Send them up north
From Brendan Duggan
Sir: So the answer to all our housing problems is a big increase in subsidised housing (Letters, 14 January). Just let everyone depend more on the state, including for their home, and everything will be fine. Consider this: some 60,000 empty private houses are up for publicly funded demolition in the north of England, and entire streets are boarded up in low demand areas with very little ‘local spend’. The vast majority of these houses have no structural problems; they have little value but are the same size and design as those selling for £300,000 in London, where the government’s token gestures in the form of housing loans to nurses and other politically sexy groups are the bold response to the south-east’s housing crisis.
The solution lies in transferring demand to where there is supply. England’s economy would benefit from having true decentralisation, like Canada, Australia, the USA or Germany — having a number of major cities in different regions, balancing up the geographical spread of economic power, not as some kind of gift to the post-industrial towns, but as an economic safety valve.
Brendan Duggan Stockport
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