I think the application of the term obscene to these 5000 or so households is disproportionate and borders on the extreme.

Council housing always served many purposes including assisting in economic and social mobility and there are many people who could not get their foot on the bottom rung of the property ladder (a problem that is not just a contemporary issue) and were grateful for the presence of good quality housing provided by local authorities.

On the obscenity point - is it also obscene that more than 50% of UK mortgages are currently with banks or building societies who in turn received bail-out deals funded by HMG (ie the taxpayer) and thereby saved morgagees who otherwise would have had their lending arrangements foreclosed ?

Of course, the answer is no - and that moral position is not so different from those of the tenants. However the the costs of the subsidised mortgage position is substantially greater.

Any evaluation of what is obscene by reasonable people can better be exampled by the large scale incompetence and greed of bankers and building societies led by people who believed that they had an entitlement to be bailed out in the order of billions if not trillions of pounds in the event of their catastrophic failure.

This posture and belief led to untrammeled. misunderstood and corrupt dealing which caused the biggest banking and building society bail out ever.

I suspect that for the majority of reasonable people, this will be viewed as a realistic application of the term obscene.

Judge not, that ye be not judged.