Expenses Scandals Reveal the Scandalous State of UK Housing Stock

Notably the expenses claiming for houses has underlined the poor state of much of the housing stock. Rotting floors, damp, wrecked guttering and downpipes, extensive need for high level (from the ground, that is) repointing, roof repairs and replacements, lack of triple glazing, poor security, fencing and walling, and putting right the wilder shores of DIY interventions of the seventies. Poor internal maintenance, worn out kitchens and bathrooms, electrical outdatedness for modern needs or even outright dangerous, no insulation and elderly, inefficient heating systems. All this in quite undistinguished houses, the everyday houses of ordinary people.

Of itself it carries an important message. People have not been left enough of their own earnings to maintain their dwellings to a reasonable standard. The taxes they have borne have been so high, or their pretax wage levels so low (but they aren't particularly low by European standards, it's the stoppages on wages, not the wages themselves) that a major part of social infrastructure has been driven into grave dilapidation.

The constructing of a realised socialism at least in part of the economy has devastated everyday life enjoyment. It's all very well spending on 'schools'n'hospitals' but not when they are producer oriented systems that effectively starve consumers, by definition private consumers, of the means to provide themselves with shelter that is at advanced capitalist country standards.

Of course MPs out to make a profit may have bought rundown housing to advantage themselves with our meeting their renovation bills. I suspect though that most of us have had, and would have, difficulty in finding housing maintained at a decent level. The response to this is not government grants and means tested refurbishment allowances (although there is room for local authority co-ordination of, for instance terraces of roofing or better water and sewage services, and streetscaping, even walling). There wouldn't be such need for health services and 'place of refuge and tranquility' attitudes rather than 'place of learning and training' in education spending if we were left, all of us, with enough of our earnings to house ourselves properly. And keep our houses maintained to modern standards.