The end of public housing?

The Comprehensive Spending Review set out plans to cut public housing investment by half, leaving housing associations to fund their own construction programmes by raising rents to near market level.

 Meanwhile new council and housing association tenants may be given insecure short-life tenancies rather than a home for life, undermining the sustainability of communities and plunging families into uncertainty and risk.

It is likely that the cuts in affordable housing grant will mean the end of all publicly funded house building, and the decay of existing stock, leaving the crisis of affordability to worsen.  Cuts in housing benefit, and in the total of welfare benefits, will make this crisis worse. New homes provided at intermediate market rent will not be affordable for those in low waged work.  The role of intermediate rent in subsidising new building is therefore likely to be negligible, unless housing associations turn their back on housing those in most housing need.

Meanwhile councils will retain their responsibility to house the most vulnerable but will have even less homes available.  Their new option of granting insecure ‘flexible’ tenancies in decaying social housing stock sits alongside their increasing use of the private rented sector to give temporary lodging to those who have most need of a secure home.

A future of insecure tenancies, unaffordable rents, negligent housing regulation, and a derelict public sector has been mapped out by the Coalition Government.  A country without social citizenship, where entitlement has been abolished, and where welfare is a dirty word has been established in the most extreme spending review since 1945.