Section questions 4 Read the text and answer Questions Housing Benefit

Questions 22 - 27 
Complete the summary below. 
Choose 
NO MORE THAN ONE WORD
 from the text for each answer. 
From a recent survey it seems that there is a healthy appetite. 
A recent survey shows that the majority of residents are (22 ___________ ) with life in their local 
community. In fact it seems that many people have a healthy (23__________ ) for a higher level of 
participation in the running of the community. The new Localism Bill attempts to facilitate this desire by 
basically giving local people more (24 __________ ). Andrew Stunell, the Communities Minister, believes 
that the bill will remove the unnecessary (25 __________ ) which currently exist and which prevent local 
people from taking positive (26 __________ ). Some of the measures included in the bill include a complete 
change in the way (27 __________ ) is carried out, along with locals having more control over issues such as 
housing. 

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SECTION 3 Questions 28 - 40
Read the text and answer Questions 28 - 40 
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.

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