Why Labour should launch the H-factor – housing for the next generation

By AnnaJoy David

An alternative version of this article appeared in Tribune.

Britain has not engaged in a serious attempt to tackle its housing problems for two decades. With the slowdown in the private sector, developers are likely to fail to meet their obligations to include social housing in their plans as their budgets get squeezed. If left unchecked, a bad situation will get worse as demand for social housing increases and supply become even more restricted.

There are three key factors for housing provision that any government must heed: who is eligible and on what basis; where do we build new homes; what kind of homes do we build and what is their relationship to the wider urban and environmental features where they are sited.

We have become over-complicated about what eligibility means. Social housing has become the place of last resort as opposed to what it should be: an option within the context of the whole market of provision.

Let’s start from an understanding that social housing should be viewed as a right and not something to meet desperate need. In this way, we will begin to open up and remove the stigma of social housing by offering it to a much more diverse social group.

Look at the model in Spain, a modern European economy with lessons for Britain, where housing need is assessed in part based on an income factor. Considerations and assessments are factored into the process, like the market value of housing in any given district against income of people; this helps to concentrate social house building in areas where there is pressure due to market factors and where urgent social needs are not being met – shortages of key workers such as nurses, teachers and fire fighters.

This is one way in which things need to change in this country. In our smaller communities and towns, it is very important to ensure that those who have existing family networks are not forced to move away by the cost of housing. Low-income single and two-parent working families have fallen out of the social housing net and often they find themselves in expensive, over-valued, poor-quality private housing, which isn’t well-regulated. Due to the lack of supply and championing of social housing by the Labour Party, they are the voiceless sector who may struggle to buy a home and forced through lack of options to remain in inadequate accommodation. Government policy needs to shift the base of its customers and make social housing an integral part of the housing market to all ages and social groups.

There will always be painful debates about where new homes should be built. First, though, there have to be crucial decisions about what kind of housing strategy Britain should adopt. Having lived in Spain and run a business which has restored hundreds of homes and built some new ones, I have learned valuable lessons about what contributes to happy communities. It takes years for new communities to emerge and sit alongside existing ones. New schools, doctors, roads, commercial and public services are required, and these social webs take years to mesh into a pattern within a social infrastructure. So I’m not convinced that the way to go is building large-scale developments which are then required to make their own relationship within the existing community.

What I have witnessed is that we’re far more likely to have successful communities if we build within existing social infrastructure, preferring additive architecture and social provision rather than the continual emergence of cumbersome new communities which face issues of identity.

Our Government needs to think seriously about this opportunity – and we can’t afford to get it wrong. As we contemplate the start of a serious and expensive house-building programme, we need to ensure that it will see us through for several generations.

My experience tells me that the most successful programmes are small-scale, beautifully designed homes that take account of existing infrastructures and do not create alien ones. We must at all costs avoid creating fractures which later emerge as social challenges for local people the wider society

We should be identifying small-scale building sites which are suitable for good- quality, well-designed homes which can be built with sensitivity to environmental and urban planning questions. Caretakers and porters should be brought back, injecting a sense of real cohesion into housing communities. I’m amazed when I see housing project after housing project forcing the maximum build on a site and failing to consider either the long-term well-being of the customer or value for money for the taxpayer. Just because it’s social housing, it does not mean that we build to minimum standards. In fact, it should be the reverse when spending other people’s money.

People who live in such model developments – small-scale, with good urban planning, excellent architecture, caretaker/porterage support and a lower density of build in ratio to outside spaces – generally have better lives and create more successful communities. We need an attitude of excellence in the social housing market, and in this way we will widen the net of social provision, placing social housing at the centre not the edges of people’s choices.

Our Government has entered into partnerships for building social provision with the private sector, and that’s good. But is also needs to develop finance schemes with the private sector and mortgage lenders to pay for social house building. We should consider, for example, options such as the Government taking on the interest payments over long fixed terms and leave the capital payments for the customer to pay, rather like a mortgage on fixed rates over a longer period.

One group we have not asked about what sort of homes they want to live in is the next generation. Labour should launch the H-factor design project and ask primary-school children in every town, city and village to design their ultimate home. Perhaps we can learn from the next generation how they want to live. My guess is what we will find is lots of open spaces, larger rooms and less density – places to breath and grow. Houses are for life and grow into a community, just like children do.

The lack of supply is a real question, but then so is the lack of good supply. Isn’t it better to build fewer homes, but build well? We have some great architects, social, environmental and urban planners, so let’s use them well and build communities that will reflect well on us well into the 21st century.

Housing is a legacy. What will ours be?