Simon Jenkins (Crisis? What housing crisis?, 1 October) is mistaken on a number of points. The housing crisis is very real: we see the worst effects of it every day, and not just in London. Since 2010, all forms of homelessness in England have risen. Rough sleeping has increased by 55%, while thousands are forced to live in precarious and dangerous conditions just to keep a roof over their heads. If this isn’t a crisis, what is?
Private renting in England is failing to provide people with homes that are decent, safe, secure and affordable. Too many people are living in appalling conditions – almost a third of privately rented homes fail to meet the government’s decent homes standard. Compared to other parts of western Europe, tenants in England have very little security. Many can be evicted from their homes with little notice and with no duty on the landlord to prove they are at fault.
With rising rents and severe cuts to housing benefit, the loss of a private rented home is now the leading cause of homelessness. This is unacceptable. Our politicians can and must do something about it. We need decisive action to make the private rented sector more accessible and affordable, along with radical solutions to tackle the severe shortage of affordable homes. At the same time, we must have a real safety net for anyone finding themselves in difficulty.
Jon Sparkes
Chief executive, Crisis
• It’s good to see Simon Jenkins recognise that the housing crisis is not caused by a shortage of houses. The main problem is that our housing is becoming more and more unequally distributed, with the rich owning more and more space, the poor occupying less and less, and many in the middle unable to afford to buy or rent anything but the smallest properties. The worst-housed 10% now have on average just one room per person while the best-housed have five. Housing has not been so unequally distributed since before the first world war.
Housing is our most popular financial investment, seen as a safer and more profitable than investing in stocks and shares. So everyone who can afford to buys a larger house or joins the one in nine households that owns a second home or buy-to-let property. This pushes house prices ever higher, demonstrating even more clearly that they are a good investment. Financial inequality, growing faster in Britain than in any other OECD country, is both a cause and a result of this cycle. There is no way we could build enough housing to satisfy the increasing demand for investment, which comes from both within Britain and abroad.
Government policy has made things worse by encouraging investment in housing, not only through the taxes mentioned by Jenkins but also through quantitative easing, pension release, “help-to-buy”, support for buy-to-let and the housing benefit payments that are going into the pockets of private landlords. We should be moving in the opposite direction, and also looking at other interesting proposals such as a capital gains tax on main residences, rolled up over a lifetime and paid on death. Significant changes are possible – we can look back for example to the successful phasing out of mortgage interest tax relief in the 1990s which was considered impossible at the time.
Allison Quick and Dick Watson
Totnes, Devon
