Featuring Charlie Winstanley, a UK Housing policy expert and author of “Bricking It”. We discuss the monopoly on housing development, roadblocks town councils run into with building, the cost of homelessness, and more nitty-gritty details on housing reform.
Books mentioned in this episode: Charlie Winstanley’s “Bricking It”
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Transcript
Cathy (00:11)
Hi and a big welcome to Charlie Winstanley who is Program Manager at Ramp, right? That’s the Refugee Asylum and Migration Policy Unit for the Mayor, is that right, in Greater Manchester?
Charlie (00:26)
Well, it’s actually national. yeah, we work across combined authorities. It’s basically a combined authority program to put special advisors with a specialist knowledge and migration policy with Metro Nez.
Cathy (00:27)
National.
Okay.
Yeah, very challenging role, I imagine. And author of Bricking It, which is the UK housing crisis and the failure of policy. and I’ve got to say, Charlie, what a huge amount of research you must have done for this book. what got you going with it in the first place and how long did it take you to finish?
Charlie (01:00)
I suppose quite a lot of people have always had writing a book on the old bucket list something to write off. So I worked for eight and half years as a political advisor to a local authority mayor, the Salford Mayor, Paul Dennett. For most of that time he was also the deputy mayor for Great Manchester and Dandie Burnham and for a lot of time the portfolio holder for housing, planning and homelessness.
Cathy (01:05)
Yeah.
Charlie (01:25)
As a portfolio holder, I was actually part of the original writing team drafting the first Greater Manchester Housing Strategy. So started from around 2017 to aggregate an awful lot of very detailed policy knowledge around the housing system. But also one of the things which was a constant backwards and forwards was balancing the
political aspirations of the Salford mayoralty and the Burnham mayoralty in Greater Manchester in terms of what we were able to achieve and how far we could push the boat balancing that against the practical realities of budgets but also the policy, can I say clusterfuck on your podcast Cath? The policy clusterfuck which we were a part of.
Cathy (02:05)
Mm.
You may say that Charlie.
Charlie (02:19)
where nothing made sense, there were contradictory aims and objectives flying all over the place and making genuine tangible progress in that environment was just incredibly difficult and at the time under, so I was obviously working for a Labour mayor under a Labour administration and with the Tories in government it felt very much that there were…
Cathy (02:41)
Was it,
hang on, the Tories or coalition? Uh-huh.
Charlie (02:44)
Tories.
So Paul came into power in 2016. Yeah, so it was after that point. But yeah, it seemed like a a never ending stream of policy initiatives, which either went contrary to what we were specifically trying to achieve in terms of the political aims in Greater Manchester, but also policy initiatives which seem to contradict even the government’s own stated aims, for example, of increasing home ownership
Cathy (02:49)
Okay,
Charlie (03:08)
and affordability and eradicating homelessness etc. So it was really kind of…
Cathy (03:12)
my word, just going
through your book, first of all, there are such a huge number of variables that affect this, this particular problem. so unpicking it is a huge task. And so as I said on my email to you, I didn’t know much about it before, apart from, what you hear, what’s going on in your local area.
So now that I’ve read it, the scale of the challenge is really huge, but it’s not unsolvable, is it? It just needs a bit of joined up thinking and imagination. But unfortunately, those two things we seem to be very short of in government, particularly central government, where they don’t seem to have much sympathy for regional issues.
Charlie (03:42)
No, no, quite.
Cathy (03:58)
So yeah, it’s really interesting the way that you’ve approached it, obviously with your practical experience. first of all, you break it down into availability, affordability, quality of housing stock, and then obviously all the factors that affect those three. And it seems from reading your book that…
There are seven or eight major land development companies that have a stranglehold on the developmental plots in the UK. stopping that or changing the incentive seems to be a really key thing to to solve this problem.
Charlie (04:35)
Yeah, so it’s on not so much the plots but the actual the ownership of delivery itself. think basically volume developers now deliver around 90 % of all the new units delivered in the UK. Sorry, I’m just remembering off the top of my head so it might not be exactly correct. But it’s an overwhelming number and it contrasts sharply with the way that the housing market used to work earlier on in the 20th century when there was a much higher number of small developers.
And then the other huge factor which has impacted housing delivery, if we’re to look at delivery itself as the issue to focus on, is the vacation of local authorities from the housing market as housing developers as well. So between 1945 and 1979, local councils built almost half the houses which were built during that period of time. When right to buy is introduced in the late 70s, early 80s, immediately,
local authority house building just falls off a cliff down to several thousand years.
Cathy (05:37)
Well, it would do if
they have to sell those units at a significant discount and those units are therefore no longer available as housing policy. It just seems incredible that that hasn’t changed in successive governments over the past 25 years. Nothing has changed.
Charlie (05:56)
it’s a frustration on myself like as I mentioned at the beginning that obviously I’ve worked many years with the Labour Mayor and I’m still for my sins a Labour Party member and it’s a continued frustration that one of the first things under the new Labour government that they did was reaffirm their commitment to right to buy. that is mediated by the fact that they have extended the period on which right to buy is applicable on new council house builds to about 30 years which makes a huge difference.
Cathy (06:22)
So
a house has to be available for social housing for 30 years before it can be bought. Okay, well that’s at least an improvement, I guess. Yeah.
Charlie (06:34)
It’s a significant improvement on the new build
in terms of ensuring the increased economic viability of being able to build them in the first place. But to be honest, I’d rather that rights didn’t kick in at all. And the selling was an option on the table for local authority or housing association should they wish to do it at any point rather than having a strict right, which kicks in after a certain amount time. And the other thing is that we still have a significant amount of existing
Cathy (06:52)
Mm.
Charlie (07:00)
social rented stock in the United Kingdom which performs a vital function in terms of the wider health of the housing system and that stock continues to bleed away. So the lack of protection, yeah, because of the right to buy or also there many different reasons but right to buy is a huge one which basically kind of ensures that we’re going to continue to just lose the remaining stock that we do have over time.
Cathy (07:09)
because the right to buy.
Which obviously means that local authorities don’t have as much of an incentive to build and even if they do, they don’t get rewarded for it. So what would be the political pushback if Right to Buy was completely changed or if it came to an end?
Charlie (07:41)
Well, ironically, I think it would be incredibly popular. They’ve already introduced an interactive by in Scotland and Wales. think when you poll this idea, you know, it polls well. I think the public are on board. I think the Labour Party particularly is stuck in a kind of psychological trap with this. It’s so traumatized by being accused of, you know, being unaspirational for working class people and for…
not supporting home ownership enough, that they’re incredibly cautious to do anything which might cut across or provide what they consider to be a kind of traditional attack line which might be used to kind of criticise them. I think on the other side of it, for the Conservative Party, I the Conservative Party still herald Margaret Thatcher’s government and the flagship policy of that government really being right to buy as this totem internally within the party and I think
Cathy (08:13)
Hmm.
Charlie (08:30)
very like you know that for all sorts of
Cathy (08:32)
Well, there’s no question
that it gave people a stake in their local communities and, you know, there are all sorts of positives, but actually I’d never quite seen the downside. And I really do appreciate it now as you spell it out in your book. So you’ve really, you know, made me think about it in a very different way. And also I didn’t realize that the discounts available to write to buy tenants were so unfavorable to the local authorities that,
from the local authorities perspective, they are just not getting value for money at all. So whereas I always assumed quite incorrectly that if someone bought their house, they would do so at least very much approaching market value. And that is not the case. So it’s maybe think about it in a very different way.
Charlie (09:02)
No, no, wait.
I
think the other thing that I tried to make in the book, because that is absolutely right enough that the system was really designed to take councils out of the development market. was designed to prevent them from doing so. But I would argue that even if you allowed local authorities to sell at the market rates, it still creates long-term delivery problems. Because the first…
Generations of council homes were built in the choicest of locations. They were built near to transport and employment amenities They were built on the best sites also because they were built on at scale It meant that in terms of estate management things could be done Quite efficiently in terms of cost you could mow everyone’s lawn at the same time You go around lots of those old council estates there on the the front gardens often didn’t have fences between them You literally used to get the lawn mower you just used to go around and mow everybody’s lawn within
20 minutes and there are lots of elements, there’s lots of efficiencies of scale which you’re able to create and then what happens is as you start to sell off plots you start to create this hodgepodge, a management problem basically, administering ownership over what becomes an increasingly disparate estate so you decrease the efficiency in terms of the management on those costs but what you’re also doing is if you are replacing those homes you’re replacing them further and further out.
Cathy (10:29)
So they become less and less desirable and more difficult for people to commute or they have to rely on cars and transport issues north of Watford Gap as we all know. It seems to be beyond the wit of government to solve. Anyway, I suppose it does seem to be a total failure of imagination, doesn’t it, and joined up policy.
but one of the things you just touched on is, know, SMEs used to be much bigger in the construction industry than they are now. And now there’s a stranglehold between, seven or eight really big companies that are actually responsible for a lot of urban sprawl or they produce homes which are executive homes.
which don’t solve the problems that we have of, people, for example, requiring smaller units to come out of homelessness or if they’ve come out of hospital, or, they don’t need a four-bedroom Bellway house which sits on the edge of town, do they? And, you know, and actually SMEs would be so much more efficient at finding smaller plots in towns.
that are close to amenities that are much more sympathetic to the local character. And SMEs would have much more of a pride in their work, I suspect. And also because they’re smaller, word of mouth would spread and you’d soon find out who the good ones were And they would be much better at producing or having a stake in skilled labor as well.
which the big guys don’t at all. One of the things you point out very well is the total disconnect between, you know, because the top guy wins the contract and then they subcontract, I don’t know how many times down the chain, squeezing the contract all the way down until eventually you get, a poor quality house that no one really has a stake in. And this is disgraceful.
Charlie (12:27)
Absolutely, I think particularly on quality and so one of the things which the previous Tory government really did emphasise was beauty in design and it’s a concept which I do very much so but again it was one of those areas where one of the big problems in my opinion for the beauty and design is the identikit volume house building model where they’re using basically the exact same
Cathy (12:37)
Which I sympathize with, but yes.
Charlie (12:56)
Essex Design Standards Code which proved sort of popular in the 80s to sort of just redesign almost identical houses over and over again and one of the things which people find beautiful about the older homes which were built often by SMEs were the idiosyncrasies of the build, the different materials that were being used, different styles and what you lose from the overall housing market effect from the reliance on volume developers is also that character. So I think it’s been multiple.
Cathy (13:11)
Mm, exactly. The character.
Charlie (13:25)
But I mean, also in terms of delivering the affordable housing, think on one level, the SMEs are less able to deliver houses as cheaply as the volume developers. And that’s why they’re being squeezed, right? Because volume developers are really value engineering their supply chain. know, they’re buying up all of the different elements of the supply chain, are squeezing those value out of them as possible. But then the issue is over the long term, it does have a negative impact on affordability. The fact that they have been squeezed out because over the long term you lose the competitivity. And whereas…
The small SMEs are making often fairly short-term decisions. I mean, they need to be building houses in order to be keeping the income rolling in. And they need to be building as many as they have the capacity to build. The more they build, the better for them. With volume developers, you start to enter a space where there’s a very different logic. And this is a kind of almost like monopoly territory, where they’re buying up plots of land with an eye for 30, 40, 50 years worth of development. They’re getting their planning permissions in.
early. They’re watching the value of the land itself appreciate drastically over a long period of time. They’re making calculated decisions, often not to build out the full rate of homes which they have planning permissions for at a given time, to avoid overstepping what’s referred to in the industry as the absorption rate, which is the rate at which you can provide new homes without negatively impacting the cost of the existing house prices. So they enter this territory of very long-term financial planning.
Cathy (14:44)
Yes.
Charlie (14:55)
where they’re no longer really incentivized to be delivering high numbers of homes as units in the same way as they might have been in the past. Because what they’re actually doing is, if they can make the same amount of value from building one home as they could do from three, and building one home is gonna cost them less in materials and labor, well, that’s what they’re gonna choose.
Cathy (15:19)
Exactly.
And it’s no secret, is it? It’s not as if they’re making a secret of this policy either, as you spell out in your book. And, you know, it surely is not beyond the wit of man to change the tax structure so that, you tax land and the ownership of land. And you could also offer planning permission for a limited amount of time. And if they don’t build within that time…
Charlie (15:22)
Okay.
Cathy (15:45)
you could rescind the planning permission and perhaps implement some sort of compulsory purchase order. Would it really be that difficult?
Charlie (15:51)
I, yeah. No, I mean…
Sorry, Cath, I was interrupting. No, no, I think absolutely that’s the case. And I would fully endorse CPO for the purposes of developing unbuilt sites. And in fact, I think it would help. So the current Labour government has a frankly unachievable goal of building 300,000 homes a year through the course of this parliament, 1.5 million over the course of the parliament.
Cathy (15:55)
No, no, no, you go ahead. was asking you the question,
Charlie (16:23)
⁓ which nobody believes is going to be met. But one of the first steps towards building that number of homes is actually identifying the sites. And I think one area which has been overlooked thus far in terms of the strategy towards achieving that number of homes has been the site acquisition. And I honestly think that the CPO of unbuilt out sites with planning permission could be a central part of actually acquiring
the sites for future development, which you could actually start to then build out that number of homes which are needed.
Cathy (16:56)
This is the thing, there was also, you mentioned a study in your book where, you know, there are so many, because the question is where are those homes gonna be built? Obviously, you don’t want low quality urban sprawl. the countryside is so important to all of us. It’s not just the Nimbys, once you’ve lost it, you never get it back again, ever.
Charlie (17:05)
Thank
Cathy (17:16)
and natural habitats are threatened wherever you go. So it’s really important that we choose where to build really carefully. And the sound of 300,000 homes must be music to your ears if you don’t have a home. And I fully appreciate how awful it must be to be on a waiting list. But the question is, if we make these decisions badly, as we have done in the past,
we all lose incalculable value that we’ll never get back. it’s quality of life, countryside, habitats. so local authorities actually are probably the best place to make these decisions rather than,
Charlie (17:56)
Well, yeah, and I think this takes us back to the start of the book as well, I kind of do a bit of a prehistory on the development of the UK housing system. And as a sort of a starting point, one of my key arguments is that I think that what we have as a UK housing system is in many ways a sort of a trauma response to the kind of the lived memory of early industrial capitalist development in cities, urban development in cities.
and the hellscapes which were created in a completely unplanned and chaotic environment where cities expanded massively, populations expanded massively, there were no design standards or codes and we
Cathy (18:29)
⁓ it was
awful. Actually, you describe it well in your book, but also Halle Rubenholtz describes it incredibly. I first read about the rise of the Peabody estate, for example, from her book, The Five, which focused on the victims of Jack the Ripper and how all of those women usually because of marital breakdown and alcoholism ended up homeless and the appalling lives they led as a result.
And then they had the slum clearances. while it sounds brilliant to clear up a slum, those people have to go somewhere, don’t they? And so communities were broken up, long standing support networks were just completely obliterated. And those people had to go to just overcrowd other slums elsewhere. and how was that managed?
Charlie (19:17)
Absolutely. Yeah, no.
How was it, Malish, did you say?
Cathy (19:24)
Yes, do you have any insight into how they, know, where people were shipped off to or?
Charlie (19:27)
Yes.
Well, I mean, yeah, mean, there’s lots of lots of so the new town stuff, which the incoming Labour government has kind of picked up, is very much inspired by the new towns of the kind of the post-war period. So there’s one not far from me in a place called Skelmersdale, which was an overspill town, primarily from Liverpool, where they demolished many, many Liverpoolian slums and built Skelmersdale and kind of decanted the population to there. There are also overspill estates. one in Salford.
called Little Halton. Interestingly, it’s on the border between Salford and Bolton and the Boltonians will still refer to the ones on the Salford side as spills because they’re from the overspill estate. So there’s still this kind of like local cultural memory about this big decantment of people from the urban centres into these sort pre-built towns. And I think a lot of these places are considered to be failures. And I think in a lot of ways,
they are, but I have some sympathy in that I think that what they replaced was so hellish that I completely agree with the criticisms of the way that communities were lifted and shifted and deposited and it was done in a very high-handed way without really much kind of holistic appreciation for what makes a community work and it’s embedded a lot of long-term problems into those areas.
Cathy (20:36)
So, Hallis.
Charlie (20:53)
I think that when you compare it, so for example the Overspillers say Salford was primarily populated by residents of Hankey Park. Hankey Park people might recognise as the location of the novel in Love on the Dole, which was a novel, yeah, of living in poverty during the Great Depression in Salford. And the houses in Hankey Park were in such a rotten state by contrast, even the very flawed kind of
Cathy (21:08)
Alright.
Charlie (21:22)
design principles which were utilized in a lot of those new towns were still a vast improvement. That said though, what I would also say is that I think that at least that modernist movement was aspiring to do something very ambitious and there are examples where it’s worked incredibly well. So you might call this a post-modernist design rather than a modernist design, but for example, the biker estate in Newcastle is a huge council estate.
the biker wall, I should say, where basically you’ve got a wall, sort of a wibbly wobbly wall of flats which intersects and encloses around a garden, like a series of little bungalows with gardens. And it created this incredibly successful community in biker, which is referred to as any international examples. And there are some fantastic examples of estates which worked very well in London as well. Camden council.
built many fantastic council estates, big brutalist modernist estates which didn’t fall to wreck and ruin in the same way that some of the others did. And the thing which I take from those experiments really is that they were experiments, as with all experiments, there are things that we didn’t know, but there are certain planning and design principles which I think you could take from and build into future attempts to build at that kind of scale, which we know are proven to work and wouldn’t fail in the same way.
gonna say there’s another example actually closer to home in Salford. A huge failure of a big monomist pre-planned sort of part of town is around the Salford Crescent and basically you’ve got a gigantic shopping centre which is surrounded by big arterial roads.
and you’ve got one of those big roads basically comes straight off. So you’ve got fast moving traffic which surrounds the shopping centre at Salford precinct. Then you’ve got this huge space around the precinct which is taken up by this vast area of car park across the roads because various people have walked into traffic at various different points. They’ve got these barriers up.
And then around the edges you’ve got various different kinds of underpasses which are not properly lit and There’s not much visibility of you’ve got all sorts of different squirrely passageways and basically what we’ve created is a in modern like design principles is a a disaster means that what should be a two-minute walk from the base apartment of one of the blocks of flats to the shopping precinct actually takes about six or seven minutes because you’re having to walk up and down through these various barriers
having to stop at traffic lights, go across. even the small time differences like that are the difference between people utilizing that public space and actually getting involved and actually becoming a community hub, or people just going down to the corner shop, spending twice as much and going back up to their flat for convenience and not seeing anybody and not experiencing the outside. it’s interesting that all of these mistakes which were made,
So Salford precinct now is in the process of a sphere of regeneration. One of the things that they did several years ago was they stripped out all of those barriers to stop people crossing the road. They started planting lots of trees, lots of those areas which are previously car parks, they’re starting to turn into a bit more of amenable public realm. ⁓
Cathy (24:35)
Maybe a
playground or something like that. You mean just to make it a bit more family friendly or?
Charlie (24:37)
That’ll be nice.
Absolutely, you probably have to price in the play-go and getting ripped to shreds the first five times you installed it, but you know you You need dedication installing a playground in an area like that. But yeah, no, it’s it’s It’s that yeah, there were huge mistakes made and I think things were done like I say in a very high-handed and lofty manner but I also think that Just because mistakes were made in the past It’s often used as a reason not to sort of aspire to that kind of that level of house building again in the future
Cathy (24:48)
It’s so depressing, but yeah. Yeah.
Charlie (25:09)
which I think is a mistake.
Cathy (25:11)
Yeah, definitely. the place you just described, has it made a big difference that place as a community hub? Is it now being used more or has it become a feature of the local community?
Charlie (25:27)
I think it’s definitely made a difference. mean, I think in terms of actually salvaging it, it’s probably too little, too light. And what I think is actually really needed there is a, you know, a big redesign and redevelopment of that entire area. Not necessarily the flats.
Cathy (25:41)
Hmm. But does
that mean knocking it to the ground and starting again or?
Charlie (25:46)
Not necessarily, possibly the precinct. mean, the issue here again, comes down to the business viability of what’s more viable. Is it repairing a very outdated organization and bringing it up to spec or is it actually just starting again and more than you’d think the answer is starting again, which is counterintuitive a lot of the time, but particularly those buildings at scale is often the case. But I’m not wedded to ripping it down necessarily.
I think you could, we’re dedicated to doing so, you could avoid that. But it definitely needs something big. But 100%, it has improved the feel of the area. If you walk through now and those barriers are gone and there’s trees around and there’s slightly nicer paving on the pavements, even small changes like that can have a drastic impact on the feel of the place.
Cathy (26:33)
absolutely,
the visuals are so important and a bit of greenery as well. It’s amazing how it’s like balm to the human soul, isn’t it? Just a bit of greenery rather than barriers and signs and all this useless urban furniture.
Charlie (26:47)
Yeah.
Cathy (26:49)
One of the other things that you touch on obviously is the quality we’ve got the oldest housing stock in Europe, or potentially the world, yeah, exactly. Or certainly the developed world. And we’ve got poor insulation, generally speaking. A lot of people live in very substandard accommodation and
you highlight the difference between, you know, obviously most people live in the private rental sector. I forget the percentages, but you have owner occupiers and you have social housing. And actually most people who live in the private rental sector, they have the highest rate of employment, which I thought was really interesting, even higher than owner occupiers, was it round about 70 % employment in the private rental sector.
50 odd in the owner occupiers and something like 30 % in social housing. And yet in the private rental sector, you often get the greatest levels of deprivation. So people are working, but they’re obviously doing very low, low paid or low skilled work and they’re not receiving much and presumably their existence is quite precarious as well.
Charlie (27:59)
Absolutely, yeah. It’s the worst in terms of it’s the physical squalor of the conditions which are the worst in the private rented sector. So I’ll defer to you on your memory of the stats because I can’t quite recall them.
Cathy (28:11)
⁓
I don’t, I sort of boned up on it a little bit this morning. and I was very surprised by those figures because I would have thought that the highest level of employment was owner occupiers, but maybe a lot of those are retirees, I presume.
Charlie (28:23)
Absolutely. I think there’s a huge
age issue there. I think a lot of them are retired, they’re now out of work. ⁓ So yeah, I think the private rented sector which is most occupied by the actual working class people actually working in employment and has the worst physical conditions of any housing sector.
I mean, there lots of reasons for this. one of the main ones is that residents living tenants as a tenant living in a house that you don’t own. this isn’t like in a housing association property where you have a very long term tenancy. housing association properties, it’s very common to have 10 year tenancies. whereas in most of private rented sector is a year. That’s like a good standard. And many, I know people are getting their tenancy renewed every six months.
Cathy (29:08)
Yeah, but actually that’s often at the request of the tenant because the tenants want flexibility. there’s a very fine line, isn’t there? I mean, there are very few people who know what they’re going to be doing for the next 10 years.
Charlie (29:21)
That’s true, but you wouldn’t be beholden to a 10 year tenancy if you really wanted to move out of a house in social housing. There’s not really anything that would be forcing you to stay. It very much benefits the tenant in terms of the security on that side of relationship. My experience of both, I’m lucky enough to have a house now, but whilst I was renting and knowing many of my peers in the great Manchester area, and knowing many of peers in London as well.
As the experience of having those short-term tenancies is incredibly stressful and massively reduces your investment in the property. It means simple things like making your room look pretty, putting up shelves, sometimes you’re not even allowed to do that. Looking after the property itself becomes something which is not worth it to you when, for all you know, rents could go up, your contract could get scrapped.
Cathy (30:05)
Mm.
Charlie (30:14)
and then you know you either afford to pay it or you don’t or sometimes you get kicked out anyway and then no fault eviction which I’ve known quite a number of people have experienced and you’re out the door and I think that there’s a psychological relationship with a private rented house which you don’t have with any of the former tenure where you’re not attached to it you can’t be you know it’s different even from living with a odd general
Cathy (30:34)
Right.
What would you suggest?
What is the most practical way to address this then? Would you advocate for longer tenancies? Yeah.
Charlie (30:47)
Very much so, yeah. think we
have quite an immature culture of renting in the UK because for much of the 20th century we basically banished private renting to insignificant levels. Whereas private renting has always been a very large part of the housing tenure experience in most other mainland European countries. I think as a result…
they’ve developed systems of private renting which are far more sustainable. have generally much longer tenancies in most other sort of equivalent nations to the UK in terms of other European nations and other countries with high levels of economic development. You have higher levels of tenancies, generally greater protections for tenants.
there is an expectation more that you’re, and often are protections in terms of rent controls as well. So whereas in the UK, we kind of solved the post-war housing crisis with council housing primarily in a lot of other countries. They solved them with firming up rights in the private rent detector, rental controls and controlling the private rent detector more. There’s obviously forms of social housing in lots of other countries, but the UK went harder and further in…
in delivering social rented housing within the UK and increasing the proportion of renters of social rented housing than pretty much any other country in the world outside the Soviet Bloc. So, you know, it’s a different model and I don’t think our legal system is used to the emerging prospect of large scale and long term private rented living.
Cathy (32:23)
Also, places like Germany or France, there are plenty of people who quite happily rent for practically all their working lives and they never expect to own a house. And I wonder, do we have this unique obsession with house ownership? And maybe it’s because we’re an island, because land obviously by its very nature is very scarce.
Charlie (32:43)
I
think we do and I think that there is a whole sort of Englishman’s home is his castle culture behind this. But it’s another thing that I try and draw out in the early area of the book where I discuss the role of building societies in developing the culture around living in the UK. And building societies are a really funny old thing because outside of Anglophone countries, there’s not that many
organisations operating precisely the same way. The building society movement in the UK was formed almost as a cooperative movement. And it was in the early days very much a case of working class people banding together in a kind of a builders club and building out each other’s houses. would have… Yeah.
Cathy (33:25)
If you’re done on a lottery system, whoever goes first or…
Yeah.
Charlie (33:29)
The companies were established on a terminating basis, i.e. once the last home was built, the organisation terminated and whatever funds they had remaining were just distributed between the members. And then they would decide, basically a weight in order. So say you have 10 people in your building club, your building society. Yeah, you take a lottery and then they build the first person’s house first and and everyone would continue contributing throughout the course, the life cycle of the building society. What ends up happening?
though is that they start to realise they have quite large surpluses at the point of termination and
Cathy (34:00)
Well that’s
a nice problem to have surely.
Charlie (34:03)
Well yeah, it means it’s very integral I think to the way that the entire housing market ended up developing in the UK because what happens is building societies start turning into banks. They start taking those surpluses and investing them into future building societies and extending. At a certain point the legislation has changed which allows them to not be terminating, so allows them to continue existing indefinitely and at this point they start to become like long-term financial institutions which are funding
specialized funding for house building for working class people. And what you end up getting in the UK with this is I think a culture of working class home ownership starts to be established, like an aspiration for working class home ownership, which doesn’t necessarily get established in the same way in a lot of other places. And then once you get to the 20th century, it’s the building society to at this point.
effectively a monopoly over mortgage lending for homes. They are the ones that innovate with the terms and conditions of mortgages to create what we now have as a standard 30-year mortgage. And I think it’s in the early 20s, which was the first time in history, where the monthly cost of paying your mortgage bill fell below the average monthly cost of renting a house for the first time. So prior to that, it had always been more expensive on a monthly basis to pay your mortgage.
Cathy (35:24)
Yeah.
Charlie (35:24)
after the early 20s and the new kinds of mortgages which building societies innovated with, that flips. So building societies then play this gigantic role in enabling working class home ownership, particularly in the UK, and working class home ownership increases in the UK significantly further than almost any other European country at its peak. And I think that the building societies play a sort of a crucial role in that. And so, yeah, yeah.
Cathy (35:51)
And then obviously in the 80s when credit became cheaper and much more widespread, that fueled speculation in home ownership which obviously changed the landscape again and you know it’s still very much a speculators market isn’t it? But this is going back to the developers again and the stranglehold on land.
Charlie (36:08)
Yeah. But this is the
other very interesting thing about the building societies is that throughout most of the 20th century they were operating under very particular conditions. So at the start of the First World War in 1914, capital controls are introduced, which are restricting the amount of lending which can be done. And those capital controls
In one form or another, there are various different changes to them, but they stay in place from the First World War all the way through to about 1976, 1979. So, right the way through. So, for most of that period, building societies are operating in a landscape where the rest of the banking system is restricted in what it’s able to lend and to whom.
They have got the specialist knowledge of mortgage lending and there’s a lot more specialisation in bank lending in those days. So you’d have business lenders, you’d have the building societies and the mortgage lenders, you’ve got financial investment lenders, you’ve got different sorts of banking, much more than you do today. And what they used to also operate was a legal cartel and the formation of the building societies was very much related to a lot of the kind of
Methodist Quaker traditions of sort of early Protestantism in the UK. They were very moralistic so Yeah, yeah, no absolutely non-conformist But yeah, no the those traditions were very non-conformist they were very Very moralistic and they weren’t very profit driven. So what you get is what you effectively have is this building societies are
Cathy (37:25)
Isn’t that your family background?
Charlie (37:46)
safely cocooned within this landscape of capital controls and then by choice they choose to get together and they set up a cartel which was legal at the time where they would get together every year and they would agree the amount that they were going to lend towards house building and the function of this cartel was to prevent speculative inflation in the housing market. So for most of the 20th century when you go to get a mortgage the only people you can go to are the building societies.
and they will often ask you to stand in a queue and wait for maybe two, three, four, five years before it’s your turn to be eligible for mortgage because they’ve rationed out the amount which is being lent on an annual basis. Now, you get through to the late 70s, early 80s and part of the international financial reforms which are made in the US and the UK, it’s part of the big, what they call the big bang in financial terms where the city of London really starts to take off. Amongst those is scrapping all the…
capital controls, releasing the kind of the international banks to sort of start lending across into different areas. And you see this massive shift from international investment banking, relatively speaking, away from business lending and capital investment of, you know, industrial capital investment and kind of other stuff into the land and housing market. So there’s a stat in the book, which is taken from Josh Ryan Collins, who’s an LSE professor.
who says that I think in beginning of 1980, 80 % of bank lending was business lending and 20 % was mortgage lending. Today, that’s flipped the other way around. 80 % is mortgage lending and only 20 % is business lending. And I think that’s crucial in terms of the inflation problem that we’ve now got built into the housing market is that the building societies used to be these guardians of a kind of, an old system of kind of signage.
Cathy (39:34)
Yeah, I get
that. on the other hand, restricting credit, actually access to credit does create a tremendous amount of, it enables people to start businesses, to start enterprises. And it was very, really difficult and expensive to borrow money in that era. So you have to get a balance, don’t you, between, and I’m not quite sure how you do it. I don’t.
have the answer but if you restrict credit you actually have a huge number of other social issues as well.
Charlie (40:07)
And the thing was as well that the credit had been restricted primarily because of the pressures of the two world wars and effectively direct state control of large areas of most western economies, right? So that had been the political imperative which had kind of forced these kind of capital controls more generally. And the thing was that they were universally applied across most of these economies at the same time. And it only takes one to break with that for the rest of it to fall because you then…
So there was an international consensus effectively around maintaining these controls up until the late 70s, early 80s and then the international consensus fell apart. But I think that one of, like I say, one of the big costs of that, is that an awful lot of the new financial economy which we have built in the Western world as a whole is built on property speculation.
and that ratio between business to mortgage lending I think is really key because the vast majority of business lending is productive investment as in it’s building new wealth, it’s building new activities, it’s creating new services. Mortgage lending, I mean, you build a new house, yes, so there’s some added value there, but an awful lot of that is simply inflating the value of the existing stock of housing.
Cathy (41:22)
Yes,
especially if it’s restricted in the way that you describe. And actually, interestingly, it’s not planning really. Planning has its own issues. Everyone imagines it’s the planners who are the bottleneck in the system, but it really is the land banking by the big… And that’s another thing I really learned from your book. know, apparently, what, nine out of 10 projects are given the planning permission and yet they just sit dormant for years because the developers don’t want to build beyond the absorption rate.
Charlie (41:31)
Thank
That’s right. So, you know, we were talking before about Labour’s ambition to build 1.5 million homes over the course of the parliament. I mean, when I last took, I think in the book I say there’s a million homes sitting with planning permission already, which aren’t being built out. I actually think that number is closer to 1.5 million now. So I mean, there were already the homes which have been granted the planning permission to be built out. They’re not being built out.
Cathy (42:10)
The is,
where are these homes situated? That’s what I want to know. In fact, I did try and look for some sort of map which would indicate, where a planning permission has been granted and who owns that land. And actually, it is very opaque who owns the land because is it the development company? Is it their investors? Is it the underlying investors? And, you know, actually trying to figure out where has planning permission
And also one of the things that is so distressing is how many homes have been built on floodplains. because the land is cheap, local authorities have this terrible pressure to build, build, build. And so they build on floodplains and the developers underplay the risk I mean, surely, again, is it not beyond the Wittoman to do proper checks on that and to hold the developers accountable?
for where they build and what sort of quality of house they produce.
Charlie (43:06)
Well, I think it’s one of those problems that’s caused when you basically create systemic incentives towards certain types of behaviour. like, as mentioned in the book, so since 2012, the National Planning Policy Framework basically sits as legal guidance governing the local plans of local authorities and requires at any given time a five-year forward supply of future housing development plots, which basically means that every five years at least, local authorities need to kind of renew and
regenerate these available sites. What you’ve then also got is you’ve got quote unquote objectively assessed housing needs, which as I go into in the book is, I’d argue is anything but objective. like a started as a basically back of a fag packet kind of calculation during the Tory party leadership campaign in 2010 and then was kind of turned into an unhypothicated methodology, which has been gerrymandered by all parties who’ve come across it since to sort of suit various different political ends.
Cathy (44:02)
Well,
Charlie (44:03)
⁓
Cathy (44:03)
you’re okay. ⁓ the coalition government or certainly the Tories that followed them cut housing allowances for local authorities by a huge nut. And they also increase the, you know, the right to buy thing and also, you know, when you you part rent and part buy. And so it’s shared ownership. So basically they increase demand without doing anything for the supply.
Charlie (44:22)
Yeah, shadow in the ship, yeah.
Cathy (44:29)
But actually, you go back beyond that, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair didn’t help the situation either. And so, you mentioned earlier that the Labour government are traumatized by, being, accused of squashing aspiration and all this sort of stuff. But to lead is to choose, isn’t it? Can’t they just scrap this? they can’t just hide behind past trauma. If they want to fix the problem,
Charlie (44:34)
not at all. Not at all.
Cathy (44:52)
and they’ve got a huge majority to do it for as long as they hang on to that majority. Present events, you know.
Charlie (44:57)
I quite agree
and I think that an awful lot of the anger actually towards the Labour Party now, know there’s things like asylum and other sorts of issues, take the headlines a lot, but I think an awful lot of the anger towards the Labour Party now is that people have no idea what they stand for, they have no idea what they’re doing, it just looks from the outside like a bunch of people who simply want to be holding office for the sake of it.
Cathy (45:22)
Yes, it does actually, yeah.
Charlie (45:24)
and I think that it contributes massively to the declining support which the current government’s experiencing now.
Cathy (45:32)
Yeah, absolutely. Do you think it’s too late for them? What can they do to seize back the initiative?
Charlie (45:40)
I mean, maybe it is too late for them. I don’t know. mean, so five years isn’t a lot of time really in a house building sense. So if we’re talking about like…
Cathy (45:50)
But the thing is,
if you make the difficult decisions at the beginning, and we all accept that someone’s got to make these decisions, okay, and from my perspective, I would really love to see intelligent house building, because I hate the idea of people being homeless. It’s just so distressing. you actually mentioned how much the NHS and other care providers, charities like Shelter and Crisis, how much they spend on the…
the side effects of homelessness, i.e. addiction, drug abuse, poor health effectively from living on the streets. There’s a huge number of massive effects of homelessness, and yet they won’t fix the underlying structural issues. And I suppose what we really need, we need…
lots more single units for individuals to just feel safe in and to that’s the housing first. If they get the housing first then they can solve an awful lot of these other associated problems. ⁓
Charlie (46:48)
Yeah, single young
men is the single highest group of people on any of the housing waiting lists. if you were creating some one bed flats, particularly around city centres, yeah, that would be the most efficient way really to house and fix that problem. I completely agree. Just on what you were saying on the Labour Party.
Cathy (47:08)
And they
have the highest level of suicide as well, young men.
Charlie (47:11)
They do, and lots of other
associated problems with them being homeless, you know. It really is a problem which affects everybody. But what you were saying about the Labour Party, I think the problem that they’ve got now is that ideally there was a good year when it was very, very clear that they were going to win the election. That people were absolutely sick, fed up and tired of the Tories. Nobody was listening anymore. They were going to win just simply by virtue of being there, you know, for no other reason. And they should have used that time.
Cathy (47:28)
Yes.
Charlie (47:40)
to have a a policy plan, coming into government. And housing is one of the biggest domestic policy failures of our age. And that time, prior to getting into government, when it was clear that it was gonna happen, should have been used to really develop a radical rewrite of the planning system, which they would have come in on a storm of a huge historical majority. And they could have put in place some programs, which over the course of the five-year parliament may have had some chance of…
people seeing tangible impacts towards the end of that parliamentary term, which they would have been electorally rewarded with. They didn’t do that. In fact, what happened was they came in with absolutely no policy agenda whatsoever and ended up creating a policy agenda via internal factional fighting between Angela Reyna’s office and Keir Starmer’s office and Sue Gray getting offed and all sorts of other psychodramas that were going on, which was all just about control of the party itself.
Cathy (48:11)
Yes.
Charlie (48:33)
and they basically have wasted a lot of time since they were elected to now. So not only did they not have a plan coming in, they have not managed to successfully generate a coherent plan even up till now and the clock is ticking and I now do wonder if it is the time.
Cathy (48:35)
they have. Yes.
And actually they’ve doubled down on some of the worst Tory policies. They’ve just made things
worse, which is, who would have thought that was possible? I think it’s an SAS motto, a bad situation can always get worse. But actually, there are a couple of things that you didn’t mention in the book or I didn’t pick up on it. One is the…
Charlie (49:06)
Yes.
Cathy (49:18)
One is the local government tendering process. So this is getting us back onto housing policy because I used to work in finance and tendering for local authority or government work is flipping difficult. And you you need someone who really knows how to navigate that system which is why the really big firms tend to win all these contracts and SMEs get totally squeezed.
Who is going to change this? And actually that tendering process, if I remember rightly, came in under Blair and Brown and it just has become more and more and more complicated and someone has got to reform it because it is impossible to win government contracts if you’re an SME. And SMEs are the other things that power our economy. So that’s surely a huge factor in this equation.
Charlie (50:06)
I do agree and I think one of the things that we spent some time working on whilst I was working at Solver Council was breaking up our large tenders into smaller chunks so that they would be able to be bid. think part of this agenda I think has actually been sort of undermined by good intentions. So the social value agenda for example often kind of prefers SMEs to larger organisations.
Cathy (50:14)
Hmm.
Charlie (50:30)
by various different metrics. But the problem is when you start creating social value checklists, again, the organizations that benefit from that are those that have the resources to game your point system and put a lot of thought into how they’re doing that as opposed to sort of dad and lad sort of construction co who haven’t got that experience with that kind of bureaucracy and that kind of self-publicity and marketing but know how to build something.
Cathy (50:53)
Well, that’s the thing.
Charlie (50:56)
Yeah.
Cathy (50:56)
You want them to be good builders, not good flipping, you know, of course they have to negotiate, but the point is you don’t need them to go through these and the documents that have to be produced are this thick. It’s just ridiculous. ⁓ it is a skill set which is very specialized and therefore only the really big guys can afford to tender.
Charlie (51:00)
Exactly.
Cathy (51:19)
business and I’m sure it all started with it with good intentions as you say so for example there must have been an awful lot of corruption you know backhanders and local and local governments probably wanted to rightfully put a stop to that but they’ve thrown the baby out with the bath water haven’t they?
Charlie (51:37)
I completely agree with you. And I think there’s a general point here as well that not only did they, I think that the tendering process is one example of the centralization of power in the UK away from local government. And yes, the UK used to have one of the most powerful sort of structures of local government in the world. And now we have possibly the least powerful. There is less sort federated power amongst local authorities in the UK than there is even in…
know, dictatorships and China and, you other countries around the world. There was very little authority and power left at local level. The tendering process is one example of that, where the ability of the local authority to make a judgment call on who it wants to win is taken away. And you’re right, the reasons for that would have been there used to be a lot of corruption, used to be a lot of backhanders, there used to be a lot of this. But there are also costs to taking away the initiative.
of an organisation from being able to make those kind of more informal judgments and often the informal judgments are the best ones, are the right ones because they’re relational and they’re built on a local knowledge about what’s happening in the area and who’s who and how it’s going to work.
Cathy (52:36)
Exactly.
And also if
you’re a local builder living in the area, you’re not going to want to screw up the build because then you’re not going to win another contract. And there’s an inherent pride there, isn’t there, to being part of a community and to doing a good job and the whole word of mouth thing. And that is completely missing in… ⁓
Charlie (52:58)
Definitely.
And
I think there’s lots of other elements which break into people’s kind of experience of their local councils as well. You know, I think we’ve all kind of experienced that point where you’re watching a certain type of road work being done or a certain bit of physical infrastructure being created and you’re just like, what on earth? Who signed that off? From being on the other side of it, what you realize is that almost every single time these individual jobs have been awarded through national funding pops, which can only be spent on doing that thing. So.
The choice from the council’s perspective was do we bid into this pot for new cycle lanes or not? If you don’t, you don’t get the money. If you do, you get the money. But if you get the money, you need to spend it. So you need to buy it. You need to spend on cycle lanes. If you want money, if your roads are in disrepair, because there’s so much demand for the money, for the pots, for money, for road disrepair, you actually need to let the roads fall into disrepair before you can apply for the money in order to have evidence for it in the first place.
Cathy (53:55)
Ugh, it’s so-
Charlie (53:58)
So there’s so many backwards elements of it and all of this feeds back to a centralization process which happened in the UK where we took powers away and I don’t want to go on like a broken record but it did happen under Thatcher where we took power away from local authorities.
Cathy (54:10)
I know, look, I fully appreciate centralization started, know, was definitely,
but the thing is we are where we are. It’s bit like that old Irish joke, you know, I wouldn’t start from here. Can’t you just go and have a beer with Keir Starmer and have this chat that we’re having now and make him see a bit of sense. You he’s still got three, four years left. You know, he could actually.
seize the initiative and start making some decent changes and forget about his foreign policy and his this and that, you know. I mean, this is what he was elected to do. And he will be remembered by history very much more fondly than he will be if he doesn’t do these things.
Charlie (54:50)
I’d love to bend his ear where I give him the opportunity, Cath. I don’t think I will, unfortunately. He certainly don’t think would have listened to me whilst he was leader in opposition. think now he’s prime minister, I think. It’s a few extra steps removed. yeah, no, there were other people in his ear on this. And there were people I know in MHCLG.
Cathy (55:04)
Yeah.
Charlie (55:12)
the people I know in the Labour Party who I trust have a good and fairly thorough understanding of this system and kind of do know lot of the things that are going wrong. I don’t want to understate how tricky it is. Going back to the situation we talking about with the book, there’s so many different levers here. And I think one of the biggest challenges is that what actually needs to happen is a lot of the existing systems and structures ideally should be just wiped clean. But it…
Cathy (55:31)
Yes, there are.
Charlie (55:41)
The organisational politics of doing that is always difficult and it’s not an easy feat to achieve. I think that’s the scale of the radical shift which is required, quite frankly. I think that the situation which we’ve currently got where the existing very flawed policy mechanisms and levers and funding pots are simply being adapted.
Cathy (56:00)
Really.
Charlie (56:10)
to try and solve and get more traction over different problems. It just isn’t working. And what we’re doing is we’re creating a more and more hideously complicated bureaucratic mess of a situation. ⁓
Cathy (56:22)
Yes, exactly. I think I’m worried
as well that it seems likely that reform are going to win the next election. I mean, who knows? An awful lot can happen in three years. Maybe Kier will find his mojo. Who knows? Let’s hope so. But I am concerned that they will win with a massive landslide.
and then they will not have the cooperation of the civil service or local governments and they will therefore waste their first four five years in office and not achieve very much. And all of these projects will continue to just get worse and worse and worse and the average living standard for ordinary people is just not going to improve.
Charlie (57:05)
Well, I have
say, you know, I have a lot of sympathy for people who are very annoyed with the present, the two main parties and they kind of look at it, no, no, 100 % as am I really, but no, I basically, I agree with you for warning there. I think that reforms policy agenda and local government is very thin and I think is not really backed by a lot of actual practical knowledge of how it works. I think one of the indicative things of that recently has been the effective failure of
Cathy (57:11)
me too, I’m one of them by the way.
Charlie (57:33)
this Kent Doge unit. So don’t know if you saw but, so you know Elon Musk, so Elon Musk obviously comes to power with the Trump government and is given his own Doge, the Department of Governmental Efficiency, which is supposed to be there to find lots of savings and again he didn’t do a massively good job of that in the US either.
Cathy (57:38)
I did, I don’t know too much about it, but.
Yes.
he got bored, didn’t he? He just wanted to go back to building rockets. He just wanted to get humanity to Mars, and he’s not
really interested in anything else than that.
Charlie (58:05)
But I also think he underestimated how much the money which he thought was going to be easy savings was invested into things which the public find a lot of value in and the difficulty of withdrawing that funding without creating a huge political storm for Trump. And I think that what has happened with the reform and their Doge experiment has been exactly the same. I they’ve got in and they thought there’s going to be loads of easy savings for us to make here.
Cathy (58:23)
Yes, that’s great.
Charlie (58:34)
And actually, no, it’s still rights. So you’re cutting the few remaining community centers in the library. Are you going to cut funding to maintain the parks? You’re going to cut SEND funding. they become significant, which by the way, it’s not just about cutting SEND funding. It’s about them being in breach of your legal requirements as a local authority and being subject to potential judicial review and or suing. So it’s the…
Cathy (58:40)
It’s tough, isn’t it?
Charlie (59:01)
it’s not as easy as I think a lot of people think to sort of come in.
Cathy (59:05)
No, it’s not as easy, but you know, one of
the things you can do is make it easier for people to work and start businesses. And the current government have just made that really difficult. you know, going back to, you know, we could bitch about the current government and the previous one, because, they had a brilliant opportunity several times and just completely wasted it. I think there’s a total lack of trust in the political class, isn’t there?
That’s the issue. It’s not conservative or labor or reform or anything. think people just generally feel that politicians are just not representing them anymore. I don’t know how you fix this problem, but… ⁓
Charlie (59:47)
No, no,
and I guess one of the things that I wanted to convey in the book is that I don’t think there’s any easy answers here. think one of the criticisms I had of a lot of the other books which broached into the housing crisis is that they all seem to offer, a focus, a singular solution. So, you know, there’s a great book called Against Landlords by a guy called Nick Banner, who’s a housing barrister who basically says that we need to get rid of the private rented sector.
makes lot of good arguments in there, but I think they’re the singular focus on landlords and misses so much more than picture.
Cathy (1:00:16)
Well, actually going back to that, okay, I have
a flat that I used to live in that I now rent out, so I’m a private landlord, but I have a duty of care towards my tenant, obviously when she needs repairs done, I’ll get them done and all that sort of stuff. Surely it is not difficult to implement some sort of minimum standards for the private rental sector. And again, because it is important, it’s a huge,
part of our housing market. And the answer cannot be that all these houses go into government ownership because the government just can’t afford it. So surely reform of what we have is much better than a fundamental change and implementing minimum standards, making sure that landlords have a duty of care towards their tenants, that they’re not living in unhealthy or unsanitary situations.
that this could even be done by random inspections. I don’t know how you do it, but surely, again, you just need a bit of imagination to fix this.
Charlie (1:01:18)
I think you could do it very easily overnight by introducing universal landlord licensing. I don’t think it would be unreasonable to expect, you know, it takes a license to own a dog. If you want to a dog, you need a license. You don’t need a license to own a house and rent it out to other human beings, which I feel is a bit perverse. And overnight, you could introduce an effective regulator in the form of the local authority. And this used to be the case effectively.
Cathy (1:01:23)
There you go, there you go, and that’s done elsewhere as…
Charlie (1:01:43)
During most of the 20th century you had rent controls and the rent officers at the local authority would have an incredibly detailed understanding of every single rental home in their particular patch. They would inspect them regularly and then in those days as well they would then set a fair rent. Obviously that’s the rent controls but then you you could introduce universal landlord licensing without the rent controls and you could effectively regulate on the quality of the properties overnight.
the structure of it is pretty much there.
That’s one big oversight of the policy.
Cathy (1:02:13)
Okay, so who,
why won’t they do it? Why hasn’t it been done?
Charlie (1:02:18)
Well,
so they’ve kind of introduced a lot of steps towards it by a very roundabout route through the Renters Reform Act, which originally started under Michael Gove, but then was kind of kiboshed and then has been resurrected. So in the Renters Reform Act, they’ve created a new ombudsman in some reforms. They’ve allowed the right of local authorities to make checks on properties without
prior advanced notice, they’ve done various different other things. The thing is though, my criticism of the renters and Formacts is they’ve taken the longest possible road around to almost getting to the powers that they would have got with simple landlord licensing as they possibly could have done and they’re still not quite there. We were the far more simple legislative route, you just create a regulator in the form of the local authority who’s responsible for maintaining the standard of rental properties in their area.
Cathy (1:03:01)
Yeah.
⁓ So you mean they don’t
necessarily have to inspect every property but they’re there to take complaints if there’s an issue that the landlord won’t fix.
Charlie (1:03:19)
Yeah, it would effectively fall to the responsibility. You could do it in different ways, but I mean, it was in the olden days with the old rent officers, it was effectively the responsibility of the rent officer to make sure that the condition of the houses was requisite, particularly given to the value of the rent which has been charged to them. You could effectively have that model in a similar way where it’s just their job is to make sure that the houses are meeting minimum decency thresholds. And if it’s their job to do it,
Cathy (1:03:38)
Yes.
Charlie (1:03:49)
they’re responsible for it, you know, they have to just keep an eye on it.
Cathy (1:03:54)
I think that’s
entirely reasonable, doable, and would add so much value. So, you know, it’s incredible that it hasn’t been done.
Charlie (1:04:00)
Yeah.
And we already have a social housing regulator, which effectively plays that job for social housing.
Cathy (1:04:06)
Mm-hmm.
So you’ve
Charlie (1:04:12)
Yeah, it could be done. That could be overnight. That could be very, very quick.
Cathy (1:04:16)
Now there’s, there was another thing that was not really touched on in your book, given the fact that you work with refugees as asylum seekers, et cetera, you don’t really mention the impact of immigration on housing policy. And I would guess that was a deliberate choice because immigration is not responsible for our housing crisis at all. if every single immigrant in the UK
were suddenly to be kidnapped by aliens, we would still have an immigration, we’d still have a housing issue. But did you deliberately miss it out because you were worried about the book being hijacked or I suppose, being misquoted or, and also I presume you didn’t want immigrants being demonized yet again. Is that fair or?
Charlie (1:05:01)
You kind of caught me there, Cath. Yeah, there was a kind of a semi-conscious omission. I mean, what I felt is that I discussed things like, I think the crucial elements of the housing crisis with regards to asylum seekers and migrants is around temporary accommodation. And I discussed the temporary accommodation situation more in the round. But there’s obviously a very particular issue around temporary accommodation with asylum seekers and migrants because their temporary accommodation is provided by the home office as opposed to local authorities. So there’s a different kind of flavour.
to the question and the different kind of specific technical elements to it which don’t necessarily completely follow over. Yeah, mean, it’s a very thorny issue. think my…
Cathy (1:05:45)
Were you
afraid that you’d have to write another book? Potentially, because it is a really thorny issue. I agree. But I just wanted to ask you, and that’s how it struck me, that it was opening up a whole can of worms and it’s also sort of deviating from the central issues that we have discussed. And actually, if we solve those, then, you know, we will be in a much better position to…
Charlie (1:05:48)
Yeah.
Cathy (1:06:14)
to take care of people who need temporary accommodation.
Charlie (1:06:17)
I think that is definitely part of it. mean, so when you write a book, you’re given a word limit of like 90,000 words, which seems like a lot of the time, but then my first draft went way over. you’re to make kind of value judgments on what you include all the way through really. So there’s a lot of areas which I sort of had to miss out. And I think you’re probably right in saying that one of my, you know,
Cathy (1:06:29)
Yes, I’m sure.
Charlie (1:06:46)
semi-conscious kind of impulses in not directly broaching the asylum seekers issues. I wanted the book to be useful for a particular purpose which was trying to create a sense of mission and navigate a possible, a realistically possible route and sense of understanding around the housing system and how messed up it was. I think there’s a lot of people in the space of asylum accommodation already, there’s a lot of noise around it and
Cathy (1:06:54)
Mm.
Charlie (1:07:16)
rightly or wrongly I felt that it might be biting off more than I wanted to in terms of sinking my teeth into that debate as opposed to just trying to make an intervention more broadly on
Cathy (1:07:29)
Yeah, fair enough. think if I’d
been your editor, I would have suggested you just write a sentence saying, this is, the reason why I’m not going to focus on this a sentence or two, just spelling out why you were not going to focus on it would have, it just takes a lot of the heat out of the argument, doesn’t it?
Charlie (1:07:48)
I think that’s fair crit from an editor. All I can say is that I think academic publishers probably give the authors a bit more license to sort of decide on those kinds of
Cathy (1:08:00)
Yes, that’s probably true.
Give me your next book to edit, okay? When you’ve, ⁓
Charlie (1:08:04)
Yeah,
okay. Deal.
Cathy (1:08:08)
We
probably have to wrap up now, Charlie, which is such a shame, but I just think it’s such a well-researched book. You’ve obviously put a huge amount of work into it. And I really hope it, I hope you get a big readership because It certainly taught me an awful lot about the gaps in housing policy, because you only ever see things from your own little narrow prism, don’t you? And your own local community and actually seeing it spelled out the way that you did. I think you did a fantastic job with it. So well done.
Charlie (1:08:35)
No, I really appreciate
that and thanks again. think one of the things you said, Vytax, when we arranging this was that, you know, you didn’t know much about it before, you felt like an expert afterwards.
Cathy (1:08:45)
I feel
like a total expert now. In fact, you know, I might just trot off and go and have a few words with those reform people who might come in and say, you know, you
Charlie (1:08:52)
Well, was
honestly, it was very nice to hear because that was really one of the things I wanted was for somebody to be able to pick it. I want it to be useful for people working in policy, but for people working in policy, they’ll read their particular area of that book and I probably won’t be telling them I even knew there. What hopefully it’s done is it’s contextualized all of these different areas of policy in a chronology, in the history, in its place, in the wider scheme of things.
Cathy (1:09:03)
Yes?
Charlie (1:09:19)
⁓ And hopefully that’s also done so in a way where even if you’re not an expert in policy you can pick it up and you can kind of go through it and get that kind
Cathy (1:09:27)
Exactly, you
know, I do feel like much more of an expert than I was, certainly. And also, I really liked some of the case studies that you focused on as well. in fact, again, if I’d been your editor, I would have put in more case studies because, you know, the concrete stories often illustrate things in a, you know, we’re all natural storytellers, aren’t we? Charlie, it’s been really fabulous talking to you and well done. And if you write another book,
Give it to me first, okay? Thanks so much. And I hope you get a big readership for your book. You really deserve it.
Charlie (1:09:55)
Cool, lovely.
That’s right.
No,
thanks Cath, and thanks for reading it as well. Bye.
Cathy (1:10:04)
⁓ total pleasure. Cheers, Charlie. Take care.