Dead air

There was a telling moment at the end of last night’s Radio 4 debate on housing: the sound of complete silence from the audience.

The dead air came in response to a question from presenter Mark Easton asking people at the debate at the London School of Economics (LSE) how many of them think our political leaders are doing their best to solve the housing crisis.

But I am not sure if what sounded like mostly a young audience was tremendously impressed by the answers from the panel either and that may have been down to the way the question was framed in Housing: Where Will We All Live?

The premise was: ‘It’s been identified as the single biggest threat to the British economy: we are simply not building enough homes.’ The debate about ‘why the problem has developed and how best to fix it’ featured deputy London mayor Richard Blakeway, John Stewart of the Home Builders Federation, Rachel Fisher of the National Housing Federation, Paul Cheshire of the LSE and designer Wayne Hemingway.

But the programme began with two members of the audience describing their housing problems. Holly Baxter had moved from a place condemned as uninhabitable to a friend’s airing cupboard to renting a shared house with four other people, all while working full-time. ‘I can’t imagine that ever ending,’ she said. ‘I can’t even imagine renting a two-bed flat.’

Laura McGuiness is a management consultant with a partner also working in the City who have been saving for a deposit for five years. She described being continually outbid by buy to let investors and overseas cash buyers. ‘The homes we bid on all went for £70,000 over the asking price,’ she said. ‘Prices are going up at £10,000 a month.’

The panel were then asked to name their solutions:

• Employer support for rental deposits and more shared ownership (Richard Blakeway)
• Reform planning so housebuilders can deliver 75 per cent of the homes we need (John Stewart)
• Link economic development, job creation and housebuilding with a national plan and think about shared ownership and other models rather than treat ownership as the only model (Rachel Fisher)
• Tackle the ‘manufactured problem’ that the planning system forces us to live on 10 per cent of the land area of England and inflates the prices of homes and land (Paul Cheshire)
• Tackle the way we provide houses and the politics that means ‘all we’re doing is making the 65 per cent [who own] richer and the 35 per cent poorer’ (Wayne Hemingway).

Some of these answers have more going for them than others. All of them addressed the question posed in the debate. However, none of them came close to tackling the issues raised by the two people from the audience.

Even before the programme (recorded on Monday) was broadcast last night, Holly Baxter had expressed her bitter disappointment with the answers on The Guardian’s website:

‘The fact that such a distinguished panel were hopelessly out of touch with the reality of housing left me deflated. I was expecting to hear practical solutions to the housing crisis, and a drive to burst the bubble. Instead, excessive pandering to landlords and an insistence that my experience was anomalous seemed to dominate. But the fact remains that my experience is the norm for people my age.

‘The only person who did speak passionately and sensibly about the issue was the designer Wayne Hemingway. He mentioned the psychological benefits of being able to decorate your home, of being able to choose your own furnishings, of choosing the other people you live with. It was the only acknowledgement I heard all night that the statistics about my generation had human faces behind them.’

The problem lay, I think, less with the panel than the premise of the programme: the assumption that increasing housing supply is the only solution to the crisis. The crisis certainly won’t be solved without increasing supply - and that requires urgent action now - but it will only have an effect over the long term. It will take at least until the end of the decade to get to 250,000 additional homes per year and it could take at least another decade of building at that rate to have an impact on prices.

Even if we can achieve that – a big if given the politics involved - remember that this was only the level that the Barker report said would bring house price increases down to the European average, not actually reduce them and that after 10 years of under-provision we need even more homes now.

The panel had some good ideas, especially from Rachel Fisher and Wayne Hemingway, and a real challenge to the current consensus from Paul Cheshire, but they had little to offer people already experiencing the worst of the housing crisis right now.

And given the narrow framing of the question there was little sense that there might just be other causes of the crisis – the affordability question, the distribution of the homes we already have, housing as an investment market, for example – that require other solutions. The failure of our political class on housing is much more profound than the question made out. No wonder it was met with silence.