Friday 2 October 2015

No, Germany doesn't have a better housing system that the UK

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Not if this is anything to go by:

Gabrielle Keller has been given until the end of the year to leave her flat in the small southern town of Eschbach, near the border with France.

The flat belongs to the local municipality, which says it is needed to house refugees.

Imagine a UK local council evicting a resident so as to house refugees. You can't can you for the simple reason that our laws don't allow the Council to do this (it's not clear whether German law allows this either).

So perhaps we can stop saying how splendid and super-duper Germany's housing market is? It isn't, it never has been and we really should stop pretending otherwise.

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1 comment:

Anonymous said...

So if German law doesn't allow this, yet it's happening, why would anyone be confident that British law would not be similarly flouted?

A Government which considers it reasonable to punish the poor for having a spare bedroom despite there being a shortage of smaller properties into which they could be rehoused might not consider it unreasonable to place immigrant families in under-utilized property and re-home the previous tenants in complexes with rooms and shared kitchens/bathrooms.

If the German Government could welcome migrants without the foresight to realize the consequences why should we have confidence in a British government which is already aware of a housing crisis in the UK yet admits that it will lobby to stay in an EU which has stated categorically that it won't move on its open borders policy?

Jay