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BEST IELTS Reading General Test 144
IELTS Reading General Test 144 – Passage – 3
IELTS Reading General Test 144
READING PASSAGE – 2
Social housing
A. Over the past 20 years in Britain, the proportion of social homes in the total stock has fallen from 31% to 21% and their number has declined from 6.8m to 5.3m. Blame—or credit—Margaret Thatcher for this. Her government forced local authorities to sell homes cheaply to existing tenants and stopped them building new ones. New social homes were to be financed centrally and run by local housing associations.
B. It now looks like the long squeeze is over. Next week, the government is expected to announce a near-doubling of the Housing Corporation’s £1.2 billion annual budget and plans to extend eligibility for social housing. An extra £1 billion would build around 20,000 new homes each year at current rates. This could be stretched further by reducing the amount of subsidy per house.
C. The government is hoping that this move will help solve its housing difficulties. Thanks to nimbyism, the supply of new houses in Britain falls well short of demand, by more than 50,000 a year according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, a social research charity. The result: surging housing costs which have priced modest earners out of the market, particularly in London and the south-east of England. Chief among the victims are public-sector workers, such as nurses and teachers.
D. The government will try to fulfil its ambitions in part through a phenomenon known as planning gain. Councils are grabbing an increasing share of rising land prices by bumping up the amount of social housing developers must build as part of a new scheme and hand over to the local housing association. Even before the government’s fresh money arrives, some local authorities in southern England are relying on planning gain to help meet demanding targets. In plush regency Cheltenham, the council wants 30% of new housing to be social; the figure is 40% in comfortable Poole in Dorset, while the Greater London Authority is targeting 50% in the capital over the next twenty years.
E. Will this policy just create new ghettos? Maybe not. People have learnt from the mistakes of the post-war housing boom. Providers have got better at design and building. Everybody now knows that concrete blocks do not work in rainy countries. The stigma of social housing can often be eliminated by making it indistinguishable from neighbouring private housing.
Social housing developments are even winning awards in competition with private sector developments—the Peabody Trust’s Bedzed development in Surrey won the Evening Standard Lifestyle Home of the Year award—though it is worth remembering that some of the most notorious 1960s and 1970s council housing estates also won design awards.
F. Housing associations are generally better at getting repairs done than are councils. They have also been more effective in tackling problems like drugs and prostitution through innovations such as estate offices and on-site caretakers. Above all, planners have learned not to think too big. “No one will ever build a big single tenure estate again,” says Richard McCarthy, Chief Executive of the Peabody Trust.
G. happens to the teacher who lives in social housing in one borough, and is offered a job in a borough that cannot offer her new cheap housing? What happens to a nurse in cheap housing who wants to move into a new profession? A government so keen on enterprise and initiative should not be recreating a system that makes it difficult for people to change their lives.
If public-sector workers cannot afford to live in the south-east of England, then the government should be changing pay scales that currently discriminate in favour of public sector workers in cheap bits of the country and against those in expensive bits, rather than reintroducing something that once looked like a boon to the poor and turned out to be a shackle.
BEST IELTS Reading General Test 144
Questions 28 – 34
The text has seven paragraphs, A – G.
Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.
i. Still difficult to move around
ii. Councils give way to housing associations
iii. Increased spending
iv. The cost of moving home
v. A shrinking supply
vi. Learning from the past
vii. Public-sector workers squeezed out
viii. New demands on developers
BEST IELTS Reading General Test 144
Questions 35 – 40
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the text?
TRUE – if the statement agrees with the information
FALSE – if the statement contradicts the information
NOT GIVEN – if there is no information on this
35. During the Thatcher years, there was a block on building social homes.
36. The housing problem in London is worse than in the rest of south-east England.
37. Local authorities are starting to depend on the ‘planning gain’ scheme.
38. One way to make social housing more successful is to make it similar to private housing.
39. Local councils are unable to deal with crimes committed on social housing land.
40. It would not be helpful to modify pubic workers salary depending on where they lived.
BEST IELTS Reading General Test 144
ANSWERS ARE BELOW
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BEST IELTS Reading General Test 144
ANSWERS
28. v
29. ii
30. vi
31. viii
32. vi
33. ii
34. i
35. FALSE
36. NOT GIVEN
37. TRUE
38. TRUE
39. NOT GIVEN
40. FALSE