Tackling Britain’s dilemma over affordable housing

RE your report ‘Taxpayer loses out as rising rents outstrip stagnant pay’ (The Yorkshire 
Post, August 20). Rents per month are often higher than the mortgage would be for the same property.

Landlords have no incentive to reduce rents as long as they get housing benefits and rents will go on rising faster than incomes meaning that inevitably housing benefit will go on rising at the same time as the rise in rents will take more and more of the renters’ income.

Mortgage guarantees 
mean that many more 
people will be able to get a mortgage, but there will only be the same number of houses to buy.

This will lead to demand-led house inflation and will soon mean that things are back to square one (this is already happening).

By all means go on for the time being helping people who rent to keep a roof over their heads and with a cap on maximum payments of housing benefits possibly rents would stop rising faster than incomes – although this is not altogether fare because people behind with their mortgages don’t get Government help, but nothing in the article or above will get more houses 
built.

The only way to get more houses built is not to make it easier for people to get a mortgage though mortgage guarantees or whatever but instead use the money saved to pay builders directly to build a much higher proportion a of affordable homes than they do at present.

Build these homes to a good standard but a at price that people on an income of not much above minimum wage can afford. Too many people now think that they should have all the whistles and bells to start with and not need to gradually improve.

As long as private landlords are not allowed to buy up to 50 per cent of these new homes as in the past but they are only sold to first-time buyers, hundreds of thousands of people (over a time maybe millions) will be able to get onto the housing 
ladder. Also they will then not still be renting after retirement out of an income that as things are going, and because Britain has now so much more competition for the world’s wealth, will be a far lower percentage of their final wage or salary.

Singapore has been helping companies to build affordable homes for many years and now 90 per cent of the people in Singapore are home owners. Why cannot it be the same in Britain?