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Jules Birch is an award-winning blogger who writes exclusive articles for Inside Housing
Housing has played a role in the Conservatives’ fall in London and rise in the red wall
A failure to address the capital’s housing crisis has helped drive hostility towards the government in the capital, but new Help to Buy owners in the North are turning blue, writes Jules Birch
Housing is set to play a key role in predicted Conservative defeat in the election for London mayor. Housing has already played a key role in actual Conservative victory in Red Wall seats in the North of England.
These are the contrasting conclusions of two recent reports in the national media that should give pause for thought about the way we think about housing and politics.
The first is a column in The Times by James Forsyth that extrapolates from the struggles of Conservative mayoral candidate Shaun Bailey to conclude that ‘Tories will lose unless they build more homes’.
He argues that falling levels of homeownership and rising levels of renter resentment in London have turned the capital into such hostile territory for the Conservatives that they now hold just 21 out of 73 parliamentary seats.
Failure to build has “created a political trap for Bailey”, he says.
A minister tells him: “The irony is that you get MPs in outer London who are quite militant about the green belt. But changing housing tenure is turning their constituencies into marginals.”
Former housing minister Gavin Barwell, a loser in Croydon Central in 2017, could certainly testify to that. The net result is that the Tories alienate their future voters to pander to an older, more prosperous section of their current electorate.
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Mr Bailey’s strategy seems to have taken that even further, with opposition not just to building out into the green belt but also to building up on station car parks, prioritising the interests of well-housed commuters over those of frustrated would-be home buyers.
As the political editor of The Spectator whose wife is the new Downing Street press secretary and whose best man was Rishi Sunak, Mr Forsyth should be well-placed to read the Tory runes.
He concludes that the Conservatives must do everything they can to get more homes built and increase homeownership and resist attempts to water down reforms of the planning system to achieve it.
I wonder, though, if he’s factored in what happens when renters see more new homes being built at prices that are still completely unaffordable.
By contrast, an article in The Economist concludes that building more homes has been a key factor in improving Conservative fortunes in the North of England.
In a survey of what he calls “Barratt Britain”, Duncan Weldon visits new suburban ‘places’ (they don’t call them estates anymore) built by the big house builders on the outskirts of industrial towns across the North.
Prices for three-bed houses at Pegswood, built on the site of a former colliery near Blyth, start at £194,955 and are available with a 5% deposit thanks to Help to Buy.
“When you knock on the door of a big new house,” a Labour shadow minister tells him, “how do you tell the people living there that the country is going wrong?”
The article is valuable as a corrective to London-centric views of the ‘housing crisis’ and also as an illustration of the under-appreciated political benefits of Help to Buy for the Conservatives.
The trend it identifies is nothing new – just watch the opening credits of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?, a 1970s sitcom in which one of the main characters moves to a new home in the suburbs in the North East and is seen by the other as a traitor to his class.
It’s more that the North-South divide is now something very different. A proud new resident of Pegswood says: “If I’d moved to London and got a graduate job, I’d probably be renting a shitty flat and I doubt I’d have two kids.”
Ironically, social mobility is still possible in some parts of the country but utterly out of reach in places where it’s housing that needs levelling up.
Jules Birch, columnist, Inside Housing
