Jonn Elledge’s article (Our home ownership dream is over. Let’s improve renting, 3 August) is mostly a realistic picture of the rental v ownership situation in the UK. The rate of home ownership here is low (63.9%) compared with other EU countries. Germany is invariably mentioned, as in this article, but it is an exception with the lowest proportion at 52%. The UK is 23rd out of the 28 EU countries; even France now has a higher percentage. (Even the much denigrated, capitalist US has a similar comparatively low rate as the UK at 65%). Ten EU countries have more than 80% home ownership (source: European Home Ownership Rate 2007-2016). So the aspiration to home ownership is evidently one of the vast majority of the population.
However, the stigma of renting and the ambition to own one’s home long predates Margaret Thatcher. In the 1960s there was a huge rise in affordable home ownership in the UK and the inevitable pressure to buy a home. From my own experience, when I emigrated to Canada in 1968, I remember the disparaging reaction from my English family and friends when my husband and I rented for several years because we could not afford to buy.
Helen Rugman
Moulsford, Oxfordshire
• Jonn Elledge implies that old people are topping up their pensions from rent and thus “looting the young”. This applies to very few of us. Traditionally, small business owners bought flats, as it was not possible to obtain satisfactory pension schemes and that is precisely what we did. So far, this has been sensible and in fact, I find myself in loco parentis to our tenants, who get free Wi-Fi and the rapid fixing of problems. However, many pensioners already face the type of problems that Elledge suggests will occur in the future, when most will have no equity to cash in, either because they never owned houses or because their parents consumed the equity in the house they had. This is yet another symptom of the rich stealing all the wealth and not paying their taxes.
Ken Baldry
London
• Jonn Elledge is right to draw attention to the insecurity of tenure facing tenants in the private rented sector but this is not confined to that sector. Under the Housing and Planning Act councils can only grant tenancies for up to five years, except where there are children under nine years of age. In addition, there are the “pay to stay” provisions under which rents are increased where family incomes exceed the not-so-princely sum of £31,000 outside London, and £40,000 in the capital. Coupled with the generous terms of right to buy, which have led to 35% of properties purchased now being in the hands of private landlords, this measure is designed to promote the demise of council housing.
Jeremy Beecham
Labour, House of Lords
• There may well be no prospect of a Tory-dominated House of Commons improving tenants’ rights any time soon. However, John Elledge seems to have overlooked the fact that in Scotland housing is a devolved matter. The Scottish parliament has recently enacted the Private Housing (Tenancies) (Scotland) Act 2016, which will create a new form of tenancy applicable to all privately rented property. This should provide private sector tenants in Scotland with rather better protection than they have enjoyed hitherto, though the likely impact of the legislation on the letting market in Scotland is still unclear.
Andrew Boyd
Edinburgh
• I would like to endorse John Gardner’s call for a celebration of new towns (Letters, 1 August). Their greatest strength was the comprehensiveness of their masterplans. They defined the housing, social, economic and leisure needs for an area 30 to 50 years ahead, with the necessary infrastructure to accommodate significant expansion. They were not riddled with sexed-up key performance indicators, and political fantasies but practical how-to instructions. And have a look at the financial outcomes; between them they cost less than a current failed IT project!
Ged Parker
Washington new town, Tyne and Wear
• New towns may be nice places to live, but so are many other places and their legacy includes a big downside. Built at ultra-low densities to reflect their garden city heritage, they squandered scarce building land and made their inhabitants fatally dependent on cars to get around. Their legacy thus includes destroying far more countryside than they needed and continuing high emissions of greenhouse gases. Their founders may not have cared about these things, but anyone considering replicating them should.
Jon Reeds
London
• I share John Gardner’s enthusiasm for new towns, and the role played by former Labour planning minister Lewis Silkin in developing them. It reminded me of the story, ably told in Stevenage museum, of the pranksters who went round the night before Lewis Silkin performed a ceremony in the town, and changed all the road signs to read “Silkingrad”. Perhaps we ought to make this change permanent to mark the anniversary…
Paul Steeples
London
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