Shock as ConDems do something useful!
BBC: The government says it is making it easier for social housing tenants to swap homes nationwide - to move nearer to family or to find work.
I approve of this!
...there's just a few niggles I have with it.
tl;dr Libratorians do something good about council housing, but in doing so remind us they can't be trusted with it, and know that themselves.
Also, as a side note, it took me 5 minutes to find this out, and 10 to write, clearly the "journalist" at the Beeb couldn't be bothered to do more than read the press release. They should just use "Cop. E. Pasta" as their staff writer alias. (NB: Despite this I think the Beeb are like number 3 amongst all our traditional media outlets in the UK. That this is their standard, more reflects on the utter shitness of everyone else.)
I approve of this!
...there's just a few niggles I have with it.
- As far as the Gov, my Housing Assn(HA), and Homeswapper were saying, HomeSwapper was THE system, the only one, and all but the few HAs/Councils that remained holdouts (due to it's being voluntary)were on it. So, rather than being a case of 'repeat announcing', they just lied beforehand, and quietly omit that.
- By naming 4 'swapper services', it makes it sound like things are worse than they are. Abritras seem to be just a web+IT service company marketing itself to social landlords, while Locata is a scheme linking 6 London Boroughs. Given then that HomeSwapper and HouseExchange are roughly the same size, the true effect is it will roughly double the choice for people falling under those, and to bring the tenants of West London and holdouts in other places under the umbrella. But this is more a gripe at press release than the principle.
- April. Why is it going to take up to 134 working days, that's a whole 938 hours of work even if you presume they use a single compsci and only work 9-5 with lunchbreak), to a) port the data of the 3 inferior databases to whichever one they pick as superior, or b) re-build one of the websites to draw from all 4 databases? Does it REALLY take that long? (It's not the HAs ops DBs remember, just the swapper ones, so like; name, postcode, contact details, interested areas by parish name) I imagine diffrentcoloursmay have a view on this.
- This is a(nother) case of government having to intervene, rather shooting a(nother) hole in an Conservative/Libertarian claims we only need a skeleton government (whatever that is).
- This is another failure of The Markets [See 4]. (Oh, why does that sound familiar?) Today, Housing Assn and Council's arms-lenght Housing depts are sort of like wolfs sewn into sheeps corpses, meant to act benevolently and for the people, but mostly stuffed to the gills with staff and management who want to be running a private property corporate, and are charged to act accordingly so long as it doesn't too blatantly violate their legal purpose.
tl;dr Libratorians do something good about council housing, but in doing so remind us they can't be trusted with it, and know that themselves.
Also, as a side note, it took me 5 minutes to find this out, and 10 to write, clearly the "journalist" at the Beeb couldn't be bothered to do more than read the press release. They should just use "Cop. E. Pasta" as their staff writer alias. (NB: Despite this I think the Beeb are like number 3 amongst all our traditional media outlets in the UK. That this is their standard, more reflects on the utter shitness of everyone else.)