Wellbeing has been forgotten in the drive to improve employment statistics

Photograph: Job Centre Plus by Andrew Writer (License) (Cropped)

As we approach eight years of Conservative government, the impact of their time in government is becoming clearer. If we judge a society by the wellbeing of it's poorest members, the Conservatives have fallen short.

Despite low unemployment and a real terms rise in household incomes - about £600 a year between 2007/8 and 2015/16 - the poorest have not seen the benefit, caught beneath the weight of the rising cost of living and Conservative cuts to benefits and tax credits.

As we wrote in October, you can't count on increasing employment alone to improve people's wellbeing - especially if the work available is precarious, with insecure pay and hours.

Last week, Resolution Foundation released a report looking at how employment had changed over the last twenty years. It pointed out that there has been a shift among working people, on the lowest incomes, towards lower hours and part-time employment.

Resolution described this shift as, in part, unwelcome and involuntary - with a quarter of working class people wanting more hours. The squeeze on working hours is not being helped by the increasingly precarious, non-standard form of hours worked.

This situation is coinciding with the real terms increase in earnings being offset by several forces: the rising cost of housing, the rising cost of energy and the rise in households servicing growing debt.

With wage growth lagging behind consumer price rises, the cost of living is putting a great deal of pressure on the least well-off households. The Conservative drive to clamp down on welfare and drive people into work has not delivered greater wellbeing.

For seven and a half years, the Conservative approach has been steady as she goes. Even a change of Prime Minister and Chancellor has not led to a change of plan. The evidence shows that, for the wellbeing of the poorest, this needs to change.

First of all, there is a need to address the punitive impact of welfare reforms - that will see the incomes of the poorest fall 10% by 2021-22 compared to 2010. Work is not paying.

Consider: how does the government expect a household that struggles to stay afloat on a precarious income - juggling high rent and servicing debt - with no extra for savings, to meet it's needs when a job if lost and they're faced with a five week benefits application waiting period? Answer: More debt.

Second, the cost of living must be tackled. We need cheaper energy and cheaper rent. How this will be achieved in the long run - whether by community-owned services to breach the energy monopoly and an expansion of social housing and a living rent, or through increased market competition - in the short term they government action.

And third, bound to the first two, a concerted effort must be made to address the growth of household debt. Debts caused by living costs, mostly rent, are a damning indictment of the failure to make work pay - debts that only increase when help is needed most.

The least well off are being crushed and trapped under Tory policies, living with growing anxiety and precarity. Wellbeing is suffering to no discernible end. That is the tale of eight years of Conservative government.

'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.

As the Conservative Housing Bill faces criticism, Spain's municipalism movement offers hopes for an alternative way forward

The housing crisis in the UK is deep rooted and impacts on everything around it. Photograph: Regency Houses from Pixabay (License) (Cropped)

The housing crisis is one of the biggest challenges facing the UK. On Tuesday, the Conservative government's attempt to address it, the Housing and Planning Bill, returns to the Commons for its third reading.

The bill aims to introduce one of the government's priority manifesto promises, namely the extension and expansion of rent-to-buy (Foster, 2016). The Conservative plans, including forcing local authorities to sell-off high value vacant properties, have however faced criticism and protests.

Progressive critics have warned that the Conservative plan will only exacerbate problems, risking simply shifting housing out of the reach of the poorest (Chakrabortty, 2016). The dangers of the direction in which the Conservatives are heading only highlights the need to explore other avenues to find creative, positive alternatives - the most promising of which appears to be the new municipalism movement.

The Housing Crisis

Britain's housing problem is extremely serious, but can be boiled down to two main factors. First, a shortage, and second, the exorbitant cost. Recommendations call for at least 200,000 new homes to be built each year to keep up with demand (Rutter, 2014). Yet building is not even keeping up with the sell-off of social housing into private hands and costs, for buying or renting, continue to rise far beyond the reach of ordinary people (Williams, 2016).

In the face of these problems it is of the utmost importance to stress that Britain's housing crisis is at the root of so many other problems and is the impediment of so many paths to reform. Britain's housing crisis is central, not least, to the struggle to arrest the cost of living, which is afflicting both businesses and individual citizens. To name just one problem, welfare reforms, whether progressive or conservative, are hindered by the huge cost of housing benefit.

Nor is it an exclusively modern problem. The large and integrated problem of housing is a long term issue, even being pointed to as the weak link in William Beveridge's analysis and his attempts to build a flat-rate, contributory, subsistence system of social welfare (Birch, 2012).

"The attempt to fix rates of insurance benefit and pension on a scientific basis with regard to subsistence needs has brought to notice a serious difficulty in doing so in the conditions of modern Britain. This is the problem of rent. In this, as in other respects, the framing of a satisfactory scheme of social security depends on the solution of other problems of economic and social organisation."

Amongst the impediments to fixing Britain's housing problems is the matter of buy-to-let (Gallagher, 2015). Alicia Glen, New York's Deputy mayor for housing and economic development, remarked in 2014 that one factor undermining efforts at establishing affordability was the small scale of private rented housing in the UK (Murray, 2014) - an inefficient and expensive system that ignores the benefits, particularly reduced costs, of operating at scale.

Conservative Opportunism

Into the breach have stepped the Conservatives, with plans that represent an attempt at a fundamental shift, not only from public to private but also from rental to ownership (Allen & Parker, 2015). However, Conservative plans to increase housing stock in the private buyers market - by opportunistically siphoning homes out of the social housing sector - so as to drive down prices through competition, will not by itself tackle the crucial element of affordability (Williams, 2016).

In fact, critics see it as only further alienating ordinary people by taking away affordable rented housing and consolidating more of the UK's housing within a market house price bubble - far beyond the reach of those earning around the national average (Chakrabortty, 2016).

For the Conservatives, the point seems to be to complete the plans of Thatcher and theories of Willetts from the 80s and 90s (George & Wilding, 1994). Those efforts focussed on dismantling the welfare state in favour of purely market systems - which included privatised social insurance and privatised housing.

From the perspective of a progressive, the obsession with subjecting the public welfare to competition for 'earned privilege', in a kind of conservative meritocracy that ignores preordained advantages but also, of course, disadvantages, is distressing. In a system that seeks to marry negative liberty, the removal of obstacles, with selfish conservative elitism - pursuing market solutions which look for cost cutting 'competitiveness' even at the expense of livelihoods - social security would begin to look fragile.

The fact that the conservatives are ascendant and have the majority necessary to impose their ideological system makes it urgently necessary to develop a realistic, alternative progressive solution.

Better Ways

In opposition to the Conservative response to the crisis is Caroline Lucas of the Green Party (Lucas, 2016). Her Lucas Plan calls for a serious rethink of the UK's housing model. It addresses the escalating rents by calling for a Living Rent - with a clear cap that not only tightens the reins on out of control rents but seeks to reduce the cost of housing down to an accessible level.

Lucas combines this with the need for getting on with plans for building new 'eco-fit' homes and renovating existing housing to be more energy efficient. These steps could together help to tackle two of the key elements in the battle to arrest the cost of living: the cost of housing and the cost of energy.

However, there are other questions around the issue that cannot be ignored in an effort to rethink the housing model. How should these homes be built, owned and run? There is a clear divide, with scepticism being poured from one side to the other for the idea of centralised authorities holding monopolies over something as fixed as land and shelter - whether that be scepticism towards the state or the exclusionary and elitist actors in the private market.

Hope for a new way forward might be found in the new municipalism movements (Gutierrez Gonzalez, 2016). In Spain, a number of cities have elected administrations born from the 15M Indignados protests, affiliated with Podemos. These local based projects are finding new ways to organise and operate, including massive horizontal co-operation between different city administrations (Shea Baird, 2015).

In Barcelona, for example, the new Barcelona En Comu led city council is making headway in tackling their housing shortage with a plan to use empty, privately owned houses for social rent properties (Rodriguez, 2016). The plan has already secured the use of 150 properties, with maybe 100 more soon to be added - with the owners compensated - which has provided secure, social rent accommodation for 450 people.

This has been achieved at the municipal level, an example of what might be achieved in cities where citizens learn they can run their own public spaces for the common good. Where citizens learn that they can lead radical administrations towards creative solutions. Exactly that kind of active and participatory concern on the part of citizens in the common good, embraced alongside a decentralisation of power, is not beyond the UK's ability to adopt.

In fact, the UK has already seen this kind of co-operative movement with community energy projects. In the UK, there have already been community owned and run green energy projects which have sought to install wind turbines and solar panels (Vaughan, 2015). However, what little support there has been from the government in the form of tax relief has been slowly cut away (Voinea, 2015).

That move has angered those on the Left who believe that community energy represents a way to a sustainable, affordable future that can oppose the power of big energy corporations (Lewis, 2015). Yet, even under attack, community energy has shown that this kind of civic action is possible in the UK. That they are possible, at least, should be an inspiration to those looking for fresh solutions to the problems of housing and energy in the UK.

On the housing front, the Lucas Plan, backed by a renewed appreciation for housing associations and an embrace of giving residents, citizens, and the community a greater stake, offers the outline for a progressive way forward. One that combines smart legislation and regulation with decentralised municipal action in pursuit of smart, creative ways to ensure availability, affordability and sustainability.