Sunak and Starmer are obsessed with home ownership. Neither seems to want to fix the housing crisis
B ritain is obsessed with home ownership. This might date back to our history of land ownership, class and colonial exploit but the fixation lives on, thanks in no small part to Thatcher’s introduction of the right to buy in 1980.
This weekend, both parties made their bids to reckon with the housing crisis, and both leaders, predictably, zeroed in on ownership. The Tories have for years declared they would transform “generation rent” into “generation buy” and Rishi Sunak is now considering bringing back help to buy – a 2013 Tory policy that ended last year – to win votes at the next election.He also recently announced he would scrap the house-building target of 300,000 every year in England, displaying a wilful ignorance of what is actually needed to plug the housing deficit. House-building alone won’t solve the crisis, but it will hugely contribute to some of the most urgent needs in this country – namely the 1.3 million people on English council house waiting lists in need of social rented homes, many of whom are privately renting and sliding into poverty. (Meanwhile, the homes available to rent in the UK fell by a third over the past 18 months.)
Starmer was no more inspirational, promising that Labour would be the “party of home ownership”. Like the Tories, he appears to be obsessed with promising to get people on to the housing ladder – as if we can simply purchase our way out of a failing economy. This simply won’t happen for people who are staring down the barrel of wage stagnation and climbing debt.
Both leaders seem unaware that homeowners, too, are not immune to the economic stress – negative equity and increasing poverty are hitting them hard, while first-time buyers are taking out longer mortgages of 40 years to
Read more on theguardian.com
