” … across Britain, people are facing a crisis in housing and in basic pay. Headlines about the collapse of BHS and the horrific conditions at Mike Ashley’s Sports Direct have understandably shocked people, but these aren’t mere consequences of one or two rogue businessmen, but the symptoms of rapacious capitalism. The women in the Sports Direct warehouses who went into labour at work did so because work has become precarious, and zero-hours contracts have been allowed to bloom, because of government attacks on workers’ rights both under Labour and, to an increased degree, under the Tories.
If you’re on a zero-hours contract, you’re forced to scrabble for any work possible to pay your rent, accepting conditions most salaried people would walk out over. If you want to take your employer to court for sexual harassment, racial discrimination, or for forcing you out when you announced your pregnancy, you now have to pay to do so. The poorest have been denied justice, as well as decent pay and conditions.
Cuts to benefits, the cataclysmic farce of the universal credit rollout, and the assault on support for disabled people mean that, post-recession, people who struggle to earn a decent wage are denied basic support. The housing crisis is an affordability crisis, but not one that solely lies in the cost of London flats: people across the country simply can’t afford to live. Rents in the north west are lower, but pay is lower still. Geographic inequalities have worsened post-recession, and many areas feel as though they’ve been left behind.
The housing crisis is everywhere, because pay, benefits and working conditions have worsened or been cut. Attacks on unionisation and government defences of zero-hours contracts will do nothing but fuel an already blazing fire. This is a nationwide crisis, because it’s a crisis of capitalism: as long as we subsidise companies for paying poverty wages, whilst blaming low earners for their own poverty, nothing will change.”
East Devon Watch 
There is no likelihood of the housing situation for young people changing while the older house-owning generation have a vested interest in keeping prices high to protect their investment.
Often being retired professionals, they safeguard their interests by being active in parish councils and preventing the increase in housing supply that is the only driver for a fall in prices.
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What is happening in the housing market is a crisis, and here in Exmouth it will not be helped at all with a shortage of skilled labour. It should not be taken away by building more retail with flats above, in this new development EDDC are still hoping we the residents will accept on the sea front.
This we not help any young person who lives here who would like to get on to the housing ladder or even to rent a property, and those people who are inclined to say it will help the housing shortage are being very insensitive to the needs of others. We need to oppose this.
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