Mitchell on Our (Wo)Man Flint

Austin Mitchell, National Treasure and Labour MP for Grimsby - and Chair of the Council Housing Group of MPs - rips into new Housing Minister Caroline Flint on his site today. Flint's extraordinary assertion that you should have to be "looking for work" to get access to social housing is, as Mitchell points out, a nonsense:

Caroline’s assumption is that social housing reduces the will to work. Numbers not in work are higher in public housing because people have retired, housing has been given to single parent families and Government policy has damaged them by selling off so much of the stock, by using the estates as a social dumping ground and by allowing unscrupulous landlords to buy up repossessed Right to Buy houses and put less desirable tenants in.

All this has broken down what were mixed communities but as the Hills report shows, the aim should be to rebuild them, not treat them as ghettos or weed out the unemployed.

As a new Minister, Caroline hasn’t realised that she can’t implement any of it. She’d have to end both “secure” and “assured” tenancies, limit access to public rented housing to those prepared to sign a new “seeking work” contract and force councils to provide expensive bed and breakfast accommodation for families evicted for not seeking work.

Translation: "as a new minister, Caroline should have kept her stupid mouth shut. For a bit."