Patrick Mooney, housing consultant and news editor of Housing, Management & Maintenance magazine asks – could home ownership, one of the traditional strengths of Conservatives, be turning into a weakness?
In a sign of the times, the Conservative party is now trailling behind Labour as ‘the party of homeownership’ in the eyes of the public, with the opposition’s policies on housing appearing to resonate with far more of the electorate.
When the polling and research organisation Opinium recently asked which party would be better at helping people buy their own homes, 36% said Labour and only 16% chose the Conservatives. This outcome would have been unthinkable in the previous 40 or 50 years.
Since 1980 when Margaret Thatcher brought in the Right To Buy (RTB) as a central plank of her property-owning democracy project, more than 2.5 million council homes have been sold to their tenants. The Scottish and Welsh governments both abolished the RTB before 2020, but in England the RTB was extended on a voluntary basis to include housing association tenants in 2019.
Mrs Thatcher also deregulated and liberalised the mortgage markets, and from 1980 to 1990 rates of home ownership rose from 55% to 67% of households. The Conservatives’ place as a safe bet for promoting home ownership in the eyes of the electorate appeared to be secure. But since the mid-2000s, rates of home ownership have fallen back (down to about 64%) while the stock of council housing has declined markedly to approx 7%, as less than one in every 10 former council homes were replaced.
Many of the RTB properties have been re-sold at significant price hikes, making substantial profits for their owners and families. Meanwhile housing associations have continued to grow and they now account for about 10% of all properties, but they usually charge higher rents than councils and some of them appear more commercial in their actions and approach.
SAFETY NET LOST
In another bizarre twist, a significant number of ex-council homes have been bought by private landlords who have let them back to the original local authority owners (often for housing homeless families) at vastly inflated rents.
This equates to 40% of the ex RTB homes sold in many London boroughs and across large swathes of England. As a result, a vital safety net (in the shape of affordable and secure housing for those in need) can no longer be relied upon and instead the strain on the housing market has been taken up by the private rented sector, which has doubled in size since 2002 to almost 20% of all housing now.
Similarly large increases have taken place in the length of council house waiting lists and the numbers of people recorded as homeless and living in temporary accommodation, including bed and breakfast hotels and hostels. The housing charity Shelter has trawled through official Whitehall statistics to reveal that 3,000 people are sleeping rough on any given night, 131,000 children are growing up in temporary accommodation, over 250,000 people are homeless and 1.2 million households are stuck on social housing waiting lists. To add to these alarming figures, Shelter has found that one in three adults in Britain (equivalent to 17.5 million people) are impacted by the housing emergency – meaning they are living in overcrowded, dangerous, unstable or unaffordable housing.
On average, private renters spend 33% of their income on rent. This is higher than for social renters, who spend about 27%, and for mortgagors, who spend 22% of their income on mortgages. This means younger adults who want to buy a home but are living in privately rented accommodation, have less of their income available in order to save up for a deposit.
HIGH LEVELS OF DISSATISFACTION
Some 62% of private renters – about 2.8 million households – eventually plan to buy a home in the UK. 28% of these think they will be able to purchase in the next two years, although purchase periods of two to five years (37%) or five or more years (35%) are more common. Buying intention among private renters declines with age – renters in the 16-24 age band are more likely to say they would eventually buy (85%) than those aged 45-64 (42%), those aged 65 to 74 (16%) or those aged 75 or older (7%).
Private renters also happen to be among the most dissatisfied members of society at present and this may explain a large part of the shift in public support away from the Conservatives to Labour. The reasons for their unhappiness probably lays in the fact that conditions in the private rented sector are among the worst in the nation’s housing stock, with the highest rates of unfitness, damp, overcrowding and hazards, as well as the worst energy efficiency levels, the lowest rate of central heating and the most insecure form of tenancy, with high numbers of evictions, many of them at just two months’ notice (the so called Section 21 or no fault eviction).
Research from the property tax consultancy Cornerstone Tax has found that 19% of private renters have had to move home at least five times in the last five years, either because of unaffordable increases in their rent or their landlords selling the properties.
The Government has drawn up legislation to reform the private rented sector, introducing a series of safeguards for tenants and improving the quality of rental homes, while at the same time supporting good landlords. A key part of the legislation is the banning of Section 21 evictions. The Renters’ Reform Bill is currently going through Parliament, where it faces a race to get onto the statute books before the next General Election is called.
DRIVERS AND BLOCKAGES
But facing a potential large-scale revolt from his backbench MPs, the Housing Secretary Michael Gove recently announced that the long awaited ban on no-fault evictions would have to be delayed (to an unspecified date in the future) until changes were made to the courts process. Separately private landlords are threatening to withdraw from the lettings market, with Cornerstone Tax finding that 15% are considering selling up, mainly for financial reasons.
Plans to force improvements in the energy efficiency of private rentals were recently the subject of a significant u-turn by the Prime Minister, as he watered down many of the ‘green measures’ designed to achieve our targets on reducing carbon emissions to net zero. This will have been a bitter blow, particularly to younger tenants facing a longer timescale paying out larger amounts on bigger energy bills, while their homes remain cool and damp.
Successive Chancellors of the Exchequer have introduced financial policies to incentivise housebuilding and encourage first time buyers onto the property owning ladder, but since the financial crash of 2008/09, the ensuing slump and recessions have made it harder to convince the British public that investing in bricks and mortar is always the best way to secure their future.
As house prices have continued to rise most years, the gap between average wages and house prices has got further and further stretched, affordability ratios and the size of deposits needed to buy have continued to grow, putting personal finances under extreme pressure.
FOCUS ON NEW RENTALS
The Government’s commitment to build 300,000 new homes a year has faltered (in good years we are building no more than 230,000 new homes at best) and successive Housing Secretaries have tweaked planning policies in their efforts to eke out as much new housing as possible, while also pandering to the nimbyism displayed by their backbenchers. But fewer and fewer young people are currently buying, more of them are living with their parents (into their 30s and beyond) or in privately rented homes paying rents which continue to outstrip inflation and their wage increases. Indeed private rents are now at their highest level ever, up by 20% in some regions over the previous 12 months.
Rates of new housebuilding have shrunk in many parts of the country and simultaneously the numbers of people experiencing homelessness continues to rise and currently sits at record levels. Taking advantage of the Government’s difficulties in delivering a coherent plan to increase the supply of new housing, at its recent conference Labour went big on its strategy to build 1.5 million new homes over the next Parliament facilitated by a fast-track planning system, and announced plans for two more new towns producing new communities with beautiful homes, green spaces, reliable transport links and bustling high streets. The response from large parts of the housing sector was very positive.
The obvious answer for the Government should be to build more homes – for social and private rent, as well as for all types of affordable ownership. But because of a very vocal group of backbench MPs, the Conservatives are instead waging an internal debate over the rights and wrongs of cutting stamp duty – a policy that will do nothing to alleviate the supply problems in the housing market, but which paradoxically might make affordability problems worse by delivering a short-term surge in house prices. If Messrs Gove, Hunt and Sunak do not pull a rabbit out of the hat and produce a credible and deliverable national housing framework which the public believe in and support, then the Government might well find itself in opposition come the next election.