It is common knowledge that the supply of new homes in England, for both owner-occupiers and renters, has failed to cope with rising demand in the face of a growing population and an increasing number of independent households. This supply-demand mismatch has led to increased local authority spending on homelessness, in the numbers of people in temporary accommodation, especially in London, and also encouraged rapacious property speculation.
It has been stated by those in the know that at least 250,000 new homes have to be built each year, which is almost double the annual average of 130,500 new homes achieved in England during the 2010s. The Conservative Manifesto of 2019 therefore set out to make amends for the inaction of preceding Conservative and Labour governments. But under the nation’s devolution arrangements, the UK Government is only responsible for housing in England. An extra 300,000 new homes a year in England were thus promised by the mid-2020s, with an unspecified proportion to be delivered under the Affordable Homes Programme. The definition of “affordable housing” is somewhat misleading, referring as it does to house prices that are set at 80 per cent of the market rate for local housing, which can be much too high to begin with. Under this programme, the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities allocates Treasury funds to Homes England (outside London) and to the Greater London Authority to achieve their set targets. Despite unfulfilled nationwide housebuilding targets, on 5 December 2022 the UK Government abandoned its plans to impose mandatory targets on local councils altogether. This action followed pressure from a group of sixty Conservative MPs seeking to protect their ‘Not in My Backyard’ constituents from house-building initiatives in leafy and desirable residential areas.
Social housing has come under threat over the past four decades from neoliberalism and free market sentiments which treat houses primarily as liquid assets whose exchange prices are determined by the interaction between supply and demand. Margaret Thatcher’s vision of a ‘property-owning democracy’ led to the Housing Act of 1980 and introduced Right-to-Buy and a Tenants’ Charter, under which local council tenants could either buy their flats or houses at a discounted mortgage or were allowed to renovate their properties without taking on ownership. These newly acquired assets could then be traded as commodities, allowing upward mobility in the housing market. The present shortage of social housing stock can also be attributed to a number of other additional factors. There is a shortage of land deemed suitable for residential planning permission; the planning process is at times sluggish and unduly rigid; the construction workforce, reliant on ageing and overseas workers, has shrunk significantly; and inflation has added to the expense of building materials (concrete, timber, steel). In particular, there is a shortage of homegrown skilled workers with appropriate NVQ qualifications and completed apprenticeships.
Home building in England is now in the hands of the private sector. Market forces have ensured that property developers prefer to cater to the needs of the rich and focus on properties with high resale value rather than respond to areas of higher demand, such as building homes for social renters in deprived locations, where returns on investment are much lower. Any trickle-down effect on the provision of social housing in the vicinity of luxury development is also often hard to identify.
Social housing is normally provided by local councils, often via tenant management organisations, or by independent housing associations (registered social landlords that benefit from government grants). A shortage of social housing has forced many low-income people into the deregulated private-rental sector of high rents and insecure tenures, where a reluctance to impose rent controls is based on the belief that they disincentivise landlords to invest in and maintain their properties have kept rents high.
The rising demand for homes has boosted house prices to unreasonable levels, with median house prices in England at eight times median annual gross household incomes. These increases are most pronounced in London and the South-East of England, which feature some of the lavish excesses of brand-new housing schemes. The skyline in London has been transformed over the last two decades by a proliferation of skyscrapers. High-rise luxury housing developments and gated low-rise communities have replaced decaying public housing estates, displacing the original residents in a process of ‘gentrification’, and rejuvenated forlorn brownfield urban industrial sites and hitherto neglected locations along rivers, canals, and railway lines. While luxury flats benefit from concierge services, and such enhancements as spas, gyms, cinemas, private dining rooms, bar lounges, co-working spaces, multifaith spaces and the like, a lower tier of social housing is rapidly expanding, in the form of high-density poor-quality housing, lacking adequate parking facilities and access to transport infrastructure and local schools.
There are many inequities in the provision of new homes. The building of luxury properties has outstripped actual demand, leading to many instances of vacant possession, while social housing continues to be under-provided for. The desire for deregulation of the construction industry has conspired to keep building standards low and may have compromised fire safety. Many reports testify to the varying quality of new-build homes, depending on region, and complaints related to customer service and aftersales care abound. Poor construction, unfinished fittings, and faults with utilities are among the many problems cited. Unfortunately, there is no single licensing body for builders and licensing with the National House-Building Council (NHBC) or Federation of Master Builders is voluntary.
New-build homes should ideally be made from eco-friendly materials and should be energy- efficient, with Energy Performance ratings at either A or B. New high-density developments should come with sustainable green leisure spaces and appropriate amenities. An appreciation of social architectural principles will hopefully avoid “sink estates” or glorified slums that only serve as incubators of future social tensions and low-level crime. Whether lessons are being learnt from the misdeeds of the past has yet to be determined. The Grenfell Tower fire of June 2017 drew attention, once again, to expensive but inadequate refurbishment programmes involving social housing. The bar had already been set low by the cheap, poorly designed and constructed inner-city tower blocks of the late 1960s and early 1970s, which often used untested prefabricated large panel building systems in a hurry to get the job done. It must not be overlooked that undue haste can lead to avoidable waste that is costly to dispose of.
It seems that owner-occupancy, rather than long-term rental, is what most people in England eventually aspire to. The Help to Buy equity loan scheme (introduced in 2013), shared ownership, and 95 per cent mortgages are among the initiatives to help England’s residents attain their dream of making it onto the property ladder. But despite these innovations, the chances for home ownership for many seem vanishingly small when genuinely affordable homes, provided at social rents, are in short supply.
While an English person’s home may no longer be their castle, it should not end up as a a slum of the future instead. A walk around London’s latest high-density housing developments and privatised public spaces is revealing. What is on offer does not necessarily forebode well for the future.
Ashis Banerjee