speedking

Why should certain workers get subsidised houses?

If an area is too expensive for nurses, binmen, teachers to live in, then that area would have to obtain those services privately (and expensively). It gets less attractive to live there and market forces balance everything out.

Supplying cheap(er) houses just perpetuates the disparity between rich and poor areas.

Who's to say that a nurse is more important than the housebuilder who constructed her house, the technician who designed her equipment, the salesman who sold her the car she needs to travel to work, the engineer who designed the roads and bridges she uses, etc. etc. Everyone is a key worker or they would be unemployed.

Discuss.

Tiggs

tell her that when you are dying and shes saving your life.

speedking

Tell me that when she has no building to work in, no equipment to use, no electricity supply, etc.

D70

If people can't afford it let them move elsewhere. As far as I'm concerned the workers needed will commute in and be damn glad of their jobs servicing the rich.

GCollier

Speedking's right in principle and market forces should be allowed to balance things out. However I doubt whether local authorities have the power to raise local taxes in order to set levels of remuneration like a private company would to 'compete' for workers. They may have no option but to (e.g.) let schools go short of teachers.

Gary.

speedking

That's my point. Once the school goes short of teachers, it will get a bad educational reputation, property will lose its attraction, and things will level out. Or residents will have to send their kids further afield to private school, reducing their disposable income and either reducing their standard of living or local house prices. Job done.

GCollier

I don't think that what you describe works though. Remember cheap homes for essential workers are a relatively new thing. This hasn't stopped the creation of deprived areas with shortages of teachers and **** poor schools.

That said, I am against subsidised cheap homes because I think it's tackling the problem the wrong way, complicating matters and causing other imbalances. Far better to set the number and standard of e.g. teachers required, then let market forces dictate what they need to be paid to fill the vacancies.

Gary.

sti-04!!

Speedking for Prime Minister

SteveV-WRX

Just to play devils advocate here,

If I remember rightly the government would only let key workers buy the property on a stupidly high fixed rate mortgage brokered by them, so was not even worth doing.

Steve

Mungo

What is wrong with the concept of council housing?
Why do the poor now have a right to home ownership?

pslewis

The TORIES sold the fecking lot of them to chavs - we now have the products of that giveaway!!!

Pete

pslewis

Anyway, Teachers can afford any house that a builder can!!

Remember they are paid a Kings Ransom!!

Pete