Amid considerable fanfare, the Housing minister Yvette Cooper, published a Green Paper less than a fortnight ago supposedly designed to confront what Gordon Brown has identified as the most urgent item on his agenda: social housing. An additional £3bn will be spent on new social housing over three years, and a commitment to build three million new homes by 2010/11, including 210,000 classed as “affordable”. At 70,000 affordable houses a year, a rough estimate reveals that it will take 32 years just to meet the current 1.6 million backlog!
Somehow this baseline figure seems to have got lost amidst the high-fives from those who believe that due to careful lobbying ‘Gordon Brown is edging towards them’. The applause is down to an apparent U-turn in allowing councils, for the first time since Margaret Thatcher began flogging off council homes, to use rents from the housing still in their ownership to fund new build. With one enormous caveat that we will come back to: the private sector has been handed responsibility for delivering on the Government’s promise.
What this means is that the belated acceptance that there must be a rental sector, and part of that sector needs to be subsidised is merely symbolic. Pure window dressing. For even if the Government fulfils its new commitment to increase “affordable” housing, this will spectacularly fall short of demand. Because even the very modest targets set by Yvette Cooper will never be met. Housebuilders won’t build them and the councils will not be able to make them.
Channel 4’s ‘Dispatches’ broadcast on Monday July 30 revealed that builders and those lobbying for them are already boasting that they have ‘secured safeguards against prescriptive…policies dictating size, type and affordability to developers.’ So that is effectively that.
In any sane society the obvious policy would be to build according to requirements. But despite Brown’s apparent retreat from the more messianic right-wing zealotry associated with Blair, anything more substantial than a token concession would be ideological heresy for New Labour. So rather than shape housing policy to meet people’s needs, people may instead be shaped to fit in with housing policy. Here is a flavour:
“One option” according to Mary Dejevsky, a columnist for The Independent,(‘Home ownership is a fixation we need to get over’, ‘The Independent’, 24 July 2007) “would be to bring rents and conditions of tenure more into line with the private sector in any given area, so that social housing would cease to be such a bargain. Another would be for councils to find out exactly who lives in their social housing – they might be surprised at the amount of subletting and profiteering that goes on – and whether those without work or local family ties could not be persuaded to move.”
“There are parts of the country where housing is in surplus and prices are static to falling. Is it really not possible to match up spare housing with those who need it? Coercion is clearly unacceptable, but where people are completely dependent on the state and without job prospects, would it be so wrong for the state to have a say in where they lived? Transfers within the local authority system are easier than they were, but maybe there should be sticks as well as carrots.”
It all seems to makes such perfect sense except that in following the same line of thinking, a reasonable argument could also be made for the return of labour camps. No coercion naturally. And this particular kite has been flown before.
Some years ago a government department suggested a set limit on housing benefit regardless of the market rents in any given area. If implemented, the unemployed or the working poor on housing benefit would be ‘encouraged’ to migrate to less sought after areas. Effectively a re-working of the old Norman Tebbit exhortation to ‘get on your bike’ but with a twist. This time the whole family gets to go with you. And the government department that came up with this brilliant wheeze was headed by? Gordon Brown. Just so you know.
Amid considerable fanfare, the Housing minister Yvette Cooper, published a Green Paper less than a fortnight ago supposedly designed to confront what Gordon Brown has identified as the most urgent item on his agenda: social housing. An additional £3bn will be spent on new social housing over three years, and a commitment to build three million new homes by 2010/11, including 210,000 classed as “affordable”. At 70,000 affordable houses a year, a rough estimate reveals that it will take 32 years just to meet the current 1.6 million backlog!
Somehow this baseline figure seems to have got lost amidst the high-fives from those who believe that due to careful lobbying ‘Gordon Brown is edging towards them’. The applause is down to an apparent U-turn in allowing councils, for the first time since Margaret Thatcher began flogging off council homes, to use rents from the housing still in their ownership to fund new build. With one enormous caveat that we will come back to: the private sector has been handed responsibility for delivering on the Government’s promise.
What this means is that the belated acceptance that there must be a rental sector, and part of that sector needs to be subsidised is merely symbolic. Pure window dressing. For even if the Government fulfils its new commitment to increase “affordable” housing, this will spectacularly fall short of demand. Because even the very modest targets set by Yvette Cooper will never be met. Housebuilders won’t build them and the councils will not be able to make them.
Channel 4’s ‘Dispatches’ broadcast on Monday July 30 revealed that builders and those lobbying for them are already boasting that they have ‘secured safeguards against prescriptive…policies dictating size, type and affordability to developers.’ So that is effectively that.
In any sane society the obvious policy would be to build according to requirements. But despite Brown’s apparent retreat from the more messianic right-wing zealotry associated with Blair, anything more substantial than a token concession would be ideological heresy for New Labour. So rather than shape housing policy to meet people’s needs, people may instead be shaped to fit in with housing policy. Here is a flavour:
“One option” according to Mary Dejevsky, a columnist for The Independent,(‘Home ownership is a fixation we need to get over’, ‘The Independent’, 24 July 2007) “would be to bring rents and conditions of tenure more into line with the private sector in any given area, so that social housing would cease to be such a bargain. Another would be for councils to find out exactly who lives in their social housing – they might be surprised at the amount of subletting and profiteering that goes on – and whether those without work or local family ties could not be persuaded to move.”
“There are parts of the country where housing is in surplus and prices are static to falling. Is it really not possible to match up spare housing with those who need it? Coercion is clearly unacceptable, but where people are completely dependent on the state and without job prospects, would it be so wrong for the state to have a say in where they lived? Transfers within the local authority system are easier than they were, but maybe there should be sticks as well as carrots.”
It all seems to makes such perfect sense except that in following the same line of thinking, a reasonable argument could also be made for the return of labour camps. No coercion naturally. And this particular kite has been flown before.
Some years ago a government department suggested a set limit on housing benefit regardless of the market rents in any given area. If implemented, the unemployed or the working poor on housing benefit would be ‘encouraged’ to migrate to less sought after areas. Effectively a re-working of the old Norman Tebbit exhortation to ‘get on your bike’ but with a twist. This time the whole family gets to go with you. And the government department that came up with this brilliant wheeze was headed by? Gordon Brown. Just so you know.