Why today’s budget won’t fix the housing crisis (and what will).
Today is budget day. An opportunity to help the housing crisis.
The housing crisis is a social crisis. It started with selling off social housing, then not replacing that social housing.
So now we don’t have enough social housing. As a result, we the taxpayers are now paying £90m per month for 250,000 homeless families to live in hostels and hotels, temporary accommodation.
We the taxpayers have lent people up to 40% of the cost of their brand new home.
Then, borrowing was made too cheap, causing house prices to rise so high that now you’ll have to save for nearly 20 years before you can afford the deposit to buy a home.
And you’ll be paying off your mortgage until well into your retirement.
We’ve been left behind.
Stuck, renting rotten, damp dumps from Lamborghini-driving, over-leveraged influencer landlords. Today, the chancellor Jeremy Hunt will not announce a massive new social housebuilding programme.
Nothing will be done to address the billions of pounds being wasted on temporary accommodation for the increasing number of people being made homeless, at the expense of public services.
Nothing will be done to make homes more affordable for working people.
Nothing will be done to make having a family any easier.
So, we will continue to see declining birth rates, as a result of which our economy will become ever-more dependent on inward migration to stop us being in permanent recession.
All because they can’t, or won’t, make living easier for working people. We will be fobbed off with a National Insurance cut that, while welcome, won’t touch the sides of the cost of living problem.
Expensive housing literally sucks the life out of the economy.
As we all pay higher rents and mortgage payments, that money is being diverted away from the local businesses who so desperately need it.
The only way to break this housing doom-loop is a massive new social housebuilding programme, where is it most urgently needed.
It will create jobs, it will create a taxpayer-owned housing stock so we can stop burning money on temporary accommodation.
It will create competitions for the private sector.
It will lower rents. It will give people back the chance of a working life with dignity, the chance of raising a family, where the children might have improved life chances.
A safe, dry, warm decent family home for everyone is what Britain’s best years were built on. We’re staring into an abyss, a sink-hole, created entirely out of a mismanaged housing market, with reckless lending that caused financial crises that we are still paying for to this day, in debt and overinflated house prices.
And no one in government has done anything to stop it. Today they will miss another opportunity and we will pay the price. I hope I’m wrong.
The private home-building sector will never solve the housing crisis. They will never build the affordable homes needed. It’s not their responsibility.
Therefore, the only way out of this mess is a massive, emergency, social housing building surge, led by our government.
There is no other way.
This government will go down as one of the worst failures in history. If we want a brighter future, the coming election must be fought on who will solve the housing crisis fastest.
If we fix housing first, we will be better placed to fix everything else.