Bob Piper is having a rant about that tiresome obsession of the drab municipal left: Local Authority housing.

From my experience, which consists mainly of knocking fruitlessly on council-owned doors on behalf of Tory candidates at various levels for the last 20 or so years, the main thing I remember of these pockets of squalor is the sound of children being shouted at, grubby unmanicured lawns and a slightly unhealthy smell coming from within.

Now there are advantages to council housing. Because everyone else drives a car, scum shovel routes are easier to plan - from the centre of the estate, via the job-centre plus to Iceland and back. Much like the original concept of concentration camps, they co-locate undesirables for easier management, so the police know where to look for stolen goods, should they ever feel like bothering with, you know, actually investigating crime. They also represent tidy pockets of Labour voters. This appeals to politicians because Tories won't bother canvassing, Labour don't need to, and the ever-hopeful Liberals waste their time leafleting the estate, competing with the BNP and Respect, keeping these non-entities all out of the way of grown-up parties.

These estates, like South-African concentration camps cause unintended problems to those interred:

1. They distort the housing market. By driving down rents at the low end, it inevitably becomes un-economic for a developer to build social housing without specific legislation. The Government took the legislative approach, which perversely drives rents up in the long run, and contributes to the housing shortage in the UK. Why would a developer build on his land bank, if he has to get rid of 25% or more of his investment at sub-market rates? Sitting on the land bank watching its value go up is much better business. Insufficient houses go up, prices go up and so on in a vicious spiral, 'till no-one without a generous or dead relative can afford a shoe-box to call home.
   
2. The council house queue offers a gross incentive for teenage girls to fuck their lives up, and that of the brat spawned by some acquaintance or other, in order that the single mother could feel some validation for her life, and jump the council house queue in the process. This access to council housing issue has been a causus belli in many political troubles from Northern Ireland to Oldham and is a rallying cry for the BNP (p14), especially when combined with the political poison of immigration.
   
3. Getting housing on these estates favours those born to it - who know how to navigate the Byzantine paperwork necessary to get a house. There is a working class aristocracy subject to sub market rents for life, despite earning perfectly acceptable wages. If you can drive a 2-year old BMW, then you shouldn't be in a council house - it is after all subsidised by John Q Taxpayer.
   
4. Concentrating the poor does nothing for their aspirations or an accurate sense of what is "normal". If you are surrounded by people, the majority or large minority of whom have no job, then rotting on benefits seems like a reasonable career option. Most council tenants believe erroneously that they're "normal" and in this world view, those with houses for which they pay market rents or mortgages, are "middle class" and therefore posh oppressors of the working man.

If you accept the logic that housing needs to be provided by the council (and I don't - except in extremis), it would be far more cost effective to pay the rents of those in need. As circumstances change, benefit could be withdrawn rather than leaving a family bed-blocking in social housing. This would stimulate the private rented sector to provide for the low end of the market. People aren't stupid. If you've got a home, for which you're paying a sub-market rent, you'd be mad to move. This means people in desperate states cannot be housed, except in hostels. This means the people with most catastrophic problems are forced into homelessness, preventing treatment of their problems and causing crime. Finally, housing stock owned by the council is rarely well-maintained because neither the tenants, nor those involved in the upkeep really care.

The council should not be a landlord, except to those in the direst personal circumstances. The fact is, the greatest redistribution of wealth from public to private was the right to buy programme. What we need to do is follow the logic to its conclusion: rather than subsidise the rents of an arbitrary group of people, based it seems on a tendency to drop 'h's (amongst those in work, council tenancy is barely correlated to income as far, as I can see), we need to stop taxing the low paid. Rather than providing boondongles for the the idle, we need to remove the incentives to rot on benefits. We need to remove the financial incentives to lone parenthood. Above all we need to stop concentrating poor people into islands of despair. Council housing is an anachronism which shouldn't have survived the 1980's, and I suspect Councillor Piper's attachment to it is based in part on electoral expediency.