FEATURE A BROKEN HOUSING SYSTEM? A broken housing system?
With ever-worsening housing affordability, first-time buyers left behind and tenants struggling to meet their rents, is the UK housing market officially broken? Professor Ken Gibb, Director of CaCHE, a major new research centre on housing, looks at the evidence
“There are some things we know quite a
lot about, and other areas that are contested or relatively overlooked. One necessary early task that CaCHE will undertake is to identify what we know we don’t know – the ‘known unknowns’ – and also map and identify housing research that is underway.”
Navigating a complex housing sector This is no easy task. The existing research
evidence on housing spans several disciplines and a wide range of different methods and techniques. Complicating matters is also that the housing market involves a number of different actors – national and local authorities and regulators, house builders, private landlords, infrastructure and environment agencies.
“CaCHE starts from a housing system
obvious point – median house prices in England and Wales are now above £200,000, with eight in 10 houses too expensive for people on ordinary wages. Is the UK housing market in crisis? “I don’t find the shorthand phrase ‘housing
C
crisis’ very helpful, but prefer to think of the housing system as confronting multiple, overlapping challenges which periodically ‘blow up’,” says Professor Ken Gibb, Director of the new UK Collaborative Centre for Housing Evidence (CaCHE). “Unaffordable housing is one of several challenges – others are the UK economy’s vulnerability to instability in the housing market, lack of access to home ownership, homelessness, and the lack of sufficient new housing supply – particularly affordable, low-cost and social housing.” CaCHE is funded by the ESRC, the Arts and
Humanities Research Council and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, and aims to provide new research evidence on housing for policymakers. Does this mean there has been a general lack of research on housing? “There is actually quite a lot of academic housing research, and the UK has long been in the vanguard in international comparative terms, although other countries like Australia are now producing a lot of excellent housing research.
30 SOCIETY NOW WINTER 2018
HANCELLOR PHILIP HAMMOND stated in the Autumn Budget statement: “House prices are increasingly out of reach for many.” He made a fairly
perspective – these different stakeholders, segments and interests operate interdependently. We need to understand the dynamics of this system better if we are to make sense of the evidence, the problems and the required policy responses,” Gibb points out. “The problems are not simple and neither are the solutions. They inevitably require political processes reconciling insiders and outsider interests and the building of consensus over difficult choices, if we are to make real long-term progress in areas such as housing taxation, the location of new housing or the shape of housing- related welfare benefits.” Taking the political out of policy Producing evidence is only one part of the challenge – there needs to be political will to act on this evidence. Throughout the years there has been a tendency for policymakers to look at the housing sector through a party political lens, acknowledges Professor Gibb.
The housing system is confronting several challenges including
unaffordable house prices and the lack of sufficient new housing supply – particularly
affordable, low-cost and social housing.
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