For today’s tenants, social mobility is dead

This single failure has erected a huge barrier to the social mobility of many social housing tenants.

Many estates are unhappy places, concentrating dependency and social dysfunction.

So arose the mission of the housing and dependency sub-group of my think tank, the Centre for Social Justice. 

Our report, Housing poverty: from social breakdown to social mobility, is the result. It has, if I may say so, caused quite a stir.

The first thing we found is that for today’s social housing tenants, social mobility is dead.

In 2006, 80 per cent of those living in social housing were in the sector 10 years earlier.

Only 34 per cent of social housing tenants were in full-time employment, so only a few thousand house moves that year out of some 4 million social households were work-related.

Social housing should be an aid, not an anchor to social mobility.  So we recommend ending the social housing tenancy for life.

We see no logical reason to disincentivise the mobility and aspiration of any social tenant. It is a sound policy to give local officials discretion to allocate tenure on a personalised, case-by-case basis.

But this is only the first stage.

With more than half of social housing tenants of key working age out of work, and a quarter on disability benefits, children who grow up in social housing often see little work-related activity among adults. 

From peer to peer and from generation to generation, these behaviours spread. It is no coincidence that, in the last 25 years, the proportion of those social housing tenants in full-time employment has halved. 

When we surveyed a number of social housing tenants who paid their rent on time, 70 per cent said that, despite often challenging personal circumstances, they retained the aspiration to one day own their own home.

Yet aspiration is futile when there is no hope of success.

That is why we recommend that social housing tenants who want to do well should be allowed to build equity stakes in their homes.   

The government has already agreed with the principle that housing policy must respond to socially positive behaviour.

Its approach though is to use ‘the stick’ to beat those who do not adhere to such behaviour. Instead, we want the government to reward those who want to do well and who seek work.

This is a progressive policy that will benefit the whole of society.

Along with benefit reform and welfare-to-work schemes, social housing reform constitutes the absolute foundation of poverty relief.  It is the key that will open the door to social mobility for the most vulnerable members of our society.  We have the key: let us use it.

Iain Duncan Smith, Conservative MP and founder of the Centre for Social Justice

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