Build 90,000 affordable homes to ease the housing pressure on low- and middle-income people
The number of homeless families trapped in temporary housing has doubled since 1997, and is set to reach 100,000 by Christmas. Over one million children are growing up in overcrowded, unfit or emergency housing, and are more likely to experience serious health problems such as TB, poor education and blighted futures.
Even more alarmingly, new research by the University of Sheffield has uncovered unprecedented and rising levels of inequality, directly caused by the distorted housing market. Those at the top of the housing ladder have seen their housing wealth increase by over 300 per cent in the last two years, while those at the bottom accumulate no housing wealth at all.
These are not merely problems for the individuals caught up in the housing crisis. They have a wider impact. Homeless families in temporary accommodation alone cost the taxpayer an unnecessary £500m in increased benefits and associated costs each year. Housing inequality is having a major impact on geographical mobility and Britain’s economic well-being.
As Kate Barker’s review for the Treasury on housing supply made clear, unless there is a significant change in policy, the crisis will deepen rapidly. The lack of affordable housing has reached crisis point in many areas, and the government seem at last to be grasping, if not the full scale of the problem, then the need to begin to address it.
The recent spending review concluded that the government must invest an additional £1.6bn in new homes each year and called for measures to tackle inequality in the housing market. While that signalled a significant and welcome boost for new homes, research carried out for Shelter by Cambridge university calculated that £3.5bn was required each year above the current spending plans to tackle the housing crisis and build the 89,000 affordable homes needed annually.
Sadly, the spending review commitment will not stretch to provide this desperately needed number of affordable homes. It is essential the government ensure that the new social homes they can build with that investment are actually built. They are likely to face opposition, particularly from an increasingly vocal nimby lobby. Government must remain committed in the face of any such challenges: new housing development can be socially, economically and environmentally stable. Failure to build will plunge Britain deeper still into the housing crisis and will have devastating consequences for those families already suffering at the sharp end of the housing crisis.
Introduce greater teaching of parenting skills, such as nutrition and developing achilds cognitive functions early
The quality of family relationships matters not just to each child and family member but to all of us. That is why all political parties now see that family policy and family services are the states business. But the state needs to tread carefully and warily when it comes to family life.
NFPI has done a number of consultations with parents to discover what kind of advice, information or assistance they would like. For most parents, the birth of a new baby is a joyful, tiring roller-coaster, but many say there were times when a helping hand or voice would have been just what they needed. They wanted help with how to care for the new baby, on what is normal for the baby to be doing and for the mother and father to be feeling. Parents like practical advice on finance and work, too.
So we think it makes sense to offer information and advice to parents, especially in the first year of life. Midwives and health visitors are the key here. Not only can they be there for families who want to learn the new child-rearing and nutrition skills, but they can see and pick up on the families who are really struggling and get more specialist help in quickly. We think this early-warning system could be helped if we had child development checks at later ages 5, 7, 11 and 13.
We also found that parents really welcomed parenting information sessions at other change times when children start school, move up to secondary school, and at 13 or 14 when the teen years really get going. We know that parents also value helplines, home visiting and meeting other parents to talk about raising children. These are often best supplied by voluntary organisations.
But none of these are enough without the more specialist back-up for families with serious difficulties. Our problem as a nation is not that we dont know what to do, its that we dont have enough services or enough highly trained workers. Families who do need help can be very resistant to accepting that they are caring inadequately or destructively. The people who need help most may be least likely to ask for it. We need to make it OK to ask for help and easy to get it before things go wrong and before children begin to be affected.
Target child-related benefits towards children in poorer households, specifically in the first five years of their life where the roots of poverty lie
The crucial question about the welfare state is not, what does it provide but, when does it provide? After the health visitors have finished their rounds and the immunisation programme is complete, the welfare state closes until the opening of the school gates. And yet we now have a wealth of data to support the old Jesuistical insight that this is the most formative period.
We know that high-quality early education and care improves the cognitive, behavioural and emotional development of children. We know we can expect long-term gains in employment, reduced welfare dependency and criminal behaviour.
We also know that most remedial programmes have a dismal record. Recent evaluations of classroom-based vocational training in France, Germany, Switzerland and Sweden showed zero impact on employment. The evaluation of the education and training option of the New Deal for Young People showed a similar result. And yet we persist in high levels of spending on such schemes. We also still subsidise higher education to an unwarranted extent. The public subsidy to higher education is around 75 per cent compared to 50 per cent for early years, which alone makes left-of-centre opposition to tuition fees baffling.
Those are some things we should not do. But if our objective was the promotion of the life chances of the least well-off, what would we do? We would offer 12 months paid parental leave, six weeks at 90 per cent of earnings, the rest at minimum wage levels; a home care allowance paid to parents to look after children aged 12-24 months, paid at half the minimum wage; 20 hours free education and care for up to 48 weeks per year for all two, three and four-year olds; 60 per cent of the workforce should have a graduate-level teaching qualification by 2015.
This would take the share of GDP spent in the early years from 0.8 per cent to 2.6 per cent, a rise from #10bn to #30bn, at current prices. Parental contributions should comprise no more than 30 per cent of the total. As in New Zealand, we should extend grant-based funding on a per child basis to providers.
This package could boost total UK parental employment by around 700,000, a plausible increase in national output of around one per cent of GDP by 2020. In addition, increased lifetime employment, parental earnings and the future productivity of children as adults could contribute up to two per cent of GDP. And then there are the social benefits, which are notoriously difficult to value. The returns exceed the costs overall and we would spend money more efficiently while helping the least well-off. It is an open-and-shut case.