What A Let Down, BBC Panorama!
Re: ‘The Race To Build’:
45 minutes of propaganda designed to generate sympathy for the government and prepare us for them not meeting the target to build a certain amount of new homes by 2029 and also for anyone one who cannot get on the property ladder BUT little exposure of the actual issue causing the renting crisis – the lack of a rent cap!!! which affects ALL renters but particularly the most vulnerable in our society – those threatened with homelessness due to eye watering rent hikes across the board.
No mention also of the threatened with homelessness population – the sleeping rough – those in emergency accommodation RIGHT NOW – whole families with children – victims of domestic abuse, etc.
Yet a huge segment devoted to talking to students in their twenties lamenting extortionate rent prices (I get it) but little coverage regarding the generation of renters who DO work multiple jobs and who still cannot afford their rent because it swallows up over a third of their salaries before they’ve even started paying their now sky high bills!!!
No mention of single people who cannot afford to live alone nowadays even when middle aged or retired – literally priced out of the rental market forced to either reside in extortionate dilapidated and diseased HMO’s with weird strangers, like sardines in overpriced tins in their twilight years long after uni ended – or move back in their parents – IF they are lucky. If they are still alive!!!
No mention of landlords and lettings agents out for profit charging a premium for these house shares / HMO’s which if you do come out of employment cannot then be covered by the local housing allowance because it hasn’t risen in line with these inflated rents since God knows when!
Because it is capped for sharers even though house share rents are now as high as what it used to cost for a bedsit or one bed flat or ‘studio’ (ergo head in the oven, feet in the fridge syndrome because your bed is in the kitchen).
The LHA tbh is pathetically low anyway compared to private sector rent fees even if you are a single occupant over the age of 35 nowadays whereas as years ago it made solitary living more doable.
I was once told to leave a very cheap houseshare whilst on benefits because the council would pay double the LHA for me to do so – hence acquiring Pixie Towers – rather than increase my housing benefit to cover the room in the share which was pennies.
Totally f**ked up logic.
I digress.
Back to Build Baby Build:
‘Bricks are too expensive to make!
We need so many of them!, we’re too skint as a country’ But we can bankroll wars a-plenty and other stories!
Ohhh, it’s impossible to get planning permission!
Ohhh, the cost to the environment! The greenbelts!
‘But there are flat-pack homes being manufactured in factories’ now – ergo prefabs!!!! – is it 1944 again? Sorry no, it’s Orwell’s 1984 more like!!!
‘Affordable’ housing – hmmn – new builds – with huge service charges and mostly shared ownership where you have to pay not only a mortgage but rent too on top for a measly 25% share of the flat you’ll never own fully unless you win the lottery!!! Fat chance of that.
A pathetic 10 minutes of this dire documentary only allocated to the desperate shortage in social housing which they admit is actually BETTER for the economy but not lucrative enough to take on.
Money.
It all boils down to money and profit over purpose.
The Money-Go-Round.
Again!
Sick.
🤢
The End.
Rachel Rhodes-Puckett 
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