Time To Demolish Tower Blocks? Iain Duncan Smith Thinks So

25 June 2017, 12:40 | Updated: 25 June 2017, 16:43

Former Conservative Party Leader Iain Duncan Smith has told LBC the money to refurbish "badly designed" tower blocks would be far better spent in replacing them with "proper family friendly housing".

Iain Duncan Smith said people do not want to live in tower blocks.

Speaking to Andrew Pierce he said: "I’ve yet to meet a constituent who has ever said to me ‘I want to go and live in a tall tower block’. None of them do and I don’t blame them because they are pretty soulless really.

"They are safer in houses, they are safer in low rises and I’d much rather have that. It breeds a better kind of community too."

Iain Duncan Smith said: "The cost of refurbishing these tower blocks, which were badly designed and planned by socialist planners after the war in the 1960s and 70s without any due regard to what people actually want to do, it’s time really to look at them and say the extent and cost of doing them, and actually it makes them more risky - It’s far better if we bring many of them down and actually replace them with proper family friendly housing.

"All this nonsense that you can’t get the right capacity in cities is complete nonsense.

"I’m not alone in this, many, many people now believe you can get just as many, if not more people, living in an area, but living in housing that they want to live in and certainly not living in blocks taller than four or five storeys high."

Listen to what he had to say on the video at the top of this page.