General Election 2017 - Housing: There is a progressive consensus that Britain needs more homes and more protection for renters

The future of housing in Britain is a key issue, for which the main parties rarely have a convincing answer.

It is not an overstatement to say that housing is in crisis in Britain. The housing and homelessness charity Shelter are stern in their assessment of a Britain that is short on affordable housing and facing the rise in precariousness and powerlessness that follows.

The Conservative approach to the crisis has been half-measures and pointed fingers. Despite the facts not agreeing with them, the Tory government has insisted it has built more houses than Labour - placing the present problems at their opponents feet.

Meanwhile their own response has amounted to mostly shoring up their own supporters. Disproportionately to the disadvantage of the least well off, the Tories have raided the public sector- councils and housing association - for more homes to prop up a housing market reluctant to build.

The Conservatives continue to make promises. In the Autumn, as they acknowledged they have failed to meet targets, Chancellor Philip Hammond and Sajid Javid announced plans for a mix of funds and loans to get back on target.

Theresa May has announced, during the current campaign, that new land will be made available for Councils to build social housing - though, they'll still be sold off after ten to fifteen years. And the plan isn't new, just a re-announcement of previous spending commitments.

It is painfully unclear that Conservative plans will not do much of anything to affect the fundamental problems.

What is clear is that there is a progressive consensus to be found on housing. Across the Left and Centre, there is a realisation that - at the raw heart of the matter - more homes need to be built. There is no escaping from that reality.

The Labour response has been to pledge a million new homes over five years. The plan accounts for half of those to be council and housing association homes, to be made available for affordable rents. The pledge was accompanied by a commitment to ensuring more secure tenancies and end bad letting practices.

The Liberal Democrats by comparison have pitched for 300,000 new homes a year across the next parliament. As is becoming more common, they have combined this with a plan to allow councils to levy penalty fees on absentee landlords with empty homes - up to 200% of council tax.

This theme of building homes, tackling bad landlording and taking on the problem of empty homes is also present in the Green Party's policy announcements. Their proposals pretty much match Labour's step for step and include the Lib Dems focus on bringing empty homes back into use.

However, what no party has offered is a concrete means of dealing with the fundamental problem: a 259% rise in house prices over just twenty years. The standard response has been simply to increase the sheer number of houses - hoping that increasing market supply alone will drive down prices.

Certainly, making rental more secure, longer termed and protected from bad practices - like hiked rents or exorbitant fees - more widely available will go some way to providing viable alternatives to home ownership, that will increase competitive pressure.

But at some point, some party or movement will have to address the fundamental roadblock to housing reform in Britain: the interests of homeowners, landlords, developers and the government being so closely aligned and deeply invested in the continued increase in property values as to form a cartel.

This problem goes deep into the heart of Britain's economic system and find there problems that are supposed to be extinct.

The rentier - the magnate who makes their unearned income from rent - is seen as an issue of the early twentieth and even nineteenth century, but remains a problem in modern Britain.

It was one of the things that originally led liberals to coalesce into a party to fight: the power of aristocratic landlords who maintained their wealth and privilege on the back of the work of others. Their answer was to fight for earned income to replace rent income.

Yet conservatism adapted and capitalism has kept alive at its core a rentier class, that finds disproportionate advantage. The continued prevalence of inherited wealth and the huge privilege afforded to wealth, allows a class to virtually exclude others from access to one of the most basic needs: shelter.

Addressing the grip of this cartel just simply isn't in the interest of a government - not least conservatives. In Britain, so much has been staked on 'financialisation' and that investment speculation is deeply entwined with property.

But what is the answer? The strong or expansive economies of countries like Germany and Singapore both have huge public ownership of land and housing and in the last twenty years have not seen prices rise like they have amidst Britain's private finance and privatisation boom.

The progressive parties are all putting forward plans that will be an improvement upon Conservative policy and there is real and meaningful overlap in their ideas. They recognise that Britain needs more decent affordable homes and renters need protection. That alone is enough to vote for progressive parties on the issue of housing, over Tories that raid social housing to feed an out of control market.

But the big answers on housing have yet to make their way into the party mainstream in Britain.

References

'The shortage of affordable homes'; from Shelter; as of 15 May 2017.

'What is the housing crisis'; from Shelter; as of 15 May 2017.

Aditya Chakrabortty's 'Rob the poor and give to the rich – housing policy for 2016: The bill before parliament is ideology at its purest: a full-throttle attack on social tenants everywhere'; in The Guardian; 5 January 2016.

'Spending Review Preview: Osborne has led government to bet the house on policies like Right to Buy cutting cost of living'; in The Alternative; 23 November 2015.

'House building: higher or lower depending on the date'; from Full Fact; 7 September 2016.

'The housing crisis is also a crisis of inequality', from Take Back The City, on Twitter; 21 April 2017.

Phillip Inman's 'Housing crisis: more than 200,000 homes in England lie empty - Birmingham is the city outside London with the most unused properties, followed by Bradford and Liverpool, new figures show'; in The Guardian; 20 April 2017.

Christopher Hope's 'Philip Hammond and Sajid Javid unveil £5billion fund to build tens of thousands of new homes twice as quickly by 2020'; in The Telegraph; 2 October 2016.

Kamal Ahmed's 'PM 'will not hit' one million new homes target'; on the BBC; 14 November 2016.

'General election 2017: Tory housing plan 'paid from existing budget''; on the BBC; 14 May 2017.

Rowena Mason & Anushka Asthana's 'Corbyn pins Labour's election hopes on housing reform pledges: Party to formally launch campaign in Manchester as Corbyn says he will continue as leader regardless of 8 June vote'; in The Guardian; 9 May 2017.

'General election 2017: Labour pledges to build 1m new homes'; on the BBC; 27 April 2017.

Toby Helm's 'Jeremy Corbyn ‘would build 1m new homes’ in five years of Labour: Papers reveal Labour government would borrow £15bn a year to build houses, half of which would be council houses'; in The Guardian; 27 August 2016

Tim Farron's 'I’ve told Britain’s property developers: if you won’t build houses, the Lib Dems will - Today the Lib Dems are laying down the law to developers: unless you build the homes that Britain needs, we will'; from the Liberal Democrats; 13 May 2017.

'Secure, affordable housing for everyone'; from the Green Party; as of 15 May 2017.

Laurie MacFarlane & Adam Ramsay's 'Podcast: to rebalance Britain’s economy, we must rethink land and housing economics'; from Open Democracy; 6 March 2017.

''Housing market' is a lie - there is no market, only a corporate monopoly, fueling a crisis, that needs desperately to be broken'; in The Alternative; 22 August 2016.