Читать книгу Start Again: How We Can Fix Our Broken Politics - Philip Collins, Philip Collins - Страница 13

Housing has often been the point at which public policy and the political promise meet. After the Great War, David Lloyd George pledged to redeem the sacrifice of the conflict with homes fit for the returning heroes. Neville Chamberlain summarised the Conservative promise to the nation as the creation of a ‘property-owning democracy’. After the Second World War, Aneurin Bevan’s reputation came at least as much from the housing stock that was built as it did from the formation of the NHS. Margaret Thatcher’s popularity with the urban working class came in large part because she adopted a policy that Frank Field had proposed but the Labour party had rejected – the sale of council houses to their tenants.

Housing is once again a pivotal question in British politics because a generation is being locked out. At the start of the last century only 10 per cent of the nation owned their own home. By the end of the century home ownership had risen to 70 per cent. George Orwell was one of the first writers to comment on the way the Englishman made a castle of his home. The British cultivated a peculiar relationship with the residential home, which they have treated as both somewhere to live and a principal investment at the same time – a decision encouraged by advantageous taxation. This was the process by which a generation of people bought their own homes and, understandably, passed them down the family line. At the same time, the number of households increased as the population grew, people married later, divorced more often and lived longer. Land was too tightly controlled, which meant that house builders hung on to it because it kept growing in value. When the supply of new houses failed to keep pace with demand, the obvious consequence was a boost in the price of property. Those already in the market have prospered but those who have yet to gain entry may now never do so. Britain faces the genuine likelihood, for the first time in its modern history, that people who are thirty years of age may never own their own home, even though they are in stable and relatively well-paid work. Someone who is thirty years of age today, who saves 5 per cent of his disposable income every year, will put down a deposit on a house of average price in the year he turns seventy-five. House prices have doubled relative to income over his lifetime.

This is a generational shift of a fundamental kind because no part of the British political promise has been more important, or more constantly repeated, than the pledge of a home. As a result, the private rental sector is fragmented and of disreputable quality. Housing has now become a crisis of the first order, every bit as important as it was after either of the two world wars. When the people feel they are not getting a fair deal from policy – which on housing they are not – we ought not to be surprised when resentment turns into hostility. It could yet get worse for this group of people because those who have suffered pay stagnation, and who are struggling to pay for housing, work in food services, retail, construction, information technology and manufacturing, exactly the sorts of trades most at risk from the threat of automation. This brings us to the fourth condition of Britain question.