Review – Britain’s housing crisis: What went wrong?

Posted: October 24, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: Home ownership, Housebuilding, Planning, Television | 1 Comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

Watch a few minutes of the new BBC housing documentary and you’ll get annoyed. Watch an episode and you’ll be full of righteous anger.

Over two hour-long episodes, Britain’s Housing Crisis: What Went Wrong?does a great job of revealing the key episodes along the way and the bad actors at the heart of them.

Interviews with leading politicians, special advisers, financiers and developers are intercut with archive news footage that neatly illustrates the way that things got steadily worse as national politics concentrated on the external crises like the credit crunch, Brexit, Covid and the rest. These are complemented well by interviews with activists who campaigned for action to put things right.

The programme does a great job of telling the story of, as the first episode puts it, ‘how a dream was destroyed by two decades of political and economic failure’ and of putting that in the wider context of house prices inflated by lax mortgage lending to the detriment of the rest of the economy.

It traces what’s gone wrong with the property-owning democracy promised by post-war politicians as house prices have soared to ever more unaffordable levels since New Labour won the election in 1997.

But why just two decades? And why start in 1997 when that edits out key parts of the social housing story: the Right to Buy, the strangulation of council housing and the rise of housing associations and private finance.

For home ownership, it starts after the zenith of the property-owning democracy under Margaret Thatcher. It also ignores the liberalisation of the financial system in the 1980s that led to the demutualisation of building societies, broke the link between savings and lending and opened the UK mortgage market up to international capital flows.

For private renting, it leaves out the ending of security of tenure in 1988 that would later underpin the rise of Buy to Let and landlords pricing out first-time buyers.

That also meant it did not put what’s happened to house prices since 1997 in the context of previous booms. Look back to 1989-1992 and you’ll see the key difference that it was followed by a crash that eventually made prices relatively affordable again. Starting in 1997 gives the slightly misleading impression that prices have almost inevitably gone in one direction.

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Labour’s promising plans still leave big questions

Posted: October 12, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: Affordable housing, Home ownership, Housebuilding, Planning, Section 106, Social housing | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

If the polls are anything like accurate, there will be a Labour government next year. What did what could be the party’s last conference before the election tell us about its plans for housing?

There seemed to be genuine excitement at packed fringe meetings at the prospect of meaningful reform of renting and leasehold if (when?) the government fails to deliver. Potential future ministers are well aware of the key issues they will face and there was loud applause inside the main hall, especially when council housing was mentioned.

Keir Starmer’s ‘we are the builders’ speech on Tuesday ticked all the right boxes on housing supply and planning reform and he became the first potential prime minister to declare himself a Yimby.

However, the conference still left some big questions about the prospects for real change.

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Housing confined to the fringes at Conservative conference

Posted: October 5, 2023 | Author: | Filed under: Housebuilding, Leasehold, Private renting | Tags: | Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

It’s hard to know quite what to make of a Conservative conference at which housing was – quite literally – a fringe issue.

The only mention of housing in the prime minister’s speech was a reference to ‘thousands of homes for the next generation of home owners’ that will be built at the new Euston terminus of HS2.

Thousands of homes were already going to be built under the existing plan but that is now set to be ramped up under a Euston Development Corporation that seems all about maximising developer contributions from luxury flats rather than meeting local housing need.

Even levelling up secretary Michael Gove had little fresh to say about the H part of his portfolio from the main stage and made no reference to plans for renter and leasehold reform.

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