Housing

You cannot explore inequality and the cosy relationship between the super rich and the government in the UK without talking about housing.

In the UK, housing is considered, first and foremost, an investment opportunity, as opposed to a human right.

There aren't enough houses

Supply and demand dictates that the fewer houses there are, the more they will cost. This affects both renting and buying.

The problem with housing in the UK, is that there are not enough houses for the amount of people there are. In England, there are fewer houses being built in 2022 than there was since the second World War.

There are also not enough affordable houses, so it is difficult for first-time buyers to get onto the property ladder. Many are stuck renting. But whether you are renting through choice or not, it's getting much more expensive.

The graph below shows that house prices in the UK have increased at a much higher rate than other G7 countries.

Buying a property

The average UK house price has skyrocketed in the past few decades. Wages have not kept up.

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This problem is even worse for younger people. However, almost half of Britons think young people are struggling with housing because they spend too much on non-essentials like Netflix and coffee, and also don't work hard enough,

The fact houses are getting more expensive means younger people need to rely on support form parents to buy their first home. This, of course, increases disparity between richer and poorer people.

Renting

The number of homes available to rent in the UK has fallen by a third between 2021-2023.

This is due to many landlords selling their rental properties. This reduce in supply, with the same demand, has seen rents skyrocket in places such as London, where renters pay on average 35% of their income to their landlord.

Landlords

There are many landlords in the UK providing sub-standard accommodation. They rarely face legal accountability for this.

See the clip of a tenant secretly filming their apparent landlord threatening the tenant because they complained about the condition of the property. The same landlord, Mark Fortune, has also been accused of owning multiple occupation (HMO) flats without a licence.

Social housing

There are 1.4 million fewer social houses in the UK since 1980.

When council houses were bought by their occupiers in the 80s, not enough were built to replace them. As of 2018, the Guardian estimated 40% of former council houses were now in the hands of private landlords, who charge double the rent of social housing in the same area.

To compensate for that, the Government will pay private landlords £70 billion between 2021-2026, six times what they will spend on building affordable housing.

Of what social housing does exist, nearly three quarters of tower blocks are found to still have flammable cladding, years after the Grenfell disaster.

Politics and housing

There was little incentive for the former Conservative government to build more houses, because a lower supply than demand inflates the price of houses. The voting population are by-in-large homeowners. If house prices went down, Conservative donors wouldn’t be happy because it would reduce the price of their property portfolio. It would also hurt those who own their own house because it would reduce the value. It is therefore not convenient for political parties to build more houses.

For example, property developers gave the Tories £891,000 in the first quarter of 2021.

Politicians also benefit directly from the decisions they make regarding housing. Jeremy Hunt made use of a loophole, which passed while he was in government, in which you are exempt from buy-to-let stamp duty if you buy houses in bulk of 6 or more. This saved Hunt almost £100,000.

Politicians as Landlords

71% of people in England support rent controls. However neither Labour nor the Conservatives included this policy in their 2024 election manifestos.

In 2017, 312 MPs voted against a bill which compelled private landlords to ensure homes were "fit for human habitation".

Many MPs are landlords. Does this prevent them from passing laws to support renters?

A quarter of Scottish MPs are landlords, as are one fifth of MSPs
As of April 2024, over 100 MPs earned over £10,000 per year as landlords
As of July 2024, 44 Labour MPs are landlords.

In August 2024, BBC reported that Parliament's biggest landlord, Labour MP Jas Athwal, rented out flats infested with ants and black mould. Communal areas were dirty, lights were not working and fire alarms hung loose form the ceiling.

If lawmakers cannot be trusted to provide safe, comfortable homes, can we trust them to prevent other slum landlords from doing the same?