[pjc50]

No, it really is part of the housing safety net and always has been. And I think it's not all that rare either: people generally only stop paying their mortgages as part of a life collapse (unemployment, divorce, bereavement). If you want to engineer a price crash try realistic property taxes rather than throwing the disabled under a bus again.

[branchless]

Just read something that made me think of this:

    When the workers swelled the ranks of the poor, the government stepped in once more — 
    this time to assist capitalists who petitioned for tax-funded favors.
    As even the anti-libertarian historian Christopher A. Ferrara explains, 

    “England’s response to the crisis of poverty among the landless proletariat” was a system of poor relief supplements 
    to meager wages, adopted de facto throughout England (beginning in 1795) in order to ensure that families did not starve.
    The result … was a vast, government-subsidized mass of wage-dependent paupers 
    whose capitalist employers, both urban and rural, were freed from the burden of paying even bare subsistence wages.

http://fff.org/explore-freedom/article/enclosure-acts-indust...

Just like tax credits (and housing benefit).

The UK establishment have been "helping" the poor for a long time.