More mesmerising investigative journalism from Manchester Pravda
Article published: Tuesday, July 20th 2010
Did everyone get their copy of Manchester People a few weeks back? You’d surely remember it, brave journalistic bastion of truth, reason and justice? “It’s barely legal propaganda masquerading as news, useful for little more than mopping up spills and starting fires,” you say?
Manchester People is one of many publications put out by local councils across the country. New Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles has called them “town hall Pravdas”. The House of Commons Select Committee called them “a real problem” since the industry is “completely unregulated,” warning the papers should not be used as “vehicle[s] for political propaganda.”
About a year back MULE found out the Council rag Manchester People was costing £140,750 per year. It seemed a fairly extraordinary waste of money, especially considering a quick survey of 100 people on Market Street found just one who’d even heard of it – and he was a policeman.
The latest issue provided as much dazzling independent journalism as ever. Pages of backslapping jollities about the Manchester Day Parade, interspersed with celebrations of the hundreds of millions of pounds of public money put into redeveloping St Peters Square to boost “civic pride,” all that’s missing in Manchester it seems. The sort of stories any independent newspaper may not be able to deal with in any serious way.
“Affordable homes are here,” screams page five. Well done us! There’s Lowry Homes’ The Maine Place in Moss Side. On time and certainly didn’t require a £9.4 million taxpayer Kickstart last year. And Urban Splash’s edgy homes in New Islington and Collyhurst. There was no need for the Government to underwrite most of (Dr) Tom Bloxham’s (MBE) developments was there?
The Council recognises that “it might feel like getting on the housing ladder is an impossible dream,” but luckily they’re all “affordable.” Maybe no one saw homeless charity Shelter’s report coming, which said people earning £16,000 or below “cannot afford even the very cheapest shared ownership homes” like the HomeBuy and shared equity properties advertised in Manchester People.
According to Shelter these so-called ‘intermediate’ schemes “have often been driven by political need or producer interest”, while “the needs of consumers have been left out of the equation and products have been developed as a means to help developers and housing associations to generate revenue.”
This surely isn’t something our beloved City Council would be party to would it? It would be pretty appalling in a city with some of the most entrenched poverty in the country and where one constituency, Manchester Central, repeatedly has the highest levels of child poverty in the UK.
The Salford Star managed to get hold of figures from its local council earlier in the year which showed that just 10 households earning under £20,000 had benefited from various ‘intermediate’ housing schemes in the year ending 2009. MULE awaits the result of similar enquiries made to Manchester City Council. Do you reckon they’ll beat 10?
Andy Lockhart
More: Manchester
Comments
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Pravda (the Moscow one) did occasionally have articles hostile to Soviet foreign policy (once Afghanistan became an obvious debacle for the Soviet Army). So Manchester People is actually WORSE than Pravda because no criticism of anything emerging from Castle Greyskull is ever allowed.
Very good piece, btw…
Comment by Marc Hudson on July 22, 2010 at 5:37 pm
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