The madness crippling housing policy

When I read stories like the one above that appears in today's Times, I sometimes despair at the insanity that has dogged housing policy for the past thirty years.

There's nothing new about the "revelations" the Times thinks it has exposed: this is simply the progression of the policy councils like Westminster began that got dubbed "homes for votes" in the 1980s: offering incentives to get long-standing council tenants out of their homes. Then, Westminster was doing so for electoral purposes: replacing supposedly Labour-voting council tenants with evidently Conservative-supporting leaseholders in key marginal wards. Today, this is being done to free up homes for those who are going to be made homeless by the recession (though again the opportunities for gerrymandering are many).

This is not entirely a bad idea: it is a good thing, for example, to encourage pensioners to downsize to a smaller flat if it releases a two, three or four bed property that can be given to a family. I fully support such incentive schemes.

But here's the 'emperor's new clothes' revelation: the answer to a massive affordable housing shortfall is not to play (very costly) musical chairs with the existing, insufficient amount of homes. It is to build many, many more affordable homes to rent.

There are 4.5 million people already waiting for affordable homes. That's forecast to rise to over 5 million by the end of the recession. Crowbarring existing council tenants out of their homes in return for a lump sum to set them up in a private home risks simply switching one group at threat of being made homeless with another. Except that the former council tenants will, by taking the council bribe, be surrendering any right to being rehoused should they find themselves fall on hard times. This is unjust and - I have to say - typical of the Conservatives.

Once again I have some sympathy with the Taxpayers' Alliance on this issue: they've said "Council housing should be a safety net for those falling on hard times...when you have some councils dishing out £25,000 with no questions asked and very few conditions, that smacks of desperation rather than good management."

They're right - it is a desperate measure. £25,000 could build a new affordable home; especially if using advanced pre-fabricated methods that manufacture entire units in a factory that just need assembly on-site. The big cost in housing is the land, not the construction.

That's why the amount of public land being sold off for private housing has been - and continues to be - an absolute scandal in boroughs like ours. Where we have publicly-owned land, the first call upon it MUST be for affordable housing. No more sweetheart deals with private developers to pile up massive overdevelopment of private apartments for which there is no market.

One of the reasons I think that people aren't convinced by the Government's response to the economic downturn is less that the investment isn't working but rather that it appears to always be a step or two behind.

The same is true with housing: the government only two weeks ago announced some lifting of the bar on councils building new homes. But that's not going to be enough to avert this crisis: we have to lift all restrictions and more than that: councils need to be directed to build affordable homes for rent. And if need be - as it will with the most resistant councils like Wandsworth - those directions will need to come with mandatory targets to force them to meet the local need they refuse to address.