Cover Story: Is it time to let councils back on the building site?

Come on, George, let ‘em play

Political policy these past 30 years has left council housing a badly depleted rump, but the tenure has proved a tenacious survivor – so maybe it’s time to bring it back from the brink. You never know, it might even help to save homeownership from collapse, writes Mark Cantrell

 First published in the June 2013 edition of Housing magazine

FOR the Conservatives – the natural heirs, you might say, to Margaret Thatcher’s housing revolution – it must be especially galling to find the ‘property owning democracy’ crumbling all around them, but they are not alone in lamenting its imperilled state.

After all, Britain is supposed to be a nation of homeowners. It’s become an article of faith, to which Labour and Conservative ministers have long paid homage. Yet despite all their efforts over the years, the tenure has effectively undergone a curious kind of residualisation.

First-timers have long-since struggled to access the market. High prices, both before and after the 2008 crash, the difficulty obtaining mortgages, the sheer scale of the deposits needed, have all combined to exclude a rising tide of people from the property ladder. Homeownership peaked around 2001 at 69%; it’s been downhill ever since.

Meanwhile, social housing has experienced its own well-documented problems and issues of residualisation, leaving it sorely restricted in terms of mopping up this added surplus of home-seekers. The property ladder exiles have tended to wash up in the private rental sector – where business is booming as rents bubble up – creating the so-called Generation Rent, and stimulating widespread fears that homeownership is becoming the preserve of the wealthy few.

Simply put, new homes are not being built at anywhere near the rate needed to cope with existing – let alone future – demand. Less than half the 240,000 homes per year are being built, and since 2007 housing completions have dwindled to their lowest levels since the 1920s. Across all tenures, the UK’s housing market has become locked in a vicious cycle of destructive dysfunction; however it’s the issue of homeownership that has perhaps most vexed ministers.

Despite an array of programmes and policy initiatives, not to mention the fortunes expended over the years, neither the last Labour government nor the current Coalition has managed to trigger a critical mass of delivery that might go some way towards stabilising the market.

Indeed, for all the effort made, the dysfunction only seems to gather pace. But there might just be a way to salvage the late Iron Lady’s legacy. Strange as it sounds, maybe the best thing the Government can do to help first-time buyers is to let local authorities build on a large scale once more. Councils are certainly willing. In fact, they’ve been lobbying for the chance to get back to the building site.

Sure, in recent years some of them have started to build again, but their efforts thus far have been necessarily small fry. Reform of the Housing Revenue Account (HRA) subsidy system has allowed ambitions to be dusted off, but for them to have any large-scale impact there’s a further hurdle to clear: lift the borrowing cap so they can work their assets and invest in still more.

“Councils have excellent credit ratings and want to use our assets to help kickstart the housing recovery but our hands are being tied,” said Councillor Mike Jones, chairman of the LGA’s environment and housing board. “At a time when housing waiting lists are rapidly expanding, levels of house building are languishing and the economy is still struggling, it makes no sense for Government to continue preventing local authorities from investing in the new homes the country badly needs.”

The economic case for building more homes, along with other infrastructure investments, is attracting a growing clamour of voices, including the International Monetary Fund (IMF), all hectoring the Chancellor George Osborne to bite the supply-side bullet and let the country build its way to better economic health.

“With thousands of construction workers out of work and interest rates at record lows, there is a growing consensus that investing in improving our infrastructure, particularly housing, would give an immediate boost to the economy, encourage more private investment, and give us a long-term return as we strengthen our economy for the future,” shadow chancellor Ed Balls said recently.

“If the entire infrastructure boost recommended by the IMF was spent on housing over the next two years, we calculate that it would allow the building of around 400,000 affordable homes across the country, and support 600,000 new jobs in construction, including 10,000 apprenticeships, supporting small businesses, helping people aspiring to buy their own home, reducing waiting lists, and easing pressure on rents and housing benefits bills.”

Research carried out last year for the LGA claimed councils could make a healthy contribution, delivering 60,000 new homes over five years if the Chancellor lifted the borrowing cap. Under current rules, councils can borrow no more than £2.8bn to invest in housing: enough to build 15,000 homes. Remove the cap and they can borrow up to £7bn under existing prudential borrowing rules to deliver the larger figure.

Councillor Jones added: “Councils, the markets and the construction industry all agree that the housing borrowing cap is unnecessary and only serves to hinder the housebuilding recovery. The Chancellor has an unrivalled opportunity to create jobs, provide more homes and help the economy without having to find a single extra penny. New homes are badly needed and councils want to get on with building them. The common sense answer is for the Treasury to remove its housebuilding block and let us get on with it.”

There’s more to the economic case than just boosting construction, as the National Housing Federation (NHF) pointed out. A ComRes study it commissioned recently highlighted the difficulties the housing crisis is causing for businesses of every sector in terms of recruitment and investment decisions.

“Our economic recovery is being held back because there aren’t enough homes in England today, and this lack of homes has pushed up prices and rents beyond people’s reach,” said Gill Payne, a director at the NHF. “As a result, businesses are finding it tough to attract workers and expand because many people can’t buy a home or would struggle to pay high rents.

“If things don’t change, employers will simply move – potentially out of the country – taking away desperately needed jobs. Building more homes can kickstart local economies faster than any other industry, create jobs and keep local shops or pubs open. It could be the crucial difference between a thriving community and a dead ghost town.”

The Chartered Institute of Housing (CIH) has backed councils’ calls to lift the borrowing cap as one of its proposals for George Osborne to consider in his Spending Review on 26 June, so the pressure on the Chancellor to deliver is certainly mounting. Of course, he’s been asked to lift the borrowing cap on a couple of occasions before now, only for the request to be shown the cold shoulder. However, it’s a demand that is unlikely to go away should he choose to ignore it yet again.

“The affordable housing sector has a proven track record of delivery – something the Government should be taking advantage of to help tackle the immediate shortage of homes and boost the economy,” said Grainia Long, the CIH’s chief executive. “In the longer term, we want to see all parts of the housing industry stepping up new building so housing is able to make the biggest contribution possible to our economic and social success.”

None of this is a call per se for the launch of a mass programme to build a new generation of socially-rented council stock, but it is somewhat implicit in the idea of freeing them up to deliver tens of thousands of new homes, so maybe it’s an idea that has finally turned full circle and come of age. If so, then it adds an ironic twist to the tale of two tenures that has – in a very real sense – defined the last 30-odd years of the housing landscape.

The ‘property owning democracy’ was launched off the back of council housing with Right-to-Buy. It proved popular – but controversial – as millions of properties came to be sold off. With councils unable to build sufficient replacement stock, so began the rapid decline of local authority housing provision, even as the sell-off boosted the ascent of homeownership.

Later, stock transfer took its own toll. The policy, though introduced within the Housing Act 1988, was embraced by the Labour Government that came into power in 1997. As the programme gathered pace, so it became a second whammy depleting numbers. By then, it had become something of a received wisdom that council housing had had its day. However, the form has tenaciously refused extinction, even as it was residualised to a near-rump, so perhaps it’s time to exploit that staying power.

For sure, it might sound farfetched, even as a conceptual link, but one might argue that Right-to-Buy effectively linked the fate of homeownership to that of council housing. By diminishing the latter, the argument goes, successive governments have undermined the foundations of sustainable mass homeownership.

The great ‘property owning democracy’, then, has come to be built upon sand. So little wonder it’s teetering. Ministers and their policymaking minions have pretty much tried everything else to solve the problems of Britain’s dysfunctional housing market, all to no avail, so why not give councils a shot? Perhaps they are the missing piece of the puzzle.

If nothing else, it’s certainly a provocative thought: that council housing might hold the key to saving homeownership.

The above article first appeared as the cover story for the June 2013 print edition of Housing magazine. It was subsequently republished on the Housing Excellence website, 6 February 2014.

Healthy homes and social justice

The ‘third world’ begins and ends at home

The international work of charities like Habitat for Humanity certainly puts the UK’s experiences into perspective; it also serves to remind that the struggle to secure healthy homes is no simple technocratic pursuit. Like it or not, there’s an essential element of social justice too

By Mark Cantrell

First published in Housing magazine, September 2013

Bishkek, Kyrgyzstan. Bermet, 9, with her brother Alybek, 3, outside their dilapidated home in Bishkek. ©Habitat for Humanity/ Daniar Ashymov

THEY say that travel broadens the mind; certainly it can provide a fresh perspective on matters a little closer to home. That’s apt, given the well-established link between health and housing, because even a cursory tour of efforts internationally, serves to remind us that good housing can’t be extricated from aspects of social justice.

The concept is there in the woodwork of a mould-ridden flat unfit for human habitation; it shivers in a cold home wracked by fuel poverty and poor insulation; it suffers the degradation of over-crowding; it frets over security of tenure and the impact of the bedroom tax; it ponders the uncertainties of increasingly unaffordable housing; it’s there in the world’s shanties and the slums, in London’s ‘beds in the sheds’, and the general mess that is the UK’s housing crisis.

It really is enough to make you ill, thinking about all that. Bad housing is detrimental to health; it diminishes life chances and helps to perpetuate poverty. In fact, social justice is built into the very fabric. The other thing about bad housing – it knows no international boundaries.

In that sense, the ‘third world’ begins at home and transcends the artificial division between ‘developing’ and ‘developed’ nations. The conditions vary widely across the globe, being more acute in some countries than others, but the need for a secure, decent home is universal; as is the struggle to achieve it. And what begins – at face value – as a straightforward effort to deliver a healthy home, can very quickly become cross-fertilised by that wider social justice arena.

Maybe that’s reading a lot into it, but it’s certainly what springs to mind when considering the work of Habitat for Humanity. The organisation works in over 70 countries around the world, “helping people to escape from poverty and disease through building safe, decent homes” as it describes itself. As a charity, it doesn’t do politics, of course, but to achieve its aim of securing decent housing, it is often called upon to help communities achieve wider aims of social justice.

In Bolivia and Brazil, for instance, the charity is running land rights projects to help people – especially women – who have been sold land illegally, a situation that has left them struggling to gain access to clean water and sanitation.

“These families are living in what would be classed as an informal settlement and they’d been sold land illegally. They didn’t know it’s illegal and the original landowners are asking for more money, they’re threatening the women, and if you’re a single-headed family, a single woman, then that’s a very precarious situation to be in,” said Lisa Stead, the charity’s assistant programmes manager.

“We’re fighting for their rights – their land rights – and we’re working with them to actually register their land and make it a state governed area. That will require the government to invest in infrastructure and other services. So, sometimes you have to start before the house. You have to start with the security of tenure.”

Security of tenure is a big issue for women in African nations too, she added, a problem exacerbated by the AIDS epidemic. “If the male in the family dies, then land can be grabbed by other members of the family, so that leaves the wife and the children out on the streets,” said Stead. “What we are doing there is not only providing them with housing, but ensuring they learn about inheritance and their land rights to give them some security, not only for them, but for the children, by putting the land and the house in their name. There is a lot of equality [issues] in the projects that we do in Latin America and in Africa.”

Here in the UK, Habitat for Humanity is perhaps best known for its ‘sweat equity’ projects, such as in Liverpool, where it works to provide affordable housing for families by involving them in the build. They literally invest their physical labour in the home; this is a common strand to the charity’s activities, but a current scheme in Cambodia is unusual in that it is a “giveaway project”. To put it bluntly, the recipients of the scheme needed the break; they were for the most part in no fit state to offer even a little of that ‘sweat equity’.

The families involved not only endured the problems of ill health – at least one family member has HIV/AIDS – but the local community also shunned them. Many were living in slums that had grown up around a rubbish site on the outskirts of the capital, Phnom Penh, where they eked out a living scavenging and selling recycled refuse; others lived in 4x5metre rooms where they struggled to meet the expensive (relatively speaking) rents. On top of that they had to pay extra to access inadequate water and sanitation.

(C) Habitat For Humanity

Inevitably, this was taking its toll on their already precarious health; other family members suffered too, mentally and physically, while the children often missed out on school in order to look after the sick adults. They were, as Stead put it, “the poorest of the poor”.

Habitat for Humanity has worked with some 500 ‘home partners’, as the charity calls the people it has helped, in partnership with the Elton John AIDS Foundation, which helped fund the scheme in recognition of the link between housing and health.

Healthcare partners provide support for managing HIV/AIDS such as the provision of anti-retroviral therapy (ART). The intervention has seen the fortunes of the families concerned turned round, from outcasts to accepted members of the community.

“They’ve now got access to clean water, they’ve got access to sanitation, we gave them health and hygiene training, and they’re not living under a leaking roof or in bad environments, which they were around the garbage tip. It’s helped their physical health, but also mentally – it’s given them hope,” said Stead.

“Because their health has improved, they are able to work, they are able to invest in decent food, and also invest in livelihood generation, building up a business, but the most important thing everybody was telling us was the future of their children. Now they have all this, they are able to send their children to school.”

By and large, it’s the children that suffer the most as a result of poor housing, whether directly by its impact on their health, or indirectly through its impact on their education. And this aspect really is a global problem, including those youngsters growing up in damp and mouldy homes in ‘first world’ England, of which many remain. There are many ways that a home can impact on our health.

Key risks according to the World Health Organisation (WHO) include respiratory and cardiovascular diseases from indoor air pollution; illness and deaths from temperature extremes; communicable diseases spread because of poor living conditions; and risks of home injuries. In 2010, the organisation estimated that nearly two million people in developing countries die from indoor air pollution caused by the burning of biomass and coal in leaky and inefficient household stoves.

Habitat for Humanity estimates that over 10,000 children die every day the world over from diseases and illnesses caused by bad housing. Many of these problems can be prevented by making improvements to everyday living conditions – housing key among them.

Take Nepal, where one volunteer with the charity described the poor living conditions he encountered during a visit last year: “The family will cook on an open fire in the house often with no chimney, so respiratory problems are common,” said GP Paul Goozee. “Clean water is difficult, especially if you live downstream of human habitation, or even if there is animal contamination. Basic hygiene of clean water and good sanitation is a huge basic need. Infant mortality is high because of this. Life expectancy is lower than in the UK and the basic living conditions I’m sure are a major reason for this.”

How about Romania, where charity worker Mihaela Apetri described overcrowding in the city of Comăneşti’s apartment buildings: “In one apartment with two rooms we found four families with a total of around 13 people. Another lived in a one-roomed apartment where there was mould and it was very cold. The family had a little girl who was two or three years old. She was always coughing and had different respiratory diseases. After she moved into a new [Habitat for Humanity] home these problems disappeared.”

A decent home is a healthy home. When you stop to think about it, that’s actually a profound call for social justice, because the home is the hearth of a life worth living – no matter where you live.

“The thing that always strikes me when I travel – and I travel a lot for the organisation – is that people are the same everywhere. We have a different culture, a different climate, but people worldwide want the same thing for their families,” said Stead.

“We all want a safe, decent place for our families to live and thrive in. We aspire to that future for our children. I don’t think it matters what country you live in, that is a really important and fundamental message.”

CAMBODIA (October 2012): Homepartner Mern Oeun, 43, who was forced to work away from home as a garbage collector in order to earn enough to support her children. She said, "“My future house means being able to start a business at home and not collect garbage any more” (c) Habitat for Humanity

World view

• HIV continues to be a major global public health issue, having claimed more than 25 million lives over the past three decades
• There were approximately 34 million people living with HIV in 2011
• Sub-Saharan Africa is the most affected region, with nearly one in every 20 adults living with HIV. Of all people living with HIV, 69% are living in this region

In 2011, more than 8 million people living with HIV were receiving anti-retroviral therapy (ART) in low- and middle-income countries. Another 7 million people need to be enrolled in treatment to meet the target of providing ART to 15 million people by 2015 More generally, one quarter of the global “disease burden” is due to environmental factors that could be changed. For instance:

•  Living conditions are estimated to cause four million deaths among children aged 0-14 each year
• Indoor air pollution caused by inefficient cookers, poor ventilation or local pollutants leads to 3.6 million premature deaths each year
• Chagas disease infects 7-8 million people worldwide each year. The World Health Organisation (WHO) is making improvements to homes to prevent the spread of the disease, as the insect carrying the disease lives in poorly constructed mud walls
• There is a high occurrence of allergic and respiratory diseases associated with poor housing conditions

(Source: WHO, ECEHH, Habitat for Humanity)

This article first appeared in the September edition of Housing magazine. It was subsequently republished on the Housing Excellence website, 6 January 2014.