CHINGFORD: Leading Tory criticises flagship Thatcher policy (From East London and West Essex Guardian Series)

CHINGFORD: Leading Tory criticises flagship Thatcher policy

11:52am Friday 17th April 2009

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CHINGFORD MP Iain Duncan Smith has said he believes the Thatcher government's Right to Buy policy led to the creation of "ghettos".

In an interview with left-wing thinktank the Fabian Society, Mr Duncan Smith said the flagship policy, which has been continued by successive governments, created ring-fenced areas of poverty.

He said: "Nobody really thought about what happens if you allow only the most broken families to exist on housing estates.

"You create a sort of ghetto in which the children who grow up there repeat what they see around them."

The Right to Buy policy allows council tenants to buy their home and has been hugely popular with tenants.

But critics say the policy, closely associated with Thatcherism, has led to the creation of "sink estates."

Mr Duncan Smith said: "While I’m not going to point the finger and say the changes made in the Eighties were wrong, we didn’t have any real sense of where this might go and what needed to happen.

"Big social reforms should have taken place then, and they never did."

"We forgot that, while the economy was moving on, society itself was not really ready for this. Swathes of the population got left behind in the process.

"The gap between the bottom socio-economic group and the rest started to grow, and it’s grown ever since. Under Labour it’s grown almost faster in some senses."

Sociologist Professor John Pitts, a former Walthamstow residents, in his groundbreaking report on gangs in Waltham Forest published in 2007, said the 'secession of the successful', in which the economically active vacate social housing, has left many areas with the most needy tenants.

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