"Legitimate entitlement"?

Margaret Hodge, contrary to previous form, has opened up an awkward issue:

We should look at policies where the legitimate sense of entitlement [to social housing] felt by the indigenous family overrides the legitimate need demonstrated by the new migrants...If you choose to come to Britain, should you presume the right to access social housing?

The question this raises - which Hodge doesn't answer - is: why should indigenous families have a legitimate claim to social housing when foreigners don't? Two possibilities come to mind.
1. British people form a society of people with legitimate obligations to, and demands upon, each other. The non-British are excluded from these.
2. The British are entitled to housing at the expense of other Britons because it's a means of restitution. The process of primitive accumulation by other Britons - enclosures, clearances and state-sanctioned theft - deprived their ancestors of the means of housing. Poles, however, were not victims of British theft and so have no such claim to restitution.
Both possibilities raise tons of questions. But which does Hodge believe, and why? What are the chances of a coherent answer?   

Comments

[Phil Edwards]

"1. British people form a society of people with legitimate obligations to, and demands upon, each other."

I think it's a nicer calculation than this. Note that Hodge didn't say that non-immigrants had a legitimate claim - she said that they had a legitimate *sense* of entitlement. "The way they feel may be wrong, but they've got a right to feel that way" - which translates roughly as "...but they *do* feel that way and they won't vote for us if we tell them not to".

So: do the unjustifiable resentments of one group outweigh the justifiable needs of another? If you're a political philosopher, no. If you're a politician, the question is which choice will lose more votes.

[Alex]

In what way would Hodge's proposed scenario not amount to child abuse?

[junglecitizen]

The problem is *NOT* the Daily Express/BNP 'story' that scrounging foreigners are coming in and taking all the houses from good honest white families. This is *NOT* happening.

The reality is that there are about 50x too few council houses being built as compared to the level of demand for them, and that this has been the case since the 1990s. The proportion of the demand made up by eligible non-British citizens is in all probability close to zero. Excluding non-British citizens will have virtually zero impact, as no doubt Margaret Hodge is well aware.

By proposing solutions to this non-existent problem, imagined up by the BNP and right wing press for the primary purpose of bashing Muslims, she is not 'listening to people', but giving mainstream credence to a pernicious falsehood, in order to garner votes and sweep the real causes of the problem (i.e. their policies) under the carpet.

An honest politician would point out we have a choice: either take the socialist route, and shell out to build council housing, or take the free market route, stop providing council housing, and declare that the housing standards of the poor are none of the government's business.

But for New Labour that would never do. A 'middle way' has to be found. So let's quietly shelve council housing, redirect most of the funding to subsidising home ownership (benefiting primarily the middle class, i.e. swing voters), and then find a convenient media scapegoat for the resulting working class discontent.

Her talking about 'white, Asian and black British families' is complete figleaf nonsense. She knows damn well what the people she's allegedly "listening to" want. They want houses for WHITE PEOPLE. They (unfortunately and wrongly) see the shortage as being caused by Asians and black people getting council houses.

Of course, this 'policy' won't stop Asians getting council houses, it'll merely generate tabloid headlines and leave a few recent immigrant families living in squalor.

But the worst thing this 'policy' does is it drags the thinly veiled idea of ethnic priority into the mainstream. It's the thin end of the wedge. There will be endless pressure from the hard right to push and push the 'length of residence' qualification further and further back until it gets hereditary.

And if we can do this with homes, why not jobs? Education? Anything else state subsidised...?

[Scratch]

Actually, in my experience, people want people who've been on the waiting list for ages to get council houses.

Don't be so fucking bad minded.

[FH]

I thought council waiting lists already awarded points for ties to the local area?

[WW]

All Brits, all their lives, pay their taxes and, as a result of doing so, have an entitlement, under a social contract, to have certain claims met. Duty of common humanity extends some degree of altruism to non-Brits - whether in the form of overseas aid funded by the taxpayer, or giving some degree of state assistance to those who seek refuge in the UK due to a well-founded fear of persecution in their home state. But that latter duty is not limitless and should not usurp the entitlement of Brits

[Tom Womack]

OK, so council houses are presently allocated by a points system very much like the one that HMG wants to impose on prospective immigrants, and the concern is that the points system does not sufficiently penalise prospective immigrants who discover that the private rented accommodation in Barking is not of liveable quality.

And the rate of supply of new council houses is so small that it is more-than-absorbed by the rate of incoming hardship cases, so people who merely want to move out from their parents' house have no hope of ever getting a council house.

I presume that, if private landlords in Barking are obliged to make their accommodation of liveable quality, they will instead stop being private landlords. Respectable Barking private rents (IE advertised on fish4.co.uk rather than on cards in the windows of Barking fish-shops) are significantly more expensive than Cambridge private rents, so Barking seems a completely crazy place to want to be a poor immigrant.

[dearieme]

Poland and such must be awash with empty houses. Why don't we buy them and decant our drones there? Fair swap is no robbery.

[junglecitizen]

"Actually, in my experience, people want people who've been on the waiting list for ages to get council houses."

In the case of the vast majority of ordinary people, absolutely, and I should have made that clearer for which I apologise. I also wasn't in a terribly good mood earlier and put things a lot more bluntly and generally than a should have, for which I also apologise.

But it is still true that the specific group of aggrieved citizens she's aiming this initiative at are upset mainly at legal UK citizens (who don't have ancestry in this country) moving into 'their' council houses. This is because only a very tiny proportion of those moving into council houses are the non-UK citizens and recent arrivals Margaret Hodge proposes to target.

And it does still strike me as a highly dubious scapegoating tactic, as well as the thin end of the wedge toward installing the general principle that immigrant families should go to the back of the queue in general.

If that's still being bad minded, so be it.

This is the same minister who said "80% of white families in Barking" would be tempted to vote for the BNP. I still think this proposal is a deeply misguided attempt to dissuade them from voting for the BNP.

[Scratch]

No worries there junglecitizen.

I'd point out that the scapegoating cuts both ways, there seems to be an implication abroad these days that ordinary people are a nazi rabble held in check only by the undying vigilance of their betters, an error Margaret Hodge appears to subscribe to.

Personally, I'd allocate public housing strictly on the basis of the waiting list, it's not like people put their names down for a laugh, also it has the cardinal virtue, when dealing with public assets, of absolute clarity.

[yellerKat]

Who the hell wants a Council House anyway?

[Scratch]

You've plainly never clapped eyes on the legion of Nathan Barleys who've somehow managed to wangle themselves a council flat in Westminster.

[Bob B]

"Poland and such must be awash with empty houses. Why don't we buy them and decant our drones there? Fair swap is no robbery."

Quite so but charity might start closer to home. The population of Hull, where the constituency of John Prescott is located, has been in decline for decades:

"Hull has experienced a sustained population decline over the over the last few decades. Between 1991 and 2001 the population fell by 5.3%, mainly through people leaving the city."
http://www.hullcc.gov.uk/portal/page?_pageid=221,52987&_dad=portal&_schema=PORTAL

The Scots have been worried about the prospect of population decline:

"Just two years ago the Registrar-General had predicted [Scotland's] population would fall below five million in 2009, but a recent influx of 26,000 migrants from the new EU accession states has led to a turnaround.

"With a further 4,000 immigrants predicted to arrive in Scotland each year, it is now expected the population will rise steadily for the next 15 years."
http://news.scotsman.com/topics.cfm?tid=552&id=2121172005

Btw to recap from the earler thread here on Teenage Parents, I posted there before Margaret Hodge went to press:

"More than 30 years ago, for a few years, I was an elected member of a city council (which will be familiar to Chris). The council at the time - and possibly since - had a very strict policy in making housing allocations.

"The policy was a queuing system on a first-come, first-served basis except for extraordinary medical circumstances which had to be fairly dire - I know that to be true as I was a member of the relevant sub-committee. Otherwise, it mattered not whether the applicant for rented housing had five children or none or was married or not, they were obliged to join the back of the queue."
http://stumblingandmumbling.typepad.com/stumbling_and_mumbling/2007/05/teenage_parents.html#comments

[Roger Thornhill]

To me the issue is of entitlement and the rules around it that can be 'worked'.

If you are dependent on the State for housing you should not be permitted extra housing in my view if you expand your family (by birth or imports). I suspect much of the "bias" in places like Tower Hamlets is down to such policies as overcrowding counting towards a new home. The indigenous whites flee TH due to overcrowding before some other races, I suspect.

If you want more space...go rent it. If I need more space I have to find a bigger place. Why should someone wedged into State housing have access to more housing pretty much for free when those paying for that "right" are forced to pay every single penny AFTER TAX towards their own housing needs?

Welfare should be a safety net, not a hammock and certainly not one where you invite others in to enjoy its meagre comforts.

[Mark Wadsworth]

Nulab have cleverly nudged the conversation round to "reasons why we should build more social housing", i.e. expanding the State and reducing self-reliance.

We only need council housing for people who can't afford to rent or buy privately; there are plenty of people who would be able to afford to rent or buy privately if the government made sure that more houses get built and that existing housing is used more efficiently.

And how do we do this? As ever, the answer is Land Value Tax.

[Shuggy]

I don't think anyone sees access to council housing as a form of 'restitution'. I think the answer's simpler: like various entitlements, the right to social housing is 'built up' over time after a demontration that one has made a contribution to society.

I know it doesn't necessarily work like this in practice but it should be like JSA; working full-time for a couple of years gets you the right to claim this and it should be the same sort of principle with social housing. I don't think there's anything wrong or racist with preferring indigenous claimants to very recent arrivals. On the other hand, if someone had come to Britain and worked and paid taxes for five years or so, I think most people would think it pretty outrageous if they found they were not entitled to welfare benefits of any kind.

[Philip Hunt]

What's the purpose of the British state? It is, or ought to be, to act in the interests of the British people. Consequently it is right and proper that the British state should treat british people better than foreigners, in matters of council house allocation as in other matters.

[Heraklites]

It's interesting that a female Labour politician can get away with something that seems far more potentially "racist" than any of the allusions to there being an immigration problem which are said to have lost the Tories the last election.

[john b]

"All Brits, all their lives, pay their taxes and, as a result of doing so, have an entitlement, under a social contract, to have certain claims met."

This is specious bollocks in the context of council house allocation. Yeah, it's *net taxpayers* who live in council houses. Obviously.

Those of us who pay net taxes provide council housing for those who have too little income to pay for their own accomodation partly because of basic human decency, and partly because we don't want them to rise up as a mob and kill us all.

Both points apply equally well to long-term and new residents, save perhaps that the new residents are less likely to form a decent mob.

[dave heasman]

Alex : "In what way would Hodge's proposed scenario not amount to child abuse?"

Maybe, but it's never been something she's worried about before. Rather the converse, if her activities in denying abuse in Islington childrens' homes is any indication.

[kimmitt]

"All Brits, all their lives, pay their taxes and, as a result of doing so, have an entitlement, under a social contract, to have certain claims met"

What about Brits who DON'T pay taxes? Some concentrations of social housing have unconscionably low levels of employment - are they kicked out of the social contract?

[Jim]

"Yeah, it's *net taxpayers* who live in council houses."

I know what you're saying, and I think the "please don't rise up and kill us" argument is a persuasive one, but there was a time when most people in council housing really were net tax-payers. That's because there was *enough* of it so it didn't have to be rationed out to just the neediest cases, which as others have pointed out is the root cause of all this palaver. So the more you 'target' the allocation of social housing (by restricting supply) the more you undermine the perceived 'fairness' (in terms of 'give and take') of the system.

[Laban Tall]

Interested to see Lib Dem Lynne Featherstone in cautious agreement with Ms Hodge. Apparently her Haringey constituents of all races resent being jumped by those who are in greater need but only arrived last week.

http://www.lynnefeatherstone.org/2007/05/margaret-hodge-and-housing.htm

[dsquared]

[That's because there was *enough* of it so it didn't have to be rationed out to just the neediest cases, which as others have pointed out is the root cause of all this palaver. So the more you 'target' the allocation of social housing (by restricting supply) the more you undermine the perceived 'fairness' (in terms of 'give and take') of the system.]

the only way to deal with this unfortunately would be to get rid of right-to-buy, which I doubt the white working class would thank you for; it's an incredibly popular policy.

[john b]

Well, you *could* have a massive ongoing programme of council housebuilding, in order to build and keep a sufficient stock of social housing to cover all low-ish-income workers rather than just the very poor, while also granting all established (is it 3 years?) tenants of such housing the right to buy.

I'm not sure that'd be the most efficient way of doing things, though.

[Richard]

It's ethnic cleansing. Native brits suffer from structural racial discrimination in the allocation of public housing.

There are 247 ethnic minority Housing Associations in the UK.

Asylum seekers who have been granted Refugee status are automatically upgraded to 'homeless'. This means they have more housing points and get priority. Many are not families with asthmatic children but single men.'Homeless' used to mean burnt out or flooded and was a only 2/3% of the yearly allocations for any Borough but is now about 50% in many Boroughs. Look it up.

The GLA put the London wide percentage for 2003(?) at 43% which was about 9000 tenancies a year.

BTW..who the fuck are the 'poor' anyway?

[Matt Munro]

Junglecitizen - You give anm almost textbook left wing reply which dismisses the perceptions of a sizeable number of people in this country, instead pretending that a very real problem (that anyone with a pair of eyes can see) doesn't exist and make a thinly veiled racist accusation against anyone who doesn't share your utopian delusions.
I don't understand your objection to the notion that immigrants should go to the back of the queue - of course they should, we are talking about economic migrants here, these are not refugees fleeing persecution, they are people who have actively chosen to come to the UK - why anyone thinks that should entitle them to publicly funded housing is beyond me - why don't we go the whole hog and buy them cars, holidays, private education for their kids ?
I'm a 2nd generation immigrant myself and I am of the opinion that until you have been in this country a long time and paid a lot of tax you should be entitled to the square root of bugger all.
You're right in one sense that migrants probably aren't the biggest drain on social housing - that would be chav teenage single mothers have always taken up most social housing, leaving everyone else to fight over the scraps.

[john b]

*sigh*

Immigrants who aren't refugees do go to the back of the queue, and length of time in the queue is already a major factor in house allocation.

I still don't see any reason, moral or otherwise, why I should be keener to support long-established Barkingites with my taxes than people fleeing either persecution or absolute poverty (i.e. that thing we don't have in the UK, no matter how 'deprived' you purport to be) elsewhere.

[dsquared]

[Well, you *could* have a massive ongoing programme of council housebuilding, in order to build and keep a sufficient stock of social housing to cover all low-ish-income workers rather than just the very poor, while also granting all established (is it 3 years?) tenants of such housing the right to buy.]

Well if we're going down that track, why not just nationalise the entire housing stock ...

[Jim]

"Asylum seekers who have been granted Refugee status are automatically upgraded to 'homeless'"

No they're not. Look it up.

[Matt Munro]

I don't beleive that housing is any of the governments business. The market managed it perfectly well for centuries, and I'm not sure social housing has really made "the poor" any better off.
However, given that the government has made it it's business, it should be given to established barkingites as a priority for 3 reasons

1) They are more likely to have family and social links in the area. This mitigates against the ghettosiation which is already established in most UK cities

2) They are more likley to have made an economic contribution to the area, and are therefore more entitled to get something back

3) Providing housing for the waifs and strays of the the world simply encourages more economic and social basket cases to come here, adding to pressure on housing, infrastrucure and public spending

There is also the more general point that sudden changes in the demographic or cultural make up of and area are generally not without significant social and economic cost.

Anyone who thinks
"established barkingite" = white
has obviously not vistied the area for at least 10 years.

The "build more council houses" argument is also a busted flush, people living longer, more people living alone, more immigrants, higher divorce rates, more single parent families - the usual left wing social flotsam and jetsum - will ensure demand always outstrips supply.

[john b]

Yeah, damn those socialists and their evil "raising life expectancy" ways.

[Scratch]

Indeed.

The idea that "the market managed it perfectly well for centuries" is amusing too, most of the population lived in overcrowded, insanitary, squalid, overpriced slum dwellings pre municipal socialism.

[Matt Munro]

""The idea that "the market managed it perfectly well for centuries" is amusing too, most of the population lived in overcrowded, insanitary, squalid, overpriced slum dwellings pre municipal socialism.""

Have you ever lived in "municipal socialisms" social housing ? And I don't mean the new shiny type that politicians tour when they do a photoshoot.
Where I live (south Bristol) most of the housing was originally built by 2 of the cities biggest employers (tobacco and docks) for their own workforce.
The police, the NHS and many other organisations, public and private, used to provide affordable accomodation for their workforce, since the state has stepped in they don't.

[Matt Munro]

""The idea that "the market managed it perfectly well for centuries" is amusing too, most of the population lived in overcrowded, insanitary, squalid, overpriced slum dwellings pre municipal socialism.""

Have you ever lived in "municipal socialisms" social housing ? And I don't mean the new shiny type that politicians tour when they do a photoshoot.
Where I live (south Bristol) most of the housing was originally built by 2 of the cities biggest employers (tobacco and docks) for their own workforce.
The police, the NHS and many other organisations, public and private, used to provide affordable accomodation for their workforce, since the state has stepped in they don't.

[junglecitizen]

"Personally, I'd allocate public housing strictly on the basis of the waiting list, it's not like people put their names down for a laugh."

Of course they don't - but if we went back to this now (which was the situation until a few years back) we'd be in a place where the list would be so long that a young family applying now wouldn't get in until the parents were looking for a care home instead. In most districts the gulf between demand and supply is 10:1 or more.

The government policy is already (in reality) not to provide social housing.

If they keep to this, they are going to see a huge explosion in numbers of whole families - and not just the unemployed, and not just immigrants - living in one rented room, just because they can't afford to rent a flat.

Trust me, municipal social housing - even in Mile End or Hackney - is paradise compared to the conditions we will soon be seeing working families living in. And yes, I expect new immigrants will carry the can for it, despite having the lowest buying power (and therefore market impact) per head of any group of people in the country.