Housing and Victorian Values

"Jersey is a low tax area and a good place to live and bring up children" (Robin Trower)

This was a quotation from the JEP about property prices from the estate agent, not as far as I know, to be confused with the influential blues and rock guitarist.

Although singing the blues would probably be apposite for the people suck in poverty, unable to ever get off the rental market and into the vastly overpriced property market.

It is precisely because Jersey is a low tax area that it has attracted the offshore finance industry, and this has effectively priced most people out of the property market, and sent rental prices sky high.

According to the local estate agent, Jersey should be largely immune to the sub-prime mortgage problems as far as its housing market goes, although it will be interesting to see if global cut-backs on lending and interest rate rises will also come over here as banks change their policies worldwide. It seems likely that while house prices will not fall (the demand push is too great), it may be more difficult to get loans available, and at the cheap interest rates hitherto enjoyed.

I wonder if Terry Le Main could also learn from Nye Bevan. As Timmins notes:

Bevan's policy was to restrict severely private housebuilding, allowing only one private house for every four built by local authorities, to order local authorities to requisition empty houses.

That would certainly ruffle a few feathers! Especially the ratio!

I know that in the mid-1980s, a friend of mine, Ken Webb was a census enumerator, and he noticed with some dismay the large number of houses deliberately left empty rather than reduce asking rents. I don't know if that is still the case - somehow those figures never appear in the official compiled statistics, but it would be interesting to know.

Sometimes I wonder how far Jersey has come. Look at this speech:


It is not the housing of the poor, but the housing of the people by the people themselves, that we must work for - not the herding into slums for the benefit of private enterprise, not the crowding into barracks in order to provide interest for municipal bondholders, but by a feasible honest system and plan.


This could apply today, for as Nicholas France (the Catholic Dean) has noted, the Housing committee just doesn't want to know when it comes to clamping down on slum properties - and yes, there are plenty over here, with poorer people crammed into one or two rooms, and mould taking residence on the walls.

In fact it was written by Fred Knee secretary of the Workers National Housing Council in the 1890s. We still have a long way to go to catch up with the these Victorian values in the 21st century!

References:

Nicholas Timmins 'The Five Giants - A biography of the Welfare State' Fontana 1996
http://www.defendcouncilhousing.org.uk/dch/resources/GraysonHistory.doc