a sincere apology to my readers about my housing blog

I must apologise to you all, on monday I blogged on how the new government policy and existing governments policies for housing were failing the people of Cornwall. In it I had written in response to the BBC article titled Get Britain Building, I had wrongly assumed that this was based upon fact and research in this assumption I was wrong, it is little more than a copied and pasted government press release. At that point the actual firm details of the coalitions plans had not been released and I feel I have let myself and my readers down by taking the government and the BBC at their word. I should have waited for the actual figures to be released and analysed and criticised them properly. Research by Channel Four news -and no doubt others-0re01veals that affordable housing is actually down a staggering 97% on work done by the Labour government. Here is the Channel four article the astonishing numbers the housing strategy failed to mention the pdf file of the actual figures proposed is here from the Homes and Communities website. Unfortunately due to the centralisation/ regionalisation of administration the figure available are from the South and South West of England, I can not begin to imagine how Cornish figures could be extracted from this 'region'. It can only be concluded that the affordable housing situation is set to get even worse and with the stagnating economy, stagnating wage levels and price increases due to inflation and the weak pound this blow to affordable housing could not come at a worse time.

I do not feel I have to apologise to Mebyon Kernow, I believe my criticisms of existing government policy whether it be Labour or the Tory-Lib Dem alliance are still valid. MK's position on selling off social housing is now even more prescient, selling them off without replacing like for like will beset our children with the same problems this generation faces. A new injection of cash into building social housing will as a response to the government's short sightedness become more of a priority for MK and for me (in terms of what I write about and personally without such action my family will stay in expensive and unsuitable rental accommodation). MK's other criticism that looking to developers to solve the housing crisis is also still valid, these companies exist to make money. They are not interested in selling houses at a discounted rate if they can make more profit they will. I am at a loss to imagine how Labour's disastrous housing policies could be bested in failing the Cornish people but the coalition somehow have managed it. We need radical action on housing and Cornish solutions to our very unique problems, we owe it to the young people of Cornwall, we owe it to our economy and we owe it to the well being of Cornish society. Again I apologise if I misled my readers into thinking the government was doing something about affordable housing they are not. The cabinet of millionaires have used the rhetoric of affordable housing to mask the fact that the banks and big developers have been handed a gift with this new policy and the people have been sold short again.