Image: St George Wharf, London 2014. James Beard/Wikipedia, Creative Commons.
Housing is a basic human requirement. There’s nothing in life more fundamental than the roof over a person’s head. Good housing policies are about people rather than profit. Unfortunately we haven’t had polices of that kind in the UK for nearly four decades.
In London there are currently hundreds of luxury towers going up, targeted mainly at foreign investors. They’re not homes in any real sense but financial assets, no more than safety deposit boxes in the sky. At the same time thousands of people are sleeping rough, tens of thousands of children are in temporary homeless accommodation and hundreds of thousands of them live in poverty in a private rented sector that’s broken. It’s a pattern that’s replicated all over the country.
