HOUSING: A PARADIGM EXAMPLE OF THE NEED FOR MODERN SOCIAL DEMOCRATIC REFORM.
Since the seventies the UK housing system, particularly in England, has contributed to systemic economic and social failure across three crucial areas, all of which are quite inimical to the achievement of the core strategic social democratic end of achieving economic efficient balanced and sustainable growth combined with social cohesion and fairness.
First, to the loss of economic efficiency that has resulted from the operation of boom-bust in the speculative housing market. Two, rising house prices have increased class and generational inequality, and skewed housing opportunity away from less established and low- and moderate income households. And third, social housing has becomeincreasingly a residualised and stigmatized sector occupied by the economically inactive: membership of the tenure itself has become an indicator of social exclusion within an increasingly fractured society that lacks cohesion.
The objectives of expanding access to affordable housing, the stabilization of house prices intra-cycle by flattening both peak and trough, and the related ones of shifting resources towards production rather than consumption in housing, and even more crucially, across the wider economy generally: all require mechanisms that are firmly social democratic in both intent and character. They are also supported to varying degrees and in different ways across the political spectrum. Indeed cross-party political support will be required if reform is to be effective and sustained.
Policy/issues papers across all these areas will be progressively added to this page.
Meanwhile, The Future of the Social Rented Sector, documents the progressive residualisation of the social rented sector, in terms of both outcomes and causes, but more importantly, proposes a conceptual framework to underpin evidence-driven and considered, yet bold, policy responses to transform it into a differentiated affordable tenure available to less established low to middle income households wishing to live in mixed communities.
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