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| Homelessness is back on the Tories’ agenda, yet it’s they who made this crisis worse | |
| (about 17 hours later) | |
| The government has a new policy on housing; rough sleeping is a national disgrace, and Theresa May has promised to eliminate it by 2027. In the Daily Telegraph, meanwhile, Boris Johnson is crusading against developers treating homeowners “like serfs”, making another back-of-a-fag-packet policy suggestion: cut “absurdly high” stamp duty. Because of course that is what’s freezing young people out of the housing market – it’s state interference, rather than stagnant wages failing to keep pace with rents and house prices in an ever-worsening expression of systemic inequality. | The government has a new policy on housing; rough sleeping is a national disgrace, and Theresa May has promised to eliminate it by 2027. In the Daily Telegraph, meanwhile, Boris Johnson is crusading against developers treating homeowners “like serfs”, making another back-of-a-fag-packet policy suggestion: cut “absurdly high” stamp duty. Because of course that is what’s freezing young people out of the housing market – it’s state interference, rather than stagnant wages failing to keep pace with rents and house prices in an ever-worsening expression of systemic inequality. |
| Homelessness, though, is a sound and decent thing to concentrate on: the government thinks it a scandal, and so do we all. It wants to spend £100m on it, and that sounds like a lot. We were momentarily cast back to the politics of yore, where problems were identified and governments, imperfectly maybe, at least undertook to solve them. It was all going so swimmingly until James Brokenshire, the housing secretary, popped the hood: this was not new money. This was £50m that had already been committed to solving rough sleeping and £50m reallocated from elsewhere in the housing budget. Nothing has changed. As Theresa May might put it: these sums are merely being “focused and targeted”. | Homelessness, though, is a sound and decent thing to concentrate on: the government thinks it a scandal, and so do we all. It wants to spend £100m on it, and that sounds like a lot. We were momentarily cast back to the politics of yore, where problems were identified and governments, imperfectly maybe, at least undertook to solve them. It was all going so swimmingly until James Brokenshire, the housing secretary, popped the hood: this was not new money. This was £50m that had already been committed to solving rough sleeping and £50m reallocated from elsewhere in the housing budget. Nothing has changed. As Theresa May might put it: these sums are merely being “focused and targeted”. |
| This is not so much a new policy as some new noise. Meanwhile, Polly Neate, the chief executive of Shelter, talks of the underlying issues: a “dire shortage of social housing for people who can’t afford market rents”; cuts to housing benefit so that even working people can’t meet the lowest-available rent in their area; a dearth of protections for private renters; a failure to build. About 90,000 new homes are needed each year to meet the social housing demand. Last year, 5,000 were built. “You need houses to solve homelessness,” says Neate, simply. | This is not so much a new policy as some new noise. Meanwhile, Polly Neate, the chief executive of Shelter, talks of the underlying issues: a “dire shortage of social housing for people who can’t afford market rents”; cuts to housing benefit so that even working people can’t meet the lowest-available rent in their area; a dearth of protections for private renters; a failure to build. About 90,000 new homes are needed each year to meet the social housing demand. Last year, 5,000 were built. “You need houses to solve homelessness,” says Neate, simply. |
| The announcement is worse than sleight of hand, juggling some numbers to amplify piecemeal measures. Homelessness is caused by policies: decisions on how many houses to build, and in which price range. Universal credit, sanctions, the child benefit cap – these are political decisions that have contributed to people being unable to afford their rent. Up to a third of universal credit claimants are having their payments deducted because they are in rent or council tax arrears. The government is acting like its own incompetent opposition, decrying a situation of its own making, offering solutions that are nowhere near the source of the crisis. | |
| Last week’s intervention on prisons followed the same pattern. The Ministry of Justice vowed to cut the prison population by keeping people with drug, alcohol or mental health problems out of jail. Again, it sounded good, and, again, it had nothing underpinning it, no extra money for those addiction services, nothing for mental health provision. Again, the crisis was caused in the first place by Conservative policies – in this case, spending cuts across the service, and the outsourcing of probation to community rehabilitation companies – an “untested and deeply unpopular privatisation process”, according to the probation officers’ union – and, again, the secretary of state, David Gauke, described his fresh, new solutions with no reference to his government’s decisive part in the problem. | |
| The spectacle of the non-governing government is unsettling enough when it discusses no policies, when all its business is Brexit and backbiting. But when it shambles back on to the territory of running the country – wilfully impotent, rhetorically disconnected from cause and effect – the effect is jolting, like crossing a road in a foreign land and mistaking the passenger’s seat for the driver’s. Why are they staring listlessly out of a side window? Who’s driving the thing? Shouldn’t somebody intervene? | The spectacle of the non-governing government is unsettling enough when it discusses no policies, when all its business is Brexit and backbiting. But when it shambles back on to the territory of running the country – wilfully impotent, rhetorically disconnected from cause and effect – the effect is jolting, like crossing a road in a foreign land and mistaking the passenger’s seat for the driver’s. Why are they staring listlessly out of a side window? Who’s driving the thing? Shouldn’t somebody intervene? |
| In this context, Johnson’s ideas are more significant than their flimsiness suggests. The rate of stamp duty, the distributive effects of a change, how much it would cost – none of that matters: it is merely a signal. “I’m the kind of Conservative who cares about people like you, not those derelicts – I care about upstanding people who just need the government to get out of their way so they can prosper.” It is an attack on May’s announcement, but not its practical application; rather, the atmosphere she creates when she makes rough sleeping society’s problem. He’s gesturing at ideas that are themselves only gestures, an elaborate Tory semaphore that conveys nothing but hunger for power. | In this context, Johnson’s ideas are more significant than their flimsiness suggests. The rate of stamp duty, the distributive effects of a change, how much it would cost – none of that matters: it is merely a signal. “I’m the kind of Conservative who cares about people like you, not those derelicts – I care about upstanding people who just need the government to get out of their way so they can prosper.” It is an attack on May’s announcement, but not its practical application; rather, the atmosphere she creates when she makes rough sleeping society’s problem. He’s gesturing at ideas that are themselves only gestures, an elaborate Tory semaphore that conveys nothing but hunger for power. |
| Meanwhile, renters in the UK are spending £10bn a year more than they were in 2010. Away from these clownish mimes, millions of lives are worse for want of a government that meaningfully seeks to better them. | Meanwhile, renters in the UK are spending £10bn a year more than they were in 2010. Away from these clownish mimes, millions of lives are worse for want of a government that meaningfully seeks to better them. |
| • Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist | • Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist |
| Homelessness | Homelessness |
| Opinion | Opinion |
| Social exclusion | Social exclusion |
| Housing | Housing |
| Poverty | Poverty |
| Housing benefit | Housing benefit |
| Benefits | Benefits |
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