-40% of 'social housing' within new developments which are supposed to be suitable for vulnerable people to be housed by their local housing departments. However, having visited many examples of this type of accomodation it is completely unsuitable for such groups of people. For example, wheelchair users are living in flats that have steps into the property and doors are not wide enough to be able to manvoure a wheelchair through. This means they are becoming 'house-bound' at a time when we should be encouraging people to be more independent. Also, they are unsuitable to families as they usually have no more than two bedrooms which are too small to accomodate little more that a few items of furniture let alone more than two children.

Also, it has been suggested that in my town of Reading, that as many as one in thirteen houses are empty at any one time. There are many reasons for this but no excuses. Rather than blaming immigrants for the sorry state of one of our most basic needs, we should be working to fight this shameless injustice of capitalism.

I write as someone who works within housing and social care and someone who lives in shocking accomodation.