Conservative Manifesto

Who know doubt bought it for less than £10,000 and made a nice tidy profit.

I hasten to add that DS and DiL do not live in one of them as they bought their house from an ex council tenant quite a few years ago.

Almost all of the council houses on my DS's estate have been given lovely new composite front doors (along with new windows, central heating, kitchens and bathrooms) under the decent homes scheme. The tenant could choose the style and the colour of kitchen and door they wanted.

I like my horrid iron fencing.

DH keeps our immaculately painted though which makes a big difference. As I said earlier we took up the horrible paving slabs and made the front into a real garden.

Exactly Elegran My house was exactly the same as all of the others built in the same style on our very large estate. However in the last few years we have changed our front door and created a small front garden (all of the others are paved and very boring). You are right, your home is what you make it.

still wouldn't mind living in a nice big house with those landscaped gardens though

I forgot the horrid iron fencing. That can be camouflaged by growing a clematis to weave in and out of it - price a couple of pounds in B&Q. Fencing likewise to make a space to sit out in without being on view - if wooden fencing is too dear, those 4 metre long rolled-up bamboo screens are £10 each on Ebay and can be attached to chain link fencing. For crying out loud, do we want our whole lifestyle to be laid out for us by someone else? Making the most of what we have is up to each individual.

There are rules about what you can and can't do to the house if you're a council tenant. I don't think you can just buy a tin of paint and change the front door colour willy-nilly, especially if you're a newish tenant.

I am not sure how anyone gets a housing association house to rent, either.
Just a very limited number (4) were built in our village for 'local people in need of housing'.
The young woman next door lived with her child (a boy aged 10), parents and her two brothers in parents' 3 bedroomed house. She had to share a bedroom with her son.
Despite being on the list and being born and bred in the village, she did not get one.
DS and DIL + DGDs therefore had no hope as they were renting privately, despite being on the list.

Goodness knows who the people are who were allocated the houses, one family with their 4x4 now parked outside.

The houses are all the same because it is cheaper to do it that way than to make them all different. Streets of cheap speculative houseing are all the same too. The gardens in new private houses are all the same as well - buyers make them individual for themselves after they move in. It is only the most expensive houses that come complete with a garden beautifully and individually landscaped. Not many of us are in those.

Is there any law that says the doors have to be all the same colour? A tin of paint would make them different.

Your home is what you make of it. Some people can put their stamp on a house, some can't.

Thanks for the link, gillybob
Someone told me about her this morning.

It is no good our family getting excited about a proposed 30 hour childcare provision for 3 and 4 year olds because we are in Wales.
Contrary to what someone posted, some children are nearly 5 when they start school and school nurseries only provide a limited number of hours free, is it 15 hours in England? - in Wales only 12.5 hours are provided free spread over 5 days and there are not many school nurseries in our area anyway. I have not heard any proposals to increase the number of hours in Wales where at present Labour are in charge - and will continue to be of course as the Assembly elections are not due.
Any proposed beneficial initiatives seem to apply to England only.

Anyone who is thinking of voting Labour should try living the reality of a Labour government in Wales before they decide - if they have an open, not blinkered, mind they may well change it! Even the parent of the First Minister recently used the private sector for healthcare because the waiting time for operations is so long!
We are turning into a second-rate poor relation under Labour.

we have new social housing here too but it is all the same, horrid iron fences, doors the same as the street, lawns plain and bare. who wants to look like hundreds of others, that's one of the reason I bought mine so I could be different, I don't want to sit out in a garden where the street can see me through iron railings. I want my property to look different and so do many people.
You get social housing by telling them you have a child/children and are separated and have no where to go, you go into a b and b and have a good social worker and they speak up for you, it helps if you are not English and have a child with adhd. You can get a relative to say they cannot have you to stay because of the childs behaviour, you get many things like this I wish I had a child now I would be well off.

Chip? You have a whole poke* of them.

1) Uni graduates come from all "classes" Even when I was a student I had a friends who lived in a poky flat where her parents slept in a double bed in the living room, with the sink as a bedside table and the gas cooker within easy reach, while she was in a tiny room next door. That was it - two rooms - the loo (no window or light) had been boxed off in a corner of the hall and there was no bathroom. She got a better degree than I did.

2) The new council houses that I lived in were of excellent construction, so was the old one I lived in for a while. The standard of building is up to the authority that commissions them, just as the standard of private housing is up to the wishes of the speculative builder who puts them up. Luxurious? Do you think that a privately-built matchbox from a speculative builder is luxurious? Who the hell needs luxurious anyway - private or Local Authority? What is needed is solidly built structures that will survive being battered by a family, with good facilities, decent sized rooms and garden, and bus routes and shops and surgeries and so on.

3) It is great that you are proud of your little house and I wish you well in it. but my mother was proud of her house too, and she had not bought it.

3) Your mind is your own. How you vote has nothing to do with the posts on this thread, so don't accuse posters of influencing you in one direction or another.They come from people who vote for all political parties, and from those (like me) who have no intention of telling you how I intend to vote. I don't tell the pushy canvassers who keep ringing my doorbell either.

*Poke = paper packet of fish and chips.

I was born and brought up in a council house and proud of the fact. When I was a young single mother I had a lovely council house. Wish the heck I had kept it too. I would have been quids in.

We have quite a lot of brand new social housing in our area ethelbags1 and I can assure you it is very much better than a lot of the private housing available. Much bigger gardens, modern designs, light and airy. Crikey knows how you get one though. Probably have to be related to a councillor (thats tends to be the way things work around here)or at the very least be a member in the Labour party.

Also are most "road sweepers" not employed by the local authority anyway? in which case they are already living off tax payers money.

I wish someone would help me decide who to vote for.

In my job I have met many professionals who live in an ex council house. I met a solicitor, just qualified, several nurses and the junior manager of my local bank and such as the nurses are happy to buy from the council and move up the 'ladder'.

Confused Ideology!

I like that last paragraph, ethel, I must remember it!

I just had a thought - some posters who were saying that people such as nurses, teachers, other public sector workers and indeed members of their own families could never hope to buy their own houses, particularly in the south-east are now saying they are against proposed 'right-to-buy'.

I am - or is it other posters who have a confused idealogy?

If social housing were to be more like private housing there would be less of a problem. The newbuild starter homes are small but quite luxurious compared to a council house. Why not put tenants in the private houses ?
There would be an uproar, mummy and daddys little darlings fresh from uni would not like scruffy dole claimants next door with broken down cars etc etc. That would be equality!!!

None of you lot would like that so why cant those on a low wage aspire to do better for themselves. The road sweeper should be given a bit of help to buy a house because after all if he gave up his job he would be living on taxpayers money for life, would it not be cheaper to subsidise his buying of his social rented home. I don't have a chip on my shoulder, I am buying my council house, luckily not in a bad area, and I am so proud of my little house which would not be possible if it had not been for Margaret Thatcher.

Thank you all for helping me to decide who to vote for because up to now I really was going to stick a pin on the voting form but having seen some of your comments I now know who I am in favour of.

don't forget that by 'helping those les well off' sometimes means keeping them in their social group, true helping means giving them a chance to better themselves by their own effort.

Yes rosequartz she is a real hypocrite if ever there was one.

www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3040796/Labour-s-queen-hypocrisy-MP-sneered-white-van-man-attacks-Tory-right-buy-plan-thought-bought

I hope rules are brought in to ensure that tenants who buy at a discount do not immediately re-sell at a profit or re-rent the property they buy.

I don't know why housing association chiefs are so against tenants purchasing their rented property for themselves when they have been known to auction off properties in the past which have been purchased by the likes of Emily Thornberry who then re-rents the property. (Labour MP and millionare property owner - remember her - the one who made comments during a bi-election about the house with the white van and the flag?).

gill please point out which post I said that anyone was 'lower class'

A family member was living in a housing ass. house and had passed whatever the criteria to buy the house. He asked if he could do this and the housing ass. told him that they preferred to keep the house he was living in within their stock but we willing to invest £X in any house he wished to buy. This meant he could buy a house he really liked and where he wanted to live. The association has retained a stake in his house and should he sell will have their stake returned to them. Seems the best solution for all - once he moved there was no delay for another family on the housing list having a new home.

Another problem is that so many of the former council houses are now owned by private landlords. I lost count of the number of drug dealers evicted by the council, who simply moved back on to the same road in a private rented property and continued to create havoc.

The stigma is not about living in a council house. It is about living in an area that is notorious for the amount of crime and anti-social behaviour - and that is true of a lot of inner-city areas which are privately rented too. It is not the houses, or who built them.

There are housing estates that are full of pleasant houses inhabited by people you would be pleased to have as friends, and there are estates where you wouldn't walk alone. Until I married and we scraped together the money for a deposit and a mortgage, I lived in estates - most of them good ones, but I know how an area can go downhill.

It is the occupants who make them into no-go slums or peaceful neighbourhoods. There are some people who would make a wilderness of Eden if they were lucky enough to live there. They are by no means the majority, but a few of them in an estate make life hell for others, and those who can manage to get out do. That leaves empty properties which are filled by either unsuspecting good tenants, who get out as well if they can afford to, or by another batch of the unsociable few. One estate we were in was excellent - it is now infamous.

The snowball effect means that good tenants avoid an estate with a bad name, and so bad ones gravitate there. It doesn't take an official "decision" to label it a sink estate and send bad tenants there - the good ones vote with their feet, if they can.

oh ethel get that chip off your shoulder. Nobody, apart from you, has ever suggested on here that people living in HA properties are somehow 'lower class' ( your expression, not mine) than people who live in owner occupied homes. Many people in the private sector with the associated insecurity of tenure desperately want a HA home which will give them security. Also, the building regulations governing HA properties are very stringent, and new build HA properties very often have more amenity space, bigger bedrooms etc than those built for private sale. I still maintain that selling Housing Association stock without replacing it will be a disaster, leaving many people stuck in the private rented sector which is of varying quality and has little security of tenure.