The Conservatives are making it impossible to buy a house in #Crawley

When Right to Buy was introduced in 1980, I was minus six years old and consequently don’t have a good memory of the period, but friends in Crawley Labour have told me that the impact when knocking-doors was immediate, where once strong Labour voters were lost to the party because “Thatcher gave us this house.”

For those who had the opportunity to buy, it was certainly a good deal, so good in fact that the discount rate has left councils unable to replace anything close to the number of houses lost, with cost in Crawley alone amounting to over £265m by 2018. In 12 years dealing with housing coursework, I have yet to come across undeserving, but on almost every occasion I have to warn people that with the numbers of council houses left it will take many years to access a property and that in most cases it is unlikely that they will ever secure one.

So, with social housing no longer an option, that leaves the other two parts of the sector, owner-occupation and the private rental sector, filling the gap in provision and that’s where the Conservative Party of 2022 comes in. Whatever Thatcher may well have thought in 1980, Right to Buy only ushered in a temporary period of growth in owner-occupation, there are a number of reasons for this but the most significant ones are that growth in housebuilding didn’t track growth in household numbers and people started to view property as an investment as opposed to a finite resource necessary to meet a basic human need.

As a result, we have seen declining owner-occupation for several decades now, with the growth in household prices increasing far faster than growth in household incomes. So, for many people with decent incomes, the chance of getting into owner-occupation before their late thirties–if ever–was already remote.

Then, the Conservatives crashed the economy. This wasn’t a global crash, as with past decades, but instead the result of extreme ideologically-driven policies which, as it turns out, were utter nonsense. As a result, first-time buyers are now not only having to borrow hugely greater sums of money than past generations, but at far higher interest rates. So, people buying the same house of the same value, would now be required to pay almost 50% extra per month on their mortgage payments, for the average house in Crawley that’s an increase of £640. People who have saved for decades are now waking up to the realisation that they will likely never buy a house and for those who are having to re-mortgage the impact of higher interest rates combined with negative equity will mean many losing their homes. Because Conservative ideologues decided to test in practice what right-wing thinktanks had always preached in theory.

For those in the private rented sector, the numbers of which increase ever upward, I’m afraid the situation isn’t any better. They will still be required to pay their landlord’s higher mortgage rate, plus whatever else they can get away with. Where people can’t afford that rent themselves the result is people having to house-share, stay at home increasingly late into their lives or facing homelessness. The council’s biggest cost-pressure right now is meeting our legal duty to providing temporary housing, already on a scale never seen before, coming out of your council tax and putting other services at risk.

The temporary housing system was never designed for this, but then nothing about our current housing system is fit for purpose. All the changes to stamp duty and planning processes in the world won’t do a thing to fix this problem, this has been extensively proven over the last 12 years. What is needed now is a fundamental rethink to UK housing policy, with investment and regulation of the sector to deliver the housing we need and ensure those who do rent get a fair deal. The Conservatives have repeatedly proven they have no interest in delivering this.

But we are still two years away from the next General Election. Today, Conservative policies of the 1980s have met Conservative policies of the 2020s and the result for tens of thousands of Crawley residents is misery. For those of us on the ground, we will simply have to do what we can to treat the symptoms and work to deliver the Government we need.