Average Crawley rent now £1,305 per month, up 9% in a year

In their latest release on private rents and house prices, the Office for National Statistics painted a fairly depressing picture , with the cost of renting privately having grown nationally by 9% in the last 12 months, against an inflation rate of 3.8% over the same period.

While local variation obviously exists, in Crawley’s case the cost of renting over the last year has grown in line with the national average of 9%. However, as a London satellite town, that increase is on top of already having amongst the UK’s existing highest rent-levels.

Actually, when comparing like-for-like housing, Crawley is probably in a worse place than most of our neighbours when it comes to rent-levels. Council tax bands are based upon what the value of a property would have been in 1991, the average for the UK and in most of our neighbouring districts being band D. The majority of houses in Crawley are band C and yet are attracting the same or higher rental costs than band D properties in adjacent areas.

Quite apart from the local picture, in analysing the quality of housing relative to its price, the Resolution Foundation has found that the UK offers the worst value for money for housing of any advanced economy.

While good news for landlords, the increase in rents isn’t even good news for the economy. Unless new properties are being built or older properties invested in, this increase in price doesn’t reflect any kind of productive economic activity, it’s purely inflationary and saps at the disposible income which would otherwise have helped to fund productive economic activity.

More simply put: the UK’s housing market is making us all poorer and the UK a weaker economy.

As we’re finding in Crawley, at the sharper end the impact is homelessness, where despite the council’s record as a top-ten performer in the delivery of new social housing, demand vastly outstrips the growing need as families find themselves unable to meet the financial requirements for renting privately, and unable to afford to access a mortgage (particularly after the Conservatives’ budget debacle under Liz Truss sent interest rates sky high).

Where housing benefit might have previously helped to make up the difference, admittedly in Crawley with the Government paying increasingly large amounts out in benefits on properties they built as council housing (only to sell at so large a discount it was impossible to replace the lost units), the Conservatives’ decision in 2012 to unteather what they would pay for housing from the actual increases in rental prices in an area means that after 12 years of record rental growth, the number of properties people can even afford with housing benefit is exceedingly low.

So, instead we have hundreds of families stuck in bed and breakfasts and other temporary accommodation, some now as far away as Rotherham, without any local means for fixing the situation. That’s why the council declared a Housing Emergency back in February–including a range of proposals available to Government to fix the situation, with the costs falling on local council taxpayers instead of falling on the Government.

At this point a third of the council’s budget available for services is now financing temporary housing (there’s no ability to cross-subsidise from the money people pay in rents, it’s all out of the services budget). It’s why despite years of generating new revenue sources to pay for services, why Crawley along with hundreds of other Housing Authorities has a realistic chance of going under in a few years, if Government doesn’t start fixing the problem they created.

In 14 years of the Conservatives, I cannot think of a single policy change which hasn’t made the problem worse. We can’t afford another five years of making the problem worse. For councils the only game in town is Labour, from getting the housing we need built through a new generation of new towns to addressing the biggest cost-pressures facing local authorities. It’s really make or break time.