Basing policy decisions on the careful use of rigorous evidence is not exactly rocket science, you might think, but it is something on which UK politicians do not have a good track record, and housing policy is no exception.
Take the help-to-buy policy introduced in 2013 by George Osborne. There was little evidence to support the assumption that the UK housing market would be able to build the increased number of homes that greater demand would require. In fact there is evidence that the UK housing market’s supply-side is much less responsive to increased demand than, for example, most of our European neighbours or the US house-building industry.
The result was a shortfall in housing supply.
Similarly, when policymakers introduced changes to benefits as part of the spare room subsidy they held beliefs about the speed at which affected households would be able to downsize – but the evidence that then came in proved those beliefs wrong.
The recent housing white paper in England demonstrates that the government and the housing minister do now seem more in tune with the realities of the housing market – particularly in terms of the shift of emphasis on to measures that boost supply. But too much policy is still being designed on the basis of what policymakers hope might happen and their assumptions about how things work rather than what the evidence is actually saying.
Some of this is about the need for more research and bringing the academic and professional worlds closer together. We also need to understand what the housing sector believes are the most pressing evidence gaps and then fill them – fundamental questions about the relationship between the economy and housing and also a greater understanding of housing’s impact on health services, education and aspirations.
To make this happen, I am leading a new, five-year housing research centre with funds of more than £7.5m from the Economic and Social Research Council, Joseph Rowntree Foundation and the Arts and Humanities Research Council. It will bring together nine universities and professional organisations like the Chartered Institute of Housing with the aim of producing robust evidence to inform housing policy.
The Collaborative Centre for Housing Research will be separate from government, with staff located at five hubs across the UK in Glasgow, Sheffield, London, Cardiff and Belfast. More than 200 researchers will be involved in the project, either as research investigators or contributors, and it will fund up to 10 PhDs in the first year.
We’ll initially focus on six overlapping areas, including supply and demand, poverty, and neighbourhoods. We want to provide robust evidence to inform housing policy and practice across the UK, and assist in tackling housing problems at a national, devolved, regional, and local level.
To paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, we need to shift from designing policies in an evidence-free world where we don’t know what we don’t know, to identifying the known unknowns, and, ultimately, designing housing policy based on what we do actually know.
Ken Gibb is professor of housing economics at the University of Glasgow and director of the new Collaborative Centre for Housing Research.
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