Starmer’s Housing Wonderland

By Andy Ford (Warrington South Labour member)[Featured photo shows newly built homes being demolished due to building defects – Bev Media]

Under Starmer, Labour Party policy on housing has evolved steadily to the right, until now it is only different in nuance to the Tories.

Despite pointing out the role of inadequate, unstable and poor housing in child poverty and under-achievement at school, in poor health outcomes for disadvantaged communities, and in crime and anti-social behaviour, the latest NPF document, which will form the basis for the next Labour manifesto, only promises to “improve standards” in social housing, and merely “to reduce the number of social homes being sold off”. Instead of abolition there will now (allegedly) be “a better approach to Right to Buy”.

In place of promising a massive council house building programme Starmer has now gone full-on into focus group territory. “Labour is the party of home ownership” says the NPF agreed text, and the Party will, in that hackneyed phrase, “Help families get on the housing ladder”. The aim is to “support aspiration and bring the dream of home ownership to millions of people”. In fact they say they want a 70% rate of home ownership!

First-timer buyers

This huge change will be achieved, says the NPF, by a Labour government helping “first-time buyers onto the ladder with a new, comprehensive mortgage guarantee scheme”, where “the state will act as guarantor for prospective homeowners who can afford mortgage repayments but struggle to save for a large deposit.”

So essentially, millions of people are going to be sent out to the private housing sector to buy their homes as best they can, albeit with help from this mortgage guarantee scheme. But what does Britain’s private housing market look like?

Firstly, house building in this country is highly monopolised. More than half of new houses are now built by just 10 companies. Sixty years ago they built around 10%.

Secondly, the quality is low – houses are churned out for profit, skimping on materials (like using pine instead of hardwood) – for the greatest possible profit. In 10 years, from 2008 to 2018, the average profit per house went from £22,000 to £63,000.

Standards plummeted

Thirdly, the standards of workmanship have plummeted, with each house built on a production line system by sub-contractors, who themselves in turn use building workers on bogus self-employment contracts. So the bricks will be laid by one firm using bricklayers on bogus self-employment, then another firm does the joinery, having won the contract for the lowest price, then the plumbers, then the electricians…and so on. None of those people will dare raise a complaint about quality, or even insist on enough time to do the job right. They can’t: there are no unions on these sites, and anyone who is seem as ‘difficult’ doesn’t even get the sack – they just don’t get phoned again.

An investigation by the Bartlett School of Planning (see it here) found that 74% of new housing developments were mediocre or poor, and that Persimmon Homes were building homes “virtually without any basic quality management systems”. The situation is so bad that one ex-site manager has made a fortune by setting up a snagging detection service which, for a fee, will advise buyers how to force the housebuilder to put defects right (see here)

Because there is no background choice of quality rented accommodation, which used to be provided by council housing, the housebuilders are selling to a captive market. Worse than this, successive schemes like the Tory ‘Help to Buy’ have strongly pushed young people towards new builds. The result has been soaring prices.

Tinkering

The main thrust of Starmer’s housing policy will simply not deal with these problems. There is some tinkering round the edges with low cost ‘micro-reforms’ such as ending leasehold, blocking speculators from buying dwellings ‘off-plan’, increase stamp duty for foreign trusts and companies, and to “reform planning rules” (watch out the Green Belt!), but the basic policy is to return to Thatcher’s dream, – and it was a dream – of the “property-owning democracy”.

Despite the promised reforms, Labour is really just offering more of the same. It is about as realistic as ‘Alice in Wonderland’.