Readers' blog: Housing crisis caused by reliance on private sector
The dramatic and shocking increase in child and family homelessness was the entirely predictable consequence of a disastrous, failing government policy of relying on the private sector to manage the housing crisis.
I am dealing with a flood of families and children, many of them with special needs, living in unsuitable emergency accommodation or facing evictions, and all that they are being told is to go and find HAP tenancies in the private sector.
These simply do not exist.
The bitter fruits of the government addiction to a private-sector solution to the current housing emergency are manifesting themselves in these figures and this situation is just going to get worse.
The national demonstration for public and affordable housing, on April 7, is now of critical importance.
We need a mass movement of people power to force the Government to break from its reliance on private-
sector solutions and to, instead, commence an emergency programme of building public and affordable housing on public land.
