The greatly increased difficulty for young adults of either buying a home or finding a long-term, affordable tenancy is both a generational and socioeconomic injustice, and a serious political problem. Sir Keir Starmer’s government knows this and hopes its commitment to build 1.5m new homes will shore up support among voters.
Making people more secure, so that disappointment and grievance do not make them easy targets for rightwing populists, is a vital task for social democratic parties everywhere. In the UK, where accommodation costs are 44% higher than the western European average, and younger people are disproportionately trapped in low-quality homes, policies to support those in housing need are a pressing priority.
The renters’ rights bill goes some way towards rebalancing the market in tenants’ favour. The reduction in the right-to-buy discount ought to make it easier for councils to replace homes that are sold – although with London councils scrambling to cope with soaring right-to-buy applications before the deadline, there is short-term disruption to manage first. Another change, made by the last government, was to increase taxes on landlords and second homes. Angela Rayner, the housing minister, is fighting to make new funding for affordable homes a priority in the spending review.
But house prices are now out of the reach of millions of people without family wealth to draw on, while one in 21 adults is a landlord. Building a way out of such baked-in inequalities – as ministers have pledged to do – is enormously challenging. The danger is not only that Labour finds itself unable to meet ambitious pledges in terms of numbers, or because objections lead to schemes becoming bogged down in planning and local politics. Already, it is clear that some “new towns” will be extensions to existing towns and cities – more like new suburbs.
The bigger problem is that the interests of the big building companies that the government relies on to deliver its policy are not the same as those of people who need homes. To maximise their profits, and value to shareholders, housebuilders want prices as high as possible, even if this places them out of reach for first-time buyers, or those without hefty deposits. Last month, the Competition and Markets Authority extended its investigation into seven firms that it said “may have exchanged competitively sensitive information”.
Increasing the supply of affordable homes for social rent, meanwhile, has not been seen as a priority, with even housing associations cutting back partly due to raised maintenance costs and tighter regulations since the Grenfell Tower fire. Fifteen years after George Osborne cut funding for affordable housing by 60%, the impact of this hollowing out of the state’s role as a housing provider is clearer than ever. The poorest households and those who are homeless bear the brunt, while wealthy people have been incentivised to own multiple properties and earn income from rent.
Housing is not the only area of life in which many young people face more restricted opportunities than their parents. But shelter is such a basic human need that its importance is hard to overestimate. Ministers must use every lever at their disposal to ensure that new homes are built on terms as favourable as possible to the people who will live in them – not according to rules made by developers.
Article by:Source: Editorial
