Why shouldn’t working-class people own their own homes? It’s a rhetorical question that has provided the justification for the transformation of housing policy over the past half century in the wake of Margaret Thatcher’s “property-owning” revolution in the 1980s. “I want Labour to be the party of home ownership,” as Keir Starmer put it last week.
There is, of course, no reason that working-class people should not own their home, any more than they should not drive a Mercedes or holiday in the Maldives. The trappings of wealth should not be confined to the middle class.
And yet, it is clearly also a far more complex issue. The idea of a “property-owning democracy” emerged as a conservative political strategy in the 1920s to attempt to counter dangerous socialist ideas percolating within the working class. It was appropriated by Anthony Eden, Conservative deputy leader in the 1940s, in response to Labour’s postwar expansion of social housing, before becoming a key strand of Thatcherite strategy in the 1980s.
Thatcher’s offer to council tenants to buy their flats, and the loosening of mortgage rules to expand bank lending policy, was a runaway success. It contributed to, and was a product of, the fragmentation of working-class communities and the atomisation of society witnessed in the 1980s. The preoccupation with home ownership was predicated in large part on the belief that social housing must necessarily be of poor quality, and that only home ownership could meet people’s aspirations and allow the working class, to anachronistically borrow a phrase from a different context almost 40 years later, to “take control” of their lives.
Poorly designed, shoddily built council housing is, however, a political choice, not the inevitable consequence of state management. The original conception of social housing was to provide the kind of homes that appealed across classes, to create communities in which “the doctor, the grocer, the butcher and the farm labourer all lived in the same street”, as health and housing minister, Nye Bevan, put it in 1949, describing his vision of the new municipally owned housing estates.
Political reality killed such aspiration. Council houses came to be built cheaply and became marked by social stigma, the repositories of the poor and the deprived. From Ronan Point to Grenfell Tower, social housing was not just tawdry but often dangerous, too.
“The phrase ‘council estate’,” Lynsey Hanley writes in Estates, her history of council housing, “is a kind of psycho-social bruise: everyone winces when they hear it.” “It makes us think of dead ends (in terms of lives as well as roads),” Hanley adds, and “of bad design, identical front doors, windswept grass verges, and the kind of misplaced optimism which, in Britain especially, gives the individualistically inclined an easy way to kick social-democratic values.” Little wonder that by 1979 so many council tenants were eager to seize the chance to become owner occupiers.
The abandonment of social housing for a policy of home ownership and of trusting in market forces has not, however, provided most working-class people with greater control of their lives. There has been a decline in house building since the 1970s. As house prices have soared while wages have stagnated, so home ownership has moved beyond the reach of more and more people. In the early 1990s, the average house cost around four times the average wage. By the end of last year, it cost nine times the average wage.
While most politicians agree in principle with the need for a new programme of housebuilding, in practice they erect all manner of nimbyist barricades. Last December, Rishi Sunak was forced to abandon a proposed mandatary target of building 300,000 homes a year in England, after a rebellion by backbenchers who acknowledged the need for new homes, but only in someone else’s backyard. By last week the prime minister had shifted from attempting to impose housebuilding targets to accusing the Labour party of wanting “to concrete over the green belt”. It is an expression of the solipsism of British politics that everybody knows what is needed but few are willing to turn it into reality.
Beyond the lack of housing is also the issue of a lack of affordable housing. The construction of social housing has virtually disappeared. There are 1.2 million people on the waiting list for social housing. Between 2012-13 and 2021-22, more than three times as many social rent homes were sold off or demolished as were built. This was deliberate policy. According to Nick Clegg, David Cameron and George Osborne squeezed the social rented sector to virtual non-existence because “all it does is produce more Labour voters”.
The proportion of social renters has fallen from a high of 29% in 1981 to less than half that today, while numbers in private renting have more than doubled. Many are forced to pay exorbitant rents for appalling and overcrowded conditions in a largely unregulated market. Even with a programme of mass housebuilding and fall in house prices, many would not be able to afford home ownership.
Yet, it need not be this way. In Vienna, the majority of the city’s population live in high-quality subsidised housing. It is a vision that Bevan would have recognised, in which nurses, teachers, office cleaners and factory workers all live in the same street, or block.
The city’s housing policy emerged in the 1920s, in the days of “red Vienna”, when the Social Democratic Party (SPÖ) first took control of the city, and launched ambitious plans to provide good quality, affordable housing for all. It has largely succeeded. The quality and affordability of public housing has meant also that the private rented sector tends to be of good quality and relatively affordable.
The city spends more than €570m (£502m) a year on its housing, including building new homes, paid for largely with a 1% levy on the salaries of every Viennese resident. Elements of the model have been adopted by many other European cities, from Barcelona to Helsinki.
What good housing requires, as Vienna shows, is political vision and will. The real question is not: why shouldn’t working-class people own their own homes? It should rather be: why should we not all have proper, decent housing? That costs money, and higher taxation. But it is not nearly as utopian as many imagine.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
