Attack on social housing tenants
Today's "i":Social housing tenants will be expected to keep fit, give up smoking and actively look for work under a controversial new scheme devised by a major housing association. Yarlington Housing Group, which manages 9,000 homes in Somerset, has come under fire for its so-called Household Ambition Plan (HAP), which new residents will be expected to sign when they agree fixed-term, seven-year tenancies. Among the ambitions they could be expected to work towards are "skills and qualifications so that you stand a better chance of finding the job you want". "Skills for life" include "cookery, gardening or DIY" and "health and wellbeing" includes "thinking about what you eat". Prospective tenants have been told: "We will look at the progress you have made with your HAP when we consider the renewal of your tenancy at the end of the seven year fixed period".Am I on my own in thinking this is just about the most insulting, patronising and quite possibly illegal load of rubbish. When did being a tenant in social housing entitle any landlord to rule an individual's life? How bloody dare they? There just has to be a contravention of Human Rights here, who do these people think they are? In the same paper is a letter from someone commenting on a piece by Amol Rajan about "the "Etonisation of the Tories": the whole political class is being discreetly stuffed with officer-class people, resulting in the shrinking of our remaining pretensions to democracy. We are just going backwards, fast. Maybe the subjugation of the common stock of the UK will be achieved by the same Eton upon whose playing fields the First World War was won, because most surely, war has been declared by them, against us." Judging by events in Somerset that correspondent isn't far wrong...........
Vanessa Smith ● 4486d8 Comments