By Neil O’Brien, Director of Policy Exchange.
This
morning, Conservative Housing Minister Grant Shapps will announce proposals to
give housing tenants the right to move around England without losing their
accommodation. This could be as big a
shift as Mrs Thatcher’s “Right to Buy” policy - and it will take the
Conservatives deep into what was once seen as Labour territory.
In Policy Exchange’s own
report The Right To Move, published
earlier this year, we advocated just such radical changes to the rights of
social housing tenants to give them the opportunity to exercise choice over
where they live, work and raise a family - so it’s great to see these proposals
being taken up today.
The
statistics about life in social housing are shocking. There is only a 1-in-100
chance that a social housing tenant and both their immediate neighbours will be
in work. Children growing up on social housing are twice as likely to end up
without any qualifications as children from otherwise identical family
circumstances who don’t. One in five social housing tenants living in flats do
not even feel safe when they are in their own home.
Yet at the
moment council and housing association tenants get little choice over where
they live and are rarely able to move: many are in properties that do not suit
either their needs or preferences. People with children get stuck high up in
tower blocks. I knew a woman in a
wheelchair who was put in a two-storey house at the top of a huge hill. It is bad for the economy too, because often
people can’t move to find work without losing their house.
Policy Exchange’s The Right to Move calls for social housing tenants who have a good record to be given the right to require their landlord, whether a council or housing association, to sell the house that they currently living in on the open market. The tenant would then choose another house on the open market, up to the value of the one that had been sold. Their landlord would then purchase that property, renting it to tenant who had chosen it under the same terms as before.
This would mean the quality and value of social housing would remain
unaffected, but the tenant would for the first time have a choice of where they
live. So tenants could move to get work, to take a better job, or just to
get a house which suits their needs better.
There would also be social advantages too, because it
would create more mixed communities.
We have evidence that this works. The
Rowntree Housing Trust has an estate in York.
It has been selling off every other house on their estate in York to the
private sector, and using the money to buy up individual houses in other parts
of York. The estate has become more diverse as a result. The evidence is that
bringing in people able to pay market prices or market rents is good for an
area characterised predominantly by social housing. It increases local
purchasing power, making it easier for local shops and businesses to flourish,
and increasing local employment opportunities. The evidence is that greater
diversity raises school attainment rates, helping the next generation to
succeed.
As Nye Bevan pointed out when social
housing was being created: “It is entirely undesirable that in modern housing estates only one type
of citizen should live”. He was right.
The right to move is a freedom that the
middle class take for granted, but which has been denied to those unable to
afford their own housing for generations. It will create a society that is both richer and more equal.
