Not sure of the facts but a sensible fireman told me Thatcher built more council housing per year than Tony Blair did during his full term .
If he was talking specifically about
council-built accommodation that may be correct.
However, that is semantics, you need to also consider the homes built and managed by
housing associations. These 'social landlords' provide affordable housing to those on low incomes, and were responsible for an increasing proportion of social house building from the early 1990s onwards.
Between 1997 and 2010, some 350,000 housing association dwellings were built. If we look at both housing association homes and council houses,
Labour built more affordable properties in 2009 than the Conservatives did in each year between 1987 and 1990.
per
In the UK's property market, there's a severe shortage of affordable homes. There was a time when we were building hundreds of thousands of council houses…
fullfact.org
Also why would Councils build houses when the law requires them to sell them?
It’s hardly surprising most councils are not building many homes at all, given they are obliged to sell them at a discount almost as soon as the paint is dry. Would you spend hundreds of thousands of pounds building a new house to rent out if your tenants could force you to flog it to them for less than it cost to construct, just three years later?
The repercussions today are more homelessness, spiralling rents and bankrupt councils, says writer Phineas Harper
www.theguardian.com
I don't want to derail this thread so please do not reply to this post.
I'm happy to set up a new thread to debate this but didn't want to let your 'sensible' fireman's nonsense go uncorrected when 3 minutes on Google gives the actual facts