Two years ago this month, Boris Johnson won an 80-seat majority – built on Red Wall constituencies across the North and Midlands. Voters across these traditional Labour strongholds, home to a high share of lower-income households, were tired of Labour’s condescending attitude towards Brexit and felt taken for granted.
Having “borrowed” such votes – the Prime Minister’s phrase – Johnson will only retain his majority by giving Red Wall voters what they want.
Across the UK, young adults are paying high private rents while struggling to get on the property ladder. With the average house now costing nine-times average annual earnings – compared to a long-term average of four-times – countless hard-working people are locked out of home ownership.
Against that backdrop, what many Red Wall voters want is more social housing – state-owned houses and flats, available for permanent tenure at below-market rents. A new report from the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ), Exposing the Hidden Housing Crisis, demonstrates that for millions of low-income and otherwise vulnerable households, social housing is all that is truly affordable.
CSJ polling suggests 67pc of Red Wall voters want social housing to be a government priority. The share among traditional “Shire Tories”, in well-healed South East constituencies, is less than half that.
In other words, while traditionally the party of aspiring homeowners, it makes more sense for the Tories to switch to building council houses if party bosses want to remain in office.
“Our focus on helping ‘just about homeowners’ onto the ladder – vital though this is–has at times distracted from what should be our overwhelming priority as Conservatives,” wrote May in her foreword to this CSJ report. “That is, ensuring everyone has a decent, affordable and secure home in which to live, work and build strong families”.
After the Second World War, Britain embarked on a building boom that included a great deal of low-cost, state-owned housing. Inspired by the 1942 Beveridge Report, successive Labour and Tory governments had built 3.1m homes by the end of the 1960s. Many were sited on land already owned by the state or bought by local authorities at “existing use” cost, which kept costs reasonably low.
During the 1970s, another 1m social housing units were constructed, increasingly in tower blocks, as speculative pressure drove up land prices. By 1979, just over a third of the UK population lived in local authority housing.
The 1980s marked the beginning of the end of mass-building of social housing, as local authorities focussed on maintaining their now aging housing stock. Margaret Thatcher’s right-to-buy legislation forced councils to sell off around 1.5m homes, at heavy discounts, to tenants. The building of new social housing quickly lagged behind numbers sold.
During the 1990s, and into the Blair-Brown era, construction of council housing in effect stopped. From 1990 to 2018, fewer than 50,000 were built. David Cameron’s government meanwhile re-launched right-to-buy, renewing the pledge to replace homes sold with new social housing. Once again, that didn’t happen. As of last year, about 13pc of UK households were living in council homes.
