UKAR gets on the dog-and-bone to chavs and tells them to pay mortgage before Sky

Sounds all right to me, what’s not to like? Deborah Orr of the Grauniad thought it patronising, but it really is a fair cop. UK Asset Resolution, which represents the taxpayers of this sceptred isle, are using credit checks and have identified 30,000 customers who are going to be in the brown stuff when interest rates rise. These checks will flag those who have rising unsecured debts. Not all of these will be chavs, of course, some will be people who have genuinely fallen on hard times since the heady days of Northern Rock’s 125% mortgages.

However, if you are the sort that prioritises the continued supply of sport on TV over keeping a roof over your head, then to be honest you shouldn’t really be in charge of a mortgage. Some financial vehicles need a modicum of training to drive…

It’s hard to argue with the appropriately named UKAR head honcho Richard Banks

“They need to think about what is their most important debt. It is not their credit card or renewing their Sky subscription, or going out for the latest mobile technology. It is their mortgage.”

Quite. If you haven’t jumped to that then there’s nothing patronising about it

Apart from that I am generally with the cut of Deborah Orr’s argument. I’m not generally with the Graun’s view of Margaret Thatcher, who did sort out some pretty toxic stuff. However, Thatcher’s abuse of power in seizing control of some collectively owned assets and flogging them off to buy votes was a devastating stroke of evil genius, and council house sales started the ball rolling.

I recall from many decades ago genuinely mixed council housing which had aspirational blue collar families as well as a few of what we now know as chavs. There were some sink estates too, but council housing was generally far more mixed in family incomes that social housing appears to be now.

What Thatcher’s move did, as well as buying her three elections, was give free housing capital to an awful lot of people, which in itself wasn’t so bad, but it bottom-sliced what was to become social housing, concentrating people by the lack of income and wealth. She may not have meant to do that, but it seems to be what has all too often happened. And it forced upon us the current dysfunctional housing market which seems to make nobody particularly happy.

Most jobs in Britain don’t pay enough to be able to afford a house at 3.5 times income, and I would go further in asserting that the standard of financial education is such that there are a lot of people who had mortgages that didn’t understand what they were for. They appeared to be under the misapprehension that they were virtual ATMs which regularly doled out free money, to be used for holidays or Tarquin and Jemima’s school fees, rather than a way of buying a damned expensive consumer good called a house, secured upon the house.

This fact that most families didn’t earn enough to be able to buy a house was acknowledged in the council house system, where only the rich or the frugal owned their houses, but now it makes us hostage to working for The Man for 40 years, plus crazy asset bubbles.

So though I’m all for UKAR ringing up people to tell them to pay the mortgage before their Sky subscription, perhaps we do need to think about whether owner-occupation is such a great idea in a globalised world of unstable jobs. How the heck we row back from here I have no idea, but we do seem to have got ourselves into a hole. Thanks a lot, Thatch…