Ruth Kelly, already in hot water!

Tuesday: we all wake up to the Today programme and Ruth Kelly telling us how 'social housing will be my personal priority' and how she will 'root out' those NIMBYs who oppose new housing in their neighbourhoods. She says that she wants an end to the culture of householders being "protective of their own space" and raising objections to social housing developments near their homes. All in the context of housing being apparently a major factor in the BNP success in Barking and DAgenham. About which I hope to post in more detail in a bit (given that B&D is one of the major sites for the Thames Gateway carpet of commuter homes).

Thursday: it comes out that actually Kelly opposed new social housing in her own back yard. Just last week she opposed the building of a new social housing development in Bolton for poor families and has opposed around 1600 new homes in total.

Whoops. Evidently she has inherited a propensity for embarrassing mistakes from Prezza...

Comments

Paulie said…
Ooh! Come on! Hurry up with the post about Barking and Dagenham housing already!

I've not worked in the area for a long time, but there were a lot of ugly machine politics around the way that homeowners had the value of their homes slashed by the indecision around the Channel Tunnel Rail Link.

Am I warm or cold?
Hana Loftus said…
Sorry! I'm WAY too busy now to write in-depth comment pieces. but what I wanted to touch on was the regeneration and Thames Gateway stuff happening in B&D and the social problems/issues arising. CTRL is another issue which I don't know much about b/c it was before I started having any involvement with the area - so maybe you should be writing about it!

You may have to wait till June (sorry!) before I find time to write my bit however. Too busy working on new rural stuff....