Arbitrary priorities don't solve the lack of housing

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It might be best to simply ignore any half-baked policy proposals put forward by Reform Ltd, given their recent slide in the polls. But in the great political game of snakes and ladders, those who slide down a snake one day may yet ascend a ladder the next, and it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that the Farageists could still be in contention come the next UK general election. The Burnham Bounce may end up being followed by the Burnham Deep Dive – and probably will, based on recent political history.

The latest of the company’s policies is a proposal to give priority for social housing to young workers born in the UK. That appears not to be the only category given priority, though – they also want to prioritise “former military service personnel and married couples with children”. The implications are wide-reaching and not entirely clear. Where, for instance, do former military service personnel born outside the UK (and there are some) fit into the priority list? And if the aim of the last part is to support families and give children a decent start in life, what about non-married couples with children? Or young widows or widowers left to bring up children alone? Not only are they wanting, apparently, to set the state up in judgement on the marital (or not) arrangements of citizens, it seems that getting a decent start in life is to be reserved to those who pass the artificial morality test.

Imagine, just for a moment, the nightmare of managing a housing waiting list which has to hold information about the place of birth, marital status, and number of children of each applicant, and then set out whether an unmarried ex-serviceman born in, say, India, who has a partner and two children, ranks ahead of or behind a single male born in the UK. And what about a ‘worker’ who may be temporarily unemployed? Does someone who loses his or her job due to redundancy and struggles to find another then lose his or her home as a result? And does the ranking change depending on whether the available accommodation is a flat or a three-bedroom house? I was a member of a local authority housing committee for a number of years, and I know how fraught the process of determining priorities is when there is a long waiting list, without Whitehall setting out additional priorities to over-ride any carefully and painfully developed points system.

The worst part of all is that this is a blatant attempt to avoid doing the one thing which would resolve the shortage of social housing: build more. They have talked about building an additional 50,000 homes a year across the UK: an inadequate number with no indication of how it will be achieved. Both Reform Ltd and the Tories seem to believe that evicting foreign-born tenants from social housing will make the homes occupied by them available to their priority categories, but unless there is alternative accommodation available for the evictees, that merely shifts the problem to another part of the system. Assuming that they have enough decency not to simply turf people out onto the streets (and I wish it were possible to say that that is a reasonable assumption), what do they plan to do with those people who have been kicked out to make way for others?

The whole thing carries echoes, horrible echoes, of times gone by when those deemed undesirable were expelled to make way for the favoured. And I’m not sure that that is either accidental or down to a simple lack of awareness.