Conservatives pledge to scrap quangos, punish unemployed and save tenants’ lives
The Tory revolution
Conservative leader David Cameron has pledged to embark on a mission to ‘save the lives’ of social tenants on deprived estates.
People on some estates had a lower life expectancy than residents of the Gaza Strip, Mr Cameron said.
A Conservative government would scrap house building targets and punish unemployed people who repeatedly fail to find work by stopping their benefits.
A huge question mark would also hang over the Homes and Communities Agency if the Conservatives won power.
The party’s shadow communities secretary Eric Pickles warned Inside Housing that he was looking at whether the HCA, which will launch in December, ‘serves any purpose whatsoever and whether it could be provided more cheaply or effectively through a different set-up’.
The Conservatives would announce plans to scrap a number of ‘unelected, unaccountable quangos’ within weeks, he said.
Mr Cameron will make social housing his main focus, according to former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith, who now chairs the Centre for Social Justice. ‘[Mr Cameron] asked me to come to say it is his priority,’ Mr Duncan Smith told delegates at the party’s annual conference this week.
Social housing represented a ‘concentration of breakdown’, he said. ‘We have ghettoised the poverty. We have locked away the problem from our vision.’
Mr Duncan Smith said the party had to ‘save [tenants’] lives’.
‘That is a mission – a mission that doesn’t matter what the circumstances are.’ The Conservative Party’s new approach to housing would also include tough action against those who refuse support to pull themselves out of long-term unemployment.
Chris Grayling, shadow work and pensions secretary, said that people who rejected three job offers would be refused work-related benefits for three years. ‘When people get a reasonable job offer, they will be expected to take it,’ he added.
Shadow housing minister Grant Shapps also revealed that the party would embark on a major review of the social and private rented sector next year.
The scrutiny would pinpoint reforms needed to accelerate house building rates, he added. ‘There is a very simple question: How is it that in no year of this Labour government that claims to value social housing they have ever built more homes than under Major or Thatcher. What is going wrong?’
Conference diary
Keith Cooper
There was something of the school assembly about the Conservative Party conference.
Sober-faced, the senior members of the shadow cabinet warned their overexcited charges to sit on their hands rather than leap to their feet as they effervesced with a feeling of triumphalism.
Yes, the party was whizzing up the opinion polls, but the economic climate meant it was no time to celebrate. The country was in pain and they were the ones to ease it, was the mantra delegates were taught to repeat.
And who was to blame for all this economic unease? ‘Thanks to this government, thousands of families are facing repossession,’ shadow housing minister Grant Shapps thundered. ‘Brown the bailiff… knocking on their doors…and it’s our job to stop him.’
‘Labour doesn’t have a monopoly on compassion’ was another maxim which enjoyed maximum airtime. The party’s ‘Broken Britain’ agenda was made flesh as members of the public were wheeled out for daytime TV-style interviews with the shadow cabinet’s major players.
An estate agent from Essex got over-excited as the party pledged to scrap home information packs. The audience exploded into rapturous applause when a nurse banged the podium with her pen complaining about her paperwork.
The sense that the Conservatives feel they are on the cusp of power was palpable. Fringe sessions were packed to the doors. Lobbyists and policy wonks of all political stripes fawned over Tory policies as they talked of the sense of spending more time with a ‘government to be’. The deputy mayor of London, Sir Simon Milton, even seemed so sure of his party’s imminent grasp on power that he kept referring to ‘our government’ in the present tense.
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Readers' comments (2)
Liam Kelly | 03/10/2008 11:00 am
Are Party Conferences closer to fact or fantasy?
FACT: Post Thatcher the economic gap between social housing residents and rest rapidly widened-
FACT: The Tory 1980 Housing Act decimated social housing stock and sucked revenue out of the sector-£43 Billion RTB receipts went to Treasury coffers- also Local Authories were stopped from building new stock
FACT: The Thatcher (" NO Such Thing as Society")Era and consequent economic revolution proclaimed a share holding, property owning democracy-social housing was for losers-Tories once considered a solution of shipping all unemplyed social housing tenants living in London up to empty estates in the North where there were no jobs
FACT: The PR for Thatchers election was targeting the necessity to keep inflation ( which had hit double figures under OLD Labour) in single figures, conveniently however house price inflation was removed from the formula and suddenly hyper -inflation was great news , the only way for property prices was exponential increases-unlike wages-can't have that can we-( unless your among the elite).
Reminds me of a Jibe made by Billy Bragg to a politican on newsnight !
" your the people who keep farting and complain - where's that smell coming from"
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Alan Savage | 03/10/2008 11:18 am
Would any conservatives like to illuminate on where tenants themselves where consulted on their master plan?
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