A Solution to Thatcher’s Housing Legacy
Mortgages are hard to get, rents keep rising, and being a landlord is becoming even more attractive to those with capital. Sixty per cent of Housing Benefit recipients are in work, as are all recipients of Tax Credits, and both these schemes look like a subsidy to employers for paying low wages. However, most of these subsidies end up in the pockets of the landlords!! It is not the first time that wages have been subsidised – and failed to solve the imagined problem. The Speenham Land System, introduced in 1795, allowed the Speenham Parish in Berkshire to subsidise the…