Opinion: Fergus Wilson: The landlord who wants to put 200 families out on the street – The Independent

Twickenham United Kingdom (Photo credit: @Doug88888)

The issue is not with this buy to let landlord, who is trying to run a business, but with the fact that we have a housing shortage of 11.5 million houses and a rate of building new houses of 100,000 a year.

We also lack the builders and craft tradesmen to build enough houses, the mortgage finance to fund the purchases even if the houses could be built and everyone seems to have forgotten that 1 person in 6 cannot get credit on standard terms or at all.

Successive Governments keep on allowing more immigration when there are no houses to put them in and successive Governments refuse to deal with the need for systems building and the parallel need to bring local authorities, banks, centralized lenders, building societies into an agreement with firms like Hof Haus and the refurbishers of shipping containers which could be used to house Housing B enefit recipients.

The truth is less than 3% of our UK politicians and Ministers have any experience of real life or are qualified as engineers and scientists whereas the corresponding figure for Germany is that 30% of German Government ministers are scientists and engineers capable of solving problems.

I say Fergus Wilson should evict all 200 of these people and that all other landlords who can afford to do so should follow suit.

Then the politicians, particularly the vacuous Ed Miliband, will have to stop shedding crocodile tears and either start getting more houses built or finally admitting that they are powerless to act.

It is in summary, “put up or shut up time”, not time for scapegoating landlords who are providing a useful and necessary service dealing with people who are often troublesome and vexatious and who are people most readers of this blog and most Government Ministers have no knowledge of and would not want to meet in a month of Sundays.

Those who feel Fergus Wilson is being harsh should adopt a bit of the spirit of the “Good Samaritan” and if their houses are large enough let them out to benefit recipients at rents below or at least within the Government’s LHA cap.

This should apply in particular to newspaper proprietors, MPs, Local Authority CEOs, Anglican Bishops, newspaper reporters, television presenters, BBC executives, reporters,TV correspondents, interviewers and to the service directors of local authorities.

I will wager that there will be no takers only more scapegoating of this maligned landlord.

John Gelmini