Twenty years too late - a Conservative finally sees the flaw in 'Right to Buy'

The Independent reports that Iain Duncan Smith has concluded that the Conservative policy of 'Right to Buy' which saw so much of the public housing stock sold of to tenants at sub-market prices is one of the primary causes of the ghetto estates that have emerged since.

There is something of an irony here, given that I criticised Caroline Flint for not actually understanding this last year. Mr Duncan Smith makes the point that, by creating a situation where council housing only gets allocated to the most broken families (I'll excuse the reference back to our 'broken society' - this time...), you create communities where expectations are low and role models often negative.

However, realising that there is a problem and developing the means to do something about it are two very different things, and there is no sense that the Centre for Social Justice is any closer to proposing action. Indeed, there is no sign that the Conservative Party has any policy in this field other than to claim that they wouldn't have done what Labour did.

The cost of these ghettos is terms of crime, underachievement and poor health is a burden that the rest of us have to bear with our taxes and our insurance premiums, and until a government invests in the types of programmes that will reintegrate these people back into mainstream society, providing opportunity and incentive, we will continue to pay the price of the 'there is no such thing as society' mantra that Iain and his friends were so gung-ho about in the 1980's.

I'm not going to claim that my beloved Liberal Democrats have the answers, although I might suggest that they've been asking the right questions for rather longer that our parvenu colleagues in blue. However, we do deserve some evidence that this is not just another plank in the campaign to persuade us that Conservatives are not simply content to jettison a chunk of the population as too poor and too stupid to matter...