Recently in Social housing Category

Notting Hill Housing describes itself as "one of the most inventive housing associations in the UK" and prides itself on providing a roof to "people in need". That's how it introduces itself on its website, anyway.

So it is difficult to fathom how that declaration of social responsibility squares with its planning application, now approved, to build 41 homes in the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham, not one of them "affordable".

According to local MP Andy Slaughter, writing on HFConwatch, four of the properties are five-bedroomed houses facing photogenic St Peter's Square (below). 

They will sell for at least £2m each.

I have yet to meet anyone who can afford a £2m property but doubtless they exist in the form of City investment organisations or people whose relationship with the concept of social housing is zilch. After all, the monied seem little affected by the current restraint.

Notting Hill might argue that the sale of £2m properties will provide reinvestment into housing stock for the very people it purports to help.

But there is also a feeling on principle that the provider should not be dabbling in what can be a cut-throat market, whose ethos the trust was set up to counter.

Notting Hill was launched in the early 1960s as a response to the criminal activities of landlord Peter Rachman and his bully-boy cohorts who harassed, threatened and exploited tenants, often evicting them at short notice, as the law then allowed them to do.

Notting Hill has a proud history. But it will need a good dollop of oil on its PR machinery to convince some of us that its present-day activities live up to that past.

Housing minister Grant Shapps probably thinks he is capturing the zeitgeist by threatening rioters with expulsion from their homes if they happen to be council tenants. 

It isn't the first time Shapps has threatened miscreants with eviction from local authority properties. He has already warned those who engage in antisocial behaviour that this sanction may be exercised.

What happens to the tenants once evicted is anyone's guess. If they end up in the private sector, the cost of the undoubtedly higher rent may have to be subsidised by housing benefit.

Yet Shapps's awkwardly populist approach may be derailed by the Supreme Court's Pinnock ruling last year.

Cleveland Pinnock was evicted by Manchester Council on the grounds of antisocial behaviour involving members his family.

But the court ruled that the eviction breached article 8 of the European Convention on Human Rights - the right to respect for Pinnock's home - because the council's action was disproportionate.

Although after several appeals Pinnock lost his case, the proportionality argument was established and has been argued in other cases with varying outcomes.

Should many of those who come to court in the days and weeks ahead live in social housing, and Shapps is being serious, then a legal maelstrom can be the only certainty. 

Picture: Rex Features

If you remember the millennium celebrations like they were yesterday, perhaps imagine fast-forwarding the same period of time plus a couple of years. Doesn't seem long, does it? 

That will be when England is likely to face a shortfall of 750,000 homes, 325,000 of them in London alone, according to a report from the Institute for Public Policy Research that is based on the government's own projections.

Little wonder that Labour leader Ed Miliband, who I sometimes wonder is overplaying the role of the silent type, has emphasised the need for more social housing and is prepared to lead a government that would invest £1.2bn in it.

The need for social housing, or affordable housing, is greater than ever. Despite the floundering economy, house prices remain high and well out of reach of many first-time buyers who are unable to save for the 20% deposit now required from lenders because the rents they pay to have a roof over their heads are equally outrageous.

That we will be 750,000 homes short by the mid-2020s is alarming. That the likes of London mayor Boris Johnson is so opposed to housing for the less well-off (he scrapped Greater London's 50% target for affordable new-build) and his pledge to construct 50,000 new homes under his watch remains filed under Bluster is irresponsible.

But Johnson would have little personal experience of overcrowding and the pernicious effects it can have on, say, children's education and the tensions that might spill over into wider society. 

If the IPPR forecasts prove accurate, the problem can only become worse, particularly with every politician in government hailing our new, lacklustre Austerity Britain, fingers jabbing at the opposition benches, a snook cocked at the rest of us, excusing themselves of action.

But, then, in 2025, that will be someone else's problem, won't it?

Picture: Nick Cobbing/Rex Features

How should we react to shoplifters? Is it a crime or is it symptomatic of something else: a mental illness or a substance addiction perhaps, as this personal account on the Frank website describes?

There was never likely to be many banks in the Sunday Times Best 100 Companies to work for, although former bosses benefiting from multi-million pound pension largesse may affect surprise at this.