Rents and power supplies

Press, Volume CXVI, Issue 34147, 7 May 1976, Page 12

Rents and power supplies

The failure of the Government and the electricity workers to agree about the rents that employees pay for the houses attached to their jobs, or about ways of making it easier for the workers to buy houses of their own, may give the country its first taste of power cuts this winter. The main grievance of the Electricity Department employees appears not to be that their rents, like those of so many who live in rented accommodation, are to go up.

Although the increases the Government intends to make will nearly double the rents paid by some employees, their rents appear attractively low when compared with rents paid even by other State servants who live in houses which go with their jobs. The workers’ main cause for concern appears to be their limited ability to buy houses of their own. The Government must at least admit that this is a real and worrying problem for workers w’hen they leave the service of the department or retire. While their relatively low rents, especially in remote places, should make it easier for them to save towards a house of their ow n, living' expenses in many of the remote areas where they are required to live may be high and cut-rates for electricity and small special allowances probably do not compensate for some of the disadvantages of remoteness. Towards the end of its term the Labour Government recognised this and agreed not to increase the rents the electricity workers pay until negotiations had been held about schemes to help the workers buy their own houses. The present Government is justified in standing firm on increasing the workers’ rents immediately. After all, some of the rents are barely equivalent to the charges for rates and maintenance faced by manj’ householders. But the Government should honour the promise made by the previous Government to the extent of talking about schemes to assist employees to buy their own houses.

In its manifesto, the National Party promised to encourage State servants living in service accommodation to join home saving schemes, and to make them loans at normal market rates to assist them to purchase houses. The electricity workers presumably want more than this. If they want more help than others, and can offer justification for special treatment that is not given to others, the Government should be ready to negotiate. When the argument may rest on this point the threat to stop work should be unnecessary’.