The Guardian view on social housing: warm words are not enough
Since 2010, responsibility for housing has changed hands at a rate of roughly one new minister per year. The incumbent secretary of state, James Brokenshire, has been in his job since April. The minister of state for housing, Kit Malthouse, was shuffled into that brief in July. Meanwhile, the prime minister insists that dealing with the housing shortage is a matter of personal urgency for her; a “burning injustice” to be tackled. But the revolving-door pattern to appointments implies otherwise. As with everything that isn’t Brexit, there is insufficient will or administrative bandwidth in government to design and champion truly radical policy.
Tension between a worthy impulse and incapacity to act is expressed in the government’s social housing green paper, published this week. It is long on generous intentions and ungenerous with resources. The stated ambition is a “new deal” for tenants. This will involve beefing up regulation to “empower residents”; “tackling stigma”; making homes safer; and expanding supply.
All are worthy causes, but not all belong in the same category. To challenge negative stereotypes around social housing (presumably what is meant by “stigma”) is an important task, but not of equivalent urgency to building homes. Publishing league tables of landlords, so the rotten ones feel pressure to improve, while potentially worthwhile, does nothing for the 1.2 million people on council waiting lists. Fiddling around with the financial incentives that make it hard for councils to replace housing stock once tenants have exercised their “right to buy” (the paper promises consultation on “new flexibilities”) will not change the fundamentals of a broken market.
Most people on average earnings who do not already own a property see no prospect of acquiring one. Many are forced to spend such a large proportion of their income on rents that they struggle to meet the cost of other essentials – food, clothing, energy. The unavoidable remedy is an increase in the supply of social housing. But to bolster public provision so it functions as a more robust safety net, let alone a high-volume alternative to the private sector, would require a massive investment in building. It would unlock new finance on a scale beyond anything implied in a green paper that pledges no new money. It would also involve a shift in priorities towards state underpinning of public investment for collective social goods. It would involve rewriting cherished Conservative doctrines regarding home ownership and market intervention.
None of the ministers responsible for housing over the past eight years has looked even close to making that journey. Instead, the government tiptoes around symptoms of market failure and tinkers at the margins of a vast social and economic crisis. To take this green paper seriously as an exercise in addressing problems connected to social housing requires good evidence that ministers are themselves serious about the task. And there is none.