My Top 10 Complaints About Housing in the UK

I know - riveting! But this is something that, one way or another, effects most people I know under about 45. The effects vary greatly and I know that I am extremely lucky, an unlucky kind of way; there are folks I know who are far more securely stuck in unhappy housing situations or worse, teetering on the precipice of homelessness.

Anyway, here's why I think we're getting housing wrong in the UK:


10. It's too cheap to own a second home and leave it empty.

Second home-ownership is fairly ruinous to rural and coastal communities, pricing local people, on local wages, out of the housing market while flats and houses remain unoccupied most of the year. On the day of the 2011 Census, 29,000 residential properties in Cornwall - one of our poorest counties - stood empty.

It's not immoral for rich people to own second homes - I live between two homes, neither of which I own, but I can see the advantages of having places to live in two very different places, just as I can see the advantage in having a robot butler or more than three pairs of shoes. But what cannot be right at all is that tax law should make it cheaper to run a second home than it costs to run the first, through discounted council tax. At the very least, second-home owners should be paying full whack to support any community they own property in, given that their part time presence is unlikely to be an unmitigated force for local good.

On the same score, although MPs represent a small minority of second-home owners, they need to do much better (especially as so many have spoken of what a luxury it is for a poor person to have a second bedroom so their kids can stay over at the weekend). For one thing, any MP who fiddles their expenses to any extent needs to be fired, just like you would in a regular job. But if the tax-payer is to foot the bill for MP's second homes, this should be funded allowances according to need rather like housing benefit, e.g. a married MP with one child only needs a two bedroom property. If they want something bigger for their own comfort, they really can afford to pay for it themselves.


9. People enjoy living in expensive houses that they couldn't afford to live in if they didn't already own them.

There's house prices which vary, but fundamentally a house is only worth the cost of a similar house. If I owned a house that cost £150K, it wouldn't matter (very much) whether the price rose to £200K or dropped to £100K; selling that house would only generate enough money to buy another similar house in a similar area. I know it gets a little more complicated than that, but fundamentally.

The trouble is that people enjoy the fact that they bought their house for £3.50 thirty years ago and suddenly it's worth more money than they could ever have afforded if they didn't already own it - more money than their own kids, if they work in similar jobs, could ever dream of earning. I knew people who charted how much their house was worth during the boom as if this was real material wealth they were accumulating. High-rent prices mean that there are a lot of very wealthy landlords who didn't know a thing about property ten years ago. And the people who have benefited most tend to be of a generation who are also most likely to use their vote. They believe that they worked hard to pay off their mortgage (which they probably did, but everyone does), and if younger people can't afford to buy, that's their look out.

These people do not want to see the price of their houses fall, nor do they want their tenants paying any less rent. Yet elsewhere, when the recession hit, property prices fell and everyone survived in. We should stop seeing a property slump as the disaster to be avoided at all costs - apart from anything else, one of those costs could be a far more massive slump than would have happened otherwise.

8. We're not building enough of the right kind of housing (I)

In the UK, we're building very old-fashioned houses, with an only limited nod to environmental concerns. Outside house-building TV programs, the houses I see being built now look exactly like the houses I watched going up when I was a kid.  Where is our architectural imagination? Why aren't we using any of the technology that's developed in the past thirty years on mainstream development?

Part of this is about the environment (and for the most part, environmental materials are not expensive to use and generate work within the UK), but quite obviously, making homes where people will source most of their heat and light from the sun, ground, air or whatever, would lower the cost of living. It seems ridiculous that almost all the houses we're building now will still be predominantly reliant on fossil fuels, when those things are only going to get more and more expensive.


7. We're not building enough of the the right kind of housing (II)

Another problem with new builds is that every single one I've seen is on two storeys. They're also small, not just small rooms, but very narrow walkways, making them difficult to navigate with crutches, let alone a wheelchair.

While I don't want to sound pessimistic about old age and disability, with 1/5 of the population over 60, the number of people who struggle with stairs, at least to some extent, is an increasing minority. But there's nowhere for them to live. I know dozens of disabled people of all ages, who still live in houses with stairs, but remain on one floor or struggle - dangerously, and at detriment to their health - to get up and down stairs.

I understand that building up is much cheaper than building across, but I can't understand why there is no obligation on developers to build a small proportion of houses that are fully accessible, in the same way they're obliged to build a few that pass that vague criteria of affordability.  It's local councils who are going to have to foot the bill for adaptations on these inaccessible houses in the long run.


6. We're not building enough of the right kind of housing (III)

Most of the new building I see is happening on new estates away from existing towns and villages - not necessarily far away, but they require residents to drive to get to a shop or post-office, let alone schools, doctors and pre-existing community centres. They don't have any buildings apart from houses in them, so they don't encourage communal activities and the sort of community that builds up simply by having folk pop into the same shop every now and again, let alone a pub or Church. There are obligations on developers to plan around the prevention of crime, but nothing about encouraging or sustaining community.

By the same token, these affordable houses, whether owned or rented, are not where the work is. You're going to have to drive to get anywhere and that's going to mean that as a low-income worker, you're going to have much less money in your pocket at the end of the day. Many people cannot live near the places they work, but far fewer can afford to live in the middle of nowhere.


5. We're propping up the property market in the worst possible way.

This government cares that people will stop buying houses and all those middle-class home-owners (they're not all middle class, but the ones that matter are) will see their house prices drop. So how could you help first time buyers?  Perhaps providing its own low interest loans for first-time buyers, who've saved up a bit but are struggling to find a mortgage on a small flat or house?

Or you could guarantee a proportion of a loan up to £600,000 where the borrowers have only a 5% deposit. Because you want to help folk who have managed to save £30K to buy a £600K house - that's normal people, ordinary folk with ordinary aspirations, just needing a little leg up. And the tax-payer's money will be perfectly safe! And it's not going to artificially prop up property prices because people wouldn't be able to buy such expensive houses otherwise!

Urgh. I really don't think the government should be in the business of helping people buy property at a time when many people don't have enough to eat. But if they chose to, it should surely be low-waged first-time buyers with modest aspirations.


4. Government is afraid to further regulate, let alone compete with, private landlords.

Rent is way too high.  Rents are too high for working people who earn too much to claim benefits, but let's talk about those who can't or don't.

Much emphasis has been placed on how much money in spent on Housing Benefit (now Local Housing Allowance) with few politicians considering why this bill is so big. The sum you get is based on the cost of the smallest accommodation you could live in, in the 30th percentile of the local rental market. So for example, a single person my age where I stay in Surrey would be entitled to £346 a month, based on a room in shared accommodation. Only that's based on the 30th percentile across a region; round here, the going rate for a room is more like £500-600 a month.

Most people are either already renting somewhere or paying a mortgage when their income drops to a level where they need the extra help. Moving can cost many hundreds of pounds - people can't just up and leave (away from where the work is, away from their communities, their kids' schools etc.) because they're unemployed this month. By the time a situation reveals itself to be long-term, there's less money to make a move with. Meanwhile, if you're disabled, you don't get any extra because you need an accessible flat, or room for a wheelchair or other equipment.

The bill to the tax-payer has nothing to do with the choices made by benefit recipients. It's all about landlords - not a bunch of villains necessarily, but folk who will pragmatically charge as much as they can. If your rent goes up, you have to move or pay, and most people can't afford to move.

This is why, in 2013, we're needing food banks and Red Cross Parcels. People on low incomes (including some who are not even entitled to benefits) are spending most of their money on keeping a roof over their head and finding there's not enough left to eat.

The idea that cutting benefits will help control the rental market is bullshit. If, as taxpayers, we can't afford to pay the rent of our very poorest people, we need to control what they're allowed to be charged. Or better yet, compete with the landlords:


3. We desperately need more social housing.

Both sets of my grandparents lived in council housing before they went on to buy their own homes. They were working people and there was no shame or stigma. In fact, the council house Kelly grandparents moved into (Granny showed me on Google Streetview) was a central-heated semi-detached palace compared to the tiny terrace houses they both grew up in. They had fought and won a war, they aspired for a better life than their parents' generation and that council house was the first step on that journey.

These days, attitudes towards social housing are completely different. Many people have the idea that if you live in a council flat, you live rent-free (you might do, but only if you're out of work and poor besides). Council housing is highly stigmatised, some people don't want to live near it and many people understand the word chav as standing for council-housed and violent.

Meanwhile, folks are desperate for social housing, there are 1.7 million people waiting for social housing in England (about 3.5% of the population), let alone the numbers who need urgent transfers to non-existent smaller housing because of the Bedroom Tax (there's even talk of demolishing three-bedroom council housing that tenants can no longer afford).

We desperately need more social housing. We need to re-embrace social housing as a necessary facility that anyone might make use of if they need to (much like public transport. Only, you know, more like public transport ought to be.)


2. The Benefit Cap

When they talked about capping benefits to £25K a year a household - once they discounted Disability Living Allowance from the calculation - I thought, "Well that's a stupid crowd-pleaser, but there aren't going to be many families effected by that. £25K is a lot of money."

Only, it's not, when it's fairly easy to pay more than half that much out in rent. Frances Ryan's coverage of a recent (failed) High Court appeal by a group of women escaping domestic violence demonstrates what a mess we are in. Yes, it is a bit ridiculous that someone who is out of work should be getting more than an average salary (which, being the mean average, is more than most salaries).

However, it is even more ridiculous that someone could be having £25K income and still have no money to spend after food, bills and most importantly rent. And until we sought out that moral scandal, we need to cough up the extra in order to keep children fed and clothed.


1. The Bedroom Tax.

The Bedroom Tax is a policy whereby people in social housing who are perceived as having a spare room must now pay a weekly fine for the privilege. The "spare room" could belong to an autistic girl struggling with puberty who the government thinks should share with her boisterous six year old sister. It might be used by children who only visit on the weekend - its presence being a condition that the parent is allowed to have their kids overnight. It might be used by adult children who are away at university or in the army and do need that place to return to. It may be used by disabled people to store equipment - a wheelchair, hoist etc - or as a bedroom for one half of a couple to retreat to if pain, spasms and other symptoms make it impossible to sleep comfortably together.

Or it might be a spare room where nobody regularly sleeps, but which is part of the flat the occupants have lived in for the last forty years. Part of the home the occupants were placed in by the council.

One inevitable effect of the Bedroom Tax is to force people to move away from their work and employment prospects, families and communities. But mostly, there are no smaller places to move to, so it's just making poor people poorer. A third of council tenants are now in rent arrears and many are now becoming homeless.

There are no words for the damage this is causing, both to individuals, families, communities and society as a whole.

The first rule of any government policy relating to housing in any way?

Don't actively increase homelessness.

The Welfare Reform Bill: What's wrong with time-limiting contributory ESA?

Another summarising primer on these issues for people who aren't necessarily aware of what's going on with UK disability benefits. If you know all about this already, click here for what we need to do about it today.

There are a few reasons why ESA has not become a national scandal, and one of those is that it sounds complicated. But it is vitally important, if you live in the UK it effects you and I am to try to keep this simple, so please bear with me.

Employment Support Allowance is replacing all the old incapacity benefits. It is awarded to people who are considered unable to work due to illness, injury or disability. There are various different levels of benefit, depending on one's level of impairment and National Insurance contributions.

The most serious issue about ESA in the Welfare Reform bill is that for most people on the benefit, there will be a time-limit of one year. These are people who

• (a) are considered unable to work but not considered incapable of work-related activity (people in the "Work Group"). Most people on ESA fall into this category, and it includes people with all manner of severe, chronic and even life-threatening conditions.

• (b) have paid enough National Insurance to be put on the "Contributory" rate. So all of these people have either worked and paid taxes for many years or else became disabled at a very young age. Most people who become incapacitated for work do so in middle-age, so most people on ESA, as with the old Incapacity Benefit, had worked for most of their lives up until that point. 

After a year, all a person's benefit will be means-tested. This means, if they have a working partner or any savings, then they will not have any income of their own. Those disabled people affected by this change were informed last April, before any parliamentary votes on the matter, that they would lose their benefit after one year. This is going to start effecting people's lives in three months time.

There are four very serious problems with this proposal

1. Hardship

Wealthier people, whose partners have well-paid jobs are unlikely to experience real hardship. Single people without savings will not become much poorer. However, the Disability Alliance calculates that on average, a person on this benefit will lose £50 per week. Many people will lose closer to £100.

A partner's income begins to effect benefits at £7500 a year - that's about a twenty-four hour working week at minimum wage. That's still a rather poor household, who cannot afford to lose a penny.

Benefits for people out of work due to ill health have always been higher than unemployment benefit because

• (a) Disabled people have very limited opportunities to improve their situation, which is likely to be longer-term or lifelong - the government's own statistic is that 94% of the ESA "Work" group will not be in work by the end of their first year.
• (b) Disabled life is more expensive. We have fewer opportunities to live frugally, such as turning down the thermostat, washing ourselves, our clothes and bed linen less often, cooking from scratch, selling the car etc.. Meanwhile, partner's of disabled people often can't afford to take on extra hours or a second job, even if they are not an official "carer". 

Often, people dismiss arguments about hardship on the grounds that poor people get “their rent paid” and all sorts of other goodies. First off, if you don't qualify for a means-tested benefit, you don't automatically qualify for Local Housing Allowance, Council Tax Benefit, Free Prescriptions and so on. Not all poor people rent - they may have a nearly-paid mortgage at the point the main breadwinner gets sick. And these days, social housing is extremely hard come by and Local Housing Allowance isn't stretching to cover many private rents, especially not accessible accommodation. When the cuts kick in, there will be a shortfall of £150 a month between the cheapest place I could physically live in my area and the amount of Local Housing Allowance I would be eligible for.

2. Hopelessness


Becoming incapacitated for work involves many losses and a loss of income, together with a more frugal lifestyle is inevitable. Nobody asks that those unable to work should be paid anything like what a person could earn in work.

However, some disabled people have savings or money they've inherited.  People affected by the time-limit will face the prospect of having to live off this money, which either they or someone else had worked hard for, resisting all the temptations they might have spent it on.

There has always been some irony in the disincentives to save money for people who might end up on means-tested benefits, but for disabled people, who crucially, have no other means of improving their situation, this seems particularly unfair. Especially, when the three most common scenarios for a disabled person with savings would be either

• (a) They worked very hard for many years and lived very frugally until they became disabled or
• (b) Because of their care needs, they were unable to move out their parents' home, so had low living expenses and chose not to squander their low incomes or
• (c) Someone else, feeling that the disabled person's future looked bleak, gave or left them a lump sum towards their future security and independence.

3. Pressure on Sick People.

There's no condition in the world, physical, sensory, mental or intellectual, which might benefit from a ticking clock. In fact, I believe the presence of a time limit could be deadly dangerous in two ways:

• (a) An increased risk of suicide. When my physical health has been so bad that I have felt like giving up, I have often found deadlines useful. I have thought, “If it is still like this next month, I will kill myself and it'll all be over and done with.” I have experienced depression at times, but usually such deals have been made on the grounds of being thoroughly fed up. Friends with chronic mental illness have talked about doing the same thing in order to put off that terminal decision, whilst leaving the option open for later. However, I also know people who set a date and then proceeded to make a serious attempt on their lives. And this is when the deadline merely signified, “It's gone on too long now.” rather than, “It's gone on too long and I am about to lose all my income."

Last January, Aliquant wrote this post about how, feeling cornered by the benefits system, suicide seemed quite rational. It's a powerful post because Ali was so articulate; she simply couldn't cope with the risk of more homelessness, further hardship or having to jump through any more hoops. Soon after, 5 Quid for Life was set up, a charity to help people like Ali survive when things go wrong. Since then, the benefits situation has been implicated in at least ten suicides.

• (b) A disincentive to self-management. Looking after your health, when your health is poor, is jolly hard work. Taking unpleasant medication, getting the right amount of exercise, preparing and eating the right food, resting and sleeping when you need to, visiting the appropriate healthcare workers, getting new complications and injuries treated and resisting naughty behaviours that will set you back, can feel like a full-time occupation. If you know that after a year, you're going to lose all income, unless your health significantly deteriorates, then you've got another major disincentive to look after yourself. I don't believe for a minute that anyone would choose to make themselves more ill, to suffer more and to deal with more health-related rigarmorale, even to shorten one's life expectancy. But a system is being created where being a good patient, hard as that is, could actually cost you money. 

I actually find it very distressing when people with far more energy than me fail to look after their health, although looking after is subjective and it is absolutely none of my business anyway. It's probably natural to worry about things that have happened to me happening to other people. However, as some disabled people involved in anti-cuts activism work themselves into the ground and expend twice as much energy in a week than I have in any given year, I am able to reassure myself that, as long as they stay alive, they'll probably wind up too sick to be effected by the time-limit. This situation is all kinds of wrong. There shouldn't be any advantage to getting sicker.


4. Damage Caused to Relationships

Money can't buy you love and poverty doesn't destroy it, but relationships can become a lot tougher when when one partner has literally no income and crucially, no means of bringing in money if they want to. I see three effects of this:

• (a) The time-limit interferes with the future relationships of single disabled people. Lisa has written about how the combination of poverty and disability dramatically reduces one's romantic chances, and the prospect of complete financial dependence will make this worse. Means-tested benefits force claimants to either restrict themselves to very casual and discreet relationships or else to place themselves in complete financial dependence on a partner the moment they begin living together – a moment which is rarely well-defined. 

• (b) The time-limit threatens to undermine existing relationships. Sue has described her fears of becoming a burden on her husband. As Shana Pezaro described, desertion is not an uncommon experience in the face of chronic illness, especially among heterosexual women, and the prospect of total financial dependence will only add to this problem. Some families, especially those with children, may even find that they would be financially better off if they occupied two different households. 

• (c) The time-limit makes disabled men and women, who are already more likely to experience domestic abuse, even more vulnerable. Disabled people are already twice as likely to experience domestic violence. If you have no income at all, then it becomes easy for an abusive partner to completely deny you access to money, to complain about or restrict your expenditure, whether on food or phone calls, bus fare or medicines. It becomes easy for an abuser to tell you what a burden you are, and how you owe them or deserve to be mistreated, when you are both financially and practically dependent on them.   

Unemployed single parents of small children have long had this problematic status, where benefit rules prevent them from having romantic relationships which progress out in the open and at their own natural pace and where the prospect of complete financial dependence can make a person feel as if they are less valuable. This is one of the major reasons that make such families particularly vulnerable to dysfunctional and abusive relationships.


The government's motives for this are deeply cynical.


Years back, when ESA was first discussed by the then Labour Government, the disability blogosphere and messageboards were awash with anxiety about sick people being pressured into work that they just couldn't get. I wrote a post on BBC Ouch! explaining that logically, we had nothing to fear. If Employment Support Allowance was to have a "Work Group", the government simply had to get these people into work. If vast numbers of us were placed in this Work Group, who didn't have a hope of getting a job, we would become bad statistics.

The Conservative Government came up with a way round this, which is to make these people disappear. Anyone on this band of ESA with savings or a working partner will simply disappear after twelve months.  They will not add to the unemployment statistics because they have been declared unfit for work. They will not be claiming any benefit at all.

Here is the link I gave you at the top: This is what we need to do now.


(A draft version of this may have appeared in your feed-reader last night - sorry about that! I was so confident that I couldn't accidentally publish my drafted post in the new style Blogger (as I often did in the old one), but hey, I found a way.)

If I were a rich man

Last week, there was a Forbes article entitled If I were a poor black kid, in which a wealthy white guy explained how poor urban black kids might pull themselves up by their bootstraps. This side of the pond, despite being in the middle of a recession, with all the random misfortune that entails for ordinary people, the UK government, peopled (though largely manned) by extremely wealthy, privately educated, white straight non-disabled Oxbridge graduates, are constantly talking about the fecklessness of the poor and the need to send out specialist trouble-shooters to deal with troubled families (which, according to the criteria, mine would be, if I had children). All of which seem to amount to the philosophical standpoint that states

If I were poor, I wouldn't be poor any more.

Then on Friday, David Cameron professed his own vague Christianity, and the importance of Christian values to fixing the country's problems. Presumably Cameron reads the New Testament (ha! As if he had actually read it!) as a morality tale: If only Jesus had knuckled down at his academic studies as opposed to learning to make rustic garden furniture with his father, he might have appreciated what the money-lenders were up to in the temple, and may have been able to afford a decent lawyer when he got into that scrape with the Romans.

I suppose I'm lucky. New Testament Christianity, humanist virtue ethics and the moral codes of almost all other world religions, put me in a rather privileged position. My responsibilities for doing good are greatly restricted by my energy levels and finances. I have the responsibility that comes with being rich relative to most people in the world, but I am surrounded by people who are much richer and far more capable of doing good than I am. As Lady Marchmain says in Brideshead Revisited, the poor have always been the favourite of God, whereas rich people have been desperately investing in camel-moleculising technology for centuries.

So from my position of almost innate virtue and particularly in the run-up to Christmas, when the world freezes over but Scrooge's heart thaws, I thought I should offer my wealthier readers some advice on how to establish a soul as sparkly clean as my own.

If I were a rich man...

Naturally, I would biddy-biddy bong for much of the day (though perhaps not all day long, as the song suggests – I'm no hedonist). Otherwise, there are a few things I would do to make sure that I fulfilled my responsibilities to the world which made me so wealthy.

I would

Pay every penny of tax I owed, publically volunteer to pay more tax and campaign for higher taxes for people like me.

All governments waste money, but there are lots of things which it is both most efficient and desirable to achieve through tax, as opposed to individual enterprise, charity, volunteering, private armies and so forth. Quite where the balance lies between what tax should pay for and what should be left up to individuals is up for eternal debate, and having a particular position in this debate is the foundation for some of our political parties. However, some of this stuff is the basis of a civilised society – like emergency services available to everyone, free school-age education, free healthcare and the welfare safety net.

In the UK, there is no mainstream political party who argues against the sanctity of these provisions, but the quality of them is fast being diminished by the current government, because of the crash. Frankly, this lot are attempting to solve the financial crisis by taking money from the poorest people and then scapegoating them as the root of the problem. This is having only mixed success; poor people are an easy target, but it won't help the deficit because poor people are not very costly and we will pay for them, one way or another.

The most obvious answer is that the very wealthiest people should pay more tax. They can afford to. The Robin Hood tax was a brilliant idea. The idea that we risk scaring away wealthy people is just daft. The only wealthy people we risk losing through high taxes are greedy bastards. So Scotland lost Sean Connery that way, but then I never found his accent convincing.

I'd also

Use, Support and Get Involved in my Local Public Services

All too often, wealthy people deny public services their social capital by sending their children to private schools, using private healthcare, living in gated communities and so on. Public services need wealthier people in order to survive and prosper. Public services are great! They are either free or massively subsidised at the point of delivery! They are interconnected and whilst not perfect, have developed with the public interest in mind over many decades. The private alternatives only want to make money out of the people who use them, which is why private healthcare-users are persuaded to have all kinds of bits and pieces removed - wisdom teeth, foreskins, appendices, self-esteem, life savings - regardless of medical need.

It's no accident that if you drive around London, public streets inhabited by wealthier people are better kept; they are cleaner, road surfaces are in better repair, they are safer. This isn't because councils quietly decide to privilege wealthier residents. But wealthier residents are more likely to be home-owners, they are more likely to consider themselves entitled to good roads, be able to organise themselves and make a fuss if there's a problem. And they are more likely to be listened to.

When wealthy people use their social capital to make a difference to other public services, they really do make a difference.  The great tragedy for our country at the moment isn't that the coalition is dominated by the Conservatives, a party which naturally leans towards the interests of the individual, but that we have a government dominated by youngish rich people who have never had to rely on the services that the rest of us use all the time.

I would also

Have a collection of electric cars and have a home which generates electricity.

Poor people have very few options when it comes to their environmental responsibilities. Unemployed people need to heat and light their homes whilst everyone else is at work. Disabled people are often unable to use public transport and have to use the pre-packaged or disposable option. Poor people often have no option to shop ethically and, especially in cities, poor people often live in tower-block housing where household rubbish cannot be sorted and there are no easily accessible recycling facilities. However, as a rule, because poor people buy less stuff, go out less, live in closer proximity to others and have fewer holidays, they generally have a lower than average carbon footprint.

For middle-income households (£40K is apparently now average for a household with two working adults – yikes!), some environmental matters are dead easy, but the bigger investments are difficult – you might be able to afford to install solar panels, or buy an electric car, but these things have a large initial outlay, which only pays you back over a period of years (and in the UK, government grants have just vanished). Meanwhile, as people who buy more stuff and travel about more, middle-income households are usually quite bad for the environment. I think it takes a lot of strength for someone in this bracket to do the right thing – so if you are and you do, well done!

If you are seriously wealthy, however, there is no excuse. People who own extensive land and property, but are still taking power from the grid as opposed to putting  itback, people who have a collection of cars and none of them are electric? Well they are a burden on the future of humankind.

I'd also

Make sure at least 10% of my income went to charity, including some to

• schemes which make a massive difference to people's lives. For example, Deworm the World, which keeps millions of children in good health and in school or Camfed which ensures the education of girls. If you educate girls in Africa, then they are much more likely to have healthy and comfortable lives, they are much less vulnerable to HIV, they are likely to have fewer babies, which increases the prospects for them and their children, but it helps to slow down population growth with a view to saving the world. Giving girls an education is by far the most effective form of population control – more effective than even then most draconian measures.

• schemes which help save lives. For example, organisation such as the Against Malaria Foundation are extremely open about how money is spent and really can save a lot of lives for your lolly.

For a long time, I imagined that all working people who considered themselves Christian paid 10% to charity – I thought it was in the rules, like Zakat in Islam. The conversation that disillusioned me was with someone whose household earnings were in excess of £50K, but who explained that they had a high mortgage and nothing to spare at all.  If Cameron was, as he claims, vaguely Christian, he might consider giving up at least 10% of his massive fortune and do so very publicly, to set an example to his colleagues and associates.

Poor people can afford to give little if anything to charity, but nevertheless give a far greater proportion of their income than richer people. If you are hard up but not stony broke, one way of helping others is through Kiva loans. You can loan someone in the developing world to improve their life or business, and you will get paid back.

Finally, if I were a rich man, I would

Apply vigorous ethics to all my business and consumer choices

Poor people can not always afford to make ethical consumer choices. For example, if I couldn't afford to buy Fair Trade teabags, bananas, chocolate etc., then I could do without and I buy almost all my clothes second hand. But when I need knickers, second hand isn't an option and I can't afford £10 a pair for Fair Trade – I have to buy cheap knickers that were probably made by people working in very poor conditions, paid much less than I have to live on. But it's those knickers or no knickers. If you do spend £10 on knickers, I suggest Who Made Your Pants?.

Rich people, however, not only have the money to make all ethical consumer choices, but they often have lifestyles which allow them to make a difference in all kinds of contexts. They can choose to look after their employees, even choose to employ people who others would not. They can choose to invest in good things and withdraw their investments from bad things – or use threats to withdraw in order to improve business practices.

Rich people can afford to to do so much good and they have a responsibility to do so. Making money is not, in and of itself, a virtue. Using money to make the make the world a better place, choosing to make less money than you would if you sacrificed the interests of other people and the environment, all that leaves a much more worthy and enduring legacy than the number of digits in the profit margin.


For better responses to If I were a poor black kid which actually address the American, urban and black kid bit, see
The Atlantic - A Muscular Empathy and
Pursuit of Harpyness - Uncle Whitey Explains It All with poignant David Simon quote.