Saturday 15th August

The trouble with housing is that it isn’t about housing people, putting a roof over their heads, anymore; but about making money.  Like so much in the modern world it is all about money.  I grew up in a council house, and there was no stigma in that at all.  It was a perfectly decent semi-detached house with a front and a back garden and had been built in the flurry of decent housing provision after the war.  I am sure that Mum and Dad were very pleased to be offered such a nice house so soon after getting married.  They would have to wait a hell of a lot longer now.

The rot started with Thatcher and her wheeze of selling off council houses.  In order to make the idea work sitting tenants were offered huge discounts, but the key ingredient was that none of the money could be ploughed back into new council houses; it could only be used to reduce the rates.  So, at-a-stroke, council housing provision almost came to a standstill.  It was still relatively easy to buy your own house if you had a deposit and a steady job and the number of owner occupiers steadily increased until about 2003 when the ever-increasing price of houses started to put the possibility of owning your own house further and further out of ordinary people’s reach.  We now have a situation where in London and the South East it is almost impossible to buy a house without being helped by your parents.  Hundreds of thousands of young couples are living in rented flats with rents going up every couple of years – they must despair.  The number of buy-to-let mortgages keeps increasing as wealthy people decide to buy another property to let out, in effect the tenant pays your mortgage and you still retain the capital.  It’s a no-brainer – except for the poor tenant who will never own their own house or have a controlled reasonable rent; making money out of other people’s misery in effect.

And all for the love of the market, that cruel beast that makes the rich rich and the poor poorer.  At the last election all parties promised to increase the number of new houses being built, but in reality that won’t happen.  As long as housing is seen as a financial investment rather than a necessity for a decent life nothing will change.  In fact it is getting worse.