Do your bit

A decent home makes all the difference to people’s lives in so many different ways. Indeed, the decent housing effect can be almost miraculous as I found when I interviewed a retired car worker for a Shelter report in the dark housing days of the 1980s.

Retiring early after an industrial accident, he had been wheelchair-bound with osteoarthritis for 14 years before he and his wife moved from a damp, cold house into a new Circle 33 flat in London’s Docklands. Within months of moving into his warm and damp-free home he was able to give up the wheelchair and walk again.

An extreme Lazarus-type case, perhaps, but those working in housing have long witnessed the change for the better in the lives of people moving into decent homes. Convincing politicians and other professionals of the case, however, has not always been easy.

Growing recognition

Thankfully, attitudes are changing. The evidence gathered by House Proud, the joint campaign from Inside Housing and the Chartered Institute of Housing, from the health service in Sandwell and elsewhere, for example, demonstrates a growing recognition among health professionals that money spent on decent housing can improve health and wellbeing and ease the pressure on health service budgets.

I have seen significant evidence of change on the education front in Brighton & Hove where I am a councillor. The local housing department, for example, is represented at many of the ‘team around the child’ meetings that look at all the problems faced by children having serious difficulties at school: clear recognition that poor housing, which is all too often twinned with poverty, has a serious effect on the education and life chances of children.

The big problem, of course, is getting the general public to understand all this, or care about it. Spending on state education and the NHS remains a vote winner at the top of all political party agendas because most people rely on these services and therefore care about them. But then only about 8 per cent of children in the UK go to private schools and most of us still use the NHS.

Housing, on the other hand, is a different matter. More than 70 per cent of housing in the UK is owner-occupied, and many property-owning democrats don’t give a fig about the homeless or poorly housed. Once they get on the housing ladder, their first instinct is to pull it up. What’s more, they have been indoctrinated to believe there is something genetically wrong with anybody who rents their home, particularly if they live in a council house.

However, I sense a change here as well. The sons and daughters of many homeowners have found it increasingly difficult to follow in their parents’ footsteps in the face of the steepening house prices of the past decade. Some rely on a deposit from their mums and dads to help them onto the ladder.

The many parents who cannot afford to give this financial help also discover their children have little chance of moving into an affordable council or housing association house or flat unless they are in desperate circumstances, because there simply aren’t enough to go round. The only alternative is the expensive and not always decent private rented sector. It’s a cause of disgruntlement I come across on the doorstep when I’m canvassing, and all the political parties should be listening.

Politicians should also lend an ear to the building industry and the trade unions who argue the economic case for housing, which is one of the quickest ways of putting people back to work and uses fewer imports than most industries.

Putting unemployed people into work by building homes cuts the nation’s welfare benefit bill, and increases the tax and national insurance take. VAT returns go up from the increased sale of furniture and white goods to new tenants furnishing their homes.

Building energy efficient new homes and retrofitting the existing stock cuts the nation’s carbon footprint and household energy bills. All of this offers training and apprenticeship opportunities.

Making the case

The economic and social case for building more council and housing association homes was well made in Meeting housing need: building Britain out of the recession, a campaign document from trade union Unite. Action on housing, it argues, has ‘the potential to positively impact on the overwhelming majority of society’.

Unite’s presence in the campaigning mix is significant.

It indicates that trade unions are taking a wider stand on housing, rather than concentrating on narrow issues that only affect their members.

The churches have been useful allies in housing campaigning. Housing associations, for example, enlisted the support of the Christian churches to oppose Margaret Thatcher’s cruel housing cuts. We have moved on since then. The UK is now a multi-faith society, and housing need can be found among members of all faiths.

Housing campaigning offers an opportunity to bring all the faiths together to work in a common cause, not least to oppose the divisive way the issue is exploited by the British National Party and other extreme right-wing groups.

It is vital that the political parties constantly hear the case for housing shouted from the rooftops and on the doorstep in the run-up to this watershed election. Remember, shutting down social housing programmes is one of the quickest ways of cutting public spending.

The Tories did it 30 years ago with disastrous consequences. For the sake of the homeless and the poorly housed, we must all work together to make sure it doesn’t happen again.

Bill Randall is a housing writer, journalist and Green Party councillor

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