Business & Economics
A Suggestion For Social Housing Policy In England by
Oliver Brufal
Currently, 1.16 million households are waiting for social housing in England, a waiting list which compounds currently at around 4% per year.1 This figure will only be drastically increased by COVID-19, as 80% of earners in the bottom 10% of national income work in sectors that have been shut down, at a time when over 30% of such households were unable to last a month without vocational income.2 Therefore, not only were we firmly lodged in a housing crisis, it is one which is assured to get considerably worse in the coming year. Despite this, there is an alarming lack of consideration in government policy for this crisis. Such policy focuses on a romantic end whereby social housing acts as a funnel, pushing tenants to the end result of owning an “affordable” home, schemes which past governments have directed a large amount of funding into. Perhaps this is an illustration of how civil servants, for whom every career decision since university has been about upwards progression, are detached from the challenges faced by those in low income households. In
reality, many who require social housing are not always in a pipeline towards home ownership, and government disdain for these people who are so crucial to the functioning of everyday society needs to end. POLICY PROPOSALS This paper proposes to address this in two ways that will enable social housing to serve all those who need it, and in an adequate manner. First it points out how government policy on social housing must readjust to one of construction and secondly how existing social housing projects must be better maintained and regulated so as to provide a higher quality of living for existing tenants. 1) Construction of Social Housing Construction and maintenance of social housing has been allocated to housing associations over the past decades, with
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