With more and more people
made homeless or forced to pay excessive rents, the charity Shelter is
investigating how to help them.
Although provoked by the Grenfell Tower tragedy, which drew
attention to social housing in the UK, Shelter’s commission into the future of social housing will
go much wider than one fateful fire and address concerns that people in social
housing are being ignored.
Alongside
15 others, including Ed Miliband, Doreen Lawrence and those from the Grenfell
community, I have joined the commission and will spend the next few months
hearing from social tenants about their experiences, setting out necessary
changes and scrutinising the role the sector could play in easing Britain’s
housing crisis.
I
am the first to admit that I’m an unlikely social housing commissioner. I have
never lived in social housing. Even during my childhood, my parents turned to
our wider family to support us during tough times. Social housing, meanwhile, was for people who
had hit rock bottom and had nowhere to turn for help.
Growing
up, I was fortunate enough to seize the opportunities provided by social
mobility. I was lucky that, as a young lawyer in Yorkshire, I was able to buy
my first home – for around twice my salary. Yes, interest rates were high 25
years ago and I still had to work hard, but it didn’t occur to me that I
wouldn’t be able to buy my own home.
Now
I meet young solicitors who, even with a promising career, know the prospect of
owning their own home seems impossible. I used to assume that the market would
always provide for people who worked hard, that any kinks in the housing market
would iron themselves out in the end. Of course, a safety net would always be
necessary for some, yet for the majority hard work would pay off and social
housing would be as irrelevant as it had been to me. Housing would be a private matter, not a
government concern.
Now, this basic social contract is broken. Socially mobile young
people find that working hard isn’t enough unless they have help from the bank
of mum and dad. And that safety net for people at the bottom? It’s looking ever
more stretched as more and more people need help.
It’s
clear that the housing market is fundamentally broken. Tweaks by successive
governments have not rectified this and even the current Conservative
government has published a white paper on the “broken housing market”.
That’s because the effects are being felt widely, from the growing numbers of
people being made homeless, to young people stuck in expensive
and insecure private rents, despairing of ever finding a way out.
Politicians cannot look young people in the eyes and honestly
tell them that everything will be OK if they just work hard. Our broken housing
market has become a major barrier to social mobility.
This
is an intolerable situation and demands politicians of all hues respond.
Shelter’s commission will consider the role in which social housing, and
government more generally, should provide an alternative.
I
start this process with a genuinely open mind. I admit that I have been
innately sceptical of large-scale social housing. I’ve always seen it as a
safety net, but a worsening housing crisis forces us to ask whether that safety
net needs to be stretched far wider. Or, with the market no longer providing a
housing ladder, does a wider group of people need to use social housing as a
stepping stone?
Shelter
has embarked on a large consultation and fact-finding exercise, which will give
me and my fellow commissioners the evidence we need to answer these questions.
It’s a privilege to have the opportunity to debate this alongside 15 smart
people from a range of backgrounds and political affiliations. We have met once
and it’s impossible to guess what we will conclude, but what’s clear and
exciting is a shared determination to set out a vision for social housing that
everyone can support.
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