The UK Housing Crisis
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On the 14th June 2017, 72 people tragically lost their lives in the Grenfell Tower fire. I, along with many of the public, saw the fire not only as a emblem of health and safety failure but as a failure of the housing system as a whole. scarce council housing supply, government apathy towards this issue and stigmatising public perception has moulded housing policy matters into a divisive debate. Lack of affordable housing for the most vulnerable in society is now perhaps one of the largest injustices in society today. The more research I conducted the more I could establish a pattern of political and legal error spanning the last century. Law and politics have failed to assist in adequately housing our generation. I wanted this dissertation to truly analyse the causes and consequences of this crisis and to forward, in some way, an approach for reform. I hope that this dissertation gives comfort not only to the victims of Grenfell Tower but to the victims of the housing crisis as a whole, that someone is listening - even when the government are not.
-Lily Church, Author
Introduction
Within the prosperous borough of Kensington and Chelsea, the burnt shell of the Grenfell Tower currently reminds the nation of the ultimate price we pay when lives are valued cheaply. Since the fire on the 14th June 2017, public dissatisfaction for housing policy has intensified and cast light on a plethora of failings within both the private and public housing sectors. Consequently, the Centre for Policy Studies has described the housing crisis as ‘one of the great public policy challenges of our age’. Victims, not only of Grenfell, but of the crisis as a whole, deserve solutions.
Chapter one investigates the key features of the UK housing crisis. It will frame the crisis as one of affordability and supply, affecting the entire population’s ability to purchase a home. Low-income citizens will be identified as the demographic worst affected and thus the focus of the dissertation will be how the government can improve the experiences of low-income households through their policy decisions. It will highlight how the UK’s reliance on the ‘private market’ results in a difficult balancing act for policy-makers wanting to improve affordability and social welfare. It will suggest that law and policy have a vital, yet complex, role to play in the housing system.
Chapter two provides a historical analysis of UK housing law over the past century with a view to identifying the increasing fetishisation of homeownership-based policy and the residualising effect on the social housing sector. The aim of this chapter is to track legal and political responses over the past century to understand how it has affected housing today.
Chapter three critiques current UK housing policy, closely analysing the Social Housing Green Paper 2018 and the Autumn Budget 2018. Using lessons learned and trends identified in chapter two, it will provide further insight into the effectiveness of these policy proposals in relation to affordability and supply.
Lastly, chapter four will present a direction for reform. It will be suggested that laissez-faire policies which prioritise homeownership should be abandoned. Instead, a ‘mixed approach’ will be advocated whereby the role of social housing is reinstated as part of a mixed-tenure policy focus. Due to brevity, this thesis does not intend to provide a complete ‘solution’ to the crisis. Rather, the paper offers a detailed critique of the policy responses forwarded by past and present governments. The suggestions for reform in chapter four relate to broad shifts and ideological changes.
A socio-legal methodological approach will be applied to this thesis which explores the intersection of social, economic and political factors throughout. It will evaluate the extent to which past and present housing policies have contributed to the current crisis, concluding that a new ‘mixed-approach’ may be more appropriate.
