Poor old Boston Borough Council. It never rains but what it pours.

By a cruel irony, as the full council met last night to discuss its housing strategy for the next five years, the national newspapers were awash with reports of a self-employed Latvian cleaner and mother-of-ten who lives in Boston, who gets £34,000 a year from the state – far more than the average UK salary of just over £26,000 before tax … and who is demanding a bigger house.
Whilst the borough council rightly points out that the situation is far from typical, it underlines a problem that it likely to get worse rather than better.
Councillor Mike Gilbert, Boston Borough Council’s housing portfolio holder, said that: “providing accommodation for a mother with 10 children is a fairly big ask in most areas, let alone Boston where that isn’t readily available.
“This is not typical or widespread.”
We agree that it isn’t – but it does serve to highlight how forward plans for subjects such as housing are often not worth the paper that they are printed on.
We assume that the last housing strategy report covered the five years from 2007 – and like last night’s effort contained ambitious targets that would see vast improvements taking place.
The fact that housing in Boston seems to be bereft in so many ways is a clear indication that previous plans have failed.
The aim for the coming five years is to provide more homes, and improve existing ones plus ambitions catchphrased “living safely in your home” and “facilitating access to your home.”
Councillor Gilbert has been quoted as saying that the plan will deal with overcrowded housing, but that the main need in the coming years will be for flats for single people and is asking people to rent out a spare room – i.e. doing the council’s job for it.
The council’s Labour opposition have accused the Tory leadership of not doing enough.
“Sadly within the housing strategy, there are no targets for future builds within our town. We are all aware of the predicted population growth in Boston, and we have seen over the last few years a 15.7% increase in the population. If our town is going to develop in the way it should, it will need to have some ambitious targets for private and affordable housing.”
The critique goes on: “The lack of targets for private and affordable housing in the future show that the present Tory administration have a sense of arrogance when running our civic affairs  … We are saddened by the lack of ambition that this Tory administration has to deal with the population change within Boston. When are the Boston Conservatives going to take their role of community leaders in a more enlightened way?  Let’s hope … that they set ambitious targets in their housing strategy similar to other authorities across the country.”
Again, the underlines our earlier point.
The plan before this one, obviously failed to take account of how Boston’s population would increase.
Presumably, the council now thinks that it has a handle on how this growth might continue during the next five years, and plans to address what it sees as the likely issues resulting from it.
We just hope that our leaders have noted the story in the national press earlier in the month which said that more than 100,000 Russian citizens could qualify for EU passports under a little-noticed law change in Latvia - which is to open its doors to ‘an unknown number’ of Siberians.
“The economically struggling Baltic state is to grant the right to citizenship to the children and grandchildren of all Latvians sent by Stalin and his Soviet successors into exile in Siberia,” says the report.
“Everyone with a Latvian passport is entitled to work and live in Britain and significant communities from the ex-Soviet state are now established in England in places such as Manchester, Peterborough and Boston.”
What is surprising about the current housing situation is the number of dwellings which are described as “non decent.”
All told, the current situation is bleak, and the outlook appears little better.
Boston has a growing elderly population, and the fashion to encourage them to “downsize” to fee up larger properties is simply not realistic in the borough where the lion’s share of housing is in band A for council tax purposes - which puts them in the lower end of the market.
And let’s not forget that this situation might have been less serious had Boston not disposed of its housing stock to Boston Mayflower in 1999.
It seems that  selling the borough’s family silver goes back longer than we thought.
One aside that tickled our fancy in the case of the Latvian mum was the way in which the council struggled to stay politically correct.
The least convincing line was the one which went: “The property is not a house in multiple occupation; we can confirm that it is in fact home to a single large family.”
So, eleven unrelated people occupying a three bedroomed house constitutes multiple occupation – but not if they comprise a mother and ten children.”
Laughable!

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