The Spectator’s Notes | 1 April 2006

David Cameron’s bold entry into the debate about housing this week reminds one of how strange it is that housing has spent such a long time in the second division of politics. For post-1945 Labour, council housing was the key to getting the right votes in the right places (e.g., Herbert Morrison’s desire to ‘build the Tories out of London’). In the 1950s Harold Macmillan headed Labour off simply by trumping them and promising to build 300,000 council houses a year. Then Mrs Thatcher changed the politics of it all with council house sales and the freeing of the rented sector. Suddenly the upper working class had been helped in a tangible and permanent way. Ever since then it has been impossible for any politician to gainsay the desire for home ownership or to re-impose rent control. Then the independence of the Bank of England granted by Gordon Brown meant that politicians could no longer play with the mortgage rate for electoral purposes. So they more or less fell silent. Housing deserves to become an issue once more, though, for the reasons that Mr Cameron has raised. The first rung of the ‘housing ladder’ now looks like one of those fire escapes which stop an unclimbable distance from the ground. Demand is huge, and supply is rigidly small, so price is enormous. A new house is seen, by people who live near it, as a bad thing, with the result that, too often, it is — being mean, ugly and adding a new burden to local infrastructure without bringing a compensatory social, aesthetic or financial benefit. It is chiefly in housing that the old problem of the ‘Two Nations’ is growing worse. The solution lies somewhere in providing more of what people actually want — the suburban ideal of a garden and a garage — in a way that gives more revenue to the local authorities in which this takes place and in which better infrastructure is created as a reward for new building.