Phil".. by far the biggest issue I find myself trying to address as a councillor is social housing, or rather the lack of it" - absolutely, 10%, far and away the biggest issue. What the people often wanted me to do was engineer them into a home despite their points position being too low. All I could do was check their points were correctly computed as I was and remain a firm believer that if you have scarcity it should be need rather than ability to pay a rent level that determines who gets social housing. The biggest problem was the Housing (Homeless Persons) Act of 1977, as I think it was called, which put homeless persons ahead of all others in the queue and in the end virtually destroyed the points system for housing allocation. I had previously urged people to be patient, and they would eventually get rehoused, but this Act knocked the stuffing out of that and so people would contrive to be homeless - countless times young people would come to me saying their parents had thrown them out, which - whilst this does happen sometimes - is a far rarer event than presented itself as being the case.Nobody ever assumed I had servants - maybe it is your demeanour, Phil?!After housing shortage, possibly the next highest issue was noise, often coming from adjacent flats where the house had been converted with inadequate sound insulation into flats - one of the reasons I am still wary of hardwood floors in flats.Dan
Dan Filson ● 6218d