Woooo I'm in the news

http://www.cambridge-news.co.uk/watch-marchers-brave-the-rain-to-call-...

The right to buy shouldn't be scrapped, there should be at least two similar properties built with a proper affordable rent to replace the sold house. The concept of right to buy is a sound one, it fails in practice because it depletes housing stock.
The pay to stay scheme that will crucify families on over £31k in council properties should be scrapped, or the limit put up to a proper level. £31k between two working people is peanuts.
Affordable housing at a rent rate that's around 20% of average take home pay should certainly feature as a substantial proportion of any new development.

As big a problem is the spineless City Council planning dept/councillors and their bend over backwards approach to property developers, the bending of rules on proportion of 'affordable' properties in city schemes and the high level of foreign investment. It's unlikely Theresa May is going to end the right to buy, but she could at least do something about the number of dodgy dictatorships using UK as a nice little cash bolthole for their illegal investments.

A word like 'affordable', means something different to everybody.
So to us this as a way of gauging the cost of a property is stupid.
There has to be an equation based on average earnings locally. Obviously this doesn't happen.
Btw... anyone that big(mal)s up housing as an issue deserves kudos.

...proportion of 'affordable' properties...

I'm not a fan of the term "affordable housing", because it implies the existence of its opposite, "unaffordable housing".

What is the point of "unaffordable housing"?

Surely we should just be building "housing"?

but we are building housing, just not for ordinary people to live in. the only housing projects in cambridge are large low-medium rise housing bought almost exclusively by foreign investors at rates few could afford or student accommodation.

If the right to buy is not scraped there will never be enough council housingm end off.

I think Priority 23 was suggesting using the right to buy as a way to finance the construction of more council housing, which I'm assuming doesn't happen right now.

........ No it doesn't, but it was one of the original tenants of the idea (excuse the pun) and certainly should be....

I didn't know that - and it makes the right to buy scheme sound a lot more sensible, at least to me.

The trouble is - how do you keep the snouts out of the trough?

Two things need pointing out here:

Firstly, some people have been complaining that the City Council planners are at fault. At the moment the City Council doesn’t have an up to date local plan, which means they do not have a five year housing supply. This means they have surprisingly little power to guard against developers making ridiculous applications and getting them granted at appeal. The City Council submitted their new local plan in 2014, but due to various fuck ups (largely involving Government and the Secretary of State examinations) it is still not in place, and won’t be until at least 2017. Some of the recent unsuitable developments in Cambridge is a result of the incredibly slow progress of the secretary of state examination, not the planners. The planners are not perfect, and there were problems with the submitted plan, but there are larger factors at work. It isn’t as black and white as “the planners let unsuitable development through”.

Secondly the government have recently revised their rules on affordable housing in the Housing and Planning Bill 2016. They are moving to replace much affordable Housing with “starter homes”, which you can read about here: http://nlpplanning.com/blog/housing-and-planning-act-2016-essential-gu...
See if you can spot the obvious problems with starter homes?

Both of the above points confirm that the current Tory government is an utter joke. They created the housing crisis with Right to Buy in the first place, and they are steadily making everything worse with their current policies and incompetence.

They created the housing crisis with Right to Buy in the first place...

Not that I'm disagreeing, but I don't think the banks are entirely innocent in this.

Yes, I would agree it wasn't entirely right to buy. But I maintain that Right to Buy played a big part. Selling off the council houses without building any more was nothing but a way to buy cheap votes for Thatcher. It was obvious it would cause massive problems down the line, and it has done.

Yup. In an ideal world, with trustworthy politicians, we might be able to reinvest the money into more housing as Priority 23 said. Sadly, with realistic politicians, I think it's a forlorn hope.

And another thing that's worth remembering is that council housing has "never" been subsidized.

I think you mean tenet, not tenant.