What does ‘good’ look like?

Posted: April 25, 2024 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Affordable housing |Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

What should we be aiming for in housing policy? Read just about any government’s green or white paper published over the last 30 years and the answer will be something like ‘decent homes for everyone at a price they can afford’.

If that sounds straightforward, achieving it has proved to be anything but. For every lofty pronouncement like that made over the decades, the housing options available have become less decent, more insecure and more unaffordable.

So what should ‘good’ look like – and how can we get there? Homes for All, a report out this week from the Church of England and Nationwide Foundation sets out to provide some of the answers.

Most of these are not rocket science. The objectives of building more homes, especially more for social rent, making existing homes more energy efficient, increasing the options available for an ageing population and reducing homelessness to a bare minimum would appear in most of our lists of desired outcomes.

But considering them all together as part of one housing system throws up some hard choices that are too often ducked by policy makers.

To take just one example, most people would agree with ensuring that house prices rise by no more than the rate of inflation few would agree on how to get there.

Because that involves tackling an issue that is mostly unspoken in our politics: confronting the substantial chunk of the population (perhaps even a majority) who continue to profit from above-inflation house price gains.

True, those gains are illusory unless we sell up and downsize and, true, they come at the expense of our children, but most politicians would rather not touch the issue of housing wealth even as they store up problems of inter- and intra-generational inequality and stoke future social conflicts.

The same is true in many other areas. For example, we may want a wider choice of homes in the private rented sector at the same time as we want affordable rents but what happens when those aims come into conflict?

A willingness to go back to first principles and to treat apparently isolated problems as symptoms of a wider malaise with an overall system are two of the great strengths of this report.

Unsurprisingly given the involvement of the Church of England, it also argues that we have ‘a moral duty to ensure that all households have access to housing that is both affordable and acceptablein terms of standards’.

However, it also considers what it might take to deliver a housing system that really works in the interests of everyone.

The report steers clear of specific policy proposals but  suggests immediate priorities might include getting to 300,000 new homes a year and targets such as ensuring that no household on average income should have to pay more than 35 per cent of their disposable income on housing costs. 

But it also asks what it will take to keep governments from different parties focussed on those priorities in the longer term.

That involves thinking long and hard about the institutional architecture of the housing system, which currently makes no sense.

England has one department charged with generating more affordable homes and another charged with controlling the housing benefit budget whose interests often clash.

The Treasury is responsible for overall spending and can trump them both, the Cabinet Office is responsible for coordinating policy and Number 10 sets overall political direction.

It looks like, and is, a recipe for contradiction and conflict and the overwhelming evidence is that nothing worthwhile will be delivered without the personal commitment of the prime minister or the chancellor or both. Even that may not be enough and both may also be committed to fundamentally bad policy for political reasons.

So how do we tackle that dysfunctionality? The report suggests setting out a clear, long-term vision and strategy, establishing a cross-departmental committee focussed on housing and requiring government to set specific targets at least every five years and realistic targets to achieve the vision in the longer term.

Meanwhile a Housing Strategy Committee, modelled on the existing Climate Change Committee (CCC), would provide independent scrutiny of policy and delivery.

Institutional changes like that should boost strategic direction. It may not be enough to prevent future political backsliding completely but ministers will know they will face criticism from their own independent watchdog if they are tempted (as from the head of the CCC over net zero recently)

A key difference, of course, is that the government is legally committed to achieving net zero by 2050, giving extra force to the CCC’s reports.

Setting the long-term strategy within a legal framework could give the Housing Strategy Committee the same kind of authority in its work. The report stops short of making this case but there is an obvious model out there that could be adopted.

The UK is already signed up to the right to adequate housing via its ratification of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights.

In the 2010s it was regularly criticised by United Nations special rapporteurs (remember ‘the woman from Brazil’?) over policies like the bedroom tax.

In theory, then, the government should already be committed to the principles of progressive realisation of the right and no retrogression from progress so far.

In practice, there is no way to enforce the right in the courts unless it is incorporated into domestic law.

However, Scotland and Wales are already moving in this direction. The long-term vision and strategy advocated in this report could create the ideal conditions for England to follow their lead under a new government.

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