How do you get rid of telephone salesmen offering the latest rip-off deals for double glazing or kitchens? Tell them you’re not a homeowner. If you own your own home and have never tried it, give it a go. They’ll put the phone down immediately, often without saying goodbye, and leave you with a very small sense of what it’s like being poor.
There is a growing underclass in Britain of people who cannot afford a home, will never be able to afford a home, cannot access services or jobs because of where they live, but can’t afford to move. As society becomes more obsessed with house prices, home improvement shows and DIY, the divide increases, and those at the bottom become more entrenched. This is the progressive deficit at its most debilitating.
The average house price in Greater London now exceeds £262,000. A single person needs to be earning in excess of £40,000 if they want to buy. Rents in London have soared and those on low incomes rely on housing benefit – the most unreliable benefit of them all. People on low demand estates find themselves blacklisted from credit companies, living in areas with no local jobs, shops or banks. They are forced to use loan sharks who take all their money and a whole lot more in interest. And they can’t afford to move to where the jobs are.
We are seeing an increase in evictions from social housing. Making people homeless because they are behind in their rent should be a last resort – but has become the first because it’s the easiest way to hit targets on rent payments. And in councils where housing benefit is in a mess, families can be evicted because the council hasn’t paid the housing benefit – one part of the council evicting a family because another part hasn’t done its job.
Owning a home doesn’t just give you choices. It’s an investment for your future. Many of us are using property as a fall back for our old age – it feels like a safe bet. If this continues, and houses become our retirement funds, those who cannot afford to buy will be at the bottom when they are pensioners as well.
So who are the people who cannot afford to buy? Poverty is the major barrier – although many on higher incomes cannot buy in London and the South east. The most economically and socially disadvantaged people in society tend to live in the worst housing. These groups include older people, lone parents, and ethnic minorities. About three million households live in poor housing conditions. Of these, 902,000 are families with children. Over a quarter of households from an ethnic minority group live in poor housing. Black and minority ethnic groups are seven times more likely than their white counterparts to experience overcrowding.
This housing crisis has been created by the Conservative legacy of underinvestment, of selling off the country’s housing stock without replacing any of it, of allowing estates to fall into disrepair, of not caring about the consequences. It’s been created because we don’t build enough houses. Last month, the Treasury sponsored Barker review of housing supply highlighted the downward spiral of affordable house-building in the UK over the last decade. It estimated that 39,000 new homes need to be built every year in England to meet housing need. It stated that 31,000 of them should be affordable.
Labour has made huge progress, considering our starting position. It’s seen through homelessness and housing legislation, a new target to end the use of B&B and significant investment. It is tackling bad housing and has a target to make all social housing ‘decent’ by 2010. But the bottom line is that we need a lot more houses. Over the last two decades subsidy for housing has shifted from bricks and mortar investment to personal subsidies, mainly housing benefit. Maybe it needs to shift back – or maybe there’s a better way.
What does the party think about a society in which home ownership seems to hold all the answers? Should we be encouraging more people to buy – or doing more to encourage other tenures like the pitifully small private rented sector or the social rented sector? We need a radical re-think about how we house people in this country, how we supply the right homes in the right places, how we can give people a stake in their housing – and how we pay for it.