Bird’s words
For all the palaver around the budget there was little discussion about the housing shortage that affects the poorest – and even the children of the comfortably off and professional classes nowadays. As I said in parliament last week, our wealth is to be found in housing. Around 80% of bank transactions – virtually their entire activity – involve the buying and selling of property. No wonder most of the wealth in the UK is expressed through your relationship to property.
Property, property, property: your road to social mobility, getting as far away from poverty as is humanly possible, all relates to property. You are defined – increasingly so – by your place on the housing ladder.
If there was an economic war to be declared on anything, it would be on the abysmal lack of affordable housing supply for a vast sector of the populous.
So property – housing – becomes a replacement for money in some ways. It becomes the currency of preference. And it becomes increasingly a political hot potato as second homes, empty properties, vast building programmes for offices and the fact that over one and a half million people are looking for social housing become ever more pressing issues. Combining to hold back the solving of all manner of other needs in the UK – like sorting out the dire state of the NHS and matters like poverty entering the school classroom and running riot with the lives of poor people.
I spoke on the budget in a debate in the Lords recently and concentrated on the housing crisis that threatens to overwhelm us even more with the passing of the years. And I spoke particularly about social housing, with 90,000 such dwellings taken out of circulation in the last year and under 10,000 built to replace them.
I concentrated my talk, though, on the underside of social housing, a topic I have often focused on that a very small fraction of children in social housing ever get to finish their school leaving certificate or their A levels or get to go to college or university. That giving people social housing does not guarantee a secure foundation so that they and their children can prosper in society and get as far away from need as possible. That getting social housing is almost a guarantee that you are going to be economically on the edge of society, unable to have the full life that is desired for all.
Etched in my brain is the fact that only 2% of those from a social housing background get out of poverty through educa
