Cameron’s housing announcement is his latest attempt to wear Mrs Thatcher’s clothes.
Cameron’s housing announcement is his latest attempt to wear Mrs Thatcher’s clothes
Tory conferences have often kicked off with a prime ministerial housing announcement. This year is no exception. David Cameron has indicated that around 100,000 new ‘starter’ homes will be provided to first-time-buyers aged under 40 years with a discount of 20 per cent on the market price.
Achieving this target is contingent on the Tories being in government come next May of course, so it’s jam tomorrow as so often with such pre-conference announcements.
As he did at the party conference in 2011, when he quadrupled the average discount to £75,000 for the right of tenants to buy their council homes, Cameron’s housing announcement in Birmingham over the weekend is his latest attempt to wear Mrs Thatcher’s clothes as the champion of the ‘property owning democracy’.
It’s worth considering the outcome of Cameron’s ‘rejuvenated’ Right to Buy, which has resulted in the sale of 8,500 social homes with a maximum of 6,400 replacements apparently appearing at some indeterminate future date. This is far from the one-for-one replacement promised by Cameron in 2011 and leaves a shortfall of at least 2,000 social homes.
So responses to this latest housing gimmick should be accompanied with a huge pinch of salt.
The location of the ‘starter’ homes (i.e. very small) just announced will be brownfield sites, mainly in cities and towns, so leaving the Tory countryside free from shouldering its fair share of accommodating the UK’s housing needs, which run at 250,000 extra homes annually for the foreseeable future.
The 20 per cent discount, which will still mean the average price for these homes will be five times the average wage, will be achieved through cheaper brownfield land, by setting aside both the zero-carbon homes standard and developers’ obligations to provide social homes under section 106 planning requirements.
So much for the greenest government in history. And the 5m people on social housing waiting lists will just have to continue to wait.
This announcement is the latest in a series from a government attempting to fill the void where a Housing Strategy should be.
Chart (1) shows the scale of the housing problem with a thirty year downwards trend in the annual number of homes completed. In the last four years, barely half of the required annual number have been provided, storing-up problems for a growing population almost 5m higher in England since Mrs. Thatcher came to power.
Yet we are building far fewer homes for this larger population, which also has a faster rate of household formation due to aging and the growth in single person living. In fact, in 1978, more social homes were built than total homes in 2013 by the private and social sectors combined.
The solution, which is ideologically alien to today’s Tory Party, but not to that of Macmillan, Douglas-Hume, Heath or Major, is to build more social homes, and especially more council homes, as SHOUT has advocated, using public subsidy for bricks and mortar investment rather than lining the pockets of private landlords.
But perhaps that 1 in 4 Tory MPs are private landlords explains the reticence.
Kevin Gulliver is director of Birmingham-based research charity the Human City Institute and chair of the Centre for Community Research but writes in a personal capacity
16 Responses to “Another Tory housing gimmick”
SimonB
The rural vs urban “fair share” argument is spurious. Better to consider south east vs the rest. Development needs to be balanced across the regions, along with economic and government bases.
The wizard wheeze that you have missed is that the few new builds will be subsidised with tax exemptions, including the new Community Infrastructure Levy (replacing Section 106 payments). This money is directly linked to adding infrastructure to accommodate new developments. Essentially the proposals are for local government and utilities to sub the costs. The effect could be simply a rise in council taxes, but if capped it would mean another increment in the running down of council services. Utility prices may rise too, or again we’ll see services further run down so that dividends can be paid.
It’s another nasty, cynical move when what is really needed is a huge program to build social housing to a good standard across the country.
Dave Roberts
Immigration?
Leon Wolfeson
You have no other thought, it seems, other than to blame the Other – and you’d need new targets if you got your way.
No, there was no systematic underbuilding of houses for 34 years in your world, it’s all the fault of the paying students, the nasty people working for multinationals, etc.
You are all in favour, of course, of your rich buddies buying up property in London, so let’s not mention that. Oh right, I did.
Leon Wolfeson
No, the basic issue is it’s “discounts” (as you say, with cash ripped from elsewhere) for houses, which will predominately go (again) to people who can afford to pay a substantial down-payment. Not the people most in need of housing.
Adding costs to utilities is especially nasty though, I agree, since that will *directly* hammer the poor.
And of course, as the article notes, there will be no affordable housing built as a result, etc.
Jack
Who wants to live in social housing? No-one, that’s who. People only live there because they can’t afford anywhere else to live. Take a tour around a social housing estate in any big city and see whether you fancy it.
Social housing is flawed in concept. It creates areas of economic separation and keeps people trapped in their social and economic strata.