Right to Buy is a deeply unequal stopgap, not a solution to the Housing Crisis

Under George Osborne's direction, the Conservative approach to tackling the housing crisis was to resurrect Thatcherism. This came in the form of Right to Buy, the cheap sell off of social housing to first time buyers.

The trouble is, from the start, it was always going to be a time and resource limited solution. Eventually, as always, the Tories would run out of public assets to privatise and the well would run dry.

As New Statesman Political Editor George Eaton put it, "the problem with Thatcherism is that eventually you run out of other people's assets."

Today, the homelessness charity Crisis and the Local Government Association (LGA) were on the same page in calling out the effects of Right to Buy on social housing: the draining of a vital resource that is not being replaced.

Right to Buy, like Thatcherite policies in the 1980s, plugged gaps created by the withdrawal of the state with privatised public assets to buy time for the private sector to get prepared to take over and pick up the slack.

Osborne's policy kept the middle class housing sector afloat at the expense of social housing - even that technically owned by housing association independent from the government - which was sorely needed to provide affordable shelter for the least well off.

Now as then, the results are wildly inconsistent and deeply unequal.

Crisis have put forward a strategy to eliminate poverty in the next decade that puts new social housing - a hundred thousand new homes a year - at the centre. It combines these with a national rollout of Housing First and the strengthening of the rights of renters.

The LGA say that the core of any sustainable social housing plans, like those proposed by Crisis, must by necessity be devolving proper funding to local government so it can get on with the work of building homes.

For progressives, redistributing funds to local government for affordable and social housing is a clear cut issue - especially to poorer areas that see the least benefit from a scheme that doesn't even return the full receipts from the sale of local housing assets. But will Conservatives listen?

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.

'Housing market' is a lie - there is no market, only a corporate monopoly, fueling a crisis, that needs desperately to be broken

Government right-to-buy policy is plugging holes in the greedy housing sector, but is unsustainably syphoning homes form social housing to do so.

Britain's housing crisis rumbles on. When Theresa May returns to the role of Prime Minister in earnest, to face whoever will be (at least nominal) leader of the opposition, getting to grips with housing has to be at the top of the list.

An uncomfortable fact for the Conservative leader is that the money made by private landlords from housing benefit - received as a welfare benefit by households in order to pay their rent - has doubled over the last decade (Gayle, 2016).

That fact goes side by side with the continued rise in rents and prices, escalating beyond reality for the overwhelming majority of people (Chakrabortty, 2016), and the failure of successive governments to build sufficient housing. And then there is the siphoning off of homes from social housing stock (Williams, 2016).

To plug shortfalls in properties available for purchase by those with the means, former Chancellor George Osborne raided social housing and housing associations. Rent-to-buy took affordable housing for the least well off, to feed a greedy and bloated system in danger of collapse.

All of these facts point to a very particular problem. The housing system is very much tailored to the interests of a small group of people. Those who own property and those who have capital to spend, playing in a housing market that is exclusively for them.

Conservative policy has failed the worst off and served only an upper middle class of wealthy property owners and those fortunate enough to already have some 'equity' in the system. Everyone else, the poor and the young, is automatically frozen out.

For some this is a double blow. While private landlords reap astounding profits from housing benefits - since the government effectively subsidises this rentier practise, so literally encourages this state of affairs - it is the taxpayer that is funding this policy.

What is more astounding is that investing public funds instead in a big increase in homes in the social housing sector would actually reduce this private landlord subsidy by billions (Gayle, 2016), saving taxpayers huge sums at a time when spending on essential services is stretched thin.

Amongst the first tasks has to be to get to grips with the rental sector. New York housing chief Alicia Glen has argued that Britain's problem is the expensive and inefficient private landlording system (Murray, 2016), which flies in the face of the lower costs, and so cheaper rents, of operating at scale - although that implies that the purpose is efficient service not self-enrichment of rentiers.

But larger organisations, operating at scale shouldn't be the end of the story. There is room and need for mutuals and cooperative principles - for rental housing that can operate at scale and which honours the stake held by those investing time and money in living in those properties.

However, this is nothing less than a complicated situation. Not all private landlords bad or greedy. For some it is an essential source of income in hard times - look at the difficult situation facing tourist trammelled Barcelona, where efforts to stop illegal renting to tourists runs up against the needs of people with otherwise limited sources of income.

A small clan of property owners are being enriched by rising property prices as most people are simply cut off from access. Some exploit that position further as rentiers, raking in cash from private renters and from public subsidy. It is clear that a new approach is needed.

Part one of any response has to be public investment: build more housing and make most of it affordable, truly affordable, social housing. So many ills could be fixed through this one act of government spending, one that would pay itself back many times over.

But part two is more difficult. The entire housing sector needs to be urgently rethought, because it is not fit for use. Housing, a human essential, a necessity like fresh water, is being held ransom by those few holding it as property - stifling supply and bloating prices in bubbles that have disastrous rippling results.

Not least, steps should be taken to discourage unproductive property accumulation - like land banking or small rental property portfolios that gouge prices - and policies such as land value taxes should be taken into serious consideration, because the phrase 'housing market' is a lie. There is no market, only a corporate monopoly that needs desperately to be broken.