Sunday 29 August 2010

Councils Allowed To Discriminate On Their Housing Lists?

Conservative Home reports that:
"Councils are to be given more power to decide their own waiting list criteria for social housing. Instead of it being entirely "needs based" they would be allowed to take into account those with "local connections" and to reward those who had got off welfare and into work.............So another day and another piece of radical localism from the DCLG"
Article 3 of the Treaty on European Union (TEU) states:
"It shall combat social exclusion and discrimination............"
Bearing in mind that Member States share competence with the European Union, under Article 4 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union (TFEU), in the areas of social policy for the aspects defined in this treaty; that under Article 6 the European Union shall have competence to carry out actions to support, co-ordinate or supplement the actions of Member States in the protection and improvement of human health and culture; bearing in mind also Article 8 which aims to eliminate inequalities; Article 10 in which the European Union aims to combat discrimination based on sex, racial or ethnic origin, etc etc................

It would seem rather unlikely that this idea will come to fruition as it seems it will flounder on the same rock as did Gordon Brown's 'British Jobs for British Workers' - and, pound to a euro, surely an email will land in Shapps inbox along the lines of 'Err, excuse us but.......'

Have the Coalition got themselves into a bit of an 'Eric' here?

3 comments:

Woodsy42 said...

The big problem with all this equality nonsense is that it allows the courts to make or interpret law in a political way, often even one that was never intended.
After all I would happily argue that disallowing an existing member of a local community housing within their own community is in fact exclusion of the worst sort. And it makes them unequal to other locals who remain living there, hence is discriminatory.
The words can be taken either way, other Eu countries like France don't pander to the PC nonsense like we do.
It is often the driving political narrative in the UK that has attached very specific specialised meanings to some words, which is the problem, not the laws themselves.
Just an observation.

Witterings from Witney said...

W42, which just goes to show what all this 'equality' crap is - utter nonsense.

ReefKnot said...

This will never happen. Councils will be "allowed to take into account...etc". But none of them will, because they don't want to. If the Government really wanted Councils to put British people first, it would change the law to require them to do so.