UK housing policy is 'crumbling'

PROFESSOR Peter Ambrose delivered a clear message to the Chancellor Gordon Brown in his lecture at the Falmer Campus in June that chronic under-investment in Britain's housing stock is a very expensive 'economy'.

'The overall condition of the ageing British social housing stock is a matter for concern. The most recent estimate is that it will take £19 billion of investment to bring it to a decent standard by 2010,' Professor Ambrose said in his visiting professorial lecture, Houses Carrots and the Jupiter Symphony.

'Our research in Stepney is the first to show that there's a huge cost attached to this under-investment - increased costs to the NHS, to policing, to education, to the emergency services and to the environment. The Stepney work showed that the housing regeneration programme there reduced the rate of illness by a factor of seven. Some health and police costs were four to five times lower in a comparator area where housing had already been improved'

'Right to buy' and related policies have cut the amount of affordable housing available - leaving an acute shortage of low-priced accommodation for key public service workers like nurses and teachers in London and the south east, said Professor Ambrose of the Health and Social Policy Research Centre.

But it is not just vital public services whose recruitment has been affected. 'The CBI has pointed out that private sector employers are finding staff recruitment and retention very difficult in some areas as the affordability problem affects even quite senior staff.'

Under-investment in housing, leading to the lowest output since 1924, is also responsible for fuelling Britain's soaring house prices and heralding the prospect of 50-year mortgages. 'When house prices go up, everyone says 'great', but if the price of carrots went up at the same rate you would get quite the opposite reaction,' he noted.

Successive governments have misrepresented the housing problem as being that of street homelessness - as a marginal issue to be dealt with by short-term programmes. But Professor Ambrose said, 'These have not in fact solved the problem and, by most measures, the use of expensive emergency 'solutions' is on the increase.'

'The reality is that UK housing investment has been declining steadily for decades, that we spend far less on housing than virtually all other EU countries, that rents and house prices in many areas have risen much faster than general inflation, and that the matter is a long way down the political agenda.' He concludes that. 'Increased housing investment is vitally necessary - on economic even more than on social grounds.'