A home for life – but only if you can afford it  

WHEN I was growing up, the home we lived in was not ours. It was rented from the then Scottish Special Housing Association. I lived there from the age of four until I was 20. My dad still lives there, although he now owns it. David Cameron’s annoyance at council tenants being given a home for life is based, he says, on the need for flexibility in social housing. He’s right to identify the problem that there is a shortage of such homes. But he chooses to ignore the need for parents to have a level of security as they raise their families. That was not a problem, I suspect, for the young David when he was growing up. Neither should it be a problem for the next generation of council tenants. What struck me about Dave’s comments – other than the fact that it shows how incredibly out of touch he and his advisers are with the realities of council tenants’ lives –...