Housing and wages should be bread and butter for Labour

By Sarah Hayward / @sarah_hayward

In case you missed it over the weekend the Tories used un-sourced figures to claim that over 6,000 social housing households had income of over £100,000. That the figure has no provenance is bad enough, but as with almost all Tory figures on both housing and benefits there’s no context.

Take a household where two parents live with their two grown up children – neither of whom can afford to move out because there’s no social housing and private rents are too high – could easily breach the £100,000 household threshold and all four would be on pretty modest incomes for London and indeed most of the country.

Even if all of the 6000 households do have a single earner in the top 2% in the country it’s a drop in the ocean compared to the nearly 2m households who are languishing on waiting lists up and down the country and surely contradicts the Tories’ stated ambition of not penalising people through benefits who want to get on.

In the unlikely event that they are all households where a single person is on a guilt edged salary it’s a bit of a kick in the teeth to both ambition and aspiration to chuck them out of their home for doing well. Particularly given that at some point they’d have to have been doing particularly badly to qualify in the first place.

And this is all before I get to defending lifetime tenure. Which I do wholeheartedly.

The problem is not the people who are lucky enough to earn £100k, the problem is there isn’t enough housing. There’s not enough social housing, there’s not enough private rented housing and there’s not enough affordable housing for people to buy.

Labour’s front bench have been strangely mute on this latest bought of Tory myth pedalling. Maybe it’s because we’re a little but embarrassed at our record of house building in our 13 years in power. But what better way to signal a new start and learning from our mistakes?

It should also be something the whole party can unite behind. Affordable, good quality housing should be core to our being, and for the committed triangulaters in the party, lack of supply and affordability is already an issue for the middle class and young professionals. With the jobs concentrated in London and the south east, house price explosions in the private rented market in particular are exacerbating the difficulties that young people are having finding work and work that pays enough for them to afford somewhere to live.

Anyone who’s canvassed in the inner London boroughs at any point in the last few years will have lost count of the times that a private renter in a supposedly well paid job has bemoaned either the cost vs quality of their housing or the unlikelihood that they’ll ever be able to get on the housing ladder anywhere closer to central London than Luton.

This brings me to the second part of the package. The reason the Tories get traction with stupid stats like this isn’t all down to the partiality of the Daily Mail. People think benefits, including social housing cost too much. Many of them think it cost too much because they themselves can’t afford to live in some of the places where social housing is located.

Rather than acquiesce to the Tory/Mail view that anyone who receives help from the welfare state is, by default, a scrounger, let’s tackle the benefits bill by tackling poverty pay and housing supply.

In work benefits, including housing benefit and tax credits are nothing more than recognition that in many cases, employers simply don’t pay enough for people to cover their essential living costs: housing, food, energy, clothing & transport. Effectively a tax payer subsidy to private business, and sometimes sadly the public sector too, who get away with paying just the minimum wage in central London. For these people, the thousands of pounds they receive in benefits are actually an essential lifeline enabling them to do jobs that our economies, like tourism, retail and hospitality rely on.

There may always need to be some extra help for people with children or other caring responsibilities or perhaps a disability. But if an able bodied, single, childless person, qualifies for in work benefits, then their employer simply isn’t paying them enough. Period.

The other story that caught my eye of the last two or three days is the stagnation of wages for those on the lower and middle of the salary spectrum for almost 30 years, while those at the upper end has just escalated off in to the distance. A combination of house building and a strong living wages policy would be to the direct benefit of literally millions of workers. Many of them, the voters we’ve lost since 1997.

Both would have the added benefit of being the right thing to do.