The Tories don’t really rate the social housing sector: that much has been clear for a good long time. They fell out a bit over their 2010 reforms to tenancies that abolished the automatic right to a council house for life, and have been scrapping over welfare reforms ever since. In recent weeks, ministers had made it quite clear that given the housing sector protested so much about the impact of the last tranche of benefit cuts, and their dire warnings hadn’t come to fruition, they weren’t going to pay much attention to the opposition to this next round of cuts announced yesterday.
Perhaps, then, it wasn’t surprising that one of the measures that George Osborne announced was a 1 per cent annual reduction in social rents, which housing associations will foot the bill for. He said:
‘This will be a welcome cut in rent for those tenants who pay it and I’m confident that Housing Associations and other landlords in the social sector will be able to play their part and deliver the efficiency savings needed.’
It’s not clear why Osborne is confident of this, other than that he may be viewing the sector as a bit flabby and ripe for reform and efficiencies.
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