What to do about Housing

 

What to do about housing.

 

Back in the 1930s the Urban District Council where I live decided to convert a few fields on the edge of our little mill-town into a “Garden Village.”  I believe the councillors went on a few (freebie?) trips to southern “Garden Cities” to gain ideas, and the result was a substantial “Housing Scheme.”

A local historian tells me that  the citizenry were very proud to have “Garden Village,”* even if they couldn’t afford to live in it, as the rents, at around £1 a week, were beyond their means,  with average workers’ pay at the time  about £3 per week.

  My parents must have taken the plunge because I was born in one of the houses, but by the time I was a month old they realised they could no longer afford the rent and moved to a “back to back” which, I think, was about 7/6d a week - just over a third of a £, or about 1/8^th of my father's  wage, assuming he earned about the average.  As was pretty normal at the time, my mother didn’t work outside the home, but was a “housewife.”

Fortunately for me, and my sister, our parents managed eventually to scrape together the funds for a mortgage, which I think was borrowed not from a building society, but from the local council,  bought a house, and my sister and I  benefitted from the proceeds of their struggle in due course.

Unfortunately, for many young people today, and especially offspring of renters, the housing market has been so badly mismanaged that prices have exploded, the  mortgages are unaffordable  and rents so high that they can take up to half of take-home pay, even for very substandard accommodation, which can be occupied without security and subject to “no fault” eviction by the landlords.

Given that security and shelter are two of our basic needs, this is surely unacceptable

An article in the Guardian last October by a Phineas Harper, director of “Open Cities,”  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/oct/23/starmer-fix-britain-housing-crisis-six-p

 outlines the following six proposals to the next government to  begin to solve the crisis.

 

1.    End the “right to buy” social housing.

2.    Permit and enable local councils to invest heavily in building social house building.

3.    Revise the VAT rules. (Apparently it is more profitable to knock down a defective  house and build another that it is to repair  the defects.)

4.    Regulate rents and end no-fault evictions.

5.    Tax empty homes.

6.    Revise the planning rules to give local authorities the powers to ensure that builders actually stick to the percentages of ”affordable” housing they promised in their planning applications.

To these I would add four further suggestions:

1.    Encourage local authorities to make brownfield sites “building ready” so that they are as attractive to builders as greenfield sites.

2.    Tax land, especially that already approved for house building but, one suspects, kept unused in anticipation of higher prices in the future.

3.    Ensure that the increase in value which land accrues when it is re-scheduled for “building purposes” goes to the local authority, and not to the land-owner.

4.    Remove the exemption of the “principal primary residence” from capital gains tax.

Clearly the above will be difficult to achieve in one parliament, or even two, but whoever forms the next government should make a start and, as far as possible set a pathway from which it will be difficult to deviate.  It is high time that houses and flats became “machines in which to live” rather than cash cows to support a luxurious retirement or feather the nests of offspring.

 

·      * The term “Garden Village “ didn’t stick and the development became known as the “Housing Scheme” or just “the  Scheme“ and as far as I know, at least to my generation, it still is.

 

P PS (added 26th March)   By a happy coincidence there's another article by Phineas Harper in today's Guardian.  Read it here:

 https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/26/councils-sell-off-more-houses-right-to-buy-failure

B Briefly, he explains that under the present rules councils are dissuaded from building social housing becasue  after a few years the "right to buy" means that they may be forced to flog them off at a discount.*  In their past two manifestos Labour have promised to abolish the "right to buy" but appear to be going to drop this commitment now.

*A *A tenant qualifies for a discount after only three years of secured tenancy. The discount may be from 35% to 70%.  The tenant may then sell the house at true market value, maybe to a "buy to let" landlord.