Tories trashed homes dream
Last week – under the cover of the Parliamentary debate on Article 50 – the Government slipped out statements and a White Paper on its failure in hospital care and housing.
Typically, the Tories blamed everyone except themselves.
They released a White Paper (a discussion document on what the Government might do) called “Fixing Our Broken Housing Market”.
Sajid Javid, the Cabinet minister responsible for housing, said it proposed “radical” reforms.
In 2011, David Cameron launched a 78-page White Paper on housing, which he described as “radical”.
The following year he unveiled “a major package” to stimulate the economy and boost house building.
Then in 2013, George Osborne donned his hard hat to announce “Help to Buy”, where taxpayers subsidised other people to get a mortgage on houses worth up to £600,000!
Since 2010, as my good friend Lord Kennedy discovered, there have been more than 1,000 housing announcements by the Tories. All helped to break the housing market.
Cameron built fewer homes than any peacetime PM since the 1920s.
The number of new affordable homes below market price to rent and to buy fell to the lowest level in almost a quarter of a century.
And the number of properties built for genuinely affordable social rent is the lowest on record.
Only one home in every six sold under Thatcher’s Right to Buy has been replaced, and one in four families now rents privately.
Since 2010 the number of rough sleepers has doubled.
It is a failure of the Tory ideology of prioritising house ownership at the expense of social housing.
In 1997, Labour inherited a housing crisis after 18 years of Tory misrule. There’d been one of the lowest levels of house building, with a record level of homelessness, cuts in housing finance support, a declining economy with high unemployment and high interest rates.
Thatcher’s Right to Buy led to us losing two million council homes for ever. It also cost the taxpayer over £40billion because of the 50 per cent discount Thatcher gave to people wanting to buy their council homes.
In London, more than a third went to private landlords who charged hard-up tenants inflated rents.
So the Tories spent billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money to flog homes off on the cheap, then billions more in increased housing benefit.
It took Labour over 12 years to reverse most of these policies, increase the subsidy for social housing and improve two million council homes after years of neglect.
We increased home ownership, protected the green belt and put more emphasis on building on brownfield sites. We also gave more resources to councils and housing associations to provide social housing. We reduced homelessness to a record low.
Cameron and May repeated all the same Tory mistakes, pursuing home ownership at the expense of social housing. They also doubled the wageto-price ratio, meaning people would have to pay more than seven times their salary for a mortgage.
May’s White Paper on housing is great on promises but short on policies on how to meet their target of two million new homes by 2020.
There’s also very little on social housing for rent, with housing associations forced to accept Right to Buy too, reducing social housing further.
The only decent idea they’ve proposed is a Labour one: forcing developers to build on land within a certain time or hand it back.
When Ed Miliband proposed it in 2013 he was accused by the Tories of being like Marxist Robert Mugabe. Now they’ve nicked it.
Within 48 hours it was decisively rejected by all those involved in the housing market.
Any good housing policy must reflect social justice in homes for all to buy or rent, which governments are responsible for delivering.
The only way to do that is to lift the restriction councils have on borrowing to build council houses.
As the Government has doubled the national debt to £1.8trillion to pay for their failed policy of austerity, they’re in no position to lecture councils on good housekeeping.