Fighting back

Posted by: Jules Birch

10/06/2009

In the search for explanations for the BNP’s breakthrough in the European elections, Labour’s collapse is the one taking the headlines but housing is not far behind.

Chancellor Alistair Darling said yesterday that the BNP had exploited anxiety about lack of housing in traditional Labour areas and that the government would bring forward plans to build more homes and provide jobs for unemployed construction workers.

‘We are looking at housing,’ he tells today’s Guardian.’It is one of those issues we really need to deal with.’

While the focus had been on falling house prices, Darling added that the ‘real housing problem is that not enough houses are being built. It is a big, big priority for us.’

Labour MP Glenda Jackson (‘How to beat the fascists? Build more houses’) draws a similar conclusion in the Independent today and calls for a ‘social housing revolution’ and ‘policy priorities that reach out to voters who have never stepped inside a focus group’.

Labour MP Jon Cruddas argues today that it could have been far worse and that mass opposition on the ground helped limit the damage. ‘The long term legacy of “Middle England” politics, free market economics, mass immigration and a housing crisis all helped create this sense of inevitable electoral success,’ he argues on his blog.

So far, so good. But if Darling and the others are right then the mainstream parties have a lot of ground to make up. The combined stock of social rented housing has fallen by more than half a million in England in the last ten years as new starts have failed to keep pace with losses to the right to buy and demolition.

Communities and Local Government stats reveal that the stock has fallen most in the north and midlands - precisely the areas where the BNP did best. Without wanting to make too much of the comparison, the stock fell 12% in England as a whole but by 17% in the two regions where the BNP took European seats, Yorkshire & Humberside and the North West.

Making any kind of dent in that shortfall will take time but it does provide a powerful argument for protecting the new rented homes budget from the drastic cuts that are just around the corner whoever wins the next election and for finding ways to kickstart regeneration without alienating local communities.

It’s also yet another good argument for changing the rules to let local authorities take the lead and show voters that politicians are at last responding to their concerns. Perhaps new homes can get the message across in ways that decent homes have not?