The Tories’ Housing Bill shows they will not deal with this growing crisis

Earlier this week the Tories’ Housing Bill passed its second reading. A day or so beforehand, the housing charity Shelter issued a press release saying that 100,000 children in the UK will be homeless this Christmas. Anyone moved by the latter should also be appalled by the former.

That so many families won’t have a home this winter – and indeed throughout the rest of the year – is a horrendous consequence of the scarcity of affordable homes in this country, both to rent and to buy. The huge shortfall means that families are more likely to be in the dramatically unstable private rented sector and, as Shelter say, the largest single cause of homelessness is the end of private tenancies.

Access to adequate housing and shelter is a fundamental social right and one on which many of our other freedoms rest. A lack of affordable housing and poor housing conditions are the root causes of a great many societal issues (and costs), not least family breakdowns, health problems, job losses and decreased educational  attainment.

There can be no doubt that we are currently experiencing a crisis in housing, indeed we have been for many years. The destructive consequences of right to buy, sharply rising rents which eat up an ever-growing percentage of income, high levels of tenant insecurity, a scarcity of cheaper homes, fewer and fewer people able get onto the property ladder – and all of these problems have been made considerably worse by the last Coalition government’s truly lamentable record on house building.

Well unfortunately, the housing crisis looks set to get worse. Chiefly because, instead of seeking to address the principal issues, the Tories are putting ideology first. The Housing Bill represents the triumph of dogma over an incontrovertible national need – it seeks to stimulate demand when what is needed is supply, it will serve to exacerbate the damaging social divide between those on the property ladder and those who have no hope of being and, crucially, it will decrease the number of affordable homes available to rent and to buy, making the housing crisis considerably worse.

The threat of imposing right to buy on housing associations, as was included in the Tories’ manifesto, forced housing associations to adopt right to buy on a ‘voluntary’ basis. This will mean that whilst some housing association tenants may be able to buy their properties at a discount, in order to be able to fund that discount and to keep pace with repairs, housing associations will have to sell their highest value properties.

The effects of extending right to buy will be harmful.  First, forcing housing associations to sell their highest value properties means there will be fewer social homes in more upmarket areas, thus exacerbating the division between well-off and less well-off areas. Second, it effectively kisses goodbye to the prospect of new social rent housing associations and means that associations lose their purpose.  But thirdly, and arguably most importantly, it completely flies in the face of our national experience of right to buy. Allowing the sell-off of homes without simultaneously replenishing stock was a dreadful policy and one which we are still reeling from.

The Tories’ Bill also provides that local authorities will have to ensure the provision of ‘starter homes’ for first-time buyers – which, taken at face value, sounds positive. But these co-called ‘starter homes’ aren’t affordable at all: a 20% discount on homes worth up to £450,000 in London and £250,000 in the rest of country. Again, the effects will be damaging. Not only is this a missed opportunity to help those who need it most (Shelter have said this will only help the well-off – you need a salary of over £77,000 in London to afford one), it also means that – disastrously – developers will build far fewer genuinely affordable homes.

The very few who are able to take advantage of the Government’s so-called ‘starter homes’ will be photographed smiling outside their new properties and feature in national newspapers, whilst the huge number of people who will continue to lose out from the Tories’ abject failure to deal with the housing crisis, some to devastating effect, will be far less noticeable. But their suffering will endure and worsen – and indeed this suffering will spread to more and more people.

Our housing crisis isn’t going to end until we build affordable homes at scale and offer people on low and average incomes the security and the stability that they need. The crisis is nothing short of an emergency and ought to be addressed as an infrastructure priority. Unfortunately for Britain, the Tories’ Housing Bill confirms not only their lack of will to respond to this emergency but also their wilfully making it worse.