Monday, April 16, 2007

Strange bedfellows

It's not often you find William Rees Mogg and Cymuned on the same side but the article from this morning's Times suggest that clearly affordable housing has become an issue across the political spectrum.

The following comments from Rees Mogg will strike a chord with many young hard working professionals in Wales

"It is the “20-20s” that are ruled out; they are the graduates in their twenties who are earning something over £20,000 a year. The average pay of a teacher is, apparently, £26,400 a year. Many graduates, even in better paid professions, will earn less than that in their early jobs. A suburban semidetached house in Gerrards Cross, which may have cost about £1,250 when it was first sold in the 1930s, would now cost between £500,000 and £1 million".

And this doesn't include the thousands of young people who didn't go to college and stayed behind in their local areas only to find that they cannot afford to buy a home in the area in which they work and want to raise a family.

I responded to this issue on Glyn Davies' blog yesterday and it was interesting to see the comment from Sanddef where Cymuned had apparently praised the Conservative leadership in Wales for their stance on this issue.

After eight years of playing with this issue, it is time the Assembly got its act together to respond to what will be one of the major social and economic challenges in Wales over the next four years especially if, as the FT notes, house price inflation is still running at around 8 per cent annually.

No comments: