Iain Duncan Smith slams Thatcher 'ghettos'
MARGARET THATCHER’S “right to buy” policy for council house owners left swathes of the population trapped in ghetto estates, according to the former Tory leader Iain Duncan Smith.
The Eighties housing sell-off was hailed as a great social leveler.
Mr Duncan Smith insisted that he was not saying it was wrong but he claimed that its architects had “no real sense of what its consequences would be” and did not implement the social reforms that should have accompanied it.
The result of the sell-off, he said, was a growing gap between the bottom socio-economic group and the rest of the country, with the worst estates populated only by the most “broken” families.
Most tenants who bought and then improved their homes in the Eighties have since sold up and moved off the estates.
Mr Duncan Smith, whose Centre for Social Justice think tank offers Conservative solutions to the problems of deprivation, told Fabian Review magazine: “Nobody really thought about what happens if you allow only the most broken families to exist on housing estates. You create a sort of ghetto in which the children who grow up there repeat what they see around them.
“While I’m not going to point the finger and say the changes made in the Eighties were wrong, we didn’t have any real sense of where this might go and what needed to happen. Big social reforms should have taken place then, and they never did.
“What happened next was in some ways unfortunate. We forgot that, while the economy was moving on, society itself was not really ready for this.
“Swathes of the population got left behind... the gap between the bottom socio-economic group and the rest started to grow, and it has grown ever since. Under Labour it’s grown almost faster in some senses.”
Last year in its Housing and Dependency report the Centre for Social Justice lamented the loss of the many “stable and prosperous” working class communities of the Sixties and Seventies, the same communities that have been allowed to degenerate into some of Britain’s worst sink estates.
There, the report concluded, tenants remain trapped on benefits in “ghettoised poverty, creating broken estates with little but unemployment, dependency, family breakdown and addiction.
Mr Duncan Smith called for far more than simply a “roof over the heads” of this vulnerable section of society but a broader social policy that pledged to get them back to work and in a position to help themselves.
He also demanded “aspirations” for tenants where they could be rewarded for self improvement with an equity share in their homes, to give them a control which he believes would transform the estates over time.
Mr Duncan Smith praised former Labour chancellor Denis Healey’s work to get Britain out of its economic downturn in the mid-Seventies, including going to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to ask for a bailout in 1976 .
“You have to remember it was Denis Healey who did most of the serious hard work, the heavy lifting, before Mrs Thatcher came in,” said Mr Duncan Smith.
“Had she come in without Healey’s work in the IMF, I don’t think she’d have lasted two years. She would have been out in 1983.”
However, he criticised another former chancellor, the Tories’ current business spokesman Kenneth Clarke, as “wrong” to remove the recognition of marriage in the tax system and to oppose its restoration under David Cameron.
