Housing Strategy

Lord Birt Excerpts

Wednesday 24th March 2021 Grand Committee

[Lord Birt (CB) [V]]

My Lords, I am unaware of any area of our national life more in need of our attention than housing. I strongly commend the initiative of the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury in prompting this valuable and informed debate.

More than 4 million households in England are living in non-decent homes, as defined by the English Housing Survey. One million are living in homes unfit for human habitation, as defined by Shelter. Almost a million now live in overcrowded accommodation. Moreover, 300,000 people in the UK, including 200,000 children, are homeless. They are living in temporary accommodation, crashing with friends or family or camping on the street. Rough sleeping has doubled in 10 years. If noble Lords want to experience the appalling conditions under which many Britons live, I strongly recommend Channel 5’s “Can’t Pay, Won’t Pay”, where noble Lords can witness real deprivation for themselves through the eyes of the bailiffs.

Housing issues affect not just the poor but every level of society. For instance, a quarter of 20 to 34 year-olds still live at home with their parents—up 1 million in the past 20 years. The reasons for the sorry state of our housing are all too easy to see. On the one hand, as the noble Lord, Lord Lilley, rightly reminded us, demand has grown, most significantly because our population has expanded by 10 million over the past 20 years. Over the same period, demographic change has increased the number of households by 3 million, in part because we are living longer and in part because we are living alone more often.

At the same time, the young are struggling to buy. House prices relative to income have doubled over the past 40 years. Post 2008, mortgages became harder to obtain. As a result, overall home ownership in the UK has declined, reversing the trend of a century. Those most in need have seen spend on housing benefit flatten then fall, adding to their pressure to find a home.

Against this mix of factors affecting demand there are corresponding issues of supply. We have the oldest housing stock in Europe—much of it substandard—and a low rate of demolition and replenishment. We have not built new towns. Small builders and local development are in decline. Large developers, on the one hand, are hoarding land, and on the other, are experiencing prolonged planning delays. It is therefore no surprise that, in the past 10 years, we have built on average fewer than 200,000 units per year.

Even more strikingly, there has been a vast decline in the availability of social housing. Local authority provision has declined by two-thirds in 50 years. The stock of housing association homes has increased but, overall, social housing provision has dropped by 2 million homes since its peak. In 2018-19, councils in England built only 5,000 units of social housing. Set against our need, what a shocking figure that is. This massive drop in housing provision for the most needy is the most critical factor in our housing crisis. Of course, the unmet demand for social housing has been taken up by the private rental sector, which has doubled in 20 years to more than 4 million units—more or less the same level now as the whole of the social housing sector.

Academic and other estimates put the present shortfall between demand and supply for housing as of the order of 1 million homes. This position will worsen, for our population continues to grow and will soon reach 70 million. If current demographic trends also continue, we will need of the order of 3 million to 4 million additional units over the next 10 to 20 years to bring demand and supply back into some balance.

As many of your Lordships have identified, we need not just numbers but the right mix of homes—of mainstream, affordable and social housing. We are a crowded island, so we should not and must not trespass any further on to our precious green spaces. One organisation guilty of trying to do that is the Church of England itself, with its willingness to sell glebe farmland for commercial development.

We need what we manifestly do not now have—almost all who have spoken have said this: a coherent, holistic, long-term framework of real ambition which grapples with the difficult, stubborn mix of factors affecting both demand and supply. My mother’s and my father’s generation rose to the challenge in the post-war years, when build rose to 400,000 units per year. I ask the Minister: can this generation rise to the challenge?