As the dust settles from the last week’s spending review, the depth of George Osborne’s incision into the welfare state is becoming clearer. Universities are being gutted of public funding, police and fire services are having their budgets slashed and Train to Gain will be abolished completely. But nowhere has the assault on the most vulnerable in society been so vicious and callous than the coalition’s housing policy.

The existence of a housing crisis is recognised by all parties and its cause – lack of supply and unaffordable house prices and rents – also receives cross-party consensus. Although it is not nearly enough, we ought to welcome the government’s commitment to deliver up to 150,000 affordable homes over the four years of the spending review. But we cannot endorse the means by which they have chosen to do so.

They have cut the National Affordable Housing Programme by 60 per cent. In order to generate the funds to meet their target, they propose that the social rents for new tenants be raised to up to 80 per cent of the market rate. The government is effectively abolishing the concept of ‘social’ rent, with rents rising from an average of little over £100/week for a three bedroom property in London to over £350/week.

In essence, this government’s strategy to build more affordable homes is to make existing homes less affordable – they are robbing Peter to pay Paul.

To make matters worse, the money raised can only be used to build further homes that charge this higher rate of rent. This means there will be no further construction of homes that charge social, affordable rents until at least 2015.

By stealth, they have also raised the age threshold for the Shared Room Rate of Housing Benefit from 25 to 35. In effect, this will lead to a substantial increase in the number of young people living in Houses of Multiple Occupation (HMOs) and a significant increase in the number of HMOs. In the fine print of the comprehensive spending review, the coalition has made overcrowding in metropolitan areas exponentially worse. The hand of the predatory landlord that converts (often illegally) a four-bedroom family home into a HMO that accommodates upwards of 10 people has been made palpably stronger by the comprehensive spending review. This is especially true when many areas with large houses – often in Tory boroughs – do not have adequate controls on the conversion of a family home into an overcrowded HMO. The people who suffer will not just be those with no option but to accept cramped living conditions, but also the residents of areas that will become a magnet for unscrupulous landlords and overcrowded homes.

The consequences of introducing a national cap for housing benefit of £250/week for a one-bedroom property and £400/week for a four-bedroom property are well known. Up to 82,000 families are thought to be affected by these changes in London alone, with a significant proportion being uprooted out of their homes, prised from their friends and networks and away from their jobs. The comparisons with the divisions between the wealthy Parisian city-centre and the ghettoised banlieues are apt, and the fears of social unrest are justified.

On Tuesday, Nick Clegg hid behind the straw man that it wasn’t fair that some families were paid to live in mansions in Kensington whilst hard working people struggle to pay the rent in Whitechapel. On Wednesday, his boss deployed the same line of attack – they are the defenders of fairness for those that work and pay taxes; we are defenders of welfare ‘scroungers’ and their excesses.

Their caricatures are misleading and their attacks are misguided. Housing benefit is not claimed by ‘scroungers’; the vast majority are pensioners and hard working people in low-paid jobs – only one in eight are unemployed.

But we cannot be backed into a corner where we are defending the flawed present system. We cannot be happy that we paid increasing amounts of public money to pernicious private landlords that squeezed as much rent out of their tenants as they could. Nor can we be content that a lack of affordable homes gave councils no choice but to pay upwards of £50,000 a year to house families in private accommodation. Our response cannot just be a shrill cry of ‘foul’; it has to be a concerted offer of an alternative.
We must offer an ambitious, comprehensive affordable house building scheme that will reinvigorate the building of both affordable and local authority homes across the country. By investing in our housing stock, we increase the number of people who have access to affordable housing, and the less we have to pay to private landlords in local housing allowance. In the shorter term, there must be a case for looking at a system of rent controls, along the lines of New York, in which landlords are limited in what they can extract out of tenants as well as setting in stone the services they must provide.

We should also consider how best to encourage more housebuilding in the private sector. A land tax, which would provide a strong incentive for the development of brownfield sites, may well be an idea whose time has come. Developers simply sitting on land, waiting for its value to rise, should have a cost attached to it. The principle should be to make it cheaper to put land to productive use than to waste it.

This is a progressive, long-term solution to a perennial problem that will lead to a larger, more affordable and better quality housing stock that at the same time provides jobs and reinvigorates communities. It is a positive message to take to the country that people can believe in and understand.

Contrast this with the coalition’s plan: not only is theirs is an ambush on the families that claim any form of housing benefit, it is bereft of ambition and shrouded by uncertainty and deceit.

There remain great, unanswered questions: what happens to those that are unable to meet their new rent levels and are thrown out by their landlord – are they intentionally homeless? Does the local authority have a duty to rehouse them? Ministers are even briefing journalists that they do not know how many families will be affected – David Cameron certainly didn’t in his exchanges at PMQs.

With opposition coming from all the major stakeholders concerned with housing and MPs from all parties, this government has buried its head in the sand. This policy was in neither the Conservative nor the Liberal Democrat manifestos and was entirely absent from the coalition agreement. Without a proper debate and a full vote on the matter, the government is proceeding with the greatest social upheaval of our time without the slightest shred of a mandate. A new politics, indeed.