Meanwhile, half the public and a third of his own party express “no opinion” about Iain Duncan Smith, whose approval rating is, at 14 per cent, less than that of Charles Kennedy.
But history has not come to an end. Unless the pendulum that has swung backwards and forwards at Westminster for 130 years ago has suddenly seized up, the Tories will be back. And they will need a housing policy.
This is the time to make a compelling case for the sector. The policy review now taking place is, by all accounts, genuinely open. Shadow ministers are all ears, “ruling nothing out when it comes to policies for schools, hospitals, transport and the environment,” Duncan Smith says.
Talk to, say, Oliver Letwin, shadow home secretary, and the Tories’ appetite for practical policy seems keen. Here is the party’s leading intellectual saying it is not the time for high theory and abstract principle.
The Tory leader’s visit to Sweden, of all places, to look at hospital provision did suggest a willingness to look anew at the party’s social policy hang-ups.
Not-for-profit housing is an old Tory favourite. They, after all, invented stock transfer and the idea that there has to be a third way (not their phrase, you understand) between private tenure and council renting.
Back in the mists of time, Benjamin Disraeli placed the Tory party behind the idea of subsidies for “artisans’ dwellings”. In the 1920s, Neville Chamberlain took a leaf out of his father Joseph’s book and committed the Tories to assisting public landlords to build. Harold Macmillan realised the Tory promise to build 300,000 dwellings a year in the early 1950s.
It was not that the Tories were keen on municipal landlords, which is why they cast around for local alternatives. Henry Brooke, Tory home secretary in the early 1960s, told his cabinet colleagues how “tremendously important it is to break the present monopoly of local authorities in buildings to let.” What was needed were “housing trusts” – housing associations.
“It is important to demonstrate that our party recognises the general need for some new rented housing and for good management, and has an alternative to municipalisation – an alternative which might contain the seeds of a great new housing movement.”
Even if it was Labour that actually realised Brooke’s dream by putting the subsidies in, Tory affection for the voluntary housing movement remained strong even during the Thatcherite ascendancy, which is why such ministers such as George Young and David Curry are still venerated.
No surprise then that the Tory transport and local government shadow, Theresa May, should declare her allegiance in the pages of Housing Today (13 December).
The voluntary principle sits comfortably with the rhetoric favoured so far by Duncan Smith and his colleagues. Rejecting Thatcherite individualism, at least as expressed in the no-such-thing-as-society dictum, the Tory leader says: “The whole of our structure is built upon people coming together and solving problems. Government’s job is to make sure that people have the opportunity to improve their lives.”
And RSLs still have all the virtues that appealed to Brooke, it seems.
But that is an instinct rather than a policy. What a real Tory government would actually do in housing does not seem much different from what William Hague promised. Nor any less paradoxical.
Take the grand Tory principle of local autonomy. May has promised to strengthen the powers of local councils and give them more freedom to run themselves in order to improve local quality of life.
But giving “responsibilities back to local communities” apparently excludes schools, for which the Tories have a different recipe. The imposition of housebuilding targets on councils would end, but did May say how much freedom would she give councils or RSLs to set rents?
May is a home counties MP, which is tantamount to saying that her attitude towards planning matters is severely restrictive – not for her the Richard Best approach of building to provide affordable homes by freeing up restrictions on development outside urban areas.
But those are details. Housing policy is ultimately about how much money is provided to support affordability. And that depends on how the Tories resolve two big issues.
One is tax-and-spend, and the other is their inherited predilection for neo-liberal individualist programmes over government action.
The truth is they cannot quite yet reconcile head and heart. Duncan Smith’s heart says cut taxes and spending, and the Letwin formula that public spending as a proportion of GDP should be reduced to 35 per cent or less has yet to be officially rescinded.
But his head, making electoral calculations, says, “hold on, maybe the public will pay for public provision”. That is why shadow chancellor Michael Howard recently had to come riding to his boss’ rescue after some loose words about tax cutting in a Financial Times interview.
The Tories are not getting much help at the moment from their think tanks. The Adam Smith Institute and the Institute of Economic Affairs, once great churners out of prescriptions for rolling back the state, have lately been embarassingly silent.
There is always America. The very existence of subsidised housing encourages the formation of dysfunctional households, says a new study for the American Enterprise Institute. Access to not-for-profit housing should therefore be “time limited”. Tenants would, presumably, be evicted. As the study puts it, newly-built housing projects “draw tenants away from the private market”.
The Tories’ almost total silence on what should be done with housing benefit, which would of course have to rise astronomically if that ultra-free market proposition were ever adopted here, suggests that social housing is going to be spared the radical treatment.
Source
Housing Today
Postscript
David Walker writes for the Guardian on social policy.
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