Housing policy popped up in the general election campaign last week with the Liberal Democrats pledging to make 760,000 empty homes in England available for people who need them. Absent owners would be eligible for a grant or cheap loan to renovate them and bring them into use for social housing or private rent and 65,000 jobs would be created in the process.
Meanwhile, the Scottish Government announced that new council and housing association tenants will no longer have the Right To Buy. Half a million homes have so far been lost in Scotland to potential tenants as a result of RTB. The Scottish Government claims the new policy should result in the retention of 18,000 homes for public use, which can’t be bad.
Heavens above, there are enough people who need them. At least 5 million languish on ever-expanding waiting lists in England alone, as the fall-out from the banking crisis continues to lead to mortgage defaults, bankrupt builders, empty blocks of new flats in every city centre and housing misery.
Millions of children across the UK live in crowded, substandard or temporary accommodation, with blighted chances of keeping up with school work and poor health outcomes. Their parents struggle with relationships and keeping families together under strained circumstances. The consequent social and fiscal cost of health care, broken relationships, lost education and unemployment are enormous.
Trade unions have always campaigned for decent housing for all, and especially those who can’t afford – or even don’t want to – enter the home ownership race. Indeed, in March 1900, nearly 100 years ago, the unions who had founded the Labour Representation Committee in Parliament the day before, held a second meeting in London to discuss a campaign for housing ‘the rural poor’.
In Unison we have maintained that proud tradition, calling for more and better public housing and housing finance systems that can sustain and maintain - as well as build – it. With average house prices reaching £160,000 in Scotland, £224,000 in England and £315,000 in London in 2009, few of our members who work as housing officers, housing benefit workers, in councils and housing associations, can afford to buy – let alone the 65% of ‘feather-bedded’ local government workers who earn less than £18,000 a year!
So what have New Labour and the Conservatives got to say on the subject? Last year Gordon Brown pledged £1.5bn to boost the number of new homes to rent or buy to 110,000 over two years. Housing minister John Healey is also looking to replace the unfair Housing Revenue Account subsidy system with something fairer and more transparent. This will allow councils to keep rents from tenants and RTB, while freeing them from annual funding decisions to be able to better plan to meet local housing need. Labour’s Public Land Initiative would free up empty sites for housing. Too little, maybe too late, but a definite step in the right direction.
David Cameron himself had had little to say on the subject of housing, although he did make passing reference at the Conservative’s conference last October to the ‘stubborn social problems’ of ‘sink estates’, a notion no doubt reflected in true blue Hammersmith & Fulham’s disputed plans simply to demolish a number of them and eliminate those stubborn social problems – or tenants as Unison prefers to call them.
However, the Conservatives have now made further proposals of their own which could play havoc with councils’ formula grant, while doing little to ease the housing crisis. The proposal is that councils will be ‘incentivised’ to build new homes through the promise of six-years’ worth of the value of the council tax raised on each property.
This means that a new Band D home would raise 6 x £1,414 (£8,484 in total). Probably not enough to make councils race to the cement mixer, and there’s a hidden catch too. Formula grant rises to cover inflation, demographic changes and new demands on local authorities. The annual increase in recent years has been around £750m. But, as ever, the devil is in the detail. ‘Extending Opportunities’, the Conservatives’ housing policy paper, says that: ‘The policy is a cost-neutral reallocation of existing government funding, to be paid for by scrapping the government’s bureaucratic and inefficient Housing and Planning Delivery Grant (HPDG) and by top-slicing a proportion of annual increases in formula grant for councils’.
This means that the £200m allocated to HPDG for 2010/11 would be ‘recycled’ and councils’ inflation increases for front-line services such as home care, libraries, leisure and neighbourhood wardens would be top-sliced, aka ‘cut’. Based on the last year’s new-build figures for England and using the £200m HDPG first, Unison estimates that by the third year, £464m will be creamed off local services and, in year six, the figure will rise to £1,119m – more than the £780m annual increase in formula grant in 2009/10.
So, to sum up: a few people might have a home, but many more would lose vital services or have to pay increased charges. I think that merits a re-think Mr Cameron.
Heather Wakefield is head of Unison’s local government service group
