As a data scientist in the property sector, my first mistake was to ignore these blandishments and insist on trying to achieve something. In 2022 I joined the housing department of one of the London borough councils. Our ostensible purposes were to procure and manage temporary accommodation, to use that accommodation to support homeless applicants, and to find and prosecute rogue landlords. We had also recently absorbed another social housing body and their staff, and were trying to pull these people and teams together into some kind of integrated service.

The challenges we faced, and the tools we had to face them with, were similar to those of hundreds of other local authorities across the country. In the last financial year £2.8bn was spent across England on temporary accommodation, and our own trends in cost were no more alarming than the national ones.

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This week, in keeping with Andy Burnham’s drive for devolution, the Government announced that mayoral authorities will gain powers to call in planning applications and manage public assets. To discharge these new powers, they will lean heavily on councils as their source of information and skills. It is worth taking stock of who we are ultimately devolving power to, and whether they are capable of exercising it. 

In the council office we began each office day with a team ritual: swap mice and keyboards between each of our desks to fill in the gaps and assemble a working computer. IT struggled to replace broken equipment, so we counted it a good day if four out of five computers were usable. Wiser heads knew that if you pretended to have fibromyalgia, a computer would be provided for you in advance. Once you had a working machine, you might be forcibly logged out until you had worked through an HR instructional video, in which cartoon characters and multiple choice questions explained that you shouldn’t leave your laptop out in public. Then at last you could face the horrors of the day.

It started as soon as we picked up a call. The system on which we logged our call records didn’t stop you from saying that a tenant had 38 children, or was 120 years old, or had left temporary accommodation before they’d entered it. So we created more new errors each day in our records than could ever be corrected. Those who find modern life excessively preoccupied with identity would have had a field day with our contact databases, in which a host of columns (Gender, gender, GENDER) had been laid up to store our many genders.

Because we did not have control over this database — and could only amend a single case at a time — we invested ever-mounting effort into training dozens of staff to fix errors manually. Every quarter, they would trawl through our web portal to find and fix, one by one, the small fraction of errors that stopped us making our statutory data submissions to central government. The rest were left to multiply. My suggestions that we fix this broken system and check the data before it was put in were not considered sufficiently accessible or focused on the resident.

People who deal with databases like to use the phrase “garbage in, garbage out”, meaning that if you use them to store any old rubbish, you might not enjoy having to reach back in to retrieve it later. In my experience this understates the problem. As time passes things change inside a bin, and not for the better.

These errors had consequences. Although the amount of housing benefit paid out by the council to temporary accommodation tenants was compounding year on year, we had not taken the trouble to find out how many tenants we were responsible for. The two figures available came from two different databases held by two different subcontractors. Both were irreconcilable, and both wrong. The figure we used for reporting in each case depended largely on whether we wanted to convey a reassuring vibe or a worrying one.

Likewise, because the council had lost the history of our social housing applicants during a migration from one software tool to another, it was impossible to say how long people had been waiting for social housing. No regular check was made on the employment status of our temporary accommodation tenants and, being unable to access data from the Department for Work and Pensions, we could not say what proportion of our tenants were in work. As with the number of tenants, this plurality of truths was often convenient; a grim figure might help us seek more grant money, and a cheerful one demonstrate progress.

Such shoddy record-keeping might have remained a mere embarrassment. But over time it led us to become increasingly unmoored from the reality of our tenants. The result was taxpayers’ money misspent or simply thrown away. For example, we had no process for closing the accounts we set up to bill tenants. One consequence was that the “temporary” storage facility we offered tenants to help them move house was used by some for years, or decades, as a permanent near-free service.

We did not know whether half of our tenants had any local connection or real need to be placed in our borough. Rather than enquire into their circumstances, we kept them in expensive locations. Often these were hotels – though I cannot say how often, as these placements were sometimes paid for by card and recorded in a separate, unknown place. And our system for recording rent payments equated four weeks to a month, with staff turnover too high for there to be any institutional memory of why. I never could find out whether we were therefore charging far too much or not enough — every month, to every tenant.

Our management of public money was no better in big things than in small. This was exemplified by the way the organization handled procurement. Out of curiosity, I requested a copy of our contract with the company that provided our tracking software for homelessness support cases. I discovered that it was about to come up for renewal. No one in the organization was aware of this renewal, whether it was desirable, or on what terms to make it. In the rare cases when an independent decision about data was made, it was made by managers who did not know the difference between a database and a website, were unaware of what data systems already existed, and had no understanding of the need for common identifiers to link different systems together.

Because no single individual knew how the whole system fit together, vagueness reigned. No matter how many people you asked, the truth about who ran a system or how it worked was typically considered ineffable. All I know is that the handful of staff with actual experience of data were never party to big decisions about it. As one analyst put it: “This is one of the countless times my working life has been made worse by decisions about databases which I had no involvement in.”

The role of the data professional, then, was manually to extract wrong information from a broken system they were banned from fixing, omit anything either too flattering or not flattering enough, and arrange for it to appear ephemerally to an innumerate manager in a pointless meeting.

What lay behind this culture of obsessive inattention to detail? Partly, behaviors that undermine public administration everywhere. Rather than pressing forward, bureaucracy tends to grope around laterally. For instance, local government is obsessed with imitation. In our case, it was the function of the “policy officer” to find out and copy anything another public body was doing, especially if it had an intriguing title with the word “strategy” in it. This approach led us to continually update a gray, churning world of unread documents. There would always be a policy document that needed a refresh, or to be turned successively into half a dozen briefings at different levels of abstraction. “This strategy is really more of an action plan.” “This action plan is really more of a strategy.” The continual push by management to make a document the same as that produced by every other public body, to the point of lifting whole sections, made perfect sense in a realm where copypasta had become the only form of credibility.

Local government is also an enthusiastic promoter of “everythingism”, a tendency to require one policy in one area to solve all problems everywhere. It was considered “siloed” to focus discussion on our basic responsibilities, but “open-minded” to link homelessness to climate change or call for total equality of outcomes across society. All meetings took on a standard form: describe every activity currently being conducted as “siloed”, call for a “holistic approach”, and make plans for a further meeting in which these lines could be repeated.

But questions of data are too specific, too technical, to allow for this. The result was a counter-norm we might call “nothingism”. That is, while every area of public policy must be discussed with reference to every other area at the same time, nothing concrete could actually be established, because obtaining data about anything was made impossible. That is not to say people were incurious; in fact they were often very interested in what others were doing, in case it might be useful in their personal quests for power. I recall being upbraided by a junior colleague for being slow to update my office calendar when my wife went into labor. But when it came to sharing information about their own projects, a cloud of unknowing would descend.

Still, people are easier to change than ideas. It might have been hoped that new hires would gradually replace the existing blob with a more advanced generation of staff. But these were not the people sought. In assessing candidates for senior data roles, the criteria were whether they could recall niceties of legislation without prompting, not whether they had any data skills, were competent to procure IT tools, or knew anything about programming. Steady wage compression did not help. Pay settlements in which lower-banded staff get a percentage pay rise, and higher earners a smaller lump sum, have left data staff salaries hopelessly uncompetitive. Whether or not a market exists for policy officers, there certainly is one for data engineers and database admins, and it pays more than any local council.

This creates an incentive to avoid any training in data skills that might lead to council staff being poached. Instead, training is only offered on the aforementioned bespoke, barely-functional tools that have no value to a prospective employer. The result is that programmers are replaced by staff who can perhaps query a database, and these in turn by staff who can hit “refresh” on an old report but lack the skills to create anything new at all.

I eventually accepted that no effort or stratagem was going to simultaneously change hiring, procurement, management, or a general culture of disinterest in whether our programs were reaching the right people or having any measurable effect. Nor did a major systems failure seem likely to cause an awakening; the investigation we were under for widespread maladministration had led only to our spasmodically procuring another parallel IT system.

After three years of fruitless attempts to map (never mind fix) these multifarious problems, I decided to lay the job aside. I went back to doing what I had done before: building data projects in a young team which survives on grant money. It’s true that it’s easier to build a new system than fix a broken one.

Until now, this is how the Mayoral authorities have operated. New, and with a continuous need to justify their existence, they haven’t calcified as councils have into an impermeable bureaucracy.

This should be a reason to welcome one of the Burnham reforms: the granting of powers to regional authorities to overrule local planning decisions. Ironically, the Burnham devolution agenda may work best where it makes public services less local — by allowing mayors to snatch them from unreformable councils!

The rub is that they will depend on local information to do it. The most generous incentives and strongest mandates are likely to founder if they rely on organizations with profound cultural commitments to inefficiency. The only chance of success is to establish entirely new systems and allow the old to wither on the vine. And the old system doesn’t deserve to survive.

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Tenants in bedsits died while we debated whether their social housing priority should be low or medium. The deliberate policy of fragmenting our information across half a dozen broken systems made their personal experience a mystery.

Ultimately, there was something evil in this banality. The culture we worked in amplified our worst instincts and thwarted our best. It took momentary mistakes and turned them into permanent rot, and took a genuine desire for joined-up government and sublimated it into pointless meetings.

Did we do any good? Perhaps, behind the fog, we were making a genuine difference to the lives of vulnerable people. Or perhaps, as the critics say, we were simply allocating workless households to prime London real estate. With no knowledge of where our applicants ended up, we are unable either to chastise failure or to praise success. The truth is impossible to trace.

Today, all of that is gone. Now, the only families who have homes and space in London are the ones who are very rich, and an ever-decreasing subset of the poor who have managed to cling on in social housing. Everyone else, especially the children, are overcrowded. Their families rent rooms in houses, they don’t have gardens and one in every 20 doesn’t have a home at all. Instead, they bounce from one temporary homelessness accommodation to another, a miserable, distressing journey through badly maintained rented rooms and hotels. Down the street I grew up on, it costs £1,000 to rent a single room. 

In three and a half decades, then, we have undone a century of progress on housing. Yet if this process began in the Eighties, with Margaret Thatcher’s planned destruction of council housing and deregulation of the private rented sector, every politician who has had responsibility for housing and for London in the years since shares some of the blame — with vast consequences for the city’s skyline, school system and even its broad culture.

Even before she came to power, Thatcher had a vision: we would no longer rely on the public sector to house people who couldn’t afford to buy, by offering council homes at local rents. Instead, we would let these people choose a private rented home and allow people to claim benefits to make up the difference. We shifted, essentially, from a welfare system based on bricks to one based on benefits, with “Right to Buy” the jewel in the monetarist crown. 

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At the same time, Thatcher made changes to the private rented sector: abolishing both rent control and security of tenure, which guaranteed tenants a new lease once the old one expired. Now, private landlords could raise rents as quickly as they liked and evict their charges at the end of a short-term tenancy for no reason at all. This was the beginning of the end: the security and community working class Londoners had built up was based on council housing. Thatcher’s moves would destroy those communities. 

The Conservative reforms came at the worst possible economic time for two reasons. First, the rapid deindustrialization of the economy, and the construction of a new financial sector in London, meant that the capital had become the center of the country’s wealth and employment. After enduring a steady decline in population for decades, the city’s population started to rise, and rapidly too, as people moved here for work. The number of Londoners has increased every year since 1988, neatly chiming with the financial Big Bang.

Then there was the global fall in interest rates, which occurred in the Nineties after Thatcher had moved on. This did several things. The first was to wreck people’s pension plans. No longer would their savings pay out enough for retirement. So they looked for another, secure destination for their money instead. And thanks to low rates, and a new financial product called the “buy-to-let mortgage”, created with the knowledge and blessing of government, there was an easy option: property in London. Millions began flowing into buying up homes in the capital: not to live in, but to rent out to the city’s growing population. I remember watching the numbers in the property section in the local paper rise to almost silly-sounding amounts: £100,000, £200,000, £300,000. How could anyone possibly afford these sums, just to live in? 

Then Tony Blair arrived, with a big Labour majority, in 1997. Things might have changed. We could have moved away from the Thatcherite focus on benefits and private landlords, back to the tradition of the 20th century: the construction of social housing on a large scale. But we didn’t. Tony Blair oversaw some of the lowest rates of council building since the “Addison Act” created the model of local authority-owned housing in 1919. New Labour did, to be fair, pump money into upgrading some social homes: but this came with strings attached. 

For one thing, councils had to transfer their homes to private social housing providers, or set up private management bodies to get hold of it. And though the money might have offered nice new kitchens and bathrooms, it didn’t address the fundamental problems with the fabric of aging housing estates. Strapped for cash, councils turned to another option: knocking them down and selling the sites to private builders to pay for a rebuild at higher density, with higher rents and more private housing. South London’s Aylesbury Estate — where Blair gave his first speech as leader — was slated for demolition in 2005. 

Meanwhile, the rest of the city was also changing. The arrival of a London mayoralty led to the elevation of Ken Livingstone. A veteran of local politics, Livingstone had been leader of the Greater London Council, until its abolition in 1986. This time around, Ken’s biggest idea was to build upwards. On his watch, dozens of new skyscrapers were signed off: The Gherkin, The Cheesegrater, The Shard — all these icons of capitalism started their journey under the auspices of Red Ken. 

But this caused a problem. As skyscrapers became increasingly common in London, the value of land on which they could be built exploded, jumping by 30% since the financial crisis alone. No longer would developers build rows of family-sized housing, as they had well into the 20th century. The land was just too expensive to make this model work any more. And with planning laws preventing the city from expanding outwards — the Green Belt has become a kind of religion for politicians of all parties — it would instead densify: with gargantuan office and apartment blocks popping up from Victoria to Croydon. The cost of building these towers, and indeed buying the land, meant they were never going to be affordable for families: even those who didn’t mind living in the clouds. 

All the while, London’s population was growing at an even faster rate. Blair, his confidence in free market absolutism, opted against a transition period for the “free movement of people”, when the EU expanded in 2004. Now, workers from all around Europe could come to what was one of the continent’s foremost economic centers. But there would not be housing for them when they arrived. So, instead, they piled into the private rented sector, driving the value up even higher for landlords and encouraging them not to rent out houses. Rather, they split them up into rooms to maximize their income. A house in London was now an extraordinarily valuable asset, with millions of cheaply-priced loans chasing every new “opportunity”. How could normal families, who just wanted somewhere to live and school for their kids, hope to compete? 

Then came the financial crisis and another opportunity to reset. The model we had followed to this point was plainly broken: wasn’t it time to try a new one? Instead, we would double down on our mistakes. The Bank of England responded to the crisis by cutting interest rates to historic lows and pumping money into the economy via quantitative easing. This meant that money rushed to safe assets, and property investors could borrow cheaply. Property in a Western capital with high demand for housing was the new gold. Speculative developments began to pull in billions from investors all around the world. A wall of investment money crashed into London’s market, sending the value of prices soaring yet higher. Suddenly, it was very easy to get stinking rich from building private housing in London and selling it off-plan in Hong Kong. 

But what these investors did not want was “affordable housing” — which cut their profits and lowered the attractiveness of the asset to investors. David Cameron’s coalition government obliged, introducing a system of “viability” which gave property developers a way to avoid their legal commitments to building affordable housing. Residential tower blocks piled up in the London skyline with hardly a unit of social flat in sight. Boris Johnson, as Livingstone’s successor as mayor, enthusiastically encouraged this trend: signing off projects boroughs had refused for containing too little affordable housing, selling off public land to private developers, and turning over government cash to help private developers build on new sites. 

At the same time, Cameron went further than Thatcher had in dismantling social housing. Grants for new social homes were cut to a third of even the historically low post-Thatcher rates. Budget cuts were also forced through ,which pushed social landlords to junk much-needed capital investment. Property increasingly fell into disrepair. A revitalization of Right to Buy saw the remaining decent stock sold off, and new build housing was let under a new “affordable rents” regime — which was still too high for the poorest to afford. Social housing, in the traditional sense, was completely residualized, while waiting times for a council home in London boroughs stretched into decades. 

And where Thatcher had elected to move from bricks to benefits, Cameron went a step further: cutting benefits as well. He prevented claimants from receiving anything more than the lowest third of the local market rate, and then froze that rate. This meant that as rents rose, the number of properties someone on benefits could afford rapidly shrank, even as many claimants were also holding down jobs. More and more families were duly evicted, and found they had no options for somewhere else to live. 

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The city started to sink into a permanent crisis, as young families escaped elsewhere. And if the London they left behind was physically unrecognizable from that of their parents — a cityscape of ugly prefab towers, built from plastic and steel — the capital’s housing crisis is now having a broader societal impact. So few young families can afford to live here, for instance, that the school system is collapsing. According to one recent study, London accounted for nine out of the ten areas nationally with the biggest drop in primary-age students, with Westminster Council closing three schools over the last five years. 

And even for those working-class Londoners clinging on, the situation is grim. These days, residents typically spend a stonking 41% of their incomes on rent. And if that inevitably has a stark economic impact, London’s culture has arguably been harmed too. Long gone are the days when struggling artists could find cheap digs in the city center — leaving plenty of time for music or writing or whatever else they had set their sights on. 

Over recent years, meanwhile, Covid has piled on even more pressure. In its aftermath, rents soared yet further, as a sudden surge in immigration due to post-Brexit reforms, a rise in international students, and an uptick affluent families seeking more space converged at the same moment — all while landlords were less willing to put their properties on the market. Sadiq Khan has done more than Boris to reverse the decline, starting off the first genuine program of council housing construction in the city since Thatcher. But he too has faltered, his build numbers dropping and his electoral promise of 50% affordable housing in new developments long forgotten. 

As for Khan’s colleagues in Whitehall, Labour has few answers either. New rental reforms will offer longer term security, but do little to help those who simply can’t pay the rent anymore. Extra money for social housing construction is welcome, but given the size of the challenge, it is too little and too late. The larger chunk of funding won’t be available until after 2030, which in practice means new homes are a decade away. That speaks to a broader failure: notwithstanding Keir Starmer’s pledge to build 1.5 million new homes nationwide by the end of this Parliament, planning approvals lately dropped to a record low. And so we have the London of today: unaffordable, atomized, sterile. Its communities dead or dying, the keys handed over to private landlords and property developers, my parents’ dream a distant memory. 

***

Peter Apps is the author of Homesick: How Housing Broke London and How to Fix It, published on 25 September

The picture built up by Nathaniel McBride’s documentary drama is one of unremitting institutional failure on the part of the local authority and the quango responsible for housing in the borough. The well-documented failures of fire safety in the years running up to the tragedy date as far back as 2010, when the ventilation system was exposed as not good enough after a fire melted a front door.

In 2013, Grenfell residents experienced a night of power surges and the threat of a serious fire when laptops and computers in some of the flats “literally exploded”. Their desperately concerned emails to the council were met with denials of responsibility and claims that no one else had reported such occurrences.

In 2015, the infamous contractor Rydon was tasked with refurbishing the tower, installing the flammable cladding, new boilers, and defective windows. This is when the pivotal decision was taken by the Kensington & Chelsea Tenants Management Organisation (KCTMO) to switch from fire resistant zinc cladding to the cheaper, but lethal, aluminium, to cut costs. Shockingly, a test on the safety of the cladding was performed but discontinued because it was deemed too dangerous.

A year later, the KCTMO carried out its own very positive review of the work they had commissioned; but in April 2017, just three months before the fire, the Fire Brigade warned that the building facades were not compliant with health and safety regulations. Over in Westminster, David Cameron’s promise to wage war on excessive health and safety set the tone. “We need to realise, collectively, that we cannot eliminate risk and that some accidents are inevitable,” the former prime minister said. The late David Amess, the chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on fire safety regulations asked for fire regulations to be reviewed a heroic 13 times, but his calls fell on deaf ears.

The two questions running through the play are: why did Grenfell fire happen, and could it happen again? The Government’s Grenfell Tower Inquiry is making it very clear that there were many instances of specific failure related to fire safety and building regulations. There is relief that there is now a ban on combustible cladding on tall buildings but that is set against the difficulties of achieving that ban, with the Government initially resistant to it.

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And while mitigating steps relating to cladding have been taken, other significant risks remain. There are serious concerns about lightweight timber frame construction, while the UK remains an international outlier by continuing to permit single staircases in tall buildings. Peter Apps, the deputy editor of Inside Housing, believes there are hundreds of thousands of buildings which have similar levels of risk to Grenfell and warns that “we are drifting back to the same attitudes”.

These are the specifics, but the broader question relates to democratic accountability and the failure to listen to residents’ repeated concerns about safety. In a horrifyingly prescient blog post written just months before the fire, the Grenfell Action Group stated: “It is a truly terrifying thought but the Grenfell Action Group firmly believe that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord, the KCTMO, and bring to an end the dangerous living conditions and neglect of health and safety legislation.”

The correspondence between the council and the KCTMO reveals the casual contempt with which residents’ concerns were treated. Residents claimed that they were not given the opportunity to comment on the refurbishment and during the works repeatedly said they faced intimidation and harassment by Rydon and the KCTMO, including abusive emails. During this time, one of the residents reporting intimidation was implicitly threatened with eviction when he found out that he was being investigated by the council for the “unclear circumstances” through which he had inherited his tenancy agreement.

Where contrition might have been expected, astonishingly the same attitude to residents continued after the fire, when the contracts manager for Rydon told the government’s Inquiry that residents who raised complaints about fire safety and cladding were “vocal and aggressive” and “regardless of what work was being carried out would still have found a reason to complain”.

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But the complete breakdown of relations between community and local authority is not limited to what happened at Grenfell. It is replicated in many other London boroughs where both homeowners and social housing tenants on housing estates find it impossible to communicate with their councils. In Southwark, a homeowner on the Aylesbury Estate who was opposed to the regeneration of the estate found herself with no electricity, no internet access, no lift services and no hot water or heating, while the postman was told nobody lived at her address. Beverley Robinson, chair of the Aylesbury Leaseholders Action Group, recalled: “I had no heating for weeks and weeks and then they wouldn’t let the people in to fix it.”

Loretta Lees, Professor of Human Geography at Leicester University and former Chair of the London Housing Panel, describes this trend towards open conflict between local authorities and housing estate residents as reflecting the “Rachman-like tendencies” of the state. Peter Rachman was a slum landlord who operated in Notting Hill in the Fifties and Sixties and who became notorious for the exploitation and intimidation of his tenants who lived in terrible conditions.

The bigger picture is that all over London, and in many other cities, residents are failing to benefit from the wholesale regeneration and reconfiguration of their areas. Entire districts are witnessing the demolition of estates, which are replaced by ubiquitous developments of luxury apartments. In Elephant and Castle, the Heygate Estate was demolished and replaced by Elephant Park where two-bedroom apartments are on sale for more than £1 million. Roughly 25% of the scheme is designated affordable housing but as the definition of affordable housing has been changed to mean up to 80% of market value, that is far from affordable for the majority of Londoners.

The refurbishment of Grenfell Tower was also part of an area-wide regeneration, laid out in the “Notting Barns Masterplan”, which planned to create “a more successful urban neighbourhood through selective demolition of existing housing stock and the provision of high-quality new homes”. The aim was to drive up land values in the area by making it a more attractive place to live, which is regeneration speak for increasing property prices. The project also included the demolition of the neighbouring Silchester Estate, the leasing of the local library to the £22,000-per-year Notting Hill Prep School and the replacement of a popular community facility, the West London Stables, with luxury apartments, all of which aroused community opposition.

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On the morning of the fire, a features editor emailed me to ask if I would write a piece “on the housing apartheid in London, how London’s poor end up living in death trap towers”. The narrative of poverty-stricken deprivation in a tower block ghetto, a stone’s throw from one of the richest parts of London, persisted throughout the media in the weeks after the disaster, with newspapers running with the need to demolish more social housing like this. It was only through the sheer level of interest in the story that it became clear that Grenfell had not only been structurally sound, but a much-loved place to live with a thriving and mixed community.

When the Government announced its Inquiry into the fire, the local community were disappointed by its limited scope, and demanded that it be widened, to “seek to understand how residents’ voices have been systematically ignored for so long”. Michael Mansfield QC, who is representing survivors and relatives, has highlighted that the Inquiry is only investigating how the fire came about and who should be accountable, rather than looking at the experience of living in social housing. He has pointed out that while the experience of living in social housing is crucial to what happened at Grenfell, it is “off limits”, with families given very limited opportunities to speak or ask questions. The consequence is that they feel excluded from the Inquiry, raising uncomfortable parallels with the reality of living in social housing.

The Inquiry is producing invaluable evidence about what happened and why, which means the likelihood of another incident related to the specific failures uncovered seems unlikely. But the broader question of elected councils listening to residents who voice uncomfortable truths has escaped scrutiny. This means that the next time concerns around potentially fatal issues are raised, there is still no certainty they will be listened to.

Governments of all stripes have long talked about the need to create mixed communities. Grenfell was a successful mixed community which found itself labelled as a ghetto, as part of a narrative of managed decline perpetuated by the institutions which wanted to regenerate the area. This is the end result of treating housing simply as financial asset, which combined with a complete failure to listen to the voices of the community, led to the tragedy of the fire.

London looks extraordinary from up here, immortal in its way, a proving ground for the capitalist dream of unending growth. In all the time I have lived here, I have never felt so blissfully remote from the economic forces embodied by that view. Since the imposition of the first lockdown last March, I have scarcely crossed the river, let alone loitered in the cultural and commercial districts, which, in times of normality, so often coaxed millions of us into their gleaming centre

In many respects, this has been a tonic. During these months of geographical constraint, our preoccupations have become localised, almost parochial: the vexatious subject of “Low Traffic Neighbourhoods”; the question of which local park cafes serve alcohol.

Only now, as Covid restrictions ease and a mayoral election comes into focus, has that spell started to break. With it comes a need to look back to that horizon, and return to the issues besetting the city at large.

The rogue’s gallery of candidates for the mayoralty betrays a city which, like the wider country, remains ill at ease with itself. To rose-tinted liberals, London is still the ultimate city, a cradle of tolerant coexistence, the place where multiculturalism works. To those on the histrionic Right, London is anarchy, plagued by terror-attacks, no-go zones and spiralling crime.

The truth, inevitably, is somewhere in between. London is not a Powellian ruin. But, for a lifelong resident like me, it is no longer possible to pretend that it is a unified, contented and enviable place either. Indeed, the most disturbing question raised in the aftermath of the Grenfell Tower fire has not gone away: how did London become a place that no longer functions for those who live here?

I suspect the answer, if it could be boiled down into a single word, would be property. In my other life, I do occasional work as a landscape gardener, tending the lawns and flowerbeds of south London’s more affluent inner-suburbs. Recently, a neighbour sidled up to me to complain about the homogenisation of her neighbourhood. I wrote about this very subject last year for UnHerd.

Next door to where I was working, someone with a lot of money had commissioned an overhaul of their semi, and the excavation conveyors were churning all day long, puking up London clay to make space for a new basement. “When we moved here 40 years ago, I was a junior legal researcher, my husband was an assistant lecturer,” the neighbour said, over the din. “This road was all teachers and police officers. Public servants. Now it’s just bankers, bankers, bankers.”

How did this happen? The erosion of London’s social-housing stock, which once inoculated the city against the creation of rich and poor ghettoes, is certainly one reason; the globe-trotting tendencies of the super-rich another. Disproportionate city incomes have furnished a portion of residents with the financial leverage to recast an area overnight if it becomes popular with a certain milieu, while the suburban dream, which only 20 years ago still lured people out of the inner-city, seemed, prior to Covid, to have expired.

Together, these processes have combined to dissolve London’s mixed communities, as well as the post-war history of town-planning which once ensured that no area of affluence could become an island, aloof from the rest of society.

The emptiness of Central London’s commercial quarters over the past year was prefigured long before in the city’s slew of new luxury residential developments, which have been devoid of people ever since they were finished. To walk through places like the Nine Elms Regeneration Area in the early months of 2020 was to enter a grotesque dystopia of late capitalism run amok.

All over town, vast welters of such towers are still in the throes of construction, invariably encircled by hoardings depicting attractive people at rest and play. But residents know that these apartments are less homes to be lived in than bricks-and-mortar commodities; investment opportunities that until recently were seen as safer than any government bond.

The sense of dislocation created by these joyless plazas is in large part architectural. London used to be a low-slung city, but these towers are vertiginous and carbuncular, looming over the besieged remnants of what came before.

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Arguably more significant than their aesthetic dissonance was the social upheaval they precipitated. As these towers grew, socio-demographic lines that once felt blurred became abrupt and pronounced, as people moved into economic enclaves and poverty was pushed outwards into peripheries and ghettoes of disadvantage. Traditional places of commonality, where shoulders rubbed, soon disappeared.

Prior to lockdown, I was frequently struck by the way in which once-diverse high streets were evolving to reflect these more stratified times: the poorer areas with their betting and pawn shops, the wealthier ones lined with estate agents, restaurants and prim cafes. Our civic spaces and landmarks were being commodified, as cash-strapped councils looked to make up budget shortfalls by monetising their assets, repurposing public libraries into private gyms. Boundaries, both real and imagined, had started to rise across the inner-city.

As established communities fractured and dissipated, the streets began to feel more febrile. People in their 30s, unable to afford the cost of raising a family here, were starting to leave in droves. And we who remained were left with a curious sense that we were an inconvenient vestige of a city that no longer exists, obdurate stone buildings amidst a forest of steel and glass.

Pre-pandemic London remained successful in many ways: as a summer playground for the super-rich; as a giant laundromat for the global kleptocracy; as an iconographic background for tourist photos and the glossy pages of a Hong Kong realtor’s brochure. But as a constellation of established communities? Not anymore; London’s covenant was coming undone.

The misery this has imposed in the city’s margins is all too easy to ignore. The more obvious victims, such as the council tenants living in mould-infested tower blocks, are rarely heard. Their abasement, like so much which afflicts the London underclass, is hidden away, in foodbanks concealed behind council estates, or displaced out of town.

But to focus exclusively on such misery is to miss a wider, more inchoate malaise — of a city adrift, changing in ways its residents don’t condone. Cities are always prone to endless flux, but when a city changes this fast, and on such an inhuman scale — when it starts to wear its inequality so gaudily — it is impossible to live here without feeling unmoored.

Suddenly, each new skyscraper feels like an act of violence; each house renovation a desecration. Wealthy newcomers appear not as new neighbours but as colonisers; hipster beards and vintage shops become hallmarks of an enemy within. Each international bar or café, an effigy of the melting pot it supplanted, becomes a reminder that London’s hallowed diversity is often merely ornamental — a desirable backdrop so long as it doesn’t press too close.

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London has become a vanity project

By Douglas Murray

So much of our yearning for the London we’ve lost seems ostensibly counter-intuitive. The city I grew up in was hardly an urban paradise. Many of my most vivid memories are recalled with a maternal hand at my back, ushering me past scenes of a recessional metropolis, rendered in grey. Cardboard shanties still proliferated beneath the Southbank undercrofts; on Oxford Street, grifters peddled counterfeit perfume from splayed suitcases. Back then the air was tubercular, the Thames flowed an effluent brown, and every road seemed dappled with litter, chewing gum, and dog shit in varying stages of putrefaction.

Yet I still yearn for that time before it was all cleaned-up and prettified. Before the pigeon-feed sellers had been turfed from Trafalgar Square. The other day I saw a car with a bumper-sticker which read: “Make Peckham Shit Again”, and I couldn’t help but smile at the oxymoron it conveyed. We have become a paradox: the progressive city nostalgic for the past.

Meanwhile, apologists for the gentrification of inner-London exonerate its degradations with platitudes about “market forces” — it’s just another reality of late capitalism, up there with sweat-shop labour and the atrophying high-street. It is something we grumble about on social media, but, for the most part, can’t bring ourselves to protest over because it would be like screaming at the tide.

Besides, don’t these market forces come with perks? As a tsunami of foreign property investment increased demand for a stagnating supply, and successive governments tailored housing policy to sustain the boom, those of us who own homes have seen their value rocket. In recent decades, owning a house in London has become the UK’s easiest path to fast cash. This is the city’s guilty secret: that so many of us have suckled on this indemnity that we cannot admit its inherent madness.

The 2016 Brexit vote exposed the intractability of these hypocrisies, as the predominantly Left-leaning city found itself in a Faustian pact, at once lamenting the financial sector’s malignant influence but terrified at the implications of its potential evacuation. Combined with the effects of the pandemic, suddenly an economy predicated on casino banking and rentier capitalism feels frail, one fiscal paroxysm from catastrophe.

Perhaps this is why we were so ready to let it go; so prepared, when Covid provided the pretext, to retreat into our respective streets, leaving the inner city to get on with its fire-sale unscrutinised.

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It remains to be seen what long-term impact the Covid year will have on London’s trajectory. It doesn’t seem wholly naïve to hope that its resuscitation of civic engagement might act as a breakwater against the city’s atomisation and its darkening mood. Lockdown has forced its neophiles to engage with their local neighbourhoods, and stalled the speculation that was so ruthlessly reshaping them. In some respects, at least, the last year could prove to be for the city’s benefit.

But, still, London’s reanimation brings with it a sense of foreboding. The fact that the wider city has only really registered over the last year as a backdrop to ill-tempered protest — in images of marching lockdown sceptics and police cordons defending Churchill’s statue — may foreshadow a summer of discontent, as the city’s unleashed energy turns sour and the economic fall-out from Covid starts to pinch.

Amid the excitement of rebirth, the queasy feeling many of us experience upon seeing roads thronged with traffic and parks strewn with revellers’ litter serves as a reminder that one of the intractable problems with London is that there are a lot of people. And people are often unbearable.

Now the giant stirs. The mayor will have a job to do.

Something else is happening too, as we stand in our doorways making a noise: there is a certain relief in making ourselves visible again, at simply being physically on the street at the same time as a significant number of other people, albeit while ‘socially distanced’.

Many of those who are now shut indoors, particularly white-collar workers, are unused to being invisible. They are accustomed to being endlessly busy and seen to be busy, in offices, in meetings, with an ever-changing cast of people. (‘busy,’ after all, had become one of the chief indicators of modern merit.)

Now, many higher-paid workers find that both their visibility and their perceived importance has been unexpectedly muted, while that of others has soared. At the same time, many among them are also understandably worried about their livelihoods in a post-Covid landscape.

This alteration in perceptions of value — a national redistribution of esteem — has happened very rapidly. Within a few weeks, the advent of Covid-19 and the ensuing lockdown — amid an unprecedented peacetime death toll — has pared Britain down and exposed the essential workings and workers of our country.

Most notably, there are those at the NHS front-line, united in a communal effort to prevent the very sick from dying. Around them are the others who help to keep the entire populace fed, watered and safe from harm, including workers in the emergency services and transport, delivery and food supply networks. Among the remainder of the population, there is a new intensity of gratitude felt towards those who brave potential infection to assist others.

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Victimhood culture will tear us apart

By Jenny McCartney

And yet — in recent years, well before Covid-19 struck — the life of a ‘key worker’ in many parts of the UK was proving ever more of a struggle. Last year, Mark Chiverton, a Unison representative for the south-east, representing public service workers, told its local government conference: “It is almost impossible now for many of our members to live in many of our towns and cities, with homes out of reach.”

The problem was worst in London. In 2015, commentators such as Michael Skapinker in the Financial Times were observing that London property was not only unaffordable for essential workers on relatively low salaries — such as nurses, firefighters, hospital porters and ambulance drivers — but increasingly so also for middle-class professionals such as doctors, teachers and professors. The complaint had been heard for many years before, of course — intensifying since the financial crisis of 2008 — but nothing decisive on the part of the government was done to address it.

The escalating cost of renting or buying London property — an increasingly attractive investment for large companies and overseas buyers — was damaging both its social coherence and its wider economy. In terms of housing, London had gradually priced out first its working-class, and then its younger middle-class, particularly those with families.

Three years ago, a report called Estimating The Value of Discounted Rental Accommodation had found that this skewing led to mass relocation from the inner to the outer boroughs of London, or further afield. It came, researchers said, at a cost to the capital of billions of pounds a year, and risked resulting in a pattern of financial segregation similar to that of Paris, in which the city centre is serviced by a large population who mainly live in densely-populated suburbs.

One of the authors of the study, Professor Peter Urwin, said that “the wage of a teacher, or nurse or tourism worker is much lower than the productive contribution they make to the economy and society’” — something long recognised, but more often informally expressed in hazy terms of moral rather than economic worth, and thereby more easily ignored by policy-makers.

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Urwin’s report, however, estimated that supplying subsidised rental housing to ‘key workers’ resulted in an average benefit of £27,000 per household to the capital’s economy. If the average cost of the subsidy for affordable homes was £14,000, as he calculated, then the net gain to the economy for each household stood at £12,500 or so. The alternative would be that — given a choice between a struggling city-centre life, and a more affordable life even with a potentially stressful commute — key workers would increasingly either choose the latter, or simply leave London entirely and find jobs in their new locality.

Despite some valiant local efforts, to date there has been no coherent national strategy to resolve this situation. Serial Conservative leaders have clung to versions of Margaret Thatcher’s flagship policy of ‘right to buy’ for social housing stock, even as rates of building new social housing remain very low. As such stock has steadily dwindled, need has increased, and both homelessness and social housing waiting lists have soared.

While home ownership remains an ideal for many, it has long been clear that security of tenure at a manageable cost — of the kind once widely guaranteed by a strong social housing supply — would fundamentally change the deep sense of precariousness now experienced by so many lower-paid workers and younger people.

Housing has long been both one of the public’s most fundamental concerns, and a growing source of political disruption. In a Britain suddenly reshaped by Covid-19, these already pressing considerations of who is housed where, and with what measure of security, are going to take on a new and even more urgent form.

Housing, though, is only the most obvious in a succession of policies over a number of decades which has made ordinary life more difficult for many of those on low to moderate salaries, including a high proportion of those in ‘key worker’ roles. Between 2011 and 2018, most public sector pay was frozen or capped at a 1% rise, outstripped by inflation. Why has the UK government’s treatment of its most necessary citizens been so cavalier?

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A partial explanation might be that where culture leads, policy follows. In the decades immediately following the shared national effort and trauma of the Second World War, social status attached to ideals of duty, hard work and sacrifice. To some extent war had been a democratising force: the Princess Elizabeth had joined the Auxiliary Territorial Service and trained as a driver and mechanic. When Buckingham Palace took a direct hit during the Blitz in September 1940, the Queen Mother famously said, “It makes me feel I can look the East End in the face.”

Without idealising those decades, or glossing over their inequalities, there was nonetheless a post-war acceptance that it was the job of government to provide the public with broad access to decent healthcare, education, and secure housing of reliable quality. Orwell, writing during the war, had predicted that “this war, unless we are defeated, will wipe out most of the existing class privileges. There are every day fewer people who wish them to continue.”

That wasn’t wholly true, of course, but the war had certainly resulted in a greater equality of perceived value, which demanded its echo in public policy. Politicians answered the call: in the early 1950s, for example, Harold Macmillan, then the Conservative housing minister, launched an ambitious housing drive which successfully committed to delivering 300,000 new homes a year.

In recent decades, however, perceptions of public value have grown increasingly patchy and distorted. I have lived through much of that period of distortion, and — as with all personal observations — memories must be handled with care. But I can certainly recall that in my childhood in the 1970s and early 80s the prevailing adult judgement of other people related to the word ‘decent’ — not in the sense of ‘respectable’, but in that of good-hearted, kind and willing to put oneself out for other people.

Money was useful, we were given to understand, and could provide for a greater degree of comfort and opportunity: if you were comfortably off, as we were, you were lucky and should be grateful. Both my parents had grown up in working-class Belfast families with little money to spare, and so they appreciated the security a higher income could provide.

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But they also understood that having money had no bearing on someone’s essential decency, and often existed in inverse proportion to that valuable quality. This wasn’t an unusual view then, and I don’t expect it is now — at least not within families and close-knit communities, where people are dependent on one another and have the ability to observe personal characteristics at close quarters. Yet for the past few decades it has not been reflected in the broader culture of the UK.

One of the first changes was that personal value began increasingly to be signalled by the possession of ‘designer’ gear. I remember a distinct excitement when a Next store first came to Belfast in the mid-Eighties, and clothes from there were at first considered ‘designer’ — until the concept of ‘designer’ travelled further into the higher echelons of cost throughout the 90s, to the point at which flashing a  £1,000 handbag or teetering through the streets in a pair of Manolos somehow established you as a person of desirability and taste.

At the same time, the word ‘chav’ began to be widely used to describe working-class people, especially those who appeared to be signalling their status through material possessions (something which those in higher income brackets were already frequently doing, but with different accents and approval ratings.) A ‘chav’ was urban, sexually unrestrained, low on educational aspirations but high on booze and bling, and seemingly undeserving of wider support. Both the term ‘chav’ and its usage were soaked in snobbery.

From the new millennium onwards, a new class-based cruelty was reflected in — now discontinued — television shows such as Jeremy Kyle, which put hard-up guests, often from difficult backgrounds or with addictions, on display before studio audiences for popular censure and mockery. Culture was dividing society more explicitly into winners and losers: even peak-time programmes such as Big Brother or the X-Factor encouraged an atmosphere of voyeurism and selective humiliation for those who failed to judge either their own talents or the nuances of self-presentation accurately.

Poverty was increasingly depicted not as a practical material condition but as a form of moral disease, seemingly experienced by those who failed to budget properly, or were reluctant to work. At the same time, however, a number of London hotels began catering to the new international super-rich, with suites priced upwards of £10,000 a night. The old feeling in Britain that there was something inherently repellent about such obvious excess had been replaced by a new climate of deference to it. 

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Yet as the ‘gig economy’ became established, and employment benefits grew more precarious, the fast-expanding ranks of the ‘working poor’ found their daily reality was very far indeed from the spendthrift caricature of the worse-off. Members of this group were increasingly counting every hard-won penny. A study in March found that three-quarters of children in relative poverty in the UK were in families where at least one adult was in work — something that is likely to be sharply exacerbated by the economic effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.

***

At the beginning, the virus was occasionally spoken of as “a great equaliser” and in a few aspects that is true. We’re all on lockdown, with only necessary exceptions. The virus seized the heir to the throne, and sent the Prime Minister to intensive care.  Famous people now film themselves cutting their own hair. International travel is banned, and social life has shrunk to Zoom calls and socially distanced walks.

Yet the more we know about Covid-19, the more we discover that it is indeed discriminatory in its attack. Statistically there are worse outcomes for the elderly, those with underlying health conditions, men and BAME people. And the risk of catching it is heightened by existing inequalities: it is much harder to stay virus-free, for example, if you already live in overcrowded accommodation, have to take the Tube to work at rush hour, or are a ‘key worker’ with insufficient PPE.

It is hard right now to imagine the shape of a post-Covid UK — but even if this pandemic is wrestled under control, the awareness of the effect that might be wrought by another one in the future will write society an altered script. 

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Don't call it poverty porn

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Some changes may play out naturally. With packed public transport recognised as a potential source of contagion, it will make more sense for ‘key workers’ in London and other UK cities to be housed nearer their city-centre workplaces, so that they can walk or cycle to work. A proportion of city-centre office space could fall empty or be converted to housing, as higher numbers of white-collar employees work from home; more affordable city rental properties suddenly become available for a greater number of people. Across the UK, the future may be simultaneously more spread out and more local, with ‘The Great Wen’ no longer exerting its outsize magnetic tug.

The most severe impact of the economic devastation will fall, as it invariably does, upon those who have the least financial security to begin with. But the precise nature of how government responds to the extreme challenges of the post-corona future, and whom it supports, will also — in large part — be determined by the demonstrable strength of public opinion.

Let us assume that ministers, and Boris Johnson in particular — whose life was recently saved by the NHS — are genuine in their admiration and gratitude for the health service and its workers. Yet already that gratitude does not seem to be translating into unambiguous policy. 

Last week the Home Secretary, Priti Patel, indicated that migrant healthcare workers, currently employed by the NHS and paying tax and National Insurance, must continue to pay the designated ‘immigration health surcharge’ to help fund the NHS, which will reach £625 per person later this year. An outraged British Medical Association correctly observed that ‘skilled international colleagues’ are putting their lives on the hospital frontline to fight Covid-19 in the UK, and that ‘it beggars belief that they are still being charged to use the very service they are working for.’

A leaked government document also hinted at a possible two-year NHS pay freeze, which met with outrage from unions and professional bodies — and was swiftly denied by the Prime Minister with the emphatic words: “Absolutely not. Anyone who suggests that can sit on it.” But the Prime Minister has robustly denied things which have come to pass before.    

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By Fiona Sturges

In the past 30 years or so, British society has gradually become more mesmerised by gossip, celebrity and wealth, and more respectful of people for how they appear and what they possess rather than what they actually do. The forces of glamour and entertainment gobbled up quieter, more altruistic measures of public service. An ‘influencer’ in his or her twenties, who could provide an online illusion of a desirable body and an aspirational life, held considerably more kudos than a middle-aged hospital porter or cleaner who managed to remain cheerful while doing arduous, necessary work day after day. Even conceptions of virtue became increasingly performative, more often located in joining vociferous denunciations on Twitter than in quietly emptying a bedpan or helping an elderly neighbour.

In a very short and disorienting time, these mores have been turned on their head: the public has a tendency to assess social worth more clear-sightedly when it is afraid. The real question is whether the aftermath of Covid-19 will translate into a more permanent alteration in society’s values. Wilde said that a cynic was someone who knew the price of everything and the value of nothing, and I don’t think that the bulk of the British public is cynical. It can, however, be forgetful.

Yet unless the present sound of clapping is not to ring hollow in retrospect, the public will need to keep reminding the government that it expects a fundamental and long-lasting change in the treatment of those ‘key workers’ who keep the UK running.

For decades these employees have been steadily exposed to ever greater levels of insecurity, a kind of slow-grinding institutionalised contempt. Now they are regularly exposing themselves to Covid-19 in the name of duty, on behalf of the wider public. Will the rest of us remain grateful, once the clapping quietens down? I hope so. Let’s see.

When she was pregnant with her daughter Biddy, and on the run from her abusive former boyfriend, for example, she worked in a seamy Soho peep-show. Numerous clients took a perverse pleasure in ogling her expanding, naked form (the author spares us no gruelling detail: one particularly charmless crack-head barked the instructions: “Turn around and spread. I want to see that baby’s head”.)

Just as the reader is reeling from the crudity of the clientele, Carraway – as ever – complicates things with details of the unexpected. The day before she is due to leave to have her baby, the peep-show boss and other girls unveil a surprise: a baby shower, with a cake and a room crammed with gifts from the ‘regulars’ such as a buggy, sleepsuits, a Moses basket (“one man even gifted me his ex-wife’s breast pump just before he ejaculated into my booth.”)

Poverty is no place for the squeamish. One of the most useful things about money, it appears, is that it buys you some distance from the bodily fluids of strangers. In its absence, they’re everywhere: the traces of urine or bloodstains on old mattresses in rented accommodation; the ancient semen that is simply recirculated with a desultory mop around the peep-show floor; the blocked toilet and the pan of vomit in the women’s refuge that mysteriously appears every morning.

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Carraway herself does not seem very squeamish, particularly as a writer. There’s a lot in Skint Estate which is shocking, sad and scary, as well as funny and painfully honest.

The author exposes herself, knowingly, to the judgement of those in more secure situations, while demonstrating an intimate understanding of how those judgements operate. (At one point she describes herself, having adapted her accent and fallen in with a posh coterie of prosecco-quaffing Maida Vale mums, joining them in tut-tutting at a group of young working-class mums having an impromptu picnic with their babies, Maltesers and cans of beer. Afterwards, she feels ashamed.)

She writes, for example, about fleeing domestic violence with her young daughter. She went to live with a well-off man, Kingsley, who had formerly been imprisoned for assaulting her but to whom she is, in some ways, still close. It is not a wise choice, as her female friends tell her at the time, but then wisdom is sometimes a luxury available only to those with other options. Exhausted by financial precariousness, she takes up Kingsley’s unusual offer of posing as his wife in order to secure an inheritance from his father (Kingsley is now gay, and his father is homophobic).

If that sounds like a 19th century plot, then so is the economic situation in which this single mother finds herself: eking out low-paid jobs as a sex chat-line worker, a ‘secret shopper,’ a ‘web psychic’ and a ‘kiss ’n’ tell girl of misery porn’ supplying real-life stories to women’s magazines, but still not making enough to avoid the trip to the foodbank.

For a time such concerns abate, and Carraway temporarily enjoys a fixed roof over her head, and an abundance of branded items which she details with self-mockery mingled with the memory of desire: Boden clothes, a Rangemaster oven, Farrow and Ball paint, Le Creuset pans.

The author argues, accurately, that these are the means by which social acceptability is signalled, albeit a fraudulent kind of acceptability. Then again, it’s easy to dismiss the importance of brands if they’re financially within reach: when they’re not, they mean so much more.

But when Kingsley kicks off again, the safety suggested by the brands is destroyed: “WHORE has been sprayed across my Farrow & Ball No 26 ‘Down Pipe’ bedroom wall in red spray paint.” Even when things are bad, Carraway can’t help spotting little ironies: “He tries to break the Le Creuset pans, but they are very durable. They have a lifetime guarantee.”

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By Fiona Sturges

The intimate details of poverty aren’t discussed much in society, largely because – to generalise – the people who currently tend to write books and articles aren’t regularly exposed to such hardships, and the people who are exposed to such hardships don’t tend to write books and articles.

There is, of course, the noble journalistic tradition of immersing oneself in poverty for the purposes of writing about it, undertaken most successfully by George Orwell in his Down and Out in Paris and London and The Road to Wigan Pier. But whatever insights such books deliver – and Orwell’s delivered many, including the unforgettable image of his landlord’s filthy thumb-print on an approaching slice of bread-and-butter – they cannot fully reflect the central panic of those who are trapped in the poverty cycle: that they will never, ever escape from it.

It is no coincidence that Carraway especially likes the writing of the US author Charles Bukowski, whose books, like his life, are full of financial uncertainty and an existence proudly played out beyond the boundaries of respectability. Like Bukowski, she keeps an authorial eye open even in the midst of howling chaos, mesmerised both by the potential awfulness and warmth of other people.

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Skint Estate, however, is also a sign of a recent phenomenon: that the publishing world is finally cracking open, after a long hiatus, a decisive conversation about class. It arrives just after Lowborn, the novelist Kerry Hudson’s powerful memoir of her peripatetic working-class childhood, being moved from one insecure dwelling to another by her troubled, heavy-drinking mother. Hudson’s book is written from the perspective of someone who has now escaped poverty, beginning: “Shall we start with a happy ending? I made it. I rose.”

Along with the tangible hardships and dangers she left behind – “sink estates, burnt-out houses and ice-cream vans selling drugs at the school gates” – is the weight of communal judgement that still falls upon the poor: “The names still ring in my head everyday: chav, scav, lowlife, NED, underclass, lowborn.” In her new lifestyle as an author, she can afford to eat well, enjoy films and books and can “heat my flat in the winter”. But there remains a sense of psychological dislocation: “I find myself unable to reconcile my ‘now’ with my past.”

Carraway and Hudson are two very different writers, and their experiences and voices are distinctively their own, but a couple of similar points arise from the histories they describe.

Both had ‘difficult’ mothers, although Carraway’s was more cruelly violent, both beating Carraway up and also rewarding her as a child for physically assaulting her own father as he slept. Hudson says of her grandmother – a former beauty who looked like Elizabeth Taylor in her youth – “my grandma was the most terrifying woman I’ve ever known” whose charm could easily turn to ice. Her mother, not ready for motherhood and largely adrift from Hudson’s father, struggled with depression and the erratic hope of fresh starts offered by unpredictable men.

There was love in the mix, too, although complicatedly expressed. For a child, it is the mother – so often harshly judged by society – who is nonetheless the last line of defence against a hostile world. But when the mother proves unreliable, buckling under wider pressures, what is it that keeps a struggling child afloat?

The lifebuoys, ideally, should be offered by wider society: the availability of social housing of decent quality, good state education with after-school provision, caring teachers, free school meals for children on low incomes, free or subsidised leisure activities, libraries that are geared towards welcoming children and encouraging reading. Such things were once imagined as the bedrock of a civilised society, and yet many of them – social housing and library provision in particular – have been steadily eroded, while teachers report trying to do their best for children in increasingly adverse circumstances.

A couple of weeks ago, for example, The Sunday Times carried a report on conditions in London’s Broadwater Farm housing estate, where the admirable headmistress of the estate’s Willow Primary School explained how she and her staff dreaded holidays, as many of their pupils would simply be kept indoors to keep them away from wider dangers of drugs and gangs. An accompanying photograph of accommodation for one family of six, a single cramped room with damp and ragged wallpaper, called to mind a Dickensian slum.

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The relatively modest leisure activities which come so easily to middle-class children – swimming, bowling, trips to the seaside or camping – are frequently unaffordable for families who are barely making ends meet: the parents can spare neither the money nor the time from work, often in jobs which do not provide holiday pay. A crowdfunded appeal will open up more opportunities for the Broadwater Farm children this summer – yet there are similar stories from streets and estates all over Britain.

There are some thoughtful initiatives happening: Hudson goes back to Hetton-le-Hole near Newcastle to revisit one of her old schools – where, unusually, she felt welcomed and not ‘embarrassed about being poor’ – which has just undergone ‘poverty proofing’, a process set up by a charity to help children from poorer backgrounds not feel excluded by details that adults often overlooked.

One significant source of embarrassment was at not having “the latest, expensive water bottle” – something the children were keenly aware of among themselves – which the school solved by introducing a standard, school-branded water bottle instead. Yet the great sweep of government policy, particularly in areas such as housing, has been travelling in the opposite direction: towards the entrenchment of social inequality.

Why is it so? Part of the answer may be that policy begins in culture, the government’s instinctive reading of the public mood. For many years the prevailing cultural attitude towards those on the poverty line has been one of suspicion bordering on contempt, with middle-market tabloid tales of chavs and scroungers milking the system, being amply rewarded with benefits for irresponsibility.

Programmes such as the Jeremy Kyle Show selected the poor and vulnerable and held them up for mass ridicule and moral lectures. Even talent shows such as the X-Factor relied upon a mood of mockery, singling out any ordinary person who dared to believe they were more talented than the panel of judges perceived.

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In a world in which branded goods were increasingly used as a signifier of who and what you were – to a much greater degree, say, than when I was growing up in the 1970s and 80s – to be unable to afford them took on a measure of stigma. The policies of austerity fell most heavily upon those who could afford it the least. Housing costs soared while affordable housing stock shrank.

At the same time as the cultural and political climate turned chilly for the working-classes, a new development entered the jobs market: the ‘gig economy’ and the ‘zero-hours’ model of employment rendered low-paid incomes more unpredictable, and ate away at many of the old securities, such as paid holiday and sick leave.

Despite high employment, we have seen the re-emergence of the ‘working poor’: according to the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, the in-work poverty rate is now the highest it has been in the past 20 years. For young graduates without family money behind them, the rise of the unpaid internship often barred them from the first step on the middle-class jobs ladder. Money made the world go round, unless you didn’t have it in the first place.

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Warehouse work needn't be worthless

By Polly Mackenzie

The publishing industry, up until very recently, has often seemed keener to discuss inequalities of gender and race than those of income and class (although frequently all such questions are intimately intertwined). That changed somewhat with Darren McGarvey’s Poverty Safari: Understanding the Anger of Britain’s Underclass (the writing of which was crowdfunded), a searing account of growing up in a precarious household in working-class Glasgow which won last year’s Orwell Book Prize.

One of the things that McGarvey noted was how often the middle and upper classes spoke about the poor, and how little the poor talked for themselves. When they did, they were encouraged to emphasise shockingly personal stories rather than put forward any wider political critique (McGarvey’s own mother was an alcoholic and drug addict, who died aged 36). Class, he said, remained the “primary dividing line” in society.

Writing a memoir from the margins of poverty and family dysfunction is a courageous act: while reading Carraway, Hudson and McGarvey you can often sense the authors steeling themselves for criticism, fearing that – by exposing a troubled family history or their own complicated struggles to survive – they are somehow betraying those closest to them while rendering themselves dangerously vulnerable.

Those self-protective reflexes were learned in childhood, and for good reason. Hudson recalls how terrified she was of writing Lowborn, because children in impoverished, tough childhoods quickly learn to cover up abuse or neglect with silence, and it’s a hard habit to break in adulthood: “when I sit down to write it feels like an actual physical force is stopping me”. To speak in your own voice is automatically to invite judgement.

Suggested reading

My social mobility shame

By Darren McGarvey

Carraway is particularly sharp on parodying all the bizarre little nuances of class sneering that stalk her as an adult: “I am a terrible, scrounging, despicable little woman – when I celebrate my birthday at the Harvester, I visit the salad bar an unacceptable amount of times … I’m so disgusting that I’ve never even been to Center Parcs.”

The new writers on class are braced against their work being consumed as “poverty porn” or “misery memoirs” but they clearly hope for something more from it. They are asking to take up space in the public imagination, for their histories to be heard and considered, and perhaps to contribute to a wider movement for social change.

In a broader sense, that ground is also covered by the new anthology Common People, edited by Kit de Waal, in which 33 writers “reclaim and redefine what it means to be working class”. Being working class does not, of course, have to mean a parent with addictions or a childhood facing homelessness – many of these stories are decidedly joyful – but each one investigates a memory or a conversation that is not routinely heard.

One such is Daljit Nagra’s tender story of his academically gifted schoolfriend Steve, and the cultural factors that led to Steve – a white working-class boy – abandoning school at 16 while Nagra carried on to higher education “driven by a migrant psychology to succeed to a status higher than my parents”. They are still friends, and there are more insights in that moving story alone than in many a doorstop policy document.

It is one of the most insidious effects of class snobbery that it has tended to promote an image of working-class people as estranged from cultural expression, as if the arts automatically belong to a sphere that is never fully considered theirs. Yet this latest wave of working-class writers are demanding to be listened to, telling their own stories with freshly compelling, poetic, poignant and sometimes furious voices.

I hope that it is more than just a temporary phenomenon, and that a fundamental cultural shift is underway. Perhaps thereafter a changing culture will finally speak truth to policy, and this time ask the question: “Can things be different now?”

It’s a clever, multi-layered put-down, painting socialism as not only profligate, but also confiscatory and unsustainable.

However, as George Eaton explains in the New Statesman, the line has been modified and turned back against the Lady’s latter-day followers:

“The problem with Thatcherism is that you eventually run out of other people’s assets.”

The “assets” referred to here are the nationalised industries that the Thatcher governments privatised and the social housing that was sold to its tenants:

“In the 1980s Margaret Thatcher and her allies championed what they called ‘popular capitalism’. According to this theory, voters would be given a permanent stake in the market through the sale of council housing and shares in privatised utilities.

“And, for a period, it worked. The sale of more than a million council homes helped transform Labour voters into Tory loyalists. In 1984, shares in the privatised BT were 10 times oversubscribed, gifted a windfall to the government and voters. The sale of British Gas (exemplified by the populist ‘Tell Sid’ campaign), British Airways and the water companies followed. By the end of the 1980s, share ownership among the public had risen from seven per cent to a quarter.”

And yet, as Eaton points out, “‘popular capitalism’ has become unpopular capitalism” – with the companies running some of these privatised industries held in contempt by the public:

“By an overwhelming majority, voters favour the renationalisation of of the UK’s water (83 per cent), electricity (77 per cent), gas (77 per cent) and railways (76 per cent)”

I totally understand the public’s anger. As a regular user of Southern Railway’s train ‘service’, I feel it myself. However, we shouldn’t forget how badly run these businesses were before they were privatised. Their asset would be ruins without the investment they’ve received since privatisation – investment they were starved of when owned by the state. They may now be ‘cash cows’ for shareholders, but at least cash cows get looked after.

Further reading

Test article

By Charlotte Pickles

However, Eaton’s core argument is irrefutable: there’s nothing much left to privatise, therefore, in that key respect, a return to Thatcherism is impossible.

Arguably the most popular bit of popular capitalism – the right of council house tenants to buy their homes – wasn’t capitalist at all. What really made the Right to Buy fly was the hefty discount on the full market value of the property. The policy, therefore, was distributist not capitalist. Anti-statists might also like to note that the houses couldn’t have been sold if they hadn’t been built by previous governments.

If Margaret Thatcher’s heirs want to revive popular capitalism – or, more accurately, the ideal of a property-owning democracy, then their first priority must be the creation of new assets – and especially housing assets.

Government has the power to buy land cheaply, grant itself planning permission quickly, and have it developed beautifully. And, as I explain here, it can sell the houses through a Community Land Trust to help ordinary people become homeowners affordably.

Further reading

More community land trusts could transform the housing debate

By Peter Franklin

Unlike, say, a pledge to increase funding for the NHS, this would be a policy on which the Conservatives can’t be outflanked by Labour.

The last thing that a socialist party needs is millions more people getting the chance to own their homes. To win power, the Left needs voters to be gratefully dependent on the state or resentfully dependent on private landlords. The re-democratisation of property ownership would be Margaret Thatcher’s dream and Jeremy Corbyn’s nightmare.

“I don’t see the point of this Affordable Housing. Why can’t we just make housing affordable?”

David Cameron used to say this, every six months or so in the coalition years, every time the Liberal Democrats put forward another demand for increased investment in social housing. I helped put together these demands, which secured a billion here and a billion there for housing associations and councils building homes. But David Cameron was right and I was wrong. Social housing is an admission of failure in the housing market. It’s a public service we should be aiming not to need.

Everyone deserves a decent home at a price they can afford. The market doesn’t deliver that. But instead of chasing that market, trying to pick up the pieces with inadequate and insufficient state-supplied homes, we should fix it, with radical land reform and massive housebuilding.

Suggested reading

The grim reality of renting in Britain

By James Bloodworth

It is hard to logically defend our system of social housing. It’s an incoherent mess. Until recent reforms, if you got into a council or housing association home, you could benefit from cheap rent for the rest of your life, no matter how much you earned. Obviously, most criticism of this has focused on the very high earners – those on £100,000 or so. But these cases are rare and trivial.

It is, however, meaningful and problematic in a community when two similar, average families – earning, say, £25,000 a year – have radically different rent costs for similar homes. The family in a council house will probably pay 30-50% less than their neighbour renting a property privately, as well as benefiting from lifetime security of tenure while their private neighbour lives in fear of being thrown out. Worse, the private tenant may have to watch as their social neighbour gets the gift of up to £100,000 from the government to buy that home at a discount through the Right to Buy.

No wonder there is so much resentment and anguish about who gets into social housing. It represents a golden ticket for the insiders, while the outsiders suffer in private rented accommodation which – for those on low incomes – is usually low quality, high cost, and unstable. What does that do for social solidarity or community cohesion? It destroys it, stoking resentment for the ‘others’ who have what you want most: a decent home – especially if those others have different colour skin, practice a different faith or speak a different language.

Social housing campaigners tend to say that we should deal with this injustice by building more social housing. Perhaps, at first glance, you might find this compelling. But it only works if you commit to building enough social homes for every single family which spends time on a low income. There are about 2.6 million families on below-average incomes living in private rented housing right now. At about £50,000 subsidy per home it would cost £129 billion to build a social home for each of them, and you still haven’t got a plan to deal with the flow of new people on low incomes. Not even John McDonnell, Labour’s hard-left Shadow Chancellor, is proposing investment of that scale – though if he did, at least we’d have a pathway to a housing policy that had some internal logic.

Letting councils borrow to build, or making developers build affordable housing alongside the homes they build to sell, may be reasonable interventions but they’re never going to make more than a dent in demand.

During the coalition years, we introduced reforms designed to reduce this perversity: we allowed social landlords to offer shorter tenancies and we let rents rise, continuing a convergence process that had started under Labour, to reduce the gap between private and social rent. These changes also helped to reduce the subsidy needed to build each home, and enabled housing associations to build more and faster. But, then, the Treasury panicked at the rising cost of housing benefit and froze rents instead, pushing building subsidies back up and putting the very financial viability of debt-laden housing associations at risk.

In the end, all we achieved was yet more mess. We certainly didn’t do what Cameron claimed he wanted, when he groaned about Affordable Housing. Housing became less affordable, on every measure, because neither he, nor his ministers nor the Liberal Democrats, for whom I worked, wanted to do anything that might threaten the real power base in this country on housing: the owner occupiers.

Those who own their own home are doped up on high house prices. Mortgaged or not, we’re attached to the idea that the price our home would fetch on the open market represents real value. The Treasury, too, is dependent on maintaining these harmful prices: invested directly in housing stock through the Help-to-Buy scheme, reliant on stamp duty and terrified of the shock to consumer confidence that falling house prices might inflict. The changes needed to actually make housing affordable, and reduce the need for state-backed housing, are just too big for our timid politicians.

Suggested reading

The housing crisis is bad, but can we please talk about renters

By Charlotte Pickles

There is a way from here to there, from incoherent and self-defeating policies to the dream of affordable, rather than Affordable, homes for all.

A house price shock is too risky. Instead, the Government should make a commitment to stop house prices from rising, in cash terms, for at least the next 30 years, and take all the action needed to make it happen. That would mean increasing supply, appropriately regulating housing finance, and reforming planning and land taxation. Every council should be charged with building enough to stop prices from rising in their area – with the right to grow into neighbouring council areas if their borders are too tightly constrained. If the costs of housing rose, Ministers would have to report to Parliament on their failure and their plans to correct the trend.

Setting this clear, national objective would change the investment model for land owners and housebuilders; instead of making more money the longer you wait to build, you’d make the most if you built quickly. Building council or housing association properties will be a necessary part of the mix, in the short term. For vulnerable people, in particular, this type of housing can provide essential stability and security (and the same protections must be afforded those in the private rental sector). But building a few Affordable Homes should never become an excuse for letting homes in general get less affordable.

“It is essential to have not only more houses, but more houses of the required type in the right place. There are technical difficulties that have to be overcome over land, financing and the organisation of the building industry. But there is also the question of will. Housing has not yet achieved the place of priority in official policy justified both by the social suffering involved and by the public concern that has been aroused”.[1. ‘The Housing Anguish’, The Times, 22 December 1969]

These words appeared in an editorial in The Times in 1969. That year, 378,320 homes were built across the UK. The net annual increase in new dwellings was slightly lower, given that post-war demolition and slum clearance was still going on in to the early-70s. But the rate at which homes became available in 1969 was still a long way ahead of household formation, which then averaged around 160,000 per annum.[2. Chapter 2: Households and Families, ‘Social Trends 39’, 2009]

The current situation could hardly be more different. Official figures show 178,450 homes were completed across the UK during 2016/17 –less than half the 1969 total.[3. See MCHLG live table 209 https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/live-tables-on-house-building] Yet around 275,000 new households are now formed each year, 70% more than in the late 60s. Instead of the supply of new homes outpacing demand, as when The Times published its editorial, the opposite is now true – and has been since the early 1990s.

Successive governments have repeatedly emphasised housing as a priority. Yet when Dominic Raab became Housing Minister in January 2018, he was the 16th person to hold that position in under 20 years.[4. Tony Blair appointed Hilary Armstrong as Housing Minister (1997 to 1999), then Nick Raynsford (1999-2001), Charles Falconer (2001-02), Jeff Rooker (2002-03), Keith Hill (2003-05) and Yvette Cooper (2005-07). Gordon Brown’s Housing Ministers were Caroline Flint (2007-08), Margaret Beckett (2008-09) and John Healy (2009-10). David Cameron appointed Grant Schapps (2010-12), Mark Prisk (2012-13), Kris Hopkins (2013-14) and Brandon Lewis (2014-16). Theresa May then appointed Gavin Barwell (2016-17), Alok Sharma (2017-18) and now Dominic Raab]  Of enormous importance to voters, and the source of increasing social division and discontent, the sector has been denied the consistent leadership needed to drive policies that might deliver significantly more homes.

During 2010-2016, when David Cameron was Prime Minister, 141,132 homes were built each year. Under Tony Blair from 1997, and then Gordon Brown, this annual average was respectively 35% and 29% higher, but still far too low. Since the mid-1980s in fact, building has fallen way short of the 245,000 new homes needed annually to meet the natural growth of demand and keep prices affordable.[5. Kate Barker, ‘Review of House Supply – Delivering Stability: Securing our Future Housing Needs’ HM Treasury, 2004]

Ahead of the 2015 election, Cameron said one million new homes would be built by 2020, an average of 200,000 a year over a five-year Parliament. But it was never clear if this was a target or an “aspiration”. Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn has also set a million-home target over five years – with half as social housing.

Since taking office in 2016, Theresa May has rhetorically upped the ante. Initially, her Housing White Paper of February 2017 contained no home-building target.[6. ‘Fixing our Broken Housing Market’, DHCLG, February 2017]  But as affordability continued to get worse, the Tory manifesto ahead of the June 2017 election restored the promise to “deliver one million homes by the end of 2020” and “half a million more by the end of 2022”.[7. Conservative Party Manifesto, ‘Forward Together: Our Plan for a Stronger Britain and a Prosperous Future’, 2017] The subsequent Queen’s Speech also pledged to “promote fairness and transparency in the housing market and help ensure more homes are built”.

Philip Hammond’s November 2017 budget appeared to strengthen this pledge. While rejecting demands by Communities Secretary Sajid Javid for £50 billion of public cash to finance house building, the Chancellor targeted “300,000 a year by the middle of the next decade”. [8. ‘Budget 2017: Hammond pledges to fix UK housing market’ Financial Times, 22 November 2017] Apart from making promises but missing home-building targets, have government policies implemented since 2010 eased the UK’s housing shortage?

Juicing-up demand

“I’d argue quite strongly that most of our housing problems have their origins in supply or rather a lack of supply – that’s what my economics training tells me when I see prices rising in the face of rising demand.” These are the words of a very senior Whitehall official, written in early 2018. “This under-supply of housing has made it less affordable, increasing the number of concealed households and contributing to declining home ownership rates.”[9. Internal unpublished Whitehall memo, obtained by author]

Ministers have long been advised the roots of the UK’s chronic housing shortage lie in the “supply side” – with developers failing to build enough homes, either due to a lack of planning permission or, more recently, a tendency to restrict new supply to keep prices, and profitability per unit, high. Yet, since 2010, as affordability issues have become particularly acute, successive governments have taken “demand-side” measures – arguably boosting prices even more.

Since 2013, “Help to Buy” (HTB) has allowed a limited number of homes to be purchased with just a 5% deposit and a low-interest government equity loan worth up to 20% of the purchase price. When chancellor, George Osborne launched the scheme for first-time buyers (FTBs) and others looking to move, with loans applicable only on new-build homes priced below £600,000.[10. HTB loans are interest-free for the first five years. The £600,000 price limit applies to England. In Wales, it is £300,000 and in Scotland the maximum has varied depending on when an application was made. The 20% share was later raised to 40% in London. A “mortgage guarantee” was also introduced, with the government (i.e. taxpayers) acting as partial guarantor on a limited number of home loans. That guarantee scheme was discontinued in 2016.]

The danger is that demand-side initiatives merely subsidise buyers to afford high prices – and for a temporary period. That generates favorable short-term headlines but does little to increase house-building over the long-term. As HTB was being introduced Sir Stephen Nickell, a distinguished economics professor and senior Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) official, was asked for his view. “Is it just going to drive up house prices? By and large, in the short run, yes,” Sir Stephen told the Treasury Select Committee. “In the medium term will the increased house prices stimulate more house building? A bit, but the historical evidence suggests not very much”.[11. ‘Financial experts question Help to buy claims’ Inside Housing, 2013. A former member of the Bank of England’s Monetary Policy Committee, Nickell was also the first Chair of the government’s National Housing and Planning Authority Advice Unit, set up in June 2007 in response to the Barker Review.]

In 2016, three years after HTB was introduced, a government-commissioned study argued it had generated a 14% rise in annual house building – well short of the significant uplift needed.[12. Stephen Finlay, Peter Williams and Christine Whitehead, Evaluation of the Help to Buy Equity Loan Scheme, DCLG, 2016] The government’s flagship housing policy was otherwise slammed by a range of credible analysts. The Adam Smith Institute, a free-market think-tank, compared HTB to “throwing petrol onto a bonfire…adding more demand without improving supply just raises prices, making homes more unaffordable for people who don’t qualify for the subsidy”.[13. ‘Help to buy won’t build the young any houses’, Adam Smith Institute, 1 October 2017]

The respected housing charity Shelter was similarly critical:

“HTB has completely missed the mark, doing barely anything to help first-time buyers, and nothing to help those most in need of an affordable home. By inflating house prices and subsidising huge corporate payouts it is actually making matters worse.”[12. Shelter CEO Polly Neate, quoted in The Independent, 13 January 2018]

There are legitimate concerns that the main impact of HTB, rather than helping young adults buy a home, has been to strengthen the powerful developers who already dominate the UK house building industry. In 2014, half the homes bought under HTB were sold by the UK’s five largest house builders.[13. Tom Archer and Ian Cole, Profits Before Volume? Major House Builders and the Crisis of Housing Supply, Sheffield Hallam University Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research, October 2016] HTB sales constituted 53% of all Taylor Wimpey homes in 2014, helping generate a 54% increase in profits, to £481 million.[14. Taylor Wimpey PLC, ‘Creating Sustainable Value’, 2014 ] The scheme drove 40% of Persimmon sales that year and 57% by 2016. Some 31% of Barratt homes were sold under HTB in 2014, rising to 44% two years later. Shelter concluded, meanwhile, that HTB added 3% to UK-wide house prices in a single year.[15. How much help is Help to Buy: Help to Buy and the impact on house prices, Shelter, 2015]

From 2013 to mid-2017, 135,000 homes were sold under HTB. There is evidence the scheme, instead of helping FTBs, instead channeled hundreds of millions of pounds of public subsidy to thousands of very wealthy buyers who already owned a home.[16. An analysis of government figures in 2018 suggested that over 5,500 homeowners earning above £100,000 a year had benefitted from taxpayer-funded HTB loans. See ‘Wealthy homeowners received millions in public money under Government scheme to help first-time buyers’, The Independent, 13 January 2018]  An even bigger worry is that 32,266 HTB homes, or almost 25%, have been sold leasehold – with the buyer not owning the property outright, but paying the freeholder an annual ground rent.

While flats are traditionally sold with a lease, with a charge made for servicing and maintenance of communal areas, leases on new homes were considered a thing of the past. Yet almost a fifth of houses purchased under HTB in 2017 were sold leasehold. There is growing outrage that large developers have been marketing new HTB houses with contract clauses allowing ground rents to rise dramatically in later years, before selling these leases on to investors at huge profit.

Campaigners say young families are “trapped as prisoners” in homes with escalating ground rent bills, that then become difficult to sell – not least as mortgage providers often won’t lend against them. An estimated 100,000 families now live in leasehold properties with spiralling ground rents, a number that has lately soared due to HTB.[16. This figure comes from the Leasehold Knowledge Partnership, part of the House of Commons All-party Parliamentary Group on Leasehold Reform. The LKP reports homebuyers being charged up to £100 to have a letter answered by the freeholder, with others being billed for thousands of pounds for permission to build a simple extension. Seven out of ten buyers of recently built leasehold homes, many of whom are young with little or no business experience, say they used conveyance solicitors recommended by the developer and the risks were not drawn to their attention. The sale of HTB leasehold homes is now the subject of multiple legal actions.]

Despite all these concerns, the Prime Minister unveiled another £10 billion of HTB funding in October 2017, similar to the amount spent since 2013. Immediately after May’s announcement, the UK’s biggest house-builders added well over £1 billion to their stock market value in a single day –illustrating the extent to which HTB has been a cash bonanza for already powerful developers.[17. ‘Help to Buy adds £1bn to house-builder valuations’, Financial Times, 2 October 2017]

Since HTB began, UK Finance (previously the Council of Mortgage Lenders) estimates it has helped 9.6% of all FTBs. Evidence suggests that the 91% of those it hasn’t helped have faced higher prices.

The Government’s other main demand-side measures have related to stamp duty. In December 2014, Chancellor Osborne rationalised the stamp duty regime, so those buying homes worth under around one million pounds paid less, with higher bills for buyers of top-end homes. The following year, he imposed a 3% stamp duty surcharge on purchases of rental properties or second homes, which again probably helped FTBs to some degree – although buy-to-let lending remained steady, at about £8 billion a quarter both before and after this change.

The most eye-catching move, though, was in November 2017, when Philip Hammond abolished stamp duty altogether for FTBs on homes under £300,000. Just months after Labour came within a whisker of power, thanks to support from younger voters, the Chancellor received positive headlines for helping FTBs get on the housing ladder. The danger remains, though, that without a very significant rise in new homes built, the main impact will be on prices. “This measure is expected to increase house prices,” said the OBR in its budget commentary, ascribing Hammond’s policy a “high uncertainty rating”.[18. ‘Eye-catching stamp duty cut will do nothing to solve our housing crisis,’ Telegraph, 23.11.17. The OBR was similarly unimpressed with an earlier demand-side attempt to help FTBs. In 2016, Osborne introduced a “lifetime ISA”, enabling under-40s to save for a home deposit alongside a pension, with the government offering a 25% top up, to a £4000 annual limit, on savings used to buy a home. “We think {the lifetime ISA} is more likely than not to lead to higher demand for the relatively fixed supply of UK housing, and so to higher prices,” said the OBR’s budget-day fine print.]

Suggested reading

Home Truths – Part III: The nine drivers of a broken market

By Liam Halligan

The Government’s demand-side policies appear to have boosted prices more than home ownership – worsening affordability, particularly for FTBs. New research from the Institute for Fiscal Studies suggests “pricing-out” has become more acute not just since the 2008 financial crisis, but particularly since HTB was introduced. Just 25% of those born in the late-1980s owned their own home by the time they turned 27, says the IFS – covering the years 2013 to 2017. By that age, 33% of those born in the early 1980s and 43% of those born in the early 1970s were home owners.[19. ‘The decline of homeownership among young adults’, IFS Briefing Note BN224, February 2018]

Supply Go-Slow

What, then, has the Government done to increase the actual supply of homes since 2010? The National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), which simplified planning guidance from 2012 – introducing the presumption “in favour of sustainable development” – has certainly led to more planning permissions being given.

Around 150,000 housing units were granted permission in 2011, rising to over 260,000 in 2016. What’s clear, though, is that housing completions have risen by less than permissions, with “build out” delays getting longer.

In early 2012, before NPPF began, official internal data showed planning permission being granted at an annual rate of 186,170, with some 118,520 homes being completed per annum. The latest data, for early 2017, indicates 303,901 permissions granted annually, 63% up on 2012. Home completions, however, were just 148,240, up only 25%.[20. This paragraph is based on internal MHCLG estimates based on Glenigan and Barbour ABI planning pipeline data]

An authoritative 2013 survey reported that once detailed planning permission had been granted, developers took an average of 1.7 years to start and complete homes.[21. ‘An analysis of unimplemented planning permission for residential dwellings’, Local Government Association, October 2013]  By 2017, an industry study revealed a delay of “at least four years on average” from detailed planning permission to completion – a 2.4-fold increase over just four years.[22. See ‘The role of land pipelines in the UK house-building process’, Chamberlain Walker, September 2017]

The growing build-out delay, then, is large and undeniable. It has happened while house prices have risen steadily and immigration has increased sharply – pointing to ample labour supply for construction. Over the same period, though, the UK house-building industry has become far more concentrated, with the eight largest builders now accounting for over half of all new homes each year, as outlined in Part III of Home Truths.

What we have seen since 2012 could easily be interpreted as “contrived scarcity”.[23. I owe this phrase to Guy Standing, The Corruption of Capitalism: Why Rentiers Thrive and Work does not Pay, London: Biteback, 2016: “Scarcity may be natural, as in the case of the truffle, because demand outstrips nature’s bounty, or because there are physical constraints on production or exploitation. But in modern capitalism, scarcity is more often contrived, because a minority possesses all or most of an asset, because rules make it hard to produce or sell, or demand is deliberately stoked to outstrip supply”.] While they would deny it, powerful, dominant developers appear to have engineered a deliberate building go-slow to put further upward pressure on prices, so boosting profitability per unit.[24. MHCLG data show that between December 2012 and July 2016, the stock of housing units unbuilt, despite full residential planning permission, increased from 496,445 to 684,000 in England alone – a 38% rise]

The graph below certainly points to a prioritisation of profit over output. From 2012 to 2015, the number of housing completions by the nine largest UK developers rose 33% but revenues grew no less than 76%. As such, profits ballooned nearly 200%. Over a slightly longer period, from 2010 to 2015, profits at the top five house-builders surged more than five-fold – from £372 million to over £2 billion.[25. Profit figures are before tax and financing costs. See Tom Archer and Ian Cole, ‘Profits Before Volume? Major House Builders and the Crisis of Housing Supply’ Sheffield Hallam University Centre for Regional Economic and Social Research, October 2016]

The “volume” house builders, in particular, have been able to sell homes at a growing premium compared to the average sale prices since 2012 (see graph below). This reflects their domination of high-value localities, given the lack of SME competition, and their overwhelming role in delivering HTB homes.[27. ‘House builders charge premium for Help to Buy properties’, Financial Times, 8 August 2017]

In 2015, the biggest five house builders returned an enormous 43% of their annual profits to shareholders, not less than £936 million. These firms are, to an enormous extent, foregoing the chance to reinvest in order to build more homes. It is rational for firms to maximise profits within the law – the legal obligation, in fact, of senior executives. But the scale of returns at the top of the industry, and the far faster growth of revenue than output – as affordability worsens – points to super-normal profits.

Some ministers have become concerned that the growing concentration of the UK house-building industry is now restricting competition to a degree that is harming consumers and broader society, contributing to the “pricing out” of countless young adults. “The big developers must release their stranglehold on supply,” said Communities Secretary Sajid Javid in October 2016. “It’s time to stop sitting on land banks and delaying build-out – the homebuyers must come first.”[27. Sajid Javid MP, Communities Secretary, Speech to Conservative Party conference, 3 October 2016]

The 2017 Housing White Paper highlighted the “large gap between permissions granted and new homes built”. It pointed to “concern that it may be in the interest of speculators and developers to snap up land for housing and then sit back for a while as prices continue to rise”.[28. ‘Fixing our Broken Housing Market’, DHCLG, February 2017]

Yet despite these words, and the growing dominance of just a few large developers, the government has done nothing to encourage planning permission to be used promptly. Large, cash-rich house-builders and the land promoters described in Part III have every incentive to let permissions lapse, usually after three years, then make fresh applications. They can sit on sites and wait for prices to rise, the gains massively out-weighing re-application costs, as there is no threat or penalty that deters them.

The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) now estimates up to 40% of permissions granted are allowed to lapse, with 20% never being used at all. As dominant developers and promoters build up permissions, those permits and the land they are linked to remain unavailable for SMEs to build the homes for which there is such strong demand – retaining upward pressure on house prices.

This problem has been clear for several years. Javid’s “stranglehold” intervention eighteen months ago was a watershed moment. A Cabinet minister finally showed something other than deference to the large house-builders, referring to concerns about restrictive practices held by housing campaigners for some time.

Yet, since then, the Government has again kicked this issue into the long grass. In November 2017, the Chancellor announced the “Letwin Review”, to examine “why hundreds of thousands of homes haven’t been built, despite having planning permission”. With an interim report failing to appear at the Spring Budget in March, Letwin is now due to publish in November 2018 – and is expected to offer only analysis, with no policy recommendations.[29. The existence of the Letwin review points to a significant difference of opinion within government regarding the now very high concentration of the UK house-building industry, and the role large developers are playing in making affordability worse.]

Nothing to write home about

Additional supply side reforms since 2010 appear piecemeal and, when it comes to “fixing” the house-building industry, somewhat insignificant. An example is the sale of public land for residential use. The state holds enormous amounts of land, often in very developable places. Transport for London, for instance, owns around 6,000 acres in the capital and Network Rail has substantial landholdings, often close to stations. The NHS, MNCLG, the Ministry of Defence and local councils also have large holdings.

From 1997 to 2010, very little public land was sold for new homes – enough to build an average of only around one thousand units each year. Between 2011 and 2015, though, this improved, with enough public land sold to build 109,500 homes, an annual average of over 27,000.[30. National Audit Office, ‘Disposal of Public land for New Homes’, July 2016]

The reality, however, is that Whitehall is entirely unaware of how many homes have actually been built on land sold since 2011. The Commons Public Accounts Committee was told in 2016 that, despite the 100,000-plus capacity, the number of new homes could be as low as 200.[31. ‘Only 200 houses built on public land that could have held 100,000’ Financial Times, 25 January 2016 ] And, since 2015, public land disposals for home building have sunk once again, to an average capacity of just 9,600 units per year – a major missed opportunity.

Various other supply-side schemes have been announced, including a £3 billion Home Building Fund in 2016. But just £1 billion of this subsidy was targeted at SMEs, with £2 billion directed towards infrastructure and large sites. This seems perverse, seeing as large developers can already access capital. The Accelerated Construction Programme, meanwhile, created a partnership between the government, investors and contractors to target the use of off-site construction and new models of building. Again, this is welcome, but with even rosy government estimates of 15,000 new homes over four years, the scheme is making a meagre contribution towards solving the UK’s affordability crisis.

Another initiative that is yet to deliver relates to brownfield sites. In 2016, the Government legislated to introduce a “zoning-like” system for brownfield land – allowing local authorities to grant “permission in principle” (PiP), a form of advance residential permission on such sites. While this sounds a good idea, at the time of writing, not one local authority has granted PiP for a single unit of housing.[31. A Royal Institute of Town Planning (RITP) survey has raised doubts PiP will spark more house-building as such permissions are still vulnerable to legal reversal by later political and public opposition. RITPs respondents also warned PiP could trigger land speculation, ultimately driving up the price of new homes. See ‘Planning Risk and Development’, RTPI, April 2018]

Suggested reading

Rogue landlords are a poor solution to the housing crisis

By Peter Franklin

Following Corbyn’s electoral gains in June 2017, and with Theresa May vowing to take “personal charge of fixing the housing market”, Chancellor Philip Hammond unveiled an eye-catching “£44 billion home-building fund” in November 2017. The package of capital funding, loans and guarantees, added just £630 million to the Home Builders Fund for SMEs. But it added £8 billion of financial guarantees “to support private house-building” seem designed for use, once again, by the “volume” developers.[32. There was also an administrative reorganisation, with Homes and Communities Agency expanding to become Homes England, which Hammond said would “bring together money, expertise and planning and compulsory purchase powers” to deliver news homes.]

Hammond pledged 300,000 new homes a year by the mid-2020s – “the biggest annual increase in housing supply since the 1970s”. The OBR, meanwhile, said it was making no changes for its forecast for new homes based on the Chancellor’s budget policies.

What does not seem to be on the Government’s agenda is one very obvious supply-side policy –measures to encourage a major increase in building by Local Authorities and Housing Associations.[33. While independent, Housing Associations are regulated by the state and often receive public funding. While non-profit, some Housing Associations also issue bonds and/or accept charitable donations – and any trading surpluses are reinvested in building and maintenance. They have their origins in the UK’s mid-nineteenth century philanthropic and voluntary organisations – early examples including Guinness Trust and Peabody Trust. Under the Thatcher government, some councils prevented from subsidising housing directly channeled money to Housing Associations, while permitting social housing tenants to buy their homes at a large discount. Facilitated by the Housing Acts of 1985 and 1986, many local authorities transferred their remaining housing stock to Housing Associations – which are now the main providers of new housing for rent across the UK, while also running shared ownership schemes for those lacking means to buy a home outright.] Over the last two decades, only a few thousand council houses have been built each year, falling to just a few hundred for several years under Tony Blair. And the Grenfell Tower tragedy of June 2017 highlighted the poor quality of much of the UK’s social housing.

Referring to Grenfell in her party conference speech five months later, Theresa May offered, “an extra £2 billion in funding for affordable homes”. Downing Street later confirmed that would pay for around 25,000 new homes, or 5,000 a year over the period the funding would be introduced. This hardly seems an adequate response.

Since 2010, despite granting many more planning permissions, successive governments have failed to incentivise an increasingly concentrated private sector to build faster, while doing little to reinvigorate the social housing sector either. In 2016, the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs concluded “the government must recognise the inability of the private sector, as currently incentivised, to build the number of homes needed”. The committee argued that without far more new social housing, the UK has no chance of building the homes required over the coming decade and more.[34. ‘Building More Homes’, House of Lords Economic Affairs Select Committee, HL Paper 20, July 2016]

If the UK is to build the 300,000 new homes now required annually, it seems inevitable that around 100,000 units of affordable social housing will be needed each year, to both rent and buy – a three-fold increase.[35. In 2016-17, Housing Associations built 30,180 homes across the UK, while Local Authorities built 2,960]

The Government has recently shown early signs of moving policy in this direction, with May suggesting Housing Association debt might be taken “off the books”, allowing them to borrow more to build in high-demand areas. But these ideas are currently very vague and a long way from fruition. On the basis of the current evidence – not least the structure, organisation and recent performance of major developers – the private sector alone will fail to provide the homes required over the coming decades. The gap between housing demand and supply will continue to grow ever larger. Only radical and disruptive government action will change that.

Read the rest of  Liam Halligan’s in-depth investigation of the UK housing crisis, Home Truths.