Imagine you are a 28-year-old earning £35,000 a year. You work full time. You are unlikely to qualify for a council house, yet you cannot afford to buy one. And in much of the country, and certainly in London, renting a flat of your own is increasingly elusive. You would not be wrong to think the housing system has very little to offer you.
Home ownership has become more distant, private rents are unaffordable and more young people find themselves unable to leave their parents’ home or stuck sharing with strangers well into adulthood. Housing has become a rich electoral seam of grievance.
The populist answer is increasingly to identify who has taken your home. For parts of the left, it is millionaires, landlords and overseas investors hoarding housing. There is a grain of truth here. Some developments are marketed years ahead in places like Hong Kong or Singapore before they reach your local estate agent.
For Reform, the answer is migrants, welfare recipients and a social housing system that prioritises need over what they might consider “deservedness”. There is a grain of truth in this grievance too, even if Reform’s explanation is wrong.
Social housing has increasingly become an ambulance service. There is so little of it that councils understandably prioritise those in the greatest need. Our council homes go to people who are homeless, overcrowded or fleeing domestic violence.
Reform is out to win voters who feel cheated out of housing, and their sympathetic parents. The party’s housing proposals explicitly promise to prioritise young British-born workers and married couples. Existing foreign nationals would lose their social housing after a grace period. The proposals divide citizens into British-born and those born abroad. They downgrade the needs of non-married couples and single people. Your worthiness for an affordable home becomes determined by random circumstances of birth and marital status.
There has always been a wider debate here about what council housing is and who it is for. For too long, social housing has become an extension of the safety net. It is housing of last resort for those too destitute and out of options to go elsewhere. There is a constant debate about expanding council housing beyond this role, including explicit housing for key workers.
But Reform’s big council housing proposal is essentially about allocations. The policy is not focused on solving the wider housing crisis or giving more working-class people the chance to live in a council home. Instead, it is focused on turning scarcity into a political opportunity.
There is also a muddled proposal to build more council homes on shaky financial workings using public-sector pensions and free land with an uncertain return. It’s designed to bait a Labour discussion on right to buy or council housing allocations but offers no answers to improve working-class lives.
Richard Tice makes much of being a former property developer of upmarket homes, contrasting his experience with generations of housing ministers. That makes the numbers in the document all the more surprising as he ought to know they don’t stack up.
Reform wants to build 500,000 affordable social homes over ten years, or an average of 50,000 a year. At the same time, it wants to sell 250,000 existing social homes through a revived right to buy system, with large discounts. So 500,000 “additional” homes actually means a net increase in the social housing stock of only 25,000 homes a year.
Reform then claims its programme will make “around one million homes” available to British families by adding the new homes to hundreds of thousands of properties it says would be vacated by foreign nationals.
Tice’s proposals should also worry older people living in council homes. He is clear he wants more working people in social homes, and is ending standard lifelong tenancies. Does he propose mass evictions of pensioners to prioritise those married young couples?
The financing is similarly optimistic. Reform proposes to raise tens of billions by changing how housing association assets are valued, arguing that the higher paper value would allow associations to borrow more. But revaluing a house does not create the additional rent needed to service the debt. Reform has published its proposal with an example of a £200,000 home costing £750 a month to finance at 4.5 per cent on an interest-only calculation; 30 years later, the £200,000 would still need to be repaid.
Reform correctly identifies a constituency that feels excluded from our housing system. It joins a long queue of political parties that recognise there is a housing crisis. But it prescribes a policy that largely reallocates this shortage between different groups rather than ending it. Recognising the grievance is easy.
The government’s housing policy has almost the reverse problem. It is very serious and very practical. Yet its ambition to push much more housing funding directly through councils has run into the difficult reality of our modern social housing sector and many councils’ lack of capacity to deliver homes quickly. Housing associations exist, have development teams and own enormous amounts of land and housing. Most of England’s councils don’t, and cannot recreate that capacity overnight.
That is an understandable compromise of being in government. Delivering new homes is more difficult than announcing them. But being serious does not mean the government has to be timid.
The mistake would be for Labour to hear any argument and respond only by defending the existing system. What exactly does the housing system offer a young person who works, earns too much to qualify for social housing and still can’t afford somewhere decent to live? Mainstream politics needs a better answer.
There is no reason answering that question requires taking a council home away from someone else. The answer should be to build more homes.
There is more Labour could do to radically reduce the costs of building council housing. Unnecessary requirements have layered costs onto development over decades. Cambridge, for example, expects major developments to spend around 1 per cent of development costs on public art. Every additional cost imposed on genuinely affordable housing is ultimately money that cannot be spent on another home.
If a development is principally providing council, social or key-worker housing, every planning requirement should have to justify itself against the number of homes it prevents being built.
There is also room to think again about what purpose affordable housing serves in Britain. Social housing should remain there for those who need it most. However, key workers, young people and families who will never reach the top of a council waiting list but cannot afford market rents desperately need a housing offer too. It is hardly a revolutionary concept. Emily Thornberry argued during her Labour leadership campaign that we should have a specific affordable housing programme for young workers to give them a secure, affordable start to life. In New York, below-market homes are commonly allocated through a housing lottery to households within specified income bands. Britain does not need to pilfer council homes from the poor to give housing to those who earn slightly more.
There is a massive political opportunity if Labour gets housing right. Housing scarcity creates a politics of insiders and outsiders. If there are 100 affordable homes and 200 people who need them, there will always be some self-serving politicians willing to explain why the other hundred are less deserving than you.
Reform’s answer is that the undeserving person is unmarried, not in work or born elsewhere. Labour should reject the premise of the question and get on with building. There doesn’t have to be a council housing shortage. It wasn’t always this way.
The answer to a generation of working people who believe they have been locked out of council housing is not to tell them which other family or pensioner should be evicted so they can move in. Build enough homes, and Reform’s politics of grievance begins to lose its power.
[Further reading: The Burnham bounce is an illusion]
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Subscribe here to commentThere’s little prospect of Labour building the extra homes needed.
The housing crisis has of course been made much worse by massive immigration.
The usual, boring excuses straight out of Farage’s hindquarters.