Phil Tate (Letters, 30 October) calls for the ramping up of the supply of social housing to reduce the housing benefit bill. Housing benefit represents a constant leakage of public finances into the pockets of private landlords, and the UK carries approximately double the burden of the EU average as a proportion of GDP. Such an appeal is doomed to failure unless there is a cessation of right to buy, which, as Andy Burnham has neatly put it, presents local authorities with an impossible task comparable with trying to fill a bath without a plug.
An illustration of this no-win situation is the social-housing development Goldsmith Street, Norwich, which was built by the city council in 2019 and won the RIBA Stirling prize for architecture the same year. This scheme created a carefully designed community of ultra-low-energy Passivhaus homes. It was announced last spring that seven residents want to buy their homes under the right-to-buy scheme and there is nothing Norwich city council can do to stop this. The number of social homes being lost continues to outnumber those being built.
