Affordable rents – doublethink in action

In the doublethink world of George Orwell’s “1984” words mean the opposite of their true meaning. So the Ministry of Truth deals in lies, the Ministry of Peace wages war, the Ministry of Love engages in torture and the Ministry of Plenty is concerned with starvation. The three slogans of the Party are War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, and Ignorance is Strength. Orwell also wrote that, “Political language ….is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable…”

In the housing sector we are sometimes rather keen on words and phrases that either mean the opposite of their true meaning or that make “lies sound truthful”. The biggest current culprit is, of course, the “affordable rent” programme. I can remember a time when an affordable rent was defined as 25 percent of net income. Webster defines affordable as, “to manage to bear without serious detriment.” That may be slightly vague, but to me it means that you should be able to pay your rent and then live reasonably well, perhaps run a car, have a holiday and save a bit for the future. So how is a rent of £300 a week in Cambridge (where I live) or £450 a week in London remotely affordable to people on low and modest incomes? Yet our sector appears to have swallowed the affordable rent canard hook, line and sinker. Admittedly it is the only game in town, but are some associations really so desperate for growth at all costs that they are willing to sell themselves for a few extra units? For big developers in the south, particularly those bidding for 100 percent conversions of voids, the profile of their stock could change dramatically - within five years more than a third of their homes could become unaffordable, forcing thousands of people into poverty. Have they really thought this through? There is a danger that housing providers are about to fall into a trap that will further stigmatise the sector, similar to the trap we fell into thirty years’ ago when we complied with a purist needs-based approach to allocations, shutting the door upon large sections of the working working-class and causing the sector be become residualised. At Harrogate a couple of weeks ago there was much discussion about re-naming the affordable rent regime. A few suggestions were: “so-called affordable rents”, “naffordable”, or simply “unaffordable rents”.  I prefer the last one. Words should mean what they say and say what they mean.

Whilst I am on the topic of words and their meaning, another phrase that should be binned is “social housing”. Why do we persist with it? For me, it conjures up images of National Health spectacles and coal in the bath. Does it mean that non-social housing is anti-social or asocial? Do we really believe that private developers, and the planners and architects they work with, don’t have a social purpose, an interest in building sustainable homes and viable communities? We should move on from this kind of segmentation – increasingly we are taking an holistic view of housing markets and considering how different providers can meet the differing needs of customers. If we are to have “social housing” then why not “social greengrocers” or “social dentists”? The phrase is out of date, degrading and meaningless.  Why not just “housing” or, more clunky perhaps, “housing provided by councils and housing associations”?