Mr Portillo must be aware that the councils didn't receive money from the sales of social housing under the Right to Buy scheme, which went to the central government. This made it basically impossible for local councils to replace homes at the rate they were being sold off.

Just a heads up this was aired 2018 so it's already 8 years out of date.

the population has grown by ten million in twenty years .

and at the same time Thatcher refused to allow the councils that sold council homes to reinvest that money into building new homes - so the stock has been dramatically reduced and most of the rest private.

Nobody aspires to live and raise a family in a tower-block!

If you increase the population by 25% adding 15 million people to a small densely populated country in 25 years, inevitably you will have a housing crisis. And Portillo was part of a party which contributed more to this problem than even the previous Labour government.

Fancy a bloke whose government saw to the beginning of the sell off of 2.6 million council homes for cheap, with only 1.6 million units remaining describing how we now have a housing crisis for low income families.

25k a year in London is impossible to live on for a single person Nevermind with a family.

The sad fact is that it is indeed Thatcher who created the housing crisis of today by allowing the sale of council houses in the first place and actively made it so councils were not allowed to use the proceeds to replace them under the Housing Act 1980. She then deregulated the private rental market under the Housing Act 1988 which led to the framework we have today. This further continued under Labour and Blair which allowed the "Buy to Let Mortgage" boom which led to a three fold increase in house prices. Austerity under the Coalition Government allowed house prices to increase further as social house building reduced 80% thanks to cuts and further discounts were often with "Help to Buy" further increasing the price of homes. Even Atlee in 1947 made buying land to build your own home hard with the Town and Country Act 1948. Our housing crisis is 80 years in the making, both Tories and Labour have added to it. And that's before adding millions of people to an already crumbling nation.

To see such a decline is the saddest thing. The cost of greed crisis. Sending well wishes to all.

Not just UK , the government is the problem.  Here in Western Australia the state government has just demolished an entire development almost completed.  A total waste of money to build and another waste to demolish.

Great documentary. Good to see more prominent figures putting a spotlight on the Urgent issue of lack of affordable housing for all.

Just think 25 times someone's annual wage is like 50 year mortgage.
Once you discount taxes,bills,fuel,groceries, clothing and else. You'd have less than half your wage which in term would never pay a mortgage 25 times your annual income.
What have they done to the economy?

This is not a documentary issue, but investigations into everything that have to do with, housing, eviction and homelessness is all connected.  Someone or a group are cashing out of people's misery.

Do ya know, Michael has put so much effort into this documentary without a political agenda (unlike his former boss) that I genuinely believe he should be in government again. He seems to genuinely care.

Right now "affordable housing" or "London Living Rent" is not affordable. Many social housing tenants are completely stuck in homes too small for their household. When they are offered one of the new builds, the rents are often x2 higher than they are currently paying. The developers are building but the housing associations in charge of letting them are hiking the prices.

The Mondo Buildings at Stratford International have been offered to social housing residents in need of 1, 2, 3 bedrooms x2 what many of them had been paying elsewhere. Just before many moved in. Rents increased from 1st April by £300 PER MONTH for the new service charges. Those working social housing residents will be struggling to make ends meet within the next 10 years.

The service charges on new builds whether this be for open market buy or rent is the killer. It needs to be culled.

Not an opinion. Just a fact for others to muse over. I'm a landlord of over twenty years in the Bedworth / Nuneaton area near Coventry. I went to school in the late 80s to mid 90s. There were maybe four or five ethnic minority kids in the whole school at all tne schools I went to. I've been in the same job now since I was 22 for the past 24 years. When I started there was one Asian guy who worked with us who was born in Nuneaton. Now over half our work force isn't just ethnic minority, but wasn't even born in the UK. We interviewed for a post a few weeks back and every candidate for the first days interviews was Nigerian. I have four houses I rent out. When I started 20 years ago I had maybe two in ten who were ethnic minority. Now it's 8 in ten. It's hard not to look around what's going on in your own little world and nit come to the conclusion that immigration is not a huge part of the problem.

The housing problem is in  every European and US city the same: Globalisation and liberalen of markets brought in stakeholder capital for investment in real estate. Too much money is circulating and is being invested in any housing. Modern feudalism is being sold to us like in the middle ages  with  many nobles owning the land. You will have nothing and be happy. Because you will live in a rental economy and property for the few on the top.

The real problem is the government and civil service machine. Even if we had sensible policies, does anyone really believe that they would get implemented properly? We are currently living off the legacy of systems established decades ago, the modern establishment can do very little except tweak the parameters.

Need to learn from Singapore - Minimum Occupation Period (MOP) - If you buy public housing you have to live in it yourself for 5 to 10 years, no selling on or renting the whole apartment within that time period.  That one simple change could stop a large part of this current madness of people buying at a discount then renting it back to the council, but it does need enforcement.  Given the UK doesn't seem interested in enforcing existing laws doubtful the situation will improve