Instinctively I feel I ought not to feel sympathy for the 70,000 council house tenants earning more than £40,000 a year in London (£30,000 outside London) and who are going to be made to pay an average of an extra £1000 a year to stay in their subsidised council homes. They are better off than average and at a level of income at which they ought not to be reliant on the charity of the state. There was a time early on in my working life when I earned substantially less than the average earnings, and not for a minute would I have dreamed of applying for social housing.
But then we aren’t in the early 1990s now. We are in an age of vastly inflated property prices, caused by government policies which are deliberately aimed at keeping prices high.
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