Grenfell and Housing Policy; the need for a sensible response

The tragic and avoidable deaths of so many people in the Grenfell Tower will remain with us for many years. The public inquiry is planning its first hearings in September. It will clearly take time. Depending on the final terms of reference (wider or narrower) and setting aside the allocation of blame, what flows from the inquiry in terms of policy could be considerable. DCLG is already strongly focussed on the implications of Grenfell in terms of updating regulations, providing funding and rethinking policy as will be evident from a visit to their website https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/department-for-communities-and-local-government.

Although the May Government’s Housing White Paper published in February gave substance to the view that it was adopting a broader based housing policy than the previous administration, i.e. one in which the importance of social housing was both recognised and supported, the reality was that no substantial new investment was promised. The tower disaster has re-awakened the debate over this tenure and the sustained decline and neglect it has experienced both in terms of the number of homes it provides and the residents that call this home. In recent years we have seen the closure of the Tenant Services Authority in 2012 (under the Cameron government), the introduction of an enhanced Right to Buy, the financial pressure put on ‘underoccupying’ tenants under the Pay to Stay scheme, the introduction of ‘affordable rents’ and the loss of security of tenure – none of this suggests much appetite to enhance or even retain social housing. The new housing minister Alok Sharma, MP (the 6th since 2010 and despite housing being a long term issue) and the Secretary of State Sajid Javid MP have a mountain to climb to give assurance it will be different. They face the immediate pressure of funding all the works on tower blocks that flow from Grenfell. They also need to return to the issues of the Decent Homes Standard bringing it up to date and funding it. Then there is the question of more social housing supply.

Given the Budget pressures it is hard to see massive new resources being released unless there is a re-allocation of the current spend –which is dominated by spending on the private sector (and mainly on housebuilders). It is striking how quickly the government has moved to address the scandal of new homes being sold on leasehold terms with a ground rent escalator clause. It has issued a fairly wide ranging consultation paper with action promised although it leaves open the question of what will happen to existing leaseholders (rather than new ones) and with rather limited evidence to date that housebuilders will move rapidly and collectively to help house buyers exit leasehold.

We can only hope that we can see a similar sense of urgency in the case of Grenfell and its aftermath. There are 4 million residential leaseholders in England and of which 1.2 million are houses (as opposed to flats). We also know that in 2016 around 10,000 new build leasehold houses were sold, out of around 57,000 sales of leasehold houses in England. This suggests that there may be fewer than 100,000 houses where these clauses are in place. Contrast the social housing sector. There are about 1.6 million council homes and 2.4 million housing association homes – 4 million in total with around 4,000 tower blocks, perhaps around half a million homes. Some of these are leasehold flats –bought under the Right to Buy. In Grenfell fourteen of the 129 flats in Grenfell Tower were owned by leaseholders (selling for between £185,000 and £270,000, according to Rightmove).

In this politics may loom large. According to recent numbers from IPSOS MORI 26% of social housing tenants voted Conservative in the last election compared to 55% of outright owners and 43% of mortgaged owners. The proportion of social housing tenants voting Labour has gone up from 47% in 2010 to 57% in 2017. Several decades ago a leading Tory referred to council estates as ‘odious socialist islands’. It has to be hoped much has changed since then and with a general upswell of public support for Grenfell survivors and the wider issues of social housing government will be socially and politically driven to respond properly with new resources and new policies around social housing.

In so doing the onward march towards ever greater based market provision and processes may have to come to a halt. The simple point is that housing requires a balanced response with sensible scales of provision and quality across all tenures reflecting what households can afford. A recent speech by my colleague Michael Oxley set out a cogent case for social housing – an argument too rarely made. He concluded, “If social housing is to command public support, finance and votes, it has to be good social housing. It has to be social housing that does more than house residualised minorities as a tenure of last resort. It has to be truly social, with the social benefits for communities argued, explained and demonstrated to a sceptical majority.”

This is the task this government must rise to if it is truly for the many not just the few.