This recent debate about housing benefit has been explosive, with anger and froth expelled by both sides of the debate. And with Christmas coming, I can’t help feeling that there are many out there whose approach to housing the poor is somewhat Scrooge-like. ‘Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?’ they are almost asking.
Housing benefit reform is a tricky beast, no doubt, as the most outrageous (but numerically few) examples of, say, unemployed immigrants getting £1,000 a week to live in Notting Hill have riled many, myself included. But it’s worth asking the question why are so many people in need of financial aid to pay the rent in the first place? It is because of a simple word: scarcity. The shortage of affordable homes has pushed millions onto waiting lists and into paying private rents in cities that are expensive precisely because of a dearth of supply. This lack of new homes creates housing benefit claims. Punishing the claimant for this situation is not just putting the cart before the horse, it is blaming the horse for being on the wrong side of the cart, and then giving it a kicking just for good measure.
The number of people on housing benefit, and the £21 billion we all pay for it each year, is a consequence of two generations of opposition to new public housing. Like the argument that we must ration council houses for the very worst off only, capping housing benefit is essentially an argument about re-arranging deckchairs, about reacting to scarcity. It seeks to reduce demand, when we need to increase supply. The answer for the right wing is to blame those who are poor for their status, and to find new ways to make them compete against each other for declining resources. The socially progressive way, the Liberal way, is to build more housing.
Rather than caps, and cuts of 10% merely for being unemployed, what we need is a new NHS. A National House Building Scheme. A neo-Jerusalem of public works, built by the people, for the people. I will admit to an unfashionable adherence to Keynesian economics here. If we borrow to build, if we put to work the thousands of people in an sluggish construction sector (which, it should be noted, accounted for half of the economy’s GDP growth in the last three months), we keep them off benefits, create jobs and tax revenue, and ease the crisis for those at the bottom, while expanding the choices for those who want to buy.
It can be done. The economics support the moral choice that we must make. It was in housing that we saw a credit bubble burst all over the world economy, it is housing that can provide our industry with a way out recession.
But we mustn’t also recreate the mistakes of the past – the isolated suburban estates and the brutalist block-built disasters. As Bevan said “we shall be judged for a year or two by the number of houses we build, we shall be judged in ten years’ time by the type of houses we build.” We have the knowledge and the expertise in Britain to make the new successful communities of tomorrow. We are the inventor of the Garden City, and the New Town Development Corporation. We have world class architects and urban planners who are in demand for projects all over the globe. We have the knowledge, experience and enthusiasm to do it, and to do it right.
The private sector must be a part of the solution too, of course, but it will never be the only solution. Thatcher said that the private sector would expand to fill the space left by a retreating public sector. The Chancellor today says the same. But this didn’t happen with housing when the state stepped out in the 1980’s, and with a planning system in limbo, the chances of the private sector doing so today are slim at best.
Even in this age of austerity, we have an opportunity to do what the housebuilding dreamers in the 1940s and 50s tried to do in their own austere, rationed age. We can create jobs, reduce suffering, and empower our citizens to make a better life for themselves. We have the skills and we have the knowledge. We don’t need new ways to slice a smaller pie. We don’t need to accept scarcity. Get out there and tell your MP you won’t stand for it anymore, and get them to promise to solve this problem, not by punishing HB claimants, but by building enough houses so that this problem doesn’t arise in the first place. Well, what are you waiting for?