Real Estates

There are 13,000 households on Cumbria's waiting lists

When you hear the name of a well known local council estate, what do you think? Do you judge the people who live there, or not?

In Real Estates, BBC Cumbria will be going under the skin of Cumbria's council estates and finding out what life is really like.

It is 30 years since the Right to Buy scheme came in allowing council tenants to buy their own homes.

To mark this we are focussing on life on the Woodhouse estate in Whitehaven.

Bad reputation

It is an estate which has had its problems in the past but it is now being regenerated. We will be meeting the people who live there and hearing their stories. Perhaps surprisingly for some, many of them would not move off the estate for anything.

But there are challenges. The estate is in one of the county's more deprived areas. It still has a bad reputation amongst some of the people who live nearby. So what is the future for the young people who live on Woodhouse?

HOUSING The average income in Cumbria is £18,751 Cumbria's average house price for 2008 was £173,853 There are some 32,383 social houses in Cumbria Some 2,831 social homes were newly let during 2007/8 In 2007/8, 206 Cumbrian homes were sold through right to buy Right to buy has seen the sale of some 21,000 homes in Cumbria during the past 30 years The waiting list for homes in Cumbria stood at 12,900 during 2008

We will also be looking at the issues surrounding social housing in general. In the past 30 years nearly half of Cumbria's social housing stock has been sold off and yet around 13,000 households are on the county's waiting lists. What is stopping Cumbria's housing associations from building more homes? We will be talking to the decision makers too.

On air

Real Estates is on BBC Radio Cumbria from Sunday, 8 November 2009, starting with the Sunday Breakfast Show and carrying on throughout the week on the Mike Parr Breakfast Show and on many of our other programmes too.

The Mike Parr Breakfast Show will be coming live from the St Peters Centre on Monday, 9 November 2009, from 0630 GMT to 0900 GMT.

The Gordon Swindlehurst Show will be live from Finnegans chip shop on Wednesday, 11 November 2009 form 1300 GMT to 1400 GMT