Another awful interview by UK Greens leader
LBC has a transcript of an interview with UK Green Leader Natalie Bennett on affordable housing. Some extracts:
Nick: The third key theme is ‘The Greens will ensure everyone has a secure, affordable place to live. How would that be brought about?
Natalie: A couple of things that we want to focus on. In terms of council housing, we want to build 500,000 new social rent homes.
Nick: Good lord, where would you get the money from for that?
Natalie: Well, what we want to do is fund that particularly by removing tax relief on mortgage interests for private landlords. We have a situation where…
Nick: How much would that bring in?
Natalie: Private landlords at the moment are basically running away with the situation of hugely rising rents while collecting huge amounts of housing benefit.
Nick: How much would that be worth, the mortgage relief for private landlords?
Natalie: “Erm… well… it’s… that’s part of the whole costing.”
Nick: Yes, but how much would that bring? The cost of 500,000 homes, let’s start with that. How much would that be?
Natalie: “Right, well, that’s, erm… you’ve got a total cost… erm… that we’re… that will be spelt out in our manifesto.
Nick: So you don’t know?
Natalie: No, well, err.
Nick: You don’t, ok. So you don’t know how much those homes are going to cost, but the way it’s going to be funded is mortgage relief from private landlords. How much is that worth?
Natalie: Right, well what we’re looking at with the figures here. Erm, what we need to do is actually… uh……… we’re looking at a total spend of £2.7… billion.
Nick: 500,000 homes, £2.7billion? What are they made of, plywood?
Natalie: Erm, basically what we’re talking about is 500,000 new homes and basically each one pound spent on this brings back £2.40…
Nick: Yes, but what is the total cost of 500,000 homes?
Natalie: [Long, long pause] Erm… it’s a cost of £60,000 per home.
Nick: £60,000 per home?
Natalie: Because what we’re talking about is, is the opportunity for…
Nick: That can’t include the land?
Natalie: Well, what we’re talking about is, what we want to see is the possibility of, um, of homes being built…
Nick: That’s not much more than a large conservatory, £60,000. So where’s the land, how are you going to pay for the land?
Good to see an interviewer holding a politician to account for promises that are clearly going to cost more than they say. We need more of that.
It has been labelled in world media as possibly the worst interview ever.