Barometer | 18 June 2011

Council housing

Ed Miliband proposed that a Labour government under his leadership would send people in employment to the top of the council house waiting list. Mr Miliband risks criticism by his own party, which has already attacked similar plans by the Tory-controlled Westminster Council. How would Mr Miliband’s policy have gone down with the architect of Labour’s post-war housing policy, Nye Bevan?

—Bevan always intended council housing to be a choice of the middle classes as well as the working classes, saying he wanted to create a ‘living tapestry’ where ‘the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the labourer all lived on the same street’. He said nothing about the long-term unemployed, perhaps because he never imagined that there would by 2011 be 350,000 households where no one has ever worked.

Rubbish collections

The government abandoned its plan to force councils to collect rubbish every week rather than every fortnight. Do we need weekly collections?