Event: Britain

The failure to provide enough social housing should shame successive governments. Britain has been in the grip of a housing crisis for over a decade at least. During that time, the cost of a flat or a house has continued to rise while wages have fallen in real terms. The result has been increasing rates of homelessness and housing poverty. In the words of a previous piece I wrote for spiked, the housing crisis is shredding the social contract. The stakes are incredibly high for working-class people on low incomes and in insecure work. Too many people today are worried about just surviving in ways not seen since before the Second World War. I know families who are eating from food banks so that they have enough money to pay the rent. As it stands, people’s only hope for affordable housing is social housing, of which there is a severe shortage. Houses have not been built at the rate we need for years. To compound the shortfall, over two million council houses have been sold off since Margaret Thatcher’s right-to-buy policy was introduced in 1980. Over 40 per cent of those former council houses are now in the hands of private landlords, who are renting them out at the market rate. A combination of a lack of new homes being built and a rising population, thanks largely to immigration, has meant that social-housing eligibility is increasingly restricted to the most vulnerable and those whom the local authority has a legal duty to house. Even with these restrictions in place, the social-housing waiting list stands at over 1.3million households, many of whom will have to wait years for a home. Keen to reduce their individual waiting lists, local councils have sought a bureaucratic fix. They have been changing their social-housing eligibility…