During one of the 4,000 Zoom quizzes in which I’ve recently taken part, those assembled were asked what it was that the French called “the English disease.” The answer, dredged up along with an ocean floor of other sexual proclivities, was spanking. But if there is any obsession in this country which seems almost pathological, or indeed perverse, in its intensity, it is that with the property market.
No matter what the crisis, there’ll always be a front-page item telling us what it might mean for house prices. And usually, as is the case right now, the prognosis ain’t too brill. Well, if you’re a homeowner, anyway.
If, however, you’re one of the nearly 40 per cent of working age Britons who doesn’t own their home (a figure that rises to around 75 per cent for those aged 18-35) you might not give it a second thought. Or you might take some schadenfreudic glee in the news. You might even start to think “hmmm… with prices low, this could be my chance to join the semi-detached ranks, to finally own my own home!” You might feel all three, I know I have—there’s a lot of time to feel things at the moment.
Our fanaticism is not surprising, when you think about it. Combining as it does speculation and private property, the housing market seems like a perfect match for the country that codified modern capitalism, and modern gambling, then took both worldwide. But the truth is, it’s only in the past 30-odd years that Britain’s bricks-and-mortar habit has become such a debilitating problem, with serious long-term effects.
The irony is, of course, that it was Thatcher’s “Right to Buy” scheme which began the steady decline in the average person’s ability to do just that. Since then, successive prime ministers have preached the cut and thrust benevolence of an unregulated housing market, while selling home ownership as an opportunity to realise that which has always been the closest we’ll ever get to a “British Dream.”
If their aim was to drive up house prices, they succeeded, and in doing so, they made a lot of people rich. Those able to afford property when the going was good found that they were sitting on assets whose value was increasing over 100% every ten years (even more in London). And if their aim was for people to think of home ownership as the only way to secure a stake in the country’s future, they succeeded again: the top ten highest Leave-voting constituencies in 2016 were those with some of the lowest homeownership rates in the country.
The Brexit crisis revealed deep divisions, while exposing the folly of political presumption, something tub-thumping MPs on both sides promise will never happen again. But this pandemic has the potential to make Brexit look like a brouhaha on a level with the pasty tax. Already the country’s inequalities are being laid bare. Perhaps the most pertinent, at least while we’re confined to them, are to do with housing.
After many weeks of lockdown, most of us will have settled into a routine. For those of us lucky enough to live in secure housing, with fast internet and outdoor space, our experience has probably come to resemble something 2000s TV producers might have dubbed a “Very British Apocalypse”: baking, gardening, wine, that sort of thing. On the other hand, if we’re starved of space (inside and out) and have been furloughed, fired or are working in low-paid “essential work”, our mental and physical health will be suffering. This is further compounded for those in insecure, unsafe living arrangements.
The housing crisis has been rumbling on in the background of political debate for years, but it’s taken an international pandemic to reveal the impediments to effective change. It’s unsurprising, given government policy, that tenant’s rights pale in comparison with those of their landlords. Until a temporary ban was placed on it in March, tenants could be evicted for no reason with only two months’ notice, allowing landlords to consistently drive up rents.
This practice was outlawed for three months, offering tenants a glimmer of what normal rights might look like. But at the same time, landlords were given a mortgage holiday, recently extended, by way of appeasement. When it became clear that, despite the government’s furlough scheme, many tenants would be unable to pay their full rent, some decided to go on strike. Though there are numerous stories of rents being voluntarily reduced for three months, and while it’s purely anecdotal, everyone I know who’s asked for a reprieve has been rebuked.
Striking is occasionally mooted as a way of strengthening renters’ rights but, as with all industrial action, efficacy requires mass participation. Though groups have had some success, especially on university campuses, the movement is up against overwhelming legal obstacles, as well as the belief (indeed, opposition policy) that people should not be making trouble during a national crisis.
The other great modern housing ill, homelessness, also saw early pandemic-related progress. The government acknowledged the hypocrisy in outlawing being outside for those with nowhere else to go. After a decade of political inertia, over 5,400 rough sleepers were quickly housed in empty hotel rooms. Unfortunately, last week, following a raft of evictions for “rule-breaking,” a leaked internal report from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, suggested it was “drawing a line” under its drive to accommodate rough sleepers during the crisis (the government has deemed the claims "simply wrong.")
Our pseudo-Churchillian prime minister would have us believe that we’re all in this together: a VE Day conga line marching through the storm and up into the sunlit hills. But the truth is, our ability to maintain the lockdown, or look back on this time with anything less than deep trauma, will depend massively on the space in which we endured it, and the crisis’s ability to deliver real change.
Though Boris Johnson evokes the spirit of the Blitz, not least to pad out the future memoir he’s writing in his head, more historians have compared our current plight to that of the home front during the First World War. Back then, the wartime call for “Homes Fit for Heroes” assumed a tragic apogee when thousands of veterans returned to homelessness.
There’s more than a little farce involved in calling NHS workers heroes while implementing policies that deprive them of basic equipment, and basic pay. Perhaps an appropriate reward for their service would be a housebuilding project that makes the British dream of home ownership more possible, even for those merely risking their lives.
Despite the stuttering progress of initiatives aimed at mitigating the housing crisis during the pandemic, their taking place offers hope for longer lasting change. For years we’ve been told that the eradication of homelessness, universal basic income or even rent control are politically impossible. The fact all three were implemented in as many weeks—and by a Tory government (in which more than one in four MPs are landlords)—show that none should be dismissed as magical thinking.
A rampant property market has been put forward by successive prime ministers as evidence of an essential economic vitality—even as the growing mountain of private debt keeping it up creaks and teeters. The last major recession (itself caused by lousy mortgages) only made things worse: banker’s bailout cash funnelled back into London property. We’ve had a lot of time over the past two months in which to imagine a new future. After dealing with coronavirus, we should focus on overcoming this country’s housing illness.
