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OPINION

Housing, housing, housing

Housing, housing, housing
August 16, 2018
Housing, housing, housing

As I recently mentioned in this column, home ownership remains the primary aspiration of many; for the less well off, safe and affordable housing will do as a start – as the election-winning Conservatives put it in 1951, “housing is the first of the social services”. But Conservative housing policy was tucked away on page 70 of the party’s 84-page 2017 election manifesto – hardly screaming ‘priority’. Now her political opponents are co-opting this hot topic for themselves; lost among the coverage of Boris Johnson this week was his description of housing as “the single biggest and most urgent crisis we face” – planting a political flag if nothing else. 

As a shrewd political operative and student of history, Mr Johnson will no doubt also be very aware of the importance of housing to his party’s political fortunes over the years. In 1951, Winston Churchill correctly gambled that housing would prove electoral gold and tasked then housing minister Harold Macmillan with building 300,000 homes a year – he more than delivered, and the Tories spent over a decade in power. But, as Mr Johnson alludes, housing today is more often seen as opportunistic builders using government largesse to fatten up their margins and pay their directors huge salaries – the worst excesses of capitalism writ large in bricks and mortar.  

Yet it is not too late for May to win lost hearts and minds. In fact, this week saw the launch of the government’s green paper on social housing and an ambition to kick-start council house building. But critics are rightly sceptical that the government has the will or, like Macmillan, ability to deliver – they point out that there is no suggestion of new funding, either through taxation or by lifting the ability of councils to borrow to build. There also seems to be little exploration of new markets-led funding models that bring much-needed private cash, either from pension funds or listed-Reits like Civitas and Triple Point, or any answer to the biggest question of all – with labour and skills in short supply, who will build these homes? 

While I feel like I have expended too many words on property of late, it is increasingly hard to ignore the importance housing as a pillar of the UK economy – Churchill’s Conservatives described housing as “one of the keys to increased productivity”, and the subsequent building boom did indeed underpin a long era of prosperity and rising living standards. Housing has been similarly important to the UK’s recent economic performance – the nation can ill-afford a reversal now.