The government’s housing bill is a mess. It makes promises that it will not be able to deliver and shows a complete lack of understanding for how the English housing market works. In this sense, it is nothing new.
Part of the problem is that housing policy in England is not made by the minister for housing. These people come and go, barely leaving a trace. They administer small projects and token schemes and every so often get their picture taken wearing a hard hat.
Housing policy is made by the Treasury, Number 10 and the Bank of England. The most important policies affecting housing in the last parliament included changes to housing benefit levels, freezing interest rates and policies to stimulate demand such as the Help to Buy scheme. None of these came from the minister for housing.
Perhaps it is worth quickly reviewing quite how little these policies achieved, from a housing perspective.
They failed to arrest the continued decline in the number of young people who own their own homes:
The number of new houses came nowhere near to keeping up with demand:
They failed to reduce the number of people claiming housing benefit:
The number of households living in temporary accommodation increased:
The number of people sleeping rough increased:
The housing bill presents more of the same magical thinking – all posturing and rhetoric with no chance of any real impact.
The government has announced it intends to give a generous subsidy to housing association tenants to help them use their ‘right to acquire. It will force local authorities to sell council homes in expensive areas and apparently use the money raised to pay for a huge number of poorly thought through schemes. The government will also force house builders to offer reduced price ‘starter homes’ instead of affordable homes on new developments.
These initiatives will achieve very little in the grand scheme of things. A few people will benefit from cut-price homes. A few more people will have to wait even longer to access the rapidly diminishing stock of social housing.
In the main, long-term housing trends will continue. Young people without help from their family will not be able to buy a home and more people will sleep rough. Huge numbers of people will need the government help to make rent. The number of new houses will not come anywhere close to keeping up with demand.
Many of the candidates for leader of the Labour party have talked about the importance of ‘aspiration’. Housing is an area where this word has a clearly defined meaning. British people almost universally aspire to own their own home. The government’s proposals to date are clearly failing to help people make this aspiration a reality.
In fact, they are failing to such a dramatic extent that it is tempting to think that they are part of an organised campaign to undermine the belief that any government could ever reverse the trend towards lower and lower home ownership. The one piece of relief is that this is certainly untrue, this government does not appear to be capable of this level of organisation.
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Thomas Neumark is a former Labour councillor and blogs at Dream Housing. He tweets @TomNeumark
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