The outward manifestation of a housing crisis is right before our eyes, on a street near you, tucked anonymously in a doorway or lying on a park bench. Rough sleeping, according to the House of Commons library, has probably risen by 100% since 2010.
The government’s own figures to the end of June show homelessness up by 10% in a year – 15,170 households at the last estimate – while another 73,000 languish in temporary accommodation, a rise of more than 50% in six years. The knock-on effect of the crisis hits home ownership, the cornerstone of the Thatcherite revolution, which is at its lowest level in 30 years. And that’s in spite of the hundreds of millions diverted by the Cameron-Osborne government into subsidising the mortgages of the privileged few who can afford a deposit, rather than the majority who are unable to get a foothold on the housing ladder, let alone find a property to rent.
Theresa May could turn her welcome rhetoric of serving the many, rather than the few, into reality by addressing a chaotic housing market in which an affordable homes programme will get a paltry £2bn up to 2020 from a total housing package of £44bn. On Wednesday the PM has her chance, through her chancellor’s autumn statement. Whether she takes it is a moot question. Certainly the newish housing minister, Gavin Barwell, has signalled a welcome change of course by acknowledging that social housing, as well as more homes for private renting, is vital to address the crisis alongside support for home ownership.
The scale of the challenge has been underlined by government figures showing that the number of new homes classed as “affordable” has fallen to the lowest level for 24 years. And of the 32,000 in this category – some at 80% of the full market rate – a miserable 6,550 were for social renting, a fall of 52% on the previous year. Homeless charity Shelter said the “shocking” figures highlighted the level of homelessness and people living in temporary accommodation 50 years after Ken Loach’s film Cathy Come Home alerted the nation to a (then) housing crisis. As a nation, we made great strides to improve housing and the squalid conditions in which too many people lived. Then we regressed. Shockingly, we seem to have learned little. Today, amid such paltry government support for renting – the tenure of necessity for millions of mainly young people – non-profit housing associations, originally founded on social principles, have been forced to build commercial homes, many for sale and shared ownership, with the virtual disappearance of government funding to allow them to house the neediest and those on low-to-average incomes.
What passes for a housing strategy is broken. The government will doubtless respond today by repeating that it will publish a housing white paper in the coming weeks apparently aimed at detailing how it plans to hit the target of building 1m new homes by 2020.
This should be a golden opportunity for a change of course to distance the May administration from its predecessor’s wasteful, indirect subsidies to the big six private housebuilders through mortgage subsidy. It should mark a fundamental reassessment of policy, a recognition that the state has a wider role beyond largesse to the private sector.
Support for home ownership should be just one element in a programme to give the delivery of social and affordable housing for rent the highest priority. That could be achieved by updating new town legislation to coordinate the assembly of large sites in regenerated and expanding areas on the edge of cities and towns. And housing delivery should be classed as infrastructure and of equal if not greater importance than, for example, road building, with government guarantees to both underwrite development and support modern methods of manufacturing modular housing in factories – of which there are a few – for final fast-track assembly on prepared sites. Is that such a big ask?
