Letter: Chancellor Is Scapegoating Existing House Owners

Published on: 7 Oct, 2015
Updated on: 7 Oct, 2015

From Ben Paton

Deputy chairman of Lovelace Conservatives and a member of the Wisley Action Group.

It really is a bit rich when a senior Conservative government minister, the chancellor of the exchequer no less, utters words such as: “We’ve had enough of people who own their own home lecturing others why they can’t own one too.” (See: New Planning Tsar Says Guildford Should Double in Size)

Has anyone given any such lectures? Who? He should cite them. If they cannot be quoted then is this not an attempt to find “an enemy without” to justify government policy?

If anyone has given such lectures then it has been past Conservative administrations. It has, of course, been Conservative policy for local government to sell off council houses such that the stock local government social housing is lower now by over 10% than it was ten years ago and and not to build new social housing.

In Guildford, for a period of twenty years which ended only recently, as cited in GBC’s 2014 annual report, the council had not build any new social housing at all.

To the extent that there is a shortage of housing in this country, it is shortage of social housing. And that has in large measure been the creation of government policy.

That policy was to encourage housing associations to build social housing. That mechanism was damaged during the 2008 financial crisis when the finances of housing associations were damaged by interest rate derivative contracts.

The other problem of housing is affordability. The biggest drivers of house prices have been money printing or “quantitative easing” and foreign investment in UK domestic housing.

Rather than admit that these are the true causes of the problems and addressing them, the government seeks to create the false notion that people are against building houses. Of course they are not.

What they are against is the indiscriminate building of inappropriate buildings (e.g. even more retail space) in inappropriate places (e.g. flood plans and good farmland).

What they are against is re-writing planning law to create a bias in favour of developers, whose motivation may be nothing other than profit.

The “enemy without” argument may be marshalled by President Putin to justify invading the Ukraine. It is scraping the barrel when a UK minister tries to use it to justify his housing policy.

What is needed is transparent disclosure of the facts and proper analysis, not sound bite politics. Otherwise the conjecture that central government is now dominated by the building industry lobby looks extremely plausible.

And that would be, to borrow council leader Stephen Mansbridge’s choice of phrase, “innately selfish”.