The Bishop of Rochester
Homes for Britain 2015
Why, you might reasonably ask, am I here as one of the trio introducing this event?
The simple answer is that I’m here because the Archbishop of Canterbury wasn’t
available – though he sends his greetings. As it happens I come with some 25
years as Board Member or Trustee of various organisations involved with
homelessness and social & affordable housing – currently as Chair of the
ecumenical charity, Housing Justice. But more importantly, I am here because I
am absolutely convinced that ensuring for the people of our nation decent and
secure housing in the right place and at an affordable cost is one of the most
important issues for our society today. If we do not do that, effort and money
spent on all sorts of other issues will be wasted.
Now having a decent, secure, affordable and appropriate home will not solve all
your problems: while some would question its affordability and its appropriateness,
I do have a secure and decent home – that does not mean that my life is problemfree. However, not having a decent, secure, affordable and appropriate home is
almost guaranteed to make it all-but impossible to get the other important bits of
life into a healthy place. People without such homes find it much harder to find
employment and be economically active (and my colleagues will talk about that);
they suffer higher levels of mental and physical ill-health; sadly, are their
relationships often unstable and sometimes break apart; their children struggle to
attend school regularly; they have little incentive to get involved in and contribute
to the life of a local community. And all those things mean greater costs for society
as a whole in the long run. My argument is a very pragmatic one: tackling our
housing issues will not only produce social goods now, but will also reduce costs in
other areas of public expenditure in the future. The trouble is, we tend to do our
sums in a rather short-term way, so the argument doesn’t get heard.
Bishopscourt, 24 St Margaret’s Street, Rochester, Kent, ME1 1TS
tel 01634 842721 email bishop.rochester@rochester.anglican.org
The headline, as we all know, is that we have been building no more than half the
number of new homes needed each year. But volume building of lots more houses
will not be the whole answer. A generation or so ago, a small flat in London was
affordable – it cost about 4 times the average wage for a first-time buyer and that
made sense on a mortgage. Today the same flat would be completely unaffordable
to that first-time buyer. Today an identical property in different parts of the
country can vary in cost by well over £100,000. We know that’s how the market
works, but does it make sense? It is clear that we have a housing economy that is
badly distorted – indeed (and this isn’t really my brief, though I was once trained
as an economist) the housing market is for all sorts of reasons a very imperfect
market. On another issue, people in rented accommodation, even with the best of
landlords, very often have so little security that there is little incentive for them to
involve themselves in their local neighbourhood and community – why bother if you
could have to move in a few months? Rural areas need small affordable
developments to sustain the life of our villages – otherwise local young people have
to move away. Small developments cost more to build, so support is needed. I
could go on through the many issues which we face.
It is complex. But is it so complex that we can’t do anything? No. We can
encourage innovation including self-build, cooperatives, land trusts etc.; we can
give private tenants more security; we can make sure small-scale rural schemes are
viable; we can incentivise house-sharing, so that fewer actual buildings are needed;
we can devise the kind of joined-up planning system which will put the right kind of
houses where they are most needed. It can be done if there is the will to do it.
And, with a coalition (perhaps that’s the wrong word) like the one represented in
this hall today, we can have that will. And if together we do remove housing need
in a generation, then the rewards for society as a whole, as well as for families and
individuals, will be huge. Perhaps I’m naive, but it just seems so obvious. We can
do it – and we must. If we don’t, it really doesn’t bear thinking about.