Being a Conservative MP must be one of the most thankless, if well-remunerated, jobs currently going in Britain. You spend years working on policy, hammer it into the manifesto, sometimes force it through parliament, then, inevitably, junk it in a cataclysmically embarrassing U-turn.
This week’s volte-face was a partial U-turn on the local housing allowance (LHA) cap for supported housing. Plenty of housing professionals had warned that capping the amount of support available for schemes such as sheltered accommodation, women’s refuges and extra-care facilities would mean they would cease to function. Supported housing costs more because it relies on far more than simple bricks and mortar: slashing the money available meant many housing associations announced they would have to mothball plans for such schemes.
The announcement that the cap will not be applied to social housing is welcome to those who’ve spoken up about the dangers, but for millions of people in the private rented sector, LHA cuts continue to bite and rents continue to rise.
In a recent report by the homelessness charity Shelter, it estimates that by 2020, one million people will have been made homeless by the cuts. The report also warns that the biggest single cause of homelessness right now is when a private tenancy comes to an end. So while this feels like a victory for some, in the long-term the problem remains for millions.
As with the removal of the fee for the universal credit phone line , this change by the government is tinkering with a broken system, rather than making the large scale overhaul needed.
But it’s also worth examining precisely what the Conservatives have done for housing: very little.
The Housing Act has been hollowed out, with U-turn upon U-turn, so that no council or housing association can now categorically say whether the plan to force sales of high value homes and extend right to buy to housing associations will come to fruition. Since the Conservative party conference, the Tories have tried, again and again, to put forward a bold solution to the housing crisis.
The sputtering and stalling started with the announcement of the extension of help to buy. Rightly, the press and public pointed out this subsidises developers and artificially inflates house prices, rather than being actively useful. Then, Theresa May announced that she would put £2bn into building homes for affordable rent, only for journalists to do the sums and point out that amount willdeliver only 5,000 homes a year.
Now, rumours are swirling that communities and local government secretary, Sajid Javid, is pushing to include a major housebuilding programme in the upcoming budget, causing a rift with chancellor Philip Hammond.
We’ve yet to see an announcement from the Tories that hasn’t turned out to be a damp squib, so caution is advised before getting excited about that one.
The Conservative problem with housing remains that for many Tory MPs and for their core supporters, the housing crisis has not fully affected them, either because they are private landlords or because they bought when homes were cheap and are now wedded to the ideological belief that they have earned the massive uptick in their assets.
But now, even core Tory supporters are being hit. Their children can’t buy or, often, afford to rent, and the housing crisis has massively impacted the turnout of Tory voters under 50. If the party wants a future in government, it will need to attract new, younger voters. Scrapping LHA for social housing may not affect the core Tory vote, but the number of people unable to afford to rent privately might.
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