Sir, It makes me sad to say it but your lead story (“Council homes for life ‘to be scrapped’ ”, Nov 10) isn’t a forecast of the Green Paper on social housing, but a last-ditch attempt by a tiny group of ideologically motivated barm-pots, some of them in Communities & Local Government, to achieve their longstanding aim of destroying council housing.

This has failed so far because, despite mass privatisations, there are still 2.8 million council houses. So they now propose to turn them into transit camps for the poor. It’s illogical to say that because the Government hasn’t built anything like enough public housing for rent and can’t provide for the huge numbers in housing need, that it should now turn tenants out of council houses to make room for even poorer people. They justify this by the daft example of a 17-year-old unmarried mother allocated a council house for life who then becomes a celebrity millionaire but opts to stay in her council house instead of buying property in Hove, to the annoyance of the homeless but the delectation of her neighbours.

It would be crazy to end secure tenancies on such an extreme case. Yet the idea has been foisted on an embarrassed Chartered Institute of Housing (not the other way round, as your article implied) in an attempt to push it on our new Housing Minister, Margaret Beckett, in the same way those zealots did on Caroline Flint.

It won’t work. The Labour Party won’t wear it. Nor will the councils. Margaret is a Labour minister, not a Blairite, and she’ll give it the short shrift it deserves because she recognises, as we do, that the only answer to the acute shortage of public housing for rent is to build more. Indeed, the only way to get more housing built in a credit crisis is to finance the councils to put builders back to work and to regenerate estates so they’re not ghettos.

Austin Mitchell

Chair, Council Housing Group of MPs,

House of Commons, London SW1

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