Cooperative housing is being held back by feudalist laws. It is time to scrap them
Housing is one of the truly great challenges of our age. And while it is clearly a highly complex agenda, encompassing issues as wide-ranging as overcrowding, antisocial behaviour, planning, and the environment, at the heart of it all is a straightforward shortage of supply.
In a world where mortgage finance is out of reach to anyone without a 20 or 30 per cent deposit, we simply must do more to address the needs of the ‘intermediate market’ – that growing number of people caught in an unhappy limbo between home ownership and the social rented sector. Against this backdrop and the crippling restrictions that have been placed on capital budgets we simply have to find new and innovative ways of delivering more homes for less. And we are not just talking about increasing the supply of housing in the social rented sector, vital though that is.
The cooperative and mutual sector has a huge role to play in helping us rise to that challenge. But there are a number of obstacles currently preventing progress, chiefly, our unreformed land and property law, based as it is on the presumption that there is an inherent conflict of interest between the rights of landlord and tenant, a presumption which is simply not valid in housing cooperatives which have commonality of interest at their very heart.
Leaving aside whether in the 21st century it is right that our law governing land and property is based on medieval feudalism, the built-in inflexibility of a system which only recognises occupancy of a dwelling through freehold of the crown or grant of a lease from a superior landlord is a massive practical barrier to the development of the cooperative housing sector.
It may seem arcane, but it is in fact the key reason why the cooperative housing sector in this country is so underdeveloped. In Sweden, which has had a distinct cooperative housing tenure since 1920, 18 per cent of homes are provided by cooperatives; in the UK, the figure is just 0.6 per cent.
The cooperative housing bill, valiantly brought before parliament this autumn by Jonathan Reynolds MP and which returns for a second reading in January, seeks to address this anomaly. With the new legislative powers now afforded to Wales, it is an agenda I am determined to take forward here.
In isolation, establishing a legally separate cooperative housing tenure will not foster the cooperative housing revolution I want to see in Wales over the next few years, but it would be a long-overdue modernisation of the rights of housing consumers that would see Wales leading the way, and making it far easier for new cooperative housing models to gain a foothold.
In May, nine Labour and Cooperative assembly members were elected to the Welsh assembly, including two cabinet ministers. The cooperative movement has never been better represented at the heart of decision-making. We have a cooperative moment here in Wales and I am determined to capitalise on that.
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Huw Lewis AM is the Welsh government’s minister for housing, regeneration and heritage
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