Two stories I’ve run across today suggest that over coming months and years there’s a really big an important issue that will bite politicians – an issue that has barely merited a mention in the “great debates”, hasn’t registered at all in the frothy new media campaigning and yet concerns one of the true basics of people’s lives – housing.The first story is a report from the New Statesman (that I found suitably fisked by JuliaM) on Margaret Hodge’s campaign in Barking:
“There are 11,695 families on Barking and Dagenham's housing list and local anger has been directed at the new faces they see down the street. As I follow Hodge canvassing, complaints about housing crop up again and again. We hear tales of families that have had to wait three, five or even more years to get a home. One man has spent eight years living in a one-bedroom flat with his wife and four children.”
Now Labour machine politicians like Hodge want to blame all this on right-to-buy – on the wicked Tories. But that’s only part of the story – yes right-to-buy had an impact on the stock of social housing. Yes, right-to-buy has led to an increase in private rented property on formerly mono-tenure estates. But local authorities like Barking have not replaced the shortfall and more importantly have created the situation where only people in “priority need” get access to social housing.
The result of this is precisely what the residents of Barking interviewed by the New Statesman were saying – houses in the area are simply not available for the working sons and daughters of current residents. Not because they’re white but because they aren’t in “priority need”. Which brings me to the second story where Victoria Derbyshire interviews a soldier wounded in Iraq and who cannot get a home (a pre-requisite for getting a job) because he is not in “priority need”.
In truth our housing system – I can’t credit it with the positive term “market” – is almost entirely dysfunctional. Constrained by stifling rules and regulations, battered by politicians and simply not delivering good homes for hard working people like it should. And, unless something changes, it will get worse – already in London so-call “affordable” rents are not really affordable for low paid workers and this will be the case in Leeds and other cities in the next few years.
As I said, be prepared for housing to become a really big issue some point soon.
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1 comment:
I very much hope you're right, and that housing does become a big issue. But it's hardly fair to complain that LA's have not replaced housing stock lost to right-to-buy sales when there has been neither the funding nor the legal basis for them to do so until the last few months, and even then only in tiny numbers. Will funding housing be more important than paying down the deficit? I rather doubt it, whatever the result next Thursday.
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