Why we should evict the rich from council housing

Taxpayer-subsidised housing should be made available to those who need it, says Merryn Somerset Webb - and not to those earning £60,000 a year.

You know that council tenants don't pay commercial rents - of course you do. But do you know just how much their rent subsidy comes to? I wonder.

Anew report just out from the Centre for London estimates that the "average London social household receives £5,300 subsidy every year" (the average rent on social housing is £102 a week about half the market rent). Outside London, it is lower the average subsidy is more like £3,600. But that's still proper money. However, odds are that you don't mind this particularly. After all, you probably think that council housing/social housing is only for the needy and the poor and that we have made a decision as a country (quite rightly) to provide a welfare safety net for the needy and the poor. But here's the thing: council housing isn't just for the needy and the poor.

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Merryn Somerset Webb

Merryn Somerset Webb started her career in Tokyo at public broadcaster NHK before becoming a Japanese equity broker at what was then Warburgs. She went on to work at SBC and UBS without moving from her desk in Kamiyacho (it was the age of mergers).

After five years in Japan she returned to work in the UK at Paribas. This soon became BNP Paribas. Again, no desk move was required. On leaving the City, Merryn helped The Week magazine with its City pages before becoming the launch editor of MoneyWeek in 2000 and taking on columns first in the Sunday Times and then in 2009 in the Financial Times

Twenty years on, MoneyWeek is the best-selling financial magazine in the UK. Merryn was its Editor in Chief until 2022. She is now a senior columnist at Bloomberg and host of the Merryn Talks Money podcast -  but still writes for Moneyweek monthly. 

Merryn is also is a non executive director of two investment trusts – BlackRock Throgmorton, and the Murray Income Investment Trust.