Large amounts spent in state benefits at the centre of the capping row go in paying for housing – Martin Hesp thinks we’re going backwards rather than forwards on bricks-and-mortar basics.

Many people will have experienced involuntary facial reactions including spluttering and jaw-dropping – and these will have been caused when those in paid work learned that the unemployed can, for the present time at least, obtain more than £26,000 a year per family in state benefits. The Government, of course, is trying to cap this sizeable sum under the Welfare Reform Bill.

No doubt much of the spluttering and jaw-dropping inspired by some newspaper headlines will have been coupled with imagined thoughts of professional benefit-scroungers booking winter holidays to Tenerife and such like.

I almost went down the outraged, blood-pressure inducing, route myself until I remembered that nothing in this life is quite as it seems – which is why we have that strange modern phrase “elephant in the room”.

In this case the big thing that looms vast, enormous and unmoveable – but which very few people talk about – is the simple but necessary requirement we humans have for shelter. A massive part of these seemingly gigantic handouts is actually paid towards the cost of keeping roofs over people’s heads.

Now let’s use another well-known but older phrase: the one that talks about reaping and sowing.

When Conservative politicians went hell for leather down the road that led us all towards a private housing market – selling off hundreds of thousands of council-owned homes under their Right to Buy legislation as Margaret Thatcher and her cronies embraced the need for greed – what did they expect would be the eventual outcome?

The inevitable answer was only ever going to be found down at the end of an expensive bijou cul-de-sac.

Private landlords are not there to provide social housing – they do not own homes because they feel a charitable need to help others less fortunate than themselves – they rent out property purely to make money. Which is fine if you want to make a few people wealthy while driving up the price of housing in an ever-spiralling vortex so you can make out that this, in some inexplicable way, gives the nation’s overall worth more value.

But it is absolutely disastrous if, years later, you happen to end up in charge of the nation’s social benefit purse strings. Take the cost of housing out of those gigantic benefit payments and the bill met by taxpayers would be dwarfed in a trice.

Flogging off the council houses – which equated to a vast chunk of hugely valuable real-estate – at heavily discounted prices achieved what exactly?

The answer is simple: it guaranteed in absolute terms that a couple of decades down the line the nation’s social housing bill would be astronomical and, even worse, unsustainable.

When society owned all the bricks and mortar which provided social housing it at least meant there would be some kind of sustainability because houses tend to out-last people.

Old council houses used to become someone’s new home when, for whatever reason – death or change of circumstances – the previous tenant vacated. Now old council houses (in the South West at least) change hands to become someone’s new holiday home.

Between 1980 and 1998, some two million residential properties of the kind that used to be called council houses were sold in the UK after Margaret Thatcher pushed forward the Right-to-Buy legislation as part of the Housing Act 1980.

You won’t need me to remind you that tenants were encouraged to buy their council houses by huge carrots, dangled in the form of generous discounts. You may also recall that local authorities were legally restrained from using the monies raised from the sale of these homes to build more social housing.

During this kind of rant I like to imagine a visiting alien of superior intelligence landing in his spaceship on a fact-finding mission: “So let me get this straight – you humans realised there was a need to house all members of society and eventually you became so civilised that, communally, you built homes for the millions of less well-off?” he might muse.

“Then you reversed this sophisticated trend by selling all these homes with no thought for the generations of needy that might follow – with the inevitable result that you now feel angry when paying huge bills for social housing to a comparatively small number of private landlords.”

He might even add: “On my planet we would exterminate the leaders who thought up this disastrous policy.”

The sums involved are astronomical – and I for one would rather see my taxes spent on building the bricks and mortar of tomorrow’s social housing than paid direct in to bank accounts of today’s private landlords who may, for all I know, be spending winter somewhere warm and luxurious like Tenerife.