When a top Tory radically alters her view over social housing, it really is a crisis
Ros Wynne-Jones standing up for you and your family
AT the launch of the Shelter Housing Commission this week – set up after the devastating fire at Grenfell – one commissioner stood out.
There, among housing activists, Labour MPs and social housing tenants, was Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, former Chair of the Tory Party.
For Lady Warsi, taking part in the Commission has radically altered her view of social housing.
“I think it’s important in these times for politicians to admit they have changed their minds,” she says.
“I started out putting my cards on the table saying I believed ideologically in leaving it to the housing market to fix things. I didn’t think it was the role of the state.
“But taking part in the commission has been very challenging. I realised I can’t tell my own story of social mobility any more.
“This fundamentally came back to me, personally. I bought my first house in West Yorkshire for two and a half times my annual salary. You can’t do that now. That’s a story that won’t be told in future.”
The age-old Tory narrative that if people just worked a bit harder they’d succeed had failed her. The ‘market’ wasn’t fixing things. It was holding people back. “I wanted to tell the story that if you work hard it will all work out, but that story is no longer true,” Warsi says. “People on low incomes are spending 67% of their income on rent. It’s decimating social mobility.
“Three million people are in need. The level is so big the economic case follows for a National Housing Service. It’s the same argument as funding a big project like HS2.”
If a former chair of the Conservative Party is now saying this, the housing crisis must have truly reached epidemic proportions. But it’s also rare in these rigid political times to hear a politician change a fundamental view. Warsi says it was the lawyer in her that did it, looking dispassionately at the stark figures the commission were confronted by. But it was also imagining herself as the young woman she once was in today’s Britain. As a young solicitor, she was able to buy a house. “The town I was born and raised in, young solicitors couldn’t buy a house there now,” she says. “They might be on £18,000
– two and half times that won’t buy you a house.
The market has simply failed. Housing costs have risen far more than pay. People can’t even afford to rent.” The report clearly shows that the savings to the welfare bill of building three million houses would massively offset the cost of the housebuilding programme – and leave the country with national assets instead of private
landlords profiting wildly from rip-off tenancies. It also prompted another Commissioner – former Labour leader Ed Miliband – to admit he had got it wrong. “Absolutely. I wasn’t bold enough in 2015 when it came to social housing,” he says. “That’s why I’m here today, out of recognition that we need to be bolder as a country, that all parties haven’t been bold enough.
“Over the past 30 or 40 years I’m afraid it’s been a massive failure of public policy. That has to change.” The disparate commissioners and voices behind the report were wrangled by Rev Mike Long, superintendent of Notting Hill Methodist Church, which opened its doors to Grenfell residents after the fire. Commissioners included Ed Daffarn, the campaigner from the tower who had predicted the fire, and local resident and organiser Samia Badani. But while prompted by Grenfell’s horrific call to action, the report is just as important for the invisible emergencies happening up and down the country. The record evictions, the quiet misery of families in bed and breakfasts, the people in accommodation that disables them.
“For someone like me, this report could change everything,” says Anthony Pynaert, a disabled dad who lives in a flat he can’t move around in or leave on his own. His fiancee works long hours as an HGV driver, and he has a four-year-old son and 11-yearold stepson who has ADHD and autism, making it hard for the two boys to share a room.
“We’re paying over £1,000 a month for two bedrooms,” he says. “I have to sleep on a sofa bed downstairs with my son. I can’t get down the steps outside. God knows what would happen if there was a fire. It’s very stressful. I don’t have any independence, I have to ask my partner Lisa to do things and she’s at work from 2am.”
Anthony, 62, who lives in Chesham, Bucks, had polio as a young child, and now has Post-Polio Syndrome. He uses a wheelchair. Recently, after an accident at home, he says the paramedics struggled to get him out of the building and into the ambulance.
Despite everything, Anthony’s family has almost zero chance of getting social housing. “We barely have any points on the system,” he says. “We need what the report says – a moment like after World War Two where there is a major overhaul of everything. It would give us so much hope.”
It’s important for politicians to admit they have changed their minds