Eric Pickles got plenty of headlines for the way he suddenly managed to find £250m that he could give to local authorities so that they can re-instate weekly collections of smelly non-recyclable rubbish destined for landfill.
This works out at under £¾m per council (in England) or less than 50p per household per fortnight – quite a bargain.
At the same time George Osborne, Chancellor of the Exchequer, has found £805m not spent by Whitehall, which will be used to keep down council taxes next year.
That’s more than £1 billion which someone carelessly, it seems, lost down the back of the sofa.
David Cameron has announced a new, improved, Right To Buy scheme for tenants of social housing with discounts bigger than those offered under the existing scheme which will be forever associated with the name of Thatcher. This time however all money raised will be used, immediately, to build replacement housing in the social rented sector, thus keeping up the supply of homes for new tenants and providing lots of jobs for builders.
Magic.
I am wondering who will actually provide this money. Mortgages today seem very hard to come by in the private sector, as they were in 1981 when the Right To Buy scheme began, before Big Bang & the decision to allow Building Societies to borrow funds on the open market instead of just relying on savers. So there was a second right, which guaranteed that the tenant could get a mortgage from the same local authority which was selling them the house.
As housing finance came to seem an ever more attractive licence to print money, private lenders piled into the market for providing mortgages for Right To Buy purchasers. So the local authority got an actual capital receipt in cash when they sold to a tenant.
If the Right to a Mortgage remains part of the new scheme, & if private lenders prove reluctant to provide a more attractive alternative source of finance to tenants, then the social housing authorities will have to borrow the cash to build the replacement homes, presumably on the security of these mortgages.
Sounds horribly familiar.
