Yet an unusual amount of building activity is underway here — years before the development reaches the end of its natural lifespan. Outside three of the largest homes squat three commercial-sized skips. They are filled with builders’ waste and discarded furniture. Insulation boards and other building materials are stacked up next to them. Workers move in and out of various rooms, the windows open against the stifling heat, the sounds of drilling and banging echoing around the estate. The homes are being gutted. 

I stop and chat to a group of residents. Most have lived on the estate for decades, first renting privately from a local housing charity, then from Nationwide bank, and then from the commercial arm of the charitable housing association Notting Hill Genesis (NHG). 

But in October 2025, NHG — under financial pressure — sold the £58 million estate to a company called BMR Group. BMR specializes in office-to-residential conversions: buying up offices and flipping them into homes. It then lets the rooms, mostly to people who have applied to the council as homeless and need a temporary roof over their head. 

Residents at St James’ say that their new managing agent has told them that the company borrowed a large sum to fund the purchase. BMR is a small firm, with only two employees and £1.7 million in assets, according to its most recent accounts. It is eyeing significant changes to the estate. 

Fifty residents were served with “no fault” evictions before the law was changed to ban them in April. Dozens more were notified of hefty rent hikes: one was told their monthly bills would increase from £1,185 to £1,900, and others were quoted similar amounts. 

The existing residents feel certain that the new landlord wants them out and plans to convert their homes once empty into “‘houses in multiple occupancy”’ (HMOs). This way, the landlord could take placements from the local council, the Home Office and various other government bodies, making substantially more than they would renting to families. The residents say some homes have already been converted in this way, and that the skips and building work in the vacant ones represent further conversions.

Neither BMR or its managing agent, Freshview, responded to a request for comment by UnHerd. But Freshview has since told the BBC that it is “no proposal to convert the estate as a whole into HMOs”, and that it reviewed rent levels after finding those previously charged were “substantially below” market rates.   

More from this author

Can Britain escape its housing trap?

By Peter Apps

“I just don’t like to think about what will happen — if I do I get too upset,” says Mary, a 55-year-old mother of two. “I am sticking up for my neighbors, but I am afraid. I don’t know where I will live.” 

This estate is an extreme example of something that is happening throughout lower income urban areas across the UK. At its most basic, an “HMO”, or “house in multiple occupation”, is any property rented to two or more separate households who share facilities like bathrooms and kitchens. But in 2026, it can also represent what one councilor covering the St James Estate describes as a “state-backed cash machine”. 

This is because several government agencies — primarily local authorities and the Home Office — owe statutory housing duties to various people in need, which they need to discharge quickly and cheaply. To do so, they rely on a network of private sector middlemen who strike “guaranteed rent” deals with local landlords, who then take on the governments’ tenants. 

As traditional private renting becomes more tightly regulated and less profitable, more and more landlords are moving to this model. But as they do, decent housing  is cannibalized to make way, and family neighborhoods slowly transform into more transient, more atomized places. 

“You’ve got to think about what it does to the community,” says Danny Turner, who works for the housing charity Keep It Moving, which works with young people who live in HMOs in south London. “I don’t want to vilify the people who have complex support needs, but they have no space inside and often just end up sat out in the street. It contributes to a decline in the community, to people not feeling safe in the area.”

All told, there were an estimated 360,000 such properties in England and Wales in 2025 — although this only includes those large enough to be registered with a local council.  

And what is most staggering is the rate of growth. In the absence of official statistics, UnHerd sent Freedom of Information requests to 50 of the largest urban areas. Among the 32 which responded, there were a combined 21,888 registered HMOs in 2020-1. By 2025-6, there were 32,099 — a 50% rise in just five years.

In some inner London areas the rise was sharper still. Haringey, for instance, had just 396 registered HMOs five years ago. Half a decade on, that figure had jumped to 1,871.

How, then, to explain the HMO boom? In terms of demand, the years since Covid-19 and the cost-of-living crisis have seen more people seeking out the cheapest possible accommodation they can find. In most instances, this will be a room in a HMO. The same pressures have sharply increased rates of homelessness — especially in London. When a homeless household is in priority need (due to poor health, fleeing domestic violence or having children), its local council is obliged to find them temporary housing. Again, this is often in a HMO. The Home Office also secures thousands of properties around the country to use as dispersal accommodation for asylum seekers awaiting decisions; meanwhile prison leavers, recovering addicts, people with complex mental health needs and even looked-after children can all find themselves in state-funded HMO housing. 

And then there is supply. The new legislation protecting tenants from, say, no-fault evictions will mostly not apply when a resident is housed under one of these government schemes. Certain taxes can be skirted too. And in some instances, especially where public bodies are desperate or residents have additional needs, huge sums of money can be charged. This makes it good business for landlords.   

The sums of public money on offer here are not small. Councils in England spent £2.8 billion on temporary housing for the homeless in 2024-5. The Home Office spent £2.7 billion on asylum seeker accommodation in the same year. Up to £130 million in housing benefit goes to landlords providing so-called “exempt accommodation” for people in particular need. Convert a street property into a HMO and you can get your hands on a big chunk of cash. 

“There seems to be two things going on,” explains Susie Dye, who leads policy work on housing at the charity Trust for London. “One is about landlord business models. Some landlords are concluding that being a private landlord is too risky and they want to avoid the regulations. And the other is straight up tooth-and-claw capitalism — they are hearing about the money being spent on temporary accommodation and they are trying to increase their return.”

For private landlords, the most common model is some form of “guaranteed-rent” arrangement, with an estate agency acting as middleman and broker between the landlord and the state. The landlord will take a home off the regular private rented market, before leasing it to an estate agency. UnHerd phoned one such agency — Theori Housing Management Services — and posed as the owner of a newly-inherited three-bedroom home in east London. We were offered a guaranteed £2,000 a month for three years. This is less than might be made on the open private market in this particular area, but the guaranteed cash and removal of responsibility make it an attractive proposition nonetheless. 

The private landlord receives this “guaranteed rent” from the agency, and effectively sees their involvement end. It is the agency that then finds a resident, charges the state-body rent above that which it is paying the landlord, and makes a tidy profit on the margin. 

Steadily, these agencies — often backstreet affairs with a small number of directors, limited public accounts, and no real regulation — have become the major beneficiaries of state spending on housing.  

One analysis of transparency data showed that the estate agent Stef and Philips, headquartered in an office near the northern end of the Piccadilly Line, was paid £3.49 million by London boroughs in a single month last year. In London, where there are an extraordinary number of homeless households seeking temporary accommodation, councils spend £5 million a day on this accommodation: equivalent to £200 a year out of the council tax bill of every single Londoner.

There is an argument that these landlords and agents are simply reacting to societal demands. “They are meeting a legitimate demand in what is a really problematic housing market,” says Dan Hawthorn, co-chair of the London Housing Directors’ Group. But London boroughs also struggle to find housing that is both affordable and good quality. As Hawthorn adds: “Never has so much public money been spent on such terrible outcomes”.

That’s clear enough across London. England’s Lane, in Camden, is a former interwar nurses accommodation with 162 rooms. Now it’s used by Southwark Council to house vulnerable families — including mothers with children, some of them very young. 

A report by a tenant’s union that represents residents at the block raised issues with very high electricity costs. Tenants have to top up a cash meter every day, with most saying they had to pay between £40 and £60 a week to keep the lights on, including a daily charge. More than 60% said they go without power because it costs too much and skipped meals to pay for it. Many of them reported rooms getting too hot, with indoor temperatures reaching 40 degrees. “My child gets a recurring nosebleed due to excessive heat,” said one. Almost half told the survey there were problems with mold and pests. They said staff bullied them and were “rude beyond words” when they raised concerns. Property Playbook* — which manages the block — has taken £7.5m in rental payments from Southwark for it since 2020, according to a Freedom of Information request made by UnHerd.

I also visit Kap House**, a converted office property on a back street in the North London suburb of Harrow. There are 73 flats in the block, with each tenant paying around £600 a month in rent. That means the property pays out more than £40,000 a month to the landlord. Several of the doors I knock on have residents placed there by local authorities, meaning much of this money comes from the public purse. Others are renting privately — it is the best they can afford. 

When UnHerd visited in June, in the hallway, a stack of residents’ letter lockers were battered, their doors hanging loose as if someone had raided them. A sign warned there was now CCTV coverage in the building due to “serious criminal activity”. I entered flats which had stains on the walls and stank of raw sewage. “I have had [serious health issues],” one resident explained. “I had to leave my old home because the landlord put the rent up. But I shouldn’t have to live like this, it’s inhuman.” One vacant flat — which a resident had recently been moved out of due to the conditions — had walls covered in mold and holes in the ceiling. 

Not that these problems discourage agencies from being hard-elbowed about extracting even more money from local authorities. When, for instance, a council is desperate to find a home for a tenant in need at short notice, an agency will sometimes ask for “incentive” payments to secure a room fast. These can run to thousands of pounds. UnHerd has seen an email from letting agent K7 Residential asking Croydon Council to pay “an incentive requirement of £2,500” before allowing a resident have a viewing. A source familiar with the model says that desperate local authorities have at times been billed as much as £7,000 to secure a room. 

All the while, agents have increasingly moved from agreeing long-term lease arrangements to demanding “nightly rates”, which are unsurprisingly much higher. In some cases, this has involved a peculiar legal fiction, where they effectively evict themselves from the property and re-let it.

Luke Sheldon, a solicitor who works with the community group Housing Action Southwark and Lambeth, says he attended a court hearing in April 2024 where ZFA — an agency which works across many London boroughs and receives millions in rental payments — was having possession proceedings brought against them and “persons unknown” by another company with which it shares directors. 

“From seeing a number of similar cases,” Sheldon explains, “I believe the intention was often to end the current leases they’d agreed with the councils so they could be re-let at a higher nightly rate.” Though Sheldon and his colleagues normally can’t see how much an agency wants to increase the rent by, he says that in one case it surged by 40%. “I’ve got a client [in temporary accommodation] who’s been on a nightly rate for 10 years now, despite having been in the same property for that whole time.”

Bigger money has taken note. Large investment funds operate a “leaseback” model with local authorities. They purchase housing for use as temporary accommodation and then sign a long-term, inflation-linked lease deal with a council, which is able to use the bedspace for households in need. 

“The investors that are coming into this space do seem to be getting bigger in terms of their backing,” says Samantha Grix, a partner at Devonshires Solicitors, which works on deals of this kind. “Enquiries are regularly coming from people looking to get into this area. Some are institutionally backed whereas others are existing property investors or family offices who have seen the opportunity. They see this as a potential investment portfolio where they can buy properties and use them for a good cause.”

Grix adds that securing longer-term deals could help councils move away from reliance on nightly paid accommodation to more strategic agreements. All the same, this may not make commercial sense; councils with huge waiting lists could easily be tempted into long-term deals that burden taxpayers for years to come. 

In the meantime, so desperate are local authorities for accommodation that they will seemingly broker deals with anyone who can offer a room. Freedom of Information requests sent to a range of local authorities in 2024 showed a range of private individuals with no registered businesses receiving tens of thousands of pounds from various London boroughs. Several pubs received regular payments; Eastleigh Council had even spent money on “Bell Tent Glamping”, which provides yurts on a campsite outside Southampton. 

As well as local authorities, there is the Home Office, which rents large numbers of rooms in HMOs as it seeks to move people awaiting asylum decisions out of hotels. The Home Office primarily uses three large contractors, Serco, Mears and Clearsprings Ready Homes, to source the rooms. These large contractors then work in the same way as the councils do when they are housing homeless families. They find an agency offering a bedspace, which is likely to have secured it from a private landlord with a guaranteed rent deal. This means three layers of business make a profit from the state: the landlord who owns the property, the middleman who signed them up to the guaranteed rent deal, and the large contractor who arranged it for the Home Office. 

The homes can be miserable. A report by Refugee Action found whole families living in single rooms with no lockable front door for years. The report also referred to pest infestations, mold, flooding, overcrowding, infectious disease outbreaks, children going without education and families going without food.

Andy Burnham’s recent statement that all parts of the UK must “do their part” in housing asylum seekers signals that Home Office will find placements across a wider swathe of the country. Currently, most Home Office HMOs are located in the North West and North East, with 11% of local authority areas not having taken any placements at all.  

HMOs are hard to escape. Residents who succeed in their application are given 42 days to leave Home Office accommodation and find somewhere else to live. Once they leave, often this means moving directly into another HMO. Croydon recently signed a £1 million contract with a firm called Reloc8 — which styles itself as a “London Relocation Expert”. The firm, this time based in a small industrial estate in a village in Derbyshire, finds rooms in towns around the country, which local authorities can offer to individuals and families in need of housing, including homeless households and those leaving asylum accommodation. Again, this sort of deal provides the demand which drives landlords in the receiving towns to set up HMO housing.

There are various other drivers of demand for HMO housing. People with complex support needs can claim higher rates of housing benefit to cover enhanced housing costs, but this so-called “exempt accommodation” has been seized on by some unscrupulous landlords who are simply warehousing recovering addicts and people with serious mental health problems in HMOs and cashing the check. Worse still are unregistered children’s homes, subject of a recent investigation by the BBC. These properties can become enormous money-spinners for those running them. After all, agencies can bill the council for the cost of staff to care for the children. 

Danny Turner, from the charity Keep It Moving, supports young people in this position, some of whom have been freshly discharged from custody or prison hospitals. “They [the landlords] basically say, ‘Oh, we need more staff to take on this young person,’” Turner explains. “In extreme cases, this can end up with eight staff for one child.” These staff may have limited qualifications, and do little real work, but the council will pay for the lot. “These guys are printing money,” says Turner. 

There are many other uses for HMOs — often the only option for those who cannot afford to rent elsewhere. HMOs originally grew throughout the 2000s in university towns where whole enclaves were taken over by students. Students still make up a big proportion of the HMO population in these towns. Moves towards purpose-built student accommodation have stalled recently thanks to higher building costs, and the market is reverting back to investment in HMOs. In November last year, Brookfield Asset Management, one of the largest owners of real estate in the world, spent £100m on a portfolio of 1,300 HMO rooms aimed at students. 

All of this causes real problems. On the one hand, HMOs are simply a way of making housing cheaper — you rent a room in a house rather than a house. But they also come with problems. Individuals are more atomized. They tend to move rapidly. Bonds between neighbors fray. The homes are often overcrowded. There are longstanding concerns about sanitation and fire safety.

The growth of HMOs in coastal towns — where former B&Bs were converted in the 2000s and often used for homelessness placements — has been viewed as a major factor in their decline. A study of these places in 2012 found “high population transience and density; downgraded residential environments; and fragile community cohesion”. As HMOs march forward into a wider swathe of urban environments, such issues are likely to follow. 

What are the solutions? A kneejerk response would be to insist that the state should not provide this kind of housing so widely. But where would that leave those in need? Grim as an HMO might be for a homeless family or a recovering addict, it beats sleeping under a bridge. And a room in a house with — at least — cooking facilities is better and cheaper than an indefinite stint in a hotel.

The rising demand for emergency HMO housing is the result of policy failures elsewhere. People are falling through the cracks in the support system, and this is the very bottom layer of the safety net left after much else has been stripped away. 

Suggested reading

The scandal of Portsmouth's broken homes

By Greg Noone

Some hope that better protection for tenants in private rented housing will help many people avoid becoming homeless, and Burnham’s renewed push to build more council housing will provide better options for the homeless families who need a more secure home. But these hopes must be tempered by realism: there is a risk that enhanced renters’ rights will push more private landlords to move into the HMO space instead, where the profits are much greater; and council housing targets are a long way from being delivered. Recent funding of £39bn to build new social housing is impressive in recent terms, but will be spent across a 10-year period. 

Perhaps the state needs to become smarter: it needs to procure better, know who it is getting housing from, ensure it is decent quality and pay more competitive prices rather than simply throwing money at the issue. Local authorities could surely deliver more of this housing directly rather than rely on multi-layered private lease deals that turn it into a cash machine. 

More radical solutions involve the construction of quick, temporary factory-built structures — which, when done well, can be comfortable and secure. These are being piloted in some areas, but bump into issues with planning and cost. 

Back on the St James’ estate in Bermondsey, residents fear they will find themselves homeless and then placed in the sort of HMOs which have forced them out of their permanent homes. As an encapsulation of where we’ve been going wrong in housing policy, the residents’ story is hard to beat. 

“There are six primary schools in this area,” says Abigail, who lives on the estate and is campaigning against the eviction. “This is a community with a lot of families, and they are trying to get rid of us all. Everyone will be scattered out of London and beyond, and the schools will eventually close down.”

The yellow skips behind her as she talks are being filled with the remnants of a family home. It will soon be driven to an industrial tip and landfilled or incinerated. Without a fight, the community it was once a part of will be consigned to the scrapheap too. 

* In a letter to UnHerd, Property Playbook said its records show residents pay around £35 a week for utilities (including gas, electric and water) and disputed the claims of higher payments made in the survey. It added that England’s Lane accommodates many residents who are satisfied with their accommodation, the management of the building and the support they receive. It listed various support services – including stay and play and family support services – which residents receive.

** On its website, a company named Kingsbridge Capital claims to have developed Kap House into residential in 2016, having acquired the freehold in 2017. When UnHerd contacted Kingsbridge for comment, it said it was not a freeholder and was not in any way a connected party to the property. It went on to say that the allegations about the property were “inaccurate, wholly unsubstantiated and rejected in their entirety”. It said none of the flats in Kap House were impacted by damp or mold, and added that it rejected that there was a sewage smell or water staining. 

In April, the headline and youth unemployment rates stood at 4.9% and 16.2% respectively, with recent estimates suggesting that an additional 2.5% of the working-age population has taken up out-of-work benefits since 2018. Graduate and entry-level hiring is being reined in and vacancies have fallen below pre-pandemic levels. Meanwhile, as the energy shock from the Iran war works through the system, the Bank of England expects inflation to climb above 3% in the summer, keeping pressure on sterling, gilt yields, and already strained household budgets.

What has attracted less attention is the thing that, more than anything else, has anchored this country’s economic discourse and political imagination over recent decades, and which will exacerbate burdens for young people in particular: housing. Burnham himself seems acutely aware of this. “If you’ve not got control of housing,” he said last September, “you’ve not got control of the costs the country is facing.” In Monday’s speech he seemingly doubled down on making housing a priority, vowing to oversee “biggest council house building program since the postwar period” using “public land, vacant public land to reduce costs”.

Yet by any sensible measure, the housing price growth that marked the 2010s and early 2020s has come to an end. Nominal prices have been broadly flat nationally for nearly three years. London flat values have dropped more than 5% in 12 months, and two in five new-build buyers in the capital who sold in 2025 did so at a loss. HM Land Registry’s index shows real prices have fallen 12.4% from their 2021 peak.

Would it be so bad for this trend to continue? The cost of renting and homeownership in Britain is unusually high in international comparison. According to the English Housing Survey, private rental households spend on average 39% of pre-tax income on rent, with the poorest fifth paying 63% even after housing support, up from 56% in 2019-20. The latest OECD data show one in four UK households paying more than 40% of disposable income on housing; this puts it in line with Spain’s rate, and is significantly higher than Greece’s, Italy’s and Portugal’s, nearly twice Japan’s (12.3%), and almost four times Germany’s (6.7%).

The cohort most exposed, routinely spending over half their gross income on rent, is young people under 35 in London and the South East. Because average house prices in those regions run 10 to 13 times average annual income, these people are effectively locked out of ownership for the foreseeable future. A British private renter born around 1995 has minimal prospects of acquiring property without inherited capital, lives by necessity where entry-level jobs are concentrated and costs are highest, and faces the real-terms erosion of whatever savings they manage to accumulate. Wouldn’t an abatement of the trend that brought all this about be highly welcome?

More from this author

How financialisation broke Britain

By Dominik A. Leusder

Unfortunately not. When house prices rise, rents tend to rise too, partly because landlords set them as a desired percentage return of the property’s current value, partly because rising prices push would-be owner-occupiers into the rental market. When prices fall, rents don’t follow. Since house price growth peaked in mid-2022, rents have risen 27.7%, exceeding inflation by 3.1 percentage points. The asset has lost real value for those who hold it, and the cost has risen for those who do not. Because the share of income spent on rent is rising, savings can’t compound fast enough for a household to afford a deposit even as values fall.

So “let housing prices fall” is not the solution. And the economic effects of falling values could be widely felt and pernicious. To understand why, we need to consider how housing as an asset reshaped Britain’s political economy.

The main social divide used to be between those who earn from labor and those who derive income from financial assets. That is no longer quite true. The wealthiest households are now increasingly the highest earners in both categories at once, parlaying favorable labor-market positions into anything that generates capital gains. Life chances and intergenerational mobility are now decisively structured by access to asset ownership and the leverage it permits. Many ordinary households have come to act like financial firms, riding asset price inflation and using credit to acquire claims on future appreciation. Middle-class voters have been reconstituted around their capacity to participate in this game, and household balance sheets are now welded to broader economic trends in a way they once were not.

Britain is the most fully-developed case of this dynamic among large advanced economies, and the asset around which the game is organized is overwhelmingly residential property. In the most recent ONS national accounts, residential property and the land beneath it account for around 60% of UK household net worth, with the remainder consisting of pension and other financial assets that the average household cannot access until retirement. Outstanding residential mortgage debt sits at around 66% of GDP, having peaked above 80% after the financial crisis. The UK remains among the more mortgage-leveraged advanced economies, alongside Australia, the Netherlands and Canada; the corresponding figures for Germany, France and Italy run between 22% and 50%.

The concentration of household wealth in housing has a financial-sector counterpart. Around half of all UK bank lending now flows into mortgages, against roughly 15% reaching businesses; the German ratio is closer to one-to-one. The UK banking sector has organized itself around lending against bricks and mortar rather than productive capacity, producing a financial system whose principal activity is the inflation of an existing asset class rather than the funding of new investment. The coalition defending British housing wealth includes a mortgaged middle class whose housing costs are not the problem. The problem is concentrated on those who pay them rent.

This is the legacy of the post-1979 settlement. Thatcher’s government encouraged a particular kind of citizen: an owner-occupier whose stake in society was financial and whose political loyalty would be cemented by rising prices. The Housing Act 1980 and the Local Government, Planning and Land Act 1980 converted a substantial stock of public housing into a tradable financial asset. Around 2.5 million council homes were sold under Right to Buy at an average discount of 40%, and a stock that had peaked at almost a third of all UK housing fell to less than a fifth. The Big Bang reforms of 1986 transformed retail banking from corporate lending into secured household lending. The introduction of buy-to-let mortgages in 1996 opened residential property to leveraged investment in a way that had not previously been possible.

By the mid-Nineties, the British political class had constructed an economy in which housing was the favored store of household wealth almost by default. Capital gains on a principal private residence had been exempt from tax since 1965. There was no annual wealth tax, no imputed rent tax of the kind found in Switzerland and the Netherlands, and council tax bands had been frozen in 1991 values. The alternatives were inaccessible or unattractive: direct stock ownership had collapsed from around 54% of UK-listed equities held by individuals in 1963 to around 11% by the early 2020s, and the FTSE 100 returned far below the cumulative gains available to leveraged homeowners. Defined benefit pensions (fixed payout) were progressively closed and replaced with defined contribution schemes (payout depending on contributions over time and investment performance). The median household was left with housing as the only legible, accessible, tax-advantaged store of wealth on offer.

Suggested Reading

Why Burnhamomics will fail

By Wolfgang Münchau

The resulting intergenerational divide is one of the most striking features of British politics: voting patterns now align extraordinarily well with housing tenure, and through tenure with age and asset position. The electorate divides crudely into three: an asset-holding coalition (homeowners above 50 outside London, around 13% of adults, voting two-to-one for the Reform-Conservative Right at high turnout); a renter coalition (under-40 private renters in cities, around 17% of adults, breaking two-to-one for Labour-Lib Dem-Green at lower turnout and dispersed across fewer seats); and the mortgagor middle (indebted working-age owners, around 29% of households, split nearly five ways). The mortgagor middle is the decisive swing constituency and its acute financial pains in 2024-26 have been driving Labour’s current collapse.

Charting this group’s balance sheet is therefore key to understanding how falling prices will play out. The immediate risk is negative equity. A household that bought a £550,000 central London flat in mid-2022 with a 90% loan-to-value mortgage, and has paid down only around £8,000 of principal, would tip into negative equity if market value fell below the remaining balance of around £487,000. London flat values have already fallen 8-10% nominally since 2022, leaving such a household with barely ~£10,000 to ~£20,000 of equity on a £55,000 deposit; a further nominal decline of 3-5% (well within range over the next 12 months) would push them under.

The consequences are immediate and self-reinforcing. The household cannot sell without realizing a cash loss to the lender, and cannot refinance onto competitive rates because the best deals are reserved for lower loan-to-value bands. They are locked into their current property and their lender’s standard variable rate, typically two to three points above the market. The equity withdrawal that has underpinned British consumption for four decades closes off entirely.

The cessation of housing price growth has broader macroeconomic consequences too, transmitting through three main channels: wealth effects, by which households feel poorer and reduce consumption; the credit channel, by which tighter lending against depreciating collateral suppresses the broader flow of credit; and the construction channel, by which falling prices make speculative housebuilding unviable in a sector that accounts for around 6% of UK GDP. 

But the dominant mechanism in the UK is through mortgages. A recent study estimates that two-thirds of the consumption response to a UK interest rate change works through the asset price route rather than direct cash flow: as lower rates push prices up, households extract equity against the higher values and spend it. When prices stop rising, as they have despite the Bank of England cutting rates four times since autumn 2024, this channel closes.

These problems are compounded by the impending price shock from the Iran war. The crisis has already pushed UK inflation to 3.3% in March 2026, with services inflation at 4.5% and the Bank expecting CPI to climb above 4% by summer. Markets that previously expected two further interest rate cuts in 2026 have priced them out entirely and are now pricing a meaningful probability of a hike by year-end; one MPC member voted to raise rates on 30 April. Two-year fixed mortgage rates have risen by around 0.9% since the start of February. Around 41% of UK mortgage accounts, some 3.6 million households, will refinance from low-rate fixes onto these higher rates between mid-2025 and mid-2028, with the typical borrower facing a £107 monthly payment rise. And while the headline figure to mortgage arrears (the share of outstanding mortgage payments that are missed or incomplete) remains low by historical standards, this is because only part of the cohort has yet refinanced and the labor market has so far cushioned the shock. But the full transmission of the past four years of monetary policy is still partly ahead of us.

The UK’s exposure is unusual by international standards. British mortgages are typically fixed for two, three or five years, against a 30-year US standard, 10 to 15 years in Germany, and up to 30 years with refinancing optionality in Denmark. This gap is a consequence of the UK having a bank-based rather than capital markets-based housing finance system: banks prefer shorter fixes because it means less duration risk on their balance sheets. UK households therefore experience rate changes far more rapidly than households in any comparable advanced economy. The Bank of England prefers this arrangement, since it allows it to fight inflation by slowing the economy through the direct effect on household cash flows. But the recent unresponsiveness of prices to rate cuts implies the Bank has lost much of its ability to stimulate consumption once inflation ebbs. The main policy response to the coming shock will be politically painful in a way subsequent cuts cannot easily offset.

The mortgagor middle is therefore hit by compounding shocks simultaneously: falling real asset values, suppressed equity withdrawal, and rising nominal mortgage costs. The same household is losing wealth on the asset, losing access to credit against the depleted equity, and paying more in cash to hold it. The electoral consequences shouldn’t come as a surprise.

What politically plausible options remain? Rachel Reeves’s rent-freeze episode in late April was instructive. The Chancellor, casting around for a visible cost-of-living intervention as inflation crept up and local elections approached, briefly floated a temporary halt on private rent rises. Downing Street killed the idea within hours. The intellectual case against rent controls is straightforward: they tend to worsen supply shortages, accelerate landlord exits, and shift the costs of scarcity onto a less mobile cohort of tenants. But rent controls are usually meant not as a solution but as a circuit-breaker. Their use is indicative of a deep policy crisis and of a government caught in a bind. Any viable solution to the British housing question requires a deliberate diminution of the housing wealth held by the current voting majority — which is why such solutions have been politely set aside for 40 years.

The most obvious short-term response is to build more. England built 208,600 additional dwellings in 2024-25, and is broadly on track to repeat that figure in 2025-26, against a government target implying 300,000 a year. There are 1.34 million households on local authority waiting lists, the highest since 2014. London is the most acute case: just 28,576 new homes were completed in the capital in 2024-25 against a London Plan target of 88,000, with 23 of 33 boroughs recording zero housing starts in the first quarter of 2025. By contrast, Tokyo, whose population has grown at a similar pace to London’s, registers around 133,000 new constructions a year (or about 2.9 times as many homes per capita) with essentially no real-terms house price appreciation across the period. Over the same span, London prices have roughly tripled nominally and risen close to 90% in real terms. UK supply is constrained by excessive regulation, a planning system designed in the late Forties for a country with a state-led housebuilding sector that has not existed for 40 years, and the collapse of institutional capacity to build public housing at scale.

Another source of pressure is the market’s openness to global financial flows. Around 27% of London residential transactions in the first quarter of 2024 went to foreign buyers. The aggregate, at 189,793 properties in England and Wales at the end of 2024, is modest in volume but concentrated at the top of the market in ways that ripple through the price chain. An LSE study suggests every 1% increase in foreign transaction share is associated with a 2.1% rise in local house prices. UK residential property functions as a sterling-denominated safe-haven asset for international wealth, particularly from Hong Kong, Singapore, the Gulf and increasingly from a politically uncertain United States.

In economic terms, removing barriers to construction and restricting openness to global investors are viable responses to both the affordability crisis and the pain that stagnating prices will bring. But politically the problem runs deeper. Britain has reconfigured its economy in a way that is difficult to unwind. For four decades, rising house prices have stood in for productivity growth, wage growth, pension provision and, in some sense, the legitimacy of the broader economic order. The country has tolerated the long stagnation of real incomes after 2008 in part because the value of the asset under each homeowner’s feet kept rising. As the market reverses, that settlement is under strain.

What we are likely to see is a slow, grinding adjustment of the kind central London has been undergoing for a decade, and that Japan has lived through since the early Nineties. Japanese housing has been broadly flat or falling in nominal terms throughout that period. Most Japanese have come to accept this as normal, partly because homes are now treated more as depreciating consumption goods than appreciating financial assets, and partly because the broader macroeconomic settlement simply does not depend on rising house prices in the way the British one still does.

In Britain, too, the adjustment could be slow, painful, and accompanied by a long-term shift in household wealth composition that takes a generation to play out. Years of real-terms stagnation will erode housing wealth without provoking a full nominal collapse; persistent inflation will quietly redistribute purchasing power from creditors to debtors; the political coalition that defended the settlement is aging out of the electorally decisive cohorts. That coalition is dominated by property-owning over-55s who benefited from buying into a rising market and now vote in disproportionate numbers; their children stand to inherit. It is at their expense that the tacit settlement of the 2010s will have to be redrawn. Any government serious about solving Britain’s housing problem has to face this head on. 

I tell the impeccably polite receptionist that I’m here to speak to Giles Mackay. For the last three months I have been reporting on his affordable housing company, Heylo, which owns and operates 10,100 “shared ownership” homes (a type of affordable housing where you part-buy, part-rent your home from a social landlord) across the UK. Mackay, an entrepreneur who claims to have established 13 businesses, amassed these properties with debt, including at least £52 million of public money and £532 million from private investors. Earlier this year, something spooked the investors and they pulled out of the scheme. Now, Mackay’s portfolio is coming undone — and the cash he owes may not be recovered. 

The receptionist’s answer is disappointing, even though it’s the one I expected. “He’s not in,” she says. “He lives in Monaco and comes into the office when his schedule allows.”

The crisis at Heylo has gripped the social housing world since March, when I revealed in Inside Housing that two asset-owning subsidiaries of the business had entered administration. Together these two companies own 3,450 homes, all of which are occupied and are now expected to be sold to new owners by the administrators. Heylo is therefore likely to lose a third of its homes at a stroke — and there is no guarantee they will end up in the hands of another social landlord. Residents have been assured that they will not lose their homes, but the administrators are not required to keep them in the social housing sector, so they could end up sold to a private owner.

Since they provide homes for people on low incomes, a level of responsibility is expected from social housing landlords. If you open your books to officials, and demonstrate good governance and sound finances, you can access the benefits of regulation including government grants to buy new homes. Heylo stretched this principle to breaking point. Mackay bought a dormant social landlord and created an elaborate structure where his homes sat in unregulated investment companies. The result was that Heylo could receive public funds and sidestep scrutiny, all while generating big profits. In its most recently published accounts, for 2023-24, the overarching Heylo Group recorded post-tax profits of £39.4 million. There is an extraordinary contrast between Mackay himself, whose personal life revolved around mansions and raucous parties, and his thousands of lower-middle income residents who now face an uncertain future. (Mackay was also approached for comment for this article by email.)

Although it may be the most extreme example, Heylo is one of a wave of “for-profit” affordable housing landlords in England backed by billions of pounds in private capital. Should ministers be encouraging this? Are big profits compatible with providing social homes? This debate will only intensify as new investors flood in, lured by the government’s new £39 billion grant program for affordable housing. Heylo’s unraveling is a reminder that however genuine these investors’ social purpose may be, their residents will come second and their returns will come first.

Giles Patrick Cyril Mackay, now aged 64, was born in 1962. He passed the bar aged 21 and quickly moved into structured finance. In 1985 he founded Assettrust, the first in a series of companies that would help businesses such as Ford and Sainsbury’s sell and lease back their properties. In 1999 he founded Hometrack, a property data business which he sold to Zoopla in 2017 for £120 million.

In the last 15 years, newspaper coverage of Mackay has focused just as much on eye-popping stories from his personal life as it has on his businesses. In 2012, a court ruled that he had bullied the contractors building his Chelsea mansion and was ordered to pay £2.3 million. “My middle name is relentless,” he had warned the builders in an email criticizing delays and defects. “Guess what, when I have forgotten about you in a year’s time enjoying my £100m home or sailing on one of my 40 meter yachts — you’ll still be trying to wind up some other poor unsuspecting customer with your brand of mediocrity — a sad loser.”

Mackay’s former wife Caroline accused him of not revealing his full wealth following the breakdown of their marriage in 2015. After they divorced, he became notorious for hosting parties at his London home with girlfriends including his now-wife, Yfke Sturm, a Dutch model, with whom he has at least one child.

Those who lived near Mackay called him the “poshest neighbor from hell”. In 2018, he held a Nostradamus-themed end of the world party with flamethrowers, dry ice and a laser light show. He was fined £7,500 for breaching a noise abatement order and accused of “total disregard for his neighbors”. He moved to Monaco in 2023, shortly after selling his Chelsea home to the president of the United Arab Emirates for £65 million.

There is considerable suspicion about Mackay among the senior leaders in the social housing sector I have spoken to. One describes him as “incredibly forthright with his opinions” and always focused on “what’s best for Giles”, although he concedes, with a note of awe, that he is “bloody good with numbers” and was ahead of his time on the importance of housing data and valuations. Another warily called his business model “not vanilla” shared ownership and “more of a DIY product”, with less regulatory oversight and protection for residents. All agree, though, that Heylo’s model is an outlier in the affordable housing landscape and that Mackay is trying to do something different, with a more aggressively “for-profit” structure than other social landlords. 

Suggested reading

When private equity came for trailer parks

By Adrian Nathan West

A former associate takes a more sympathetic view. Mackay is a “very intense yet respectful guy”, he tells me, whose “mind works at a thousand miles an hour”. He comes from a “legal, banking perspective” which is the “opposite” of most of the social housing sector, a profession people traditionally enter to make a difference rather than to make big profits. “That alone doesn’t make him a bad guy, but I can see why it would fuel some negativity and concern,” he says. Affordable housing is “the biggest supply and demand opportunity” for a business and Mackay is “creating new supply” when cash-strapped non-profit housing associations aren’t buying new homes. Are Heylo’s residents being exploited? No, he says. They chose to live in their homes and got the chance to own a stake through the business.

Mackay’s involvement in the social housing sector goes back to 2003 when he founded Assettrust Housing, a precursor to Heylo. A 2004 article in The Times captures the pitch: “Let’s give a big hand to the company with a plan for building affordable housing in the most expensive parts of England, without any help from the taxpayer.” Mackay, the article says, “has a genius for creating financial solutions to complex problems”; his social housing venture, we are told, “is not a charitable gesture, but a serious business proposition”.

Like Heylo, Assettrust Housing was focused on shared ownership. The company used private finance from backers such as RBS to buy new-build homes from house builders. It amassed a portfolio of just under 800 homes before its 18 subsidiary companies fell into administration during the 2013-14 financial year. Mackay had got into a dispute with his investors, who appointed the administrators to protect their capital. Following the administrations, in 2014 Assettrust’s homes were sold to a mix of landlords within the affordable housing sector. One-third were sold to Heylo, Mackay’s new company. 

Twelve years on, the situation at Heylo is strikingly similar. Once again, it was the lenders who pulled the plug. According to PwC, the Heylo subsidiaries defaulted on their loan terms, which led the investors to conclude that a consensual solution was “no longer achievable”. The same person who did the administration of Assettrust Housing — David Baxendale at PriceWaterhouseCoopers — is now leading the Heylo administrations. (PwC has assured the residents they will not lose their homes and should continue to pay their mortgage and rent as usual.)

Yet the collapse of the Heylo subsidiaries is on a different scale to Assettrust. The two affected Heylo companies owe £532 million to BlackRock, the giant US asset manager, and two pension funds, Phoenix Life and the Universities Superannuation Scheme. There is another crucial difference: the two Heylo companies owe a total of £52 million to Homes England, the government’s housing agency. This cash was granted to Heylo between 2018 and 2022 to help purchase its homes. Public grant for shared ownership housing is typically repayable once residents have “staircased” up to buy full ownership of their home, but it will be lost if a buyer is not willing to pay a sufficient price for Heylo’s homes.

Attention is now turning to the value of the 3,450 homes hanging in the balance. The administrators have appointed an independent valuer to estimate how much the homes are worth, and therefore how much the companies’ creditors will be repaid. According to Heylo’s own estimate, its homes were worth enough to repay both companies’ debts in full. PwC’s estimation may differ. But valuations are only a guide, and how much the creditors — including the taxpayer — will receive back will be decided by the ultimate buyer of the homes and how much it is willing to pay. 

What are the lessons from all this? First, regulators were powerless to stop the Heylo crack-up. England’s Regulator of Social Housing (RSH) has expressed reservations about Mackay’s model for years. Assettrust had tried to use a registered social landlord to access the benefits of regulation, including bidding for public money, but was rebuffed by the regulator, which criticized its governance and viability. However, under a deregulation package introduced by the government in 2017, Heylo was able to buy an existing registered provider and attach it to its investment structure — bypassing the need to go through a registration process. Eventually, in 2022, the regulator deemed Heylo’s registered provider non-compliant, warning it did not sufficiently safeguard its social housing assets. But regulators never had oversight of the wider Heylo Group, or the investment companies that actually own the homes public money paid for. 

A spokesperson for the RSH says: “This case reinforces the importance of meeting debt obligations. It also shows the importance of landlords having robust risk management arrangements and control over the social housing they provide. It highlights the need to follow our full registration process, rather than acquiring an existing provider, so we can identify potential issues with a landlord’s business arrangements at the outset.”

Second, Heylo is a cautionary tale in a wider story: the rise of “for-profit” affordable housing providers backed by private capital. Since 2008, successive governments in England have encouraged investors to enter the social housing sector on the basis that public money alone will not be enough to address the huge demand for affordable homes. There are now 85 for-profit registered providers, backed variously by high-octane private equity such as Blackstone and more “patient capital” such as local government pension funds. They own just 1.6% of England’s total affordable housing stock, but were responsible for 13% of new completions last year. Heylo may be unique or it may be a harbinger of things to come. Either way, its size — it completed 804 homes in 2024-25, making it England’s third-fastest growing for-profit provider — means it cannot be ignored.

The RSH says it does not have a problem with for-profit providers per se; it points out that it has awarded other large for-profit providers owned and operated by Legal & General, Universities Superannuation Scheme and M&G top marks. These companies are not charities. To me, at least, profit is not in and of itself a bad thing; but what is crucial is how for-profits are structured, and where their profits flow. In the case of L&G, for example, an affordable housing investment structure is enriching thousands of pension policyholders. In Heylo’s case, the structure is set up to enrich one enormously wealthy man.

“The team at Heylo Housing is working closely with the administrators, and our customers remain our top priority to ensure a smooth and orderly transition,” Heylo said in its original statement on the announcement of the administrations last month. “As this is an ongoing matter, we are unable to comment further at this stage.”

Mackay will be alright: relentless is his middle name, after all. But his story should be studied closely before the government opens the door to more state-backed super-rich social landlords. If you mix social housing with profit-chasing, the biggest winners could be the ones in Monaco and Chelsea Harbour.

The upshot? A bonanza for investors, with firms like Blackstone betting literally billions of dollars on buying up American homes, before renting them out to desperate tenants. And if 28% of US single family homes were sold to investors in Q1 2022, an 8% jump on the previous year, the trend is increasingly popular on the far side of the Atlantic too. Not content with dolling out mortgages, Lloyds Bank apparently has plans to become Britain’s biggest landlord.

Yet as large corporations gobble up a diminishing supply of houses, they pose an enormous threat to would-be homeowners, particularly those Millennials too young to have cashed in the boom of earlier decades. Combined with frequent complaints that these mega-landlords don’t maintain their new purchases — and signs that they’re keen to scoop up even more real estate — much of the Western world edges closer to genuine disaster territory, even if the antagonists are more feudal vampires than undead shamblers.

Housing now dominates political discourse right across the developed world. Among Americans, it now ranks second only to inflation as a leading economic worry. In my native California, almost 70% of residents are concerned about housing costs; in Britain, housing has risen to become one of the top issues for voters — well ahead of defense, security, poverty and crime. That’s hardly surprising: especially under the country’s inflexible NIMBY regime, projections suggest that nearly five million UK households will live in unaffordable accommodation by 2030.

More from this author

Democrats need a new Clinton

By Joel Kotkin

And if the Anglosphere is especially bad in this respect, it’s hardly unique. Studies have found similar problems stalk the European and East Asian markets too, as prices rise far faster than household incomes or inflation. And if the OECD warns that living standards are bound to “stagnate or decline” in consequence, this is far more than a series of individual catastrophes for the families involved. Rather, the West’s housing crisis, so exacerbated by outfits like Blackstone, has terrifying implications for the maintenance of middle-class democracy.

Small landowners have been the bulwark of democracy for millennia. This was true in the early origins of Athens and Rome, and in the rise of the Dutch Republic during the 17th century, perhaps the first genuinely middle-class society in history. If, however, the rise of property ownership undermined the aristocracy and hastened the end of feudalism, the most dramatic changes came after the Second World War.

Servicemen returning home wanted something better than the dank Victorian apartments they’d inhabited before. Their dreams were embraced, and indeed realized, by a series of progressive governments, often on the Left but sometimes Christian Democratic. There are plenty of examples here: Harry Truman’s GI Bill and Clement Attlee’s welfare state are probably the two most famous, but Australia and Canada pursued similar policies too.

And if President Roosevelt was surely right when he proclaimed that a “nation of homeowners” is unconquerable, the postwar embrace of quality, affordable houses for all provided “the secret sauce” that made liberal capitalism palatable to working people. Throughout the Fifties and Sixties, that was self-evident for those thousands of working-class families that fled the slums of Brooklyn or Wapping, embracing instead a front lawn and back garden in Long Island or its Essex equivalent. “Was there ever such a stealthy social revolution as the rise of this semi-detached suburbia?” wondered the filmmaker John Boorman, recalling his childhood in a South London suburb.

Now, though, many Western countries are transforming into “rentership” societies — where citizens have plenty of income to enjoy video games or tend to houseplants, but can never accumulate their own brick-and-mortar assets. The broader effect may ultimately resemble a modern form of feudalism, where institutional ownership concentrates control over housing.

If these problems transcend demographics, young people are particularly threatened here. When I ask my students if they feel confident about buying a home here in Southern California, they rarely answer affirmatively. In a recent Harvard poll of 18- to 29-year-olds, housing ranked as the third most important issue overall, just behind inflation and health care. No wonder: nationally, homeownership for people under 35 has fallen steadily since the Great Recession, and is now half that of over 45s. And, to be clear, this is not due to changing priorities, as two-thirds of millennials still yearn to escape to the suburbs.

All this has a predictable number of knock-on effects: starting with wealth accumulation. With property now so expensive, a situation hardly helped by Blackstone and the rest, American home owners have a median net worth over 40 times that of renters. It’s not hard, here, to see the political implications of this economic divide, with renters tending to favor Leftist policies such as rent control and housing subsidies. To put it differently, a class of permanent renters seems tailor-made for fomenting class warfare against an ever-shrinking number of owners.

Indeed, this is precisely the factor that’s pushed an obscure socialist named Zohran Mamdani to the verge of becoming the mayor of America’s largest and most important city. Mamdani’s “cost of living” campaign — based on rent control, free buses, childcare and city-owned supermarkets — seems to some Leftist pundits as a potential path back to power. And why not? As one recent poll found, a majority of people under 40 embrace socialist principles, even as 70% of adults no longer believe the American Dream is even attainable.

More from this author

Why the South is winning

By Joel Kotkin

This politics of bitterness is arguably exacerbated elsewhere too. The only way many can now buy homes is by relying on the classic feudal formula — “the funnel of privilege”. In the US, after all, Millennials are three times as likely as boomers to count on inheritance for their retirement. In high-price markets like Los Angeles, close to 40% of loans rely on family money for qualification, up from 25% in 2011. For the losers of this economic lottery, resentment is bound to follow.

Of course, it’d be wrong to blame all this on Wall Street or the City. Many forces contribute to higher home prices. That includes immigration — especially the kind of open-door policy faced by Britain in recent years — as well as land-use policies that restrict development. Yet adding big capital to the mix deepens the assault on middle-income aspirations, especially when investors are especially eager to snatch up single-family homes. That, it goes without saying, does much to harden even moderate hearts to free-market ideas, especially when balancing housing with other priorities means that even something as basic as childbearing is now thrown by the wayside.

Nor does the situation look likely to improve in the medium term. As the industry journal Private Equity Real Estate estimates, investors could control as much as 40% of US housing stock by 2030, with similar trends visible in Australia and elsewhere. So pervasive is the trend, in fact, that some lawmakers, including in California, Washington and Georgia, have sought to limit purchases by large real estate outfits. Yet as the radical social theorist Barrington Moore wisely noted half a century ago, “no bourgeois, no democracy”. And if such tweaks are enough to save either remains decidedly unclear, as the stumbling masses look to take revenge.

The fight over housing reform exposed a deep divide between the elite discourse-shaping class — those aligned with YIMBYism and the new “abundance” movement — and the older, activist-driven wing of liberalism that is parochial and operating on autopilot, directed by the concerns of a previous era. This latter group primarily wants to preserve local control and community character, even if it comes at the cost of affordability and housing availability. Animated by habit and identity and disconnected from wider debates taking place, it has long stood in the way of reform.

Newsom’s success, along with other recent YIMBY efforts across the country, suggests that in key policy areas, liberalism may be slowly shedding some of its self-imposed constraints. Understanding the conflict between an intellectually engaged elite and grassroots activists stuck in outdated paradigms is key to making sense of current battles within the American Left.

At the end of June, as part of the yearly budget process, Newsom signed two bills which mark the state’s most significant shift on housing in at least a generation. CEQA was enacted in 1970 to ensure that state and local agencies assess, disclose, and mitigate the environmental impacts of development projects. Over time, it came to be used to delay or block new housing, especially in urban areas. The new reforms limit the reach of the law by, among other changes, exempting the majority of multifamily infill housing projects, limiting the grounds for lawsuits, and streamlining review processes for qualifying developments.

Showing the importance of elite discourse, in his speech announcing the signing, Gavin Newsom thanked YIMBYs for their “abundant mindset,” adding that this was a “plug to Ezra.” For those unfamiliar with internal squabbling within the liberal coalition, this is a reference to the book Abundance by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, which was released this year and has caused a rift among left-leaning activists and intellectuals.

More from this author

Trump’s war on science

By Richard Hanania

At the same time, a coalition of over 100 environmental groups sent a letter calling Newsom’s changes “the worst anti-environmental bill in California in recent memory.” Organized labor also put up a fight, demanding certain carve outs as part of the reforms, at one point “fill[ing] a hearing room at the state Capitol mocking, yelling, and storming out at points while lawmakers went over the details of Newsom’s plan.”

As someone who has tried to understand the Left from outside the coalition, I’ve been fascinated watching this debate unfold. Abundance is highly readable and convincing, especially to someone with a pro-market orientation. On the housing issue in particular, we have built too little for too long, and, as Klein and Thompson point out, there’s a reason that Republican states are more affordable places to live.

Yet little that they said on this topic was surprising. Before the book came out, these arguments had been circulating for years in liberal media. Freddie deBoer expresses frustration that NIMBYs appear to be completely shut out of the discourse, estimating that pro-YIMBY perspectives are heard in mainstream media outlets by a ratio of at least 10 to 1. So what took so long? And why did so much of the organized Left still unite in opposition to California housing reforms?

The Right-wing political theorist Curtis Yarvin famously uses the term “the Cathedral” to describe what he sees as the informal but powerful ideological and institutional complex that shapes public opinion and policy in Western democracies. Under this theory, the Cathedral had a position on housing, politicians in California realized what it was, and acted accordingly. But somehow the memo had not trickled down to organized groups within the liberal coalition. While the Cathedral just notched a major victory, it was difficult and long delayed. State Senator Scott Wiener has credited Governor Newsom for putting his political capital on the line in order to enact the recent reforms.

When I recently interviewed Derek Thompson, I asked him about this divide on the Left. He responded that the key variable is age. Older Leftists grew up in a world in which ideas about overpopulation were taken seriously and development was seen as infringing on unspoiled nature. This was the time when Paul Ehrlich’s dire warnings about overpopulation and coming famines were staples of TV and radio. Younger people, in contrast, realize that housing costs have gotten out of control, and that housing is a fundamental issue facing members of their generation as they seek to build a life.

What all of this reveals is that the concept of the Cathedral, or any framework that sees the establishment in monolithic terms, needs to be unbundled. Take a look at the environmental groups that opposed housing reform. Aside from a few exceptions, most of the rest are completely obscure, even to policy wonks.

Some have names like Green Latinos and Senior & Disability Action, organized around the logic of identity politics. Many, however, are hyper local, calling themselves Alianza Coachella Valley, Los Angeles Waterkeeper, or Sierra County Land Trust. They don’t necessarily have the support of The New York Times. But they represent the priorities of liberals with money and a desire to work in the field of activism.

These people are evergreen activists, far from the intellectual currents of their own party. We may call them practitioners of Curb Your Enthusiasm liberalism. One of the recurring themes in the early seasons of the show was Cheryl Hines, Larry David’s wife, dragging him to charity events and parties with do-gooder activists. The class her friends represented were mocked for their vapidity and virtue signalling. In “The Anonymous Donor,” for example, Larry is vilified for wanting public credit for his donation, while another donor who goes by “anonymous” is celebrated, even as it turns out that he made sure his identity was whispered throughout social gatherings.

Probably not accidentally, since art is often an exaggerated portrayal of real life, the actress who played Cheryl Hines is married to RFK Jr, who spent much of his life an anti-development environmental activist before becoming better known for his views on vaccines and public health. It’s tempting to speculate that such activists might begin to feel more at home among the GOP in the future, given that RFK is now part of the Trump administration, and some of the most strident resistance to YIMBYism in blue states comes from Republican politicians.

Suggested reading

Gavin Newsom won’t save California

By Justin H. Vassallo

This demographic tends not to incorporate much new information from the wider world. They are enamored with a few narratives like the need to always be “doing more” to protect the environment, ready to also latch on to new causes like covid safety-ism and wokeness when they detect a cultural shift that is too large to ignore. And yes, they are often very old, with a lot of time on their hands.

While the NYT, Harvard, and other shapers of the discourse often get the blame for what has gone wrong with liberalism, the story of housing reform shows how problems are often caused from below. Both Curb your Enthusiasm-style Leftists and readers of Abundance can be considered liberal elites, yet while YIMBY journalists engage in high-level persuasion, those who provide money and support to most Left-wing activist groups are channeling the ideas of intellectuals and journalists of a previous generation.

In the long run, it is those who engage in the world of ideas who often triumph on the Left. But they face formidable foes among activists in the short term. The battle over Covid restrictions seems to have been another instance where these two classes were at odds. Schools remained closed to full-time, in-person learning for much longer than elite media messaging supported such an approach.

Yarvinism is right in the sense that a few prestigious media outlets and educational establishments have an outsized role in shaping discourse; but it’s too conspiratorial in its outlook. It implies internal cohesion, centrally planned messaging, and doors being closed to outsiders, when in reality, liberal institutions are often undermined by activist groups. A better model here would be Jürgen Habermas’ theory of communicative action, with democratic legitimacy coming from rational-critical deliberation among citizens.

California is finally waking up from its self-imposed crisis. The enemies of progress have often not been the liberals most prominent in public discourse who get the most attention from conservatives, but vain, superficial, and parochial interests that seek to extract rents and signal virtue to others in their social circle while imposing costs on the rest of society. Gavin Newsom took on this class and won. He’ll have a powerful story to tell in the likely event he runs for president in 2028.

Each room, says Oliver, is occupied by at least one individual, though they usually won’t know or get to know the tenant living down the corridor. Most are young professionals, sometimes lifelong Portsmouthians, sometimes born outside the UK, but usually without any other means to clamber onto the housing ladder in a city where flats and houses are in short supply. But this isn’t a bad life, insists Oliver, himself a landlord. Though they usually stay for just 14 months, he says, HMO tenants benefit from an affordable, bills-included rental package and contribute to their local community — just like the six foreign-born tenants in the building, who all work either in the care industry or the local hospital.

It’s an image at odds with that of HMOs in countless local newspapers, Facebook forums and planning objections. From Bolton to Bognor, Durham to Dover, residents are up in arms, deriding HMOs as slum housing that brings only bored and boisterous tenants, each bringing anti-social behavior to the street, all while piling untold pressure on local services bled dry by austerity. In Derby, HMOs have already been blamed for causing a “spiral of decline” across the city, while in Oldham and Wigan, Spelthorne and Worcester, local campaigners have mounted protests against a “deluge” of these new tenements arriving in their neighborhoods.

Nowhere, however, have tensions escalated so sharply as in Portsmouth. Home to just over 210,000 people, most of them crammed onto 9.5 square kilometers of Portsea Island, competition for accommodation is fierce, with rents shooting up by 29% in recent years. Most properties on offer are flats, though while these command a much higher median rent than a place in an HMO (£1,125pcm versus £695pcm), the ability to charge slightly more per room often means that the ROI is generally higher. The result? Builders’ vans scurrying hither and thither under the screech of seagulls and the low burr of ships’ horns to plaster together new HMOs, while angry residents write increasingly terse objections to new developments.

Even getting an idea of how many HMOs exist is difficult. Officially, there were 4,326 such properties as of April 2024, according to Portsmouth City Council (PCC), though only 28% definitively possess a license to operate from the local authority (the absence of which, ironically, doesn’t automatically lead to the HMO’s closure). This confusion is reflected nationally. The most authoritative number for the total number of HMOs in England and Wales is 182,554 — figures that derive from the 2021 census and, judging from the leap in HMO developments reported in cities across the UK since (79 in Barrow-in-Furness; 141 in Filton, South Gloucestershire; 550 in Bolton), wildly unreliable.

Suggested reading

The battle for Thamesmead

By John Boughton

Data on who’s living in these properties is also sparse or outdated. Often marketed to single, “young professionals”, anecdotal evidence suggests that this means just about anyone who can’t afford to put down a deposit on a flat or a house. That was the position Mike found himself in. Like many people living in HMOs, he was at the start of his career when he rented his room in North End, Portsmouth, bills included, for just £550pcm.

“People come and go,” says Mike, who had his room for three years and broadly enjoyed his experience. “It’s not a lie to say that some people are a bit dodgy. The vast majority of people aren’t. They’re just people looking for somewhere to stay, not permanently, for a good price.”

Eventually, Mike saved enough money for a deposit on a house 10 minutes walk away from his old room. He doesn’t believe HMOs bring anti-social behavior, recalling how he was too busy treading on eggshells around his housemates to even think about throwing parties or being noisy. But what they do bring, he concedes, are cars. “There’s an HMO in my street,” says Mike. “A normal house might have one or two cars, but in an HMO, you might have five adults living there [and] they could have five cars.”

That problem should have been mitigated by Portsmouth City Council’s (PCC’s) decree that no HMO should be officially sanctioned if more than 10% of the homes within 100 meters are the same property type. “We, as a group, are fighting for 5%”, argues Russell Simpson, a councillor for the Portsmouth Independents Party (PIP) and one of the most anti-HMO voices in PCC. Simpson’s constituents are aghast at their streets being choked off by traffic, but they’re also echoing concerns similar to those in Derby, Durham and Dover about anti-social behavior and the erosion of community spirit. Undergirding all this is a growing sense of bewilderment at how the planning system consistently favors HMO developers.

“If they don’t get planning permission, they can still build it,” says Simpson, referring to how landlords use “permitted development” rights to renovate their properties into de facto HMOs without having to consult the council — before obtaining a license to operate as a fait accompli. The resulting tidal wave in the north of Portsmouth, argues Simpson, has led to a breakdown in community feeling amid the churn of new residents, with at least one couple approaching him to say that their row no longer feels like a “family road” but “broken.”

But where, then, do you put those people who need affordable housing? HMOs are the only answer right now, argues Martin Silman — but that’s not something the council wants to hear, says the chair of the Portsmouth & District Private Landlords Association (PDPLA). Instead, says Silman, the PCC has increased the regulatory burden for landlords, pushing what he estimates to be 1,500 rooms off the city’s rental market and the most vulnerable residents into emergency accommodation. Worse, certain councillors have actively whipped up animosity against both tenants and landlords by encouraging anti-HMO protests in the public gallery during planning meetings, and even going as far as to tell one developer in the same forum that she should “hang her head in shame.”

The atmosphere grew so feverish last year, says Silman, that the PDPLA chairman warned that a “potential HMO Kristallnacht” against landlords was in the offing. After facing down calls to resign for the comment, Silman says the rhetoric on HMOs from the council has cooled. Even so, he says, residents and councilors still “talk about mixed and balanced communities, and what they mean is, ‘We don’t want anyone not the same as the rest of us,’ which isn’t ‘mixed and balanced.’ It’s just the label gets hidden behind.”

Silman’s concern stems from his claim that a disproportionate number of HMO tenants in Portsmouth are foreign-born. Just how far such hostility might go can be seen in the apoplectic protests against some of the estimated 6,000 council-run HMOs for asylum seekers. Angry opposition to one such property in Millom, Cumbria, led to a ban on new licenses, but not before “NOT WELCOME SCUM” was daubed on one of the properties being converted, with a builder’s tires slashed too. In Wigan, meanwhile, locals complained that a surge in HMO development by companies contracted by the government to house migrants was making it a “dumping ground” — a sentiment seized upon by Reform’s Nigel Farage who, ever-eager to personify the threat he sees in the massive rise in net migration in recent years, echoed accounts from residents in Dover about bedsit-dwelling foreign men loitering in their streets and stalking their children to school.

Similar levels of hostility to privately-run HMOs seem to be percolating in Portsmouth, says Alwin Oliver, himself a landlord. “I haven’t seen anyone directly concerned about the color of somebody’s skin,” he says. “I think it’s a lot more subtle. It may even be unintentional… but, for example, we’re seeing people write objections to [an] HMO at planning stages because they believe that the people are going to be pedophiles, or what have you. And that kind of labeling, and stigmatizing, of HMO tenants, is at its most insidious when most of the people living in HMOs are born outside the UK.”

For his part, Simpson thinks these insinuations from Oliver and Silman are nonsense, a “made-up narrative” crafted to “dismiss and dilute [the] real concerns of residents” (a planning consultant for developers I spoke to also disagreed with the premise that most HMO tenants in Portsmouth were foreign-born). Such arguments certainly appear to be a leap when sifting through planning objections on PCC’s website. While many do mention safeguarding concerns about HMOs near schools and the demise of “mixed and balanced” communities, those points seem more inspired by the petitioner’s general gut feeling about the HMO tenants as itinerant wrong’uns, usually found at the bottom of a long list of complaints about unwanted pressure on local services.

For his part, Darren Sanders hasn’t heard any xenophobic comments against HMO residents. Meeting me in another small back room in the council’s oversized offices, the PCC’s Lib Dem cabinet member for housing, and an HMO tenant himself, carries all the garrulous charisma of an old pol, sympathizing with all sides of the debate while committing fully to none. Case in point: on the one hand, the role of HMOs in Portsmouth’s housing stock is “significant”, Sanders says, with many people unable to afford anything else. On the other, council inspections of licensed HMOs between 2018 and 2020 found that 32% of HMOs surveyed had “Category One” hazards — fire risks, black mold, structural defects and the like — compared to 12% in the broader rental market.

The problem, says Sanders, is that there’s little alternative to HMOs for affordable housing in Portsmouth. Not only did the government recently turn down an 850-home development in Tipner West: the site is, apparently, an irreplaceable haven for black-tailed godwits. Whitehall also raised the council’s housing target — an impossible diktat because, given the lack of space to build on Portsea Island, “we frankly don’t know where to put them.”

So, the council has tried to mend and make do, spending £100 million last year to buy back 570 council houses and convert them into council-run flats. It’s also trying to use its mandatory licensing framework for HMOs to favor good landlords and punish bad ones. But those efforts tend to be lost in public outrage at the planning system’s apparent sympathy with developers over and above residents. Sanders also claims that pushback on proposals by councillors is also discouraged by council bureaucrats. “I left the planning committee,” he says, “because I was told by the planning inspector that I didn’t know planning law, and if we carried on as the committee doing this, we’d get fined — even though, sometimes, you look at an application and imagine, ‘This isn’t a good place to live in.’”

Suggested reading

How Boomers blocked the open road

By Matthew Gasda

Jen, who speaks to UnHerd using a pseudonym, has heard it all before. A resident of North End since 2017, she lives with her son and his partner on a street with five HMOs, one next door to their own house. As we chat in a near-empty Costa, Jen laments how one bedsit after another have been built in anticipation of guaranteed planning approval, and how her row is now so choked with cars that she’s afraid to drive to see friends and family outside the city for fear of returning to a parking space three streets away and a long, painful walk home on her arthritic knee.

“They seem to be able to do stuff for people to buy, but not cheap enough to help people get on that ladder if they’re in these rooms,” Jen says. She also worries about her son and his partner, who can’t afford a flat of their own, while the value of her home is declining. In the meantime, things keep getting more tatty, more expensive, more cramped. And Jen’s getting angry.

“My issue is the way people are treated in them,” she says of HMOs, though she’s afraid that the conversation about them could easily get hijacked by residents with bigoted agendas if action isn’t taken. “I have said to the Labour [MPs] office that, very soon, I will look at a city-wide thing, to try and bring everyone together and fight it that way. But, I am concerned that [there] would be people that are fighting for the wrong reason.”

The trouble is, nobody seems interested in actually building the kind of homes HMO tenants can afford, let alone want to live in, with successive governments seemingly incapable of setting targets for affordable housing and housing in general that actually satisfy demand. Absent new houses, the money to build them, the transport infrastructure to knit them all together, and the bloody-minded will to slash through a planning system that rewards NIMBYism over necessary development, the rental market will adapt by reaping ever-greater profits on ever-smaller spaces — and leave residents, councillors and landlords continuing to blame each other for the squeeze.

As I turn onto the slip road to the M27 and switch the radio on to another asinine panel show, I think about what Jen says about not being able to see a dentist anymore, or her GP, or if there are children in the rooms next door now that she’s seen a couple of toys for sale in the front garden. I think of frogs swimming in a saucepan. My reverie slips when I spy a broken-down SUV on the hard shoulder. Metres away, a woman in a traffic warden’s uniform sits with her head in her hands.

As Canadians greeted the announcement of Mark Carney’s cabinet, the expectation was that of far-reaching change. But a day after being sworn in, Canada’s new housing minister, Gregor Robertson, put an end to those hopes. Robertson, the ex-mayor of Vancouver — which saw one of the most severe localized housing crises — said home prices should not go down. Has his boss’s campaign pledge already been turned to dust?

This is a terrible start to a supposedly new era. What Canada needs is not just a total rupture with the Trudeau years but a break with decades of virtual NIMBY dictatorship under all parties, at all levels of government. At this rate, the divide between the generally affluent home-owning Boomers and Gen Xers and the downwardly mobile Millennials and Gen Zs is only likely to persist into the Carney era. This generational divide, of course, exists as well in the US, the UK, and elsewhere, but the Canadian context is distinct: owing to the lesser relative salience of culture war and immigration issues compared with other Western nations, it is now the central cleavage of Canada’s politics, in a way that it isn’t elsewhere.

So how great is the gulf between them? Statistics Canada shows a 65-67% gap between average Millennial household wealth ($493,423) and the equivalent figures for Boomers ($1,397,609) and Gen X ($1,485,654). On top of this, there is said to be $1 trillion in Boomer wealth set to be passed down soon, but even this is in doubt given longer lifespans and this cohort’s tenacity in holding on to what they have.

The reason for this disparity is real estate, which props up the economy. Young Canadians have either been excluded from homeownership by high prices and interest rates, with big cities like Robertson’s Vancouver and Toronto among the two most unaffordable cities in North America; or they are new homeowners who managed to buy properties but are now squeezed by rising mortgage payments.  Older Canadians meanwhile have seen the value of their properties soar over a much longer period.

Suggested reading

Why Americans don’t get Canada

By Marilyn Simon

But this snapshot is part of a 60-year-old pattern whereby Boomers exert their influence as the largest generation. Because “Canada’s was the loudest boom in the industrialized world”, as the demographer David K. Foot has recounted, “Canadian boomers are a… more important factor in Canadian life than American boomers are in American life”. The subsequent history of Canada has been one of governments responding with reflexive deference to their demands. The growth of the public sector in the Sixties catered to their educational needs, while the Nineties-era turn towards fiscal austerity (and federal disengagement from housing) coupled with the rise of prohibitive zoning at local levels reflected this now middle-aged cohort’s intention to keep and grow their personal net worths.

They have maintained this goal — through ceaseless real estate appreciation — with fanatical discipline ever since. As Foot wrote, “It was just as inevitable that once the boomers were housed, the [housing] boom would end.”

But it’s not just their numbers that let the Boomers get away with so much: it’s also their enormous capacity for political cohesion. People who voted for the first time in 1965 kept voting at high rates — around 60-70% — throughout their whole adult lives. In contrast, later generations, especially Millennials and Gen Zs, mostly voted at the lower rates of 30-40% range, with few exceptions.

In fact, Foot failed to foresee how the Boomers would prolong their stranglehold well past their working-age primes. He predicted they would relinquish their urban properties and cash in early, mass migrate to smaller retirement towns, and gracefully free up space in the cities for younger cohorts, believing that not long after 2000, “houses will be what they were before the boomers entered the housing market, places to live rather than investments… the days of rapid and huge increases in house prices are gone.” Of course, this never happened — quite the opposite.

More from this author

Elon Musk and the return of Anti-Federalism

By Michael Cuenco

Gen X is in a special position; though they were not able to benefit as quickly from the system set up by the Boomers, enough of them were nonetheless able to break into the housing market and build up household wealth as the price upswing was in its initial stages in the mid-Nineties and 2000s, an entry point that was closed off to many Millennials who came after. As a result, they even have a marginally higher average net worth than Boomers and are not in a position to break ranks politically with the status quo.

Naturally, the flip side of Boomer hyper-engagement is consistent Millennial and Gen Z non-engagement: countless youths who have abdicated their civic rights altogether, citing apathy or ignorance.

What we are dealing with here are gross sociological distinctions, which cannot be put down to partisan differences. Canadian and global outlets who covered the race put special emphasis on a supposed bond between the disenfranchised youth and the populist Conservative Party under Pierre Poilievre, just as the over 55s flocked to Carney: in this telling, the former voted on cost of living while the latter voted on anti-Trump nationalism, depicted with scorn in Right-wing media as a luxury issue for Boomers intent on drowning out the affordability debate with nostalgic invocations of their own postwar golden age.

Yet the polling data does not confirm this: yes, the Boomers have gone majorly for the Liberals, but surveys carried out in the lead-up to the election and in its immediate aftermath indicate a very close, competitive race for the youth vote, with apparent Liberal leads for the 18-35 cohorts. It was actually middle-aged Gen X males (along with the oldest Millennials) who went overwhelmingly for the Tories.

But it is enormously comforting for the Right to say that they have a strong lock on the youth vote, and they will continue to do so. To hear Poilievre speak, it is as if the housing crisis sprung up overnight in 2015 right as Trudeau was elected — instead of being the result of decades of joint Liberal and Conservative misrule, including the last Tory government of which he was a part. Other than deregulation, which really needs to happen at the municipal rather than the federal level, it is also hard to see Poilievre’s neo-Thatcherite agenda as anything other than a return to vintage Nineties Boomer conservatism; or as JD Vance said of him, “Mitt Romney with a French accent” (Poilievre doesn’t have an accent, but point taken).

In any event, Canada’s youth is still up for grabs, even as young and old jostle for the favor of the governing Liberals who have historically been the big-tent brokerage party par excellence. In the 20th century, Liberal leaders brokered ingenious compromises to reconcile the divergent interests of competing groups in Canadian society: English and French, East and West, capital and labor. Today, they must do the same with the Boomers and their children; they must first admit, however, that a zero-sum standoff currently exists between them, instead of ignoring the problem in the first place as Robertson did as mayor in Vancouver, and as Trudeau did as prime minister.

Enough first-time voters responded to Carney’s pledge of a Second World War-style, nationally directed industrial policy to get “government… back in the business of building affordable homes”, that is, to mass manufacture homes at scale: the very idea that his housing minister can’t seem to contemplate. But what will it take for such an ambitious plan to actually succeed?

Carney will need to compensate the Boomers and Gen Xers whose home values will start tumbling once new units enter the market en masse. A creative way to do it would be to find ways to deploy the older cohorts’ own wealth toward funding the construction boom, perhaps through the issuance of special Canada Construction Bonds that pension funds and retirees can purchase, the returns on which would be drawn from the profits to be generated by the resulting newly manufactured affordable unit sales. This is exactly the kind of financial alchemy that Carney should be able to perform. The “counteroffer” to the Boomers could then be supplemented by seniors’ discounts, subsidized nursing care, and the construction of retirement villages as part of the new industrial policy.

Whatever the case, young Canadians must realize (as well as young Americans, Britons and anyone else with this challenge) that the conflict will be settled not on the terrain of patriotism or political ideologies but of raw self-interest. Beating the Boomers at their own game will be the only way to humble them.

Welcome to renting in 2025. What did you think I was talking about?

The perils of modern dating are well documented, but the concurrent battle for housing — the uncanny tonal similarities, the vibe of existential uncertainty — is little discussed. For those between 25 and 34 — that Gen Z/Millennial crop now looking, in many ways, to settle down — the confluence of these twin concerns is not news. This group makes up a third of the UK rental pool; in the capital, the average age of the renter is rising. If the analogy of renting and dating is indulged a little, then marriage would be the logical equivalent of buying. The data here is what you’d expect, with the number of unmarried couples in Britain in the 25-35 age bracket doubling between 1991 and 2021.

The cost and uncertainty of the housing market is often cited as the keystone in the collapsing birth rate, a more sensible analysis, in my view, than blaming social vogues (or feminism) alone. It is understandable that couples looking to start a family would wait to first cobble together a deposit; it must be frightening to think of the site of your baby’s first few years being at the whim of a landlord, with creeping rents which threaten to outstrip pay rises. The marital custom of house then kids also makes financial sense: having children is expensive, so getting your ducks in a row by prioritizing a mortgage seems prudent. In this sense, falling birth rates is a policy failure — an unchecked housing system which has doomed Millennials to the status of tenant is a direct cause. But what of dating?

The game of seduction, in both the rental and romantic sense, has become more miserably cynical in recent years. Both are subject to a scarcity mindset; both have moved almost exclusively online. This was intended to provide the “customer” with a bounty of choice and customization — will I filter for a garden, or a dishwasher, or a brunette? — but the reality is a sense of fraught competitiveness. In London in particular, the restless urgency is exhausting.

I suspect Boomers forget, or have little sympathy for, how soul-destroying it is to queue up for viewings with your begging bowl, gazumping other young professionals with ever-higher security deposits, lugging your worldly possessions across the city to a borough you’ve never been to when your last landlord unexpectedly hikes the rent out of your price range. It is disconcerting, unnatural even, to form attachments to a street — even to get to know the shopkeepers, the barmaids, the postman — only to be booted into a different postcode a year on. Similarly, dating apps engender a dread of insecurity: it is peopled by the romantically homeless, sofa-surfing and subletting hearts in empty situationships. Settling down young is not, in a romantic sense at least, something my crowd has ever aspired to — but the alternative, the promised sexual freedom, takes its toll.

In both scenarios, the true villain is the timewaster; estate agents, like daters, have been known to ghost would-be tenants when a better offer comes along, while triggering the break clause is the instinctive get-out for bad Hingers (“we met on an app; you didn’t think it was serious, did you?”). Recently, my estate agent held a series of viewings in my flat; it occurred to me how similar that initial look-around really is to a first date. I watched as bashful viewers dutifully took their shoes off, gave the right compliments, asked tactical questions — do you get much noise?; do you get used to the stairs? — only to scurry off, as I have done after many a viewing and many a date, and debrief with a friend. Bit cramped, they say; definitely lied about his height. Needs doing up.

What does this grand theory amount to? The fate of daters and renters in modern Britain really boils down to one thing: casualization. I don’t believe young people desire marriage any less than they desire home ownership; while there is less social pressure, and certainly less religious imperative for wedlock, the fact remains that my generation has been conditioned to expect uncertainty and insecurity by an array of economic factors which have shaped a lifestyle of casual impermanence. A buoyant, optimistic generation — like our parents’ — is one that comes of age both socially and financially confident, which knows ease and ambition, and for whom the trappings of adulthood (a spouse, a car, a home) are not just appealing but within reach. Can we say the same for young people today?

Suggested reading

Why Gen Z hates Britain

By Poppy Sowerby

If those trappings are less fashionable among Gen Z, it is because we have been weaned on post-2008 bohemianism: the further into my twenties I get, the more I realize that the lifestyle we have been taught to accept as cool — bouncing around different living situations, gliding from moldy flat to ketamine-dusted warehouse to freezing-cold houseboat, all the while jumping from lover to lover too — is in fact “cope”. Nobody wants this. Our generation was promised a lifestyle of choice; what it got was instability; our low-low expectations of dating are colored by our expectations of how we have to live, the dire roommates we have to endure, the grim proximity to grimmer neighbors. We are used to being buffeted around, at the mercy of a hostile market, told to accept imperfection at great expense.

A perceptive joke flying about social media at the moment is that we are seeing the return of “recession indicators”. The theory goes that the return of Millennial pop culture — its fashion, its TV, its heavily filtered selfies — heralds an impending economic collapse. This month Trump’s tariffs threatened to plunge America and its trading partners into recession; the return of 2008’s economic headwinds seems less and less a joke. But I predict a stranger consequence of the return of Credit Crunch mores: a doubling down on its depressing romantic values, the injection of even more uncertainty, casualness and insecurity into the dating world, an even darker cloud of pessimism sailing over pub tables as Hinge voyagers steel themselves for summer. The consequence of miserable economics is miserable daters: romantic paralysis is the result of a culture in which commitment is framed as a luxury. Having the means to settle down, the confidence and security, seems almost quaint now — an echo of a different time. Nothing, and nobody, belongs to us. We are the recession-era precariat, and our sex lives suck.

The country is plagued by an affordability crisis, a housing shortage, crumbling infrastructure, and a general sense of diminishing expectations. For abundance liberals, it’s no accident that these crises are most acute in the states and cities where Democrats hold most of the political power.

The journalists Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson have emerged as the most prominent faces of this movement. In their buzzy new book, Abundance, they argue that scarcity is a choice, and that “to have the future we want, we need to build and invent more of what we need”. Progressives, in this telling, must be on the side of dynamism and productive capacity, even if this means bucking the Left’s orthodoxies.

The abundance movement gives hope for a progressive revival amid Trumpian gloom — even if proponents fail to fully reckon with the material incentives that keep many of their constituents on the side of the un-abundant status quo.

Supply-side liberals want to roll back regulations that make it harder to innovate and build. Yet it would be a mistake to cast them as neoliberals in the Clinton-Obama mold, as many on the Left are now doing. They emphasize the role of a strong, active government in shaping policy and directing markets. And while some abundance liberals describe themselves as moderates, many more are explicit about their passion for progressive ideals. The concern that unifies them is the tendency of progressive governance to hinder its own ostensible goals.

Stringent zoning laws block the construction of new housing, while burdensome rules around the use of public money make affordable public housing too expensive to build. Endless environmental reviews delay public transportation and green infrastructure projects. As Klein and Thompson put it: “Liberals speak as if they believe in government and then pass policy after policy hamstringing what it can actually do.”

Ordinary people suffer as a result. A majority of California tenants are now “rent-burdened”, meaning they spend more than a third of their income on housing. The same is true in New York City. Nearly a quarter of Seattle residents spend more than half of their income on rent. Even middle-class workers are being priced out of the most desirable cities and job markets.

Suggested reading

Democrats are wasting a populist moment

By Justin H. Vassalo

Nonetheless, deep-blue cities permit far fewer new homes than those with more conservative governance. Despite having 8 million more residents than Texas, the Golden State issued only half as many residential building permits in 2023. Meanwhile, in Austin, the median rent has fallen a staggering 22 percent over the last two years, even amid a tech boom, thanks to a concerted push to build new rental housing.

Difficulty building isn’t confined to the housing sector. Large infrastructure projects in blue areas regularly run behind schedule and over-budget due to onerous regulations and activist litigation. In 2008, California approved funding for an ambitious high-speed-rail project stretching across much of the state. The project is now $100 billion over-budget and a decade behind schedule. Meanwhile, the Lone Star State, with its loose regulatory climate, beats environmentally friendly California in solar and wind power capacity.

These failures partly explain why blue areas drifted most dramatically to the Right in the 2024 election, with core urban voters in liberal bastions like Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City shifting 8 percentage points toward Trump. This should terrify Democrats, but they appear incapable of correcting course.

To be sure, the toxic and inane cultural politics progressives championed over the last decade did Democrats no favors at the ballot box. But rebranding the party as more socially moderate — with performative gestures towards masculinity, sports, patriotic kitsch, and Joe Rogan fans — won’t solve the deeper problems of progressive governance.

Suggested reading

The Left won’t let go of woke

By Catherine Liu

For some supply-side progressives, the warning signs were flashing red long before the election. Thompson began to reconsider the cause of supply shortages during the Covid pandemic, when the country was short on protective equipment, drug supplies, and hospital beds. He saw these shortages as more than mere supply-chain failures. The authorities were failing to fast-track an appropriate pandemic response in the same way they failed at housing, energy, infrastructure, and skilled labor. In a January 2022 Atlantic essay Thompson called for a broad “abundance agenda” that would harness the power of both government and markets to supply more of what people need.

Supply-side has long been a Right-coded phrase. The term refers to the economic theory that low taxes and small government boost economic output and living standards for all. Progressives have instead generally focused, to borrow Klein’s words, on “the demand side of the ledger”: subsidizing the cost of housing, food, health care, education, and other essentials.

But price controls and food stamps don’t put more eggs and other goods on supermarket shelves. Simply handing out money for people to buy a limited supply of goods drives up prices, as the inflation of recent years has made clear. Had Kamala Harris been able to follow through on her campaign promise to give $25,000 grants to first-time homebuyers, the likely result would have been a rise in the cost of housing.

When demand outstrips supply, especially for inelastic goods, redistribution is an insufficient response. Hence why supply-side progressives are calling for a political shift away from redistribution toward the production and supply of more goods and services. They want a liberalism that builds and innovates and therefore lowers prices, not just redistributes.

This is a radical departure from the last 50-plus years of progressive orthodoxy, which has focused mostly on inequality and, more recently, climate change. The climate dimension is especially prone to a combination of radicalism and pessimism that alienates ordinary people. The “degrowth” movement — which calls for managed decline and even winding down industrial society in the face of ecological collapse — has gained purchase in many corners of the Left. Even many mainstream liberals espouse tacitly antigrowth sentiments.

Such policies sabotage progressive governance. Then, too, the legislative model was forged in a different era with different problems. The environmental regulations of the postwar era sought to ameliorate the harms associated with rapid economic growth and technological progress. The postwar American economy was vibrant. Suburbs and highways and factories were going up all across the country. But the air and water were polluted, manufacturing was degrading natural environments, and crime, smog, noise, and crowding had the affluent fleeing cities.

But these environmental regulations, zoning laws, historic preservation statutes, and “grassroots” public-interest policies, implemented to protect the public in a time of rapid change, have since been captured by special interests. Activist citizen and business groups weaponize these same laws to stymie construction and growth for their own personal ends.

A willingness to grapple with the failures of progressive governance — and the ideological choices underpinning those failures — sets supply-side progressives apart from many of the other rival factions seeking to remake or just rebrand the Democratic Party. But for now, the abundance faction consists mostly of policy wonks confined to media, think tanks, and academia. A few prominent politicians have expressed support for their ideas, at least as they appear on paper, and others hit on similar themes. California Gov. Gavin Newsom recently issued a State Economic Blueprint teasing new infrastructure, innovation, government investment, and dynamism. (The cover features hard hats, construction cranes, and a commercial farm that is notably not bucolic.)

However, the “pathologies of the broad Left”, as Klein and Thompson put it, didn’t arise by happenstance, and they won’t be easily cured. Though regulatory hurdles were raised as well-intentioned solutions to the problems of another age, the entrenched interests keeping them in place are very much contemporary. In the cities home to much of the Democratic base, NIMBYism remains a potent force. Affluent homeowners have moved back into the cities, but they still fear the traffic, crime, noise, and blocked views that come with high-density affordable housing and infrastructure projects. They are unlikely to be happy about slumping home prices as new housing stock becomes available.

Klein and Thompson are too quick to excuse or brush aside the vested interest affluent liberals have in the status quo. Klein has asked for grace and understanding for the contradictory but human impulses of those practicing what he calls “lawn-sign liberalism”. Elsewhere, Thompson floated promoting the abundance agenda as pushback against greedy elites but stopped short of openly blaming homeowners.

Yoni Appelbaum, another supply-side progressive with a new book out, Stuck: How the Privileged and the Propertied Broke the Engine of American Opportunity, is more comfortable naming villains. Appelbaum points the finger at Jane Jacobs, the community activist famous for keeping planning virtuoso Robert Moses from running highways through Manhattan. Jacobs’s writing and activism against large “top-down” urban development in favor of community-based planning laid the blueprint for activist groups that would squash urban development for decades to come.

In Why Nothing Works: Who Killed Progress and How to Bring It Back, yet another text simpatico to the abundance movement, Marc Dunkelman argues that such activists, and progressives in general, have leaned too far into a “Jeffersonian” impulse as opposed to the Hamiltonian tradition’s emphasis on developmentalism and large-scale solutions to mass problems.

Suggested reading

The closing of the Democratic mind

By Lee Seigel

Though such honesty is refreshing, Thompson is probably right that a politics vilifying homeowners would struggle to find a constituency among affluent liberals with property in major cities. No one likes to be told that they are the problem. Even if the movement can find support among young progressives struggling to break into the housing market, the youth vote isn’t easy for progressives to mobilize (just ask Bernie Sanders); many young people are now pivoting to the Right anyway.

Immigration is another sticking point. Supply-side progressivism shares traditional progressivism’s support for expanding migration. Matthew Yglesias, a longtime associate of Klein’s, made this argument explicitly in his book One Billion Americans, published in 2020 (the title gives away the gist). However, while supply-side progressives are mostly in agreement, few seem so eager to foreground the point — understandably, given the ferocious public backlash against an unrestricted border under former President Joe Biden.

Klein and Thompson make only passing mention of the need for more skilled immigrant labor to build new infrastructure and technologies, but they spend little time defending or even making the case. Obvious questions go unacknowledged. Why can’t American citizens do these jobs? Won’t more people create even more issues with supply? The reason is surely strategic: the public has soured on mass immigration, which has been electorally damaging for progressive parties across Western democracies.

Suggested reading

The progressive case against immigration

By Lee Fang

Then there are unions. The abundance movement’s critics on the Left charge that making building easier would disrupt unions and be “politically ruinous”. It’s true that Klein & Co. identify labor laws as one of the factors holding back development. Yet Klein has also underscored his support for the labor movement, noting that countries with stronger unions build transit infrastructure faster and for less than the United States, with its much weaker labor movement. Klein is correct to warn, however, that nothing threatens the labor movement more than a public that blames it for the failures of progressive governance.

Still, criticizing labor law risks making enemies for abundance within organized labor. Likewise, few “affluent metropolitan liberals” will take kindly to the movement’s criticisms of environmental regulations, DEI initiatives, and other progressive pieties.

That’s why some abundance liberals have sought to forge partnerships across the aisle. Colin Mortimer of the Center for New Liberalism, a think tank that serves as a home for this rising strain of progressive thought, pointed to the Abundance Institute as a “Right-wing institution” promoting an abundance agenda centered around science and technology. Then there is the economist Tyler Cowen and his “state-capacity libertarianism”, which can be thought of as an inverse movement tackling the pathologies of the Right: above all, a perverse adherence to laissez-faire principles and refusal to harness the unique powers of government.

Likewise, figures in the so-called Tech Right — such as the venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Peter Thiel, who have both lamented the country’s inability to build — get lumped into the abundance mix. “The degree that we can make this a cross-partisan, bipartisan issue, we think that’s fantastic, and it’s going to be all the more reason why this movement can be effective”, Mortimer told me.

Suggested reading

How Elon Musk lost the plot

By Richard Hanania

Yet the danger is that Right and Left abundance proponents will each double down on their own side’s respective preferences without taking up the productive ideas of the other: that is, Republicans will deregulate without building up state capacity, while Democrats will splurge without deregulating.

The first months of the new Trump administration are instructive. The Department of Government Efficiency, headed by Elon Musk, himself pro-building and pro-dynamism in the Andreessen-Thiel sense, doesn’t appear to share any interest in making government perform better — or at all. The new Trump administration, largely abandoning the pro-worker populist posturing of the campaign trail, now seems intent on realizing Grover Norquist’s quip about shrinking the government until it can be drowned in a bathtub.

For their part, Thompson and Klein frame their agenda as an opportunity to step into the vacancy Republicans create by peddling what they call a “scarcity mindset”, in which, as JD Vance infamously claimed, illegal immigrants are taking up all of the homes that could go to native citizens. Their great hope is that Democrats might help forge a new political order that displaces the faltering neoliberal consensus.

Until recently, this did not seem so out of the realm of possibility: some Republicans had shown more openness to state interventions and industrial policy, and the Biden administration, which chose to leave many of Trump’s strategic tariffs in place, was able to garner enough bipartisan support to enact no fewer than three large spending bills centered around infrastructure and industrial policy.

Lately, however, supposedly populist Republicans have come more and more to resemble their tax-cutting, government-attacking, laissez-faire predecessors, while many Democrats are falling back into tired #Resistance tropes. Can abundance liberals (and thoughtful counterparts on the Right) cut through these familiar battle lines to forge creative new solutions to the nation’s supply problems? At stake is the future not just of the Left, but American prosperity in the 21^st century.

The first of these factors, immigration, has brought Leicester into the national spotlight in recent years. Since the Fifties, when small numbers arrived from the Commonwealth, the city has increasingly become known as a place of different cultures and faiths. Some 20,000 South Asians came during the Seventies, not from India but East Africa, where they had settled under the British Empire. Leicester is also home to Somali, Polish and Romanian minorities. But in 2022, the city’s vaunted harmony was ruptured by clashes between Hindus and Muslims in Highfields and the neighbouring Belgrave area. In a foreshadowing of the recent riots that followed the Southport stabbings, authorities in Leicester blamed the unrest on false claims spreading via social media, including rumours of attacks on places of worship and the attempted kidnapping of a Muslim girl. The mayor Peter Soulsby spoke of a campaign to recruit troublemakers from outside the city. But other accounts of the disturbances — including one I heard from a long-standing Gujarati resident in the city — have drawn attention to the recent arrival, via Portugal, of more assertive Hindus from the Indian regions of Daman and Diu.

The spectre of sectarian politics returned at last month’s general election. In Leicester South, the constituency where Highfields is located, former Labour frontbencher Jonathan Ashworth saw his 22,000 majority overturned by an independent, the optometrist Shockat Adam, who channelled the anger of local Muslims over the war in Gaza. Ashworth complained that “I’ve never known a campaign of such vitriol, such bullying, such intimidation,” saying he was barred from mosques and chased down streets. Meanwhile, the only Conservative gain of the entire election came in Leicester East, apparently confirming the drift of the city’s Hindus towards the Tories.

These ructions may help to explain the suspicion I encountered in Leicester, from both council employees and members of the public. Many people did not want to speak to me or be seen speaking to me. Then again, I saw no signs of religious tension, with the exception of one angry diatribe about immigrants, and that came from an elderly Sikh man who had moved here in the Sixties. Leicester has also remained relatively peaceful during the widespread anti-immigration protests and riots of the past fortnight. Most of my conversations pointed to a different, more material problem raised by immigration: the difficulty of finding housing in a city that is growing rapidly, even as its authorities struggle with overstretched resources.

Recent demographic data for Leicester presents a picture of remarkable change. The city’s population was estimated at about 380,000 last year, a rise of 15% since 2011. The increase in its foreign-born residents has been greater than its overall population growth, suggesting that the latter has mainly been driven by international migration. In a single year to July 2023, the equivalent of 3.6% of the city’s population arrived from overseas. But Leicester has only added 25,000 new houses since 2001, despite gaining four times as many new residents. It is now one of the most densely populated local authorities outside London, a density that its ageing, low-rise housing stock is not well placed to handle.

More from this author

Shein has revealed Britain's cheap heart

By Wessie du Toit

One result of this is fierce competition in the rental market. Leicester’s prices are rising even faster than London’s. An estate agent in Highfields told me she had received 10 calls in a matter of hours for a two-bed house at £900 per month, which is above the city average. She also said she did not struggle to find housing for newly arrived immigrants, since they tended to have good jobs — often in the NHS — and to be hard-working, wanting to “make a better life”. It is more difficult, of course, for those in the gig economy. The father of one family I met, who is an Uber driver, told me they had been looking for a one-bed flat in Leicester for six months, having originally moved to London from India in 2022.

Other losers in the housing market are those working for low wages, such as east Leicester’s textile workers. Their situation has become even worse since the local clothing industry was decimated by the Covid pandemic and soaring energy costs. Similar issues exist in white working-class areas in the west of the city. A 21-year-old street cleaner said he was still living with his dad and had no intention of moving. When I asked if this would make it difficult to start a family, he told me he already had a partner and two children there with him. Apparently most of his friends have similar arrangements.

All this has contributed to a surge of claims on the local authority. In 2022, Leicester City Council officially declared a crisis due to the numbers on its waiting lists for social housing, reported to be 6,400 households late last year. Half of those applicants qualify due to overcrowding in their existing homes; I heard of two-bed properties housing as many as 15 people. Yet the council’s ability to provide housing has been steadily undermined by a high uptake of Right to Buy, the Thatcherite policy which allows social tenants to purchase their homes at a discounted rate. It lost nearly 2,000 properties in this way in the five years up to 2022.

Recent years have also seen a dramatic rise in homelessness. Faced with the costs of housing hundreds of homeless families in bed and breakfasts and other temporary accommodation, the council this year borrowed £45 million to buy and rent more properties. It also cited the costs of 1,000 asylum decisions expected this year, and has taken out further loans to accommodate those arriving through humanitarian schemes.

The need for more housing in Leicester is evident; the question is where, and how quickly, it can be built. In theory, the obvious solution is to increase the density of terraced streets like those in Highfields, by building upwards. Yet even with Labour’s much-hyped planning reforms, a city like Leicester has neither the financial capacity nor the policy tools for such a challenge. Instead, it is currently committed to adding around 1,300 new houses annually, a target that is basically unchanged since 2006. The council cites lack of land as a constraint, though there are signs of the inefficiencies that have plagued house-building in Britain more generally. A large development in the north of the city, Ashton Green, received planning permission for 3,000 houses in 2011 (the site had been earmarked since the Seventies), but so far just 208 have been completed.

Housing shortages place heavy strains on the social fabric, and as such, they cannot be neatly separated from Leicester’s recent political convulsions. Few forms of deprivation are as liable to fuel resentment and undermine trust as the lack of a secure home.  Writing in The Guardian, Yohann Koshy suggests that a sense of dwindling resources has given life in the city “an edge of desperation”, as “communities compete for what remains”. In his victory speech, the new Leicester South MP Shockat Adam declared “this is for the people of Gaza”, but he has since claimed that “when I spoke at events or on my campaign trail, housing was the number-one issue”. Progressives rightly emphasise the impact of austerity on local authorities since 2010, which has left places like Leicester unable to handle issues such as unemployment, overcrowding and homelessness. The on-going consequences of Liz Truss’ disastrous financial experiment have made these significantly worse. But the charge sheet against Westminster must also include immigration policy.

Whatever one thinks of mass immigration in cultural or economic terms, the fact is that successive governments have rapidly increased the country’s population with no realistic plan for housing it with dignity. These were deeply irresponsible decisions, contributing to the return of slum conditions in many parts of Britain. The recent outbreaks of violence against migrants will only make politicians more reluctant to acknowledge the link between immigration and housing shortages; and yet, while this certainly leaves an open goal for Nigel Farage’s Reform Party, it is foolish to imagine that only those who consider themselves native Brits will feel aggrieved. In British cities, it is often immigrants and the children of immigrants who must bear the instability of large, chaotic population flows, denying them the opportunity to put down roots. Leicester is a clear example of this, as the struggle for affordable housing afflicts a population that is well over 40% foreign-born.

However, Leicester’s recent experience also points to changes unfolding beyond urban Britain. When the city’s council said it was unable to meet new housing targets in 2020, an agreement was reached for an “overspill” of 18,700 houses be built in surrounding parts of Leicestershire instead. For some local authorities, such as Blaby and North West Leicestershire, this means doubling their existing housebuilding quotas up to 2036. This has not been without controversy. Local news is full of scare stories about housing developments swamping small villages and golf courses, while several Conservative MPs with constituencies bordering Leicester have protested the overspill scheme. Neil O’Brien, who represents Harborough, Oadby and Wigston, demanded that the city “meet its own housing needs locally, rather than dump it onto surrounding districts”.

Such tensions between city, suburb, town and countryside were bound to be a result of Britain’s housing shortfall. They have now reappeared at a national level, as Labour’s newly announced formulas shift housebuilding quotas from inner cities to less built-up (and less reliably Labour-voting) areas. These plans will doubtless meet with plenty of local friction, but the overall trajectory is already clear. Visit an affluent, medium-sized British town with decent transport links — a town such as Market Harborough, in O’Brien’s constituency, which is 15 minutes from Leicester and an hour from London — and the chances are that you will see redbrick new-builds going up around its outskirts. Given their available and affordable land, these places will inevitably be the focus of development over the next decades.

And they will become more of a destination for migration as well. Since their residents skew older and wealthier, there is demand for the kinds of service jobs and social care positions that many new arrivals occupy. At the same time, they will continue attracting middle-class Brits from immigrant backgrounds, who are doing as the middle classes always do and moving outwards from the suburbs. Since the post-war era, the story of migration to Britain has been dominated by urban, often relatively deprived areas like Highfields; the next chapter will also be set in leafy satellite towns.

But what of those that already exist? Once imagined as bastions of social democracy, many in the South East have, since the Seventies, been reliable bellwethers of broader national voting trends. Even today, despite Labour overstating the significance of their residents, the long story of New Town politics remains fascinating as much for what it reveals of the observers as of the observed.

Once conceived by the Labour government in 1946, 11 New Towns were designated in the first phase of construction, with eight forming a ring around London, intended to draw a population of almost 400,000 from a capital then considered dangerously overcrowded. The hopes expressed by Lewis Silkin, Minister of Town and Country Planning, in introducing the legislation seem impossibly utopian in these more jaded times. Silkin himself was unembarrassed in channelling Sir Thomas More and thought it “not unreasonable to expect that that Utopia of 1516 should be translated into practical reality in 1946”.

Silkin believed “neighbourhood units, each unit with its own shops, schools, open spaces, community halls and other amenities” (what we might call today a “15-minute city”) would bring people of all classes together. When, having attended some community facility or event together, New Town residents left to go home, he did “not want the better-off people to go to the right and the less well-off to go to the left. I want them to ask each other, ‘Are you going my way?’”. The true measure of New Town success, he said, would be “the kind of citizens they produce, by whether they create this spirit of friendship, neighbourliness and comradeship”.

Though Conservative critics may have felt differently, this was not ostensibly a party political appeal. Rather, it speaks to a short-lived moment in British politics when this old country was fundamentally reimagined and a new more rationally organised, socially just and classless society believed possible. It’s no spoiler to state that such extravagant hopes were destined for disappointment, but it’s worth dissecting both their trajectory and the thinking that underlay them.

Stevenage was the first New Town to be designated, in November 1946, and it was one built, more than literally, by its construction workers. Of the first 2,000 houses completed by the Development Corporation (all what we would now call social rented), over a quarter went to building workers and their families. This was a unionised workforce that came to take a leading role in tenants’ associations, community campaigns and local government.

By the Sixties, however, one perceives a certain ambivalence in attitudes towards Stevenage from some who had been its biggest supporters. Frederic Osborn and Arnold Whittick welcomed the New Town’s “dramatic societies, art clubs, horticultural and gardening societies, political groups, sports clubs for almost every sport, numerous women’s and youth organisations”, but somehow seemed less enamoured of the new Locarno ballroom and “American-style bowling hall”. They concluded:

“The people have had well-paid regular jobs in the factories and this has conduced to producing a feeling of contentment. It has enabled them to furnish their homes well, to acquire television, cars, and domestic gadgets, so that many who came as habitual grousers were transformed into contented citizens in a few years.”

Long before he became a celebrated socialist historian, a young Raphael Samuel, surveying attitudes in Stevenage that might explain Labour’s third consecutive general election defeat in 1959, lamented the “pattern of mass media-imposed misery” that apparently fuelled the acquisitive consumerism of many of his interviewees. This was reflected too in aspirations towards owner occupation; a 1966 survey found that 43% of Development Corporation tenants in Stevenage wanted to own their own home and 93% thought the Corporation should sell houses to sitting tenants. The popularity of Margaret Thatcher’s Right to Buy policy in the Eighties should come as no surprise.

All this played out to a backdrop of surprising nostalgia for what Michael Young and Peter Willmott (whose 1957 book, Family and Kinship in East London, provided one of its foundational texts) called the “sociable squash of people and houses, workshops and lorries” of the slum districts from which many New Town dwellers had relocated. Their move, the authors suggested, marked a shift from “a people-centred to a house-centred existence”. The implicit suggestion was that the working class was becoming literally and metaphorically domesticated.

Sociologists soon coined the term “the affluent worker”; the title of a major study of Luton workers published by John Goldthorpe et al in 1968. (Employment and lifestyle patterns in Luton were similar to those of nearby New Towns.) The notion that rising living standards would inevitably condition the working class to vote Conservative grew. A 1960 book, Must Labour Lose?, concluded pessimistically that it seemed, in the short term at least, that it must. Left-wing intellectuals talked of embourgeoisement, a belief that working people were adopting middle-class lifestyles and values.

But, of course, the Labour Party won the 1964 and 1966 general elections and Shirley Williams held the Stevenage constituency for Labour from 1964 to 1979.  The reality was more complex — it always is. Dissecting the Stevenage data, Jon Lawrence found that “people’s ambition to ‘better’ themselves… was intertwined with an awareness that this was also a collective endeavour”. Goldthorpe et al concluded that “our affluent workers remain, in spite of their affluence, men who live by selling their labour power to their employers in return for wages”.

More from this author

The battle for Thamesmead

By John Boughton

In other words, aspiration and self-improvement were not antithetical to working-class affiliations but central to them. There remains, however, a caveat. This was not necessarily the self-improvement that earnest liberal reformers and the more idealistic Labour politicians envisaged. Silkin’s speech had referred to New Town residents enjoying “amateur theatricals” or playing “their part in a health centre or community centre”. One infers, perhaps unfairly, from the words of Osborne and Whittick a faint disappointment that Stevenage residents had been so easily bought off by consumer baubles. The laudable drive to improve working-class conditions has very often been associated with a desire to “improve” the working class themselves according to more elite ideas of what constituted rational, respectable or worthy behaviour.

As to class — a felt sense of one’s socioeconomic status and position, it remained central to people’s lived experience. Hierarchy, a certain precarity even in the prosperous Sixties, remained defining. It encouraged working-class people to join a union; it disposed them to vote Labour when the party spoke most directly to their interests and values. At the time, the Conservatives were signed up to a broadly social democratic, post-war political consensus centred on full employment, a mixed economy and the National Health Service. To many working-class electors, there was no great betrayal in voting for a party pledged to sustain the progress made since 1945.

Twenty years on much had changed. The New Towns were older, somehow more ordinary, and subject to some of the same economic pressures that afflicted more traditional working-class areas. The post-war consensus had frayed and then been broken by the election of a New Right Conservative government in 1979 that was to hold office for eighteen years. “Basildon Man” — more often “Essex Man” — became the avatar of this shift. Basildon had been created a New Town in 1948 but, far from embodying the progressive ideals of its post-war foundation, it now came to represent pure Thatcherism. To advocates, such as Simon Heffer who coined the “Essex Man” phrase in 1990, these were people who had escaped what he described as “the nasty workers’ barracks” of the New Towns to pursue an unashamedly acquisitive and individualist lifestyle of material self-improvement. (Harry Enfield’s character “Loadsamoney” was their hostile caricature.) Critics echoed Heffer’s definition for the most part but saw only boorish vulgarity lacking redeeming features. This was “the affluent worker” gone very rogue. Both Basildon and Stevenage (under shifting boundaries) were securely Conservative from 1979 to 1997.

Suggested reading

Will Britain ever build beautiful?

By Fred Skulthorp

It takes perhaps another political stereotype to allow a more nuanced and sympathetic view of the politics in play here. Tony Blair introduced us to “Mondeo Man” in his 1996 speech to the Labour conference. He had met him, so he claimed, four years earlier “in the Midlands on an ordinary, suburban estate”, polishing his Sierra. (It became a Mondeo after Ford phased out its Sierra line.)

“His Dad always voted Labour, he said. He used to vote Labour too. But he’d bought his own house now. He’d set up his own business. He was doing quite nicely. “So, I’ve become a Tory”, he said… His instincts were to get on in life. And he thought our instincts were to stop him.” 

“But that,” Blair continued, “was never our history or purpose.” In many ways, the New Labour project — like it or loathe it — was an attempt to persuade that man and a wider cohort of so-called C2 voters in skilled manual occupations that Labour was the party that both respected and best reflected their interests.

Basildon and Stevenage were Labour-held from 1997 to 2010, but have voted Tory ever since.  After a run of four election defeats, Starmer’s project — aided greatly by the record of successive Conservative governments — has been to offer just that reassurance and promise again, now not only to “Stevenage Woman” (the “Fortysomething disillusioned suburban voters with little time for politics” once thought vital to Labour gains), but to a far wider swathe of voters who have seen their living standards fall and the public services on which they depend decimated. In this context, electorally, ideologically perhaps, the red meat of socialism is subordinate, even counterproductive.

The New Town programme — 32 developed between 1946 and 1996, now housing around 2.8 million people — was an astonishing achievement, a mark of government ambition and accomplishment that today seems almost unimaginable. That the more extravagant hopes placed in it were unfulfilled is unsurprising, but it reminds us that any politics predicated on myths of class identity and destiny — whether Marxist-inspired or more modestly socialist — is bound for failure. Labour’s job now, as it has always been, is to persuade working-class and middle-class voters to vote for it not out of virtue but out of self-interest. That perhaps is the real lesson of New Town politics.

She was reiterating an all-too-common contempt for other Sixties estates. But John Grindrod, Britain’s foremost chronicler of post-war modernism, saw something very different in that scene: “The town’s formal beauty, lakes and crisp white architecture were enhanced by his use of classical music to make the scenes of sudden violence even more shocking and incongruous.” In the early Seventies, Thamesmead still seemed futuristic, utopian even — “the town of tomorrow”, as it was dubbed when the Greater London Council embarked upon the “Woolwich-Erith Project” in 1966. The practical intention, in the Council’s words, was to “create a reservoir of housing for decanting population from the hard-pressed inner area”. In an era of mass slum clearance, the form of its early implementation was exhilarating.

These two senses of Thamesmead — coexisting interpretations of it as dystopian and utopian — are now in open warfare against each other. The social housing provider Peabody has unveiled a proposal to demolish the Lesnes Estate, an area of almost 600 homes located just to the south of Southmere Lake. However, residents are fighting to save the estate, protesting against both the loss of their own homes and the nature of their proposed replacement. Beyond this David-and-Goliath struggle, though, their conflict is a microcosm of a broader battle in British social housing: one which pits developers’ ambitions to radically redevelop estates against both the interests of those who live in them and the model of communal living they symbolise.

Here, the chief protagonist — they certainly wouldn’t consider themselves the villain of the piece — is Peabody, one of our largest social housing providers and the organisation that was seen to be coming to the rescue of Thamesmead when it took over its management back in 2014. By then, the Thamesmead project was widely judged to have failed. Its population stood at 32,000, around half of the 60,000 originally planned. The new town seemed remote and forlorn; to some, most pejoratively, even a kind of giant “sink estate” inhabited by people housed from waiting lists lacking the choice or opportunity to live somewhere better.

This was a sad betrayal of the visionary planning that had inspired Thamesmead’s early construction. The difficult site prone to flooding was treated as a chance to create water features; Southmere Lake, for example, provided drainage as well as recreation. There was even talk of “being able to travel by punt right across the site along four and a half miles of canals”. The first-floor walkways, “streets in the sky”, and ground-floor garaging of the Lesnes Estate blocks in the first phase South Thamesmead’s development reflected this location too, but also the contemporary planning ideal that cars and people should be separated for what seemed obvious reasons of health and safety.

What still excites, however, is the form of the 1,500 homes built around Southmere Lake in this phase of construction. Four 13-storey towers line the southern edge of the lake adjacent to a (since demolished) ziggurat-style, half-mile long spinal block along Binsey Walk and Coralline Walk, forming a barrier between its eastern shore and the arterial A2401, all constructed in the gleaming white concrete panels of the Balency system of prefabrication. The artists’ impressions and early photographs of Thamesmead would surely turn the head of even the most hardened traditionalist. So, what went wrong?

The conventional explanation for Thameside’s failure is straightforward. The new town was isolated by the abandonment of projected transport connections to Greater London via an extension to the Jubilee Line and a new river crossing. The failure to provide facilities within the scheme was equally damaging: the first residents moved in 1968, the first school in the same year and the health centre two years later — but incredibly the first shops not till 1971. Momentum faltered and decline set in. In any case, later phases pursued a far more conventionally suburban pattern of design and construction though possibly one better fitted to popular tastes.

Suggested reading

Michael Gove's Cambridge folly

By Jonathan Glancey

Thamesmead suffered a confused period of governance after Margaret Thatcher’s abolition of the Greater London Council in 1986 until the promised revival of Peabody’s takeover in 2014. Its “plan for Thamesmead [was] simple — to create an amazing place that people love to work in, to visit, and of course, call home”. It’s hard to take issue with that — but how has it done? The most significant and positive change has been the arrival at Abbey Wood in 2022 of the Elizabeth Line, reducing the time taken to travel to central London to a mere 30 minutes. There’s also serious talk of a DLR connection from Beckton to Thamesmead itself. “This southeast London estate is the buzzing next neighbourhood to be,” Metro gushed in September 2023.

Since one of its oft-stated aims is “the creation of a more mixed community at South Thamesmead”, this must have been music to the ear of Peabody. But, as always, the devil is in the detail and implementation. What does that “more mixed community” look like in the context of plans to demolish the Lesnes Estate? It means the construction of 1,849 homes to replace the 596 to be cleared. It means directly the replacement of 411 social and “affordable” rent homes with 368 of which 307 are to be let at “London Affordable Rent” and just 61 (intended for existing residents who wish to remain) at social rent.

Peabody makes three principal claims to reflect its sensitivity to this issue. Firstly, that the floor space dedicated to affordable housing is greater in the new scheme than in the existing estate. Secondly, in a dubious stretching of the term “affordable”, that it will additionally be providing 279 homes for shared ownership. For all this pleading, the officers of the Greater London Authority concluded that the scheme failed to comply with the London Plan and resulted “in a loss of affordable housing when assessed on a per unit and per habitable room basis”.

Thirdly, and most disingenuously, Peabody suggests that residents have approved the scheme. In March 2020, 70% of residents approved (in a ballot in which two-thirds voted) the following statement: “Are you in favour of Peabody’s proposal to include Lesnes Estate in their regeneration plans for South Thamesmead?” The glossy leaflet advertising the vote urged residents to “Please read” and to “not throw away, your estate, your future”. The words “demolish”, or “demolition”, were conspicuously absent, however.

That this was not by any means a vote for the current proposals is made clear by the protests that have erupted in recent weeks. Many residents, particularly those who have already bought their houses, are up in arms, complaining about the loss of homes in which they have invested so much, and the inadequate compensation offered to enable them to purchase elsewhere. The words of Dolorosa Buhari, 69, summarise their anger: “Most of us here are retired and we have worked our lives to pay and to say ‘this is our home’, and then Peabody come in to tell us we cannot live here and they want to take our property, offering peanuts.”

The protest has also drawn the support of a wide range of housing activists opposed to the form of council -state regeneration in recent years — a familiar tale of “densification” in which developers build significantly more “units” (I’ll use the jargon for once) and yet contrive a net loss of social rent housing; in which profits accrued by the sale of homes for purchase or private rental all too frequently fail to benefit existing residents, let alone the 300,000 households on social housing waiting lists in London and the 170,000 (half of them children) living in temporary accommodation. Peabody will resent the banners proclaiming “Housing for Need not Greed” but they resonate strongly for the many displaced by estate regeneration.

Finally, at a time of climate crisis, should we really demolishing buildings — with all the loss of embodied carbon entailed — that could be effectively retrofitted to meet current environmental standards? Peabody have referred to the “poor quality and dated appearance” of the current estate but residents testify to its comfort and structural soundness.

Suggested reading

The battle for Zone 6's soul

By Fred Skulthorpe

If the climate crisis offers a new challenge, the need to house all our people well remains a persistent one. Thamesmead reflects part of the ambitious attempt to meet that challenge after 1945; one element of a national programme that built on average 126,000 social rent homes annually between 1945 and 1979 and which provided what Conservative prime minister Theresa May called, in a 2018 speech to the National Housing Federation, the “biggest collective leap in living standards in British history”.

At Thamesmead, there were obvious and avoidable planning missteps that undermined its potential, but it has suffered equally from the perfect storm of circumstances that have undermined and marginalised social housing more broadly in recent decades. The statutory right to social housing given in 1977 to those in “priority need” was a well-intentioned and progressive measure. However, in a subsequent era when social housing stock was sharply reduced by Right to Buy (well over 300,000 social rent homes have been lost in London alone) and the near cessation of new-builds, it has led to what sociologists call the “residualisation” of social housing — the perception that it is, sometimes the belief that it should be, housing of last resort.

It has never been that to the millions who have benefitted from the decent, secure and affordable homes it has offered; it is not that now to the many in desperate housing need. We must build a new generation of social rent homes supported by direct public investment — expenditure that by every rational calculation saves far money in the long-term than it costs in the short-term. We need more homes and we need more social housing. The plans and protests at the Lesnes Estate illustrate precisely why the former should not be achieved at the expense of the latter.

Might “Govetown”, an ambitious “new quarter” of Cambridge proposed by Michael Gove at his all-purpose Department of Levelling Up, Housing and Communities, be his very own Fatehpur Sikri? He imagines 150,000 new homes here in the next 20 years of the quality and “gentle density” of Marylebone, Clifton, Toulouse and Utrecht. But Cambridge is already challenged by a lack of water. And the Government by lack of voters.

Quite why Cambridge needs to build at least three times the number of new homes than even its own planners would like to — the City of Cambridge currently only comprises 53,000 — is a hard question to answer. Gove’s aim and that of the Cambridge Delivery Group, a new government team set up to “advise on and drive forward the government’s vision”, is to “supercharge this scientific and economic supercluster”. In other words, as Cambridge’s hi-tech and bio-medical sectors are thriving, let’s jump in and see how much bigger these can be grown, fattening government coffers along the way, rather than investing in towns and cities in real need of “levelling up”.

Numbers aside, a civilised Marylebone-like extension to Cambridge would certainly be an infinitely better proposition than the ever-growing, car-dependent, jobless, shop-less, medical and civic-free sprawl now wrapped around the city like some tectonic boa-constrictor. But quite who would be willing to pay for such high-quality streets and buildings, though, is an unanswered question hanging over the Case for Cambridge.

Perhaps Gove’s authors took a cue from one of Cambridge’s most famous academics: “What we cannot talk about, we must pass over in silence.” This is Wittgenstein, of course, who, working as a consultant in the late Twenties on the design of a new house for his sister in Vienna, had a newly completed ceiling in one room removed and raised by 30mm to give it perfect proportions.

Suggested reading

Welcome to Britain's prefab nightmare

By Wessie du Toit

But when Gove’s similarly rarefied homebuyers move in, can they expect such attention to detail? When, for instance, they turn the elegant taps in their splendid kitchens, will they expect water to flow? It’s not such a silly question. Water is not a given here. There are no local reservoirs. Cambridgeshire water comes from underground chalk aquifers supplying rivers, including the punted Cam, as well as homes, colleges and the recondite labs of “Silicon Fen”. There is a plan for a reservoir north of Chatteris in the Fens, but this is subject to public consultation and unlikely to be completed before 2040. And there is another for a pipeline from Grafham Water, one of England’s largest reservoirs, 25 miles north-west of Cambridge.

If Govetown were a less ambitious proposition in terms of numbers, it might be built and supplied with just enough water. Here, though is the rub. “Our water scarcity issue”, Stephen Kelly, Chief Planner for Cambridge City and South Cambridgeshire District Councils, has told Building magazine, “makes it slightly indulgent to try and meet the country’s housing need in a place that doesn’t have any water”, especially when the Environment Agency plans to cap water abstraction licences in Cambridgeshire in two steps in 2030 and 2040.

But Govetown is flawed most of all because it conflates the possibility of a new “urban quarter” of hi-tech, high-income Cambridge with solving the nation’s need for millions of new homes. If these are to be built properly, rather than rushed up in unsuitable locations, including Cambridge, simply to meet pie-in-the-sky government targets, they need to be part of a genuine policy of “levelling up” towns and cities the length and breadth of the country. New housing must be a life-enhancing part of new and revived industries, supporting opportunities, education, jobs, wealth creation, health and welfare, and integrated transport networks. They must be a part, too, of places with true centres, or hearts, with all this implies in terms of delight and of the only wealth that truly matters: life. And, certainly, they must not just be plonked down, isolated, on fields, meadows, flood plains and former airfields. Think of how in the 1840s the Great Western Railway set up its workshops in rural Wiltshire. With so many skilled jobs on offer, Swindon prospered and grew, with new homes arriving in the wake of its economic ascendancy. In time, Great Western built a system of education and healthcare — a precursor of the NHS — demonstrating along its metalled way how a progressive new town might be formed and prosper.

Suggested reading

Will Britain ever build beautiful?

By Fred Skulthorp

If the Case for Cambridge is a product of both wishful thinking and a squintingly focused political imagination, it is also case study of governmental as much as spatial sprawl. Stephen Kelly, whom we met earlier, leads a shared planning service of 140 or so professional and technical staff managing what is already enormous growth — 61,000 new homes — across the Greater Cambridge area. But Kelly’s team was not invited to join Gove’s Case for Cambridge discussions. Now a new governmental body, the Cambridge Delivery Group headed by Peter Freeman, Chair of Homes England, a national body with a “crucial role in delivering the government’s housing, regeneration and levelling up priorities”, will set up a dedicated “Growth Company for Cambridge as the next step towards a Development Corporation”.

The Growth Company’s remit will be to enable and accelerate developments, to establish a “Cambridge presence and brand… including a website”, to “identify… solutions to complex constraints” and to discuss the future of East-West Rail, that is the Cambridge to Oxford railway line hacked to pieces by Lord Beeching in the Sixties, and along which many thousands of  new homes will surely sprout in years to come as trains return. It is hard not to think that all these fast-breeding official bodies talking 19 to the dozen about “delivery” — once the preserve of milkmen — seem a little remote from the earthy processes of pouring concrete and laying bricks.

My own experience of housing and planning ministers and the expert bodies and quangos they have spawned, from Mrs Thatcher’s governments onwards, is of a “passionate” commitment to architecture and planning that has tended to burn out before you could say Perpendicular Gothic, Milton Keynes or “the next election”. So many ambitious politicians and well-paid experts hanging on to their coat tails, so few buildings. I have been shown plans for a Barcelona-style “Greenwich Village” (all tram-adorned boulevards and New Labour café culture), for Gordon Brown’s Eco-Towns, George Osborne’s Ebbsfleet (a Garden Suburb, of 150,000 people), Nick Clegg’s vague new garden cities, and some administration or another’s Thames Gateway, a Cockney Siberia intended to smother the Essex marshes.

The supply of and demand for new housing have been out of kilter for decades. Where, until the Eighties, there were four key methods by which houses got built — private housebuilders, housing associations, local authorities and New Towns — only the first two, with very mixed results, remain at work today. Gove appears to be harking back to the halcyon days of New Town Corporations. These were certainly effective in terms of getting homes built. Idealistic, too. In September 1948, a year before the Essex New Town got under way, Lewis Silkin, Clement Attlee’s Minister of Town and Country Planning addressed a packed local public meeting. “Basildon”, he proposed, “will become a city which people from all over the world will want to visit.” Really? No, not really. Yet the New Towns were built. Today, especially with high levels of immigration, Britain will need something like five new cities the size of Birmingham even before Govetown is, if ever, completed.

Given the problematic scale of the British housing question, is Govetown just a case of re-arranging deckchairs on a sinking ship? Not quite. Yet the intense focus on Cambridge seems, at best, overwrought, and the advisers as misinformed as the architects and planners of Fatehpur Sikri. And where Akbar rode out and away from his short-lived dream city, surely Gove can only follow.

Rayner maintains she has acted properly, making the right declarations to the right people at the right time. If that proves incorrect, she will have to be sacrificed to maintain Starmer’s claims to be the party of propriety. Even then, Labour will likely take some political flack and its Left will be enraged at her internal exile.

But even if she is vindicated, that will offer little respite. In politics, behaviour is often only incidental to the scale of the scandal. Boris Johnson showed us how, with a fair wind and an almost inhuman rejection of contrition, you can just plough on. William Wragg, despite resigning the Tory whip, has managed to spin being a fool and betraying his colleagues into a call for sympathy. Others have found being “technically innocent” insufficient to avoid public opprobrium: Sir Peter Viggers took the most public fall for the expenses scandal despite the fact the claim for his infamous duck house was never actually approved. Even if Rayner is exonerated, the stench of scandal could be just enough to stick around. Indeed, the issue contains all the ingredients for making political hay: the fairness of taxation, the private lives of politicians, and house prices.

It helps that this scandal is easy to understand. Where an MP has complex financial affairs, it can be impenetrable from the outside. Rayner’s predicament lacks that advantage. Her situation is simple: either she made wrong declarations about her primary residence or not. Even though the sums involved are small (experts have said the tax advantage might be £1,500 at most), the principle matters — and is easier for a voter to understand than, say, Nadhim Zahawi’s tax affairs. In politics, it’s rarely about the money, but the message.

This is all the more important when it comes to housing. The price of property is in some ways our national obsession. Daytime TV encourages people to rubberneck on those who are downsizing, trading up, moving to the country, or the sun and everything in between. News reports anxiously note whether property prices are up or down, while policy debates increasingly focus on the unaffordability of housing. It’s an issue not just of political salience, but of cultural import too.

Thus for Rayner’s critics, there is an edge here. Owning multiple properties is a signifier. Regardless of how you came by them, or even their exact values, that you have to worry about such a thing as the location of your primary residence means something. While we talk about the divide between the have-homes and the have-nots, the multiple property owners feel a class apart from everyone else.

This is where Rayner hits a snag. For decades, rising house prices have been seen as a boon, an increase of wealth to which one is almost naturally entitled. The tax system, which sees your home as tax-exempt, encourages this. To own one home — of any value — is simply good fortune. It’s something you’ve worked for and which the state could never claim a share of. Even inheritance tax treats main homes differently, with generous exemptions that don’t apply to other assets. Yet a second feels speculative, luxurious, and worthy of taxation. It’s absurd, but owning a one-million-pound home feels less rich than having two at a fraction of the value.

More from this author

Keir Starmer and the triumph of the middle class

By Terry Eagleton

This attitude is informed and determined by the housing crisis. A lack of supply has given Britain a uniquely miserly approach to housing. The country has one of the lowest amounts of second homeowners in the Western world. There is no culture of keeping the family home in the old village ticking over, as our Mediterranean cousins might, or the forest-bound holiday homes of Scandinavia. Instead, second-home owners are derided. Either they are exploitative landlords, or wealthy blow-ins taking over countryside villages and seaside towns.

For MPs, second homes are an even bigger vulnerability. Our political culture has never recovered from the expenses scandal. Nearly a decade and a half later, it still rankles with the electorate regardless of changes to the system. Across social media and vox pops, it is the go-to complaint against those we send to Westminster. Second homes are at the apex of that, widely regarded as a wheeze that enriches those who get elected.

The facts are different now. MPs are given a modest allowance, and can no longer pass mortgage interest onto the taxpayer, effectively gaining an appreciating asset for no real cost. For those elected after 2010, maintaining a home in London and the constituency is a burden rather than an opportunity for enrichment. Some have ended up living in canal boats due to the unaffordability of multi-home life. Little of that, however, has cut through.

Instead, the public memory is of those who enjoyed the pre-scandal high life. They were able to “flip” their homes, changing the designation between primary and secondary residences whenever it suited them. This often led to the taxpayers footing the more expensive mortgage before the designation switched back to Capital Gains Tax (CGT) purposes. Some made thousands and banked five-figure tax benefits. No current MP is so lucky, but the public memory lingers. For that, Rayner could hardly have chosen a worse position to be mired in.

And yet, this applies to the Tories too, whose efforts to ensnare Rayner may still come to nothing. Many voters have already switched off. It’s hard to launch aggressive comms moves when your brand is already tarnished — just look at how the many attempts to push “Sir Beer Korma” floundered. If no smoking gun of deceit is found, Rayner will likely ride through the crisis and Sir Keir will avoid having to once again take on his Left flank.

That this is what the Right thinks will land a blow is, however, telling. Partygate was damning for Johnson in a way no other scandal was because it touched a national nerve. Almost everyone had endured lockdown to the best of their ability because they felt it was worth the sacrifice. Flaunting it was an affront to the national conscience. There’s every reason to believe a housing scandal might be the best mirror of this.

Of course, this latest scandal smacks of desperation on behalf of a Conservative Party doing anything to cling on. But sometimes, in politics as in life, the throes of desperation create collateral. The Tories are going down, and they might as well try and take Rayner with them.

Her immediate neighbour has already moved to escape the new estate. In the next house along there is an old man who grew up in this part of northern Bristol, and who remembers when the land now under development, a half-kilometre strip of green space called Bonnington Walk, was graced by roe deer, horses and vegetable allotments. My interviewee would settle for some sparrows. “I used to have all kinds of birds here,” she says. “Now I just get magpies and pigeons.”

There is an enormous irony in this fiasco. Bonnington Walk was meant to be a showcase for a faster, greener and cheaper way of building homes, known as modular construction or “modern methods of construction”. A more familiar term would be prefab. The houses and apartments are factory-built in sections, and then transported to site for assembly. For its champions, modular construction holds the key to addressing Britain’s housing crisis. The government has been promoting prefab as a means to achieve its ever-elusive target of 300,000 new homes annually, and has supported the industry with hundreds of millions of pounds in funding over the last five years.

The nightmare at Bonnington Walk suggests these hopes are still a long way from being realised. In 2021, the masterplan for 185 prefabs won a prize at the Housing Design Awards. The following autumn, the CEO of the Legal & General Modular Homes, the manufacturer behind the project, visited the site to announce “a housebuilding revolution”. Bristol Mayor Marvin Rees hailed the development as evidence that the city could “build affordable housing” while also tackling “the climate emergency”. And yet, last summer, prospective buyers were told that the newly assembled houses would be dismantled again due to faulty foundations. An indignant local man described how a convoy of low-loaders had come to remove the ill-fated homes. “Can you imagine how much that cost? Must be millions!” His take on the whole affair was scathing: “totally incompetent.”

More from this author

British Nimbys are unlikely populists

By Wessie du Toit

To make matters worse, Legal & General announced last spring that it would be winding down its prefab venture, citing a lack of demand. It has reported losses of £235 million since 2016. And this is not an isolated case: two further modular housebuilders, Ilke Homes and Urban Splash, went into administration last year. Both had received millions of pounds of taxpayer support, some of which the government has promised to claw back. Legal & General says it will still deliver the homes at Bonnington Walk, but the woman living next to the site told me an entire row of the prefabs had yet to reappear. Strangely, the building going up just beyond her garden fence was made of old-fashioned concrete bricks.

Do these failures simply reflect teething problems in the prefab industry, or are they indicative of a flawed concept? Some modular homes are being completed in the UK, delivered by firms such as the Wee House Company and Boklok, a Swedish partnership between Ikea and modular specialist Skanska. Another manufacturer, TopHat, will this year open Europe’s biggest prefab factory in Corby, Northamptonshire, with investment from Aviva and Goldman Sachs. But so far, the houses are arriving at a drip — a few hundred here, a few hundred there. There is no sign of the glorious future envisioned by prefab boosters: an abundance of affordable housing, built by robots on production lines, customised for the preferences of every consumer, and ready for move-in a week after ordering.

It’s true that housebuilding is a woefully backward trade. Thanks to factory production, other commodities have seen big improvements in quality, cost and manufacturing efficiency over the past century; just compare a new Tesla with Henry Ford’s Model-T. By contrast, few people think Britain’s new houses are better than its older ones. Visionaries point to the impressive prefabs on offer from German firms such as WeberHaus and HufHaus — stylish, modern, bespoke homes that can be assembled in a matter of days. They contend that factory construction allows for superior quality control and energy efficiency. And they cite the examples of Japan, where prefabs built by companies such as Toyota account for 10-15% of homes completed each year, and Sweden, where up to 85% of new houses make some use of factory construction.

But these comparisons are misleading. The truly elegant prefabs that show the technology at its most advanced are tailor-made luxury products carrying big price tags, not templates to be rolled out at high volume and low cost. Japan’s modular industry has secured a niche thanks to the unusual attitudes to housing in that country: since homes rapidly lose their resale value, they are only designed to last around 25 years, and moving often involves demolishing an existing house and building a new one. Meanwhile, Sweden benefits from enormous timber resources, given that 70% of the country is forest.

More from this author

Britain is turning into South Africa

By Wessie du Toit

The problem in a place like Britain is that prefabs need to be purchased in really large numbers before substantial gains are realised. When factories have order books running into the hundreds of thousands, as carmakers do, the cost of machinery can be spread out, consumers get greater choice, and products can improve rapidly through investment in research and automation. But all these houses need to be assembled somewhere, and so we’re back to the bottlenecks that impede building of all kinds: a restrictive planning system and local opposition to development. At Bonnington Walk, the fact that the houses were prefab did not prevent 124 local residents from writing letters to oppose the development, complaining about the loss of green space and intrusive new power lines. Some of them still believe the land was unfit for building due to shallow groundwater, pointing to large pools and mounds of wet mud on the construction site.

Progress on modular construction has certainly been hampered by the Government’s grossly inept strategy, as detailed by a damning select committee investigation in January. Housing associations have received £5.2 billion in public funding, with the requirement that 25% of the resulting homes be modular. But no figures have been published to show how much of this money has actually been spent on prefab, and thanks to vague definitions, what counts as prefab could actually be traditional construction. The Government has also failed to provide the design specifications needed to lower planning and insurance costs. A £10 million task force on modular housing, set up in 2021, has not met once. The committee concluded that, apart from “undirected and nonstrategic investment of public money”, it had “limited confidence that a coherent plan to encourage the use of [modular construction] is in place”.

Perversely then, the Government is subsidising housing associations to build prefab, but has not created the conditions where prefab can actually become cheaper than traditional homes. This is why some advocates, such as the Southbank University professor James Woudhuysen, insist modular housing can only work as part of a far more ambitious effort at modernisation. In a 2003 book, he claimed that the archaic state of housebuilding is symptomatic of a “culture of fear” pervading contemporary society, which has become too risk-avoidant to pursue genuine innovation. He told me the prefab revolution will only take off when politicians are willing to throw their full weight behind it: “We need design competitions, Type Approvals of winning designs, and large expanses of land deregulated… so that manufacturers of homes are guaranteed enough sales to bring prices right down. Annual output of thousands, even tens of thousands, will not suffice.”

Of course such a project would require popular support, which raises another difficult question for the future of modular homes: do British people actually want to live in them? Factory-built housing still has awkward associations in the public mind, recalling the austere bungalows that housed servicemen after the Second World War, or the systems-built concrete tower blocks of the Sixties. Moreover, since the Industrial Revolution, Brits have generally not wanted their homes to emulate the ephemeral world of mass production and technology, but to provide a counterweight to it. More than any other product, houses are valued for embodying a sense of stability and permanence.

Suggested reading

The socialist case for Trad Architecture

By Aaron Bastani

Of course, prefab is never going to supplant the Cotswolds cottage and Georgian townhouse as expressions of middle-class aspiration, but perhaps it does not need to. Visiting another development in Bristol, I found that Britain’s dire housing situation is making people receptive to new ideas. Along the Airport Road in the south of the city, the Swedish partnership BoKlok has completed 173 “flatpack” homes over the last two years, using wooden frames clad in artificial brick. One construction worker who watched them being assembled was impressed. “That’ll keep you warm and dry — what more do you need?” he said, pointing at a house resembling a scaled-up Monopoly piece. “I’d have one of those.” He thought it was time for a different approach, especially given the low standards of conventional new builds, which he contrasted with the solidity of the council house where he’d grown up in the north of England. “We had pride then,” he said of homes built in the Fifties and Sixties. “We’d just won the war, we’d achieved something, and we had a bit of pride.” As for today, he told me he had “spent the last five years building houses I can’t afford”, including million-pound properties that were falling apart a year after completion.

I heard a similarly positive view from a Boklok resident. Two years after moving in, he was satisfied with his home’s insulation, energy efficiency and below market-average price. All of this suggests there will be demand for prefab if it can simply establish a reputation for reliability and value for money. That means avoiding more disasters like the one at Bonnington Walk, which may, in fairness, reflect the unfamiliarity of the new methods. It also means ensuring that modular homes are built to last, since I struggle to see Britain adopting a Japanese view of housing as a disposable commodity. But even that is largely dependent on cost. If prices come down enough, we could see a split in housing cultures, between bricks-and-mortar traditionalists and modernists who embrace the latest prefab model as they would a new Apple gadget.

For the time being, there remains a strong case for the next government to try prefab on a bigger scale. The housebuilding industry badly needs a shakeup: just this week, the Competition and Markets Authority announced it is opening a probe into eight major housebuilders, looking at concerns that they are sharing information which may affect house prices. It also demanded a “significant intervention” on the poor quality of homes. Can we reach Woudhuysen’s threshold of 100,000 per year? It would be an experiment, yes, but with housing we no longer have the luxury of too much caution.

This story helps to illustrate why discussion of Britain’s housing crisis focuses on two issues above all: the planning system and Nimbyism. The two are closely connected, since it is the planning system that provides Nimbys with their legal tools, and in return Nimbys protect the planning system itself. This planning system is byzantine, unpredictable, expensive and slow. It requires local authorities to assign land ahead of time based on their own assessment of local needs, rather than actual demand, and allows them to reject applications even when they meet its stated requirements. It protects greenbelt areas that, as the name suggests, are corsets specifically designed to prevent the expansion of the most productive urban areas. The Centre for Cities think tank claims that, had British planning been closer to the European norm, it could now have 4.3 million additional houses.

A thick coating of safety and environmental regulations has made the process more unwieldy still. As one architect fulminated in a trade organ last year, “the system has become close to impossible”, since “even a small application for a single replacement house… can require a small army of consultants to address collateral issues such as trees, ecology, landscape, energy use, highways, heritage, drainage, surface water disposal, flood risk, light spillage, air quality, acoustics, and contamination”. It took him 27 months to get a single house approved. Each agency and requirement seems justifiable by itself, but in combination they form a bureaucratic thicket that is showing increasingly Soviet characteristics. Juliet Samuel recently reported that enterprising councillors have found ways of “selling inside information on how the planning system works to those who will pay to know”.

To make matters worse, local government cuts have left planning departments severely understaffed. Across 17 local authorities, average annual funding has fallen by 44% since 2010, while the average number of employees has more than halved. And it isn’t just house building that is affected; it is, if anything, even more difficult to build the infrastructure that houses need. National Grid’s Ben Wilson has claimed that, largely thanks to the planning process, it can take more than 10 years to install an electricity transmission line. Earlier this month, The Times reported on a railway footbridge in Berkshire that has taken longer to build than the Empire State building.

Suggested reading

How landlords became monsters

By Nicholas Harris

This is all deeply humiliating for the Conservative Party. The supposed party of home ownership, individual opportunity and economic growth cannot supply the one basic commodity that would most facilitate all these goals, even as it has created still more demand by overseeing historically unprecedented levels of immigration. Not only has the government failed to once meet its target of building 300,000 houses annually, it cannot even find projects on which to use the allocated funds. It recently emerged that more than two-thirds of a £4.2 billion Housing Infrastructure Fund, created in 2017, is still unspent. And in September, the Home Builders Federation released an analysis claiming that planning permissions for new homes had fallen to their lowest level since it started collecting data in 2006.

A succession of efforts to reform planning, each less ambitious than the last, have all foundered on the opposition of Tory MPs whose voters don’t want to surrender their veto on local projects. Unsurprisingly, Labour leader Keir Starmer has spotted an opportunity in all of this. In his October conference speech, he held up the “pebble-dashed semi” of his own childhood as a symbol of the “dream of home ownership”, and vowed to build 1.5 million new houses by “removing the blockages” in the planning system.

Yet this political fixation on building more homes has obscured the true scope and nature of the housing crisis. Britain has more problems with housing than just the shortage of it; there is also the matter of what kind of homes people must settle for. And the politics of house building is not just a case of bypassing local activists armed with data on nutrient levels and bat populations. There are fundamental questions of trust in play, and deep tensions between the local and the national. If left to fester, these seemingly secondary issues will ensure that any revival of house building in the UK is only fleeting.

To put it bluntly, Britain cannot actually build decent houses at scale. Its construction industry is in a sorry state, with its contractors notorious for poor workmanship and unreliability, and its new builds famously shoddy. The Camden development where, five years after completion, apartments sold for the best part of £1 million are so riddled with flaws as to be “effectively worthless” is only one example of a much wider problem. The poor standards of volume housebuilders have given rise to an industry of snaggers, hired by nervous homeowners to find defects in newly finished homes. All the while, the construction workforce is shrinking — smaller now than in 2007, and yet to recover its pre-Covid level — and getting older, with a third of hours worked by people over the age of 50. Those young people who do enter the trade are not gaining adequate skills.

Suggested reading

British renters are losers

By Joel Golby

In 2016, Mark Farmer published a damning review of the construction industry. He observed that big housebuilding firms exploit the smaller subcontractors that rely on them for work, denying them capital to invest in training and greater productivity. A fragmented system also allows operators to dodge responsibility for projects, leading to “a general acceptance of failure and underperformance”. Farmer warned that “if we do not address in short order how the construction industry operates and delivers, we will see a long-term and inexorable decline in its fortunes”. Almost a decade later, the departure of skilled EU workers has only made the situation worse.

Another problem, as detailed by Oliver Wainwright, is that a handful of investment firms exercise outsized influence over major housebuilders, who in turn capture the lion’s share of big contracts. The profits of these companies have been booming since the Great Financial Crisis, even as standards deteriorate. The two trends are linked, as cutting costs on materials and skilled labour protects returns for shareholders even in a downturn. Altogether, the construction industry reflects the flaws that have plagued the British economy more generally in recent decades: underinvestment, low productivity, financialisation, and a culture that affords low status to some of its most important practical work.

The upshot is that an overhaul of the construction industry, focusing on recruitment and training in particular, should be seen as integral to addressing the housing crisis. According to a recent report by the Chartered Institute of Building, the public is already suspicious of the quality and character of new builds. If planning reform results in hundreds of thousands of substandard homes that no one wants to live in, it will only deepen the resistance to building in the medium term.

Mistrust has already seeped into the politics of housebuilding. The term Nimby is unhelpful insofar as it encourages us to imagine that the country is being held ransom by small, well-organised groups of pathologically selfish people. But the Chesham and Amersham by-election in June 2021, which effectively killed the Conservatives’ appetite for genuine planning reform, saw the Liberal Democrats overturn a 16,000 majority in part by playing to fears that locals would be powerless to stop new developments. Controversial building proposals were also a factor in numerous local election battles in May 2023, as they had been the previous year. In other words, Nimbyism is a more popular cause than we give it credit for.

Suggested reading

How the Tories lost their way

By James Vitali

Clearly not everyone is a fan. For obvious reasons, the two-thirds of the population who own their homes — who tend to be older and wealthier — are more likely to oppose building than the remainder who do not. The same goes for those living in rural areas. And these groups are more likely to be Conservative voters, which means that the politics of housebuilding should be somewhat easier for Labour. But not by much. Only one fifth of households in Labour’s target constituencies are privately rented, according to the Financial Times, while two-thirds are owner-occupied. This means that, while the party’s current voters are more friendly to building new homes, the same is not true of those they need to win over.

There is no avoiding the fact that, on a small and crowded island, it is quite difficult to find places to build significant numbers of houses that won’t anger an equally significant number of people. So the real question is not how can the malign influence of Nimbys be circumvented, but how can the anxieties of local communities in general be addressed. The problem is that policy-minded people tend to see the next step in purely transactional terms. Ideas such as community land auctions and street votes, which give existing residents the opportunity to enrich themselves by allowing more development, assume that misgivings are, if not purely financial, then remediable by financial means.

Of course, material considerations do matter. More houses mean more traffic, more demand on overstretched local services, and quite possibly the devaluation of the property you were planning to pass on to your children. But it also matters how people understand their local existence in relation to the country as a whole; it matters to what extent they feel responsible for ensuring there are homes for other people’s children. If they feel part of a wider society where they have a voice and whose authorities they regard as competent and accountable, they will be less inclined to see development as something imposed on them from the outside.

Suggested reading

Who will win the gentrification wars?

By Chris Clarke

What we have in Britain today is essentially the opposite: a country whose direction most people feel they have no control over, with a prevailing mood of dysfunction and competition for scarce resources. These circumstances encourage a kind of siege mentality. A local area which is moderately pleasant seems that much more precious, change seems more risky, and local powers become all the more significant since this is the only place where people can actually exert any influence.

In other words, vibes matter, and I don’t think the housing issue can be disentangled from the ambient sense of exasperation induced by soaring NHS waiting lists, crumbling schools, paralysed railways, financial mismanagement and broken promises on immigration. When chaos prevails, is it any wonder the politics of the local housing association becomes highly attractive? Is it not even plausible that, for some people at least, resistance to development is a political act intended to assert the sovereignty of the local against the national? We should understand Nimbyism not purely in terms of material self-interest, but as a very British form of populism — and one that will only grow if it isn’t handled with care.

In fact, the economy has not looked truly healthy for years and forward-looking indicators imply that a recession is almost certainly in the pipeline in the next six to 18 months. And one of the key reasons that the Tory Party has already haemorrhaged support is due to the poor condition of the post-Covid economy, specifically with respect to the high rate of inflation. This has gradually made itself manifest in poll numbers. According to YouGov, at the beginning of 2021, still in the midst of the Covid pandemic, the most pressing issue in the country was “Health”. And at this time, and for months after, the Tories were still ahead in the general election polls (though Labour were biting at their heels).

As 2021 progressed, the initial burst of inflation caused by the lockdown’s impact on supply chains rippled through the economy. By the start of last year, with inflation running at about 6%, economic matters had overtaken health in YouGov’s polling. Then on 24 February 2022, another inflationary shock hit the world economy: the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It was not primarily the invasion itself that caused the shock, but rather the counter-sanctions undertaken in response, with the European energy supply in particular drying up. In October 2022, with inflation in Britain peaking at around 11% and a population-wide cost-of-living crisis broadly diagnosed by commentators, economic matters dwarfed any other issue. Labour stood at over 50% in some polls.

Which is another way of saying that over the last two years, the Tory Party have lost their credibility on the economy. They have ruled over an inflationary mess. But after years of shedding their veneer of competence, it actually looks as though the worst is still to come. Even though Britain has a serious cost-of-living crisis, most people who want work can find it. Until recently, the unemployment rate has been historically low — in 2022 it touched 3.5%, a record that had not been seen in over 40 years. But this is beginning to change. Unemployment has been ticking up since April of this year, with recent reports suggesting that it is set to increase even further. The media has been largely silent about this issue, but economists have been paying attention. After all, the Bank of England has been aggressively increasing interest rates since the beginning of 2022, raising them from almost 0% to 5.25%. Few economists would think that these sorts of hikes can be achieved without generating a recession.

The British economy is particularly prone to higher interest rates, most glaringly through its overinflated and economically axial housing market. At its previous peak in 2007, before housing crashed worldwide, the average house in England was worth around 7.15x the average salary. Fifteen years later, this has risen to 8.28x — a record high. And though our housing debate is dominated by questions of supply — the intractable Yimby v Nimby contestation — there is every reason to think that the current inflation in house prices is another speculative mania of the sort we saw collapse in 2008.

Suggested reading

Rishi Sunak's annus horribilis

By Tom McTague

It is already telling that the housing market has proven completely unable to stomach higher interest rates. House prices have been falling every month since January of this year and in the third quarter of 2023 the average house price was down nearly 5% from its peak. While this may not seem like much, declines in house prices of this nature this rarely bottom out quickly and usually signal further falls. The pressure in this regard can be seen in the falling number of mortgage approvals in Britain, a contraction which dates back to 2020. Mortgage approvals went into steep decline after August 2022 as the Bank of England interest rate rose to just under 2%; it was shortly after this that house prices themselves began to decline.

And this is leading to a consequent decline in construction as firms pull out of new projects, no longer confident of a return on their investments. Private housing construction output in August was down 7.1% since the start of the year, and 15.9% from its peak in May 2022. The labour market is already beginning to mirror this trend. Between July and September, vacancies in the real estate sector fell 29.6% from the previous quarter. It is very likely that — for the second time this century — the Great British housing bubble has burst. And, just as in 2008, it is taking the rest of the economy with it. A deep recession is now very probable.

How this recession interacts with politics is another question. As we have seen, the Conservative Party have already lost their credibility on the economy. If they go into an election with the economy in recession and the unemployment rate rising, they will get eviscerated. A few months ago, there was chatter within the party that maybe they should hold out, see if the Bank of England could get inflation under control, and hope that the economy improves. That position is no longer tenable. Inflation may be coming down, but the economic situation is spiralling beyond the control of central banks, and if the Tory strategists think that the public dislike inflation, just wait until they find out how much they abominate a recession and rising unemployment.

Political strategists are rightly sceptical of those wielding crystal balls. For every accurate forecast, there are a handful of inaccurate ones. Yet all the statistics currently show that the British economy is in a rapid state of decline. For this reason, the Tories might think of what they are facing as what investors refer to as an “asymmetric bet”. This is a gamble in which the loss incurred from losing is far greater than the gain incurred from winning. It is as if two people gamble on a coin toss, but while one gets £1 if he wins the other gets £100 if he wins.

The asymmetric bet the Tories are currently facing is roughly as follows. If they continue sitting on their hands, hoping that the electoral gods will smile favourably on them, the economy may fall into recession. If this happens, the party will lose vastly more seats than they would lose if an election were called today. On the other hand, if the economy stabilises or even improves slightly, people will barely notice. Skyrocketing growth and a booming housing market is simply not on the cards and anyone who tells you otherwise is trading in snake oil.

More from this author

Rishi Sunak's war on the young

By Philip Pilkington

On the other side of the bet is Labour. The polling seems to suggest that most people are willing to give Labour a punt in the hope that they can improve the economic situation. The policies that Labour are putting forward that are popular, especially with their base, all involve spending lots of money. This means that if Labour are handed the reins and soon thereafter the economy falls into recession, support for the party will dry up. As the recession hits government tax revenues, Labour will find themselves encircled by the same furious markets that brought down the Truss government. They will be forced impose austerity, and support for the party will likely collapse within 12-18 months.

The statistics do not lie. Recession in the coming months seems very likely, if not almost certain. And its arrival will provide a reminder of how economics undergirds the daily rigamarole of politics. The most important political event of the 21st century so far remains the Great Recession, triggering the populist uprisings and neoliberal collapse that has defined our recent history. The Conservatives and Labour can attempt to read the runes of the British financial system, trying to divine economic growth and surf its waves. But the economy does not serve to buttress political dignity — and whichever party winds up in power will soon have to reckon with the consequences.

In a local competition organised by the developers, schoolchildren presented contending utopias: green arches adorned with solar panels; a tram to ferry residents between parks and leisure centres. It got the adults talking, too. The town, it was proposed, would have its own community-based energy company. This would be an “innovation market town”, capable of sustaining local employment in an eco-idyll of tree-lined cycle lanes and allotments, a sustainable suburbia for 21st-century England.

Nearly 15 years on, the dream is dead. Visit Northstowe today and you are greeted by a Portakabin community centre that, as one local suggests, looks like a “pop-up STI clinic”. Bored children on bikes circle aimlessly, and a steady stream of cars forms an exodus from the leaden townscape of roofs and sky. There is, as one terminally bored 14-year-old tells me, “absolutely nothing to do”. No shops. No leisure centre. No green arches or trams. And certainly nothing that would give this place a collective hearth: a high street, town hall or a pub.

At the entrance to the town, I meet Richard of nearby Cambourne, who takes daily walks through Britain’s newest town to “try and work out what it all means”. Surveying the sprawl of identikit new-builds that stretch into the distance, he pronounces: “I have come to realise that this a soulless place built for a new generation of soulless people.”

Were it not for Michael Gove’s own fit of master-planning ambition, the absent soul of Northstowe might have gone further unexamined. Cambridge 2040 was announced at the end of July, a pipe dream of Scrutonian aesthetics and early 20th-century Californian boosterism. Gove envisaged an annexe of up to 250,000 “beautiful” houses around the nation’s most valuable innovation real estate.

Tied up in this lofty ambition is an urgent necessity. Cambridge is the dusted jewel in Global Britain’s future economic crown, its fastest-growing region held back from becoming a powerhouse by a shortage of lab space and housing. Yet Northstowe, a half-built eco-modernist outpost on the periphery of this vision, offers a foreshadowing of future problems for developing this area: water shortage, unsold housing, a failure to build at the pace and scale desired. Two decades on and Britain cannot even give birth to a modest new town, let alone a Victoriana Silicon Valley in the East Anglian Fens.

More from this author

Westminster has failed Selby

By Fred Skulthorp

Housing will be one of the biggest issues of the 2024 election, a protracted British crisis now as old as the days when Brown first dreamt of Northstowe. And the proposed solutions are nearly as old. Building “beautiful” houses has been discussed in Tory circles for years, most prominently with 2019’s Building Better, Building Beautiful Commission, which mouthed the rhetoric of a “conservative” built environment that has wafted around the party’s attendant think tanks for years. But talk aside, its achievements were minimal. And meanwhile, a donor-driven relationship with property developers (in 2021, a fifth of Tory donations came from the sector) has kept them in the driving seat, carpeting England with unimaginative, and all too often poorly built homes at a rate of about 200,000 a year. The few exceptions to the rule, such as the King’s Poundbury, have already become unaffordable, by virtue of their marked difference. Northstowe therefore stands as a monument to the new-build Britain we’re left with: a vision unfulfilled, undesirable, unloved.

Yet the facts of supply and demand are intractable. Whoever wins the next election will have to build, both to accommodate the record numbers living with their parents and new arrivals to the country over the coming decades (new immigrants are expected to form 57% of new households in the next 20 years). Keir Starmer has not ruled out building on the Green Belt, and has unveiled plans to allow local authorities to buy land cheaply for development to “tilt the balance of power” away from landowners. Sunak, meanwhile, has already been urged to consider a generation of new towns in the upcoming Tory manifesto. New developments on the scale of Northstowe therefore seem inevitable. But the question remains of what we build.

You would hope, then, that Northstowe would be a compulsory stop on the 2024 election circus. A warning for new-build Britain, the poorly conceived and ill-executed end product of what a housing arms race might plaster across England. Does either party have the political will or skill to stop this happening?

Something of an answer lies in the last time the country was forced to build at scale. The post-war building boom was unprecedented in Europe, creating 22 new towns that became home to 2.7 million people. Northstowe’s predecessor, Milton Keynes, now feels like an infrastructural marvel from a more confident age, the post-war equivalent of the Victorians’ Crystal Palace. It was conceived in 1967, progressing (unlike Northstowe) through the austerity of the Seventies to offer its new population an idiosyncratically English hodgepodge of the garden city movement and the car-friendly suburban utopias of Fifties America. Its legacy has always attracted a seam of snobbery: a “bland kitsch, Thatcherite reality”, wrote the architecture critic Owen Hatherley, “the non-place it was planned to be”. Despite this, Milton Keynes grew and grew, and has become one of Britain’s most economically successful cities. Now, by way of grim irony in 2023, both the scale of its conception and the pace of its execution seem a much needed luxury.

No surprise, then, that the Milton Keynes “development corporation” model has been invoked by both parties in their attempts to confront housing, the Tories in 2018 and Labour earlier this year. But such a model demands a vision beyond mere house numbers. And this is what haunts Northstowe. Unlike Milton Keynes, the fact that it is “driven by developers”, as one councillor told me, has left it open to the vagaries of Britain’s long-term economic malaise. The pandemic has been widely blamed by developers for slow operation, but this didn’t prevent Savills gushing in November 2021 that the site of a town centre represented a “significant milestone”. But two years on and there is still nothing that might offer a sense of place or identity. A tangle of contracts and obligations compels developers to wait for houses to sell before delivering on promised infrastructure and facilities in stages (dependent itself on “market conditions”). Let them come, then build it, is the future of Northstowe.

Amid the Yimby call for housing at any cost, this model poses a warning, accentuated by the proximity and symbolic contrast between Cambridge and Northstowe. The former, a city trying to escape stagnant Britain via an Anglo-futurist mix of historical prestige, accelerated building and scientific innovation. The other: already more of a relic than Cambridge’s honey-gothic landmarks, tethered both spiritually and contractually to a decade of economic stagnation and political amnesia. A visionary piece of planning that has turned into a housing estate without a pulse or purpose.

Suggested reading

In defence of Little England

By Tom McTague

There are faint idols to its old conception of an “eco-town” in its fledgling trees, sparse allotments and bike lanes to nowhere. But half-built sustainable suburbia places its residents, and the surrounding area, in new-build purgatory. House prices still demand around £150,000 above the national average, deterring the mass influx of future arrivals needed to complete the town in haste. While its present residents wait, the lack of infrastructure has pushed them into nearby communities, enraging locals and only mobilising them against future developments around Cambridge. To solve the housing crisis, we don’t just need more houses, but new places where people want to live.

I get lost as I try to leave, and spend an hour frustratedly wandering around this surreal array of building sites and newly christened homes. “What god cannot do does not exist,” reads a sticker plastered on one front door. Electric cars buzz by like bloated, dull insects. Here is Britain’s most recent lunge into the decade of change and construction ahead: and it’s a purgatory between the built and unbuilt, the desired and the unsatisfied. Northstowe has inadvertently been burdened with all the disappointment of a country that has failed to plan for its future. But it will endure as a symbol, a visual reminder of our politics’s failure to execute any sort of aesthetic or functional vision for Britain.

The by-election in Selby and Ainsty, 50 miles south of Sunak’s estate, is part of the reason why. Mention it to the attendees and they grimace. On Thursday, Labour will have a chance to overturn a 20,000 majority and lay the first meaningful stone in the path to a Tory electoral apocalypse. Two weeks ago, the race was compared to a coin toss. But since then, a great pilgrimage of shadow ministers and Labour activists has flooded the Yorkshire town, hoping to pull off the second-largest swing to Labour in electoral history. This would be the sort of decisive victory not seen in Selby since the days of the English Civil War, when a Royalist rout spelled the end of King Charles I’s rule in the North. The bookies now have them as favourites to win.

Selby, however, as both Labour and Conservative canvassers confess, is a “weird constituency”. It takes in pockets of poverty and comfortable Country Life villages. It is an area of contrasts and contradictions: a beautiful Norman Abbey within a stone’s throw of a high street garlanded with vape shops; a commuter belt to Leeds and York in the former industrial heartland once home to the most productive coal mine in Europe. A place where three-quarters of homes are owner-occupied, but the housing shortage and mortgage-rate crisis now make home ownership both untenable and undesirable. A place where you can find all of England’s problems and convince no one of their solutions.

For both parties, this is not just a by-election, but a chance to war game electoral machines for 2024. Labour see it as a zone of reckoning for a country fed up with Tory rule, and a chance to lay the ghost of Jeremy Corbyn to rest after their vote dropped here by 9.6% in 2019. The local Tory wisdom — and ready defence — is that if they lose the seat, it will be because their vote stays at home. But outside of the two major parties, Selby is also a place where we can observe, in the form of political rebels and strays, the two unresolved forces of British electoral politics: the disbelief in the power of politics to change things, and a hatred of Westminster.

Nothing sums up the latter like the circumstances which led to the by-election. The stroppy resignation of Nigel Adams — a Johnson lackey who departed after failing to get a peerage — “has pissed everyone off”, as one Tory put it. The constituents aren’t impressed either. “Good riddance, you shocking grifter,” read one of the kinder comments on a farewell post. The legacy of Adams, further tainted by his temporal association with the other more sleaze-orientated by-elections, has only contributed to a broad cynicism towards Westminster. Adams himself is now regarded as a political morality tale in the pubs of Selby: the local lad who went to London and got lost in its web in his pursuit of patronage.

More from this author

Levelling up died in Teesside

By Fred Skulthorp

The Conservative candidate, lawyer and councillor Claire Holmes, seems eager to bridge that gap by talking up her “local connections”. But she already appears to have misread the mood of the constituency on housing.  There’s only so much she can say about the mortgage woes other than repeating the promise to cut inflation, but her pledge to protect “green spaces from inappropriate housing” was regarded as tone deaf in a constituency that can no longer rely on Nimbyism to form a winning coalition of voters. It was this comment that spurred a number of younger local Tories to abandon her campaign — “the sort of lazy politics that will stop anyone under 50 from voting for us”, as one senior councillor put it.

By contrast, Labour has seized upon housing in their campaign. Speaking in the Commons last week, Keir Starmer pointedly raised the case of a police officer from Selby forced to sell his home due to rising mortgage costs. And mortgage deals are coming to an end across the area as repayments rise by up to £400 a month. At the age of 25, the Labour candidate Keir Mather might seem perfectly positioned to court young voters stuck in the area and unable to get on the housing ladder. But — Oxford to public-affairs consultant via the office of Wes Streeting — he delivers his campaign video with the robotic flair of a sixth-former running for headboy. When I walk into his campaign office in the centre of the high street, full of students and the odd flat-capped local, Mather is whisked away into a backroom the moment I mention the word “interview”. It’s not hard to understand why. He is most effective when saying nothing and grinning weakly in front of a giant portable screen that reads: Conservative Mortgage Bombshell.

Both candidates are accurate personifications of their parties: the Tories’ an unimaginative clone; Labour’s an anodyne silhouette. Where they are concerned, the belief that “nothing will change” persists. But then there’s the array of political eccentrics who always come out of the woodwork for a by-election. Nick Palmer is one archetypal centrist dad who has gone rogue in the terraced suburbs of Selby. He is the closest thing Yorkshire may ever get to Michael Douglas’s character in Falling Down. Striding from a delayed train into Selby, the independent candidate looks and speaks like he’s just had to sit through an entire series of Question Time. Armed with a clipboard with his LinkedIn handle scrawled in black Sharpie, Nick preaches a message of democratic breakdown and a system of “shit processes” from London, carried out by people “scared to have a conversation with people who’ll tell them to piss off”.

He nonetheless emerges as a canny soothsayer for the town’s misery. In a busy cafe near the station, he finds common ground with the clientele sipping cappuccinos as they gleefully watch a set of passing canvassers getting drenched in the rain. A clear “90% of the people who come in here won’t vote”, the cafe owner tells us. “Modern politicians have no power or control over the real decisions,” adds her husband. “So what’s the point?” 

One of the more coherent protest votes against Westminster comes from a former Conservative councillor now standing to establish a Yorkshire Parliament: Mike Jordan of the Yorkshire Party. Does he have anything more profound to say? “He’s more likely to say something profoundly fucking stupid,” a Tory member retorts. Behind this sentiment, however, is a quiet frustration. Jordan will be lucky to come fourth, but he represents a disgruntled Tory demographic. In a narrow race, the regionalist-populist energy he can attract and possibly harness is a potent minority view — one that Labour and the Tories cannot ignore.

The rosy-faced Yorkshireman tells me about his adventures in the Tory heartlands to the north of the constituency to garner interest in his vision for Yorkshire. “I spoke to one lady,” he tells me with relish, “who says this is the first time in 50 years she won’t vote Tory. She’s going to vote for me and Yorkshire instead.” When he took to the stage of the hustings, it took him only 30 seconds to deliver his message: “Voting for me is a chance to send a message to Westminster that Yorkshire needs to be thought about — and what are you gonna do about that, cock?” 

Suggested reading

Will the hard Left ever leave campus?

By Nicholas Harris

It’s a straightforward message delivered in straightforward Yorkshire, but tellingly it’s being redeployed by both parties as a means to cut through the apathy. “No one on the doorstep is interested in what’s happening in Westminster,” says former policeman now Tory councillor Tim Grogan, fresh from campaigning in the key battlegrounds to the south of Selby. And taking power and money away from Westminster is about the only thing the Conservative Party has left to talk about up here, a localist stance that puts them in a strange alliance with Jordan. A new devolution deal has just been signed that will bring an elected Metro Mayor to York and North Yorkshire, in charge of £540 million in grants. But the push for more local power feels symbolic. It can’t stymie the disgruntled energy that drove Brexit — and which is now starting to turn its gaze towards Westminster in another effort to “take back control”.

We’re far from the Red Wall, but 60% of people here voted Leave. They feel the democratic deficit all too keenly. And nationally, Labour has tried to address this discontent, too, with their Gordon Brown-drafted “New Britain” constitution that promises a “radical devolution of power”, to “unleash the potential that exists everywhere in this country”. It is seen as one of the key components of Starmer’s reforming project, should he seize power. And much of the document reads like a Yorkshire Party rant condensed into polished policy prose. The irony with this, of course, is that this is likely to create more, not less, of the politics and politicians that everyone in Selby and Ainsty seems to hate.

Regionalism has frequently, and frequently lazily, been proffered to restore the discontented provinces to political equanimity. But devolution was overwhelmingly rejected by the North East in 2004; it’s hard to see that a Yorkshire “parliament” of Mike Jordans would satisfy Selby. One woman looks appalled when I suggest it. “The idea of some of the local politicians getting their hands on more power around here,” she says, standing outside Selby Abbey, “is, quite frankly, terrifying.” Whatever happens on Thursday, this mood is here to stay — a disquiet that all these candidates want to exploit, and none can bear to resolve.

The release of 2021 census numbers helps to explain why, for millennials in our core cities, the “G” word has become so politically charged. One recent data-blog showed the steeply rising number of residents in professional jobs across London and Manchester. The changes will have been plain to see if you have lived in these places over the past decade, with estate agents popping up on formerly run-down high streets and artisan bakeries appearing in railway arches.

Long-term residents and those on the public-sector frontline often see the shift as a mixed blessing at best. But anxieties are most acute, in my experience, among those doing the gentrifying. The term, after all, describes a moneyed caste pushing out “authentic” locals. Ruth Glass, the formidable Marxist sociologist who coined contemporary usage of the word, described the phenomenon as “displacement”. And many of those doing the displacing — whose politics tend also to be Left-leaning — feel a deep unease about their role.

This guilt is sometimes absorbed internally, but on other occasions it’s deflected elsewhere — at everyone from oligarchs and developers to hipsters and yummy mummies. At the real gentrifiers. And this imagined class is easily illustrated, such as through the Nine Elms Sky Pool, the Dalston Cereal Cafe and the Deptford Job Centre bar. These developments represent the most decadent aspects of modern urban renewal, and encourage people to conclude that it’s something only ever done by other people. (Curiously, the above feelings rarely dampen the appetite for craft beer and sourdough, or spur people to become regulars at the nearest flat-roofed pub. But that’s a debate for another day.)

I am a gentrifier myself. That is: I’m a former young professional who moved to London for work in the early 2010s. I haven’t felt especially flush as I’ve bumped around London’s private rental market over the past decade. But I guess, without realising it, I have been able to pay higher rents than previous waves of residents in the same areas. In this sense, I am “part of the problem”. But I increasingly wonder if this mood of penitence is helpful. This isn’t to downplay the absurdities of the London housing market. Or to deny that such absurdities bring with them an often-ugly social reality, with visible affluence a stone’s throw from homelessness. It’s more that the way gentrification is discussed, as an urban cancer wantonly infecting hearty postcodes, seems very narrow.

I first questioned my attitude to the phenomenon a few years ago, when I heard a parliamentary candidate in an economically struggling town mention the possibilities of gentrification. As the only Londoner in the room, I looked around incredulously, expecting people to be on their feet in anger. Yet the audience gazed back with interest. The candidate did not talk of it as a catch-all solution, and no one broke into spontaneous applause either. But I was struck by the fact that, in an area that had seen its high streets boarded up and its economy ravaged after the 2008 crash, gentrification was not the dirty word it had become in London.

More from this author

Why do we pretend to be working-class?

By Chris Clarke

To extend this thought, let’s revive the reportedly abandoned slogan, “levelling up”. The need to rebalance the national economy is acknowledged, in principle, by Left as well as Right. And addressing regional inequality will require, most agree, the attraction of skilled sectors to the places which currently have the fewest opportunities. Hence, the “left behind” towns which successfully level up will be those who persuade their younger populations that they don’t need to move to the nearest metropolis to advance their prospects. If they manage this, then they’ll start to attract skilled workers from elsewhere, too. House prices will rise, as the demand to live in the town increases. And cultural and commercial changes will follow, to cater for the new resident base. The area will begin to gentrify, in other words, once it “levels up”.

Writing in 2017, Dave Hill, a critic of the anti-gentrification zeitgeist, pointed out that ending gentrification in London is not difficult: “Boroughs could stop collecting rubbish…and let packs of dangerous dogs roam public parks, snarling, biting and defecating freely on the grass,” he wrote. “Southwark could close Borough Market. Lambeth could rip out Windrush Square. Sadiq Khan could…launch a campaign called London Is Closed. [This] would soon limit the capital’s attractions, deter foreign investment and eventually bring its population down.” Hill’s argument, acidly put, is that gentrification is a problem of success. Londoners should be careful what they wish for. His contention is underscored by a recent MRP poll, which found that only 11 of the UK’s 367 council areas say their communities have improved in recent years. Ten of these are in — you guessed it — Inner London. The remaining one is Manchester City Council.

At what cost, some might ask? How many people have been pushed out to achieve these polling results? Indeed, even if Hill is right and regeneration is a net positive, you could argue that central London has, in the past 20 years, become a victim of how sought after it is, experiencing “gentrification overkill”. In the late 20th century, boroughs such as Lambeth or Brent benefited from an influx of additional social capital and spending power; from groups who’d once have been too scared or snobbish to live in inner-city areas that had become hollowed out. But, by the 2010s, this had reached a tipping point. If we compare 2011 and 2021 census data for non-UK born populations, we find that much of Inner London is bucking both the national trend and its own history. Boroughs are either getting less diverse or flatlining, with newer waves of migrants settling in parts of the UK where housing is affordable. For Londoners who pride themselves on their city’s multiculturalism, this will be worrying.

Another piece in the puzzle is social class. Gentrification reflects the unromantic fact that more and more Brits do desk jobs. If our cities are gentrifying then that’s partly because our whole economy is, and has been for decades. The true history of the capital is like that of a room repeatedly wallpapered, as its inhabitants move “up” in the world. The road names in the Square Mile — Poultry, Cheapside, Milk Street — reveal a gentrification process going back centuries. And, like the increasing tendency to renounce middle-class identities, the anxiety about gentrification comes from changing material circumstances. The very term “gentrification” insinuates membership of a new nobility, of modern-day squires and duchesses. Few, in a country which aspires to meritocracy, welcome this association. But the reality, however squeamish some feel about it, is that a larger and larger proportion of the population do non-manual roles — and that these people need to live somewhere.

Suggested reading

Poundbury and the English apocalypse

By Fred Skulthorp

The rising number of middle-class jobs does become an issue if it’s happening faster in some places than others. And this, according to the data-blog cited at the start, is in fact the case. While the blog found that “the professionalisation pattern is clearly visible [beyond] big cities like London”, it also revealed that different areas are professionalising at different speeds. Of the 30 local authorities becoming middle-class quickest, for example, 13 were in Greater London or Greater Manchester. The rest were mostly commuter towns around the capital, or university cities such as Cambridge, Bristol, Warwick and Exeter.

The issue, then, if we’re talking about the increasing number of white-collar jobs, is not necessarily gentrification itself but the uneven spread of gentrification. You could argue — and perhaps there’s an undergraduate essay question to be set on this topic — that the goal of policy-makers should simply be that every UK classroom contains a representative economic and demographic cross-section of the population. If that’s not happening, then governments must intervene.

Does the above question matter, to anyone except gentrifiers already beating themselves up? The debate, I’d say, has wider implications. For one thing, it reveals the extent of geographic polarisation. Very different conversations are happening in different parts of Britain. One analysis I conducted in 2021 looked at parliamentary seats according to various deprivation metrics. The 100 English seats with the highest housing deprivation were almost exclusively in London. The 100 seats with the highest employment deprivation were, in most cases, a long way from big cities. Just eight seats featured on both lists (most of them, interestingly, in Birmingham). To put it bluntly, deprivation in half of the UK means you can’t get a decent house, and deprivation in the other half means you can’t get a decent job.

Another interesting element was party politics. Seats with high housing deprivation tended to swing towards Labour between 2010 and 2019. Constituencies with the fewest barriers to housing shifted Tory — including places which are deprived according to most other metrics. And a recent study by Ben Ansell showed a more specific consequence of this. It estimated, at constituency level, support for house-building — a topic that’s become especially charged over the past year. Enthusiasm was greatest in Labour-held city seats with high housing deprivation: places with transient communities, a precarious rental market, visible street homelessness, high internal inequality and pressure on services thanks to overcrowding. Constituencies where gentrification is, as we like to put it these days, “a thing”. Londoners may feel betrayed by the lack of enthusiasm outside the big cities. But is it really a surprise that those with a completely different experience of the housing market are less convinced about the need to build?

More from this author

The secret millennial class war

By Chris Clarke

The gentrification debate can feel myopic. To those living in places where well-paid work is in short supply, it may look like navel-gazing from people who’ve had too much of a good thing. Those in its midst, on the other hand, feel the claustrophobia of rising rents, or see their local economy becoming prohibitively expensive over just a couple of years. The fallout from the Liz Truss mini-budget, which affected home owners and private renters alike, has created an intense focus on the housing issue. Young residents in cities have become vocal critics of Nimby-ism by older generations, and planning — not an especially sexy subject a few years ago — has become a wedge issue in some areas. The risk, for mainstream politicians, is that house-building becomes the next big culture war topic, splitting the country along generational or geographical lines.

There is a temptation for politicians to throw their all behind this, attacking the gilded lives of those in one area or another. But those who successfully bridge the electoral divide will be those who identify the thread that links the two. Gentrification is proof not that our authentic urban centres are being invaded, but that exceptionally high levels of regional inequality benefit no one.

In those final fateful moments, you can observe highly intelligent, highly trained professionals making error after error, gradually dooming them and their passengers. Despite the ringing alarms of the onboard systems, they lose sight of what they are doing or how to avoid the impending doom. They pull the joystick instead of releasing it, they shut down the working engine instead of the failing one, or sometimes the two pilots pull in different directions, cancelling each other out. Eventually, they hit the Point Of No Return and, shortly after, the ground.

The current Conservative leadership election has a similar atmosphere. Every day in this interminably long contest, the final two candidates fire out press releases and half-formed policy proposals, only to wind them back in — flailing around the controls they want to wield in a month’s time. Meanwhile, the country slides towards crisis.

Neither Rishi Sunak nor Liz Truss appears to recognise the serious problems Britain faces, both in the short and the long term. Analysts predict that the energy price cap will hit £4,400 this winter. As an isolated threat, that would mean deep discomfort for many. Combined with other price rises and increasing interest rates, it will mean destitution. Government will have to step in to prevent this. And yet it is offering only piecemeal solutions.

This might be forgivable if it were the sole issue to which the candidates seem oblivious. But everywhere you look, the country faces massive challenges that the governing party has no answer to. On housing, for instance, Rishi Sunak has swung behind defending the greenbelt, while Liz Truss has prevaricated and developed an obsession with “Soviet style targets”. But as anyone who has managed KPIs will tell you, if there is no target for something, the target is zero.

Beyond this, Britain looks forward to running out of water and electricity. Infrastructure projects that could have alleviated this have been bandied around and frustrated for decades, and little can be done to turn it around on short notice. They say the best time to plant a tree was ten years ago, and the second-best time is today. In Britain, the second-best time to begin is after three preliminary reports, two judicial reviews and a general election. The best time is never.

Even in foreign and military policy, the natural home of the Conservative politician, the reality is bleak. While the country has performed well in arming Ukraine, its own defence commitments have been mealy mouthed. Promised rises are undermined by inflation and clever accounting, while procurement remains scandalously wasteful. With beautiful bureaucracy, a chunk of our defence spending goes on consultants planning the next round of cuts and another chunk on how to cope with the last ones.

But this catalogue of woes just serves to highlight the most pervasive and surprising problem the Tory Party faces: it doesn’t care about politics. This is not to say that the party doesn’t care about winning elections. It remains ruthlessly committed to that and its record is clear. Even after the crashing scandals of the Johnson era, the incoming PM has a fighting chance of securing the next election, giving the Tories nearly 20 years in power. The problem is they no longer understand why or to what end they wield such power.

Suggested article

Who would be a young Tory?

By James Sean Dickson

Those on the Left must be shocked by how apolitical most of the Conservative Party is. I suspect no more than a handful of Tory MPs have ever read Burke or Hayek, unless they cropped up on a PPE reading list. They will be far more familiar with Isabel Oakeshott than Michael.

Factionalism within the party is therefore driven far more by aesthetics than by ideology. One former MP once told me that when he asked his association why they had picked him for the safe seat, he was told: “It was the lovely way you spoke about your wife at the selection.” In more than a decade as a party activist, I’ve met fewer than half a dozen mainstream Tories who could be classed as ideologues. At its best, this makes the party flexible and pragmatic, able to pivot around the issues of the day. At its worst — and it really seems to be falling into the worst now — it becomes listless, incapable and slightly baffled by the power it holds. It’s the cat that has finally caught the laser pointer.

The track record of the current government is testament to this. Despite coming to power with a majority of 80, the government has failed to push forward on any of its purported objectives. The government which claimed to be hard-line on immigration did nothing to reduce it. The government that seeks to be tough on crime has seen petty crime become almost legal. The government that complains about “woke culture” has done nothing at a legislative level to prevent it.

Suggested article

The Tories need to get over Thatcher

By Robert Saunders

Even on its beloved Brexit, the party tries to stoke an ongoing threat that it might be undone or revoked or strangled at birth rather than engage with the realities of leaving the EU. It has no clue whether Britain’s future is Singapore-on-Thames or shoring up the dying embers of Red Wall industries. Instead, it jumps to silly-season headlines on imperial measures and crowns on pint glasses. The party once sought to campaign in poetry and govern in prose; now it campaigns in shitposts and governs in tweets.

All of which reflects an emptiness at the heart of the current Conservative Party. Its politics and principles are skin-deep and conflicted. It is apparent in almost everything it does, from Remainer Liz Truss becoming the “Brexit candidate” for leadership, to the pious Catholic Jacob Rees-Mogg defending the serial liar and philanderer Boris Johnson to the hilt. In place of policy innovation, the party grasps around for yesterday’s answers to yesterday’s problems, copying the homework of a leader who has been out of power for 30 years and dead for ten.

In the place of politics, all the party can do is say things that appeal to the voters who keep returning it to power — the generally older, wealthier suburban dwellers. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the leadership contest. Last weekend, Rishi Sunak’s suggestion that he would cut degrees that don’t lead to good jobs was viewed by many on the Left as an attack on the university sector, or even part of a grand plan to exclude the working classes from the humanities. In truth, it is neither. It is Sunak appealing to an electorate who came of age when 10% of the population went to university and economic growth carried them to prosperity, and who now see their grandchildren laden with debt, unable to buy a home. It’s the “common sense” of the bloke at the end of the Conservative Club bar — not something that will ever seriously happen.

Equally tenuous is Liz Truss’s insistence that the cost-of-living crisis can be solved by tax cuts rather than handouts. Those facing the most acute pain pay no income tax and minimal national insurance, while much of their spending is likely concentrated on low-rated or VAT exempt items, such food. It’s preaching to the Tory choir, with a plan that won’t survive a collision with reality once she is in Number 10.

Suggested article

Britain needs Macmillan, not Thatcher

By Aris Roussinos

I could go on through a dozen such announcements — the theme remains the same: Tory MPs and Tory leaders, saying what they think the person in front of them wants to hear. No plan for implementation, no plan for adverse consequences, no underpinning logic or principle. They are bricks thrown through windows with no notes attached.

Which takes me back to those panic-filled cockpits. With an impending crisis, they have lost sight of what levers they hold and what they can do, instead debating whether they want the chicken or lamb as the altitude warnings flash. The Conservative Party has fallen into a fundamental problem — it is unwilling and unable to address the needs of the day.

So when I look at my own party, I feel not fealty but disappointment. From the housing crisis, to the stagnating economy, to law and order, to the health service, there are solutions out there. Yet the party has given up on seeking them, seduced instead by the 24-hour news cycle, the focus group and the Twitter grifters. Neither leadership candidate offers much hope. Sunak looks like he will run the country like a private equity project, cutting any expense he can and damn the consequences, while Truss will run it like a village fete, harking back with boundless enthusiasm to the old hits.

Whoever wins in September, Britain will remain stuck. The Conservative Party is failing to adapt, failing to plan. The sirens are ringing. The ground is coming.

***

A version of this article first appeared on the Joxley Writes Substack

The picture built up by Nathaniel McBride’s documentary drama is one of unremitting institutional failure on the part of the local authority and the quango responsible for housing in the borough. The well-documented failures of fire safety in the years running up to the tragedy date as far back as 2010, when the ventilation system was exposed as not good enough after a fire melted a front door.

In 2013, Grenfell residents experienced a night of power surges and the threat of a serious fire when laptops and computers in some of the flats “literally exploded”. Their desperately concerned emails to the council were met with denials of responsibility and claims that no one else had reported such occurrences.

In 2015, the infamous contractor Rydon was tasked with refurbishing the tower, installing the flammable cladding, new boilers, and defective windows. This is when the pivotal decision was taken by the Kensington & Chelsea Tenants Management Organisation (KCTMO) to switch from fire resistant zinc cladding to the cheaper, but lethal, aluminium, to cut costs. Shockingly, a test on the safety of the cladding was performed but discontinued because it was deemed too dangerous.

A year later, the KCTMO carried out its own very positive review of the work they had commissioned; but in April 2017, just three months before the fire, the Fire Brigade warned that the building facades were not compliant with health and safety regulations. Over in Westminster, David Cameron’s promise to wage war on excessive health and safety set the tone. “We need to realise, collectively, that we cannot eliminate risk and that some accidents are inevitable,” the former prime minister said. The late David Amess, the chair of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on fire safety regulations asked for fire regulations to be reviewed a heroic 13 times, but his calls fell on deaf ears.

The two questions running through the play are: why did Grenfell fire happen, and could it happen again? The Government’s Grenfell Tower Inquiry is making it very clear that there were many instances of specific failure related to fire safety and building regulations. There is relief that there is now a ban on combustible cladding on tall buildings but that is set against the difficulties of achieving that ban, with the Government initially resistant to it.

Suggested reading

Why we have to let the morons laugh at Grenfell

By Paul Embery

And while mitigating steps relating to cladding have been taken, other significant risks remain. There are serious concerns about lightweight timber frame construction, while the UK remains an international outlier by continuing to permit single staircases in tall buildings. Peter Apps, the deputy editor of Inside Housing, believes there are hundreds of thousands of buildings which have similar levels of risk to Grenfell and warns that “we are drifting back to the same attitudes”.

These are the specifics, but the broader question relates to democratic accountability and the failure to listen to residents’ repeated concerns about safety. In a horrifyingly prescient blog post written just months before the fire, the Grenfell Action Group stated: “It is a truly terrifying thought but the Grenfell Action Group firmly believe that only a catastrophic event will expose the ineptitude and incompetence of our landlord, the KCTMO, and bring to an end the dangerous living conditions and neglect of health and safety legislation.”

The correspondence between the council and the KCTMO reveals the casual contempt with which residents’ concerns were treated. Residents claimed that they were not given the opportunity to comment on the refurbishment and during the works repeatedly said they faced intimidation and harassment by Rydon and the KCTMO, including abusive emails. During this time, one of the residents reporting intimidation was implicitly threatened with eviction when he found out that he was being investigated by the council for the “unclear circumstances” through which he had inherited his tenancy agreement.

Where contrition might have been expected, astonishingly the same attitude to residents continued after the fire, when the contracts manager for Rydon told the government’s Inquiry that residents who raised complaints about fire safety and cladding were “vocal and aggressive” and “regardless of what work was being carried out would still have found a reason to complain”.

Suggested reading

Scotland's poor are left to die

By Darren 'Loki' McGarvey

But the complete breakdown of relations between community and local authority is not limited to what happened at Grenfell. It is replicated in many other London boroughs where both homeowners and social housing tenants on housing estates find it impossible to communicate with their councils. In Southwark, a homeowner on the Aylesbury Estate who was opposed to the regeneration of the estate found herself with no electricity, no internet access, no lift services and no hot water or heating, while the postman was told nobody lived at her address. Beverley Robinson, chair of the Aylesbury Leaseholders Action Group, recalled: “I had no heating for weeks and weeks and then they wouldn’t let the people in to fix it.”

Loretta Lees, Professor of Human Geography at Leicester University and former Chair of the London Housing Panel, describes this trend towards open conflict between local authorities and housing estate residents as reflecting the “Rachman-like tendencies” of the state. Peter Rachman was a slum landlord who operated in Notting Hill in the Fifties and Sixties and who became notorious for the exploitation and intimidation of his tenants who lived in terrible conditions.

The bigger picture is that all over London, and in many other cities, residents are failing to benefit from the wholesale regeneration and reconfiguration of their areas. Entire districts are witnessing the demolition of estates, which are replaced by ubiquitous developments of luxury apartments. In Elephant and Castle, the Heygate Estate was demolished and replaced by Elephant Park where two-bedroom apartments are on sale for more than £1 million. Roughly 25% of the scheme is designated affordable housing but as the definition of affordable housing has been changed to mean up to 80% of market value, that is far from affordable for the majority of Londoners.

The refurbishment of Grenfell Tower was also part of an area-wide regeneration, laid out in the “Notting Barns Masterplan”, which planned to create “a more successful urban neighbourhood through selective demolition of existing housing stock and the provision of high-quality new homes”. The aim was to drive up land values in the area by making it a more attractive place to live, which is regeneration speak for increasing property prices. The project also included the demolition of the neighbouring Silchester Estate, the leasing of the local library to the £22,000-per-year Notting Hill Prep School and the replacement of a popular community facility, the West London Stables, with luxury apartments, all of which aroused community opposition.

Suggested reading

The heroic failure of Cumbernauld

By Daniel Kalder

On the morning of the fire, a features editor emailed me to ask if I would write a piece “on the housing apartheid in London, how London’s poor end up living in death trap towers”. The narrative of poverty-stricken deprivation in a tower block ghetto, a stone’s throw from one of the richest parts of London, persisted throughout the media in the weeks after the disaster, with newspapers running with the need to demolish more social housing like this. It was only through the sheer level of interest in the story that it became clear that Grenfell had not only been structurally sound, but a much-loved place to live with a thriving and mixed community.

When the Government announced its Inquiry into the fire, the local community were disappointed by its limited scope, and demanded that it be widened, to “seek to understand how residents’ voices have been systematically ignored for so long”. Michael Mansfield QC, who is representing survivors and relatives, has highlighted that the Inquiry is only investigating how the fire came about and who should be accountable, rather than looking at the experience of living in social housing. He has pointed out that while the experience of living in social housing is crucial to what happened at Grenfell, it is “off limits”, with families given very limited opportunities to speak or ask questions. The consequence is that they feel excluded from the Inquiry, raising uncomfortable parallels with the reality of living in social housing.

The Inquiry is producing invaluable evidence about what happened and why, which means the likelihood of another incident related to the specific failures uncovered seems unlikely. But the broader question of elected councils listening to residents who voice uncomfortable truths has escaped scrutiny. This means that the next time concerns around potentially fatal issues are raised, there is still no certainty they will be listened to.

Governments of all stripes have long talked about the need to create mixed communities. Grenfell was a successful mixed community which found itself labelled as a ghetto, as part of a narrative of managed decline perpetuated by the institutions which wanted to regenerate the area. This is the end result of treating housing simply as financial asset, which combined with a complete failure to listen to the voices of the community, led to the tragedy of the fire.

The rise of this view on the Left has coincided with the decline in support for the Labour Party among those traditionally considered ‘working class’, and an increase in their support for the Conservatives. But if we see housing tenure as the real indicator of class in modern Britain, then we can still claim that the working class has not abandoned Labour. All that was needed was to change its definition.

The first thing to say about this argument is that it’s a little too convenient. Only five years ago, the Labour Left was using ‘working class’ in the traditional sense and upholding the dichotomy between ‘university-educated middle-class professionals’ on the one hand and ‘working-class communities’ on the other. Indeed, this understanding of class, culture and political values held until as recently as the eve of the 2019 general election.

You don’t have to be a cynic to think that this new understanding of class would not be put forward if the traditional class alignment of the post-1945 period still held, and if young people and renters were as supportive of the Tories as they had been in 2015. Certainly, the old concept of ABC1-C2DE is inadequate, as argued by a range of academics. But disregarding the importance of class and insisting on the primacy of housing tenure is politically misguided and empirically unfounded.

Just look at the ten safest Labour seats in the country. Five of them are in Liverpool; two each in London and Birmingham; and one in Manchester. There is, in fairness, a clear disparity between the percentage of people who own their homes outright in these seats and the national average — only 19% on average in those ten constituencies, compared with 30.6% nationwide.

Suggested reading

The vultures behind London's housing crisis

By Niamh Mulvey

However, when we look at the percentage of homes with a mortgage, the average across the ten safest Labour seats is 25.6% — just over six points behind the UK as a whole. If you take out the three outliers of Liverpool Riverside, Birmingham Ladywood, and Tottenham, it is 29.3% — barely distinguishable from the UK average of 32.9%.

The idea that Labour can build a ‘coalition of the renters’ is also undermined by the stats. In the ten safest Labour seats the average proportion of private renters is 23.3% — exactly seven points more than the national average of 16.3%. Seven points is not insignificant, but it is not indicative of a massive disparity in housing tenure between Labour’s heartlands and the average UK constituency. What’s more, if you take away the outliers of Liverpool Riverside, Manchester Gorton and Tottenham, the average proportion of private renters in the safest Labour seats is 19% — only 3% more than the national average.

There are some qualifications to this argument: just because these are the ten safest Labour seats, it does not mean they are typical Labour seats. In fact, the five Merseyside seats are demographically very different from Labour heartland seats, with low numbers of university graduates and even fewer immigrants. But if housing tenure truly is the new dividing line in UK politics, we would surely expect to see more significant discrepancies in rates of mortgage-holders and private renters between the ten safest Labour seats and the national average.

And there are other reasons why the Left should not pin its hopes on an alliance of young, graduate, private renters riding to the rescue. As recently as the 2010 election, there was no difference between the proportion of 18-24s and over 65s voting Labour, both at 31%, and the Tories were only one percentage point behind Labour among 18-24s, on 30%. In 2015, while the age alignment that characterised the last two elections began to take shape, the Conservatives actually did slightly better than Labour among university graduates, with 35% voting Tory as opposed to 34% for Labour. (The Tories also had a two-point lead among private renters that year.)

Suggested reading

The vultures behind London's housing crisis

By Aris Roussinos

In the last six years alone, the Conservatives have moved Left on culture and won their first majority in 27 years. Four years later, they moved Right on culture and (somewhat) Left on economics and won an even bigger majority. It is not beyond their wit to pivot once more, moving Left on culture and introducing policies to help renters.

While it seems too politically difficult for the Tories to build millions of new homes, it is not too difficult for them to throw small and medium-landlords under the bus. They have already introduced pro-renter legislation such as the 2019 ban on tenancy fees; further legislation to make life-long renting as desirable as it is in large parts of continental Europe and North America could see the Tories make up lost ground among private renters. And if combined with another about-turn on cultural issues, as after 2005 and 2016, they could quickly catch up on Labour’s lead among young people and graduates.

There is an increasing sense that Boris Johnson’s days are numbered, and his likely successors — currently Rishi Sunak and Liz Truss are the safest bets — would represent a move away from the Red Wall-courting strategy of the last five years and a return to economic and cultural liberalism. The cancellation of the HS2 extension from Birmingham to Leeds might be the first sign of this coming pivot.

Suggested reading

Stop pretending to be working class

By Julie Bindel

But perhaps most importantly, the Left’s new focus on homeownership ignores the importance of geography and cultural capital: there are all kinds of advantages that middle-class and even poor renters in London and other big cities have over homeowners in small towns. As even the ‘It’s homeownership, stupid!’ school concede, the areas where you are least likely to be able to afford a house are those where all the prospects are.

As long as that remains the case, it is unlikely that homeownership will swing an election. In the meantime, the Left ignore the importance of class at their peril.

Many of the streets have Scottish names; many of the houses are graced with distinctive male or female keystones above the front door, rumoured to be based on Archie and his wife. The estate is at least a 15-minute walk from the nearest train station and is mostly an established family neighbourhood. I have lived here for three years and have fallen hard for its charms.

While Archibald Corbett’s legacy is widely known and celebrated with affection locally, it’s unlikely that his politics would go down well with many of his estate’s residents today: he was an unapologetic capitalist (Lewisham has been Labour for as long as anyone can remember) and he disapproved thoroughly of drinking (summer nights around here are full of the sound of late-night partying; K-pop, Jamaican dance-hall, Eastern European folk, take your pick). And as someone who believed in decent housing for working-class people — by which he meant one family per house, a garden, proximity to a station and park — it’s likely he would have been appalled by what’s been going on lately in his streets.

Because at the moment, as a result of Tory housing policy, the modest houses of the Corbett estate are being bought up by property developers, their interiors ripped out, and in their place, units designed for individual occupation inserted into them. The units can be as small as 6.52 metres squared — smaller than a prison cell. By adding a hastily constructed loft, a narrow terraced house of approximately 60 square metres can be transformed into a “HMO” — a house of multiple occupancy comprising up to six separate “units”. These HMOs represent different things to different people: for the owners, they are sources of profit; for the neighbours, they can often be sources of nuisance or even danger. And for the vulnerable people who live in them, they can be a living nightmare.

As residents became aware of an increase of HMOs in the area, an acquaintance of mine organised a meeting last month with the Lewisham East MP, Janet Daby, to address the issue: he expected it would be attended by him and a few other people who were directly affected. In the event, the church hall was standing room only, with at least 150 people in attendance. The officials were clearly expecting this as we were met not only by Janet Daby, but two local councillors, three council staff including Lewisham’s Director of Planning, and three Metropolitan Police Officers.

Residents spoke of a sense of hopelessness as developers bought up houses next to them and undertook building work without any regard for its impact on them, ignoring party wall agreements. One woman from another ward but within the borough reported being told by a council officer to not go into her back garden because the irresponsible building work rendered it too dangerous. For her there was nothing that could be done, because the work was being conducted around the back of the house and was, as such, private and none of the council’s business. A councillor described the companies that make hay amid the lax regulatory environment as “cartels”.

The council staff and the politicians were not defensive, as I expected them to be. It was far more depressing: they seemed utterly defeated. The Director of Planning asked people not to sell their houses to these developers; one might reasonably ask, if you have a badly run HMO next door to you, who other than a developer is going to buy it? Another councillor suggested direct action and looked to the three Met police officers in attendance, one of whom had already described local HMOs as “not fit for human habitation”. They shrugged, perhaps in assent. The “cartel” comment councillor — with a flair for drama or perhaps an appropriate sense of what was at stake — spoke of law and order breaking down. Another woman questioned the absence of the state, why she was paying her taxes, and whether anyone cared about what was going on in the community?

More from this author

Activists aren't what they used to be

By Niamh Mulvey

What is going on here is something called “exempt accommodation”: housing that is exempt from the usual limit a local authority can pay in housing benefit for the provision of accommodation to vulnerable people. The additional money is intended to cover the cost of caring for the residents of such accommodation; people who are vulnerable for a whole host of reasons. Ashley Horsey of Commonweal, a charity that has researched exempt accommodation extensively, explained to me that there are two types: one sort is for people with long-term challenges such as mobility or an intellectual disability. This kind tends to be well run.

The other type of exempt accommodation (“non-commissioned”) is intended as a stop-gap for people who temporarily need assistance during a transitional stage in their lives. This includes people emerging from prison, people recovering from drug and alcohol addiction, women escaping domestic violence, care-leavers and people who have been sleeping rough. It’s not uncommon for people from all of these categories — and others — to live alongside one another, sharing a hallway, a kitchen and an entrance. According to Crisis, 150,000 people across the UK are being housed in exempt accommodation, a 62% increase since 2016.

​​This type of accommodation (non-commissioned exempt) has created a situation that turns vulnerable people into units of profit to be mined by developers — the “cartels” the local councillor spoke of. Providers can charge up to £960 per month for the provision of accommodation for people in this category. By examining adverts for rental accommodation locally, one can clearly see this: a “studio” going for £960 per month in a borough where a double room in a more traditional house-share with a responsible landlord yields only around £500-£700 per month. At the meeting in Lewisham, one such landlord — and brave soul, given the atmosphere — spoke up in some bewilderment: why aren’t the Government regulating us, he asked.

The additional money paid to these providers is supposed to be used to provide assistance to residents, to ensure they have the help they need to move on with their lives. What has actually happened is that many providers absolutely fail to provide this “help” — it is neither defined, measured nor monitored — and simply cream off the money that is supposed to assist people, as profit. In a detailed report into the issue Commonweal describe an “accountability deficit” that has arisen here: there is no obligation on providers to ensure that their residents are looked after — despite the premium that is paid for the accommodation. The results can be grim — “sex for rent” situations, drug users living alongside those trying to stay clean and endless anti-social behaviour issues for neighbours.

More from this author

How to save fiction

By Niamh Mulvey

Imagine for a moment that you are a woman escaping a violent situation in your home. You get away, and you get housed. You turn up at your new address and find a six-square-metre room is now your home. The kitchen you use is shared by five others, some of whom have histories of violence, some of whom are using drugs. The kitchen has no window; you have nowhere to dry your clothes. You are supposed to stay here temporarily, but you can’t afford private rents, and there is no social housing available.

What do you do? What can you do? It’s too noisy to sleep at night. Your landlord is making up to £12,000 per year off of you; he doesn’t want you to leave and there is nowhere for you to go. Some women in situations like this have children living with them — and because of the lack of oversight, it is unclear how many children are currently living in such circumstances.

The “accountability deficit” — lax oversight, little to no building regulation and helpless local councils — has created a gold rush in neighbourhoods like Lewisham: places where housing is still cheap, relatively, and where local homeowners are of modest incomes and can’t easily afford solicitors to defend their rights. A local homeowner here in Catford dug into the ownership of the HMO next door to him and found the property was flipped four times in quick succession between companies owned by the same person. The tactics used by many of these companies are straightforward: they purchase houses, in cash, easily outbidding ordinary buyers. They then proceed with building work as quickly as possible and ignore legal requirements that require consent from neighbours.

If neighbours object, they have trouble finding out to whom they can object — these companies maintain a practice of keeping former buyers’ names on the land register or they flip houses (four to five times in one day) to obscure ownership. These companies take a calculated risk, knowing that most regular homeowners will not have the time or the resources to wade through the legality of the situation. The game is stacked utterly in favour of the developers; the only instrument the council has is weak and ineffectual.

Suggested article

Serfs don't vote Tory

By Peter Franklin

This instrument — an Article Four Direction — can be used to prevent further HMO development in a neighbourhood, but only after complaints have been made. It cannot be applied retrospectively, meaning there is no disincentive for developers to continue to act with impunity. Article Four was applied in wards to the south of the Corbett estate and this is why development has suddenly descended upon these streets; the problem was not solved, it simply moved. The first many people knew of it was the sudden, poignant sight of six small fridges turning up for delivery at the recently-sold, small three-bedroom house next door.

This, of course, points to another issue: habitation by what amounts to six separate households creates a dangerous strain on services and facilities. I hear of a HMO in another neighbourhood that had its gas and electricity switched off due to fire safety concerns.

Nobody is being incentivised to fix this situation. Not local government, not the taxpayer, not vulnerable citizens, and not central government, which is effectively paying private corporations a premium to house people in dangerous conditions. But when the guiding ideology of our era lacks a moral dimension, or a sense of responsibility towards a community then this is where we end up. It’s hard not to think of Grenfell and the callousness of companies such as Kingspan, where staff have admitted to prioritising profits over standards. And I’m struck by the clinical nature of the language we now use around housing: units, delivery, services, clients. Who thinks about their homes in that way? Who are we forcing to think about their homes in that way?

A lack of housing security, a lack of a home — not knowing where or if you’re going to sleep at night or if the place you have is safe, is a reality for thousands of people across this country. The current solution: pay developers to make it go away; pay them whatever they want. The utter disregard for the dignity of the individuals involved or the neighbourhoods they live in, is grim and very telling. As a resident told me: the developers don’t live in Catford. They live in Knightsbridge or Dubai, or everywhere and nowhere.

These are our elites: they don’t put the names of their cherished homeland on the streets they create, they hide behind shell companies and when they look at vulnerable people and ordinary neighbourhoods, they see pound signs and profit.

In the short term, there’s the next election — which will be won or lost in the former Red Wall. If the Government doesn’t make some progress with the levelling-up agenda it promised new blue voters, it may well face defeat. In the long term, it is facing extinction. Younger voters don’t vote Tory — and show few signs of doing so as they get older. And who can blame them? If you exclude an entire generation from home ownership, then they won’t become Conservatives.

So levelling-up and solving the housing crisis are top priorities — and Gove is now responsible for both, although the latter in particular might be considered a poisoned chalice. A few years back, when his department was called something else, I did a stint as a lowly speechwriter. Every morning I’d walk past a wall of portraits — framed photographs of the men and women who used to do Gove’s job — and the thing that struck me was the turnover, most of them only spending a year or two before the impossible job got to them. In the last five years, four more portraits have been nailed to that wall. Greg Clark (who I worked for), Sajid Javid, James Brokenshire and Robert Jenrick — they’ve all been and gone, while the average house price to earnings ratio has continued to rise and rise.

Gove’s first problem, like that of his doomed predecessors, is that most of the important decisions are made elsewhere — principally Downing Street and the Treasury — and the people making the decisions often haven’t got a clue what they’re doing.

The Treasury, for instance, has just blown the best part of £5 billion on a stamp duty “holiday” that wasn’t needed. They did this because they thought that Covid would crash the property market when, in fact, the exact opposite happened — another win for economics experts! House prices have in fact surged — and not because of the tax break. We could have built a lot of social housing with that sum, and made at least some inroad into a queue of over one million households waiting for a property.

But after eleven years of not solving the housing crisis, I wonder if this Government even understands what it is anyway. Typically, it’s presented as a problem of supply — i.e. we’re not building enough houses. But much more to the point, it’s a crisis of affordability — i.e. house prices and rents are too high. Unless prices fall — or at least stay still long enough for wages to catch up — then building more houses won’t solve the problem.

Same difference, you might think — by building more homes we’ll bring prices down. Except that’s not what the Government wants to happen. More houses, yes — but ministers are too afraid of the Daily Telegraph to actually call for lower prices, which would be disastrous for the electoral core support of the party. And in case you were wondering, we can have one without the other. As long as any extra supply is outstripped by increased demand — especially from professional property investors — then we can continue to build while prices continue to go up. This is how property booms work.

Absurdly, we still view rising house prices as a measure of prosperity, when in reality, it’s a vicious form of inflation that hurts the poorest and sucks value from the productive parts of the economy. It doesn’t even help ordinary homeowners, not unless they’re planning to downsize, and the only winners turn out to be landowners. That’s not just a few lucky farmers, but all those involved in the control of the land supply, including developers, consultants, lawyers and financiers: there’s a huge vested interest in not solving the housing crisis.

When he was Secretary of State for Education, Michael Gove famously took on “the blob” — the forces in the education establishment who didn’t want his reforms to succeed, because it suited them.

More from this author

How Tony Blair gets away with it

By Peter Franklin

But the education blob has got nothing on its housing equivalent. The former was ideological, and almost entirely Left-wing, which makes it easier for a Tory government to challenge. Not so the housing blob — also known as the “the landed interest” — which has infested the Conservative Party for centuries. Being within the party itself, but working against the party’s long-term interests, it is a far more powerful and persistent lobby.

Gove, of all people, should also be wary of “experts” who say that they know best, but who keep getting it wrong — and on this issue they’ve been getting it wrong for years. Thanks to their influence, we’ve had bill after bill bashing away at the planning system as if it were the big obstacle, under the enduring myth that we don’t build enough houses because councils won’t allow them to be built. Yet that theory doesn’t square with the massive backlog of unused planning permissions. We have the building sites, so where are the houses?

It’s as if the bottleneck lies elsewhere, which of course it does. It’s not council planning officers who control the rate at which permitted land is turned into actual houses, but the big developers. Having purchased the land on which they say they want to build, they’d lose money if its value fell. So, they’ve got every incentive to ration supply to local housing markets. Whether you want to call this “land banking” or go in for some fancier explanation doesn’t matter, since it boils down to the same thing.

Suggested reading

The plot against Mercia

By John Myers

But there is a solution. In many other countries, the state supplies the land along with the planning permission. Under this system, a local or national agency would purchase a site, put in the basic infrastructure, and then sell it off as ready-to-build plots to those who intend to live there. Building firms, large and small, would still bid for the construction work, but they’d have no involvement in the buying and selling of the land — and so they’d have no incentive or ability to ration its supply.

We also need action on the demand side. Aspiring homeowners have to compete with buy-to-let landlords, absentee foreign investors and now major financial institutions. Even to people who believe in the free market, this cannot be right. A house should be a home, not an investment product.

If the Chancellor wants to raise some more revenue, then he should whack up taxes on property speculation instead of jobs. And if Rishi Sunak won’t act, then Michael Gove could do so, by using the planning system under his control. For instance, he could make at least 80% of new planning permissions conditional on owner-occupation — and charge fat planning fees on the rest.

Suggested reading

How communities lost their soul

By Nicholas Boys Smith

This would require new legislation, but Gove should welcome that. He’s just inherited a planning bill whose main provisions are now dead in the water. Wisely, he’s “paused” these reforms, but before scrapping them all together, he’ll need something better to put in their place.

I’d recommend a radical programme to end land banking by the big developers and to push speculation out of the housing sector. Obviously, this is interfering in the marketplace, biasing the whole system towards aspiring homeowners. But so what? If the Conservative Party has to choose between ideological purity and home ownership, it’s no contest.

Without change we’re heading to a very different future — in which the landlord class further takes over our housing stock and owner-occupation goes into free fall, especially in the larger cities where most of the jobs are. This is the new road to serfdom — and serfs don’t vote Tory.

Summary: older social conservatives living in the North, younger social liberals in the South. “Howay, plus ça change bonny lad” as they say in Hartlepool. It’s just culture subsidence and resettling. Party allegiances are changing, not people’s attitudes. The North’s always been more old-fashioned, the South’s always been more trendy-bendy.

Endless pieces on “The Problem For Labour” like to rummage around in the debris of a party destroyed first by a Tory Parliamentary majority, then by murderous national opinion polls. Whoever it is leading the Labour party at the moment keeps telling interviewers that it’s a national issue — how can Labour win back the trust of Britain’s voters? But maybe the big picture is itself the problem.

All this hyphenated North-South/Left-Right jive is so last-cench, daddio. It’s useful journalistic shorthand, but I wonder how many voters in our new atomised electorate think in those terms. We elect our MPs to represent us in Westminster, of course. But they increasingly seem more valuable to us as constituency activists — save the hospital, stop the fracking, help the homeless, amplify local voices. I know, I know #NotAllMPs — the useless clump of nothing in my neighbouring constituency firmly believes that food-bank dependence is a lifestyle choice. Shock reveal: he’s a Tory MP.

There’s a lot of huffing and puffing about how humbled, chastened Labour won’t get back in for years, and how a party can’t do anything unless it’s in government. But can’t it? Until Andy Burnham became mayor of Manchester he was known chiefly as the runner-up to Corbyn in the Labour leadership election of 2015, and before that as a hapless yet versatile shadow cabinet plug-in. Now look at him. He’s King of the North, defying the Johnson government so theatrically he should be wearing a pelt cloak. Right now he could ride a stallion into St Peter’s Square, declare war on Bollinger Politics and march a Manc army down the M6 singing Is This The Way To Amarillo.

Suggested article

How the North could save the Union

By Dan Jackson

One of the few genuinely brilliant things to somehow swerve out of the path of the Government’s lethal, careening coronavirus clown car was the power of local authorities and NHS Trusts to work together efficiently in an emergency. The infrastructure somehow survives, like a World War Two operations bunker. As the private sector profited, dithered and wilted in the Great British Covid Call-Up, teams of local volunteers pitched in for a remarkable community effort of civic and public sector can-doery.

Westminster seems more remote from ordinary lives than ever. Food poverty and NHS waiting lists may be national talking points but they’re local problems. You feel that the new slogan for Labour, with its unique network of constituency activists, ought to be Think Local, Act Local. It’s national issues versus local issues, and Labour should build on its grassroots base.

More from this author

Why the miners will never win

By Ian Martin

I say national versus local but let’s be honest, it’s London vs the Rest. “London” is shorthand for England in the same way that “Pyongyang” is North Korea, except London obviously has more Korean restaurants. London is Britain. London is Great Britain. Most of all, Great Britain is London. The M25 might as well be a moat of fire.

As someone who moved from London to “The North” in 1988 — passing a lot of people going the other way, incidentally — I can confirm that there’s no such thing as “The North”. Lancaster, where I’ve lived for 33 years, has little in common with Middlesbrough or Berwick or Blackpool. My adopted home — a university city with a Green council leader — is quite different from the seaside town of Morecambe six miles away, the setting for ITV’s gritty drama The Bay. Which is, trivia fans, created and written by Lancaster’s Daragh Carville. Yet another example of northern “trickle-up” cultural economics.

I’m not saying there aren’t some comically enduring tribal rivalries up here. On this side of the Pennines we’re required by folklore to pretend all Yorkshiremen are tight, humourless narcissistic bastards. This apparently caused the Wars of the Roses, ruining lives as recently as the 15th Century. People in the border town of Carlisle can be ultra-English or secretly Scottish, which is why it’s safer to avoid eye-contact with anyone there. Liverpool is a very special, deeply emotional place to be for Liverpudlians.

“What’s London even for these days?” I wheeze to myself. Lunch, obviously. Nothing beats a long, boozy Soho lunch. Meetings of course, until you tell people you actually live 250 miles north of London — then it’s either a Zoom or they’re paying for lunch.

People work there still, but fewer than before Covid’s WFH-variant. People live there too obviously, but as far as I can make out the rental sector seems to function as a tenanted version of an apple press for venal cyborg landlords.

God, even looking at London’s cluttered skyline depresses me. It used to inspire, now it merely laughs drunkenly at us, all leering and aggressive. Goethe said that architecture was “frozen music”, a phrase architects themselves elevated to “petrified music”. Art captured in stone and glass. A lot of what we see on the London skyline now is more what you’d call “concretised overseas investment” or “honeycombed tax dodge” or “commodified drug money”. Once the church built landmarks; now gangsters do.

More from this author

A brief history of profanity

By Ian Martin

We couldn’t have moved North in the Eighties without the fax machine, my liberation. Our first one cost a grand and a half, which in those days was an arm and a leg. However, it allowed me, a freelance writer and journalist, to fax my drivel in from anywhere. “But everything’s HERE,” our London friends mewled. I mean, everything was there if you were a childless double-earning couple in your twenties. We had two young children and it felt like the right time to resettle. Had some family in the north-west, drifted into living in Lancaster, where we’ve been ever since. “Once you leave London you’ll never be able to move back” people said, with an almost undetectable satisfaction in their voice. That seemed fine at the time and feels positively reassuring now.

My 35-year-old lungs seemed untroubled by all the poisonous Marlboro fags and the poisonous London fugs. Now, with 68 year-old bagpipes compromised by years of abuse, I’m very grateful to live somewhere with clean, sparkling air. Children have flourished here, as grandchildren flourish now. In Lancaster there’s a green space round every corner. It’s a weird city; where we live you can hear trains on one side and cows on the other.

We’re conditioned to think of London as the future, as the place to be. It’s been a bellwether for so long, apparently charting our wellness and confidence through rising house prices. While conditions for the poor deteriorate, in every property hotspot the Foxtons equity monitor whizzes silently round and round and round, like a gas meter in winter. Oh look, that three-bed’s gone up a grand since the start of this sentence.

Suggested article

Can London be saved?

By Henry Wismayer

And yet, in the mid-20th Century, as in the Eighties, London was the past — a place to escape from. The Dan Dare vision of 21st-Century London was exciting to see as a child of the Fifties: the very air was a road busy with futuristic bubble cars, and every building looked like a Hilton hotel. But the London I was born into — austerity, overcrowding, bomb sites, poisonous air — was a dead end. As young families moved out of the Smoke, skint singles moved in.

Imagine. Once upon a time you could run away to London and live cheaply. Every struggling artist and musician I knew in the Seventies was on the dole. Good luck getting any goal-assistance now. Perhaps today’s hostile environment for piss-takers with the nerve to be poor, unverified or working class might, over the coming decade, create new centres of creative and economic gravity in the North, and expand existing ones. Why not?

When we moved up in ’88, Lancaster-Euston by train often took the best part of four hours. These days it’s two and a half and you can work on a laptop, stroll into town for a meeting and a lunch and still be home for dinner. London for a visitor is bloody GREAT. Also, with global warming, the summers up here in a generation or so will be as hot as summers are in London now. Bask up here, or boil down there? Now that IS a North-South divide.

How else do we explain the Prime Minister’s incredibly good fortune, which now seems likely to carry him to another election victory in a couple of years’ time? Barely 12 months after almost imitating his hero Pericles by dying of the plague, Boris is unassailable, credited not just with the successful vaccine programme, but more bizarrely, ending the European Super League, thereby making him the saviour of English football on top of everything else.

But fortuna has most favoured Boris with his timing; he’s leader of the Tory Party at a time when political changes beyond his control are acting to make it invincible. Ten years ago, its primacy wouldn’t have been possible, and neither will it be in another ten.

While the Government has no doubt benefited from the vaccine effect, the underlying cause of last week’s Hartlepool result is the Great Realignment of politics: in short, the political divide is no longer about economics but values.

There are various reasons for this shift, but globalisation is the central theme; a process that has been speeding up since this epoch began in December 2001 with China’s admission to the WTO. That Hartlepool, or Blyth Valley or Don Valley are now to be found in the Conservative camp isn’t inevitable, but it is highly probable; neither Jeremy Corbyn nor Keir Starmer nor Attlee himself could have stopped it.

Following last week’s results, UnHerd featured voices from the three wings of the former Labour coalition, which you might call the Corbynite, Blairite and Blue Labour factions. This realignment is taking place partly because the latter has dropped out of the coalition, or been pushed out; as Paul Embery argued, the two other wings essentially have a great deal in common, as much as they like fighting on social media.

Suggested reading

Is Labour dead?

By Ian Birrell

They are a logical coalition, broadly sharing an internationalist and socially liberal worldview. The problem is that, without Blue Labour, they don’t have enough voters to win, a problem aggravated by the fact that progressives tend to self-segregate geographically, which is extremely unhelpful in a first-past-the-post system.

On top of this, the radical Left, often too interested in politics and their own moral purity, are very off-putting to a large number of voters and bad at compromise and coalition-building — more fortuna for Boris.

Yet if current demographic trends continue, these two groups will have enough voters to win. Not by the next election, but maybe the one after. For despite Johnson’s victory last week, Labour now has a coalition designed for winning in the Britain of 2040. They have strong support among the young, unmarried, renters and ethnic minorities — all the groups which are demographically ascendent.

In particular, the age gap is the most worrying thing for Conservatives. The idea that most people start off as excitable socialists who want to change the world and darken into cynical conservatives is historically exaggerated. Thatcher did very well among 18-24-year-olds, for instance, and the under-30s aren’t anywhere near as rebellious as popular culture wants them to be. Most in fact tend to be quite conformist, following the prevailing culture noises around them – which is exactly what should worry the Tories. Crucially, their values aren’t shifting as they age; unless that changes, then at some point the demographic balance will tip towards Labour, and quite heavily.

This was the underlying theme of my book, Small Men on the Wrong Side of History, published with rather unfortunate timing just months after Boris’s huge election victory. For the time being, however, this trend won’t win elections because it is concentrated among certain professions, the university-educated, and the metropolitan. That’s a minority of people, in an even smaller minority of seats, but history shows that populations tend to adopt the belief systems of high-status members over time. Twitter isn’t Britain, but in a generation or so it probably will be.

Suggested reading

Labour isn't working

By Paul Embery

I’ve often read the comforting argument that the young will rebel against the “woke wave” — but there is little evidence of that, except in small clusters. Few of us are naturally non-conforming or rebellious, because most of us don’t want to be unpopular and having unpopular political beliefs take a toll on wellbeing. Young people won’t rebel against wokery anymore than young people in late 4^th century Rome rebelled against Christianity. And the new religion is stronger and more powerful, so much so that it can successfully dictate what society’s taboos are, and what is beyond the pale to say. No ideology can compete with that.

At some point, the “woke” worldview which has come to the fore in the United States since 2013, will start to spread enough to become electorally significant in Britain, and there will be a tipping point where liberals and progressives together will win. This will happen not long into the future: just as the Tories won an overwhelming majority in the Tees Valley last week, and even made gains in Durham, so they lost Tunbridge Wells and Cambridgeshire, a sign of things to come as the disappearance of younger Conservative voters in the professions begins to turn south-east England red.

Yet while much of this is to do with values and identity, there are also more banal material explanations. Recounting the awful conditions facing Russia’s urban underclass before the revolution, Orlando Figes described in A People’s Tragedy how Moscow landlords were able to prevent the authorities from building more homes for the desperate workers: “Such was the demand for accommodation that workers thought nothing of spending half their income on rent.” Only half their income, a twenty-something Londoner would complain, like the proverbial Monty Python Yorkshireman: When I was growing up, we paid 60%!

There is a noticeable link between high housing costs and voting for Left-wing parties, partly because affordable housing encourages people to start families, which makes them more conservative for a whole array of reasons: everything from a declining belief in the blank slate — a cornerstone of progressive thinking — to support for more traditional gender roles to economic conservatism.

Voting also maps on to population density; the more people per square mile, the more Left-wing people become on average. Meanwhile, urban people adopt more of the character traits associated with being progressive; they’re more likely to be mentally ill, for example, which correlates with liberalism, more likely to be sexually progressive, innovative and open to new experiences, and trusting of a wider circle of people.

Suggested reading

Starmer has proved the Blairites wrong

By Matt Zarb-Cousin

There is also the effect of people’s social milieus; if everyone around you believes something, most people come to adopt those beliefs. Anti-Toryism is almost a social norm for young people — something accelerated by housing costs — but at some point the social network becomes so anti-Tory that even home-owning does not flip a person’s politics.

The trend I’ve outlined is, of course, Londoncentric — for now — but then things are different outside the capital; for all the chatter about the North being deprived, the sort of people who vote Tory in the Red Wall (and even more so in the Midlands) are doing okay. They can afford their own home and car, with enough income to afford a decent holiday and gym membership, while their university-educated contemporaries in London are living in squalid flat shares in their 30s, without any prospect of affording a family, their politics getting redder and their hair bluer.

Both these cultural and economic trends are going against the Conservatives; house inflation continues to rise and fertility continues to fall — yet despite this Britain’s population is growing and therefore becoming more urban.

And here is another long-term advantage for the Left: immigration and its longer-term effects. While modern progressivism is increasingly repulsive to a lot of minority voters, in every western democracy the Left have a plurality or majority among non-white populations (although this varies from Canada at one end, where it has been very narrow, to France, where the gap is huge). This is because the Left-Right divide is essentially about the conflict between national and global identities, and there is little that conservatives can do to overturn that advantage (although they can, and should, reduce it by being moderate).

To put it simply, demographically Britain under 30 is very different to Britain over 50. It’s going to be more diverse, more urban, more single, more university-educated and more impoverished by rental prices. Its values are completely different.

Suggested reading

Who reads the Daily Mail?

By Ed West

So, unless something is done about housing costs, this wave of disappointment will wash away today’s Tory advantage. So far, the best proposal has been Policy Exchange’s Street Votes, which would potentially create millions of new homes without touching the Green Belt, while also making lots of suburban homeowners immensely rich. That one idea, more than any other, might lay the ground for a future Tory home-owning majority.

In the meantime, as housing inflation sadly denies more people the chance of a decent life, we will see the Tory desert in overpriced London constituencies start to spread outwards. And when the time comes, Labour will almost certainly capture once-unimaginable areas of the Home Counties and Thames Valley, just as the Democrats win almost all the most expensive ZIP codes in the US.

But for now Boris can kick around and enjoy his great advantage, with an enfeebled opposition whose values repulse much of the country, knowing that he truly has the luck of the devil. But Mephistopheles, and demography, will come for him and his party eventually.

David Spiegelhalter, the chairman of the Winton Centre for Risk at Cambridge University, suggests that the risk posed to children by Covid-19 is “tiny”, with under-15s more likely to be struck by lightning than die of the virus. Young adults are slightly more at risk, but not by much. Seroprevalence surveys suggest that this age group are more likely than any other to have already come into contact with and recovered from the virus, which makes sense given the daily habits of young adults who are disproportionately likely to live in cities and to have work and social lives that bring them into contact with large numbers of people. Almost all young people experience Covid-19 as a mild illness, and often suffer no symptoms at all, meaning that the age-mortality graph for this disease looks less like a u-shape, and more like a hockey stick.

And here is the political problem. Many young people feel resentment towards the generation born between roughly 1945 and 1965, otherwise known as ‘boomers’, a word often spoken with derision by young adults, and sometimes with a snarl.

Boomers, according to the narrative popular among my peer group, had it easy. Boomer landlords sit atop the housing market and exploit their young tenants; boomer students enjoyed free tuition courtesy of the taxpayer while today’s students pay through the nose; boomer public sector workers are living the high life on gold plated pensions while their descendants suffer the effects of austerity; boomer voters gave us Brexit, against the wishes of the majority of the young; boomer job-seekers benefited from an economy that offered opportunities that today’s millennials, coming of age in the wake of the 2008 crash, can only dream of.

There are flaws in this narrative, of course, since the image of the complacent boomer doesn’t always fit with reality. A quarter of baby boomers don’t own their homes, the vast majority didn’t go to university, and almost a third can expect to enter old age with no financial security, since they have no private pension to call on. Plus younger members of the boomer cohort are likely to suffer terribly as a result of job losses, with a quarter of a million over-50s predicted to never work again.

Suggested reading

The older workers condemned by Covid

By Ian Birrell

But the narrative is nevertheless attractive to a generation feeling the sting of downward social mobility. And now we have a new, even more enraging component to add to this tale of boomer entitlement: the fact that the lockdown has disproportionately protected the over 55s, who are at risk from a virus that is dangerous to them, but not to their children or grandchildren, while causing devastation to the economy. And it is not boomers who are predicted to foot the bill.

This framing relies upon abstraction. Even the young people most sceptical about the need for lockdown, and most resistant to its strictures, have no desire to put their older relatives in harm’s way because, as with all unpleasant political problems, it is difficult to support a policy when the costs must be borne by people you personally know and love.

But when the fear of death has lifted and this crisis ends, how will its story be told? We could well be suffering the consequences — economic and others — of these last six months for decades to come, and the precautionary principle that persuaded so many people that lockdown was a necessary evil will not have the same persuasive power once the panic induced by the pandemic recedes in the collective memory.

For a group of young people already comfortable with the vocabulary of ‘privilege’ and ‘oppression’, it might not take much to definitively add ‘boomers’ to the list of wrongdoers, alongside other reviled groups. And we might find that the generation who lost out most from lockdown will adopt a divisive myth about the crisis of 2020 that goes something like this: “Boris Johnson’s government destroyed our futures in order to protect Tory voting boomers.”

All it needs is a grain of truth. A longstanding Tory preference among older voters is as strong as ever, with the Conservatives currently leading Labour by 34 points among the over 65s. And children and young adults have endured some unique harms as a result of lockdown, with the closure of schools and the A Level fiasco doubtless leaving some permanent mark on students in this cohort. Meanwhile, surveys suggest that the mental health of the young has been particularly badly damaged by the experience of lockdown. And all this before the forecast global depression even arrives with its full and terrible force.

Suggested reading

How Ofqual failed the algorithm test

By Timandra Harkness

The boomer narrative doesn’t require perfect accuracy in order to thrive. The fact, for instance, that the approach adopted by the British government was similar to that of most other Western countries, and a good deal less restrictive than some, will not necessarily counteract the mythological power of a story of old betraying young.

The inaccuracy, for instance, of the ‘lions led by donkeys’ account of the First World War has done little to undermine its potency. The phrase was already in use during the war, was quickly adopted in the years immediately following, and then further popularised in 1961 by Alan Clark’s The Donkeys, a book that excoriated the British leadership on the Western Front. The musical Oh What A Lovely War! and television series Blackadder embedded the image of heartless old generals sending brave young men to their deaths and, despite the best efforts of revisionist historians, this remains the popular view of the conflict. When a story is compelling enough, inconvenient details tend to be forgotten.

At the very beginning of lockdown, Max Hastings, a military historian who understands the power of popular narrative, wrote with impressive candour about the coming generational conflict. Echoing the sentiments of the most resentful twenty-somethings, Hastings described his own generation as collectively “monumentally selfish”:

“Despite our affluence relative to the young, the grey vote has fought tooth and nail against the BBC’s sensible termination of our free TV licences; deterred politicians from means-testing free travel passes; resisted fiscal curbs on our pension privileges, and the entirely just depletion of personal resources to fund care home costs.”

Expressions of this kind of anti-boomer sentiment will only grow louder without some kind of government intervention. The proposal to end the triple lock on state pensions in order to pay for this crisis may go some way towards repairing the generational rift. As Scott Corfe, the research director of The Social Market Foundation, said in response to this proposal, “[t]here is a clear case for intergenerational reciprocation when it comes to meeting the fiscal costs of the crisis in the years ahead.”

It might also become necessary to increase taxes on assets, or even introduce a means test for pensions — a controversial proposal in the UK, although long established in Australia — in order to settle the lockdown bill. And we should expect those moves to be resisted “tooth and nail”, just as Max Hastings describes. This isn’t an easy problem for the Government to solve, and the age profile of Tory voters disincentives action.

But the effects of this crisis demand some kind of action, if we are to avoid a toxic narrative of exploitation which casts millennials as vulnerable lions, and boomers as entitled donkeys. Covid-19 could have had a classic u-shaped mortality curve, or it could even — like the 1918 flu — have been most dangerous to working age adults. Instead, by a stroke of dumb luck, the young turned out to be peculiarly resistant to this virus. And now, without some effort to remedy the generational inequality feeding the anti-boomer narrative, that flap of the butterfly’s wing could have ugly political consequences.