In England, there were 25.4 million dwellings by the end of 2022/23, an increase of less than 1% on the previous year. Of these, 16.3 million (64%) were owner-occupied (an increase of 176,000), 4.9 million (19%) were private rentals (up 35,000), and 4.1 million dwellings (or 16%) were social or affordable (up 25,000 on 2021/22).
There are myriad views on the nature of the housing problem. Rod Liddle, for one, disputes that there is one. He is rather more concerned with the concreting over of nature than he is with the proposition that society’s needs trump those of the beasts. On which we would disagree. However, I agree with him on a number of other things. He concedes that affordability is an issue for some (in the South East), and proposes solutions that others would baulk at. For instance, cutting immigration by 80% - a proposition that no mainstream political party would countenance. Indeed this demand side of the equation is barely mentioned for obvious reasons. He suggests too the conversion of empty homes to social housing. While this makes sense, it would be of limited use. There were 699,126 dwellings (or 3% of the national stock) left vacant in 2022/23; and 261,474 (just 1% of the national stock) were described as long-term vacant.
He would encourage rather than punish landlords for what he describes as their laudable civic act of providing accommodation. In so far as they might thereby increase the available stock and, as a consequence of flooding the market with new properties, bring down rents. Recent revelations regarding a landlord, who also happens to be a former Labour Council Leader and now sitting MP, suggest that not all deserve to be lauded. But I think it’s fair to assume, despite the horror stories, that not all landlords are quite so ill-suited to the job of making people feel at home. Either way, the private rented sector has grown over the past couple of decades, compared with the relative stability of the other tenures.
But what of leaseholders? As Emily Hill notes, what might be thought of as being a step up from being a tenant, can nevertheless make one ‘feel more like a serf who must pay an exorbitant annual tithe to her feudal overlord’. Baroness Claire Fox has made similar arguments in the House of Lords about the sorry state of the leaseholder experience. And when you consider there were an estimated 4.8 million leasehold dwellings in England at the last count - that’s a fifth (19%) of all our housing - there are a lot of people living in serfdom. Either way, whatever you think of landlords and freeholders, surely we could do with more social housing?
Liddle’s Spectator columnist colleague Charles Moore thinks not. In his view, the affordability problem is a product of too much state meddling in the first place. ‘The idea of planning housing is essentially a socialist one’ he states, and it drives up prices by placing restrictions on building them. The notion of affordable housing is, Moore argues, a nonsense. Surely ‘any house which someone has bought is, ipso facto, affordable, at least at the time of buying’? If there were no state intervention in the market, and no easy credit, maybe. But in an apparent desperation to rediscover Thatcher’s home-owning democracy, affordable home ownership schemes not only encourage people to buy homes that they can’t afford, they also add more fuel to an already overheated market.
As the English Housing Survey has found, the proportion of respondents saying they relied on help from family or friends to pay for their first home, rose from 27% in 2021-22 to 36% in 2022-23. And yet, for all his apparent free market convictions, Moore is in favour of the building of ‘new towns’. (A bit socialist, no?) If only on the basis of securing a particular, traditionalist, architectural taste, and the development of the infrastructures that the market has no interest in providing. As he readily concedes, the previous administration’s housing policy was undermined by ‘vested interests’ among its own MPs responding to constituents none-too-keen on sharing their comfortable, picturesque living conditions with the rest of us.
This government isn’t helping either. Far from heeding Liddle’s advice on immigration, it is expected that restrictions on access to social housing for migrants are to be relaxed. His suggestion that the government be kinder to landlords doesn’t look like finding sympathy in Whitehall either. Indeed, the government is proposing to introduce ‘hardship tests’ making it more difficult to evict poverty pleading tenants. Not to mention imposing costly eco-refurbishment requirements which will likely be passed on to those who can least afford it - those same hard-up tenants the government claims to care about. While some may be saved from homelessness, many others may be deprived of a home they might otherwise have had. The incentives for landlords to invest will be diminished, as will the available rental stock, driving up prices.
While I’m not a big fan of this new government’s already apparent Stalinist tendencies, not least its enthusiasm for imposing tougher targets on local authorities, it least it seems determined to build more. It is right, for instance, to want to take another look at the formula that expects already populous cities to absorb yet more, and to spread out development particularly in the South East. It seems right to me that we should all get a bit more space to live in. However, councils are worried that the - until now miraculously hidden - black hole in the public finances will mean that whatever is built will be lacking the basics, despite assurances from government.
According to Richard Clewer, leader of Wiltshire Council, quoted in The Telegraph:
We’ll have to settle for hundreds of unsustainable, cookie cutter developments with zero infrastructure around them.
The government is removing the requirement that new housing be ‘beautiful’ from the National Planning Policy Framework. While what housing looks and feels like is not unimportant - and every new block of flats that goes up near me seems to get uglier, more beige and identikit - the priority must be to build houses, for families. And everything else that goes with it - the pubs, the nurseries, the jobs, the transport links. Building houses generates the kind of knock-ons in economic growth the chancellor claims to want to generate.
How else will the government meet its not especially ambitious target of building 1.5 million homes over the next five years? The previous government said it would build 300,000 homes a year back in 2019, only to reframe this as an ‘aspiration’. This year, projections suggest, we won’t even get 200,000. So, Rachel Reeves is surely right that brownfield development should be brought into use more quickly? And right too that this isn’t sufficient. Much green-belt - what the new government are calling ‘grey belt’ onto which councils must build - isn’t especially scenic and would be better employed to house people. Having said that, writer and academic James Woudhuysen describes it as ‘vaguely defined and pitifully small’. Added to this, the new government is desperately trying to untangle itself from the ‘green tape’ of environmental regulations, it once supported, that is tying development up in knots.
Angela Rayner, Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, seems keener on restricting options too. She proposes to abolish the Right to Buy new council housing, and to lower discounts for tenants wishing to buy their existing homes (as Ms Rayner once did). Certainly, for those of us who think the run down of the social housing sector needs to be reversed, the money from sales needs to be fully reinvested in building more homes. Of which there has been a net loss of 24,000 since 1991 and ever-growing waiting lists. There were 252,000 new social housing lettings in England in 2022/23, a fall of 6% on the previous year. If we built enough of them, might they even help drag the relentless rise in prices and rents back down?
For William Clouston, Leader of the Social Democratic Party, the government’s proposals are ‘insufficient and will almost certainly fail’. He has little time for all its ‘posturing, wishing and regulating’. The SDP’s housing policy …
… is to make available a decent, affordable home for every citizen but no recent government has come close to securing this. Instead, the deliberate destruction of state housebuilding capacity together with mass immigration has created a perfect storm which denies millions a viable route to start a family and unfairly dashes young people’s dreams of a home of their own. We believe in urgently reversing this trend by reinvigorating state housebuilding and removing market distortions which prevent housing supply meeting demand.
The figures suggest this is much needed. In the first three months of 2024, building work began on 22,310 new dwellings, that’s 41% less than the same period last year. The number completed was 34,630, 12% down on last year.
Clouston’s party would invest in workforce and technology, and improve productivity in the housing sector; prioritise young people and owner occupiers; legislate for secure, longer term, private sector tenancies; and introduce a ‘housing MOT’. It would establish a national body to manage the social housing stock, replenish it and then reintroduce Right to Buy with the proviso that new properties are built. It would prioritise ‘married British families’ for social housing, place restrictions on buy-to-letters, and get the homeless off the streets and into hostels with appropriate support.
It’s hard to believe promises on housing. They sound too good to be true. Experience tells us they usually are. This is a shame because the housing discussion should be inspiring and point the way to a better future. Instead, we’ve grown more cynical with each missed target. But it’s good to know that there are those, admittedly on the political margins, who understand the housing problem in all its complexity and have a plan to address it. It’s good too that there are those willing to acknowledge the elephant in the living room - immigration. While it’s far from the only contributory factor to this longstanding issue, we can’t address the shortage of housing if we ignore the demands placed upon it. Houses make homes, and homes make up our communities. Let’s build them too.
Don’t miss Housing: does renting make us rootless? Part of the Belonging and community strand of debates at the Battle of Ideas, in London, at which I will also be speaking.
Image: Pawel Wozniak