Only governments can put you in a cage for breach of contract

So, there's this big hoo-ha that Subletting council houses could become criminal offence with the possibility, so either the Guardian or Grant Shapps, it's not clear which, that "penalties could include fines and possibly imprisonment" because "the rules were too weak".

What a load of nonsense.  It's a breach of a contract.  If your contracts are too full of holes, people are going to find them and exploit them.  Just tighten up your contracts and enforce them.  Nobody else gets to put people in cages over a breach of contract.  Only if you are a government with a monopoly of violence can you threaten people in such a way with being caged up for a spell that the rest of us have to pay for.

It seems that this government's answer, as with the previous one, is "if there's a problem let's create a new criminal offence".  They could do with reading Herbert Spencer's "The Sins of Legislators" before embarking on such a course.  If they're too busy for that, they could always pop an MP3 of me reading it onto their iPhones and listen to it while they wait for a division bell some day.

Now there is an abuse that you could help with that's been going on for a long time: dodgy lenders who give money to people to buy their council houses, who then find they cannot afford small print charges and interest costs, who are then offered the "opportunity" to sell back to the lender at a much reduced price and then continue living there on market rent levels.  Deal with that first.  Hint: mutual banking, free money or some other monetary reform would make this much more difficult and solve a lot of other problems besides.